OF TIME AND THE RIVER. Thomas Wolfe
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In morning sunlight on a hospital porch, five flights above the ground, an old dying spectre of a man was sitting, looking mournfully out across the sun-hazed sweep of the city he had known in his youth. He sat there, a rusty, creaking hinge, an almost severed thread of life, a shockingly wasted integument of skin and bone, of which every fibre and sinew was almost utterly rotted out, consumed and honeycombed by the great plant of the cancer which flowered from his entrails and had now spread its fibrous roots to every tissue of his life. Everything was gone: everything was wasted from him: the face was drawn tight and bony as a beak, the skin was clean, tinged with a fatal cancerous yellow, and almost delicately transparent. The great thin blade of nose cut down across the face with knife-like sharpness and in the bony, slanting, almost reptilian cage-formation of the skull, the smallish cold-grey-green eyes were set wearily, with a wretched and enfeebled dullness, out across the great space of the city which swept away and melted at length into the sun-hazed vistas of October.
Nothing was left but his hands. The rest of the man was dead. But the great hands of the stone-cutter, on whose sinewy and bony substance there was so little that disease or death could waste, looked as powerful and living as ever. Although one of his hands — the right one — had been stiffened years before by an attack of rheumatism, they had lost none of their character of power and massive shapeliness.
In the huge shapely knuckles, in the length and sinewy thickness of the great fingers — which were twice the size of an ordinary man’s — and in the whole length and sinewy contour of the hand, there was a quality of sculptural design which was as solid and proportionate as any of the marble hands of love and grace which the stone-cutter had so often carved upon the surface of a graveyard monument.
Thus, as he sat there now, staring dully out across the city, an emaciated and phantasmal shadow of a man, there was, in the appearance of these great living hands of power (one of which lay with an enormous passive grace and dignity across the arm of his chair and the other extended and clasped down upon the handle of a walking-stick), something weirdly incongruous, as if the great strong hands had been unnaturally attached to the puny lifeless figure of a scarecrow.
Now, wearily, desperately, the old enfeebled mind was trying to grope with the strange and bitter miracle of life, to get some meaning out of that black, senseless fusion of pain and joy and agony, that web that had known all the hope and joy and wonder of a boy, the fury, passion, drunkenness, and wild desire of youth, the rich adventure and fulfilment of a man, and that had led him to this fatal and abominable end.
But that fading, pain-sick mind, that darkened memory could draw no meaning and no comfort from its tragic meditation.
The old man’s land of youth was far away in time, yet now only the magic lonely hills of his life’s journey, his wife’s people, seemed sorrowful, lonely, lost, and strange to him. Now he remembered all places, things, and people in his land of youth as if he had known them instantly and for ever!
Oh, what a land, a life, a time was that — that world of youth and no return. What colours of green-gold, magic, rich plantations, and shining cities were in it! For now when this dying man thought about this vanished life that tragic quality of sorrow and loneliness had vanished instantly. All that he had read in books about old wars seemed far and lost and in another time, but when he thought about these things that he had known as a boy, he saw them instantly, knew them, breathed them, heard them, felt them, was there beside them, living them with his own life. He remembered now his wife’s people! — tramping in along the Carlisle Pike on that hot first morning in July, as they marched in towards Gettysburg. He had been standing there with his next older brother Gil, beside the dusty road, as they came by.
And he could see them now, not as shadowy, lost, phantasmal figures of dark time, the way they were in books; he saw them, heard them, knew them again as they had been in their shapeless rags of uniforms, their bare feet wound in rags, their lank disordered hair, sometimes topped by stove-pipe hats which they had looted out of stores.
“God!” the old man thought, wetting his great thumb briefly, grinning thinly, as he shook his head, “What a scarecrow crew that was! In all my days I never saw the like of it! A bum-looking lot, if ever there was one! — And the bravest of the brave, the finest troops that ever lived!”— his mind swung upward to its tide of rhetoric —“Veterans all of them, who had been through the bloodiest battles of the war, they did not know the meaning of the word ‘fear,’ and they would have gone into the valley of death, the jaws of hell, at a word from their Commander!” His mind was alive again, in full swing now, the old voice rose and muttered on the tides of rhetoric, the great hand gestured, the cold-grey, restless eyes glared feverishly about — and all of it began to live for him again.
He remembered how he and Gil had been standing there beside the road, two barefoot farmer boys, aged thirteen and fifteen, and he remembered how the rebels would halt upon their march, and shout jesting remarks at the two boys standing at the road. One shouted out to Gil:
“Hi, there, Yank! You’d better hide! Jeb Stuart’s on the way an’ he’s been lookin’ fer you!”
And Gil, older, bolder, more assured than he, quick-tempered, stubborn, fiercely partisan, had come back like a flash:
“He’ll be lookin’ fer YOU when we get through with you!” said Gil and the rebels had slapped their ragged thighs and howled with laughter, shouting at their crestfallen, grinning comrade:
“‘Y, God! I reckon you’ll be quiet now! He shore God put it on ye that time!”
And he was there beside his brother, seeing, hearing, living it again, as he remembered his strange first meeting with the Pentland tribe, the haunting miracle of that chance meeting. For among that ragged crew he had first seen his wife’s uncle, the prophet, Bacchus Pentland, and he had seen him, heard him that hot morning, and had never been able to forget him, although it would be twenty years, after many strange turnings of the roads of destiny and wandering, before he was to see the man again, and know his name, and join together the two halves of fated meeting.
Yes, there had been one among the drawling and terrible mountaineers that day who passed there on that dusty road, and paused, and talked, and waited in the heat, one whose face he had never been able to forget — one whose full, ruddy face and tranquil eyes were lighted always by a smile of idiot and beatific saintliness, whose powerful fleshy body gave off a stench that would have put a goat to shame, and who on this account was called by his jesting comrades, “Stinking Jesus.” Yes, he had been there that morning, Bacchus Pentland, the fated and chosen of God, the supernatural appearer on roads at nightfall, the harbinger of death, the prophet, chanting even then his promises of Armageddon and the Coming of the Lord, speaking for the first time to the fascinated ears of those two boys, the full, drawling, unctuous accents of the fated, time-triumphant Pentlands.
They came, they halted in the dust before the two young brothers, the lewd tongues mocked and jested, but that man of God, the prophet Bacchus Pentland, was beautifully unmoved by their unfaith, and chanted, with a smile of idiot beatitude, his glorious assurances of an end of death and battle, everlasting peace:
“Hit’s a-comin’!” cried the prophet with the sweet purity of his saintly smile. “Hit’s a-comin’! Accordin’ to my figgers the Great Day is almost here! Oh, hit’s a-comin’, boys!” he sweetly, cheerfully intoned, “Christ’s kingdom on this airth’s at hand! We’re marchin’ in to Armageddon now!”
“Hell, Back!” drawled one, with a slow grin of disbelief. “You said the same thing afore Chancellorsville, an’ all I got from it was a slug of canister in my tail!”— and the others slapped their ragged thighs and shouted.
“Hit’s a-comin’!” Bacchus cried, with a brisk wink, and his seraphic smile, unmoved, untouched, by their derision. “He’ll be here a-judgin’ an’ decreein’ afore the week is over, settin’ up His Kingdom, an’ sortin’ us all out the way it was foretold — the sheep upon His right hand an’ the goats upon His