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

Mrs. Pert chuckled softly when she spoke to him, and called him “Old Ben.” In the darkness he sat, talking a little, humming a little, laughing occasionally in his thin minor key, quietly, with a cigarette between his forked ivory fingers, drawing deeply. He would buy a flask of whisky and they would drink it very quietly. Perhaps they talked a little more. But they were never riotous. Occasionally, they would rise at midnight from the swing, and go out into the street, departing under leafy trees. They would not return during the night. Eliza, ironing out a great pile of rumpled laundry in the kitchen, would listen. Presently, she would mount the stairs, peer carefully into Mrs. Pert’s room, and descend, her lips thoughtfully kneaded.

She had to speak these things to Helen. There was a strange defiant communion between them. They laughed or were bitter together.

“Why, of course,” said Helen, impatiently, “I’ve known it all along.” But she looked beyond the door curiously, her big gold-laced teeth half-shown in her open mouth, the child look of belief, wonder, skepticism, and hurt innocency in her big highboned face.

“Do you suppose he really does? Oh surely not mama. She’s old enough to be his mother.”

Across Eliza’s white puckered face, thoughtful and reproving, a sly smile broke. She rubbed her finger under the broad wings of her nose to conceal it, and snickered.

“I tell you what!” she said. “He’s a chip off the old block. His father over again,” she whispered. “It’s in the blood.”

Helen laughed huskily, picking vaguely at her chin, and gazing out across the weedy garden.

“Poor old Ben!” she said, and her eyes, she did not know why, were sheeted with tears. “Well, ‘Fatty’s’ a lady. I like her — I don’t care who knows it,” she added defiantly. “It’s their business anyway. They’re quiet about it. You’ve got to say that much for them.”

She was silent a moment.

“Women are crazy about him,” she said. “They like the quiet ones, don’t they? He’s a gentleman.”

Eliza shook her head portentously for several moments.

“What do you think!” she whispered, and shook her pursed lips again. “Always ten years older at least.”

“Poor old Ben!” Helen said again.

“The quiet one, the sad one. I tell you what!” Eliza shook her head, unable to speak. Her eyes too were wet.

They thought of sons and lovers: they drew closer in their communion, they drank the cup of their twin slavery as they thought of the Gant men who would always know hunger, the strangers on the land, the unknown farers who had lost their way. O lost!

The hands of women were hungry for his crisp hair. When they came to the paper office to insert advertisements they asked for him. Frowning gravely, he leaned upon the counter with feet crossed, reading, in a somewhat illiterate monotone, what they had written. His thin hairy wrists slatted leanly against his starched white cuffs, his strong nervous fingers, ivoried by nicotine, smoothed out the crumples. Scowling intently, he bent his fine head, erasing, arranging. Emphatic lady-fingers twitched. “How’s that?” Answers vague-voiced, eyes tangled in crisp hair. “Oh, much better, thank you.”

Wanted: frowning boy-man head for understanding fingers of mature and sympathetic woman. Unhappily married. Address Mrs. B. J. X., Box 74. Eight cents a word for one insertion. “Oh, (tenderly) thank you, Ben.”

“Ben,” said Jack Eaton, the advertising manager, thrusting his plump face into the city editor’s office, “one of your harem’s out there. She wanted to murder me when I tried to take it. See if she’s got a friend.”

“Oh, listen to this, won’t you?” Ben snickered fiercely to the City Editor. “You missed your calling, Eaton. What you want is the endman’s job with Honeyboy Evans.”

Scowling, he cast the cigarette from his ivory hand, and loped out into the office. Eaton remained a moment to laugh with the City Editor. O rare Ben Gant!

Sometimes, returning late at night to Woodson Street, in the crowded summer season, he slept with Eugene in the front room upstairs where they had all been born. Propped high on pillows in the old cream-colored bed, painted gaily at head and foot with round medals of clustering fruit, he read aloud in a quiet puzzled voice, fumbling over pronunciation, the baseball stories of Ring Lardner. “You know me, Al.” Just outside the windows the flat veranda roof was still warm from its daytime exhalations of tar-calked tin. Rich cob-webbed grapes hung in packed clusters among the broad leaves. “I didn’t raise my boy to be a southpaw. I’ve a good mind to give Gleason a sock in the eye.”

Ben read painfully, pausing a moment later to snicker. Thus, like a child, he groped intently at all meanings, with scowling studiousness. Women liked to see him scowl and study so. He was sudden only in anger, and in his quick communications with his angel.

Table of Contents

Toward the beginning of Eugene’s fourteenth year, when he had been a student at Leonard’s for two years, Ben got work for him as a paper carrier. Eliza grumbled at the boy’s laziness. She complained that she could get him to do little or nothing for her. In fact, he was not lazy, but he hated all the dreariness of boarding-house routine. Her demands on him were not heavy, but they were frequent and unexpected. He was depressed at the uselessness of effort in Dixieland, at the total erasure of all daily labor. If she had given him position, the daily responsibility of an ordered task, he could have fulfilled it with zeal. But her own method was much too random: she wanted to keep him on tap for an occasional errand, and he did not have her interest.

Dixieland was the heart of her life. It owned her. It appalled him. When she sent him to the grocer’s for bread, he felt wearily that the bread would be eaten by strangers, that nothing out of the effort of their lives grew younger, better, or more beautiful, that all was erased in a daily wash of sewage. She sent him forth in the rank thicket of her garden to hoe out the swarming weeds that clustered about her vegetables, which flourished, as did all the earth, under her careless touch. He knew, as he chopped down in a weary frenzy, that the weeds would grow again in the hot sun-stench, that her vegetables — weeded or not — would grow fat and be fed to her boarders, and that her life, hers alone, would endure to something. As he looked at her, he felt the weariness and horror of time: all but her must die in a smothering Sargasso. Thus, flailing the clotted earth drunkenly, he would be brought to suddenly by her piercing scream from the high back porch, and realize that he had destroyed totally a row of young bladed corn.

“Why, what on earth, boy!” she fretted angrily, peering down at him through a shelving confusion of wash-tubs, limp drying stockings, empty milk-bottles, murky and unwashed, and rusty lard-buckets. “I’ll vow!” she said, turning to Mr. Baskett, the Hattiesburg cotton merchant, who grinned down malarially through his scraggly mustaches, “what am I going to do with him? He’s chopped down every stock of corn in the row.”

“Yes,” Mr. Baskett said, peering over, “and missed every weed. Boy,” he added judicially, “you need two months on a farm.”

The bread that I fetch will be eaten by strangers. I carry coal and split up wood for fires to warm them. Smoke. Fuimas fumus. All of our life goes up in smoke. There is no structure, no creation in it, not even the smoky structure of dreams. Come lower, angel; whisper in our ears. We are passing away in smoke and there is nothing today but weariness to pay for yesterday’s toil. How may we save ourselves?

He was given the Niggertown route — the hardest and least profitable of all. He was paid two cents a copy for weekly deliveries, given ten per cent of his weekly collections, and ten cents for every new subscription. Thus, he was able to earn four or five dollars a week. His thin undeveloped body drank sleep with insatiable thirst, but it was now necessary for him to get up at half-past three in the morning with darkness and silence making an unreal humming in his drugged ears.