Thomas Wolfe - Thomas Wolfe - Of Time and the River, You Can't Go Home Again & Look Homeward, Angel

The boy had two short awkward letters from Ben, who was now stationed one hundred miles away, in the tobacco town. At Easter, Eugene visited him, staying at his lodgings, where again his unerring destiny had thrown him into the welcoming arms of a gray-haired widow. She was under fifty — a handsome silly woman, who prodded and teased him as she would an adored child. She addressed him — with a loose giggle — as “Old Curly–Head,” at which he fetched out his usual disgusted plea to his Maker. “O my God! Listen to this!” She had reverted to an astonishing romping girlhood, and would exercise her playfulness by leaping suddenly upon Old Curly–Head, dealing him a stiff dig in the ribs, and skipping away with a triumphant “Hah! Got you that time!”

There was forever in that town a smell of raw tobacco, biting the nostrils with its acrid pungency: it smote the stranger coming from the train, but all the people in the town denied it, saying: “No; there is no smell at all.” And within a day the stranger too could smell it no more.

On Easter morning he arose in the blue light and went with the other pilgrims to the Moravian cemetery.

“You ought to see it,” Ben said. “It’s a famous custom: people come from everywhere.” But the older brother did not go. Behind massed bands of horns, the trumpeting blare of trombones, the big crowds moved into the strange burial ground where all the stones lay flat upon the graves — symbol, it was said, of all-levelling Death. But as the horns blared, the old ghoul-fantasy of death returned, the grave slabs made him think of table-cloths: he felt as if he were taking part in some obscene feast.

Spring was coming on again across the earth like a light sparkle of water-spray: all of the men who had died were making their strange and lovely return in blossom and flower. Ben walked along the streets of the tobacco town looking like asphodel. It was strange to find a ghost there in that place: his ancient soul prowled wearily by the cheap familiar brick and all the young facades.

There was a Square on high ground; in the centre a courthouse. Cars were parked in close lines. Young men loitered in the drug-store.

How real it is, Eugene thought. It is like something we have always known about and do not need to see. The town would not have seemed strange to Thomas Aquinas — but he to the town.

Ben prowled along, greeting the merchants with a grave scowl, leaning his skull against their round skulls of practicality, across their counters — a phantom soliciting advertisement in a quiet monotone.

“This is my kid brother, Mr. Fulton.”

“Hello, son! Dogged if you don’t grow tall ‘uns up there, Ben. Well, if you’re like Old Ben, young fellow, we won’t kick. We think a lot of him here.”

That’s like thinking well of Balder, in Connecticut, Eugene thought.

“I have only been here three months,” said Ben, resting in bed on his elbow and smoking a cigarette. “But I know all the leading business men already. I’m well thought of here.” He glanced at his brother quickly and grinned, with a shy charm of rare confession. But his fierce eyes were desperate and lonely. Hill-haunted? For — home? He smoked.

“You see, they think well of you, once you get away from your people. You’ll never have a chance at home, ‘Gene. They’ll ruin everything for you. For heaven’s sake, get away when you can. — What’s the matter with you? Why are you looking at me like that?” he said sharply, alarmed at the set stare of the boy’s face. In a moment he said: “They’ll spoil your life. Can’t you forget about her?”

“No,” said Eugene. In a moment he added: “She’s kept coming back all Spring.”

He twisted his throat with a wild cry.

The Spring advanced with a mounting hum of war. The older students fell out quietly and drifted away to enlistments. The younger strained tensely, waiting. The war brought them no sorrow: it was a pageant which might, they felt, pluck them instantly into glory. The country flowed with milk and honey. There were strange rumors of a land of Eldorado to the north, amid the war industry of the Virginia coast. Some of the students had been there, the year before: they brought back stories of princely wages. One could earn twelve dollars a day, with no experience. One could assume the duties of a carpenter, with only a hammer, a saw, and a square. No questions were asked.

War is not death to young men; war is life. The earth had never worn raiment of such color as it did that year. The war seemed to unearth pockets of ore that had never been known in the nation: there was a vast unfolding and exposure of wealth and power. And somehow — this imperial wealth, this display of power in men and money, was blended into a lyrical music. In Eugene’s mind, wealth and love and glory melted into a symphonic noise: the age of myth and miracle had come upon the world again. All things were possible.

He went home stretched like a bowstring and announced his intention of going away into Virginia. There was protest, but not loud enough to impede him. Eliza’s mind was fastened on real-estate and the summer trade. Gant stared into the darkness at his life. Helen laughed at him and scolded him; then fell to plucking at her chin, absently.

“Can’t do without her? You can’t fool me! No, sir. I know why you want to go,” she said jocularly. “She’s a married woman now: she may have a baby, for all you know. You’ve no right to go after her.”

Then abruptly, she said:

“Well, let him go if he wants to. It looks silly to me, but he’s got to decide for himself.”

He got twenty-five dollars from his father — enough to pay his railway fare to Norfolk and leave him a few dollars.

“Mark my words,” said Gant. “You’ll be back in a week’s time. It’s a wild-goose chase you’re going on.”

He went.

All through the night he drew toward her across Virginia, propped on his elbow in the berth and staring bewitched upon the great romantic country clumped with dreaming woodlands and white as a weird dawn beneath the blazing moonlight.

Early in the morning he came to Richmond. He had to change trains; there was a wait. He went out from the station and walked up the hill toward the fine old State House drenched cleanly in the young morning light. He ate breakfast at a lunchroom on Broad Street, filled already with men going to their work. This casual and brief contact with their lives, achieved after his lonely and magnificent approach through the night, thrilled him by its very casualness. All the little ticking sounds of a city beginning its day, the strange familiarity of voices in an alien place, heard curiously after the thunder of the wheels, seemed magical and unreal. The city had no existence save that which he conferred on it: he wondered how it had lived before he came, how it would live after he left. He looked at all the men, feeding with eyes that held yet the vast moon-meadows of the night and the cool green width of the earth. They were like men in a zoo; he gazed at them, looking for all the little particular markings of the town, the fine mapping upon their limbs and faces of their own little cosmos. And the great hunger for voyages rose up in him — to come always, as now at dawn, into strange cities, striding in among them, and sitting with them unknown, like a god in exile, stored with the enormous vision of the earth.

The counterman yawned and turned the crackling pages of a morning paper. That was strange.

Cars clanked by, beginning to work through the town. Merchants lowered their awnings; he left them as their day began.

An hour later he was riding for the sea. Eighty miles away lay the sea and Laura. She slept unwitting of the devouring wheels that brought him to her. He looked at the aqueous blue sky whitened with little clouds, and at the land wooded with pines and indefinable tokens of the marshes and bright salt.