Thomas Wolfe: Of Time and the River, You Can't Go Home Again & Look Homeward, Angel. Thomas Wolfe
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Dixie Ramblers arrived with two chorus girls. He was a little man, with the face of a weasel and no upper teeth. He wore a straw hat with a striped band, and a blue shirt and collar. The boarders gathered in around him. In a moment there was shrill laughter.
Julius Arthur sped swiftly down the hill, driving his father home. He grinned squintily and flung his arm up in careless greeting. The prosperous lawyer twisted a plump Van Dyked face on a wry neck curiously. Unsmiling, he passed.
A negress in the Brunswick struck on the several bells of a Japanese gong. There was a scramble of feet on the porch; the croquet players dropped their mallets and walked rapidly toward the house. Pratt wound his hose over a wooden reel.
A slow bell-clapper in the Belton sent the guests in a scrambling drive for the doors. In a moment there was a clatter of heavy plates and a loud foody noise. The guests on the porch at Dixieland rocked more rapidly, with low mutters of discontent.
Eugene talked to Laura in thickening dusk, sheeting his pain in pride and indifference. Eliza’s face, a white blur in the dark, came up behind the screen.
“Come on out, Mrs. Gant, and get a breath of fresh air,” said Laura James.
“Why no-o, child. I can’t now. Who’s that with you?” she cried, obviously flustered. She opened the door. “Huh? Heh? Have you seen ‘Gene? Is it ‘Gene?”
“Yes,” he said. “What’s the matter?”
“Come here a minute, boy,” she said.
He went into the hall.
“What is it?” he asked.
“Why, son, what in the world! I don’t know. You’ll have to do something,” she whispered, twisting her hands together.
“What is it, mama? What are you talking about?” he cried irritably.
“Why — Jannadeau’s just called up. Your papa’s on a rampage again and he’s coming this way. Child! There’s no telling what he’ll do. I’ve all these people in the house. He’ll ruin us.” She wept. “Go and try to stop him. Head him off if you can. Take him to Woodson Street.”
He got his hat quickly and ran through the door.
“Where are you going?” asked Laura James. “Are you going off without supper?”
“I’ve got to go to town,” he said. “I won’t be long. Will you wait for me?”
“Yes,” she said.
He leaped down on the walk just as his father lurched in from the street by the high obscuring hedge that shut the house from the spacious yard of the attorney Hall. Gant reeled destructively, across a border of lilies, on to the lawn, and strode for the veranda. He stumbled, cursing, on the bottom step and plunged forward in a sprawl upon the porch. The boy jumped for him, and half dragged, half lifted his great drunken body erect. The boarders shrank into a huddle with a quick scattering of chairs: he greeted them with a laugh of howling contempt.
“Are you there? I say, are you there? The lowest of the low — boarding-house swine! Merciful God! What a travesty! A travesty on Nature! That it should come to this!”
He burst into a long peal of maniacal laughter.
“Papa! Come on!” said Eugene in a low voice. He took his father cautiously by the sleeve. Gant flung him half across the porch with a gesture of his hand. As he stepped in again swiftly, his father struck at him with a flailing arm. He evaded the great mowing fist without trouble, and caught the falling body, swung from its own pivot, in his arms. Then quickly, before Gant could recover, holding him from behind, he rushed him toward the door. The boarders scattered away like sparrows. But Laura James was at the screen before him: she flung it open.
“Get away! Get away!” he cried, full of shame and anger. “You stay out of this.” For a moment he despised her for seeing his hurt.
“Oh, let me help you, my dear,” Laura James whispered. Her eyes were wet, but she was not afraid.
Father and son plunged chaotically down the wide dark hall, Eliza, weeping and making gestures, just before them.
“Take him in here, boy. Take him in here,” she whispered, motioning to a large bed-room on the upper side of the house. Eugene propelled his father through a blind passage of bath room, and pushed him over on the creaking width of an iron bed.
“You damned scoundrel!” Gant yelled, again trying to reap him down with the long arm, “let me up or I’ll kill you!”
“For God’s sake, papa,” he implored angrily, “try to quiet down. Every one in town can hear you.”
“To hell with them!” Gant roared. “Mountain Grills — all of them, fattening upon my heart’s-blood. They have done me to death, as sure as there’s a God in heaven.”
Eliza appeared in the door, her face contorted by weeping.
“Son, can’t you do something to stop him?” she said. “He’ll ruin us all. He’ll drive every one away.”
Gant struggled to stand erect when he saw her. Her white face stirred him to insanity.
“There it is! There! There! Do you see! The fiend-face I know so well, gloating upon my misery. Look at it! Look! Do you see its smile of evil cunning? Greeley, Will, The Hog, The Old Major! The Tax Collector will get it all, and I shall die in the gutter!”
“If it hadn’t been for me,” Eliza began, stung to retaliation, “you’d have died there long ago.”
“Mama, for God’s sake!” the boy cried. “Don’t stand there talking to him! Can’t you see what it does to him! Do something, in heaven’s name! Get Helen! Where is she?”
“I’ll make an end to it all!” Gant yelled, staggering erect. “I’ll do for us both now.”
Eliza vanished.
“Yes, sir, papa. It’s going to be all right,” Eugene began soothingly, pushing him back on the bed again. He dropped quickly to his knees, and began to draw off one of Gant’s soft tongueless shoes, muttering reassurances all the time: “Yes, sir. We’ll get you some good hot soup and put you to bed in a jiffy. Everything’s going to be all right,” the shoe came off in his hand and, aided by the furious thrust of his father’s foot, he went sprawling back.
Gant got to his feet again and, taking a farewell kick at his fallen son, lunged toward the door. Eugene scrambled up quickly, and leaped after him. The two men fell heavily into the roughly grained plaster of the wall. Gant cursed, flailing about clumsily at his tormentor. Helen came in.
“Baby!” Gant wept, “they’re trying to kill me. O Jesus, do something to save me, or I perish.”
“You get back in that bed,” she commanded sharply, “or I’ll knock your head off.”
Very obediently he suffered himself to be led back to bed and undressed. In a few minutes she was sitting beside him with a bowl of smoking soup. He grinned sheepishly as she spooned it into his opened mouth. She laughed — almost happily — thinking of the lost and irrevocable years. Suddenly, before he slept, he lifted himself strongly from the pillows that propped him, and with staring eyes, called out in savage terror:
“Is it a cancer? I say, is it a cancer?”
“Hush!” she cried. “No. Of course not! Don’t be foolish.”
He fell back exhausted, with eyes closed. But they knew that it was. He had never been told. The terrible name of his malady was never uttered save by him. And in his heart he knew — what they all knew and never spoke of before him — that it was, it was a cancer. All day, with fear-stark eyes, Gant had sat, like a broken statue, among his marbles, drinking. It was a cancer.
The boy’s right hand bled very badly across the wrist, where his father’s weight had ground it into the wall.
“Go