Look Homeward, Angel - Thomas Wolfe (40 page)

"I'll give you a dollar apiece for every one you
drum up," said Eliza.

"O that's all right."  O modestly. 
Generously.

"He'd give you the shirt off his back,"
said Gant.

A fine boy.  As she cooled from her labors in
the summer night, he brought her little boxes of ice-cream from town.

He was a hustler: he sold patent washboards, trick
potato-peelers, and powdered cockroach-poison from house to house. 
To the negroes he sold hair-oil guaranteed to straighten kinky hair,
and religious lithographs, peopled with flying angels, white and
black, and volant cherubs, black and white, sailing about the knees
of an impartial and crucified Saviour, and subtitled "God Loves
Them Both."

They sold like hot cakes.

Otherwise, he drove Gant's car--a 1913 five-passenger
Ford, purchase of an inspired hour of madness, occupant now of half
Gant's conversation, object of abuse, boast, and anathema.  It
was before every one owned a car.  Gant was awed and terrified
by his rash act, exalted at the splendor of his chariot, appalled at
its expense.  Each bill for gasoline, repairs, or equipment
brought a howl of anguish from him; a puncture, a breakdown, a minor
disorder caused him to circle about in maddened strides, cursing,
praying, weeping.

"I've never had a moment's peace since I bought
it," he howled. "Accursed and bloody monster that it is, it
will not be content until it has sucked out my life-blood, sold the
roof over my head, and sent me out to the pauper's grave to perish. 
Merciful God," he wept, "it's fearful, it's awful, it's
cruel that I should be afflicted thus in my old age." 
Turning to his constrained and apologetic son abruptly, he said: 
"How much is the bill?  Hey?" His eyes roved wildly in
his head.

"D-d-d-don't get excited, papa," Luke
answered soothingly, teetering from foot to foot, "it's only
$8.92."

"Jesus God!" Gant screamed.  "I'm
ruined."  Sobbing in loud burlesque sniffles, he began his
caged pacing.

But it was pleasant at dusk or in the cool summer
nights, with Eliza or one of his daughters beside him, and a fragrant
weed between his pallid lips, to hinge his long body into the back
seat, and ride out into the fragrant countryside, or through the long
dark streets of town.  At the approach of another car he cried
out in loud alarm, by turns cursing and entreating his son to
caution. Luke drove nervously, erratically, wildly--his stammering
impatient hands and knees communicated their uneven fidget to the
flivver. He cursed irritably, plunged in exacerbated fury at the
brake, and burst out in an annoyed "tuh-tuh-tuh-tuh," when
the car stalled.

As the hour grew late, and the streets silent, his
madness swelled in him.  Lipping the rim of a long hill street,
tree-arched and leafy and shelving in even terraces, he would burst
suddenly into insane laughter, bend over the wheel, and pull the
throttle open, his idiot "whah-whahs" filling the darkness
as Gant screamed curses at him.  Down through the night they
tore at murderous speed, the boy laughing at curse and prayer alike
as they shot past the blind menace of street-crossings.

"You Goddamned scoundrel!" Gant yelled. 
"Stop, you mountain grill, or I'll put you in jail."

"Whah-whah."--His laughter soared to a
crazy falsetto.

Daisy, arrived for a few weeks of summer coolness,
quite blue with terror, would clutch the most recent of her annual
arrivals to her breast, melodramatically, and moan:

"I beg of you, for the sake of my family, for
the sake of my innocent motherless babes--"

"Whah-whah-whah!"

"He's a fiend out of hell," cried Gant,
beginning to weep.  "Cruel and criminal monster that he is,
he will batter our brains out against a tree, before he's done." 
They whizzed with a perilous swerve by a car that, with a startled
screech of its brakes, balked at the corner like a frightened horse.

"You damned thug!" Gant roared, plunging
forward and fastening his great hands around Luke's throat. 
"Will you stop?"

Luke added another notch of blazing speed.  Gant
fell backward with a howl of terror.

On Sunday they made long tours into the country. 
Often they drove to Reynoldsville, twenty-two miles away.  It
was an ugly little resort, noisy with arriving and departing cars,
with a warm stench of oil and gasoline heavy above its broad main
street.  But people were coming and going from several States:
Southward they came up from South Carolina and Georgia,
cotton-farmers, small tradesmen and their families in battered cars
coated with red sandclay dust. They had a heavy afternoon dinner of
fried chicken, corn, string-beans, and sliced tomatoes, at one of the
big wooden boarding-house hotels, spent another hour in a drugstore
over a chocolate nut-sundae, watched the summer crowd of fortunate
tourists and ripe cool-skinned virgins flow by upon the wide sidewalk
in thick pullulation, and returned again, after a brief tour of the
town, on the winding immediate drop to the hot South.  New
lands.

Fluescent with smooth ripe curves, the drawling
virgins of the South filled summer porches.

Luke was a darling.  He was a dear, a fine boy,
a big-hearted generous fellow, and just the cutest thing.  Women
liked him, laughed at him, pulled fondly the thick golden curls of
his hair. He was sentimentally tender to children--girls of fourteen
years. He had a grand romantic feeling for Delia Selborne, the oldest
daughter of Mrs. Selborne.  He bought her presents, was tender
and irritable by turns.  Once, at Gant's, on the porch under an
August moon and the smell of ripening grapes, he caressed her while
Helen sang in the parlor.  He caressed her gently, leaned his
head over her, and said he would like to lay it on her
b-b-b-b-breast. Eugene watched them bitterly, with an inch of poison
round his heart.  He wanted the girl for himself: she was
stupid, but she had the wise body and faint hovering smile of her
mother.  He wanted Mrs. Selborne more, he fantasied passionately
about her yet, but her image lived again in Delia.  As a result,
he was proud, cold, scornful and foolish before them.  They
disliked him.

Enviously, with gnawn heart, he observed Luke's
ministrations to Mrs. Selborne.  His service was so devout, so
extravagant that even Helen grew annoyed and occasionally jealous. 
And nightly, from a remote corner at Gant's or Eliza's, or from a
parked automobile before the house, he heard her rich welling
laughter, full of tenderness, surrender, and mystery. 
Sometimes, waiting in pitch darkness on the stairs at Eliza's, at one
or two o'clock in the morning, he felt her pass him.  As she
touched him in the dark, she gave a low cry of terror; with an
uncivil grunt he reassured her, and descended to bed with a pounding
heart and burning face.

Ah, yes, he thought, with green morality, observing
his brother throned in laughter and affection, you Big Fool,
you--you're just a sucker!  You show off and act big, my sonny,
and spend your money bringing ice-cream for them--but what do you get
out of it?  How do you feel when she gets out of an automobile
at two o'clock in the morning after grunting in the dark with some
damned travelling-man, or with old Poxy Logan who's been keeping a
nigger woman up for years.  "May I p-p-p-put my head on
your breast?"  You make me sick, you damned fool. 
SHE'S no better, only you don't know beans. She'll let you spend all
your money on her and then she'll run off with some little pimp in an
automobile for the rest of the night. Yes, that's so.  Do you
want to make anything out of it?  You big bluff.  Come out
into the back yard. . . .  I'll show you . . . take that . . .
and that . . . and that . . .

Pumping his fists wildly, he fought his phantom into
defeat and himself into exhaustion.
 
 

Luke had several hundred dollars saved from The
Saturday Evening Post days, when he went off to school.  He
accepted very little money from Gant.  He waited on tables, he
solicited for college boarding-houses, he was the agent for a tailor
who made Kippy Kampus Klothes.  Gant boasted of these efforts. 
The town shifted its quid, nodded pertly, and spat, saying:

"That boy'll make his mark."

Luke worked as hard for an education as any other
self-made man. He made every sacrifice.  He did everything but
study.

He was an immense popular success, so very extra, so
very Luky. The school sought and adored him.  Twice, after
football games, he mounted a hearse and made funeral orations over
the University of Georgia.

But, in spite of all his effort, toward the end of
his third year he was still a sophomore, with every prospect of
remaining one.
One day in Spring he wrote the
following letter to Gant:

"The b-b-b-bastards who r-r-run this place have
it in for me.  I've been c-c-c-crooked good and proper. 
They take your hard-earned m-m-money here and skin you.  I'm
g-g-g-going to a real school."

He went to Pittsburgh and found work with the
Westinghouse Electric Company.  Three times a week at night he
attended courses at the Carnegie Institute of Technology.  He
made friends.

The war had come.  After fifteen months in
Pittsburgh he moved on to Dayton where he got employment at a boiler
factory engaged in the fabrication of war materials.

From time to time, in summer for a few weeks, at
Christmas for a few days, he returned to celebrate his holidays with
his family. Always he brought Gant a suitcase stocked with beer and
whisky. That boy was "good to his father."
 
 

19
 

One afternoon in the young summer, Gant leaned upon
the rail, talking to Jannadeau.  He was getting on to
sixty-five, his erect body had settled, he stooped a little.  He
spoke of old age often, and he wept in his tirades now because of his
stiffened hand. Soaked in pity, he referred to himself as "the
poor old cripple who has to provide for them all."

The indolence of age and disintegration was creeping
over him.  He now rose a full hour late, he came to his shop
punctually, but he spent long hours of the day extended on the worn
leather couch of his office, or in gossip with Jannadeau, bawdy old
Liddell, Cardiac, and Fagg Sluder, who had salted away his fortune in
two big buildings on the Square and was at the present moment tilted
comfortably in a chair before the fire department, gossiping eagerly
with members of the ball club, whose chief support he was. It was
after five o'clock, the game was over.

Negro laborers, grisly with a white coating of
cement, sloped down past the shop on their way home.  The
draymen dispersed slowly, a slouchy policeman loafed down the steps
of the city hall picking his teeth, and on the market side, from high
grilled windows, there came the occasional howls of a drunken
negress.  Life buzzed slowly like a fly.

The sun had reddened slightly, there was a cool
flowing breath from the hills, a freshening relaxation over the tired
earth, the hope, the ecstasy of evening in the air.  In slow
pulses the thick plume of fountain rose, fell upon itself, and
slapped the pool in lazy rhythms.  A wagon rattled leanly over
the big cobbles; beyond the firemen, the grocer Bradley wound up his
awning with slow creaking revolutions.

Across the Square, at its other edge, the young
virgins of the eastern part of town walked lightly home in chattering
groups. They came to town at four o'clock in the afternoon, walked up
and down the little avenue several times, entered a shop to purchase
small justifications, and finally went into the chief drugstore,
where the bucks of the town loafed and drawled in lazy alert groups. 
It was their club, their brasserie, the forum of the sexes. 
With confident smiles the young men detached themselves from their
group and strolled back to booth and table.

"Hey theah!  Wheahd you come from?"

"Move ovah theah, lady.  I want to tawk to
you."

Eyes as blue as Southern skies looked roguishly up to
laughing gray ones, the winsome dimples deepened, and the sweetest
little tail in dear old Dixie slid gently over on the polished board.

Gant spent delightful hours now in the gossip of
dirty old men--their huddled bawdry exploded in cracked high wheezes
on the Square.  He came home at evening stored with gutter
tidings, wetting his thumb and smiling slyly as he questioned Helen
hopefully:

"She's no better than a regular little
chippie--eh?"

"Ha-ha-ha-ha," she laughed mockingly. 
"Don't you wish you knew?"

His age bore certain fruits, emoluments of service. 
When she came home in the evening with one of her friends, she
presented the girl with jocose eagerness to his embrace.  And,
crying out paternally, "Why, bless her heart!  Come kiss
the old man," he planted bristling mustache kisses on their
white throats, their soft lips, grasping the firm meat of one arm
tenderly with his good hand and cradling them gently.  They
shrieked with throaty giggle-twiddles of pleasure because it
tuh-tuh-tuh-tuh-TICKLED so.

"Ooh!  Mr. Gant!  Whah-whah-whah!"

"Your father's such a nice man," they
said.  "Such lovely manners."

Helen's eyes fed fiercely on them.  She laughed
with husky-harsh excitement.

"Hah-ha-ha!  He likes that, doesn't he? 
It's too bad, old boy, isn't it?  No more monkey business."