Of Time and the River (61 page)

He lived a reckless and dissipated life and drank heavily: time after time, after a hćmorrhage of the lungs, he had been taken to a sanatorium in an ambulance, and his death had seemed to be a matter of only a few hours. And time after time he had come out again, and immediately started on another wild spree of women and corn whisky with Robert and others of the same breed. He was well-off as to money, and lived expensively, because he was a nephew of George Blake, the great Middle-Western manufacturer of cheap motor cars, which in twenty years’ time had created twenty thousand jokes and glutted the highways of the earth in twenty million tinny and glittering repetitions.

The name of the other youth, who was Eugene’s own age and sat beside him on the back seat, was Kitchin. He was a tall, dark, handsome fellow, with agreeable manners and a pleasant voice, the nephew of a retired physician in the town but not native to the place. Eugene had seen him on the streets, but had never talked to him before. It was evident that both Robert and his two friends had been drinking, although not heavily: there was in their manner the subdued yet wild and mounting elation of young men when they begin to drink. They laughed a great deal, rather hilariously, and for no good reason: they insisted frequently that they were going to the town of Blackstone to see a football game, an announcement which would set them off again in roars of laughter.

Almost as soon as Eugene got into the car, and even as they started off again, Blake thrust his thin hand into the leather pocket of the door beside him, produced a bottle that was three-quarters full of Scotch whisky, and turning, gave it to Eugene, saying:

“Take a big one, Gant. We’re all ahead of you.”

He drank long and deep, gulping the fiery liquor down his throat recklessly, feeling suddenly an almost desperate sense of release from the grey misery of hopelessness which had crushed him down for days now, since the letter had come. When he had finished he handed the bottle back to Emmet Blake, who took it, looked at it with a thin, evil, speculative smile, and said:

“Well, that’s pretty good. What do you say, Robert? Shall we let him pass on that?”

“Hell, no!” cried Robert hoarsely, looking swiftly round at the bottle. “That’s no drink! Make him take a good one, Emmet. You’ve got to do better than that if you keep up with us,” he cried, and then he burst out suddenly in his staccato laugh, shaking his head to himself as he bent over the wheel, and crying out: “Lord! Lord!”

Blake handed Eugene the bottle again, and he drank some more. Then Kitchin took the bottle and drank; he handed it back to Emmet Blake, who drank, and Blake handed it to Robert, who took it with one hand, his face turned slightly from the wheel, his eyes still fastened on the road, and drank until the bottle was empty. Then he flung it away from him across his arm. The bottle went sailing out across the road and down the gulch or deep ravine that sloped away beside them far down: the bottle struck a rock, exploding brilliantly in a thousand glittering fragments, and they all roared happily, and cheered.

They had finished up that bottle in one round of gulps and swallows, passing it from hand to hand as they rushed down the mountain-side, and almost instantly they were at work on a beverage of a yet more instant and fiery power—raw, white corn-whisky, in a gallon jug, clear as water, rank and nauseous to an unaccustomed throat, strong and instant as the kick of a mule, fiery, choking, formidable, and savage. They hooked their thumbs into the handle of the jug and brought the stuff across their shoulders with a free-hand motion; they let the wide neck pour into their tilted throats with a fat thick gurgle, and they gulped that raw stuff down with greedy gulpings like water going down a gully drain.

It was a drink that would have felled an ox, a terrific lightning- blast of alcohol that would have thrown Polyphemus to the earth; and yet it was not drink alone that made them drunk that day. For they were all young men, and they had shouted, sung, and roared with laughter, and pounded one another with affectionate delight as they rushed on—and it was not drink alone that made them drunk.

For they felt that everything on earth was good and glorious, that everything on earth was made for their delight, that they could do no wrong and make no error, and that such invincible strength was in them that trees would fall beneath their stroke, the immortal hills bow down before their stride, and that nothing in the world could stop them.

And for Eugene it seemed that everything had come to life for him at once—that he had emerged instantly and victoriously from the horror of shame, the phantasmal and dreamlike unreality that had held him in its spell. It seemed to him that all the earth had come to life again in shapes of deathless and familiar brightness, that he had gloriously re-entered a life he thought he had lost for ever, and that all the plain priceless joy and glory of the earth was his, as it had never been before.

And first of all, and with an almost intolerable relief and happiness, he was conscious of the pangs of hunger: his famished belly and his withered stomach, which had for days shrunk wearily and with disgust from food, now, under the stimulation of a ravenous hunger, fairly pleaded for nourishment. He thought of food—food in a hundred glorious shapes and varieties: the literal sensual images of food blazed in his mind like paintings from the brush of a Dutch master, and it seemed to him that no one had ever painted, spoken, or written about food before in a way that would do it justice.

Later, these were the things Eugene would remember from that day with a living joy, for it was as if he had been born again, or discovered the world anew in all its glory. And besides all this— a part, an element in all this whole harmonious design of triumphant joy and rediscovery—was the way the hills had looked that day as they came down the mountain, the smell of the air which was mellow and autumnal, and yet had in it the premonitory breath of frost and sharpness, and the wild joy, power, and ecstasy that had filled their hearts, their throats, their lives—the sense of victory, triumph, and invincible strength, and of some rare, glorious, and intolerable happiness that was pending for them, and which seemed to swell the tremendous and exulting music of that magic day.

Around them, above them, below them—for the living and shining air of autumn, from the embrowned autumnal earth, from the great shapes of the hills behind them with their molten mass of colour—dull browns, rich bitter reds, dark bronze, and mellow yellow—from the raw crude clay of the piedmont earth and the great brown stubble of the cotton-fields—from a thousand impalpable and unutterable things, there came this glorious breath of triumph and delight. It was late October, there was a smell of smoke upon the air, an odour of burning leaves, the barking of a dog, a misty red, a pollenated gold in the rich, fading, sorrowful, and exultant light of the day,—and far off, a sound of great wheels pounding on a rail, the wailing whistle, and the tolling bell of a departing train.

And finally, the immortal visage of the earth itself, with the soaring and limitless undulations of its blue ranges, the great bulk of the autumn hills, immense and near, the rugged, homely, and familiar trees—the pines, oaks, chestnuts, maples, locusts—the homely look of the old red clay—the unforgettable and indescribable naturalness of that earth—with its rudeness, wildness, richness, rawness, ugliness, fathomless mystery and utter familiarity, and finally the lonely, haunting, and enchanted music that it made—the strange spirit of time and solitude that hovered above it eternally, and which can never be described, but which may be evoked by a cow- bell broken by the wind in distant valleys, the lonely whistle of a departing train, or simply a sinuous gust of wind that smokes its way across coarse mountain grasses when spring comes—all this, which Eugene had felt and known in his childhood, and yet had never had a tongue to utter, he seemed now to know and understand so well that he had himself become its tongue and utterance, the more its child because he had been so long away from it, the more its eye because he now saw it again as it must have seemed to the first men who ever saw it, with the eyes of discovery, love, and recognition.

And yet, for him all these things spoke instantly, intolerably, exultantly, not of home, return, and settlement, but of one image, which now burned for ever in his brain, rose like a triumphant music in his heart. And that image was the image of the enchanted city, in which, it now seemed, all the frenzy and unrest of his spirit would find a certain goal and triumph, and toward which everything on earth, and all the hope and joy now rising in his heart, was tending.

When they got down off the mountain into South Carolina they were very drunk. On a dusty sand-clay road between some cotton-fields they stopped the car, and walked out into the fields to make water. The cotton stood stiff and dry and fleecy in its pods, the coarse brown stalks rose up in limitless planted rows, and underneath, he could see the old and homely visage of the red-clay earth.

At one edge of the field, and seeming very far away and lonely- looking, there was a negro shanty, and behind this a desolate wooded stretch of pine. Over all the earth at once, now that the roar of the engine had stopped, there was an immense and brooding quietness, a drowsed autumnal fume and warmth, immensely desolate and mournful, holding somehow a tragic prophecy of winter that must come, and death, and yet touched with the lonely, mournful and exultant mystery of the earth.

Eugene pulled several of the big cotton-stalks out of the dry red earth, thrust one through the button-hole of his coat lapel, and tore it through exultantly, although the stalk was two feet long. Then he reeled back toward the car again, holding the other stalks of cotton in his hands, got into the car, and at once began to talk to his companions about the cotton—ending up in a passionate oration about the hills, the fields, the cotton and the earth— trying to tell them all about “the South” and making of the stalks of cotton and “the South” a kind of symbol, as young men will, although they all felt and acted just as young men anywhere would do.

But at that moment, all Eugene was trying to say about his years away from home, and his return, and how he had discovered his own land again and was, “by God!” one of them—waving the stalks of cotton as he talked, and finding the whole core and kernel of all he wished to say in these stalks of cotton—all of this, although incoherent, drunken, and confused, seemed so eloquent and beautiful to him, so truthful, passionate, and exact—that he began to weep for joy as he talked to them. And they—they were, of course, delighted: they howled with laughter, cheered enthusiastically, slapped him on the back, and shook hands all round, crying—“By God! Listen to him talk! . . . Give ‘em hell, son! We’re with you! . . . Hot-damn! Thataway, boy! . . . Stay with ‘em! . . . Whee!”

Meanwhile, Robert was driving at terrific speed. They had begun to rip and tear along between the cotton-fields and over the dusty sand-clay roads, mistaking the screams of women and the shouts of men, as they swerved by their cars and wagons in a cloud of yellow dust and at a murderous clip, for admiring applause and enthusiastic cheers, an illusion which only spurred them on to greater efforts.

The upshot of it was that they finally tore into town, careening hideously along a central street and with no slackening of their speed whatever. The excited people in that part of the State had been phoning in about them for the last fifteen miles of their mad journey, and now they were halted suddenly at sight of the police, who stood lined up across the street in a double row—big, red- faced, country cops—to stop them.

The first brilliant, sparkling and wildly soaring effects of their intoxication had now worn off and, although they still felt full of power and a savage rending strength, the corn whisky was now smouldering in their veins more dully and with a sombre and brutal drunkenness. Eugene seemed to see all shapes and figures clearly— the coarse red faces of the country cops and their clumsy lumbering bodies, and the street drowsy and dusty in the warmish autumn afternoon.

The grasses on the lawns of houses were faded, sere and withered- looking, the leaves upon the trees had thinned and hung yellowed, dry and dead, and in the gutters a few dead leaves stirred dryly, a few scampered dryly in the streets before a moment’s gust of wind, and then lay still again.

Robert slowed down and stopped before that solid wall of beefy country blue and red: the police surrounded them and clambered heavily over the sides of the car, two standing on the running- boards, two on either side of Eugene on the back seat, and one with Robert and Emmet Blake up front.

“All right, boys,” said one of them, good-naturedly and casually enough, in the full, sonorous and somewhat howling voice of the countryman, “drive on down thar to the station-house now.”

“Yes, SIR! Yes, SIR!” Robert replied at once in a meek and obedient tone, and with a comical drunken alacrity. “How do you get there, Captain?” he said with a cunning and flattering ingratiation.

“Right down this here street to your right,” said the policeman in his drawling and countrified tone, “until you come to that ‘air second turning where you see that ‘air f’ar hydrant. Turn in to the left thar,” he said.

“Yes, sir!” said Robert heartily, starting the car again. “We’re all strangers here,” he lied, as if he hoped this lie might make amends for them. “We don’t know our way about yet.”

“Well,” the policeman drawled with a kind of ugly heartiness, “maybe the next time you come back you’ll be better acquainted here,” he said, winking at his comrades, and they all guffawed. “We’re glad to see you, boys,” he continued, still with this ugly falseness of good nature in his tone. “We been hearin’ about you,” he said, winking at his fellows again, “an’ we wanted to git acquainted.”

Here the policemen laughed again with sonorous countrified appreciation of their spokesman’s wit.

The policemen were all big beefy men, with hearty drawling voices, red countrified faces. They had large square feet, wore dusty- looking black slouch hats with a wide brim, and were dressed in rather gaudy but slovenly-looking uniforms, with stripes of gold braid running up the sides of their baggy trousers, and with the lower brass buttons of their heavy blue coats unbuttoned, exposing areas of soiled shirts and paunchy bellies. Their faces had a look of a slow but powerful energy, a fathomless and mindless animal good nature, and at the same time a fathomless and mindless animal cruelty—instant, volcanic, and murderous—written terribly, somehow, into their wide, thin and horribly cruel mouths, in which there was legible a vitality that had all the wild and sensual force of nature packed into it, and was therefore beyond nature— almost supernatural—in its savage and mindless qualities.