Thomas Wolfe: Of Time and the River, You Can't Go Home Again & Look Homeward, Angel. Thomas Wolfe
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and with a head full of exploding rockets.
These months, although filled with terror and hunger, must be passed in rapid summary with bare mention of the men and actions that a lost boy knew. They belong to a story of escape and wandering — valuable here to indicate the initiation to the voyage this life will make. They are a prelude to exile, and into their nightmare chaos no other purpose may be read than the blind groping of a soul toward freedom and isolation.
Eugene worked upon the Flying Field for a month. Three times a day he rode around the field to check the numbers of two dozen gangs who were engaged in the work of grading, levelling, blasting from the spongy earth the ragged stumps of trees and filling interminably, ceaselessly, like the weary and fruitless labor of a nightmare, the marshy earth-craters, which drank their shovelled toil without end. The gangs were of all races and conditions: Portugee niggers, ebony-black, faithful and childlike, who welcomed him with great toothy grins, each pointing to his big white pin, on which was printed his number, crying out in strange outlandish voices, “feefety-nine, nine-net-ty seex,” and so on; Bowery bums, in greasy serge and battered derbies, toying distastefully with pick-handles that shredded their dirty uncalloused palms — their hard evil faces, with their smudge of beard, were like things corrupt, green-yellow, that grow under barrels. And there were also drawling fishermen from the Virginia coast, huge gorilla niggers from Georgia and the lower South, Italians, Swedes, Irishmen — part of the huge compost of America.
He came to know them and their overseers — tough reckless men, gray-haired and lustful, full of swift action and coarse humor.
Stuck like a jigging doll upon the horse, whom he feared, he rode, staring into heaven, sometimes almost unconscious of the great engine expanding and contracting below him with a brown sensual rhythm. The bird-men filled the blue Virginia weather with the great drone of the Liberties.
At length, hungry again for the ships and faces, he left his work and spent his earnings in a week of gaudy riot in Norfolk and on the Virginia beaches. Almost penniless again, with only the savage kaleidoscope of a thousand streets, a million lights, the blazing confusion and the strident noise of carnival, he returned to Newport News in search of employment, accompanied by another youth from Altamont, likewise a thriftless adventurer in war-work, whom he had found upon the beach. This worthy, whose name was Sinker Jordan, was three years older than Eugene. He was a handsome reckless boy, small in stature, and limping from an injury he had received in a football game. His character was weak and volatile — he hated effort, and was obstinate only in cursing ill-fortune.
The two young men had a few dollars between them. They pooled their resources, and, with wild optimism, purchased from a pawnbroker in Newport News the rudiments of carpenter’s equipment — hammers, saws, and T-squares. They went inland fifteen or twenty miles to a dreary government camp sweltering in the Virginia pines. They were refused employment here and in black dejection returned in the afternoon to the town they had left so hopefully in the morning. Before sundown they had secured employment in the Shipbuilding Yards, but they had been discharged five minutes after they reported for work, when they confessed to a grinning foreman in a room full of woodshavings and quietly slatting belts, that they had no knowledge of the intensely special carpentry of ship’s carving. Nor (they might have added) of any other.
They were quite moneyless now, and once on the street again, Sinker Jordan had hurled upon the pavement the fatal tools, cursing savagely the folly that threatened now to keep them hungry. Eugene picked the tools up, and took them back to the imperturbable Uncle, who repurchased them for only a few dollars less than the sum they had paid him in the morning.
Thus the day. They found a lodging in a dingy house where, as an appropriate climax to his folly, Sinker Jordan surrendered their remaining capital into the greedy palm of the landlady — and a real lady too, she admitted. But, having previously eaten, they had all the hope of a full belly and their youth — they slept, Sinker without care and without effort.
Eugene was early up at dawn, and after futile efforts to waken the luxuriously somnolent Sinker, he was off to the dingy yellow piers along the waterfront, which were stored with munitions for the war. After a morning tramping up and down the dusty road outside the guarded enclosure, he had obtained employment for himself and Sinker from the chief checker, a nervous ugly man, swollen with petty tyranny. He had gimlet eyes, glittering below spectacles, and hard muscular jaws that writhed constantly.
Eugene went to work at seven the next morning — Sinker, a day or two later, only when his last small coin had vanished. Eugene screwed up his pride and borrowed a few dollars from one of the other checkers. On this he and Sinker lived meagerly until pay-day — which was only a few days off. This money slipped quickly through their careless fingers. Down to a few coins again, with the next pay-day almost two weeks off, Sinker gambled at dice with the checkers, behind the great fortress of sacked oats upon the pier — lost, won, lost, rose penniless and cursing God. Eugene knelt beside the checkers, with his last half-dollar in his palm, heedless of Sinker’s bitter taunt. He had never thrown dice before: naturally, he won —$8.50. He rose exultantly from their profane surprise, and took Sinker to dinner at the best hotel.
A day or two later, he went behind the oats again, gambled with his last dollar — and lost.
He began to starve. Day crawled into weary day. The fierce eye of July beat down upon the pier with a straight insufferable glare. The boats and trains slid in and out, crammed to the teeth with munitions — with food for the soldiers. The hot grainy air on the pier swam before his eyes speckled with dancing patches, and he made weary tallies on a sheet as the big black stevedores swarmed past him with their trunks. Sinker Jordan cadged small sums from the other checkers, and lived miserably on bottled pop and cheese at a little grocery across the road from the pier. Eugene was unable to beg or borrow. Partly from pride, but more from the powerful brooding inertia of his temper, which more and more was governing his will to act, he found himself unable to speak. Each day he said: “I shall speak to one of them today. I shall say that I must eat, and that I have no money.” But when he tried to speak he could not.
As they grew more efficient in their work they were called back, after the day’s end, for work at night. This extra work, with its time-and-a-half pay, he would otherwise have been glad to get, but stumbling from exhaustion, the command to return was horrible. For several days now he had not been home to the dingy little room which he shared with Sinker Jordan. At the end of his day’s work, he would climb to a little oasis in the enormous wall of sacked oats and sink into exhausted sleep, with the rattling of cranes and winches, the steady rumble of the trucks, and the remote baying of boats anchored in the stream — mixing in a strange faint symphony in his ears.
And he lay there, with the fading glimmer of the world about him, as the war mounted to its climax of blood and passion during that terrible month. He lay there, like his own ghost, thinking with pain, with grief, of all the million towns and faces he had not known. He was the atom for which all life had been aplot — Caesar had died and a nameless wife of Babylon, and somewhere here, upon this marvellous dying flesh, this myriad brain, their mark, their spirit, rested.
And he thought of the strange lost faces he had known, the lonely figures of his family, damned in chaos, each chained to a destiny of ruin and loss — Gant, a fallen Titan, staring down enormous vistas of the Past, indifferent to the world about him; Eliza, beetle-wise, involved in blind accretions; Helen, childless, pathless, furious — a great wave breaking on the barren waste; and finally, Ben — the ghost, the stranger, prowling at this moment in another town, going up and down the thousand streets of life, and finding no doors.
But the next day, on the pier, Eugene was weaker than ever. He sat sprawled upon a throne of plump oat sacks, with blurred eyes watching the loading of the bags at the spout, marking raggedly his tally upon the sheet as the stevedores plunged in and out. The terrible heat steamed through the grainy pollen of the air: he moved each limb with forethought, picking it up and placing it as if it were a detached object.
At the end of the day he was asked to return for night-work. He listened, swaying on his feet, to the far-sounding voice of the chief checker.
The supper hour came, upon the heated pier, with the sudden noise of silence. There