And yet Aunt Maw’s life, her time, her world, the fathomless intonations of that Joyner voice, spoken quietly, interminably at night, in the room where the coal-fire flared and crumbled, and where slow time was feeding like a vulture at the boy’s heart, could overwhelm his spirit in tides of drowning horror. Just as his father’s life spoke to him of all things wild and new, of exultant prophecies of escape and victory, of triumph, flight, new lands, the golden cities—of all that was magic, strange, and glorious on earth—so did the life of his mother’s people return him instantly to some dark, unfathomed place in nature, to all that was tainted by the slow-smouldering fires of madness in his blood, some ineradicable poison of the blood and soul, brown, thick, and brooding, never to be cured or driven out of him, in which at length he must drown darkly, horribly, unassuaged, unsavable, and mad.
Aunt Maw’s world came from some lonely sea-depth, some huge abyss and maw of drowning time, which consumed all things it fed upon except itself—consumed them with horror, death, the sense of drowning in a sea of blind, dateless Joyner time. Aunt Maw fed on sorrow with a kind of tranquil joy. In that huge chronicle of the past which her terrific memory wove forever, there were all the lights and weathers of the soul—sunlight, Summer, singing—but there was always sorrow, death and sorrow, the lost, lonely lives of men there in the wilderness. And yet she was not sorrowful herself. She fed on all the loneliness and death of the huge, dark past with a kind of ruminant and invincible relish, which said that all men must die save only these triumphant censors of man’s destiny, these never-dying, all-consuming Joyner witnesses of sorrow, who lived, and lived forever.
This fatal quality of that weblike memory drowned the boy’s soul in desolation. And in that web was everything on earth—except wild joy.
HER LIFE WENT back into the wilderness of Zebulon County before the Civil War.
“Remember!” Aunt Maw would say in a half-amused and half-impatient voice, as she raised the needle to the light and threaded it. “Why, you fool boy, you!” she would exclaim in scornful tones, “What are you thinkin’ of! Of course I can remember! Wasn’t I right there, out in Zebulon with all the rest of them, the day they came back from the war?…Yes, sir, I saw it all.” She paused, reflecting. “So here they came,” she continued tranquilly, “along about ten o’clock in the morning—you could hear them, you know, long before they got there—around that bend in the road—you could hear the people cheerin’ all along the road—and, of course, I began to shout and holler along with all the rest of them,” she said, “I wasn’t goin’ to be left out, you know,” she went on with tranquil humor, “—and there we were, you know, all lined up at the fence there—father and mother and your great-uncle Sam. Of course, you never got to know him, boy, but he was there, for he’d come home sick on leave at Christmas time. He was still limpin’ around from that wound he got—and of course it was all over or everyone knew it would be before he got well enough to go on back again. Hm,” she laughed shortly, knowingly, as she squinted at her needle, “At least that’s what he said——”
“What, Aunt Maw?”
“Why, that he was waitin’ for his wound to heal, but, pshaw!”—she spoke quietly, shaking her head—“Sam was lazy—oh, the laziest feller I ever saw in all my life!” she cried. “Now if the truth were told, that was all that was wrong with him—and let me tell you something; it didn’t take long for him to get well when he saw the war was comin’ to an end and he wouldn’t have to go on back and join the rest of them. He was limpin’ around there one day leanin’ on a cane as if every step would be his last, and the next day he was walkin’ around as if he didn’t have an ache or a pain in the world….
“That’s the quickest recovery I ever heard of, Sam,’ father said to him. ‘Now if you’ve got some more medicine out of that same bottle, I just wish you’d let me have a little of it.’—Well, then, so Sam was there.” She went on in a moment, “And of course Bill Joyner was there—old Bill Joyner, your great-grandfather, boy—as hale and hearty an old man as you’ll ever see!” she cried.
“Bill Joyner…why he must have been all of eighty-five right then, but you’d never have known it to look at him! Do anything! Go anywhere! Ready for anything!” she declared. “And he was that way, sir, right up to the hour of his death—lived over here in Libya Hill then, mind you, fifty miles away, but if he took a notion that he’d like to talk to one of his children, why he’d stand right out and come, without waitin’ to get his hat or anything. Why yes! didn’t he turn up one day just as we were all settin’ down to dinner, without a hat or coat or anything!” she cried. “Why, what on earth!’ said mother. ‘Where did you come from, Uncle Bill?’—she called him Uncle Bill, you know. ‘Oh, I came from Libya Hill,’ says he. ‘Yes, but how did you get here?’ she says—asks him, you know. ‘Oh, I walked it,’ he says. ‘Why, you know you didn’t!’ mother says, ‘And where’s your hat and coat?’ she says. ‘Oh, I reckon I came without ’em,’ he said, ‘I was out workin’ in my garden and I just took a notion that I’d come to see you all, so I didn’t stop to get my hat or coat,’ he said, ‘I just came on!’ And that’s just exactly what he’d done, sir,” she said with a deliberate emphasis. “He just took the notion that he’d like to see us all, and he lit right out, without stoppin’ to say hello or howdy-do to anybody!”