by Thomas Wolfe
That boy's a hustler.
At the end of Eugene's first year at Leonard's, Eliza told John Dorsey she could no longer afford to pay the tuition. He conferred with Margaret and, returning, agreed to take the boy for half price.
"He can help you drum up new prospects," said Eliza.
"Yes," Leonard agreed, "that's the very thing."
Ben bought a new pair of shoes. They were tan. He paid six dollars for them. He always bought good things. But they burnt the soles of his feet. In a scowling rage he loped to his room and took them off.
"Goddam it!" he yelled, and hurled them at the wall. Eliza came to the door.
"You'll never have a penny, boy, as long as you waste money the way you do. I tell you what, it's pretty bad when you think of it." She shook her head sadly with puckered mouth.
"O for God's sake!" he growled. "Listen to this! By God, you never hear me asking any one for anything, do you?" he burst out in a rage.
She took the shoes and gave them to Eugene.
"It would be a pity to throw away a good pair of shoes," she said. "Try 'em on, boy."
He tried them on. His feet were already bigger than Ben's. He walked about carefully and painfully a few steps.
"How do they feel?" asked Eliza.
"All right, I guess," he said doubtfully. "They're a little tight."
He liked their clean strength, the good smell of leather. They were the best shoes he had ever had.
Ben entered the kitchen.
"You little brute!" he said. "You've a foot like a mule." Scowling, he knelt and touched the straining leather at the toes. Eugene winced.
"Mama, for God's sake," Ben cried out irritably, "don't make the kid wear them if they're too small. I'll buy him a pair myself if you're too stingy to spend the money."
"Why, what's wrong with these?" said Eliza. She pressed them with her fingers. "Why, pshaw!" she said. "There's nothing wrong with them. All shoes are a little tight at first. It won't hurt him a bit."
But he had to give up at the end of six weeks. The hard leather did not stretch, his feet hurt more every day. He limped about more and more painfully until he planted each step woodenly as if he were walking on blocks. His feet were numb and dead, sore on the palms. One day, in a rage, Ben flung him down and took them off. It was several days before he began to walk with ease again. But his toes that had grown through boyhood straight and strong were pressed into a pulp, the bones gnarled, bent and twisted, the nails thick and dead.
"It does seem a pity to throw those good shoes away," sighed Eliza.
But she had strange fits of generosity. He didn't understand.
A girl came down to Altamont from the west. She was from Sevier, a mountain town, she said. She had a big brown body, and black hair and eyes of a Cherokee Indian.
"Mark my words," said Gant. "That girl's got Cherokee blood in her somewhere."
She took a room, and for days rocked back and forth in a chair before the parlor fire. She was shy, frightened, a little sullen--her manners were country and decorous. She never spoke unless she was spoken to.
Sometimes she was sick and stayed in bed. Eliza took her food then, and was extremely kind to her.
Day after day the girl rocked back and forth, all through the stormy autumn. Eugene could hear her large feet as rhythmically they hit the floor, ceaselessly propelling the rocker. Her name was Mrs. Morgan.
One day as he laid large crackling lumps upon the piled glowing mass of coals, Eliza entered the room. Mrs. Morgan rocked away stolidly. Eliza stood by the fire for a moment, pursing her lips reflectively, and folding her hands quietly upon her stomach. She looked out the window at the stormy sky, the swept windy bareness of the street.
"I tell you what," she said, "it looks like a hard winter for the poor folks."
"Yes'm," said Mrs. Morgan sullenly. She kept on rocking.
Eliza was silent a moment longer.
"Where's your husband?" she asked presently.
"In Sevier," Mrs. Morgan said. "He's a railroad man."
"What's that, what's that?" said Eliza quickly, comically. "A railroad man, you say?" she inquired sharply.
"Yes'm."
"Well, it looks mighty funny to me he hasn't been in to see you," said Eliza, with enormous accusing tranquillity. "I'd call it a pretty poor sort of man who'd act like that."
Mrs. Morgan said nothing. Her tar-black eyes glittered in fireflame.
"Have you got any money?" said Eliza.
"No'm," said Mrs. Morgan.
Eliza stood solidly, enjoying the warmth, pursing her lips. "When do you expect to have your baby?" said Eliza suddenly.
Mrs. Morgan said nothing for a moment. She kept on rocking.
"In less'n a month now, I reckon," she answered.
She had been getting bigger week after week.
Eliza bent over and pulled her skirt up, revealing her leg to the knee, cotton-stockinged and lumpily wadded over with her heavy flannels.
"Whew!" she cried out coyly, noticing that Eugene was staring. "Turn your head, boy," she commanded, snickering and rubbing her finger along her nose. The dull green of rolled banknotes shone through her stockings. She pulled the bills out.
"Well, I reckon you'll have to have a little money," said Eliza, peeling off two tens, and giving them to Mrs. Morgan.
"Thank you, ma'am," said Mrs. Morgan, taking the money.
"You can stay here until you're able to work again," said Eliza. "I know a good doctor."
"Mama, in heaven's name," Helen fumed. "Where on earth do you get these people?"
"Merciful God!" howled Gant, "you've had 'em all--blind, lame, crazy, chippies and bastards. They all come here."
Nevertheless, when he saw Mrs. Morgan now, he always made a profound bow, saying with the most florid courtesy:
"How do you do, madam?" Aside, to Helen, he said:
"I tell you what--she's a fine-looking girl."
"Hahahaha," said Helen, laughing in an ironic falsetto, and prodding him, "you wouldn't mind having her yourself, would you?"
"B'God," he said humorously, wetting his thumb, and grinning slyly at Eliza, "she's got a pair of pippins."
Eliza smiled bitterly into popping grease.
"Hm!" she said disdainfully. "I don't care how many he goes with. There's no fool like an old fool. You'd better not be too smart. That's a game two can play at."
"Hahahahaha!" laughed Helen thinly, "she's mad now."
Helen took Mrs. Morgan often to Gant's and cooked great meals for her. She also brought her presents of candy and scented soap from town.
They called in McGuire at the birth of the child. From below Eugene heard the quiet commotion in the upstairs room, the low moans of the woman, and finally a high piercing wail. Eliza, greatly excited, kept kettles seething with hot water constantly over the gas flames of the stove. From time to time she rushed upstairs with a boiling kettle, descending a moment later more slowly, pausing from step to step while she listened attentively to the sounds in the room.
"After all," said Helen, banging kettles about restlessly in the kitchen, "what do we know about her? Nobody can say she hasn't got a husband, can they? They'd better be careful! People have no right to say those things," she cried out irritably against unknown detractors.
It was night. Eugene went out on to the veranda. The air was frosty, clear, not very cool. Above the black bulk of the eastern hills, and in the great bowl of the sky, far bright stars were scintillant as jewels. The light burned brightly in neighborhood houses, as bright and as hard as if carved from some cold gem. Across the wide yard-spaces wafted the warm odor of hamburger steak and fried onions. Ben stood at the veranda rail, leaning upon his cocked leg, smoking with deep lung inhalations. Eugene went over and stood by him. They heard the wail upstairs. Eugene snickered, looking up at the thin ivory mask. Ben lifted his white hand sharply to strike him, but dropped it with a growl of contempt, smiling faintly. Far before them, on the top of Birdseye, faint lights waver
ed in the rich Jew's castle. In the neighborhood there was a slight mist of supper, and frost-far voices.
Deep womb, dark flower. The Hidden. The secret fruit, heart-red, fed by rich Indian blood. Womb-night brooding darkness flowering secretly into life.
Mrs. Morgan went away two weeks after her child was born. He was a little brown-skinned boy, with a tuft of elvish black hair, and very black bright eyes. He was like a little Indian. Before she left Eliza gave her twenty dollars.
"Where are you going?" she asked.
"I've got folks in Sevier," said Mrs. Morgan.
She went up the street carrying a cheap imitation-crocodile valise. At her shoulder the baby waggled his head, and looked merrily back with his bright black eyes. Eliza waved to him and smiled tremulously; she turned back into the house sniffling, with wet eyes.
Why did she come to Dixieland, I wonder? Eugene thought.
Eliza was good to a little man with a mustache. He had a wife and a little girl nine years old. He was a hotel steward; he was out of work and he stayed at Dixieland until he owed her more than one hundred dollars. But he split kindling neatly, and carried up coal; he did handy jobs of carpentry, and painted up rusty places about the house.
She was very fond of him; he was what she called "a good family man." She liked domestic people; she liked men who were house-broken. The little man was very kind and very tame. Eugene liked him because he made good coffee. Eliza never bothered him about the money. Finally, he got work at the Inn, and quarters there. He paid Eliza all he owed her.
Eugene stayed late at the school, returning in the afternoon at three or four o'clock. Sometimes it was almost dark when he came back to Dixieland. Eliza was fretful at his absences, and brought him his dinner crisped and dried from its long heating in the oven. There was a heavy vegetable soup thickly glutinous with cabbage, beans, and tomatoes, and covered on top with big grease blisters. There would also be warmed-over beef, pork or chicken, a dish full of cold lima beans, biscuits, slaw, and coffee.
But the school had become the centre of his heart and life--Margaret Leonard his spiritual mother. He liked to be there most in the afternoons when the crowd of boys had gone, and when he was free to wander about the old house, under the singing majesty of great trees, exultant in the proud solitude of that fine hill, the clean windy rain of the acorns, the tang of burning leaves. He would read wolfishly until Margaret discovered him and drove him out under the trees or toward the flat court behind Bishop Raper's residence at the entrance, which was used for basketball. Here, while the western sky reddened, he raced down toward the goal, passing the ball to a companion, exulting in his growing swiftness, agility, and expertness in shooting the basket.
Margaret Leonard watched his health jealously, almost morbidly, warning him constantly of the terrible consequences that followed physical depletion, the years required to build back what had once been thrown carelessly away.
"Look here, boy!" she would begin, stopping him in a quiet boding voice. "Come in here a minute. I want to talk to you."
Somewhat frightened, extremely nervous, he would sit down beside her.
"How much sleep have you been getting?" she asked.
Hopefully, he said nine hours a night. That should be about right.
"Well, make it ten," she commanded sternly. "See here, 'Gene, you simply can't afford to take chances with your health. Lordy, boy, I know what I'm talking about. I've had to pay the price, I tell you. You can't do anything in this world without your health, boy."
"But I'm all right," he protested desperately, frightened. "There's nothing wrong with me."
"You're not strong, boy. You've got to get some meat on your bones. I tell you what, I'm worried by those circles under your eyes. Do you keep regular hours?"
He did not: he hated regular hours. The excitement, the movement, the constant moments of crisis at Gant's and Eliza's had him keyed to their stimulation. The order and convention of domestic life he had never known. He was desperately afraid of regularity. It meant dullness and inanition to him. He loved the hour of midnight.
But obediently he promised her that he would be regular--regular in eating, sleeping, studying, and exercising.
But he had not yet learned to play with the crowd. He still feared, disliked and distrusted them.
He shrank from the physical conflict of boy life, but knowing her eye was upon him he plunged desperately into their games, his frail strength buffeted in the rush of strong legs, the heavy jar of strong bodies, picking himself up bruised and sore at heart to follow and join again the mill of the burly pack. Day after day to the ache of his body was added the ache and shame of his spirit, but he hung on with a pallid smile across his lips, and envy and fear of their strength in his heart. He parroted faithfully all that John Dorsey had to say about the "spirit of fair play," "sportsmanship," "playing the game for the game's sake," "accepting defeat or victory with a smile," and so on, but he had no genuine belief or understanding. These phrases were current among all the boys at the school--they had been made somewhat too conscious of them and, as he listened, at times the old, inexplicable shame returned--he craned his neck and drew one foot sharply off the ground.
And Eugene noted, with the old baffling shame again, as this cheap tableau of self-conscious, robust, and raucously aggressive boyhood was posed, that, for all the mouthing of phrases, the jargon about fair play and sportsmanship, the weaker, at Leonard's, was the legitimate prey of the stronger. Leonard, beaten by a boy in a play of wits, or in an argument for justice, would assert the righteousness of his cause by physical violence. These spectacles were ugly and revolting: Eugene watched them with sick fascination.
Leonard himself was not a bad man--he was a man of considerable character, kindliness, and honest determination. He loved his family, he stood up with some courage against the bigotry in the Methodist church, where he was a deacon, and at length had towithdraw because of his remarks on Darwin's theory. He was, thus, an example of that sad liberalism of the village--an advanced thinker among the Methodists, a bearer of the torch at noon, an apologist for the toleration of ideas that have been established for fifty years. He tried faithfully to do his duties as a teacher. But he was of the earth--even his heavy-handed violence was of the earth, and had in it the unconscious brutality of nature. Although he asserted his interest in "the things of the mind," his interest in the soil was much greater, and he had added little to his stock of information since leaving college. He was slow-witted and quite lacking in the sensitive intuitions of Margaret, who loved the man with such passionate fidelity, however, that she seconded all his acts before the world. Eugene had even heard her cry out in a shrill, trembling voice against a student who had answered her husband insolently: "Why, I'd slap his head off! That's what I'd do!" And the boy had trembled, with fear and nausea, to see her so. But thus, he knew, could love change one. Leonard thought his actions wise and good: he had grown up in a tradition that demanded strict obedience to the master, and that would not brook opposition to his rulings. He had learned from his father, a Tennessee patriarch who ran a farm, preached on Sundays, and put down rebellion in his family with a horse-whip and pious prayers, the advantages of being God! He thought little boys who resisted him should be beaten.
Upon the sons of his wealthiest and most prominent clients, as well as upon his own children, Leonard was careful to inflict no chastisement, and these young men, arrogantly conscious of their immunity, were studious in their insolence and disobedience. The son of the Bishop, Justin Raper, a tall thin boy of thirteen, with black hair, a thin dark bumpy face, and absurdly petulant lips, typed copies of a dirty ballad and sold them among the students at five cents a copy.
"Madam, your daughter looks very fine,
Slapoon!
Madam, your daughter looks very fine,
Slapoon!"
Moreover, Leonard surprised this youth one afternoon in Spring on the eastern flank of the hill, in the thick grass beneath a flowering dogwood,
united in sexual congress with Miss Hazel Bradley, the daughter of a small grocer who lived below on Biltburn Avenue, and whose lewdness was already advertised in the town. Leonard, on second thought, did not go to the Bishop. He went to the Grocer.
"Well," said Mr. Bradley, brushing his long mustache reflectively away from his mouth, "you ought to put up a no-trespassin' sign."
The target of concentrated abuse, both for John Dorsey and the boys, was the son of a Jew. The boy's name was Edward Michalove. His father was a jeweller, a man with a dark, gentle floridity of manner and complexion. He had white delicate fingers. His counters were filled with old brooches, gemmed buckles, ancient incrusted watches. The boy had two sisters--large handsome women. His mother was dead. None of them looked Jewish: they all had a soft dark fluescence of appearance.
At twelve, he was a tall slender lad, with dark amber features, and the mincing effeminacy of an old maid. He was terrified in the company of other boys, all that was sharp, spinsterly, and venomous, would come protectively to the surface when he was ridiculed or threatened, and he would burst into shrill unpleasant laughter, or hysterical tears. His mincing walk, with the constant gesture of catching maidenly at the fringe of his coat as he walked along, his high husky voice, with a voluptuous and feminine current playing through it, drew upon him at once the terrible battery of their dislike.
They called him "Miss" Michalove; they badgered him into a state of constant hysteria, until he became an unpleasant snarling little cat, holding up his small clawed hands to scratch them with his long nails whenever they approached; they made him detestable, master and boys alike, and they hated him for what they made of him.
Sobbing one day when he had been kept in after school hours, he leaped up and rushed suddenly for the doors. Leonard, breathing stertorously, pounded awkwardly after him, and returned in a moment dragging the screaming boy along by the collar.