Thomas Wolfe: Of Time and the River, You Can't Go Home Again & Look Homeward, Angel. Thomas Wolfe
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satisfied he would appear suddenly before her in the kitchen, and deliver himself without preliminary, as the grocer’s negro entered with pork chops or a thick steak:
“Woman, would you have had a roof to shelter you today if it hadn’t been for me? Could you have depended on your worthless old father, Tom Pentland, to give you one? Would Brother Will, or Brother Jim give you one? Did you ever hear of them giving any one anything? Did you ever hear of them caring for anything but their own miserable hides? DID you? Would any of them give a starving beggar a crust of bread? By God, no! Not even if he ran a bakery shop! Ah me! ’Twas a bitter day for me when I first came into this accursed country: little did I know what it would lead to. Mountain Grills! Mountain Grills!” and the tide would reach its height.
At times, when she tried to reply to his attack, she would burst easily into tears. This pleased him: he liked to see her cry. But usually she made an occasional nagging retort: deep down, between their blind antagonistic souls, an ugly and desperate war was being waged. Yet, had he known to what lengths these daily assaults might drive her, he would have been astounded: they were part of the deep and feverish discontent of his spirit, the rooted instinct to have an object for his abuse.
Moreover, his own feeling for order was so great that he had a passionate aversion for what was slovenly, disorderly, diffuse. He was goaded to actual fury at times when he saw how carefully she saved bits of old string, empty cans and bottles, paper, trash of every description: the mania for acquisition, as yet an undeveloped madness in Eliza, enraged him.
“In God’s name!” he would cry with genuine anger. “In God’s name! Why don’t you get rid of some of this junk?” And he would move destructively toward it.
“No you don’t, Mr. Gant!” she would answer sharply. “You never know when those things will come in handy.”
It was, perhaps, a reversal of custom that the deep-hungering spirit of quest belonged to the one with the greatest love of order, the most pious regard for ritual, who wove into a pattern even his daily tirades of abuse, and that the sprawling blot of chaos, animated by one all-mastering desire for possession, belonged to the practical, the daily person.
Gant had the passion of the true wanderer, of him who wanders from a fixed point. He needed the order and the dependence of a home — he was intensely a family man: their clustered warmth and strength about him was life. After his punctual morning tirade at Eliza, he went about the rousing of the slumbering children. Comically, he could not endure feeling, in the morning, that he was the only one awake and about.
His waking cry, delivered by formula, with huge comic gruffness from the foot of the stairs, took this form:
“Steve! Ben! Grover! Luke! You damned scoundrels: get up! In God’s name, what will become of you! You’ll never amount to anything as long as you live.”
He would continue to roar at them from below as if they were wakefully attentive above.
“When I was your age, I had milked four cows, done all the chores, and walked eight miles through the snow by this time.”
Indeed, when he described his early schooling, he furnished a landscape that was constantly three feet deep in snow, and frozen hard. He seemed never to have attended school save under polar conditions.
And fifteen minutes later, he would roar again: “You’ll never amount to anything, you good-for-nothing bums! If one side of the wall caved in, you’d roll over to the other.”
Presently now there would be the rapid thud of feet upstairs, and one by one they would descend, rushing naked into the sitting-room with their clothing bundled in their arms. Before his roaring fire they would dress.
By breakfast, save for sporadic laments, Gant was in something approaching good humor. They fed hugely: he stoked their plates for them with great slabs of fried steak, grits fried in egg, hot biscuits, jam, fried apples. He departed for his shop about the time the boys, their throats still convulsively swallowing hot food and coffee, rushed from the house at the warning signal of the mellow-tolling final nine-o’clock school bell.
He returned for lunch — dinner, as they called it — briefly garrulous with the morning’s news; in the evening, as the family gathered in again, he returned, built his great fire, and launched his supreme invective, a ceremony which required a half hour in composition, and another three-quarters, with repetition and additions, in delivery. They dined then quite happily.
So passed the winter. Eugene was three; they bought him alphabet books, and animal pictures, with rhymed fables below. Gant read them to him indefatigably: in six weeks he knew them all by memory.
Through the late winter and spring he performed numberless times for the neighbors: holding the book in his hands he pretended to read what he knew by heart. Gant was delighted: he abetted the deception. Every one thought it extraordinary that a child should read so young.
In the Spring Gant began to drink again; his thirst withered, however, in two or three weeks, and shamefacedly he took up the routine of his life. But Eliza was preparing for a change.
It was 1904; there was in preparation a great world’s exposition at Saint Louis: it was to be the visual history of civilization, bigger, better, and greater than anything of its kind ever known before. Many of the Altamont people intended to go: Eliza was fascinated at the prospect of combining travel with profit.
“Do you know what?” she began thoughtfully one night, as she laid down the paper, “I’ve a good notion to pack up and go.”
“Go? Go where?”
“To Saint Louis,” she answered. “Why, say — if things work out all right, we might simply pull out and settle down there.” She knew that the suggestion of a total disruption of the established life, a voyage to new lands, a new quest of fortune fascinated him. It had been talked of years before when he had broken his partnership with Will Pentland.
“What do you intend to do out there? How are the children going to get along?”
“Why, sir,” she began smugly, pursing her lips thoughtfully, and smiling cunningly, “I’ll simply get me a good big house and drum up a trade among the Altamont people who are going.”
“Merciful God, Mrs. Gant!” he howled tragically, “you surely wouldn’t do a thing like that. I beg you not to.”
“Why, pshaw, Mr. Gant, don’t be such a fool. There’s nothing wrong in keeping boarders. Some of the most respectable people in this town do it.” She knew what a tender thing his pride was: he could not bear to be thought incapable of the support of his family — one of his most frequent boasts was that he was “a good provider.” Further, the residence of any one under his roof not of his blood and bone sowed the air about with menace, breached his castle walls. Finally, he had a particular revulsion against lodgers: to earn one’s living by accepting the contempt, the scorn, and the money of what he called “cheap boarders” was an almost unendurable ignominy.
She knew this but she could not understand his feeling. Not merely to possess property, but to draw income from it was part of the religion of her family, and she surpassed them all by her willingness to rent out a part of her home. She alone, in fact, of all the Pentlands was willing to relinquish the little moated castle of home; the particular secrecy and privacy of their walls she alone did not seem to value greatly. And she was the only one of them that wore a skirt.
Eugene had been fed from her breast until he was more than three years old: during the winter he was weaned. Something in her stopped; something began.
She had her way finally. Sometimes she would talk to Gant thoughtfully and persuasively about the World’s Fair venture. Sometimes, during his evening tirades, she would snap back at him using the project as a threat. Just what was to be achieved she did not know. But she felt it was a beginning for her. And she had her way finally.
Gant succumbed to the lure of new lands. He was to remain at home: if all went well he would come out later. The prospect, too, of release for a time excited him. Something of the old thrill of youth touched him. He was left behind,