I mention all this merely to fix the point from which I started. This was the beginning of the road.
In recent years there have been several attempts to explain what has happened to me since that time in terms of something that happened to me in college. I believe, Fox, that I never told you about that episode. Not that I was ashamed of my part in it or was afraid to talk about it. It just never came up; in a way, I had forgotten it. But now, at this moment of our parting, I think I had better speak of it, because it is vitally important to me to make one thing clear: that I am not the victim or the embittered martyr of anything that ever happened in the past. Oh, yes, there was a time, as you well know, when I was full of bitterness. There was a time when I felt that life had betrayed me. But that preciousness is gone now, and with it has gone my bitterness. This is the simple truth.
But to get back to this episode I spoke of:
As you know, Fox, when my first book was published, feeling ran high against me at home. Then it was that an effort was made to explain what was called the “bitterness” of the book in terms of my disfranchisement when I was at college. Now, the Pine Rock case is famous in Old Catawba, but the names of its chief actors had been almost forgotten when the book appeared. Then, because I was one of them, people began to talk about the case again, and the whole horrible tragedy was exhumed.
It was recalled how five of us (and God have mercy on the souls of those others who kept silent at the time) had taken our classmate Bell out to the playing-field one night, blindfolded him, and compelled him to dance upon a barrel. It was recalled how he stumbled and toppled from the barrel, fell on a broken bottle-neck, severed his jugular, and bled to death within five minutes. It was recalled, then, how the five of us—myself and Randy Shepperton, John Brackett, Stowell Anderson, and Dick Carr—were expelled, brought up for trial, released in the custody of our parents or nearest relatives, and deprived of the rights of citizenship by legislative act.
All this was true. But the construction which people put upon it when the book appeared was false. None of us, I think, was “ruined” and “embittered”—and our later records prove that we were not. There is no doubt that the tragic consequences of our act (and of the five who suffered disfranchisement, at least three—I will not say which three—were present only in the group of onlookers) left its dark and terrible imprint on our young lives. But, as Randy whispered to me on that dreadful night, as we stood there white-faced and helpless in the moonlight, watching that poor boy as he bled to death:
“We’re not guilty of anything—except of being plain damned fools!”
That was the way we felt that night—all of us—as we knelt, sick with horror, around the figure of that dying boy. And I know that was the way Bell felt, too, for he saw the terror and remorse in our white faces and, dying though he was, he tried to smile and speak to us. The words would not come, but all of us knew that if he could have spoken he would have said that he was sorry for us—that he knew there was no evil in us—no evil but our own stupidity.
We had killed the boy—our thoughtless folly killed him—but with his dying breath that would have been his only judgment on us. And we broke the heart of Plato Grant, our Old Man, our own Philosopher; but all he said to us that night as he turned towards us from poor Bell was, quietly:
“My God, boys, what have you done?”
And that was all. Even Bell’s father said no more to us. And after the first storm had passed, the cry of outrage and indignation that went up throughout the state—that was our punishment: the knowledge of the Done inexorable, the merciless insistence in our souls of that fatal and irrevocable “Why?”