OF TIME AND THE RIVER

by Thomas Wolfe

  Oh, return, return!

  "October is the richest of the seasons: the fields are cut, the granaries are full, the bins are loaded to the brim with fatness, and from the cider-press the rich brown oozings of the York Imperials run. The bee bores to the belly of the yellowed grape, the fly gets old and fat and blue, he buzzes loud, crawls slow, creeps heavily to death on sill and ceiling, the sun goes down in blood and pollen across the bronzed and mown fields of old October.

  "The corn is shocked: it sticks out in hard yellow rows upon dried ears, fit now for great red barns in Pennsylvania and the big stained teeth of crunching horses. The indolent hooves kick swiftly at the boards, the barn is sweet with hay and leather, wood and apples--this, and the clean dry crunching of the teeth is all: the sweat, the labour, and the plough are over. The late pears mellow on a sunny shelf; smoked hams hang to the warped barn rafters; the pantry shelves are loaded with 300 jars of fruit. Meanwhile the leaves are turning, turning, up in Maine, the chestnut burrs plop thickly to the earth in gusts of wind and in Virginia the chinkapins are falling.

  "There is a smell of burning in small towns in afternoon, and men with buckles on their arms are raking leaves in yards as boys come by with straps slung back across their shoulders. The oak leaves, big and brown, are bedded deep in yard and gutter: they make deep wadings to the knee for children in the streets. The fire will snap and crackle like a whip, sharp acrid smoke will sting the eyes, in mown fields the little vipers of the flame eat past the black coarse edges of burned stubble like a line of locusts. Fire drives a thorn of memory in the heart.

  "The bladed grass, a forest of small spears of ice, is thawed by noon: summer is over but the sun is warm again, and there are days throughout the land of gold and russet. But summer is dead and gone, the earth is waiting, suspense and ecstasy are gnawing at the hearts of men, the brooding prescience of frost is there. The sun flames red and bloody as it sets, there are old red glintings on the battered pails, the great barn gets the ancient light as the boy slops homeward with warm foaming milk. Great shadows lengthen in the fields, the old red light dies swiftly, and the sunset barking of the hounds is faint and far and full of frost: there are shrewd whistles to the dogs, and frost and silence--this is all. Wind stirs and scuffs and rattles up the old brown leaves, and through the night the great oak leaves keep falling.

  "Trains cross the continent in a swirl of dust and thunder, the leaves fly down the tracks behind them: the great trains cleave through gulch and gulley, they rumble with spoked thunder on the bridges over the powerful brown wash of mighty rivers, they toil through hills, they skirt the rough brown stubble of shorn fields, they whip past empty stations in the little towns and their great stride pounds its even pulse across America. Field and hill and lift and gulch and hollow, mountain and plain and river, a wilderness with fallen trees across it, a thicket of bedded brown and twisted undergrowth, a plain, a desert, and a plantation, a mighty landscape with no fenced niceness, an immensity of fold and convolution that can never be remembered, that can never be forgotten, that has never been described--weary with harvest, potent with every fruit and ore, the immeasurable richness embrowned with autumn, rank, crude, unharnessed, careless of scars or beauty, everlasting and magnificent, a cry, a space, an ecstasy!--American earth in old October.

  "And the great winds howl and swoop across the land: they make a distant roaring in great trees, and boys in bed will stir in ecstasy, thinking of demons and vast swoopings through the earth. All through the night there is the clean, the bitter rain of acorns, and the chestnut burrs are plopping to the ground.

  "And often in the night there is only the living silence, the distant frosty barking of a dog, the small clumsy stir and feathery stumble of the chickens on limed roosts, and the moon, the low and heavy moon of autumn, now barred behind the leafless poles of pines, now at the pine-woods' brooding edge and summit, now falling with ghost's dawn of milky light upon rimed clods of fields and on the frosty scurf on pumpkins, now whiter, smaller, brighter, hanging against the steeple's slope, hanging the same way in a million streets, steeping all the earth in frost and silence.

  "Then a chime of frost-cold bells may peal out on the brooding air, and people lying in their beds will listen. They will not speak or stir, silence will gnaw the darkness like a rat, but they will whisper in their hearts:

  "'Summer has come and gone, has come and gone. And now--?' But they will say no more, they will have no more to say: they will wait listening, silent and brooding as the frost, to time, strange ticking time, dark time that haunts us with the briefness of our days. They will think of men long dead, of men now buried in the earth, of frost and silence long ago, of a forgotten face and moment of lost time, and they will think of things they have no words to utter.

  "And in the night, in the dark, in the living sleeping silence of the towns, the million streets, they will hear the thunder of the fast express, the whistles of great ships upon the river.

  "What will they say then? What will they say?"

  Only the darkness moved about him as he lay there thinking, feeling in the darkness: a door creaked softly in the house.

  "October is the season for returning: the bowels of youth are yearning with lost love. Their mouths are dry and bitter with desire: their hearts are torn with the thorns of spring. For lovely April, cruel and flowerful, will tear them with sharp joy and wordless lust. Spring has no language but a cry; but crueller than April is the asp of time.

  "October is the season for returning: even the town is born anew," he thought. "The tide of life is at the full again, the rich return to business or to fashion, and the bodies of the poor are rescued out of heat and weariness. The ruin and horror of the summer are forgotten--a memory of hot cells and humid walls, a hell of ugly sweat and labour and distress and hopelessness, a limbo of pale greasy faces. Now joy and hope have revived again in the hearts of millions of people, they breathe the air again with hunger, their movements are full of life and energy. The mark of their summer's suffering is still legible upon their flesh, there is something starved and patient in their eyes, and a look that has a child's hope and expectation in it.

  "All things on earth point home in old October: sailors to sea, travellers to walls and fences, hunters to field and hollow and the long voice of the hounds, the lover to the love he has forsaken--all things that live upon this earth return, return: Father, will you not, too, come back again?

  "Where are you now, when all things on the earth come back again? For have not all these things been here before, have we not seen them, heard them, known then, and will they not live again for us as they did once, if only you come back again?

  "Father, in the night-time, in the dark, I have heard the thunder of the fast express. In the night, in the dark, I have heard the howling of the winds among great trees, and the sharp and windy raining of the acorns. In the night, in the dark, I have heard the feet of rain upon the roofs, the glut and gurgle of the gutter spouts, and the soaking gulping throat of all the mighty earth, drinking its thirst out in the month of May--and heard the sorrowful silence of the river in October. The hill-streams foam and welter in a steady plunge, the mined clay drops and melts and eddies in the night, the snake coils cool and glistening under dripping ferns, the water roars down past the mill in one sheer sheet-like plunge, making a steady noise like wind, and in the night, in the dark, the river flows by us to the sea.

  "The great maw slowly drinks the land as we lie sleeping: the mined banks cave and crumble in the dark, the earth melts and drops into its tide, great horns are baying in the gulph of night, great boats are baying at the river's mouth. Thus, darkened by our dumpings, thickened by our stains, rich, rank, beautiful, and unending as all life, all living, the river, the dark immortal river, full of strange tragic time is flowing by us--by us--by us--to the sea.

  "All this has been upon the earth and will abide for ever. But you are gone; our lives are ruined and broken in the night, our lives are mined below us by th
e river, our lives are whirled away into the sea and darkness and we are lost unless you come to give us life again.

  "Come to us, Father, in the watches of the night, come to us as you always came, bringing to us the invincible sustenance of your strength, the limitless treasure of your bounty, the tremendous structure of your life that will shape all lost and broken things on earth again into a golden pattern of exultancy and joy. Come to us, Father, while the winds howl in the darkness, for October has come again, bringing with it huge prophecies of death and life and the great cargo of the men who will return. For we are ruined, lost, and broken if you do not come, and our lives, like rotten chips, are whirled about us onward in darkness to the sea."

  So, thinking, feeling, speaking, he lay there in his mother's house, but there was nothing in the house but silence and the moving darkness: storm shook the house and huge winds rushed upon them, and he knew then that his father would not come again and that all the life that he had known was now lost and broken as a dream.

  XL

  During the whole course of that last October--the last October he would spend at home--he was waiting day by day with a desperation of wild hope for a magic letter--one of those magic letters for which young men wait, which are to bring them instantly the fortune, fame, and triumph for which their souls thirst and their hearts are panting, and which never come.

  Each morning he would get up with a pounding heart, trembling hands, and chattering lips, and then, like a man in prison who is waiting feverishly for some glorious message of release or pardon which he is sure will come that day, he would wait for the coming of the postman. And when he came, even before he reached the house, the moment that Eugene heard his whistle he would rush out into the street, tear the mail out of his astounded grasp, and begin to hunt through it like a madman for the letter which would announce to him that fortune, fame, and glittering success were his. He was twenty-two years old, a madman and a fool, but every young man in the world has been the same.

  Then, when the wonderful letter did not come, his heart would sink down to his bowels like lead; all of the brightness, gold, and singing would go instantly out of the day and he would stamp back into the house, muttering to himself, sick with despair and misery and thinking that now his life was done for, sure enough. He could not eat, sleep, stand still, sit down, rest, talk coherently, or compose himself for five minutes at a time. He would go prowling and muttering around the house, rush out into the streets of the town, walk up and down the main street, pausing to talk with the loafers before the principal drug store, climb the hills and mountains all around the town and look down on the town with a kind of horror and disbelief, an awful dreamlike unreality because the town, since his long absence and return to it, and all the people in it, now seemed as familiar as his mother's face and stranger than a dream, so that he could never regain his life or corporeal substance in it, any more than a man who revisits his youth in a dream, and so that, also, the town seemed to have shrunk together, got little, fragile, toy-like in his absence, until now when he walked in the street he thought he was going to ram his elbows through the walls, as if the walls were paper, or tear down the buildings, as if they had been made of straw.

  Then he would come down off the hills into the town again, go home, and prowl and mutter around the house, which now had the same real-unreal familiar-strangeness that the town had, and his life seemed to have been passed there like a dream. Then, with a mounting hope and a pounding heart, he would begin to wait for the next mail again; and when it came, but without the letter, this furious prowling and lashing about would start all over again. His family saw the light of madness in his eyes and in his disconnected movements, and heard it in his incoherent speech. He could hear them whispering together, and sometimes when he looked up he could see them looking at him with troubled and bewildered faces. And yet he did not think that he was mad, nor know how he appeared to them.

  Yet, during all this time of madness and despair his people were as kind and tolerant as anyone on earth could be.

  His mother, during all this time, treated him with kindness and tolerance, and according to the law of her powerful, hopeful, brooding, octopal, and web-like character, with all its meditative procrastination, never coming to a decisive point, but weaving, re-weaving, pursing her lips, and meditating constantly and with a kind of hope, even though in her deepest heart she really had no serious belief that he could succeed in doing the thing he wanted to do.

  Thus, as he talked to her sometimes, going on from hope to hope, his enthusiasm mounting with the intoxication of his own vision, he would paint a glittering picture of the fame and wealth he was sure to win in the world as soon as his play was produced. And his mother would listen thoughtfully, pursing her lips from time to time, in a meditative fashion, as she sat before the fire with her hands folded in a strong loose clasp above her stomach. Then, finally, she would turn to him and with a proud, tremulous, and yet bantering smile playing about her mouth, such as she had always used when he was a child, and had perhaps spoken of some project with an extravagant enthusiasm, she would say:

  "Hm, boy! I tell you what!" his mother said, in this bantering tone, as if he were still a child. "That's mighty big talk--as the sayin' goes,"--here she put one finger under her broad red nose-wing and laughed shyly, but with pleasure--"as the sayin' goes, mighty big talk for poor folks!" said his mother. "Well, now," she said in a thoughtful and hopeful tone, after a moment's pause, "you may do it, sure enough. Stranger things than that have happened. Other people have been able to make a success of their writings--and there's one thing sure!" His mother cried out strongly with the loose, powerful and manlike gesture of her hand and index finger which was characteristic of all her family--"there's one thing sure!--what one man has done another can do if he's got grit and determination enough!" His mother said, putting the full strength of her formidable will into these words--"Why, yes, now!" she now said, with a recollective start, "Here, now! Say!" she cried--"wasn't I reading?--didn't I see? Why, pshaw!--yes! just the other day--that all these big writers--yes, sir! Irvin S. Cobb--there was the very feller!" cried his mother in a triumphant tone--"Why, you know," she continued, pursing her lips in a meditative way, "--that he had the very same trials and tribulations--as the sayin' goes--as everyone else! Why, yes!--here he told it on himself--admitted it, you know--that he kept writin' these stories for years, sendin' them out, I reckon, to all the editors and magazines--and having them all sent back to him. That's the way it was," she said, "and now--look at him! Why, I reckon they'd pay him hundreds of dollars for a single piece--yes! and be glad of the chance to get it," said his mother.

  Then for a space his mother sat looking at the fire, while she slowly and reflectively pursed her lips.

  "Well," she said slowly at length, "you may do it. I hope you do. Stranger things than that have happened.--Now, there's one thing sure," she said strongly, "you have certainly had a good education--there's been more money spent upon your schoolin' than on all the rest of us put together--and you certainly ought to know enough to write a story or a play!--Why, yes, boy! I tell you what," his mother now cried in the old playful and bantering tone, as if she were speaking to a child, "if I had your education I believe I'd try to be a writer, too! Why, yes! I wouldn't mind getting out of all this drudgery and house-work for a while--and if I could earn my living doin' some light easy work like that, why, you can bet your bottom dollar, I'd do it!" cried his mother. "But, say, now! See here!" his mother cried with a kind of jocose seriousness--"maybe that'd be a good idea, after all! Suppose you write the stories," she said, winking at him,--"and I tell, you what I'll do!--Why, I'll tell 'em to you! Now, if I had your education and your command of language," said his mother, whose command of language was all that anyone could wish--"I believe I could tell a pretty good story--so if you'll write 'em out," she said, with another wink, "I'll tell you what to write--and I'll bet you--I'll bet you," said his mother, "that we could write a story that w
ould beat most of these stories that I read, all to pieces! Yes, sir!" she said, pursing her lips firmly, and with an invincible conviction--"and I bet you people would buy that story and come to see that play!" she said. "Because I know what to tell 'em and the kind of thing people are interested in hearing," she said.

  Then for a moment more she was silent and stared thoughtfully into the fire.

  "Well," she said slowly, "you may do it. You may do it, sure enough! Now, boy," she said, levelling that powerful index finger toward him, "I want to tell you! Your grandfather, Tom Pentland, was a remarkable man--and if he'd had your education he'd a-gone far! And everyone who ever knew him said the same! . . . Oh! stories, poems, pieces in the paper--why, didn't they print something of his every week or two!" she cried. "And that's exactly where you get it," said his mother. "--But, say, now," she said in a persuasive tone, after a moment's meditation, "I've been thinkin'--it just occurred to me--wouldn't it be a good idea if you could find some work to do--I mean, get you a job somewheres of some light easy work that would give you plenty of time to do your writin' as you went on! Now, Rome wasn't built in a day, you know!" his mother said in the bantering tone, "--and you might have to send that play around to several places before you found the one who could do it right for you! So while you're waitin'," said his mother persuasively, "why, wouldn't it be a good idea if you got a little light newspaper work, or a job teachin' somewheres--pshaw! you could do it easy as falling off a log," his mother said contemptuously. "I taught school myself before I got married to your papa, and I didn't have a bit of trouble! And all the schoolin' I ever had--all the schoolin' that I ever had," she cried impressively, "was six months one time in a little backwoods school! Now if I could do it, there's one thing sure, with all your education you ought to be able to do it, too! Yes, sir, that's the very thing!" she said. "I'd do it like a shot if I were you."