Look Homeward, Angel - Thomas Wolfe (7 page)

All through the afternoon upon the veranda Gant told
the story, summoning the neighbors and calling upon Eugene to
perform.  Eugene heard clearly all that was said that day: he
was not able to answer, but he saw now that speech was imminent.

Thus, later, he saw the first two years of his life
in brilliant and isolated flashes.  His second Christmas he
remembered vaguely as a period of great festivity: it accustomed him
to the third when it came.  With the miraculous habitude
children acquire, it seemed that he had known Christmas forever.

He was conscious of sunlight, rain, the leaping fire,
his crib, the grim jail of winter: the second Spring, one warm day,
he saw Daisy go off to school up the hill: it was the end of the noon
recess, she had been home for lunch.  She went to Miss Ford's
School For Girls; it was a red brick residence on the corner at the
top of the steep hill: he watched her join Eleanor Duncan just
below.  Her hair was braided in two long hanks down her back:
she was demure, shy, maidenly, a timid and blushing girl; but he
feared her attentions to him, for she bathed him furiously, wreaking
whatever was explosive and violent beneath her placidity upon his
hide.  She really scrubbed him almost raw.  He howled
piteously.  As she climbed the hill, he remembered her.  He
saw she was the same person.

He passed his second birthday with the light
growing.  Early in the following Spring he became conscious of a
period of neglect: the house was deadly quiet; Gant's voice no longer
roared around him, the boys came and went on stealthy feet. 
Luke, the fourth to be attacked by the pestilence, was desperately
ill with typhoid: Eugene was intrusted almost completely to a young
slovenly negress. He remembered vividly her tall slattern figure, her
slapping lazy feet, her dirty white stockings, and her strong smell,
black and funky.  One day she took him out on the side porch to
play: it was a young Spring morning, bursting moistly from the thaw
of the earth.  The negress sat upon the side-steps and yawned
while he grubbed in his dirty little dress along the path, and upon
the lily bed.  Presently, she went to sleep against the post. 
Craftily, he wormed his body through the wide wires of the fence,
into the cindered alley that wound back to the Swains', and up to the
ornate wooden palace of the Hilliards.

They were among the highest aristocracy of the town:
they had come from South Carolina, "near Charleston," which
in itself gave them at that time a commanding prestige.  The
house, a huge gabled structure of walnut-brown, which gave the effect
of many angles and no plan, was built upon the top of the hill which
sloped down to Gant's; the level ground on top before the house was
tenanted by lordly towering oaks.  Below, along the cindered
alley, flanking Gant's orchard, there were high singing pines. 
Mr. Hilliard's house was considered one of the finest residences in
the town.  The neighborhood was middle-class, but the situation
was magnificent, and the Hilliards carried on in the grand manner,
lords of the castle who descended into the village, but did not mix
with its people.  All of their friends arrived by carriage from
afar; every day punctually at two o'clock, an old liveried negro
drove briskly up the winding alley behind two sleek brown mares,
waiting under the carriage entrance at the side until his master and
mistress should come out.  Five minutes later they drove out,
and were gone for two hours.

This ritual, followed closely from his father's
sitting-room window, fascinated Eugene for years after: the people
and the life next door were crudely and symbolically above him.

He felt a great satisfaction that morning in being at
length in Hilliard's alley: it was his first escape, and it had been
made into a forbidden and enhaloed region.  He grubbed about in
the middle of the road, disappointed in the quality of the cinders.
The booming courthouse bell struck eleven times.

Now, exactly at three minutes after eleven every
morning, so unfailing and perfect was the order of this great
establishment, a huge gray horse trotted slowly up the hill, drawing
behind him a heavy grocery wagon, musty, spicy, odorous with the fine
smells of grocery-stores and occupied exclusively by the Hilliard
victuals, and the driver, a young negro man who, at three minutes
past eleven every morning, according to ritual, was comfortably
asleep. Nothing could possibly go wrong: the horse could not have
been tempted even by a pavement of oats to betray his sacred mission.
Accordingly he trotted heavily up the hill, turned ponderously into
the alley ruts, and advanced heavily until, feeling the great circle
of his right forefoot obstructed by some foreign particle, he looked
down and slowly removed his hoof from what had recently been the face
of a little boy.

Then, with his legs carefully straddled, he moved on,
drawing the wagon beyond Eugene's body, and stopping.  Both
negroes awoke simultaneously; there were cries within the house, and
Eliza and Gant rushed out of doors.  The frightened negro lifted
Eugene, who was quite unconscious of his sudden return to the stage,
into the burly arms of Doctor McGuire, who cursed the driver
eloquently. His thick sensitive fingers moved swiftly around the
bloody little face and found no fracture.

He nodded briefly at their desperate faces: 
"He's being saved for Congress," said he.  "You
have bad luck and hard heads, W. O."

"You Goddamned black scoundrel," yelled the
master, turning with violent relief upon the driver.  "I'll
put you behind the bars for this."  He thrust his great
length of hands through the fence and choked the negro, who mumbled
prayers, and had no idea what was happening to him, save that he was
the centre of a wild commotion.

The negro girl, blubbering, had fled inward.

"This looks worse than it is," observed Dr.
McGuire, laying the hero upon the lounge.  "Some hot water,
please."  Nevertheless, it took two hours to bring him
round.  Every one spoke highly of the horse.

"He had more sense than the nigger," said
Gant, wetting his thumb.

But all this, as Eliza knew in her heart, was part of
the plan of the Dark Sisters.  The entrails had been woven and
read long since: the frail shell of skull which guarded life, and
which might have been crushed as easily as a man breaks an egg, was
kept intact. But Eugene carried the mark of the centaur for many
years, though the light had to fall properly to reveal it.

When he was older, he wondered sometimes if the
Hilliards had issued from their high place when he had so impiously
disturbed the order of the manor.  He never asked, but he
thought not: he imagined them, at the most, as standing superbly by a
drawn curtain, not quite certain what had happened, but feeling that
it was something unpleasant, with blood in it.

Shortly after this, Mr. Hilliard had a
"No-Trespassing" sign staked up in the lot.
 
 

5
 

Luke got well after cursing doctor, nurse, and family
for several weeks: it was stubborn typhoid.

Gant was now head of a numerous family, which rose
ladderwise from infancy to the adolescent Steve--who was
eighteen--and the maidenly Daisy.  She was seventeen and in her
last year at high school.  She was a timid, sensitive girl,
looking like her name?Daisy-ish industrious and thorough in her
studies: her teachers thought her one of the best students they had
ever known.  She had very little fire, or denial in her; she
responded dutifully to instructions; she gave back what had been
given to her.  She played the piano without any passionate
feeling for the music; but she rendered it honestly with a beautiful
rippling touch.  And she practised hours at a time.

It was apparent, however, that Steve was lacking in
scholarship. When he was fourteen, he was summoned by the school
principal to his little office, to take a thrashing for truancy and
insubordination.  But the spirit of acquiescence was not in him:
he snatched the rod from the man's hand, broke it, smote him solidly
in the eye, and dropped gleefully eighteen feet to the ground.

This was one of the best things he ever did: his
conduct in other directions was less fortunate.  Very early, as
his truancy mounted,and after he had been expelled, and as his life
hardened rapidly in a defiant viciousness, the antagonism between the
boy and Gant grew open and bitter.  Gant recognized perhaps most
of his son's vices as his own: there was little, however, of his
redeeming quality. Steve had a piece of tough suet where his heart
should have been.

Of them all, he had had very much the worst of it. 
Since his childhood he had been the witness of his father's wildest
debauches.  He had not forgotten.  Also, as the oldest, he
was left to shift for himself while Eliza's attention focussed on her
younger children.  She was feeding Eugene at her breast long
after Steve had taken his first two dollars to the ladies of Eagle
Crescent.

He was inwardly sore at the abuse Gant heaped on him;
he was not insensitive to his faults, but to be called a
"good-for-nothing bum," "a worthless degenerate,"
"a pool-room loafer," hardened his outward manner of
swagger defiance.  Cheaply and flashily dressed, with peg-top
yellow shoes, flaring striped trousers, and a broad-brimmed straw hat
with a colored band, he would walk down the avenue with a
preposterous lurch, and a smile of strained assurance on his face,
saluting with servile cordiality all who would notice him.  And
if a man of property greeted him, his lacerated but overgrown vanity
would seize the crumb, and he would boast pitifully at home: 
"They all know Little Stevie!  He's got the respect of all
the big men in this town, all right, all right!Every one has a good
word for Little Stevie except his own people. Do you know what J. T.
Collins said to me to-day?"

"What say?  Who's that?  Who's that?"
asked Eliza with comic rapidity, looking up from her darning.

"J. T. Collins--that's who!  He's only
worth about two hundred thousand.  'Steve,' he said, just like
that, 'if I had your brains'"--He would continue in this way
with moody self-satisfaction, painting a picture of future success
when all who scorned him now would flock to his standard.

"Oh, yes," said he, "they'll all be
mighty anxious then to shake Little Stevie's hand."

Gant, in a fury, gave him a hard beating when he had
been expelled from school.  He had never forgotten. 
Finally, he was told to go to work and support himself: he found
desultory employment as a soda-jerker, or as delivery boy for a
morning paper.  Once, with a crony, Gus Moody, son of a
foundry-man, he had gone off to see the world.  Grimy from
vagabondage they had crawled off a freight-train at Knoxville,
Tennessee, spent their little money on food, and in a brothel, and
returned, two days later, coal-black but boastful of their exploit.

"I'll vow," Eliza fretted, "I don't
know what's to become of that boy."  It was the tragic flaw
of her temperament to get to the vital point too late: she pursed her
lips thoughtfully, wandered off in another direction, and wept when
misfortune came.  She always waited.  Moreover, in her
deepest heart, she had an affection for her oldest son, which, if it
was not greater, was at least different in kind from what she bore
for the others.  His glib boastfulness, his pitiable brag,
pleased her: they were to her indications of his "smartness,"
and she often infuriated her two studious girls by praising them. 
Thus, looking at a specimen of his handwriting, she would say:

"There's one thing sure: he writes a better hand
than any of the rest of you, for all your schooling."

Steve had early tasted the joys of the bottle,
stealing, during the days when he was a young attendant of his
father's debauch, a furtive swallow from the strong rank whisky in a
half-filled flask: the taste nauseated him, but the experience made
good boasting for his fellows.

At fifteen, he had found, while smoking cigarettes
with Gus Moody, in a neighbor's barn, a bottle wrapped in an oats
sack by the worthy citizen, against the too sharp examination of his
wife. When the man had come for secret potation some time later, and
found his bottle half-empty, he had grimly dosed the remainder with
Croton oil: the two boys were nauseously sick for several days.

One day, Steve forged a check on his father.  It
was some days before Gant discovered it: the amount was only three
dollars, but his anger was bitter.  In a pronouncement at home,
delivered loudly enough to publish the boy's offense to the
neighborhood, he spoke of the penitentiary, of letting him go to
jail, of being disgraced in his old age--a period of his life at
which he had not yet arrived, but which he used to his advantage in
times of strife.

He paid the check, of course, but another name--that
of "forger"--was added to the vocabulary of his abuse. 
Steve sneaked in and out of the house, eating his meals alone for
several days.  When he met his father little was said by either:
behind the hard angry glaze of their eyes, they both looked
depthlessly into each other; they knew that they could withhold
nothing from each other, that the same sores festered in each, the
same hungers and desires, the same crawling appetites polluted their
blood.  And knowing this, something in each of them turned away
in grievous shame.

Gant added this to his tirades against Eliza; all
that was bad in the boy his mother had given him.