Look Homeward, Angel - Thomas Wolfe (11 page)

And Eliza's hurt was deeper because she knew that
just at this time, when her slightest movement goaded him, did what
was most rawly essential in him reveal itself.  She was forced
to keep out of his way, lock herself in her room, while her young
daughter victoriously subdued him.

The friction between Helen and Eliza was often acute:
they spoke sharply and curtly to each other, and were painfully aware
of the other's presence in cramped quarters.  And, in addition
to the unspoken rivalry over Gant, the girl was in the same way,
equally, rasped by the temperamental difference of Eliza--driven to
fury at times by her slow, mouth-pursing speech, her placidity, the
intonations of her voice, the deep abiding patience of her nature.

They fed stupendously.  Eugene began to observe
the food and the seasons.  In the autumn, they barrelled huge
frosty apples in the cellar.  Gant bought whole hogs from the
butcher, returning home early to salt them, wearing a long
work-apron, and rolling his sleeves half up his lean hairy arms. 
Smoked bacons hung in the pantry, the great bins were full of flour,
the dark recessed shelves groaned with preserved cherries, peaches,
plums, quinces, apples, pears.  All that he touched waxed in
rich pungent life: his Spring gardens, wrought in the black wet earth
below the fruit trees, flourished in huge crinkled lettuces that
wrenched cleanly from the loamy soil with small black clots stuck to
their crisp stocks; fat red radishes; heavy tomatoes.  The rich
plums lay bursted on the grass; his huge cherry trees oozed with
heavy gum jewels; his apple trees bent with thick green clusters. 
The earth was spermy for him like a big woman.

Spring was full of cool dewy mornings, spurting
winds, and storms of intoxicating blossoms, and in this enchantment
Eugene first felt the mixed lonely ache and promise of the seasons.

In the morning they rose in a house pungent with
breakfast cookery, and they sat at a smoking table loaded with brains
and eggs, ham, hot biscuit, fried apples seething in their gummed
syrups, honey, golden butter, fried steak, scalding coffee.  Or
there were stacked batter-cakes, rum-colored molasses, fragrant brown
sausages, a bowl of wet cherries, plums, fat juicy bacon, jam. 
At the mid-day meal, they ate heavily: a huge hot roast of beef, fat
buttered lima-beans, tender corn smoking on the cob, thick red slabs
of sliced tomatoes, rough savory spinach, hot yellow corn-bread,
flaky biscuits, a deep-dish peach and apple cobbler spiced with
cinnamon, tender cabbage, deep glass dishes piled with preserved
fruits--cherries, pears, peaches.  At night they might eat fried
steak, hot squares of grits fried in egg and butter, pork-chops,
fish, young fried chicken.

For the Thanksgiving and Christmas feasts four heavy
turkeys were bought and fattened for weeks: Eugene fed them with cans
of shelled corn several times a day, but he could not bear to be
present at their executions, because by that time their cheerful
excited gobbles made echoes in his heart.  Eliza baked for weeks
in advance: the whole energy of the family focussed upon the great
ritual of the feast.  A day or two before, the auxiliary
dainties arrived in piled grocer's boxes--the magic of strange foods
and fruits was added to familiar fare: there were glossed sticky
dates, cold rich figs, cramped belly to belly in small boxes, dusty
raisins, mixed nuts--the almond, pecan, the meaty nigger-toe, the
walnut, sacks of assorted candies, piles of yellow Florida oranges,
tangerines, sharp, acrid, nostalgic odors.

Seated before a roast or a fowl, Gant began a heavy
clangor on his steel and carving knife, distributing thereafter
Gargantuan portions to each plate.  Eugene feasted from a high
chair by his father's side, filled his distending belly until it was
drum-tight, and was permitted to stop eating by his watchful sire
only when his stomach was impregnable to the heavy prod of Gant's big
finger.

"There's a soft place there," he would
roar, and he would cover the scoured plate of his infant son with
another heavy slab of beef. That their machinery withstood this
hammer-handed treatment was a tribute to their vitality and Eliza's
cookery.

Gant ate ravenously and without caution.  He was
immoderately fond of fish, and he invariably choked upon a bone while
eating it. This happened hundreds of times, but each time he would
look up suddenly with a howl of agony and terror, groaning and crying
out strongly while a half-dozen hands pounded violently on his back.

"Merciful God!" he would gasp finally, "I
thought I was done for that time."

"I'll vow, Mr. Gant," Eliza was vexed. 
"Why on earth don't you watch what you're doing?  If you
didn't eat so fast you wouldn't always get choked."

The children, staring, but relieved, settled slowly
back in their places.

He had a Dutch love of abundance: again and again he
described the great stored barns, the groaning plenty of the
Pennsylvanians.

On his journey to California, he had been charmed in
New Orleans by the cheapness and profusion of tropical fruits: a
peddler offered him a great bunch of bananas for twenty-five cents,
and Gant had taken them at once, wondering desperately later, as they
moved across the continent, why, and what he was going to do with
them.
 
 

7
 

This journey to California was Gant's last great
voyage.  He made it two years after Eliza's return from St.
Louis, when he was fifty-six years old.  In the great frame was
already stirring the chemistry of pain and death.  Unspoken and
undefined there was in him the knowledge that he was at length caught
in the trap of life and fixity, that he was being borne under in this
struggle against the terrible will that wanted to own the earth more
than to explore it.  This was the final flare of the old hunger
that had oncedarkened in the small gray eyes, leading a boy into new
lands and toward the soft stone smile of an angel.

And he returned from nine thousand miles of
wandering, to the bleakbare prison of the hills on a gray day late in
winter.

In the more than eight thousand days and nights of
this life with Eliza, how often had he been wakefully, soberly and
peripatetically conscious of the world outside him between the hours
of one and five A.M.?  Wholly, for not more than nineteen
nights--one for the birth of Leslie, Eliza's first daughter; one for
her death twenty-six months later, cholera infantis; one for the
death of Major Tom Pentland, Eliza's father, in May, 1902; one for
the birth of Luke; one, on the train westbound to Saint Louis, en
route to Grover's death; one for the death in the Playhouse (1893) of
Uncle Thaddeus Evans, an aged and devoted negro; one, with Eliza, in
the month of March, 1897, as deathwatch to the corpse of old Major
Isaacs; three at the end of the month of July, 1897, when it was
thought that Eliza, withered to a white sheeting of skin upon a bone
frame, must die of typhoid; again in early April, 1903, for Luke,
typhoid death near; one for the death of Greeley Pentland, aged
twenty-six, congenial scrofulous tubercular, violinist, Pentlandian
punster, petty check-forger, and six weeks' jailbird; three nights,
from the eleventh to the fourteenth of January, 1905, by the
rheumatic crucifixion of his right side, participant in his own
grief, accuser of himself and his God; once in February, 1896, as
death-watch to the remains of Sandy Duncan, aged eleven; once in
September, 1895, penitentially alert and shamefast in the City
"calaboose"; in a room of the Keeley Institute at Piedmont,
North Carolina, June 7, 1896; on March 17, 1906, between Knoxville,
Tennessee, and Altamont, at the conclusion of a seven weeks' journey
to California.
 
 

How looked the home-earth then to Gant the
Far-Wanderer?  Light crept grayly, melting on the rocky river,
the engine smoke streaked out on dawn like a cold breath, the hills
were big, but nearer, nearer than he thought.  And Altamont lay
gray and withered in the hills, a bleak mean wintry dot.  He
stepped carefully down in squalid Toytown, noting that everything was
low, near, and shrunken as he made his Gulliverian entry.  He
had a roof-and-gulley high conviction; with careful tucked-in elbows
he weighted down the heated Toytown street-car, staring painfully at
the dirty pasteboard pebbledash of the Pisgah Hotel, the brick and
board cheap warehouses of Depot Street, the rusty clapboard
flimsiness of the Florence (Railway Men's) Hotel, quaking with
beef-fed harlotry.

So small, so small, so small, he thought.  I
never believed it. Even the hills here.  I'll soon be sixty.

His sallow face, thin-flanked, was hang-dog and
afraid.  He stared wistful-sullenly down at the rattan seat as
the car screeched round into the switch at the cut and stopped; the
motorman, smoke-throated, slid the door back and entered with his
handle.  He closed the door and sat down yawning.

"Where you been, Mr. Gant?"

"California," said Gant.

"Thought I hadn't seen you," said the
motorman.

There was a warm electric smell and one of hot burnt
steel.

But two months dead!  But two months dead! 
Ah, Lord!  So it's come to this.  Merciful God, this
fearful, awful, and damnable climate. Death, death!  Is it too
late?  A land of life, a flower land.  How clear the green
clear sea was.  And all the fishes swimming there. Santa
Catalina.  Those in the East should always go West.  How
came I here?  Down, down--always down, did I know where? 
Baltimore, Sydney--In God's name, why?  The little boat
glass-bottomed, so you could look down.  She lifted up her
skirts as she stepped down. Where now?  A pair of pippins.

"Jim Bowles died while you were gone, I reckon,"
said the motorman.

"What!" howled Gant.  "Merciful
God!" he clucked mournfully downward.  "What did he
die of?" he asked.

"Pneumonia," said the motorman.  "He
was dead four days after he was took down."

"Why, he was a big healthy man in the prime of
life," said Gant. "I was talking to him the day before I
went away," he lied, convincing himself permanently that this
was true.  "He looked as if he had never known a day's
sickness in his life."

"He went home one Friday night with a chill,"
said the motorman, "and the next Tuesday he was gone."

There was a crescent humming on the rails.  With
his thick glove finger he pushed away a clearing in the window-coated
ice scurf and looked smokily out on the raw red cut-bank.  The
other car appeared abruptly at the end of the cut and curved with a
skreeking jerk into the switch.

"No, sir," said the motorman, sliding back
the door, "you never know who'll go next.  Here to-day and
gone to-morrow.  Hit gits the big 'uns first sometimes."

He closed the door behind him and jerkily opened
three notches of juice.  The car ground briskly off like a wound
toy.

In the prime of life, thought Gant.  Myself like
that some day. No, for others.  Mother almost eighty-six. 
Eats like a horse, Augusta wrote.  Must send her twenty
dollars.  Now in the cold clay, frozen.  Keep till Spring. 
Rain, rot, rain.  Who got the job?  Brock or Saul Gudger? 
Bread out of my mouth.  Do me to death--the stranger. 
Georgia marble, sandstone base, forty dollars.
 

    
"A gracious friend from
us is gone,
     
A
voice we loved is fled,
     
But
faith and memory lead us on:
     
He lives; he is not dead."
 

Four cents a letter.  Little enough, God knows,
for the work you do.  My letters the best.  Could have been
a writer.  Like to draw too.  And all of mine!  I
would have heard if anything--he would have told me.  I'll never
go that way.  All right above the waist. If anything happens it
will be down below.  Eaten away.  Whisky holes through all
your guts.  Pictures in Cardiac's office of man with cancer. 
But several doctors have to agree on it.  Criminal offense if
they don't.  But, if worst comes to worst--all that's outside. 
Get it before it gets up in you.  Still live.  Old man
Haight had a flap in his belly.  Ladled it out in a cup. 
McGuire--damned butcher.  But he can do anything.  Cut off
a piece here, sew it on there.  Made the Hominy man a nose with
a piece of shinbone. Couldn't tell it.  Ought to be possible. 
Cut all the strings, tie them up again.  While you wait. 
Sort of job for McGuire--rough and ready.  They'll do it some
day.  After I'm gone.  Things standing  thus,
unknown--but kill you maybe.  Bull's too big.  Soon now the
Spring.  You'd die.  Not big enough.  All bloody in
her brain. Full filling fountains of bull-milk.  Jupiter and
what's-her-name.
 
 

But westward now he caught a glimpse of Pisgah and
the western range.  It was more spacious there.  The hills
climbed sunward to the sun.  There was width to the eye, a
smoking sun-hazed amplitude, the world convoluting and opening into
the world, hill and plain, into the west.  The West for desire,
the East for home. To the east the short near mile-away hills reeked
protectively above the town.  Birdseye, Sunset.  A straight
plume of smoke coiled thickly from Judge Buck Sevier's smut-white
clapboard residence on the decent side of Pisgah Avenue, thin
smoke-wisps rose from the nigger shacks in the ravine below. 
Breakfast.  Fried brains and eggs with streaky rashers of limp
bacon.  Wake, wake, wake, you mountain grills!  Sleeps she
yet, wrapped dirtily in three old wrappers in stale, airless
yellow-shaded cold.  The chapped hands sick-sweet glycerined. 
Gum-headed bottles, hairpins, and the bits of string.  No one
may enter now.  Ashamed.