Look Homeward, Angel - Thomas Wolfe (15 page)

"What does it mean?  What do you reckon it
means?" he whispered dryly to Otto Krause.

"Oh, you'll ketch it now!" said Otto
Krause, laughing hoarsely.

And the class tormented him slily, rubbing their
bottoms when they caught his eye, and making grimaces of agony.

He was sick through to his guts.  He had a
loathing of physical humiliation which was not based on fear, from
which he never recovered.  The brazen insensitive spirit of the
boys he envied but could not imitate: they would howl loudly under
punishment, in order to mitigate it, and they were vaingloriously
unconcerned ten minutes later.  He did not think he could endure
being whipped by the fat young man with the flower: at three o'clock,
white-faced, he went to the man's office.

Armstrong, slit-eyed and thin lipped, began to swish
the cane he held in his hand through the air as Eugene entered. 
Behind him, smoothed and flatted on his desk, was stacked the damning
pile of rhymed insult.

"Did you write these?" he demanded,
narrowing his eyes to little points in order to frighten his victim.

"Yes," said Eugene.

The principal cut the air again with his cane. 
He had visited Daisy several times, had eaten at Gant's plenteous
board.  He remembered very well.

"What have I ever done to you, son, that you
should feel this way?" he said, with a sudden change of whining
magnanimity.

"N-n-nothing," said Eugene.

"Do you think you'll ever do it again?"
said he, becoming ominous again.

"N-no, sir," Eugene answered, in the ghost
of a voice.

"All right," said God, grandly, throwing
away his cane.  "You can go."

His legs found themselves only when he had reached
the playground.
 
 

But oh, the brave autumn and the songs they sang;
harvest, and the painting of a leaf; and "half-holiday to-day";
and "up in the air so high"; and the other one about the
train--"the stations go whistling past"; the mellow days,
the opening gates of desire, the smoky sun, the dropping patter of
dead leaves.

"Every little snowflake is different in shape
from every other."

"Good grashus!  ALL of them, Miss Pratt?"

"All of the little snowflakes that ever were. 
Nature never repeats herself."

"Aw!"
 
 

Ben's beard was growing: he had shaved.  He
tumbled Eugene on the leather sofa, played with him for hours,
scraped his stubble chin against the soft face of his brother. 
Eugene shrieked.

"When you can do that you'll be a man,"
said Ben.

And he sang softly, in his thin humming ghost's
voice:
 

    
"The woodpecker pecked
at the schoolhouse door,
     
He
pecked and he pecked till his pecker got sore.
     
The woodpecker pecked at the schoolhouse bell,
     
He pecked and he
pecked till his pecker got well."
 

They laughed--Eugene with rocking throatiness, Ben
with a quiet snicker.  He had aqueous gray eyes, and a sallow
bumpy skin.  His head was shapely, the forehead high and bony. 
His hair was crisp, maple-brown.  Below his perpetual scowl, his
face was small, converging to a point: his extraordinarily sensitive
mouth smiled briefly, flickeringly, inwardly--like a flash of light
along a blade.  And he always gave a cuff instead of a caress:
he was full of pride and tenderness.
 
 

9
 

Yes, and in that month when Prosperpine comes back,
and Ceres' dead heart rekindles, when all the woods are a tender
smoky blur, and birds no bigger than a budding leaf dart through the
singing trees, and when odorous tar comes spongy in the streets, and
boys roll balls of it upon their tongues, and they are lumpy with
tops and agated marbles; and there is blasting thunder in the night,
and the soaking millionfooted rain, and one looks out at morning on a
stormy sky, a broken wrack of cloud; and when the mountain boy brings
water to his kinsmen laying fence, and as the wind snakes through the
grasses hears far in the valley below the long wail of the whistle,
and the faint clangor of a bell; and the blue great cup of the hills
seems closer, nearer, for he had heard an inarticulate promise: he
has been pierced by Spring, that sharp knife.

And life unscales its rusty weathered pelt, and earth
wells out in tender exhaustless strength, and the cup of a man's
heart runs over with dateless expectancy, tongueless promise,
indefinable desire. Something gathers in the throat, something blinds
him in the eyes, and faint and valorous horns sound through the
earth.

The little girls trot pigtailed primly on their
dutiful way to school; but the young gods loiter: they hear the reed,
the oatenstop, the running goathoofs in the spongy wood, here, there,
everywhere: they dawdle, listen, fleetest when they wait, go vaguely
on to their one fixed home, because the earth is full of ancient
rumor and they cannot find the way.  All of the gods have lost
the way.
 
 

But they guarded what they had against the
barbarians.  Eugene, Max, and Harry ruled their little
neighborhood: they made war upon the negroes and the Jews, who amused
them, and upon the Pigtail Alley people, whom they hated and
despised.  Catlike they prowled about in the dark promise of
night, sitting at times upon a wall in the exciting glare of the
corner lamp, which flared gaseously, winking noisily from time to
time.

Or, crouched in the concealing shrubbery of Gant's
yard, they waited for romantic negro couples climbing homewards,
jerking by a cord, as their victims came upon the spot, a stuffed
black snake-appearing stocking.  And the dark was shrill with
laughter as the loud rich comic voices stammered, stopped, and
screamed.

Or they stoned the cycling black boy of the markets,
as he swerved down gracefully into an alley.  Nor did they hate
them: clowns are black.  They had learned, as well, that it was
proper to cuff these people kindly, curse them cheerfully, feed them
magnanimously.  Men are kind to a faithful wagging dog, but he
must not walk habitually upon two legs.  They knew that they
must "take nothin' off a nigger," and that the beginnings
of argument could best be scotched with a club and a broken head. 
Only, you couldn't break a nigger's head.

They spat joyously upon the Jews.  Drown a Jew
and hit a nigger.

The boys would wait on the Jews, follow them home
shouting "Goose Grease!  Goose Grease!" which, they
were convinced, was the chief staple of Semitic diet; or with the
blind acceptance of little boys of some traditional, or mangled, or
imaginary catchword of abuse, they would yell after their muttering
and tormented victim: "Veeshamadye Veeshamadye!" confident
that they had pronounced the most unspeakable, to Jewish ears, of
affronts.

Eugene had no interest in pogroms, but it was a
fetich with Max. The chief object of their torture was a little
furtive-faced boy, whose name was Isaac Lipinski.  They pounced
cattishly at him when he appeared, harried him down alleys, over
fences, across yards, into barns, stables, and his own house; he
moved with amazing speed and stealth, escaping fantastically, teasing
them to the pursuit, thumbing his fingers at them, and grinning with
wide Kike constant derision.
 
Or,
steeped catlike in the wickedness of darkness, adrift in the brooding
promise of the neighborhood, they would cluster silently under a
Jew's home, grouped in a sniggering huddle as they listened to the
rich excited voices, the throaty accentuation of the women; or
convulsed at the hysterical quarrels which shook the Jew-walls almost
nightly.
 
Once, shrieking with
laughter, they followed a running fight through the streets between a
young Jew and his father-in-law, in which each was pursued and
pummelled, or pursuing and pummelling; and on the day when Louis
Greenberg, a pale Jew returned from college, had killed himself by
drinking carbolic acid, they stood curiously outside the dingy
wailing house, shaken by sudden glee as they saw his father, a
bearded orthodox old Jew, clothed in rusty, greasy black, and wearing
a scarred derby, approach running up the hill to his home, shaking
his hands in the air, and wailing rhythmically:
 

    
"Oi, yoi yoi yoi yoi,
     
Oi yoi yoi yoi yoi,
     
Oi yoi yoi yoi yoi."
 

But the whiteheaded children of Pigtail Alley they
hated without humor, without any mitigation of a most bitter and
alienate hate. Pigtail Alley was a muddy rut which sprawled down hill
off the lower end of Woodson Street, ending vaguely in the rank
stench of a green-scummed marsh bottom.  On one side of this
vile road there was a ragged line of whitewashed shacks, inhabited by
poor whites, whose children were almost always whitehaired, and who,
snuff-mouthed bony women, and tobacco-jawed men, sprawled stupidly in
the sun-stench of their rude wide-boarded porches.  At night a
smoky lamp burned dismally in the dark interiors, there was a smell
of frying cookery and of unclean flesh, strident rasping shrews'
cries, the drunken maniacal mountain drawl of men: a scream and a
curse.

Once, in the cherry time, when Gant's great White Wax
was loaded with its clusters, and the pliant and enduring boughs were
dotted thickly by the neighbor children, Jews and Gentiles alike, who
had been herded under the captaincy of Luke, and picked one quart of
every four for their own, one of these whitehaired children had come
doubtfully, mournfully, up the yard.

"All right, son," Luke, who was fifteen,
called out in his hearty voice.  "Get a basket and come on
up."

The child came up the gummed trunk like a cat: Eugene
rocked from the slender spiral topmost bough, exulting in his
lightness, the tree's resilient strength, and the great
morning-clarion fragrant backyard world.  The Alley picked his
bucket with miraculous speed, skinned spryly to the ground and
emptied it into the heaping pan, and was halfway up the trunk again
when his gaunt mother streaked up the yard toward him.

"You, Reese," she shrilled, "what're
you doin' hyar?"  She jerked him roughly to the ground and
cut across his brown legs with a switch.  He howled.

"You git along home," she ordered, giving
him another cut.

She drove him along, upbraiding him in her harsh
voice, cutting him sharply with the switch from moment to moment
when, desperate with pride and humiliation, he slackened his retreat
to a slow walk, or balked mulishly, howling again, and speeding a few
paces on his short legs, when cut by the switch.

The treed boys sniggered, but Eugene, who had seen
the pain upon the gaunt hard face of the woman, the furious pity of
her blazing eyes, felt something open and burst stabbingly in him
like an abscess.

"He left his cherries," he said to his
brother.

Or, they jeered Loney Shytle, who left a stale sharp
odor as she passed, her dirty dun hair covered in a wide plumed hat,
her heels out of her dirty white stockings.  She had caused
incestuous rivalry between her father and her brother, she bore the
scar of her mother's razor in her neck, and she walked, in her
rundown shoes, with the wide stiff-legged hobble of disease.

One day as they pressed round a trapped alley boy,
who backed slowly, fearfully, resentfully into a reeking wall, Willie
Isaacs, the younger brother of Max, pointing with sniggering
laughter, said:

"His mother takes in washin'."

And then, almost bent double by a soaring touch of
humor, he added:

"His mother takes in washin' from an ole
nigger."

Harry Tarkinton laughed hoarsely.  Eugene turned
away indefinitely, craned his neck convulsively, lifted one foot
sharply from the  ground.

"She don't!" he screamed suddenly into
their astounded faces.  "She don't!"
 
 

Harry Tarkinton's parents were English.  He was
three or four years older than Eugene, an awkward, heavy, muscular
boy, smelling always of his father's paints and oils,
coarse-featured, meaty sloping jaw and a thick catarrhal look about
his nose and mouth.  He was the breaker of visions; the proposer
of iniquities.  In the cool thick evening grass of Gant's yard
one sunset, he smashed forever, as they lay there talking, the
enchantment of Christmas; but he brought in its stead the smell of
paint, the gaseous ripstink, the unadorned, sweating, and imageless
passion of the vulgar.  But Eugene couldn't follow his barn-yard
passion: the strong hen-stench, the Tarkintonian paint-smell, and the
rank-mired branch-smell which mined under the filthy shambles of the
backyard, stopped him.

Once, in the deserted afternoon, as he and Harry
plundered through the vacant upper floor of Gant's house, they found
a half-filled bottle of hair-restorer.

"Have you any hairs on your belly?" said
Harry.

Eugene hemmed; hinted timidly at shagginess;
confessed.  They undid their buttons, smeared oily hands upon
their bellies, and waited through rapturous days for the golden
fleece.

"Hair makes a man of you," said Harry.

More often, as Spring deepened, he went now to Gant's
shop on the Square.  He loved the scene: the bright hill-cooled
sun, the blown sheets of spray from the fountain, the garrulous
firemen emerging from the winter, the lazy sprawling draymen on his
father's wooden steps, snaking their whips deftly across the
pavement, wrestling in heavy horseplay, Jannadeau in his dirty
fly-specked window prying with delicate monocled intentness into the
entrails of a watch, the reeking mossiness of Gant's fantastical
brick shack, the great interior dustiness of the main room in front,
sagging with gravestones--small polished slabs from Georgia, blunt
ugly masses of Vermont granite, modest monuments with an urn, a
cherub figure, or a couchant lamb, ponderous fly-specked angels from
Carrara in Italy which he bought at great cost, and never sold--they
were the joy of his heart.