“My dear child, surely you must know by now,” his uncle cried, as he turned on him with the fixed, blazing glare of his eyes, his set grimace of scorn and fury—“surely you have learned by now that a Joyner is incapable of doing wrong. Cruelty, blind indifference to everything except oneself, brutal neglect, children criminally begotten in casual gratification of one’s own lust, children born unwanted and untended into a world of misery, poverty, and neglect where they must live or die or sicken or be strong according to their own means, in a struggle to survive as barbarously savage as the children of an Indian tribe endure—why, these are faults that might be counted crimes in other men, but in a Joyner are considered acts of virtue!—No, he can see the starved eyes of his children staring at him from the shadows as they go comfortless and famished to their beds, and then go out upon his porch to listen to the million little sounds of night, and meditate the glory of the moon as it comes up across the hill behind the river! He can breathe the sweet, wild fragrance of a Summer’s night and dreamily compose a lyric to the moon, the lilac, and his lady’s hair, while his daughter coughs her life out from the darkness of the wretched house—and find no fault or error in his life whatever!…
“Oh, did I not live and know it all?” his uncle cried, “that agony of life and death, blind chance, survival or extinction—till the mind went mad, man’s heart and faith were broken, to see how little was the love we had, how cruel, vile, and useless was the waste!—My brother Edward died when he was four years old: there in the room with all of us he lay for a week upon his trundle bed—oh! we let him die beneath our very eyes!” his uncle cried, striking his fist into the air with a kind of agony of loss and pain—“he died beneath the very beds we slept in, for his trundle bed was pushed each night beneath the big bed where my mother and my father slept. We stood there staring at him with the eyes of dumb, bewildered, foolish oxen, while his body stiffened, his heels drew backward towards his head in the convulsions of his agony—and that damned sanctimonious, well-pleased voice drawled on and on with the conceit of its interminable assurance, ‘giving it as my theory,’” snarled the boy’s uncle—“though all things else were lacking in that house, there never was a dearth of theory—that unplumbed well of wisdom could give theories till you died. And Edward died, thank God, before the week was out,” his uncle quietly went on. “He died suddenly one night at two o’clock while the Great Theorist snored peacefully above him—while all the rest of us were sleeping! He screamed once—such a scream as had the whole blind agony of death in it—and by the time we got a candle lighted and had pulled his little bed out on the floor, that wretched and forsaken child was dead! His body was as stiff as a poker and bent back like a bow even as the Noble Theorist lifted him—he was dead before our eyes before we knew it—dead even as that poor woman who had borne him rushed screaming out of doors like a demented creature—running, stumbling, God knows where, downhill, into the dark—the wilderness—towards the river—to seek help somehow at a neighbor’s when the need for help was past. And his father was holding that dead child in his arms when she returned with that unneeded help….
“Oh, my child,” his uncle whispered, “if you could have seen the look on that woman’s face as she came back into that room of death again—if you could have seen her look first at the child there in his arms, and then at him, and seen him shake his head at her and say, ‘I knew that he was gone before you went out of the door, but I didn’t have the heart to call you back and let you know’—oh! if you could have heard the sanctimonious, grief-loving unction of that voice, that feeding gluttony and triumphant vanity of sorrow that battened on his own child’s life and said to me, as it had said a thousand times, more plain than any words could do: ‘I! I! I! Others will die, but I remain! Death, sorrow, human agony, and loss, all the grief, error, misery, and mischance that men can suffer occurs here for the enlargement of this death-devouring, all-consuming, time-triumphant universe of I, I, I!’—Why, damn him,” said his uncle huskily, “I had no words to nail him with a curse, no handle to take hold of my complaint—he had escaped as always like oil running through my fingers, speaking those unctuous words of piety and sorrow that none could challenge—but I hated him like hell and murder in my heart—I could have killed him where he stood!”
BUT NOW, AS the boy and his uncle stood there on the mountain top looking into the lonely vistas of the westering sun, watching its savage stripes of gold and red as it went down in the smoky loneliness and receding vistas of the great ranges of the west, the wind would fill the boy’s heart with unwalled homelessness, a desire for houses, streets, and the familiar words again, a mighty longing for return.
For now black night, wild night, oncoming, secret, and mysterious night, with all its lonely wilderness of storm, demented cries, and unhoused wandering was striding towards them like an enemy. And around them on the lonely mountain top they heard the whistling of the wind in coarse, sere grasses, and from the darkening mountain side below them they could hear the remote howlings of the wind as it waged its stern, incessant warfare in the stormy branches of the bare and lonely trees.