Thomas Wolfe: Of Time and the River, You Can't Go Home Again & Look Homeward, Angel. Thomas Wolfe
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footfalls of workers walking toward the entrance, a slap of water at the ship’s hull, a noise from the bridge.
Eugene went behind the oat pile and climbed blindly up until he reached his little fortress at the top. The world ebbed from his fading sense: all sound grew fainter, more far. Presently, he thought, when I have rested here, I shall get up and go down to work. It has been a hot day. I am tired. But when he tried to move he could not. His will struggled against the imponderable lead of his flesh, stirring helplessly like a man in a cage. He thought quietly, with relief, with tranquil joy. They will not find me here. I cannot move. It is over. If I had thought of this long ago, I would have been afraid. But I’m not, now. Here — upon this oat pile — doing my bit — for Democracy. I’ll begin to stink. They’ll find me then.
Life glimmered away out of his weary eyes. He lay, half-conscious, sprawled upon the oats. He thought of the horse.
In this way the young checker, who had loaned him money, found him. The checker knelt above him, supporting Eugene’s head with one hand, and putting a bottle of raw hard liquor to his mouth with the other. When the boy had revived somewhat, the checker helped him to descend the pile and walked slowly with him up the long wooden platform of the pier.
They went across the road to a little grocery-store. The checker ordered a bottle of milk, a box of crackers, and a big block of cheese. As Eugene ate, the tears began to flow down his grimy face, dredging dirty gullies on his skin. They were tears of hunger and weakness: he could not restrain them.
The checker stood over him watchfully, with a kindly troubled stare. He was a young man with a lantern jaw, and a thin dish face: he wore scholarly spectacles, and smoked a pipe reflectively.
“Why didn’t you tell me, boy? I’d have let you have the money,” he said.
“I— don’t — know,” said Eugene, between bites of cheese. “Couldn’t.”
With the checker’s loan of five dollars he and Sinker Jordan lived until pay-day. Then, after dining together on four pounds of steak, Sinker Jordan departed for Altamont and the enjoyment of an inheritance which had fallen due a few days before, on his twenty-first birthday. Eugene stayed on.
He was like a man who had died, and had been reborn. All that had gone before lived in a ghostly world. He thought of his family, of Ben, of Laura James, as if they were ghosts. The world itself turned ghost. All through that month of August, while the war marched to its ending, he looked upon its dying carnival. Nothing seemed any longer hard and hot and raw and new. Everything was old. Everything was dying. A vast aerial music, forever far-faint, like the language of his forgotten world, sounded in his ears. He had known birth. He had known pain and love. He had known hunger. Almost he had known death.
At night, when he was not called back to work he rode out by trolley to one of the Virginia beaches. But the only sound that was real, that was near and present, was the sound in his heart, in his brain, of the everlasting sea. He turned his face toward it: behind him, the cheap million lights of the concessionaires, the clatter, the racket, the confetti, the shrill blare of the saxophones, all the harsh joyless noise of his country, was softened, was made sad, far, and phantom. The wheeling merry-go-round, the blaring dance-orchestra, played K-K-K-Katy Beautiful Katy, Poor Little Buttercup, and Just a Baby’s Prayer at Twilight.
And that cheap music turned elfin and lovely; it was mixed into magic — it became a part of the romantic and lovely Virginias, of the surge of the sea, as it rolled in from the eternal dark, across the beach, and of his own magnificent sorrow — his triumphant loneliness after pain and love and hunger.
His face was thin and bright as a blade, below the great curling shock of his hair; his body as lean as a starved cat’s; his eyes bright and fierce.
O sea! (he thought) I am the hill-born, the prison-pent, the ghost, the stranger, and I walk here at your side. O sea, I am lonely like you, I am strange and far like you, I am sorrowful like you; my brain, my heart, my life, like yours, have touched strange shores. You are like a woman lying below yourself on the coral floor. You are an immense and fruitful woman with vast thighs and a great thick mop of curling woman’s hair floating like green moss above your belly. And you will bring me to the happy land, you will wash me to glory in bright ships.
There by the sea of the dark Virginias, he thought of the forgotten faces, of all the million patterns of himself, the ghost of his lost flesh. The child that heard Swain’s cow, the lost boy in the Ozarks, the carrier of news among the blacks, and the boy who went in by the lattice with Jim Trivett. And the waitress, and Ben, and Laura? Dead, too? Where? How? Why? Why has the web been woven? Why do we die so many deaths? How came I here beside the sea? O lost, O far and lonely, where?
Sometimes, as he walked back among the dancers, a scarecrow in flapping rags, he looked and saw himself among them. He seemed to be two people: he constantly saw himself with dark bent face sitting upon the top rail of a fence, watching himself go by with a bright herd of young people. He saw himself among the crowds, several inches shorter than he was, fitting comfortably into a world where everything was big enough for him.
And while he stared and saw himself beloved and admitted, he heard them laugh: he felt suddenly the hard white ring of their faces about him, and he plunged away, with cursing mouth.
O my sweet bitches! My fine cheap sluts! You little crawling itch of twiddlers: you will snigger at me! At me! At me! (He beat his hands against his ribs.) You will mock at me, with your drug-store pimps, your Jazz-bo apes, your gorilla gobs, you cute little side-porch chippies! What do you understand? The lust of a goat, the stink of your kind — that does for you, my girls. And yet you laugh at me! Ah, but I’ll tell you why you laugh: you are afraid of me because I am not like the others. You hate me because I do not belong. You see I am finer and greater than any one you know: you cannot reach me and you hate me. That’s it! The ethereal (yet manly) beauty of my features, my boyish charm (for I am Just a Boy) blended with the tragic wisdom of my eyes (as old as life and filled with the brooding tragedy of the ages), the sensitive and delicate flicker of my mouth, and my marvellous dark face blooming inward on strange loveliness like a flower — all this you want to kill because you cannot touch it. Ah me! (Thinking of his strange beauty, his eyes grew moist with love and glory, and he was forced to blow his nose.) Ah, but She will know. The love of a lady. Proudly, with misty eyes, he saw her standing beside him against the rabble: her elegant small head, wound with a bracelet of bright hair, against his shoulder, and with two splendid pearls in her ears. Dearest! Dearest! We stand here on a star. We are beyond them now. Behold! They shrink, they fade, they pass — victorious, enduring, marvellous love, my dearest, we remain.
Brooding thus on the vision of his own beauty, stirred by his own heroic music, with misty eyes, he would pass over into the forbidden settlement, with its vigilant patrols of naval and military police on the watch for their own, and prowl softly down a dark little street to a dingy frame house with drawn blinds, where dwelt a love that for three dollars could be bought and clothed with his own fable. Her name was Stella Blake. She was never in a hurry.
With her lived a young corn-haired girl of twenty years whose family lived in Pulpit Hill. Sometimes he went to see her.
Twice a week the troops went through. They stood densely in brown and weary thousands on the pier while a council of officers, tabled at the gangways, went through their clearance papers. Then, each below the sweating torture of his pack, they were filed from the hot furnace of the pier into the hotter prison of the ship. The great ships, with their motley jagged patches of deception, waited in the stream: they slid in and out in unending squadrons.
Sometimes the troops were black — labor regiments from Georgia and Alabama; big gorilla bucks from Texas. They gleamed with sweat and huge rich laughter: they were obedient as children and called their cursing officers “boss.”
“And don’t you call me ‘boss’ again, you bastards!” screamed a young Tennessee lieutenant, who had gone slowly insane during the moving, as he nursed his charges through hell. They grinned at him cheerfully, with affection, like good obedient children, as he stamped, raving, up and down the pier. From time to time they goaded him into a new frenzy with complaints