Look Homeward, Angel - Thomas Wolfe (85 page)

This served to quiet Gant
for a moment.  But as he entered the room, and saw Ben lying in
the semi-conscious coma that precedes death, the fear of his own
death overcame him, and he began to moan again.  They seated him
in a chair, at the foot of the bed, and he rocked back and forth,
weeping:

"O Jesus!  I
can't bear it!  Why must you put this upon me?  I'm old and
sick, and I don't know where the money's to come from.  How are
we ever going to face this fearful and croo-el winter?  It'll
cost a thousand dollars before we're through burying him, and I don't
know where the money's to come from."  He wept affectedly
with sniffling sobs.

"Hush! hush!"
cried Helen, rushing at him.  In her furious anger, she seized
him and shook him.  "You damned old man you, I could kill
you!  How dare you talk like that when your son's dying? 
I've wasted six years of my life nursing you, and you'll be the last
one to go!"  In her blazing anger, she turned accusingly on
Eliza:

"You've done this to
him.  You're the one that's responsible.  If you hadn't
pinched every penny he'd never have been like this. Yes, and Ben
would be here, too!"  She panted for breath for a moment. 
Eliza made no answer.  She did not hear her.

"After this, I'm
through!  I've been looking for you to die?and Ben's the one who
has to go."  Her voice rose to a scream of exasperation. 
She shook Gant again.  "Never again!  Do you hear
that, you selfish old man?  You've had everything--Ben's had
nothing.  And now he's the one to go.  I hate you!"

"Helen! 
Helen!" said Bessie Gant quietly.  "Remember where you
are."

"Yes, that means a
lot to us," Eugene muttered bitterly.

Then, over the ugly
clamor of their dissension, over the rasp and snarl of their nerves,
they heard the low mutter of Ben's expiring breath.  The light
had been re-shaded: he lay, like his own shadow, in all his fierce
gray lonely beauty.  And as they looked and saw his bright eyes
already blurred with death, and saw the feeble beating flutter of his
poor thin breast, the strange wonder, the dark rich miracle of his
life surged over them its enormous loveliness.  They grew quiet
and calm, they plunged below all the splintered wreckage of their
lives, they drew together in a superb communion of love and valiance,
beyond horror and confusion, beyond death.

And Eugene's eyes grew
blind with love and wonder: an enormous organ-music sounded in his
heart, he possessed them for a moment, he was a part of their
loveliness, his life soared magnificently out of the slough and pain
and ugliness.  He thought:

"That was not all! 
That really was not all!"

Helen turned quietly to
Coker, who was standing in shadow by the window, chewing upon his
long unlighted cigar.

"Is there nothing
more you can do?  Have you tried everything?  I
mean--EVERYTHING?"

Her voice was prayerful
and low.  Coker turned toward her slowly, taking the cigar
between his big stained fingers.  Then, gently, with his weary
yellow smile, he answered:  "Everything.  Not all the
king's horses, not all the doctors and nurses in the world, can help
him now."

"How long have you
known this?" she said.

"For two days,"
he answered.  "From the beginning."  He was
silent for a moment.  "For ten years!" he went on with
growing energy. "Since I first saw him, at three in the morning,
in the Greasy Spoon, with a doughnut in one hand and a cigarette in
the other. My dear, dear girl," he said gently as she tried to
speak, "we can't turn back the days that have gone.  We
can't turn life back to the hours when our lungs were sound, our
blood hot, our bodies young.  We are a flash of fire--a brain, a
heart, a spirit.  And we are three-cents-worth of lime and
iron--which we cannot get back."

He picked up his greasy
black slouch hat, and jammed it carelessly upon his head.  Then
he fumbled for a match and lit the chewed cigar.

"Has everything been
done?" she said again.  "I want to know!  Is
there anything left worth trying?"

He made a weary gesture
of his arms.

"My dear girl!"
he said.  "He's drowning!  Drowning!"

She stood frozen with the
horror of his pronouncement.

Coker looked for a moment
at the gray twisted shadow on the bed. Then, quietly, sadly, with
tenderness and tired wonder, he said: "Old Ben.  When shall
we see HIS like again?"

Then he went quietly out,
the long cigar clamped firmly in his mouth.

In a moment, Bessie Gant,
breaking harshly in upon their silence with ugly and triumphant
matter-of-factness, said:  "Well, it will be a relief to
get this over.  I'd rather be called into forty outside cases
than one in which any of these damn relations are concerned. 
I'm dead for sleep."

Helen turned quietly upon
her.

"Leave the room!"
she said.  "This is our affair now.  We have the right
to be left alone."

Surprised, Bessie Gant
stared at her for a moment with an angry, resentful face.  Then
she left the room.

The only sound in the
room now was the low rattling mutter of Ben's breath.  He no
longer gasped; he no longer gave signs of consciousness or struggle. 
His eyes were almost closed; their gray flicker was dulled, coated
with the sheen of insensibility and death.  He lay quietly upon
his back, very straight, without sign of pain, and with a curious
upturned thrust of his sharp thin face. His mouth was firmly shut. 
Already, save for the feeble mutter of his breath, he seemed to be
dead--he seemed detached, no part of the ugly mechanism of that sound
which came to remind them of the terrible chemistry of flesh, to mock
at illusion, at all belief in the strange passage and continuance of
life.

He was dead, save for the
slow running down of the worn-out machine, save for that dreadful
mutter within him of which he was no part.  He was dead.

But in their enormous
silence wonder grew.  They remembered the strange flitting
loneliness of his life, they thought of a thousand forgotten acts and
moments--and always there was something that now seemed unearthly and
strange: he walked through their lives like a shadow--they looked now
upon his gray deserted shell with a thrill of awful recognition, as
one who remembers a forgotten and enchanted word, or as men who look
upon a corpse and see for the first time a departed god.

Luke, who had been
standing at the foot of the bed, now turned to Eugene nervously,
stammering in an unreal whisper of wonder and disbelief:

"I g-g-g-guess Ben's
gone."

Gant had grown very
quiet: he sat in the darkness at the foot of the bed, leaning forward
upon his cane, escaped from the revery of his own approaching death,
into the waste land of the past, blazing back sadly and poignantly
the trail across the lost years that led to the birth of his strange
son.

Helen sat facing the bed,
in the darkness near the windows.  Her eyes rested not on Ben
but on her mother's face.  All by unspoken consent stood back in
the shadows and let Eliza repossess the flesh to which she had given
life.

And Eliza, now that he
could deny her no longer, now that his fierce bright eyes could no
longer turn from her in pain and aversion, sat near his head beside
him, clutching his cold hand between her rough worn palms.

She did not seem
conscious of the life around her.  She seemed under a powerful
hypnosis: she sat very stiff and erect in her chair, her white face
set stonily, her dull black eyes fixed upon the gray cold face.

They sat waiting. 
Midnight came.  A cock crew.  Eugene went quietly to a
window and stood looking out.  The great beast of night prowled
softly about the house.  The walls, the windows seemed to bend
inward from the thrusting pressure of the dark.  The low noise
in the wasted body seemed almost to have stopped.  It came
infrequently, almost inaudibly, with a faint fluttering respiration.

Helen made a sign to Gant
and Luke.  They rose and went quietly out.  At the door she
paused, and beckoned to Eugene.  He went to her.  "You
stay here with her," she said.  "You're her youngest. 
When it's over come and tell us."

He nodded, and closed the
door behind her.  When they had gone, he waited, listening for a
moment.  Then he went to where Eliza was sitting.  He bent
over her.

"Mama!" he
whispered.  "Mama!"

She gave no sign that she
had heard him.  Her face did not move; she did not turn her eyes
from their fixed stare.

"Mama!" he said
more loudly.  "Mama!"

He touched her.  She
made no response.

"Mama!  Mama!"

She sat there stiffly and
primly like a little child.

Swarming pity rose in
him.  Gently, desperately, he tried to detach her fingers from
Ben's hand.  Her rough clasp on the cold hand tightened. 
Then, slowly, stonily, from right to left, without expression, she
shook her head.

He fell back, beaten,
weeping, before that implacable gesture. Suddenly, with horror, he
saw that she was watching her own death, that the unloosening grip of
her hand on Ben's hand was an act of union with her own flesh, that,
for her, Ben was not dying?but that a part of HER, of HER life, HER
blood, HER body, was dying. Part of her, the younger, the lovelier,
the better part, coined in her flesh, borne and nourished and begun
with so much pain there twenty-six years before, and forgotten since,
was dying.

Eugene stumbled to the
other side of the bed and fell upon his knees.  He began to
pray.  He did not believe in God, nor in Heaven or Hell, but he
was afraid they might be true.  He did not believe in angels
with soft faces and bright wings, but he believed in the dark spirits
that hovered above the heads of lonely men.  He did not believe
in devils or angels, but he believed in Ben's bright demon to whom he
had seen him speak so many times.

Eugene did not believe in
these things, but he was afraid they might be true.  He was
afraid that Ben would get lost again.  He felt that no one but
he could pray for Ben now: that the dark union of their spirits made
only HIS prayers valid.  All that he had read in books, all the
tranquil wisdom he had professed so glibly in his philosophy course,
and the great names of Plato and Plotinus, of Spinoza and Immanuel
Kant, of Hegel and Descartes, left him now, under the mastering surge
of his wild Celtic superstition.  He felt that he must pray
frantically as long as the little ebbing flicker of breath remained
in his brother's body.

So, with insane sing-song
repetition, he began to mutter over and over again:  "Whoever
You Are, be good to Ben  to-night.  Show him the way . . . 
Whoever You Are, be good to Ben to-night.  Show him the way . .
."  He lost count of the minutes, the hours: he heard only
the feeble rattle of dying breath, and his wild synchronic prayer.

Light faded from his
brain, and consciousness.  Fatigue and powerful nervous
depletion conquered him.  He sprawled out on the floor, with his
arms pillowed on the bed, muttering drowsily. Eliza, unmoving, sat
across the bed, holding Ben's hand.  Eugene, mumbling, sank into
an uneasy sleep.

He awoke suddenly,
conscious that he had slept, with a sharp quickening of horror. 
He was afraid that the little fluttering breath had now ceased
entirely, that the effect of his prayer was lost.  The body on
the bed was almost rigid: there was no sound. Then, unevenly, without
rhythm, there was a faint mutter of breath. He knew it was the end. 
He rose quickly and ran to the door. Across the hall, in a cold
bedroom, on two wide beds, Gant, Luke, and Helen lay exhausted.

"Come," cried
Eugene.  "He's going now."

They came quickly into
the room.  Eliza sat unmoving, oblivious of them.  As they
entered the room, they heard, like a faint expiring sigh, the final
movement of breath.

The rattling in the
wasted body, which seemed for hours to have given over to death all
of life that is worth saving, had now ceased.  The body appeared
to grow rigid before them.  Slowly, after a moment, Eliza
withdrew her hands.  But suddenly, marvellously, as if his
resurrection and rebirth had come upon him, Ben drew upon the air in
a long and powerful respiration; his gray eyes opened.  Filled
with a terrible vision of all death to the dark spirit who had
brooded upon each footstep of his pillows without support--a flame, a
light, a glory--joined at length in death to the dark spirit who had
brooded upon each footstep of his lonely adventure on earth; and,
casting the fierce sword of his glance with utter and final
comprehension upon the room haunted with its gray pageantry of cheap
loves and dull consciences and on all those uncertain mummers of
waste and confusion fading now from the bright window of his eyes, he
passed instantly, scornful and unafraid, as he had lived, into the
shades of death.

We can believe in the
nothingness of life, we can believe in the nothingness of death and
of life after death--but who can believe in the nothingness of Ben? 
Like Apollo, who did his penance to the high god in the sad house of
King Admetus, he came, a god with broken feet, into the gray hovel of
this world.  And he lived here a stranger, trying to recapture
the music of the lost world, trying to recall the great forgotten
language, the lost faces, the stone, the leaf, the door.