Someone was dead in a hill cabin long ago. It was night. He heard the bowling of the wind about the eaves of March. He was within the cabin. The rude, bare boards creaked to the tread of feet. There was no light except the flickering light of pine, the soft, swift flare of resinous wood, the crumbling ash. Against the wall, upon a bed, lay a sheeted figure of someone who had died. Around the flickering fire flame at the hearth, the drawling voices of the Joyners who could never die and who attended the death of others like certain doom and prophecy. And in the room again there was a soft and sudden flare of pine flame flickering on the faces of the Joyners, a smell of camphor and of turpentine—a slow, dark horror in the blooded memory of the boy he could not utter.
In these and in a thousand other ways, from every intonation of Aunt Maw’s life and memory, he heard lost voices in the hills long, long ago, saw cloud shadows passing in the wilderness, listened to the rude and wintry desolation of March winds that howl through the sere grasses of the mountain meadows in the month before the month when Spring is come. It came to him at night, in Winter from a room before a dying fire, in Summer from the porch of his grandfather’s little house, where Aunt Maw sat with other rusty, aged crones of her own blood and kin, with their unceasing chronicle of death and doom and terror and lost people in the hills long, long ago. It came to him in all they said and did, in the whole dark image of the world they came from, and something lost and stricken in the hills long, long ago.
And they were always right, invincibly right, triumphant over death and all the miseries they had seen and known, lived and fed upon. And he was of their blood and bone, and desperately he felt somehow like life’s criminal, some pariah, an outcast to their invincible rightness, their infallible goodness, their unsullied integrity. They filled him with a nameless horror of the lost and lonely world of the old-time, forgotten hills from which they came, with a loathing, with a speechless dread.
His father was a bad man. He knew it. He had heard the chronicle of his father’s infamy recounted a thousand times. The story of his father’s crimes, his father’s sinfulness, his father’s lecherous, godless, and immoral life was written on his heart. And yet the image of his father’s world was pleasant and good, and full of secret warmth and joy to him. All of the parts of town, all of the places, lands, and things his father’s life had touched seemed full of happiness and joy to him. He knew that it was wicked. He felt miserably that he was tainted with his father’s blood. He sensed wretchedly and tragically that he was not worthy to be a death-triumphant, ever-perfect, doom-prophetic Joyner. They filled him with the utter loneliness of desolation. He knew he was not good enough for them, and he thought forever of his father’s life, the sinful warmth and radiance of his father’s world.
He would lie upon the grass before his uncle’s fine new house in the green-gold somnolence of afternoon and think forever of his father, thinking: “Now he’s here. At this time of the day he will be here.” Again:
“He will be going now along the cool side of the street—uptown—before the cigar store. Now he’s there—inside the cigar store. I can smell the good cigars. He leans upon the counter, looking out into the street and talking to Ed Battle, who runs the store. There is a wooden Indian by the door, and there are the people passing back and forth along the cool and narrow glade of afternoon. Here comes Mack Haggerty, my father’s friend, into the cigar store. Here are the other men who smoke cigars and chew strong and fragrant plugs of apple tobacco….
“Here is the barber shop next door, the snip of shears, the smell of tonics, of shoe polish and good leather, the incessant drawling voices of the barbers. Now he’ll be going in to get shaved. I can hear the strong, clean scraping of the razor across the harsh stubble of his face. Now I hear people speaking to him. I hear the hearty voices of the men, all raised in greeting. They are all men who come out of my father’s world—the sinful, radiant, and seductive world, the bad world that I think about so much. All the men who smoke cigars and chew tobacco and go to Forman’s barber shop know my father. The good people like the Joyners go along the other side of the street—the shadeless side of afternoon, that has the bright and light….