Look Homeward, Angel - Thomas Wolfe (28 page)

"By God!" he boasted, "I bet he does
the damnedest piece of operating you ever heard of."

"Why, hell," said the counterman loyally,
"he ain't worth a damn until he's got a quart of corn licker
under his belt.  Give him a few drinks and he'll cut off your
damned head and put it on again without your knowing it."

As Jeff Spaugh roared off Harry Tugman said
jealously:  "Look at that bastard.  Mr. Vanderbilt. 
He thinks he's hell, don't he?  A big pile of bull.  Ben,
do you reckon he was really out at the Hilliards to-night?"

"Oh for God's sake," said Ben irritably,
"how the hell should I know!  What difference does it
make?" he added furiously.

"I guess Little Maudie will fill up the column
to-morrow with some of her crap," said Harry Tugman.  "'The
Younger Set,' she calls it! Christ!  It goes all the way from
every little bitch old enough to wear drawers, to Old Man Redmond. 
If Saul Gudger belongs to the Younger Set, Ben, you and I are still
in the third grade.  Why, hell, yes," he said with an air
of conviction to the grinning counterman, "he was bald as a
pig's knuckle when the Spanish American War broke out."

The counterman laughed.

Foaming with brilliant slapdash improvisation Harry
Tugman declaimed:

"Members of the Younger Set were charmingly
entertained last night at a dinner dance given at Snotwood, the
beautiful residence of Mr. and Mrs. Clarence Firkins, in honor of
their youngest daughter, Gladys, who made her debut this season. 
Mr. and Mrs. Firkins, accompanied by their daughter, greeted each of
the arriving guests at the threshhold in a manner reviving the finest
old traditions of Southern aristocracy, while Mrs. Firkins'
accomplished sister, Miss Catherine Hipkiss, affectionately known to
members of the local younger set as Roaring Kate, supervised the
checking of overcoats, evening wraps, jock-straps, and jewelry.

"Dinner was served promptly at eight o'clock,
followed by coffee and Pluto Water at eight forty-five.  A
delicious nine-course collation had been prepared by Artaxerxes
Papadopolos, the well-known confectioner and caterer, and proprietor
of the Bijou Café for Ladies and Gents.

"After first-aid and a thorough medical
examination by Dr. Jefferson Reginald Alfonso Spaugh, the popular
GIN-ecologist, the guests adjourned to the Ball Room where dance
music was provided by Zeke Buckner's Upper Hominy Stringed Quartette,
Mr. Buckner himself officiating at the trap drum and tambourine.

"Among those dancing were the Misses Aline
Titsworth, Lena Ginster, Ophelia Legg, Gladys Firkins, Beatrice
Slutsky, Mary Whitesides, Helen Shockett, and Lofta Barnes.

"Also the Messrs.  I. C. Bottom, U. B.
Freely, R. U. Reddy, O. I. Lovett, Cummings Strong, Sansom Horney,
Preston Updyke, Dows Wicket, Pettigrew Biggs, Otis Goode, and J.
Broad Stem."

Ben laughed noiselessly, and bent his pointed face
into the mug again.  Then, he stretched his thin arms out,
extending his body sensually upward, and forcing out in a wide yawn
the night-time accumulation of weariness, boredom, and disgust.

"Oh-h-h-h my God!"
 
 

Virginal sunlight crept into the street in young
moteless shafts. At this moment Gant awoke.

He lay quietly on his back for a moment in the
pleasant yellow-shaded dusk of the sitting-room, listening to the
rippling flutiness of the live piping birdy morning.  He yawned
cavernously and thrust his right hand scratching into the dense
hairthicket of his breast.

The fast cackle-cluck of sensual hens.  Come and
rob us.  All through the night for you, master.  Rich
protesting yielding voices of Jewesses.  Do it, don't it. 
Break an egg in them.

Sleepless, straight, alert, the counterpane moulded
over his gaunt legs, he listened to the protesting invitations of the
hens.

From the warm dust, shaking their fat feathered
bodies, protesting but satisfied they staggered up.  For me. 
The earth too and the vine.  The moist new earth cleaving like
cut pork from the plough. Or like water from a ship.  The spongy
sod spaded cleanly and rolled back like flesh.  Or the earth
loosened and hoed gently around the roots of the cherry trees. 
The earth receives my seed. For me the great lettuces.  Spongy
and full of sap now like a woman.  The thick grapevine--in
August the heavy clustered grapes--How there?  Like milk from a
breast.  Or blood through a vein. Fattens and plumps them.

All through the night the blossoms dropping. 
Soon now the White Wax.  Green apples end of May.  Isaacs'
June Apple hangs half on my side.  Bacon and fried green apples.

With sharp whetted hunger he thought of breakfast. 
He threw the sheet back cleanly, swung in an orbit to a sitting
position and put his white somewhat phthisic feet on the floor. 
Standing up tenderly, he walked over to his leather rocker and put on
a pair of clean white-footed socks.  Then he pulled his
nightgown over his head, looking for a moment in the dresser mirror
at his great boned structure, the long stringy muscles of his arms,
and his flat-meated hairy chest.  His stomach sagged paunchily. 
He thrust his white flaccid calves quickly through the shrunken legs
of a union suit, stretched it out elasticly with a comfortable
widening of his shoulders and buttoned it.  Then he stepped into
his roomy sculpturally heavy trousers and drew on his soft-leathered
laceless shoes.  Crossing his suspender braces over his
shoulders, he strode into the kitchen and had a brisk fire of oil and
pine snapping in the range within three minutes.  He was
stimulated and alive in all the fresh wakefulness of the Spring
morning.
 
 

Through Birdseye Gap, in the dewy richness of Lunn's
Cove, Judge Webster Tayloe, the eminent, prosperous, and aristocratic
corporation counsel (retired, but occasional consultations), rose in
the rich walnut twilight of his bedchamber, noted approvingly,
through the black lenses of the glasses that gave his long, subtle,
and contemptuous face its final advantage over the rabble, that one
of his country bumpkins was coming from the third pasture with a
slopping pail of new milk, another was sharpening a scythe in the
young glint of the sun, and another, emulating his more intelligent
fellow, the horse, was backing a buggy slowly under the carriage
shed.

Approvingly he watched his young mulatto son come
over the lawn with lazy cat-speed, noting with satisfaction the grace
and quickness of his movements, the slender barrel strength of his
torso, his smallboned resiliency.  Also the well-shaped
intelligent head, the eager black eyes, the sensitive oval face, and
the beautiful coprous olive of the skin.  He was very like a
better-class Spaniard.  Quod potui perfeci.  By this
fusion, perhaps, men like men.

By the river the reed-pipes, the muse's temple, the
sacred wood again.  Why not?  As in this cove.  I,
too, have lived in Arcady.

He took off his glasses for a moment and looked at
the ptotic malevolence of his left eye, and the large harlequinesque
wart in the cheek below it.  The black glasses gave the
suggestion that he was half-masked; they added a touch of
unsearchable mystery to the subtle, sensual and disquieting
intelligence of his face.  His negro man appeared at this moment
and told him his bath was ready. He drew the long thin nightgown over
his freckled Fitzsimmons body and stepped vigorously into tepid
water.  Then for ten minutes he was sponged, scraped, and
kneaded, upon a long table by the powerful plastic hands of the
negro.  He dressed in fresh laundered underwear and newly
pressed clothes of black.  He tied a black string carelessly
below the wide belt of starched collar and buttoned across his
straight long figure a frock coat that reached his knees.  He
took a cigarette from a box on his table and lighted it.

Bouncing tinnily down the coiling road that came
through the Gap from the town, a flivver glinted momently through the
trees.  Two men were in it.  His face hardened against it,
he watched it go by his gates on the road with a scuffle of dust. 
Dimly he saw their lewd red mountain faces, and completed the image
with sweat and corduroy.  And in the town their city cousins. 
Brick, stucco, the white little eczema of Suburbia.  Federated
Half-Breeds of the World.

Into my Valley next with lawnmowers and front lawns. 
He ground out the life of the cigarette against an ashtray, and began
a rapid window calculation of his horses, asses, kine, swine, and
hens; the stored plenitude of his great barn, the heavy fruitage of
his fields and orchards.  A man came toward the house with a
bucket of eggs in one hand and a bucket of butter in the other; each
cake was stamped with a sheaf of wheat and wrapped loosely in clean
white linen cloths.  He smiled grimly: if attacked he could
withstand a prolonged siege.
 
 

At Dixieland, Eliza slept soundly in a small dark
room with a window opening on the uncertain light of the back porch. 
Her chamber was festooned with a pendant wilderness of cord and
string; stacks of old newspapers and magazines were piled in the
corners; and every shelf was loaded with gummed, labelled,
half-filled medicine bottles.  There was a smell in the air of
mentholatum, Vick's Pneumonia Cure, and sweet glycerine.  The
negress arrived, coming under the built-up house and climbing lazily
the steep tunnel of back steps.  She knocked at the door.

"Who's there!" cried Eliza sharply, waking
at once, and coming forward to the door.  She wore a gray
flannel nightgown over a heavy woollen undershirt that Ben had
discarded: the pendant string floated gently to and fro as she opened
the door, like some strange seamoss floating below the sea. 
Upstairs, in the small front room with the sleeping-porch, slept Miss
Billie Edwards, twenty-four, of Missouri, the daring and masterful
liontamer of Johnny L. Jones Combined Shows, then playing in the
field on the hill behind the Plum Street School.  Next to her,
in the large airy room at the corner, Mrs. Marie Pert, forty-one, the
wife of an itinerant and usually absent drug salesman, lay deep in
the pit of alcoholic slumber.  Upon each end of the mantel was a
small snapshot in a silver frame--one of her absent daughter, Louise,
eighteen, and one of Benjamin Gant, lying on the grass-bank in front
of the house, propped on his elbow and wearing a wide straw hat that
shaded all his face except his mouth.  Also, in other chambers,
front and back, Mr. Conway Richards, candy-wheel concessionaire with
the Johnny L. Jones Combined Shows, Miss Lily Mangum, twenty-six,
trained nurse, Mr. William H. Baskett, fifty-three, of Hattiesburg,
Mississippi, cotton grower, banker, and sufferer from malaria, and
his wife; in the large room at the head of the stairs Miss Annie
Mitchell, nineteen, of Valdosta, Georgia, Miss Thelma Cheshire,
twenty-one, of Florence, South Carolina, and Mrs. Rose Levin,
twenty-eight, of Chicago, Illinois, all members of the chorus of
"Molasses" Evans and His Broadway Beauties, booked out of
Atlanta, Georgia, by the Piedmont Amusement Agency.

"O G-hirls!  The Duke of Gorgonzola and the
Count of Limburger are on their way here now.  I want all you
girls to be nice to them and to show them a good time when they
arrive."

"You BET we will."

"And keep your eye on the little one--he's the
one with all the money."

"I'll SAY we will.  Hurrah, Hurrah,
Hurrah!"
 

    
"We are the girls that
have the fun,
     
We're
snappy and happy every one;
     
We're jolly and gay
     
And ready to play,
     
And that is why we say-ee--"
 
 

Behind a bill-plastered fence-boarding on upper
Valley Street, opposite the Y. M. I. (colored), and in the very heart
of the  crowded amusement and commercial centre of Altamont's
colored population, Moses Andrews, twenty-six, colored, slept the
last great sleep of white and black.  His pockets, which only
the night before had been full of the money Saul Stein, the
pawnbroker, had given him in exchange for certain articles which he
had taken from the home of Mr. George Rollins, the attorney (as an
18-carat Waltham gold watch with a heavy chain of twined gold, the
diamond engagement ring of Mrs. Rollins, three pairs of the finest
silk stockings, and two pairs of gentlemen's under-drawers), were now
empty, a half-filled bottle of Cloverleaf Bonded Kentucky Rye, with
which he had retired behind the boards to slumber, lay unmolested in
the flaccid grip of his left hand, and his broad black throat gaped
cleanly open from ear to ear, as a result of the skilled razor-work
of his hated and hating rival, Jefferson Flack, twenty-eight, who now
lay peacefully, unsuspected and unsought, with their mutual mistress,
Miss Molly Fiske, in her apartment on east Pine Street.  Moses
had been murdered in moonlight.

A starved cat walked softly along by the boards on
Upper Valley: as the courthouse bell boomed out its solid six
strokes, eight negro laborers, the bottoms of their overalls stiff
with agglutinated cement, tramped by like a single animal, in a
wedge, each carrying his lunch in a small lard bucket.
 
 

Meanwhile, the following events occurred
simultaneously throughout the neighborhood.

Dr. H. M. McRae, fifty-eight, minister of the First
Presbyterian Church, having washed his lean Scotch body, arrayed
himself in stiff black and a boiled white shirt, and shaved his spare
clean un-aging face, descended from his chamber in his residence on
Cumberland Avenue, to his breakfast of oatmeal, dry toast, and boiled
milk.  His heart was pure, his mind upright, his faith and his
life like a clean board scrubbed with sandstone.  He prayed in
thirty-minute prayers without impertinence for all men and the
success of all good ventures.  He was a white unwasting flame
that shone through love and death; his speech rang out like steel
with a steady passion.