Look Homeward, Angel - Thomas Wolfe (45 page)

"Ah! you little idiot!" Ben snarled,
lifting his white hand sharply.  He turned away quickly with a
flickering smile.

At this moment, Annie appeared on the walk outside
the door, with a face full of grieved decorum.

Luke looked nervously and gravely from his father to
the negress, fidgeting from one big foot to the other.

"I'se a married woman," said Annie. 
"I ain't used to nothin' like dis.  I wants my money."

Luke blew up in an explosion of wild laughter.

"Whah-whah!"  He pronged her larded
ribs with scooped fingers.  She moved away angrily, muttering.

Eugene lolled about feebly on the floor, kicking one
leg out gently as if he had just been decapitated, and fumbling
blindly at the neckband of his nightshirt.  A faint clucking
sound came at intervals from his wide-open mouth.

They laughed wildly, helplessly, draining into mad
laughter all the welled and agglutinated hysteria that had gathered
in them, washing out in a moment of fierce surrender all the fear and
fatality of their lives, the pain of age and death.

Dying, he walked among them, whining his lament
against God's lidless stare, gauging their laughter cautiously with
uneasy prying eyes, a faint tickled grin playing craftily about his
wailing mouth.
 
 

Roofing the deep tides, swinging in their embrace,
rocked Eliza's life Sargassic, as when, at morning, a breath of
kitchen air squirmed through her guarded crack of door, and fanned
the pendant clusters of old string in floating rhythm.  She
rubbed the sleep gently from her small weak eyes, smiling dimly as
she thought, unwakened, of ancient losses.  Her worn fingers
still groped softly in the bed beside her, and when she found it
vacant, she awoke. Remembered.  My youngest, my oldest, final
bitter fruit, O dark of soul, O far and lonely, where? 
Remembered O his face!  Death-son, partner of my peril, last
coinage of my flesh, who warmed my flanks and nestled to my back. 
Gone?  Cut off from me?  When?  Where?

The screen slammed, the market boy dumped ground
sausage on the table, a negress fumbled at the stove.  Awake
now.
 
 

Ben moved quietly, but not stealthily, about,
confessing and denying nothing.  His thin laughter pierced the
darkness softly above the droning creak of the wooden porch-swing. 
Mrs. Pert laughed gently, comfortingly.  She was forty-three: a
large woman of gentle manners, who drank a great deal.  When she
was drunk, her voice was soft, low, and fuzzy, she laughed
uncertainly, mildly, and walked with careful alcoholic gravity. 
She dressed well: she was well fleshed, but not sensual-looking. 
She had good features, soft oaken hair, blue eyes, a little bleared. 
She laughed with a comfortable, happy chuckle.  They were all
very fond of her.  Helen called her "Fatty."

Her husband was a drug salesman: he travelled through
Tennessee, Arkansas, and Mississippi, and returned to Altamont for a
fortnight every four months.  Her daughter, Catherine, who was
almost Ben's age, came to Dixieland for a few weeks each summer. 
She was a school-teacher in a public school in a Tennessee village. 
Ben squired both.

Mrs. Pert chuckled softly when she spoke to him, and
called him "Old Ben."  In the darkness he sat, talking
a little, humming a little, laughing occasionally in his thin minor
key, quietly, with a cigarette between his forked ivory fingers,
drawing deeply.  He would buy a flask of whisky and they would
drink it very quietly. Perhaps they talked a little more.  But
they were never riotous. Occasionally, they would rise at midnight
from the swing, and go out into the street, departing under leafy
trees.  They would not return during the night.  Eliza,
ironing out a great pile of rumpled laundry in the kitchen, would
listen.  Presently, she would mount the stairs, peer carefully
into Mrs. Pert's room, and descend, her lips thoughtfully kneaded.

She had to speak these things to Helen.  There
was a strange defiant communion between them.  They laughed or
were bitter together.

"Why, of course," said Helen, impatiently,
"I've known it all along."  But she looked beyond the
door curiously, her big gold-laced teeth half-shown in her open
mouth, the child look of belief, wonder, skepticism, and hurt
innocency in her big highboned face.

"Do you suppose he really does?  Oh surely
not mama.  She's old enough to be his mother."

Across Eliza's white puckered face, thoughtful and
reproving, a sly smile broke.  She rubbed her finger under the
broad wings of her nose to conceal it, and snickered.

"I tell you what!" she said.  "He's
a chip off the old block.  His father over again," she
whispered.  "It's in the blood."

Helen laughed huskily, picking vaguely at her chin,
and gazing out across the weedy garden.

"Poor old Ben!" she said, and her eyes, she
did not know why, were sheeted with tears.  "Well,
'Fatty's' a lady.  I like her--I don't care who knows it,"
she added defiantly.  "It's their business anyway. 
They're quiet about it.  You've got to say that much for them."

She was silent a moment.

"Women are crazy about him," she said. 
"They like the quiet ones, don't they?  He's a gentleman."

Eliza shook her head portentously for several
moments.

"What do you think!" she whispered, and
shook her pursed lips again.  "Always ten years older at
least."

"Poor old Ben!" Helen said again.
 
"The quiet one, the sad one.  I tell you
what!"  Eliza shook her head, unable to speak.  Her
eyes too were wet.

They thought of sons and lovers: they drew closer in
their communion, they drank the cup of their twin slavery as they
thought of the Gant men who would always know hunger, the strangers
on the land, the unknown farers who had lost their way.  O lost!
 
 

The hands of women were hungry for his crisp hair. 
When they came to the paper office to insert advertisements they
asked for him. Frowning gravely, he leaned upon the counter with feet
crossed, reading, in a somewhat illiterate monotone, what they had
written. His thin hairy wrists slatted leanly against his starched
white cuffs, his strong nervous fingers, ivoried by nicotine,
smoothed out the crumples.  Scowling intently, he bent his fine
head, erasing, arranging.  Emphatic lady-fingers twitched. 
"How's that?" Answers vague-voiced, eyes tangled in crisp
hair.  "Oh, much better, thank you."

Wanted: frowning boy-man head for understanding
fingers of mature and sympathetic woman.  Unhappily married. 
Address Mrs. B. J. X., Box 74.  Eight cents a word for one
insertion.  "Oh, [tenderly] thank you, Ben."

"Ben," said Jack Eaton, the advertising
manager, thrusting his plump face into the city editor's office, "one
of your harem's out there.  She wanted to murder me when I tried
to take it.  See if she's got a friend."

"Oh, listen to this, won't you?" Ben
snickered fiercely to the City Editor.  "You missed your
calling, Eaton.  What you want is the endman's job with Honeyboy
Evans."

Scowling, he cast the cigarette from his ivory hand,
and loped out into the office.  Eaton remained a moment to laugh
with the City Editor.  O rare Ben Gant!

Sometimes, returning late at night to Woodson Street,
in the crowded summer season, he slept with Eugene in the front room
upstairs where they had all been born.  Propped high on pillows
in the old cream-colored bed, painted gaily at head and foot with
round medals of clustering fruit, he read aloud in a quiet puzzled
voice, fumbling over pronunciation, the baseball stories of Ring
Lardner.  "You know me, Al."  Just outside the
windows the flat veranda roof was still warm from its daytime
exhalations of tar-calked tin.  Rich cob-webbed grapes hung in
packed clusters among the broad leaves.  "I didn't raise my
boy to be a southpaw.  I've a good mind to give Gleason a sock
in the eye."

Ben read painfully, pausing a moment later to
snicker.  Thus, like a child, he groped intently at all
meanings, with scowling studiousness.  Women liked to see him
scowl and study so.  He was sudden only in anger, and in his
quick communications with his angel.
 
 

22
 

Toward the beginning of Eugene's fourteenth year,
when he had been a student at Leonard's for two years, Ben got work
for him as a paper carrier.  Eliza grumbled at the boy's
laziness.  She complained that she could get him to do little or
nothing for her. In fact, he was not lazy, but he hated all the
dreariness of boarding-house routine.  Her demands on him were
not heavy, but they were frequent and unexpected.  He was
depressed at the uselessness of effort in Dixieland, at the total
erasure of all daily labor.  If she had given him position, the
daily responsibility of an ordered task, he could have fulfilled it
with zeal.  But her own method was much too random: she wanted
to keep him on tap for an occasional errand, and he did not have her
interest.

Dixieland was the heart of her life.  It owned
her.  It appalled him.  When she sent him to the grocer's
for bread, he felt wearily that the bread would be eaten by
strangers, that nothing out of the effort of their lives grew
younger, better, or more beautiful, that all was erased in a daily
wash of sewage.  She sent him forth in the rank thicket of her
garden to hoe out the swarming weeds that clustered about her
vegetables, which flourished, as did all the earth, under her
careless touch.  He knew, as he chopped down in a weary frenzy,
that the weeds would grow again in the hot sun-stench, that her
vegetables--weeded or not--would grow fat and be fed to her boarders,
and that her life, hers alone, would endure to something.  As he
looked at her, he felt the weariness and horror of time: all but her
must die in a smothering Sargasso.  Thus, flailing the clotted
earth drunkenly, he would be brought to suddenly by her piercing
scream from the high back porch, and realize that he had destroyed
totally a row of young bladed corn.

"Why, what on earth, boy!" she fretted
angrily, peering down at him through a shelving confusion of
wash-tubs, limp drying stockings, empty milk-bottles, murky and
unwashed, and rusty lard-buckets. "I'll vow!" she said,
turning to Mr. Baskett, the Hattiesburg cotton merchant, who grinned
down malarially through his scraggly mustaches, "what am I going
to do with him?  He's chopped down every stock of corn in the
row."

"Yes," Mr. Baskett said, peering over, "and
missed every weed. Boy," he added judicially, "you need two
months on a farm."

The bread that I fetch will be eaten by strangers. 
I carry coal and split up wood for fires to warm them.  Smoke. 
Fuimas fumus. All of our life goes up in smoke.  There is no
structure, no creation in it, not even the smoky structure of
dreams.  Come lower, angel; whisper in our ears.  We are
passing away in smoke and there is nothing to-day but weariness to
pay for yesterday's toil.  How may we save ourselves?
 
 

He was given the Niggertown route--the hardest and
least profitable of all.  He was paid two cents a copy for
weekly deliveries, given ten per cent of his weekly collections, and
ten cents for every new subscription.  Thus, he was able to earn
four or five dollars a week.  His thin undeveloped body drank
sleep with insatiable thirst, but it was now necessary for him to get
up at half-past three in the morning with darkness and silence making
an unreal humming in his drugged ears.

Strange aerial music came fluting out of darkness, or
over his slow-wakening senses swept the great waves of symphonic
orchestration.  Fiend-voices, beautiful and sleep-loud, called
down through darkness and light, developing the thread of ancient
memory.

Staggering blindly in the whitewashed glare, his
eyes, sleep-corded opened slowly as he was born anew, umbilically
cut, from darkness.

Waken, ghost-eared boy, but into darkness. 
Waken, phantom, O into us.  Try, try, O try the way.  Open
the wall of light.  Ghost, ghost, who is the ghost?  O
lost.  Ghost, ghost, who is the ghost? O whisper-tongued
laughter.  Eugene!  Eugene!  Here, O here, Eugene. 
Here, Eugene.  The way is here, Eugene.  Have you
forgotten?  The leaf, the rock, the wall of light.  Lift up
the rock, Eugene, the leaf, the stone, the unfound door. 
Return, return.

A voice, sleep-strange and loud, forever far-near,
spoke.

Eugene!

Spoke, ceased, continued without speaking, to speak. 
In him spoke. Where darkness, son, is light.  Try, boy, the word
you know remember.  In the beginning was the logos.  Over
the border the borderless green-forested land.  Yesterday,
remember?

Far-forested, a horn-note wound.  Sea-forested,
water-far, the grotted coral sea-far horn-note.  The pillioned
ladies witch-faced in bottle-green robes saddle-swinging. 
Merwomen unsealed and lovely in sea-floor colonnades.  The
hidden land below the rock. The flitting wood-girls growing into
bark.  Far-faint, as he wakened, they besought him with
lessening whir.  Then deeper song, fiend-throated, wind-shod. 
Brother, O brother!  They shot down the brink of darkness, gone
on the wind like bullets.  O lost, and by the wind grieved,
ghost, come back again.
 
 

He dressed and descended the stairs gently to the
back porch.  The cool air, charged with blue starlight, shocked
his body into wakefulness, but as he walked townward up the silent
streets, the strange ringing in his ears persisted.  He listened
like his own ghost, to his footsteps, heard from afar the winking
flicker of the street-lamps, saw, from sea-sunk eyes, the town.