by Thomas Wolfe
Enormous humor flowed from him like crude light. Men who had never known him seethed with strange internal laughter when they saw him, and roared helplessly when he began to speak. Yet, his physical beauty was astonishing. His head was like that of a wild angel--coils and whorls of living golden hair flashed from his head, his features were regular, generous, and masculine, illuminated by the strange inner smile of idiot ecstasy.
His broad mouth, even when stammering irritably or when nervousness clouded his face, was always cocked for laughter?unearthly, exultant, idiot laughter. There was in him demonic exuberance, a wild intelligence that did not come from the brain. Eager for praise, for public esteem, and expert in ingratiation, this demon possessed him utterly at the most unexpected moments, in the most decorous surroundings, when he was himself doing all in his power to preserve the good opinion in which he was held.
Thus, listening to an old lady of the church, who with all her power of persuasion and earnestness was unfolding the dogmas of Presbyterianism to him, he would lean forward in an attitude of exaggerated respectfulness and attention, one broad hand clinched about his knee, while he murmured gentle agreement to what she said:
"Yes? . . . Ye-e-es? . . . Ye-e-e-es? . . . Ye-e-es? . . . Is that right? . . . Ye-e-es?"
Suddenly the demonic force would burst in him. Insanely tickled at the cadences of his agreement, the earnest placidity and oblivion of the old woman, and the extravagant pretense of the whole situation, his face flooded with wild exultancy, he would croon in a fat luscious bawdily suggestive voice:
"Y-ah-s? . . . Y-a-h-s? . . . Y-a-h-s? . . . Y-ah-s?"
And when at length too late she became aware of this drowning flood of demonic nonsense, and paused, turning an abrupt startled face to him, he would burst into a wild "Whah-whah-whah-whah" of laughter, beyond all reason, with strange throat noises, tickling her roughly in the ribs.
Often Eliza, in the midst of long, minutely replenished reminiscence, would grow conscious, while she was purse-lipped in revery, of this annihilating mockery, would slap at his hand angrily as he gooched her, and shake a pursed piqued face at him, saying, with a heavy scorn that set him off into fresh "whah-whahs": "I'll declare, boy! You act like a regular idiot," and then shaking her head sadly, with elaborate pity: "I'd be ash-a-amed! A-sha-a-med."
His quality was extraordinary; he had something that was a great deal better than most intelligence; he saw the world in burlesque, and his occasional answer to its sham, hypocrisy, and intrigue was the idiot devastation of "whah-whah!" But he did not possess his demon; it possessed him from time to time. If it had possessed him wholly, constantly, his life would have prevailed with astonishing honesty and precision. But when he reflected, he was a child?with all the hypocrisy, sentimentality and dishonest pretense of a child.
His face was a church in which beauty and humor were married?the strange and the familiar were at one in him. Men, looking at Luke, felt a start of recognition as if they saw something of which they had never heard, but which they had known forever.
Once or twice, during the Winter and Spring, while she was touring with Pearl Hines, Helen got into Atlanta to see him. In Spring they attended the week of Grand Opera. He would find employment for one night as a spearman in Aé and pass the doorman for the remainder of the week with the assurance that he was "a member of the company--Lukio Gantio."
His large feet spread tightly out in sandals; behind the shingreaves his awkward calves were spined thickly with hair; a thick screw of hair writhed under the edge of his tin helmet, as he loafed in the wings, leaning comically on his spear, his face lit with exultancy.
Caruso, waiting his entrance, regarded him from time to time with a wide Wop smile.
"Wotta you call yourself, eh?" asked Caruso, approaching and looking him over.
"W-w-w-why," he said, "d-don't you know one of your s-s-s-soldiers when you see him?"
"You're one hell of a soldier," said Caruso.
"Whah-whah-whah!" Luke answered. With difficulty he restrained his prodding fingers.
In the summer now he returned to Altamont, finding employment with a firm of land-auctioneers, and assisting them at the sale of a tract or a parcel of lots. He moved about above the crowd in the bed of a wagon, exhorting them to bid, with his hand at the side of his mouth, in a harangue compounded of frenzy, passionate solicitation, and bawdry. The work intoxicated him. With wide grins of expectancy they crowded round the spokes. In a high throaty tenor he called to them:
"Step right up, gentlemen, lot number 17, in beautiful Homewood?we furnish the wood, you furnish the home. Now gentlemen, this handsome building-site has a depth of 179 feet, leaving plenty of room for garden and backhouse (grow your own corn cobs in beautiful Homewood) with a frontage of 114 feet on a magnificent new macadam road."
"Where is the road?" some one shouted.
"On the blueprint, of course, Colonel. You've got it all in black and white. Now, gentlemen, the opportunity of your lives is kicking you in the pants. Are you men of vision? Think what Ford, Edison, Napoleon Bonaparte, and Julius Caesar would do. Obey that impulse. You can't lose. The town is coming this way. Listen carefully. Do you hear it? Swell. The new courthouse will be built on yonder hill, the undertaker and the village bakery will occupy handsome edifices of pressed brick just above you. Oyez, oyez, oyez. What am I offered? What am I offered? Own your own home in beautiful Homewood, within a cannonshot of all railway, automobile, and airplane connections. Running water abounds within a Washingtonian stone's throw and in all the pipes. Our caravans meet all trains. Gentlemen, here's your chance to make a fortune. The ground is rich in mineral resources--gold, silver, copper, iron, bituminous coal and oil, will be found in large quantities below the roots of all the trees."
"What about the bushes, Luke?" yelled Mr. Halloran, the dairy-lunch magnate.
"Down in the bushes, that is where she gushes," Luke answered amid general tumult. "All right, Major. You with the face. What am I offered? What am I offered?"
When there was no sale, he greeted incoming tourists at the station-curbing with eloquent invitations to Dixieland, rich, persuasive, dominant above all the soliciting babel of the car-drivers, negro hotel-porters, and boarding-house husbands.
"I'll give you a dollar apiece for every one you drum up," said Eliza.
"O that's all right." O modestly. Generously.
"He'd give you the shirt off his back," said Gant.
A fine boy. As she cooled from her labors in the summer night, he brought her little boxes of ice-cream from town.
He was a hustler: he sold patent washboards, trick potato-peelers, and powdered cockroach-poison from house to house. To the negroes he sold hair-oil guaranteed to straighten kinky hair, and religious lithographs, peopled with flying angels, white and black, and volant cherubs, black and white, sailing about the knees of an impartial and crucified Saviour, and subtitled "God Loves Them Both."
They sold like hot cakes.
Otherwise, he drove Gant's car--a 1913 five-passenger Ford, purchase of an inspired hour of madness, occupant now of half Gant's conversation, object of abuse, boast, and anathema. It was before every one owned a car. Gant was awed and terrified by his rash act, exalted at the splendor of his chariot, appalled at its expense. Each bill for gasoline, repairs, or equipment brought a howl of anguish from him; a puncture, a breakdown, a minor disorder caused him to circle about in maddened strides, cursing, praying, weeping.
"I've never had a moment's peace since I bought it," he howled. "Accursed and bloody monster that it is, it will not be content until it has sucked out my life-blood, sold the roof over my head, and sent me out to the pauper's grave to perish. Merciful God," he wept, "it's fearful, it's awful, it's cruel that I should be afflicted thus in my old age." Turning to his constrained and apologetic son abruptly, he said: "How much is the bill? Hey?" His eyes roved wildly in his head.
"D-d-d-don't get excited, papa," Luke answered soothingly, teetering from foot to foot, "it'
s only $8.92."
"Jesus God!" Gant screamed. "I'm ruined." Sobbing in loud burlesque sniffles, he began his caged pacing.
But it was pleasant at dusk or in the cool summer nights, with Eliza or one of his daughters beside him, and a fragrant weed between his pallid lips, to hinge his long body into the back seat, and ride out into the fragrant countryside, or through the long dark streets of town. At the approach of another car he cried out in loud alarm, by turns cursing and entreating his son to caution. Luke drove nervously, erratically, wildly--his stammering impatient hands and knees communicated their uneven fidget to the flivver. He cursed irritably, plunged in exacerbated fury at the brake, and burst out in an annoyed "tuh-tuh-tuh-tuh," when the car stalled.
As the hour grew late, and the streets silent, his madness swelled in him. Lipping the rim of a long hill street, tree-arched and leafy and shelving in even terraces, he would burst suddenly into insane laughter, bend over the wheel, and pull the throttle open, his idiot "whah-whahs" filling the darkness as Gant screamed curses at him. Down through the night they tore at murderous speed, the boy laughing at curse and prayer alike as they shot past the blind menace of street-crossings.
"You Goddamned scoundrel!" Gant yelled. "Stop, you mountain grill, or I'll put you in jail."
"Whah-whah."--His laughter soared to a crazy falsetto.
Daisy, arrived for a few weeks of summer coolness, quite blue with terror, would clutch the most recent of her annual arrivals to her breast, melodramatically, and moan:
"I beg of you, for the sake of my family, for the sake of my innocent motherless babes--"
"Whah-whah-whah!"
"He's a fiend out of hell," cried Gant, beginning to weep. "Cruel and criminal monster that he is, he will batter our brains out against a tree, before he's done." They whizzed with a perilous swerve by a car that, with a startled screech of its brakes, balked at the corner like a frightened horse.
"You damned thug!" Gant roared, plunging forward and fastening his great hands around Luke's throat. "Will you stop?"
Luke added another notch of blazing speed. Gant fell backward with a howl of terror.
On Sunday they made long tours into the country. Often they drove to Reynoldsville, twenty-two miles away. It was an ugly little resort, noisy with arriving and departing cars, with a warm stench of oil and gasoline heavy above its broad main street. But people were coming and going from several States: Southward they came up from South Carolina and Georgia, cotton-farmers, small tradesmen and their families in battered cars coated with red sandclay dust. They had a heavy afternoon dinner of fried chicken, corn, string-beans, and sliced tomatoes, at one of the big wooden boarding-house hotels, spent another hour in a drugstore over a chocolate nut-sundae, watched the summer crowd of fortunate tourists and ripe cool-skinned virgins flow by upon the wide sidewalk in thick pullulation, and returned again, after a brief tour of the town, on the winding immediate drop to the hot South. New lands.
Fluescent with smooth ripe curves, the drawling virgins of the South filled summer porches.
Luke was a darling. He was a dear, a fine boy, a big-hearted generous fellow, and just the cutest thing. Women liked him, laughed at him, pulled fondly the thick golden curls of his hair. He was sentimentally tender to children--girls of fourteen years. He had a grand romantic feeling for Delia Selborne, the oldest daughter of Mrs. Selborne. He bought her presents, was tender and irritable by turns. Once, at Gant's, on the porch under an August moon and the smell of ripening grapes, he caressed her while Helen sang in the parlor. He caressed her gently, leaned his head over her, and said he would like to lay it on her b-b-b-b-breast. Eugene watched them bitterly, with an inch of poison round his heart. He wanted the girl for himself: she was stupid, but she had the wise body and faint hovering smile of her mother. He wanted Mrs. Selborne more, he fantasied passionately about her yet, but her image lived again in Delia. As a result, he was proud, cold, scornful and foolish before them. They disliked him.
Enviously, with gnawn heart, he observed Luke's ministrations to Mrs. Selborne. His service was so devout, so extravagant that even Helen grew annoyed and occasionally jealous. And nightly, from a remote corner at Gant's or Eliza's, or from a parked automobile before the house, he heard her rich welling laughter, full of tenderness, surrender, and mystery. Sometimes, waiting in pitch darkness on the stairs at Eliza's, at one or two o'clock in the morning, he felt her pass him. As she touched him in the dark, she gave a low cry of terror; with an uncivil grunt he reassured her, and descended to bed with a pounding heart and burning face.
Ah, yes, he thought, with green morality, observing his brother throned in laughter and affection, you Big Fool, you--you're just a sucker! You show off and act big, my sonny, and spend your money bringing ice-cream for them--but what do you get out of it? How do you feel when she gets out of an automobile at two o'clock in the morning after grunting in the dark with some damned travelling-man, or with old Poxy Logan who's been keeping a nigger woman up for years. "May I p-p-p-put my head on your breast?" You make me sick, you damned fool. SHE'S no better, only you don't know beans. She'll let you spend all your money on her and then she'll run off with some little pimp in an automobile for the rest of the night. Yes, that's so. Do you want to make anything out of it? You big bluff. Come out into the back yard. . . . I'll show you . . . take that . . . and that . . . and that . . .
Pumping his fists wildly, he fought his phantom into defeat and himself into exhaustion.
Luke had several hundred dollars saved from The Saturday Evening Post days, when he went off to school. He accepted very little money from Gant. He waited on tables, he solicited for college boarding-houses, he was the agent for a tailor who made Kippy Kampus Klothes. Gant boasted of these efforts. The town shifted its quid, nodded pertly, and spat, saying:
"That boy'll make his mark."
Luke worked as hard for an education as any other self-made man. He made every sacrifice. He did everything but study.
He was an immense popular success, so very extra, so very Luky. The school sought and adored him. Twice, after football games, he mounted a hearse and made funeral orations over the University of Georgia.
But, in spite of all his effort, toward the end of his third year he was still a sophomore, with every prospect of remaining one.
One day in Spring he wrote the following letter to Gant:
"The b-b-b-bastards who r-r-run this place have it in for me. I've been c-c-c-crooked good and proper. They take your hard-earned m-m-money here and skin you. I'm g-g-g-going to a real school."
He went to Pittsburgh and found work with the Westinghouse Electric Company. Three times a week at night he attended courses at the Carnegie Institute of Technology. He made friends.
The war had come. After fifteen months in Pittsburgh he moved on to Dayton where he got employment at a boiler factory engaged in the fabrication of war materials.
From time to time, in summer for a few weeks, at Christmas for a few days, he returned to celebrate his holidays with his family. Always he brought Gant a suitcase stocked with beer and whisky. That boy was "good to his father."
19
One afternoon in the young summer, Gant leaned upon the rail, talking to Jannadeau. He was getting on to sixty-five, his erect body had settled, he stooped a little. He spoke of old age often, and he wept in his tirades now because of his stiffened hand. Soaked in pity, he referred to himself as "the poor old cripple who has to provide for them all."
The indolence of age and disintegration was creeping over him. He now rose a full hour late, he came to his shop punctually, but he spent long hours of the day extended on the worn leather couch of his office, or in gossip with Jannadeau, bawdy old Liddell, Cardiac, and Fagg Sluder, who had salted away his fortune in two big buildings on the Square and was at the present moment tilted comfortably in a chair before the fire department, gossiping eagerly with members of the ball club, whose chief support he was. It was after five o'clock, the game was over.
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Negro laborers, grisly with a white coating of cement, sloped down past the shop on their way home. The draymen dispersed slowly, a slouchy policeman loafed down the steps of the city hall picking his teeth, and on the market side, from high grilled windows, there came the occasional howls of a drunken negress. Life buzzed slowly like a fly.
The sun had reddened slightly, there was a cool flowing breath from the hills, a freshening relaxation over the tired earth, the hope, the ecstasy of evening in the air. In slow pulses the thick plume of fountain rose, fell upon itself, and slapped the pool in lazy rhythms. A wagon rattled leanly over the big cobbles; beyond the firemen, the grocer Bradley wound up his awning with slow creaking revolutions.
Across the Square, at its other edge, the young virgins of the eastern part of town walked lightly home in chattering groups. They came to town at four o'clock in the afternoon, walked up and down the little avenue several times, entered a shop to purchase small justifications, and finally went into the chief drugstore, where the bucks of the town loafed and drawled in lazy alert groups. It was their club, their brasserie, the forum of the sexes. With confident smiles the young men detached themselves from their group and strolled back to booth and table.
"Hey theah! Wheahd you come from?"
"Move ovah theah, lady. I want to tawk to you."
Eyes as blue as Southern skies looked roguishly up to laughing gray ones, the winsome dimples deepened, and the sweetest little tail in dear old Dixie slid gently over on the polished board.
Gant spent delightful hours now in the gossip of dirty old men--their huddled bawdry exploded in cracked high wheezes on the Square. He came home at evening stored with gutter tidings, wetting his thumb and smiling slyly as he questioned Helen hopefully: