Similarly, if the grey and humid skies of desolation pressed down upon your spirit; if the broad, wet lights of shame were eating nakedly into your unhoused, unwalled, unprotected flesh; if the nameless and intolerable fear—huge, soft, grey, and shapeless—was pressing at you from the immense and planetary vacancy of timeless skies; if grey horror drowned you, and every sinew, power, exultant strength and soaring music of your life, together with the powerful, delicate, and uncountable fabric of the nerves lay snarled, palsied, and unedged, leaving you stricken, wrecked, impotent, and shuddering in the hideous shipwreck of your energies: then they, they—Sid, Carl, Guy, Harry, Floyd, Clarence, Victor, Roy, that damned, vile, sneering horde of evil-loving, pain-devouring, life-destroying names—would be there certain as a curse, to dip their dripping beaks into your heart, to feed triumphant on your sorrow while you strangled like a mad dog in your wretchedness, and died!
And oh! to die so, drown so, choke and strangle, bleed so wretchedly to death—and die! die! die! in horror and in misery, untended and unfriended by these ghouls of death! Oh, death could be triumphant—death in battle, death in love, death in friendship and in peril, could be glorious if it were proud death, gaunt death, lean, lonely, tender, loving, and heroic death, who bent to touch his chosen son with mercy, love, and pity, and put the seal of honor on him when he died!
Yes, death could be triumphant! Death could come sublimely if it came when the great people of the living names were with you. Heroic fellowship of friendship, joy, and love, their names were John, George, William, Oliver, and Jack; their names were Henry, Richard, Thomas, James, and Hugh; their names were Edward, Joseph, Andrew, Emerson, and Mark! Their names were George Josiah Webber and Nebraska Crane!
The proud, plain music of their names itself was anthem for their glorious lives, and spoke triumphantly to him of the warmth, the joy, the certitude and faith of that heroic brotherhood. It spoke to him of great deeds done and mighty works accomplished, of glorious death in battle, and a triumph over death himself if only they were there to see him greet him when he came. Then might he say to them, with an exultant cry: “Oh brothers, friends, and comrades, dear rivals with me in the fellowship of glorious deeds, how dearly I have loved my life with you! How I have been your friendly rival and your equal in all things! How proudly and sublimely have I lived!—Now see how proudly and sublimely I can die!”
To die so, in this fellowship of life, would be glory, joy, and triumphant death for any man! But to die wretchedly and miserably, unfed, famished, unassuaged; to die with queasy guts and running bowels, a dry skin, feeble limbs, a nauseous and constricted heart; to die with rheumy eyes, and reddened, running nostrils; to die defeated, hopeless, unfulfilled, your talents wasted, your powers misused, unstruck, palsied, come to naught—the thought of it was not to be endured, and he swore that death itself would die before he came to it.
To die there like a dull, defeated slave in that ghoulish death-triumphant audience of Sid, Roy, Harry, Victor, Carl, and Guy!—to die defeated with those sneering visages of scorn-maker’s pride upon you, yielding to that obscene company of death-in-life its foul, final victory—oh, it was intolerable, intolerable! Horror and hatred gripped him when he thought of it, and he swore that he would make his life prevail, beat them with the weapons of certitude, nail their grisly hides upon the wall with the shining and incontrovertible nails of joy and magic, make their sneering mouths eat crow, and put the victorious foot of life upon the proud, bowed neck of scorn and misery forever.
NEBRASKA CRANE WAS a fellow that he liked. That was a queer name, sure enough, but there was also something good about it. It was a square, thick, muscular, brawny, browned and freckled, wholesome kind of name, plain as an old shoe and afraid of nothing, and yet it had some strangeness in it, too. And that was the kind of boy Nebraska Crane was.
Nebraska’s father had been a policeman, was now a captain on the force; he came from back in Zebulon County; he had some Cherokee in him. Mr. Crane knew everything; there was nothing that he could not do. If the sun came out the fourteenth day of March, he could tell you what it meant, and whether the sun would shine in April. If it rained or snowed or hailed or stormed three weeks before Easter, he could prophesy the weather Easter Sunday. He could look at the sky and tell you what was coming; if an early frost was on its way to kill the peach trees, he could tell you it was on its way and when it would arrive; there was no storm, no sudden shift in weather that he could not “feel in his bones” before it came. He had a thousand signs and symptoms of foretelling things like these—the look of the moon or the look of a cloud, the feel of the air or the direction of the wind, the appearance of the earliest bird, the half-appearance of the first blade of grass. He could feel storm coming, and could smell the thunder. It all amounted to a kind of great sixth sense out of nature, an almost supernatural intuition. In addition to—or as a consequence of—all these things, Mr. Crane raised the finest vegetables of anyone in town—the largest, perfectest tomatoes, the biggest potatoes, the finest peas and greens and onions, the most luscious strawberries, the most beautiful flowers.