LOOK HOMEWARD, ANGEL. Thomas Wolfe
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odor as she passed, her dirty dun hair covered in a wide plumed hat, her heels out of her dirty white stockings. She had caused incestuous rivalry between her father and her brother, she bore the scar of her mother’s razor in her neck, and she walked, in her rundown shoes, with the wide stiff-legged hobble of disease.
One day as they pressed round a trapped alley boy, who backed slowly, fearfully, resentfully into a reeking wall, Willie Isaacs, the younger brother of Max, pointing with sniggering laughter, said:
“His mother takes in washin’.”
And then, almost bent double by a soaring touch of humor, he added:
“His mother takes in washin’ from an ole nigger.”
Harry Tarkinton laughed hoarsely. Eugene turned away indefinitely, craned his neck convulsively, lifted one foot sharply from the ground.
“She don’t!” he screamed suddenly into their astounded faces. “She don’t!”
Harry Tarkinton’s parents were English. He was three or four years older than Eugene, an awkward, heavy, muscular boy, smelling always of his father’s paints and oils, coarse-featured, meaty sloping jaw and a thick catarrhal look about his nose and mouth. He was the breaker of visions; the proposer of iniquities. In the cool thick evening grass of Gant’s yard one sunset, he smashed forever, as they lay there talking, the enchantment of Christmas; but he brought in its stead the smell of paint, the gaseous ripstink, the unadorned, sweating, and imageless passion of the vulgar. But Eugene couldn’t follow his barn-yard passion: the strong hen-stench, the Tarkintonian paint-smell, and the rank-mired branch-smell which mined under the filthy shambles of the backyard, stopped him.
Once, in the deserted afternoon, as he and Harry plundered through the vacant upper floor of Gant’s house, they found a half-filled bottle of hair-restorer.
“Have you any hairs on your belly?” said Harry.
Eugene hemmed; hinted timidly at shagginess; confessed. They undid their buttons, smeared oily hands upon their bellies, and waited through rapturous days for the golden fleece.
“Hair makes a man of you,” said Harry.
More often, as Spring deepened, he went now to Gant’s shop on the Square. He loved the scene: the bright hill-cooled sun, the blown sheets of spray from the fountain, the garrulous firemen emerging from the winter, the lazy sprawling draymen on his father’s wooden steps, snaking their whips deftly across the pavement, wrestling in heavy horseplay, Jannadeau in his dirty fly-specked window prying with delicate monocled intentness into the entrails of a watch, the reeking mossiness of Gant’s fantastical brick shack, the great interior dustiness of the main room in front, sagging with gravestones — small polished slabs from Georgia, blunt ugly masses of Vermont granite, modest monuments with an urn, a cherub figure, or a couchant lamb, ponderous fly-specked angels from Carrara in Italy which he bought at great cost, and never sold — they were the joy of his heart.
Behind a wooden partition was his ware-room, layered with stonedust — coarse wooden trestles on which he carved inscriptions, stacked tool-shelves filled with chisels, drills, mallets, a pedalled emery wheel which Eugene worked furiously for hours, exulting in its mounting roar, piled sandstone bases, a small heat-blasted cast-iron stove, loose piled coal and wood.
Between the workroom and the ware-room, on the left as one entered, was Gant’s office, a small room, deep in the dust of twenty years, with an old-fashioned desk, sheaves of banded dirty papers, a leather sofa, a smaller desk layered with round and square samples of marble and granite. The sloping market Square, pocketed obliquely off the public Square, and filled with the wagons of draymen and county peddlers, and on the lower side on a few Poor White houses and on the warehouse and office of Will Pentland.
Eugene would find his father, leaning perilously on Jannadeau’s dirty glass showcase, or on the creaking little fence that marked him off, talking politics, war, death, and famine, denouncing the Democrats, with references to the bad weather, taxation, and soup-kitchens that attended their administration, and eulogizing all the acts, utterances, and policies of Theodore Roosevelt. Jannadeau, guttural, judiciously reasonable, statistically argumentative, would consult, in all disputed areas, his library — a greasy edition of the World Almanac, three years old, saying, triumphantly, after a moment of dirty thumbing: “Ah — just as I thought: the muni-CIP-al taxation of Milwaukee under De-MO-cratic administration in 1905 was $2.25 the hundred, the lowest it had been in years. I cannot ima-GINE why the total revenue is not given.” And he would argue with animation, picking his nose with his blunt black fingers, his broad yellow face breaking into flaccid creases, as he laughed gutturally at Gant’s unreason.
“And you may mark my words,” proceeded Gant, as if he had never been interrupted, and had heard no dissenting judgment, “if they get in again we’ll have soup-kitchens, the banks will go to the wall, and your guts will grease your backbone before another winter’s over.”
Or, he would find his father in the workroom, bending over a trestle, using the heavy wooden mallet with delicate care, as he guided the chisel through the mazes of an inscription. He never wore work-clothes; he worked dressed in well brushed garments of heavy black, his coat removed, and a long striped apron covering all his front. As Eugene saw him, he felt that this was no common craftsman, but a master, picking up his tools briefly for a chef-d’oeuvre.
“He is better at this than any one in all the world,” Eugene thought, and his dark vision burned in him for a moment, as he thought that his father’s work would never, as men reckon years, be extinguished, but that when that great skeleton lay powdered in earth, in many a tangled undergrowth, in the rank wilderness of forgotten churchyards, these letters would endure.
And he thought with pity of all the grocers and brewers and clothiers who had come and gone, with their perishable work a forgotten excrement, or a rotted fabric; or of plumbers, like Max’s father, whose work rusted under ground, or of painters, like Harry’s, whose work scaled with the seasons, or was obliterated with newer brighter paint; and the high horror of death and oblivion, the decomposition of life, memory, desire, in the huge burial-ground of the earth stormed through his heart. He mourned for all the men who had gone because they had not scored their name upon a rock, blasted their mark upon a cliff, sought out the most imperishable objects of the world and graven there some token, some emblem that utterly they might not be forgotten.
Again, Eugene would find Gant moving with bent strides across the depth of the building, tearing madly along between the sentinel marbles that aisled the ware-room, muttering, with hands gripped behind him, with ominous ebb and flow. Eugene waited. Presently, when he had shuttled thus across his shop some eighty times, he would leap, with a furious howl, to his front door, storming out upon the porch, and delivering his Jeremiad to the offending draymen:
“You are the lowest of the low, the vilest of the vile. You lousy good-for-nothing bums: you have brought me to the verge of starvation, you have frightened away the little business that might have put bread in my mouth, and kept the wolf from my door. By God, I hate you, for you stink a mile off. You low degenerates, you accursed reprobates; you would steal the pennies from a dead man’s eyes, as you have from mine, fearful, awful, and bloodthirsty mountain grills that you are!”
He would tear back into the shop muttering, to return almost at once, with a strained pretense at calmness, which ended in a howl:
“Now I want to tell you: I give you fair warning once and for all. If I find you on my steps again, I’ll put you all in jail.”
They would disperse sheepishly to their wagons, flicking their whips aimlessly along the pavements.
“By God, somethin’s sure upset the ole man.”
An hour later, like heavy buzzing flies, they would drift back settling from nowhere on the broad steps.
As he emerged from the shop into the Square, they would greet him cheerfully, with a certain affection.
“‘Day, Mr. Gant.”
“Good day, boys,” he would answer kindly, absently. And he would be away with his gaunt devouring