Look Homeward, Angel - Thomas Wolfe (9 page)

The house had a back yard, completely enclosed by a
red board fence.  At the end was a red barn.  Years later,
Steve, returning home, said:  "That section's all built up
out there now."  Where?

One day in the hot barren back yard, two cots and
mattresses had been set up for airing.  He lay upon one
luxuriously, breathing the hot mattress, and drawing his small legs
up lazily.  Luke lay upon the other.  They were eating
peaches.

A fly grew sticky on Eugene's peach.  He
swallowed it.  Luke howled with laughter.

"Swallowed a fly!  Swallowed a fly!"

He grew violently sick, vomited, and was unable to
eat for some time.  He wondered why he had swallowed the fly
when he had seen it all the time.

The summer came down blazing hot.  Gant arrived
for a few days, bringing Daisy with him.  One night they drank
beer at the Delmar Gardens.  In the hot air, at a little table,
he gazed thirstily at the beaded foaming stein: he would thrust his
face, he thought, in that chill foam and drink deep of happiness. 
Eliza gave him a taste; they all shrieked at his bitter surprised
face.

Years later he remembered Gant, his mustache flecked
with foam, quaffing mightily at the glass: the magnificent gusto, the
beautiful thirst inspired in him the desire for emulation, and he
wondered if all beer were bitter, if there were not a period of
initiation into the pleasures of this great beverage.

Faces from the old half-forgotten world floated in
from time to time.  Some of the Altamont people came and stayed
at Eliza's house.  One day, with sudden recollective horror he
looked up into the brutal shaven face of Jim Lyda.  He was the
Altamont sheriff; he lived at the foot of the hill below Gant. 
Once, when Eugene was past two, Eliza had gone to Piedmont as witness
in a trial.  She was away two days; he was left in care of Mrs.
Lyda.  He had never forgotten Lyda's playful cruelty the first
night.

Now, one day, this monster appeared again, by
devilish sleight, and Eugene looked up into the heavy evil of his
face.  Eugene saw Eliza standing near Jim; and as the terror in
the small face grew, Jim made as if to put his hand violently upon
her.  At his cry of rage and fear, they both laughed: for a
blind moment or two Eugene for the first time hated her: he was mad,
impotent with jealousy and fear.

At night the boys, Steve, Ben, and Grover, who had
been sent out at once to seek employment by Eliza, returned from the
Fair Grounds, chattering with the lively excitement of the day's
bustle. Sniggering furtively, they talked suggestively about the
Hoochy-Koochy: Eugene understood it was a dance.  Steve hummed a
monotonous, suggestive tune, and writhed sensually.  They sang a
song; the plaintive distant music haunted him.  He learned it:
 

    
"Meet me in
Saint--Lou--iss, loo--ee,
     
Meet me at the Fair,
     
If you see the boys and girlies,
     
Tell them I'll be there.
     
We will dance the Hoochy-Koochy--"
 

and so on.

Sometimes, lying on a sunny quilt, Eugene grew
conscious of a gentle peering face, a soft caressing voice, unlike
any of the others in kind and quality, a tender olive skin, black
hair, sloeblack eyes, exquisite, rather sad, kindliness.  He
nuzzled his soft face next to Eugene's, fondled and embraced him. 
On his brown neck he was birth-marked with a raspberry: Eugene
touched it again and again with wonder.  This was Grover--the
gentlest and saddest of the boys.

Eliza sometimes allowed them to take him on
excursions.  Once, they made a voyage on a river steamer: he
went below and from the side-openings looked closely upon the
powerful yellow snake, coiling slowly and resistlessly past.

The boys worked on the Fair Grounds.  They were
call-boys at a place called the Inside Inn.  The name charmed
him: it flashed constantly through his brain.  Sometimes his
sisters, sometimes Eliza, sometimes the boys pulled him through the
milling jungle of noise and figures, past the rich opulence and
variety of the life of the Fair.  He was drugged in fantasy as
they passed the East India tea-house, and as he saw tall turbaned men
who walked about within and caught for the first time, so that he
never forgot, the slow incense of the East.  Once in a huge
building roaring with sound, he was rooted before a mighty
locomotive, the greatest monster he had ever seen, whose wheels spun
terrifically in grooves, whose blazing furnaces, raining hot red
coals into the pit beneath, were fed incessantly by two grimed
fire-painted stokers. The scene burned in his brain like some huge
splendor out of Hell: he was appalled and fascinated by it.

Again, he stood at the edge of the slow, terrific
orbit of the Ferris Wheel, reeled down the blaring confusion of the
midway, felt his staggering mind converge helplessly into all the mad
phantasmagoria of the carnival; he heard Luke's wild story of the
snake-eater, and shrieked in agony when they threatened to take him
in.

Once Daisy, yielding to the furtive cat-cruelty below
her mild placidity, took him with her through the insane horrors of
the scenic railway; they plunged bottomlessly from light into roaring
blackness, and as his first yell ceased with a slackening of the car,
rolled gently into a monstrous lighted gloom peopled with huge
painted grotesques, the red maws of fiendish heads, the cunning
appearances of death, nightmare, and madness.  His unprepared
mind was unrooted by insane fear: the car rolled downward from one
lighted cavern to another, and as his heart withered to a pea, he
heard from the people about him loud gusty laughter, in which his
sister joined.  His mind, just emerging from the unreal
wilderness of childish fancy, gave way completely in this Fair, and
he was paralyzed by the conviction, which often returned to him in
later years, that his life was a fabulous nightmare and that, by
cunning and conspirate artifice, he had surrendered all his hope,
belief, and confidence to the lewd torture of demons masked in human
flesh. Half-sensible, and purple with gasping terror, he came out
finally into the warm and practical sunlight.

His last remembrance of the Fair came from a night in
early autumn:with Daisy again he sat upon the driver's seat of a
motor bus, listening for the first time to the wonder of its labored
chugging, as they rolled, through ploughing sheets of rain, around
the gleaming roads, and by the Cascades, pouring their water down
before a white building jewelled with ten thousand lights.

The summer had passed.  There was the rustling
of autumn winds, a whispering breath of departed revelry: carnival
was almost done.

And now the house grew very still: he saw his mother
very little, he did not leave the house, he was in the care of his
sisters, and he was constantly admonished to silence.

One day Gant came back a second time.  Grover
was down with typhoid.

"He said he ate a pear at the Fair grounds,"
Eliza repeated the story for the hundredth time.  "He came
home and complained of feeling sick.  I put my hand on his head
and he was burning up. 'Why, child,' I said, 'what on earth--?'"

Her black eyes brightened in her white face: she was
afraid.  She pursed her lips and spoke hopefully.
 
"Hello, son," said Gant, casually entering
the room; his heart shrivelled as he saw the boy.

Eliza pursed her lips more and more thoughtfully
after each visit the doctor made; she seized every spare crumb of
encouragement and magnified it, but her heart was sick.  Then
one night, tearing away the mask suddenly, she came swiftly from the
boy's room.

"Mr. Gant," she said in a whisper, pursing
her lips.  She shook her white face at him silently as if unable
to speak.  Then, rapidly, she concluded:  "He's gone,
he's gone, he's gone!"

Eugene was deep in midnight slumber.  Some one
shook him, loosening him slowly from his drowsiness.  Presently
he found himself in the arms of Helen, who sat on the bed holding
him, her morbid stricken little face fastened on him.  She spoke
to him distinctly and slowly in a subdued voice, charged somehow with
a terrible eagerness:

"Do you want to see Grover?" she
whispered.  "He's on the cooling board."

He wondered what a cooling board was; the house was
full of menace. She bore him out into the dimly lighted hall, and
carried him to the rooms at the front of the house.  Behind the
door he heard low voices.  Quietly she opened it; the light
blazed brightly on the bed.  Eugene looked, horror swarmed like
poison through his blood. Behind the little wasted shell that lay
there he remembered suddenly the warm brown face, the soft eyes, that
once had peered down at him: like one who has been mad, and suddenly
recovers reason, he remembered that forgotten face he had not seen in
weeks, that strange bright loneliness that would not return.  O
lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again.

Eliza sat heavily on a chair, her face bent sideways
on her rested hand.  She was weeping, her face contorted by the
comical and ugly grimace that is far more terrible than any quiet
beatitude of sorrow.  Gant comforted her awkwardly but, looking
at the boy from time to time, he went out into the hall and cast his
arms forth in agony, in bewilderment.

The undertakers put the body in a basket and took it
away.

"He was just twelve years and twenty days old,"
said Eliza over and over, and this fact seemed to trouble her more
than any other.

"You children go and get some sleep now,"
she commanded suddenly and, as she spoke, her eye fell on Ben who
stood puzzled and scowling, gazing in with his curious old-man's
look.  She thought of the severance of the twins; they had
entered life within twenty minutes of each other; her heart was
gripped with pity at the thought of the boy's loneliness.  She
wept anew.  The children went to bed.  For some time Eliza
and Gant continued to sit alone in the room.  Gant leaned his
face in his powerful hands.  "The best boy I had," he
muttered.  "By God, he was the best of the lot."

And in the ticking silence they recalled him, and in
the heart of each was fear and remorse, because he had been a quiet
boy, and there were many, and he had gone unnoticed.

"I'll never be able to forget his birthmark,"
Eliza whispered, "Never, never."

Then presently each thought of the other; they felt
suddenly the horror and strangeness of their surroundings.  They
thought of the vine-wound house in the distant mountains, of the
roaring fires, the tumult, the cursing, the pain, of their blind and
tangled lives, and of blundering destiny which brought them here now
in this distant place, with death, after the carnival's close.

Eliza wondered why she had come: she sought back
through the hot and desperate mazes for the answer:

"If I had known," she began presently, "if
I had known how it would turn out--"

"Never mind," he said, and he stroked her
awkwardly.  "By God!" he added dumbly after a moment. 
"It's pretty strange when you come to think about it."
 
 

And as they sat there more quietly now, swarming pity
rose in them--not for themselves, but for each other, and for the
waste, the confusion, the groping accident of life.

Gant thought briefly of his four and fifty years, his
vanished youth, his diminishing strength, the ugliness and badness of
so much of it; and he had the very quiet despair of a man who knows
the forged chain may not be unlinked, the threaded design unwound,
the done undone.

"If I had known.  If I had known,"
said Eliza.  And then:  "I'm sorry."  But he
knew that her sorrow at that moment was not for him or for herself,
or even for the boy whom idiot chance had thrust in the way of
pestilence, but that, with a sudden inner flaming of her clairvoyant
Scotch soul, she had looked cleanly, without pretense for the first
time, upon the inexorable tides of Necessity, and that she was sorry
for all who had lived, were living, or would live, fanning with their
prayers the useless altar flames, suppliant with their hopes to an
unwitting spirit, casting the tiny rockets of their belief against
remote eternity, and hoping for grace, guidance, and delivery upon
the spinning and forgotten cinder of this earth.  O lost.

They went home immediately.  At every station
Gant and Eliza made restless expeditions to the baggage-car.  It
was gray autumnal November: the mountain forests were quilted with
dry brown leaves. They blew about the streets of Altamont, they were
deep in lane and gutter, they scampered dryly along before the wind.

The car ground noisily around the curve at the
hill-top.  The Gants descended: the body had already been sent
on from the station.  As Eliza came slowly down the hill, Mrs.
Tarkinton ran from her house sobbing.  Her eldest daughter had
died a month before.  The two women gave loud cries as they saw
each other, and rushed together.

In Gant's parlor, the coffin had already been placed
on trestles, the neighbors, funeral-faced and whispering, were
assembled to greet them.  That was all.
 
 

6
 

The death of Grover gave Eliza the most terrible
wound of her life: her courage was snapped, her slow but powerful
adventure toward freedom was abruptly stopped.  Her flesh seemed
to turn rotten when she thought of the distant city and the Fair: she
was appalled before the hidden adversary who had struck her down.