Look Homeward, Angel - Thomas Wolfe (12 page)

A paper-carrier, number 7, finished his route on the
corner of Vine Street, as the car stopped, turned eastwards now from
Pisgah Avenue toward the town core.  The boy folded, bent, and
flattened the fresh sheets deftly, throwing the block angularly
thirty yards upon the porch of Shields the jeweller; it struck the
boarding and bounded back with a fresh plop.  Then he walked off
with fatigued relief into time toward the twentieth century, feeling
gratefully the ghost-kiss of absent weight upon his now free but
still leaning right shoulder.

About fourteen, thought Gant.  That would be
Spring of 1864.  The mule camp at Harrisburg.  Thirty a
month and keep.  Men stank worse than mules.  I was in
third bunk on top.  Gil in second.  Keep your damned dirty
hoof out of my mouth.  It's bigger than a mule's. That was the
man.  If it ever lands on you, you bastard, you'll think it is a
mule's, said Gil.  Then they had it.  Mother made us go. 
Big enough to work, she said.  Born at the heart of the world,
why here?  Twelve miles from Gettysburg.  Out of the South
they came.  Stove-pipe hats they had stolen.  No shoes. 
Give me a drink, son.  That was Fitzhugh Lee.  After the
third day we went over.  Devil's Den.  Cemetery Ridge. 
Stinking piles of arms and legs.  Some of it done with
meat-saws.  Is the land richer now? The great barns bigger than
the houses.  Big eaters, all of us.  I hid the cattle in
the thicket.  Belle Boyd, the Beautiful Rebel Spy. 
Sentenced to be shot four times.  Took the despatches from his
pocket while they danced.  Probably a little chippie.

Hog-chitlins and hot cracklin' bread.  Must get
some.  The whole hog or none.  Always been a good
provider.  Little I ever had done for me.

The car still climbing, mounted the flimsy
cheap-boarded brown-gray smuttiness of Skyland Avenue.

America's Switzerland.  The Beautiful Land of
the Sky.  Jesus God! Old Bowman said he'll be a rich man some
day.  Built up all the way to Pasadena.  Come on out. 
Too late now.  Think he was in love with her.  No matter. 
Too old.  Wants her out there.  No fool like--White bellies
of the fish.  A spring somewhere to wash me through.  Clean
as a baby once more.  New Orleans, the night Jim Corbett knocked
out John L. Sullivan.  The man who tried to rob me. My clothes
and my watch.  Five blocks down Canal Street in my nightgown. 
Two A.M.  Threw them all in a heap--watch landed on top. 
Fight in my room.  Town full of crooks and pickpockets for
prizefight.  Make good story.  Policeman half hour later. 
They come out and beg you to come in.  Frenchwomen. 
Creoles.  Beautiful Creole heiress.  Steamboat race. 
Captain, they are gaining.  I will not be beaten.  Out of
wood.  Use the bacon she said proudly. There was a terrific
explosion.  He got her as she sank the third time and swam to
shore.  They powder in front of the window, smacking their lips
at you.  For old men better maybe.  Who gets the business
there?  Bury them all above ground.  Water two feet down. 
Rots them.  Why not?  All big jobs.  Italy. 
Carrara and Rome.  Yet Brutus is an hon-or-able man. 
What's a Creole?  French and Spanish.  Has she any nigger
blood?  Ask Cardiac?

The car paused briefly at the car-shed, in sight of
its stabled brothers.  Then it moved reluctantly past the
dynamic atmosphere of the Power and Light Company, wheeling bluntly
into the gray frozen ribbon of Hatton Avenue, running gently up hill
near its end into the frore silence of the Square.

Ah, Lord!  Well do I remember.  The old man
offered me the whole piece for $1,000 three days after I arrived. 
Millionaire to-day if--

The car passed the Tuskegee on its eighty-yard climb
into the Square.  The fat slick worn leather-chairs marshalled
between a fresh-rubbed gleaming line of brass spittoons squatted
massively on each side of the entry door, before thick sheets of
plate-glass that extended almost to the sidewalks with indecent
nearness.

Many a fat man's rump upon the leather.  Like
fish in a glass case. Travelling man's wet chewed cigar, spit-limp on
his greasy lips. Staring at all the women.  Can't look back
long.  Gives advantage.

A negro bellboy sleepily wafted a gray dust-cloth
across the leather.  Within, before the replenished
crackle-dance of the wood-fire, the nightclerk sprawled out in the
deep receiving belly of a leather divan.

The car reached the Square, jolted across the netting
of north-south lines, and came to a halt on the north side, facing
east. Scurfing a patch away from the glazed window, Gant looked out. 
The Square in the wan-gray frozen morning walled round him with
frozen unnatural smallness.  He felt suddenly the cramped mean
fixity of the Square: this was the one fixed spot in a world that
writhed, evolved, and changed constantly in his vision, and he felt a
sick green fear, a frozen constriction about his heart because the
centre of his life now looked so shrunken.  He got very
definitely the impression that if he flung out his arms they would
strike against the walls of the mean three-and-four-story brickbuilt
buildings that flanked the Square raggedly.

Anchored to earth at last, he was hit suddenly by the
whole cumulation of sight and movement, of eating, drinking, and
acting that had gathered in him for two months.  The limitless
land, wood, field, hill, prairie, desert, mountain, the coast rushing
away below his eyes, the ground that swam before his eyes at
stations, the remembered ghosts of gumbo, oysters, huge Frisco
seasteaks, tropical fruits swarmed with the infinite life, the
ceaseless pullulation of the sea.  Here only, in his
unreal-reality, this unnatural vision of what he had known for twenty
years, did life lose its movement, change, color.

The Square had the horrible concreteness of a dream. 
At the far southeastern edge he saw his shop: his name painted hugely
in dirty scaly white across the brick near the roof:  W. O.
Gant?Marbles, Tombstones, Cemetery Fixtures.  It was like a
dream of hell, when a man finds his own name staring at him from the
Devil's ledger; like a dream of death, when he who comes as mourner
finds himself in the coffin, or as witness to a hanging, the
condemned upon the scaffold.

A sleepy negro employed at the Manor Hotel clambered
heavily up and slumped into one of the seats reserved for his race at
the back. In a moment he began to snore gently through his blubbered
lips.

At the east end of the Square, Big Bill Messler, with
his vest half-unbuttoned over his girdled paunch-belly, descended
slowly the steps of the City Hall, and moved soundingly off with
country leisure along the cold-metallic sidewalk.  The fountain,
ringed with a thick bracelet of ice, played at quarter-strength a
sheening glut of ice-blue water.

Cars droned separately into their focal positions;
the carmen stamped their feet and talked smokily together; there was
a breath of beginning life.  Beside the City Hall, the firemen
slept above their wagons: behind the bolted door great hoofs drummed
woodenly.

A dray rattled across the east end of the Square
before the City Hall, the old horse leaning back cautiously as he
sloped down into the dray market by the oblique cobbled passage at
the southeast that cut Gant's shop away from the market and
"calaboose."  As the car moved eastward again, Gant
caught an angular view of Niggertown across this passage.  The
settlement was plumed delicately with a hundred tiny fumes of smoke.

The car sloped swiftly now down Academy Street,
turned, as the upper edge of the negro settlement impinged steeply
from the valley upon the white, into Ivy Street, and proceeded north
along a street bordered on one side by smutty pebble-dash cottages,
and on the other by a grove of lordly oaks, in which the large
quaking plaster pile of old Professor Bowman's deserted School for
Young Ladies loomed desolately, turning and stopping at the corner,
at the top of the Woodson Street hill, by the great wintry, wooden,
and deserted barn of the Ivy Hotel.  It had never paid.

Gant kneed his heavy bag before him down the passage,
depositing it for a moment at the curbing before he descended the
hill.  The unpaved frozen clay fell steeply and lumpily away. 
It was steeper, shorter, nearer than he thought.  Only the trees
looked large.  He saw Duncan come out on his porch,
shirtsleeved, and pick up the morning paper.  Speak to him
later.  Too long now.  As he expected, there was a fat coil
of morning smoke above the Scotchman's chimney, but none from his
own.

He went down the hill, opening his iron gate softly,
and going around to the side entrance by the yard, rather than ascend
the steep veranda steps.  The grape vines, tough and barren,
writhed about the house like sinewy ropes.  He entered the
sitting-room quietly.  There was a strong odor of cold leather. 
Cold ashes were strewn thinly in the grate.  He put his bag down
and went back through the wash-room into the kitchen.  Eliza,
wearing one of his old coats, and a pair of fingerless woollen
gloves, poked among the embers of a crawling little fire.

"Well, I'm back," Gant said.

"Why, what on earth!" she cried as he knew
she would, becoming flustered and moving her arms indeterminately. 
He laid his hand clumsily on her shoulder for a moment.  They
stood awkwardly without movement.  Then he seized the oil-can,
and drenched the wood with kerosene.  The flame roared up out of
the stove.

"Mercy, Mr. Gant," cried Eliza, "you'll
burn us up!"

But, seizing a handful of cut sticks and the oil-can,
he lunged furiously toward the sitting-room.

As the flame shot roaring up from the oiled pine
sticks, and he felt the fire-full chimney-throat tremble, he
recovered joy.  He brought back the width of the desert; the
vast yellow serpent of the river, alluvial with the mined accretions
of the continent; the rich vision of laden ships, masted above the
sea-walls, the world-nostalgic ships, bearing about them the filtered
and concentrated odors of the earth, sensual negroid rum and
molasses, tar, ripening guavas, bananas, tangerines, pineapples in
the warm holds of tropical boats, as cheap, as profuse, as abundant
as the lazy equatorial earth and all its women; the great names of
Louisiana, Texas, Arizona, Colorado, California; the blasted
fiend-world of the desert, and the terrific boles of trees, tunnelled
for the passage of a coach; water that fell from a mountain-top in a
smoking noiseless coil, internal boiling lakes flung skywards by the
punctual respiration of the earth, the multitudinous torture in form
of granite oceans, gouged depthlessly by canyons, and iridescent with
the daily chameleon-shift beyond man, beyond nature, of terrific
colors, below the un-human iridescence of the sky.

Eliza, still excited, recovering speech, followed him
into the sitting-room, holding her chapped gloved hands clasped
before her stomach while she talked.

"I was saying to Steve last night, 'It wouldn't
surprise me if your papa would come rolling in at any minute now'--I
just had a feeling, I don't know what you'd call it," she said,
her face plucked inward by the sudden fabrication of legend, "but
it's pretty strange when you come to think of it.  I was in
Garret's the other day ordering some things, some vanilla extract,
soda and a pound of coffee when Aleck Carter came up to me. 
'Eliza,' he said, 'when's Mr. Gant coming back--I think I may have a
job for him?' 'Why, Aleck,' I said, 'I don't much expect him before
the first of April.'  Well, sir, what do you know--I had no
sooner got out on the street--I suppose I must have been thinking of
something else, because I remember Emma Aldrich came by and hollered
to me and I didn't think to answer her until she had gone on by, so I
called out just as big as you please to her, 'Emma!'--the thing
flashed over me all of a sudden--I was just as sure of it as I'm
standing here--'what do you think?  Mr. Gant's on his way back
home'."

Jesus God! thought Gant.  It's begun again.

Her memory moved over the ocean-bed of event like a
great octopus, blindly but completely feeling its way into every
seacave, rill, and estuary, focussed on all she had done, felt and
thought, with sucking Pentlandian intentness, for whom the sun shone,
or grew dark, rain fell, and mankind came, spoke, and died, shifted
for a moment in time out of its void into the Pentlandian core,
pattern and heart of purpose.

Meanwhile, as he laid big gleaming lumps of coal upon
the wood, he muttered to himself, his mind ordering in a mounting
sequence, with balanced and climactic periods, his carefully
punctuated rhetoric.

Yes, musty cotton, bated and piled under long sheds
of railway sidings; and odorous pine woodlands of the level South,
saturated with brown faery light, and broken by the tall straight
leafless poles of trees; a woman's leg below an elegantly lifted
skirt mounting to a carriage in Canal Street (French or Creole
probably); a white arm curved reaching for a window shade,
French-olive faces window-glimmering, the Georgia doctor's wife who
slept above him going out, the unquenchable fish-filled abundance of
the unfenced, blue, slow cat-slapping lazy Pacific; and the river,
the all-drinking, yellow, slow-surging snake that drained the
continent. His life was like that river, rich with its own deposited
and onward-borne agglutinations, fecund with its sedimental
accretions, filled exhaustlessly by life in order to be more richly
itself, and this life, with the great purpose of a river, he emptied
now into the harbor of his house, the sufficient haven of himself,
for whom the gnarled vines wove round him thrice, the earth burgeoned
with abundant fruit and blossom, the fire burnt madly.