Thomas Wolfe: Of Time and the River, You Can't Go Home Again & Look Homeward, Angel. Thomas Wolfe
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more than a pang or two to see Helen go. She was almost fourteen.
In early April, Eliza departed, bearing her excited brood about her, and carrying Eugene in her arms. He was bewildered at this rapid commotion, but he was electric with curiosity and activity.
The Tarkintons and Duncans streamed in: there were tears and kisses. Mrs. Tarkinton regarded her with some awe. The whole neighborhood was a bit bewildered at this latest turn.
“Well, well — you never can tell,” said Eliza, smiling tearfully and enjoying the sensation she had provided. “If things go well we may settle down out there.”
“You’ll come back,” said Mrs. Tarkinton with cheerful loyalty. “There’s no place like Altamont.”
They went to the station in the street-car: Ben and Grover gleefully sat together, guarding a big luncheon hamper. Helen clutched nervously a bundle of packages. Eliza glanced sharply at her long straight legs and thought of the half-fare.
“Say,” she began, laughing indefinitely behind her hand, and nudging Gant, “she’ll have to scrooch up, won’t she? They’ll think you’re mighty big to be under twelve,” she went on, addressing the girl directly.
Helen stirred nervously.
“We shouldn’t have done that,” Gant muttered.
“Pshaw!” said Eliza. “No one will ever notice her.”
He saw them into the train, disposed comfortably by the solicitous Pullman porter.
“Keep your eye on them, George,” he said, and gave the man a coin. Eliza eyed it jealously.
He kissed them all roughly with his mustache, but he patted his little girl’s bony shoulders with his great hand, and hugged her to him. Something stabbed sharply in Eliza.
They had an awkward moment. The strangeness, the absurdity of the whole project, and the monstrous fumbling of all life, held them speechless.
“Well,” he began, “I reckon you know what you’re doing.”
“Well, I tell you,” she said, pursing her lips, and looking out the window, “you don’t know what may come out of this.”
He was vaguely appeased. The train jerked, and moved off slowly. He kissed her clumsily.
“Let me know as soon as you get there,” he said, and he strode swiftly down the aisle.
“Good-by, good-by,” cried Eliza, waving Eugene’s small hand at the long figure on the platform. “Children,” she said, “wave good-by to your papa.” They all crowded to the window. Eliza wept.
Eugene watched the sun wane and redden on a rocky river, and on the painted rocks of Tennessee gorges: the enchanted river wound into his child’s mind forever. Years later, it was to be remembered in dreams tenanted with elvish and mysterious beauty. Stilled in great wonder, he went to sleep to the rhythmical pounding of the heavy wheels.
They lived in a white house on the corner. There was a small plot of lawn in front, and a narrow strip on the side next to the pavement. He realized vaguely that it was far from the great central web and roar of the city — he thought he heard some one say four or five miles. Where was the river?
Two little boys, twins, with straight very blond heads, and thin, mean faces, raced up and down the sidewalk before the house incessantly on tricycles. They wore white sailor-suits, with blue collars, and he hated them very much. He felt vaguely that their father was a bad man who had fallen down an elevator shaft, breaking his legs.
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,