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

As they approached the polls, glancing, like surrounded knights, for an embattled brother, the church women of the town, bent like huntresses above the straining leash, gave the word to the eager children of the Sunday schools. Dressed all in white, and clutching firmly in their small hands the tiny stems of American flags, the pigmies, monstrous as only children can be when they become the witless mouths of slogans and crusades, charged hungrily, uttering their shrill cries, upon their Gulliver.

“There he is, children. Go get him.”

Swirling around the marked man in wild elves’ dance, they sang with piping empty violence:

“We are some fond mother’s treasure,

Men and women of tomorrow,

For a moment’s empty pleasure

Would you give us lifelong sorrow?

Think of sisters, wives, and mothers,

Of helpless babes in some low slum,

Think not of yourself, but others,

Vote against the Demon Rum.”

Eugene shuddered, and looked up at Gant’s white emblem with coy pride. They walked happily by unhappy alcoholics, deltaed in foaming eddies of innocence, and smiling murderously down at some fond mother’s treasure.

If they were mine I’d warm their little tails, they thought — privately.

Outside the corrugated walls of the warehouse, Gant paused for a moment to acknowledge the fervent congratulation of a group of ladies from the First Baptist Church: Mrs. Tarkinton, Mrs. Fagg Sluder, Mrs. C. M. McDonnel, and Mrs. W. H. (Pert) Pentland, who, heavily powdered, trailed her long skirt of gray silk with a musty rustle, and sneered elegantly down over her whaleboned collar. She was very fond of Gant.

“Where’s Will?” he asked.

“Feathering the pockets of the licker interests, when he ought to be down here doing the Lord’s Work,” she replied with Christian bitterness. “Nobody but you knows what I’ve had to put up with, Mr. Gant. You’ve had to put up with the queer Pentland streak, in your own home,” she added with lucid significance.

He shook his head regretfully, and stared sorrowfully at the gutter.

“Ah, Lord, Pett! We’ve been through the mill — both of us.”

A smell of drying roots and sassafras twisted a sharp spiral from the warehouse into the thin slits of his nostrils.

“When the time comes to speak up for the right,” Pett announced to several of the ladies, “you’ll always find Will Gant ready to do his part.”

With far-seeing statesmanship he looked westward toward Pisgah.

“Licker,” he said, “is a curse and a care. It has caused the sufferings of untold millions —”

“Amen, Amen,” Mrs. Tarkinton chanted softly, swaying her wide hips rhythmically.

“— it has brought poverty, disease, and suffering to hundreds of thousands of homes, broken the hearts of wives and mothers, and taken bread from the mouths of little orphaned children.”

“Amen, brother.”

“It has been,” Gant began, but at this moment his uneasy eye lighted upon the broad red face of Tim O’Doyle and the fierce whiskered whiskiness of Major Ambrose Nethersole, two prominent publicans, who were standing near the entrance not six feet away and listening attentively.

“Go on!” Major Nethersole urged, with the deep chest notes of a bullfrog. “Go on, W. O., but for God’s sake, don’t belch!”

“Begod!” said Tim O’Doyle, wiping a tiny rill of tobacco juice from the thick simian corner of his mouth, “I’ve seen him start for the door and step through the windey. When we see him coming we hire two extra bottle openers. He used to give the barman a bonus to get up early.”

“Pay no attention to them, ladies, I beg of you,” said Gant scathingly. “They are the lowest of the low, the whisky-besotted dregs of humanity, who deserve to bear not even the name of men, so far have they retrograded backwards.”

With a flourishing sweep of his slouch hat he departed into the warehouse.

“By God!” said Ambrose Nethersole approvingly. “It takes W. O. to tie a knot in the tail of the English language. It always did.”

But within two months he moaned bitterly his unwetted thirst. For several years he ordered, from time to time, the alloted quota — a gallon of whisky every two weeks — from Baltimore. It was the day of the blind tiger. The town was mined thickly with them. Bad rye and moonshine corn were the prevailing beverages. He grew old, he was sick, he still drank.

A slow trickle of lust crawled painfully down the parched gulley of desire, and ended feebly in dry fumbling lechery. He made pretty young summer widows at Dixieland presents of money, underwear, and silk stockings, which he drew on over their shapely legs in the dusty gloom of his little office. Smiling with imperturbable tenderness, Mrs. Selborne thrust out her heavy legs slowly to swell with warm ripe smack his gift of flowered green-silk garters. Wetting his thumb with sly thin aftersmile, he told.

A grass widow, forty-nine, with piled hair of dyed henna, corseted breasts and hips architecturally protuberant in a sharp diagonal, meaty mottled arms, and a gulched face of leaden flaccidity puttied up brightly with cosmetics, rented the upstairs of Woodson Street while Helen was absent.

“She looks like an adventuress, hey?” said Gant hopefully.

She had a son. He was fourteen, with a round olive face, a soft white body, and thin legs. He bit his nails intently. His hair and eyes were dark, his face full of sad stealth. He was wise and made himself unobtrusively scarce at proper times.

Gant came home earlier. The widow rocked brightly on the porch. He bowed sweepingly, calling her Madam. Coy-kittenish, she talked down at him, slogged against the creaking stair rail. She leered cosily at him. She came and went freely through his sitting-room, where he now slept. One evening, just after he had entered, she came in from the bathroom, scented lightly with the best soap, and beefily moulded into a flame-red kimono.

A handsome woman yet, he thought. Good evening, madam.

He got up from his rocker, put aside the crackling sheets of the evening paper (Republican), and undipped his steel-rimmed glasses from the great blade of his nose.

She came over with sprightly gait to the empty hearth, clasping her wrapper tightly with veinous hands.

Swiftly, with a gay leer, she opened the garment, disclosing her thin legs, silkshod, and her lumpy hips, gaudily clothed in ruffled drawers of blue silk.

“Aren’t they pretty?” she twittered invitingly but obscurely. Then, as he took an eager stride forward, she skipped away like a ponderous maenad soliciting Bacchic pursuit.

“A pair of pippins,” he agreed, inclusively.

After this, she prepared breakfast for him. From Dixieland, Eliza surveyed them with a bitter eye. He had no talent for concealment. His visits morning and evening were briefer, his tongue more benevolent.

“I know what you’re up to down there,” she said. “You needn’t think I don’t.”

He grinned sheepishly and wet his thumb. Her mouth worked silently at attempted speech for a moment. She speared a frying steak and flipped it over on its raw back, smiling vengefully in a mounting column of greasy blue vapor. He poked her clumsily with his stiff fingers; she shrieked a protest mixed of anger and amusement, and moved awkwardly out of his reach with bridling gait.

“Get away! I don’t want you round me! It’s too late for that.” She laughed with nagging mockery.

“Don’t you wish you could, though? I’ll vow!” she continued, kneading her lips for several seconds in an effort to speak. “I’d be ashamed. Every one’s laughing at you behind your back.”

“You lie! By God, you lie!” he thundered magnificently, touched. Hammer-hurling Thor.

But he tired very quickly of his new love. He was weary, and frightened by his depletion. For a time he gave the widow small sums of money, and forgot the rent. He transferred to her his storming abuse, muttered ominously to himself in long aisle-pacings at his shop, when he saw that he had lost the ancient freedom of his house and saddled himself with a tyrannous hag. One evening he returned insanely drunk, routed her out of her chamber and pursued her unfrocked, untoothed, unputtied, with a fluttering length of kimono in her palsied hand, driving her finally into the yard beneath the big cherry tree, which he circled, howling, making frantic lunges for her as she twittered with fear, casting splintered glances all over the listening neighborhood as she put on the crumpled wrapper, hid partially the indecent jigging of her breasts, and implored succor. It did not come.