OF TIME AND THE RIVER. Thomas Wolfe
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sounds and voices — the sense of instant recognition, union to a town, a life which they had never known, but with which they now felt immediately familiar. A railwayman was coming swiftly down the station platform beneath the windows of the train, pausing from time to time to hammer on the car-wheels of each truck. A negro toiled past below them with a heavy rattling truck in tow, piled high with baggage.
And elsewhere there were the casual voices of the railwaymen — conductors, porters, baggage masters, station men — greeting each other with friendly words, without surprise, speaking of weather, work, plans for the future, saying farewell in the same way. Then the bell tolled, the whistle blew, the slow panting of the engine came back to them, the train was again in motion; the station, and the station lights, a glimpse of streets, the thrilling, haunting, white-glazed incandescence of a cotton mill at night, the hard last lights of town, slid past the windows of the train. The train was in full speed now, and they were rushing on across the dark and lonely earth again.
Then one of the men in the compartment, the politician, who had been looking curiously out of the window at this town and station scene, turned and spoke with a casual interest to the boy:
“Your father’s in Baltimore now, isn’t he, son?” he said.
“Yes, sir. He’s at Hopkins. Luke’s up there with him.”
“Well, I thought I read something in the paper a week or two back about his being there,” said the man with the florid face.
“What’s wrong with him?” Mr. Flood demanded coarsely in a moment, after he had absorbed this information. “Ain’t he feeling good?”
The boy shifted nervously in his seat before he answered. His father was dying of cancer, but for some reason it did not seem possible or proper for him to say this to these men. He said:
“He’s got some kind of kidney trouble, I think. He goes up there for radium treatments.”
“It’s the same thing John Rankin had,” the florid-faced man glibly interposed at this moment. “Some sort of prostate trouble, isn’t it?” he said.
“Yes, sir, that’s it,” the boy said. For some reason he felt a sense of relief and gratefulness towards the man with the florid face. The easy, glib and false assurance that his father’s “trouble” was “the same thing John Rankin had” seemed to give the disease a respectable standing and to divest the cancer of its fatal, shameful and putrescent horror.
“I know what it is,” the florid-faced man was saying, nodding his head in a confident manner. “It’s the same thing John Rankin had. A lot of men get it after they’re fifty. John told me he went through agony with it for ten years. Said he used to be up with it a dozen times a night. It got so he couldn’t sleep, he couldn’t rest, he couldn’t do anything but walk the floor with it. It got him down so that he was nothing but skin and bones, he was walking around like a dead man. Then he went up there and had that operation and he’s been a new man ever since. He looks better than he’s looked in twenty years. I was talking to him the other day and he told me he didn’t have an ache or a pain in the world. He said he was going to live to be a hundred and he looked it — the picture of health.
“Well,” he said in a friendly tone, now turning to the boy, “remember me to your father when you see him. Tell him Frank Candler asked to be remembered to him.”
“Are you and him good friends?” Mr. Flood demanded heavily, after another staring pause, with the brutal, patient, and somehow formidable curiosity which belonged to him. “You know him well?”
“Who? Mr. Gant?” Mr. Candler cried with the hearty geniality of the politician, which seemed to suggest he knew the man so well that the very question was amusing to him. “Why, I’ve known him all my life — I’ve known him ever since he first came to Altamont — let’s see, that’s all of forty years ago when he first came here?” Mr. Candler went on reflectively, “or no, maybe a little less than that. Wait a minute.” He considered seriously for a moment. “The first time I ever saw your father,” said Mr. Candler very slowly and impressively, with a frown on his face and not looking at any one, but staring straight before him, “was in October, 1882 — and I believe — I believe,” he said strongly, “that was the very year he came to town — yes, sir! I’m positive of it!” he cried. “For Altamont was nothing but a cross-roads village in those days — I don’t believe we had 2,000 people there — why, that’s all in the world it was.” Mr. Candler now interrupted himself heartily. “The courthouse up there on the square and a few stores around it — when you got two blocks away you were right out in the country. Didn’t Captain Bob Porter offer me three lots he owned down there on Pisgah Avenue, not a block from the square, for a thousand dollars, and didn’t I laugh at him to think he was fool enough to ask such a price as that and expect to get it! Why!” Mr. Candler declared, with a full countrified laugh, “it was nothing but a mud-hole down in the holler. I’ve seen old Captain Porter’s hawgs wallerin’ around in it many’s the time. ‘And you,’ I said to him, ‘you — do you think I’d pay you a price like that for a mud-hole? Why, you must think I’m crazy, sure enough.’ ‘All right,’ he says, ‘have it your own way, but you’ll live to see the day you’ll regret not buying it. You’ll live to see the day when you can’t buy ONE of those lots for a thousand dollars!’ ONE of them!” Mr. Candler now cried in hearty self-derision. “Why, if I owned one of those lots today, I’d be a rich man! I don’t believe you could buy a foot of that land today for less than a thousand dollars, could you, Bruce?” he said, addressing himself to the swarthy, pompous-looking man who sat beside the boy.
“Five thousand a front foot would come closer to it, I should think,” the pompous little man replied, with the crisp, brisk and almost strutting assurance that characterized all his words and gestures. He crossed and uncrossed his fat little legs briskly as he uttered these words and then sat there “all reared back” as the saying goes, unable even to reach the floor with his fat little legs, but smiling a complacent smile and simply exuding conceit and strutting self-satisfaction from every pore. “Yes, sir!” the swarthy little man continued, pompously, “I should doubt very much if you could buy a foot of that property for less than $5,000 today!”
“Well,” said Mr. Candler with a satisfied air. “That’s what I thought! I knew it would be way up there somewheres. But I could have had the whole thing once for a thousand dollars. I’ve kicked myself in the seat of the pants a thousand times since to think what a fool I was for not taking it when I had the chance! I’d be a rich man today if I had! It just goes to show you, doesn’t it?” he concluded indefinitely.
“Yes, sir,” the pompous, swarthy little man replied, in his dry, briskly assured tones, “it goes to show that our hindsight is usually a great deal better than our foresight!” And he glanced about him complacently, obviously pleased with his wit and convinced that he had said something remarkably pungent and original.
“It was about that time when I first met your father,” said Mr. Candler, turning to the boy again. “Along there in the fall of ‘82 — that’s when it was all right — and I don’t think he’d been in town then more than a month, for in a town that size, I’d have known if he’d been there longer. And yes, of course!” he cried sharply, struck by sudden recollection, “that very first day I saw him he was standing there in front of his shop with two nigger men, unloading some blocks of marble and granite and tombstones, I reckon, and moving them back into his shop. I guess he was just moving in at the time. He’d rented an old shack over there at the north-east corner of the square where the Sluder building is now. That’s where it was, all right. I was working for old man Weaver at the time — he had a grocery and general-goods store there opposite the old courthouse about where the Blue Ridge Coal and Ice Company is now. I was going back to work after dinner and had just turned the corner at the Square there from Academy Street when I saw your father. I remember stopping to watch him for a moment because there was something about his appearance — I don’t know what it was, but if you saw him once you’d never forget him — there was something about the way he looked and talked and worked that was different from any one I’d ever seen. Of course, he was an awful tall, big-boned,