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

It was half-past three in the morning. The ugly station settlement lay fixed and horrible, like something in a dream. His strange and sudden return to it heightened his feeling of unreality. In one of the cars lined at the station curbing, the driver lay huddled below his blanket. In the Greek’s lunchroom a man sat sprawled faced downward on the counter. The lights were dull and weary: a few burned with slow lust in the cheap station-hotels.

Hugh Barton, who had always been a cautious driver, shot away with a savage grinding of gears. They roared townward through the rickety slums at fifty miles an hour.

“I’m afraid B-B-B-Ben is one sick boy,” Luke began.

“How did it happen?” Eugene asked. “Tell me.”

He had taken influenza, they told Eugene, from one of Daisy’s children. He had moped about, ill and feverish, for a day or two, without going to bed.

“In that G-g-g-god dam cold barn,” Luke burst out. “If that boy dies it’s because he c-c-c-couldn’t keep warm.”

“Never mind about that now,” Eugene cried irritably, “go on.”

Finally he had gone to bed, and Mrs. Pert had nursed him for a day or two.

“She was the only one who d-d-d-did a damn thing for him,” said the sailor. Eliza, at length, had called in Cardiac.

“The d-d-damned old quack,” Luke stuttered.

“Never mind! Never mind!” Eugene yelled. “Why dig it up now? Get on with it!”

After a day or two, he had grown apparently convalescent, and Cardiac told him he might get up if he liked. He got up and moped about the house for a day, in a cursing rage, but the next day he lay a-bed, with a high fever. Coker at length had been called in, two days before —

“That’s what they should have done at the start,” growled Hugh Barton over his wheel.

“Never mind!” screamed Eugene. “Get on with it.”

And Ben had been desperately ill, with pneumonia in both lungs, for over a day. The sad prophetic story, a brief and terrible summary of the waste, the tardiness, and the ruin of their lives, silenced them for a moment with its inexorable sense of tragedy. They had nothing to say.

The powerful car roared up into the chill dead Square. The feeling of unreality grew upon the boy. He sought for his life, for the bright lost years, in this mean cramped huddle of brick and stone. Ben and I, here by the City Hall, the Bank, the grocery-store (he thought). Why here? In Gath or Ispahan. In Corinth or Byzantium. Not here. It is not real.

A moment later, the big car sloped to a halt at the curb, in front of Dixieland. A light burned dimly in the hall, evoking for him chill memories of damp and gloom. A warmer light burned in the parlor, painting the lowered shade of the tall window a warm and mellow orange.

“Ben’s in that room upstairs,” Luke whispered, “where the light is.”

Eugene looked up with cold dry lips to the bleak front room upstairs, with its ugly Victorian bay-window. It was next to the sleeping-porch where, but three weeks before, Ben had hurled into the darkness his savage curse at life. The light in the sickroom burned grayly, bringing to him its grim vision of struggle and naked terror.

The three men went softly up the walk and entered the house. There was a faint clatter from the kitchen, and voices.

“Papa’s in here,” said Luke.

Eugene entered the parlor and found Gant seated alone before a bright coal-fire. He looked up dully and vaguely as his son entered.

“Hello, papa,” said Eugene, going to him.

“Hello, son,” said Gant. He kissed the boy with his bristling cropped mustache. His thin lip began to tremble petulantly.

“Have you heard about your brother?” he snuffled. “To think that this should be put upon me, old and sick as I am. O Jesus, it’s fearful —”

Helen came in from the kitchen.

“Hello, Slats,” she said, heartily embracing him. “How are you, honey? He’s grown four inches more since he went away,” she jeered, sniggering. “Well, ‘Gene, cheer up! Don’t look so blue. While there’s life there’s hope. He’s not gone yet, you know.” She burst into tears, hoarse, unstrung, hysterical.

“To think that this must come upon me,” Gant sniffled, responding mechanically to her grief, as he rocked back and forth on his cane and stared into the fire. “O boo-hoo-hoo! What have I done that God should —”

“You shut up!” she cried, turning upon him in a blaze of fury. “Shut your mouth this minute. I don’t want to hear any more from you! I’ve given my life to you! Everything’s been done for you, and you’ll be here when we’re all gone. You’re not the one who’s sick.” Her feeling toward him had, for the moment, gone rancorous and bitter.

“Where’s mama?” Eugene asked.

“She’s back in the kitchen,” Helen said. “I’d go back and say hello before you see Ben if I were you.” In a low brooding tone, she continued: “Well, forget about it. It can’t be helped now.”

He found Eliza busy over several bright bubbling pots of water on the gas-stove. She bustled awkwardly about, and looked surprised and confused when she saw him.

“Why, what on earth, boy! When’d you get in?”

He embraced her. But beneath her matter-of-factness, he saw the terror in her heart: her dull black eyes glinted with bright knives of fear.

“How’s Ben, mama?” he asked quietly.

“Why-y,” she pursed her lips reflectively, “I was just saying to Doctor Coker before you came in. ‘Look here,’ I said. ‘I tell you what, I don’t believe he’s half as bad off as he looks. Now, if only we can hold on till morning. I believe there’s going to be a change for the better.’”

“Mama, in heaven’s name!” Helen burst out furiously. “How can you bear to talk like that? Don’t you know that Ben’s condition is critical? Are you never going to wake up?”

Her voice had its old cracked note of hysteria.

“Now, I tell you, son,” said Eliza, with a white tremulous smile, “when you go in there to see him, don’t make out as if you knew he was sick. If I were you, I’d make a big joke of it all. I’d laugh just as big as you please and say, ‘See here, I thought I was coming to see a sick man. Why, pshaw!’ (I’d say) ‘there’s nothing wrong with you. Half of it’s only imagination!’”

“O mama! for Christ’s sake!” said Eugene frantically. “For Christ’s sake!”

He turned away, sick at heart, and caught at his throat with his fingers.

Then he went softly upstairs with Luke and Helen, approaching the sick-room with a shrivelled heart and limbs which had gone cold and bloodless. They paused for a moment, whispering, before he entered. The wretched conspiracy in the face of death filled him with horror.

“N-n-n-now, I wouldn’t stay but a m-m-m-minute,” whispered Luke. “It m-m-might make him nervous.”

Eugene, bracing himself, followed Helen blindly into the room.

“Look who’s come to see you,” her voice came heartily. “It’s Highpockets.”

For a moment Eugene could see nothing, for dizziness and fear. Then, in the gray shaded light of the room, he descried Bessie Gant, the nurse, and the long yellow skull’s-head of Coker, smiling wearily at him, with big stained teeth, over a long chewed cigar. Then, under the terrible light which fell directly and brutally upon the bed alone, he saw Ben. And in that moment of searing recognition he saw, what they had all seen, that Ben was dying.

Ben’s long thin body lay three-quarters covered by the bedding; its gaunt outline was bitterly twisted below the covers, in an attitude of struggle and torture. It seemed not to belong to him, it was somehow distorted and detached as if it belonged to a beheaded criminal. And the sallow yellow of his face had turned gray; out of this granite tint of death, lit by two red flags of fever, the stiff black furze of a three-day beard was growing. The beard was somehow horrible; it recalled the corrupt vitality of hair, which can grow from a rotting corpse. And Ben’s thin lips were lifted, in a constant grimace of torture and strangulation, about his white somehow dead-looking teeth, as inch by inch he gasped a thread of air into his lungs.