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

He hunted out her home. She was living in an old frame house far out from the centre of the town. He stalked carefully about the neighborhood, keeping a block away from the house at all times, observing it obliquely, laterally, from front and back, with stealthy eye and a smothering thud of the heart, but never passing before it, never coming directly to it.

He was foul and dirty. The soles of his shoes wore through: his calloused feet beat against hot pavements. He stank.

At length, he tried to get work. Work there was in great abundance — but the princely wages of which he had been told were hard to find. He could not swear he was a carpenter, a mason. He was a dirty boy, and looked it. He was afraid. He went to the Navy Yard at Portsmouth, the Naval Base at Norfolk, the Bush Terminal — everywhere there was work, abundant work — hard labor that paid four dollars a day. This he would gladly have taken; but he found that he could not have his wages until after the second week, and that one week’s pay would be withheld to tide him over in illness, trouble, or departure.

And he had no money left.

He went to a Jew and pawned the watch Eliza had given him upon his birthday. He got five dollars on it. Then he went by boat once more to Newport News, and by trolley up the coast to Hampton. He had heard, in the thronging rumor of Norfolk, that there was work upon the flying field, and that the worker was fed and housed upon the field, at company expense.

In the little employment shack at the end of the long bridge that led across into the field, he was signed on as a laborer and searched by the sentry, who made him open his valise. Then he labored across the bridge, kneeing his heavy bag, which bulged with his soiled and disorderly belongings, before him.

He staggered at length into the rude company office and sought out the superintendent, a man in the thirties, shaven, pale, weary, who wore a blue eyeshade, armbands, and talked with a limp cigarette plastered on his lip.

Eugene thrust out his employment slip in shaking fingers. The man looked briefly at it.

“College boy, aren’t you, son?” he said, glancing at Eugene.

“Yes, sir,” said Eugene.

“Did you ever do day labor before?” said the man.

“No, sir,” said Eugene.

“How old are you, son?” the man asked.

Eugene was silent for a moment. “I’m — nineteen,” he said at length, wondering, since he had lied, why he had not had courage to say twenty.

The superintendent grinned wearily.

“It’s hard work, son,” the man said. “You’ll be among the wops and the Swedes and the hunkies. You’ll live in the same bunkhouse, you’ll eat with them. They don’t smell nice, son.”

“I have no money,” said Eugene. “I’ll work hard. I won’t get sick. Give me the job. Please!”

“No,” said the man. “No, I won’t do that.”

Eugene turned blindly away.

“I tell you what I’ll do,” said the superintendent. “I’ll give you a job as a checker. You’ll be with the office force. That’s where you belong. You’ll live with them in their own bunk-house. They’re nice fellows,” he said elegantly, “college fellows, like yourself.”

“Thank you,” said Eugene, clenching his fingers, with husky emotion. “Thank you.”

“The checker we’ve got is quitting,” said the superintendent. “You’ll go to the stables with him in the morning to get your horse.”

“H-h-h-horse?” said Eugene.

“You’ll have a horse,” said the superintendent, “to ride around on.”

With strong bowel-excitement Eugene began to think of the horse, with joy, with fear. He turned to go. He could not bear to talk of money.

“H-h-how much —?” he finally croaked, feeling that he must. Business.

“I’ll give you $80 a month to begin with,” said the manager with a touch of magnificence. “If you make good, I’ll give you a hundred.”

“And my keep?” whispered Eugene.

“Sure!” said the manager. “That’s thrown in.”

Eugene reeled away with his valise, and with a head full of exploding rockets.

These months, although filled with terror and hunger, must be passed in rapid summary with bare mention of the men and actions that a lost boy knew. They belong to a story of escape and wandering — valuable here to indicate the initiation to the voyage this life will make. They are a prelude to exile, and into their nightmare chaos no other purpose may be read than the blind groping of a soul toward freedom and isolation.

Eugene worked upon the Flying Field for a month. Three times a day he rode around the field to check the numbers of two dozen gangs who were engaged in the work of grading, levelling, blasting from the spongy earth the ragged stumps of trees and filling interminably, ceaselessly, like the weary and fruitless labor of a nightmare, the marshy earth-craters, which drank their shovelled toil without end. The gangs were of all races and conditions: Portugee niggers, ebony-black, faithful and childlike, who welcomed him with great toothy grins, each pointing to his big white pin, on which was printed his number, crying out in strange outlandish voices, “feefety-nine, nine-net-ty seex,” and so on; Bowery bums, in greasy serge and battered derbies, toying distastefully with pick-handles that shredded their dirty uncalloused palms — their hard evil faces, with their smudge of beard, were like things corrupt, green-yellow, that grow under barrels. And there were also drawling fishermen from the Virginia coast, huge gorilla niggers from Georgia and the lower South, Italians, Swedes, Irishmen — part of the huge compost of America.

He came to know them and their overseers — tough reckless men, gray-haired and lustful, full of swift action and coarse humor.

Stuck like a jigging doll upon the horse, whom he feared, he rode, staring into heaven, sometimes almost unconscious of the great engine expanding and contracting below him with a brown sensual rhythm. The bird-men filled the blue Virginia weather with the great drone of the Liberties.

At length, hungry again for the ships and faces, he left his work and spent his earnings in a week of gaudy riot in Norfolk and on the Virginia beaches. Almost penniless again, with only the savage kaleidoscope of a thousand streets, a million lights, the blazing confusion and the strident noise of carnival, he returned to Newport News in search of employment, accompanied by another youth from Altamont, likewise a thriftless adventurer in war-work, whom he had found upon the beach. This worthy, whose name was Sinker Jordan, was three years older than Eugene. He was a handsome reckless boy, small in stature, and limping from an injury he had received in a football game. His character was weak and volatile — he hated effort, and was obstinate only in cursing ill-fortune.

The two young men had a few dollars between them. They pooled their resources, and, with wild optimism, purchased from a pawnbroker in Newport News the rudiments of carpenter’s equipment — hammers, saws, and T-squares. They went inland fifteen or twenty miles to a dreary government camp sweltering in the Virginia pines. They were refused employment here and in black dejection returned in the afternoon to the town they had left so hopefully in the morning. Before sundown they had secured employment in the Shipbuilding Yards, but they had been discharged five minutes after they reported for work, when they confessed to a grinning foreman in a room full of woodshavings and quietly slatting belts, that they had no knowledge of the intensely special carpentry of ship’s carving. Nor (they might have added) of any other.

They were quite moneyless now, and once on the street again, Sinker Jordan had hurled upon the pavement the fatal tools, cursing savagely the folly that threatened now to keep them hungry. Eugene picked the tools up, and took them back to the imperturbable Uncle, who repurchased them for only a few dollars less than the sum they had paid him in the morning.