WEDDING RING
379
a.J.d class, almost to brush the collar of the coarse, hand-me-down–
looking jacket, which was the jacket of an infantryman in the Con–
federate Army.
But everything in the picture, in contrast with the dark, burning
eyes, seemed accidental. That jacket, however, was not accidental. It
was worn as the result of calculation and anguish, in pride and self–
humiliation, in the conviction that it would be worn in death. But
death was not to be that quick and easy. It was to come slow and
hard, in a stinking hospital in Atlanta. The last letter in the packet
was not in Cass Mastern's hand. Lying in the hospital with his rotting
wound, he dic.tated his farewell letter to his brother, Gilbert Mastern.
The letter, and the last of the account books in which Cass Mastern's
jGurnal was kept, were eventually sent back home to Mississippi, and
Cass Mastern was buried somewhere in Atlanta, nobody had ever
known where.
It was, in a sense, proper that Cass Mastern-in the gray jacket,
sweat-stiffened, and prickly like a hair shirt, which it was for him at
the same time that it was the insignia of a begrudged glory-should
have gone back to Georgia to rot slowly to death. For he had been
born in Georgia, he and Gilbert Mastem and Lavinia Mastern, Jack
Burden's grandmother, in the red hills up toward Tennessee. "I was
born," the first page of the first volume of the journal said, "in a
.log cabin in north Georgia, in circumstances of poverty, and
if
in later
years I have lain soft and have supped from silver, may the Lord not
let die in my heart the knowledge of frost and of coarse diet. For all
men come naked into the world, and in prosperity 'man
is
prone to
evil as the sparks fly upward.' " The lines were written when Cass
was a student at Transylvania College, up in Kentucky, after what he
called
his
"darkness and trouble" had given place to the peace of God.
For the journal began with an account of the "darkness and trouble"
-which was a perfectly real trouble, with a dead man and a live
woman and long nailscratches down Cass Mastern's bony face. "I
write this down," he said in the journal, "with what truthfulness a
sinner may attain unto that if ever pride is in me, of flesh or spirit,
I can peruse these pages and know with shame what evil has been
in me, and may be in me, for who knows what breeze may blow
upon the charred log and fan up flame again?"
The impulse to write the journal sprang from the "darkness and
trouble," but Cass Mastern apparently had a systematic mind, and
so he went back to the beginning, to the log cabin in the red hills
of Georgia.
It
was the older brother, Gilbert, some fifteen years
