Look Homeward, Angel - Thomas Wolfe (46 page)

There sounded in his heart a solemn music.  It
filled the earth, the air, the universe; it was not loud, but it was
omnipresent, and it spoke to him of death and darkness, and of the
focal march of all who lived or had lived, converging on a plain. 
The world was filled with silent marching men: no word was spoken,
but in the heart of each there was a common knowledge, the word that
all men knew and had forgotten, the lost key opening the prison
gates, the lane-end into heaven, and as the music soared and filled
him, he cried:  "I will remember.  When I come to the
place, I shall know."
 
 

Hot bands of light streamed murkily from the doors
and windows of the office.  From the press-room downstairs there
was an ascending roar as the big press mounted to its capacity. 
As he entered the office and drank in the warm tides of steel and ink
that soaked the air, he awoke suddenly, his light-drugged limbs
solidifying with a quick shock, as would some aerial spirit, whose
floating body corporealizes the instant it touches earth.  The
carriers, waiting in a boisterous line, filed up to the circulation
manager's desk, depositing their collections, cold handfuls of greasy
coin.  Seated beneath a green-shaded light, he ran swiftly down
their books, totalling up their figures and counting nickels, dimes,
and pennies into little spooned trays of a drawer.  Then he gave
to each a scrawled order for his morning quota.

They ran downstairs, eager as whippets to be off,
brandishing their slips at a sullen counter whose black fingers
galloped accurately across the stiff ridges of a great sheaf. 
He allowed them two "extras."  If the carrier was not
scrupulous, he increased his number of spare copies by keeping on his
book the names of a half-dozen discontinued subscribers.  These
surplus copies were always good for coffee and pie with the lunchman,
or as tribute to a favorite policeman, fireman, or motorman.

In the press-pit Harry Tugman loafed under their
stare comfortably, a fat trickle of cigarette smoke coiling from his
nostrils.  He glanced over the press with professional
carelessness, displaying his powerful chest with its thick bush,
which lay a dark blot under his sweat-wet under-shirt.  An
assistant pressman climbed nimbly among roaring pistons and
cylinders, an oil-can and a bunch of waste in his hand.  A broad
river of white paper rushed constantly up from the cylinder and
leaped into a mangling chaos of machinery whence it emerged a second
later, cut, printed, folded and stacked, sliding along a board with a
hundred others in a fattening sheaf.

Machine-magic!  Why not men, like that? 
Doctor, surgeon, poet, priest--stacked, folded, printed.

Harry Tugman cast away his wet fragment of cigarette
with a luxurious grimace.  The carriers eyed him reverently. 
Once he had knocked a sub-pressman down for sitting in his chair. 
He was Boss. He got $55 a week.  If he was not pleased he could
get work at any time on the New Orleans Times-Picayune, the
Louisville Courier Journal, the Atlanta Constitution, the Knoxville
Sentinel, the Norfolk Pilot.  He could travel.

In a moment more they were out on the streets,
hobbling along rapidly under the accustomed weight of the crammed
canvas bags.
 
 

He was most desperately afraid of failure.  He
listened with constricted face to Eliza's admonition.

"Spruce up, boy!  Spruce up!  Make
them think you are somebody!"

He had little confidence in himself; he recoiled in
advance from the humiliation of dismissal.  He feared the
sabre-cut of language, and before his own pride he drew back and was
afraid.

For three mornings he accompanied the retiring
carrier, gathering his mind to focal intensity while he tried to
memorize each stereotyped movement of the delivery, tracing again and
again the labyrinthine web of Niggertown, wreaking his plan out among
the sprawled chaos of clay and slime, making incandescent those
houses to which a paper was delivered, and forgetting the others. 
Years later, alone in darkness, when he had forgotten the twisted
anarchy of that pattern, he still remembered a corner where he left
his bag while he climbed a spur of hill, a bank down which he
clambered to three rotting shacks, a high porched house into which
accurately he shot his folded block of news.

The retiring carrier was a robust country boy of
seventeen who had been given better employment at the paper office. 
His name was Jennings Ware.  He was tough, good-humored, a
little cynical, and he smoked a great many cigarettes.  He was
clothed in vitality and comfort.  He taught his pupil when and
where to expect the prying face of "Foxy," how to escape
discovery under the lunchroom counter, and how to fold a paper and
throw it with the speed and accuracy of a ball.

In the fresh pre-natal morning they began their
route, walking down the steep hill of Valley Street into tropical
sleep, past the stabled torpor of black sleepers, past all the
illicit loves, the casual and innumerable adulteries of Niggertown. 
As the stiff block of paper thudded sharply on the flimsy porch of a
shack, or smacked the loose boarding of a door, they were answered by
a long sullen moan of discontent.  They sniggered.

"Check this one off," said Jennings Ware,
"if you can't collect next time.  She owes for six weeks
now."

"This one," he said, flipping a paper
quietly on a door mat, "is good pay.  They're good
niggers.  You'll get your money every Wednesday."

"There's a High Yaller in here," he said,
hurling the paper against the door with a whizzing smack and smiling,
as a young full-meated woman's yell of indignation answered, a thin
devil's grin.  "You can have that if you want it."

A wan smile of fear struggled across Eugene's mouth. 
Jennings Ware looked at him shrewdly, but did not press him. 
Jennings Ware was a good-hearted boy.

"She's a pretty good old girl," he said. 
"You've got a right to a few dead-heads.  Take it out in
trade."

They walked on down the dark unpaved street, folding
papers rapidly during the intervals between delivery.

"It's a hell of a route," said Jennings
Ware.  "When it rains it's terrible.  You'll go into
mud up to your knees.  And you can't collect from half the
bastards."  He hurled a paper viciously.

"But, oh man," he said, after a moment. 
"If you want Jelly Roll you've come to the right place.  I
ain't kidding you!"

"With--with niggers?" Eugene whispered,
moistening his dry lips.

Jennings Ware turned his red satirical face on him.

"You don't see any Society Belles around here,
do you?" he said.

"Are niggers good?" Eugene asked in a small
dry voice.

"Boy!"  The word blew out of Jennings
Ware's mouth like an explosion.  He was silent a moment.

"There ain't nothing better," he said.
 
 

At first, the canvas strap of the paper-bag bit
cruelly across his slender shoulders.  He strained against the
galling weight that pulled him earthwards.  The first weeks were
like a warring nightmare: day after day he fought his way up to
liberation.  He knew all the sorrow of those who carry weight;
he knew, morning by morning, the aerial ecstasy of release.  As
his load lightened with the progress of his route, his leaning
shoulder rose with winged buoyancy, his straining limbs grew light:
at the end of his labor his flesh, touched sensuously by fatigue,
bounded lightly from the earth.  He was Mercury chained by
fardels, Ariel bent beneath a pack: freed, his wingshod feet trod
brightness.  He sailed in air. The rapier stars glinted upon his
serfdom: dawn reddened on release.  He was like a sailor drowned
within the hold, who gropes to life and morning through a hatch; a
diver twined desperately in octopal feelers, who cuts himself from
death and mounts slowly from the sea-floor into light.

Within a month a thick hummock of muscle hardened on
his shoulder: he bent jubilantly into his work.  He had now no
fear of failure. His heart lifted like a proud crested cock.  He
had been dropped among others without favor, and he surpassed them. 
He was a lord of darkness; he exulted in the lonely sufficiency of
his work.  He walked into the sprawled chaos of the settlement,
the rifleman of news for sleeping men.  His fast hands blocked
the crackling sheet, he swung his lean arm like a whip.  He saw
the pale stars drown, and ragged light break open on the hills. 
Alone, the only man alive, he began the day for men, as he walked by
the shuttered windows and heard the long denned snore of the
tropics.  He walked amid this close thick sleep, hearing again
the ghostly ring of his own feet, and the vast orchestral music of
darkness.  As the gray tide of morning surged westward he awoke.

And Eugene watched the slow fusion of the seasons; he
saw the royal processional of the months; he saw the summer light eat
like a river into dark; he saw dark triumph once again; and he saw
the minute-winning days, like flies, buzz home to death.
 
In summer, full day had come before he finished: he
walked home in a world of wakenings.  The first cars were
grouped on the Square as he passed, their new green paint giving them
the pleasant appearance of fresh toys.  The huge battered cans
of the milkmen glinted cleanly in the sun.  Light fell hopefuly
upon the swarthy greasiness of George Chakales, nightman of the
Athens Cafe.  The Hellenic Dawn.  And in Uneeda No. 1, upon
the Square, Eugene sat, washing an egg-sandwich down with long
swallows of pungent coffee, stooled in a friendly company of
motormen, policemen, chauffeurs, plasterers, and masons.  It was
very pleasant, he felt, to complete one's work when all the world was
beginning theirs.  He went home under singing trees of birds.

In autumn, a late red moon rode low in the skies till
morning.  The air was filled with dropping leaves, there was a
solemn thunder of great trees upon the hills; sad phantasmal
whisperings and the vast cathedral music deepened in his heart.

In winter, he went down joyously into the dark
howling wind, leaning his weight upon its advancing wall as it swept
up a hill; and when in early Spring the small cold rain fell from the
reeking sky he was content.  He was alone.
 
 

He harried his deficient subscribers for payment,
with a wild tenacity.  He accepted their easy promises without
question; he hunted them down in their own rooms, or in the rooms of
a neighbor, he pressed so doggedly that, at length, sullenly or
good-humoredly, they paid a part of their debt.  This was more
than any of his predecessors had accomplished, but he fretted
nervously over his accounts until he found that he had become, for
the circulation manager, the exemplar for indolent boys.  As he
dumped his desperately gathered pile of "chicken feed" upon
the man's desk, his employer would turn accusingly to a delinquent
boy, saying:

"Look at that!  He does it every week! 
Niggers, too!"

His pallid face would flame with joy and pride. 
When he spoke to the great man his voice trembled.  He could
hardly speak.

As the wind yelled through the dark, he burst into
maniacal laughter.  He leaped high into the air with a scream of
insane exultancy, burred in his throat idiot animal-squeals, and shot
his papers terrifically into the flimsy boarding of the shacks. 
He was free.  He was alone.  He heard the howl of a
train-whistle, and it was not so far away.  In the darkness he
flung his arm out to the man on the rails, his goggled brother with
steel-steady rail-fixed eyes.

He did not shrink so much, beneath the menace of the
family fist. He was more happily unmindful of his own unworthiness.

Assembled with three or four of the carriers in the
lunchroom, he learned to smoke: in the sweet blue air of Spring, as
he sloped down to his route, he came to know the beauty of Lady
Nicotine, the delectable wraith who coiled into his brain, left her
poignant breath in his young nostrils, her sharp kiss upon his mouth.

He was a sharp blade.

The Spring drove a thorn into his heart, it drew a
wild cry from his lips.  For it, he had no speech.

He knew hunger.  He knew thirst.  A great
flame rose in him.  He cooled his hot face in the night by
bubbling water jets.  Alone, he wept sometimes with pain and
ecstasy.  At home the frightened silence of his childhood was
now touched with savage restraint.  He was wired like a
race-horse.  A white atom of inchoate fury would burst in him
like a rocket, and for a moment he would be cursing mad.

"What's wrong with him?  Is it the Pentland
crazy streak coming out?" Helen asked, seated in Eliza's
kitchen.
 
Eliza moulded her lips
portentously for some time, shaking her head slowly.

"Why," she said, with a cunning smile,
"don't you know, child?"

His need for the negroes had become acute.  He
spent his afternoons after school combing restlessly through the
celled hive of Niggertown.  The rank stench of the branch,
pouring its thick brown sewage down a bed of worn boulders, the smell
of wood-smoke and laundry stewing in a black iron yard-pot, and the
low jungle cadences of dusk, the forms that slid, dropped, and
vanished, beneath a twinkling orchestration of small sounds. 
Fat ropes of language in the dusk, the larded sizzle of frying fish,
the sad faint twanging of a banjo, and the stamp, far-faint, of heavy
feet; voices Nilotic, river-wailing, and the greasy light of four
thousand smoky lamps in shack and tenement.