The Web and The Root Read Free

posse that riddled his body and hanged it up for view in the town square. Posing a question akin to Melville’s in Billy Budd when Claggart turns against the handsome young sailor, Wolfe seeks to understand the nature of good and evil. Dick is a deeply religious man, a man who prays, reads the Bible, and gains the trust of his employer and of George and his friend, Randy. What explains his onslaught? How to account for the paradox of his behavior, his gentleness and patience when with George and Randy, but his animal-like ferocity as he rifles down man after man in his murderous march across town? His conduct is a mystery to young George, but the older George, recalling the events after many years have passed, could be helped by contemplating the paired poems of William Blake about the tiger, a creature of “fearful symmetry” and the “meek and mild” lamb. “Did he who made the Lamb make thee?” Nowhere else in Wolfe is there a thornier metaphysical mystery to ponder. In a strategy much like one favored by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Wolfe poses the question and leaves the reader to puzzle through its ambiguity, its ambivalence.
    Putting “The Child by Tiger” back in its context as Wolfe’s delineation and examination of violence in American life provides ample support for reissuing the first three books of The Web and the Rock . This story both underscores and magnifies his deeply felt conviction that to see America at night was to see the nation for what it really was. It must not be lost to American literature nor appreciated alone out of context. Welcome back to the canon of American literature.
    John L. Idol, Jr.

CHAPTER 1
The Child Caliban
    Up to the time George Webber’s father died, there were some unforgiving souls in the town of Libya Hill who spoke of him as a man who not only had deserted his wife and child, but had consummated his iniquity by going off to live with another woman. In the main, those facts are correct. As to the construction that may be placed upon them, I can only say that I should prefer to leave the final judgment to God Almighty, or to those numerous deputies of His whom He has apparently appointed as His spokesmen on this earth. In Libya Hill there are quite a number of them, and I am willing to let them do the talking. For my own part, I can only say that the naked facts of John Webber’s desertion are true enough, and that none of his friends ever attempted to deny them. Aside from that, it is worth noting that Mr. Webber had his friends.
    John Webber was “a Northern man,” of Pennsylvania Dutch extraction, who had come into Old Catawba back in 1881. He was a brick mason and general builder, and he had been brought to Libya Hill to take charge of the work on the new hotel which the Corcorans were putting up on Belmont Hill, in the center of the town. The Corcorans were rich people who had come into that section and bought up tracts of property and laid out plans for large enterprises, of which the hotel was the central one. The railroad was then being built and would soon be finished. And only a year or two before, George Willetts, the greatNorthern millionaire, had purchased thousands of acres of the mountain wilderness and had come down with his architects to project the creation of a great country estate that would have no equal in America. New people were coming to town all the time, new faces were being seen upon the streets. There was quite a general feeling in the air that great events were just around the corner, and that a bright destiny was in store for Libya Hill.
    It was the time when they were just hatching from the shell, when the place was changing from a little isolated mountain village, lost to the world, with its few thousand native population, to a briskly-moving modern town, with railway connections to all parts, and with a growing population of wealthy people who had heard about the beauties of the setting and were coming there to live.
    That was the time John