by Thomas Wolfe
During the first years of this illness Gant showed a diminished, but not a seriously impaired, energy. At first he had, under the doctor's treatment, periods of tranquillity when he almost believed himself well. There were also times when he became a whining dotard over night, lay indolently abed for days, and was flabbilyacquiescent to his disorder. These climaxes usually came on the heels of a roaring spree. The saloons had been closed for years: the town had been one of the first to vote on "local option."
Gant had piously contributed his vote for purity. Eugene remembered the day, years before, when he went proudly with his father to the polls. The militant "drys" had agreed to advertise their vote by wearing a scrap of white silk in their lapels. That was for purity. The defiant wets wore "red."
Announced by violent trumpetings in the Protestant churches, the day of atonement dawned on a seasoned army of well drilled teetotalers. Those wets who had victoriously withstood the pressure of hearth and pulp it--their number (aié aié was small--went to their death with the gallant swagger, and with the gleam of purloined honor, of men who are to die fighting most desperately against the engulfing mob.
They did not know how gallant was their cause: they knew only that they had stood against the will of a priest-ridden community?the most annihilating force in the village. They had never been told they stood for liberty; they stood rubily, stubbornly, with the strong brown smell of shame in their nostrils, for the bloodshot, malt-mouthed, red-nosed, loose-pursed Demon Rum. So, they came down with vine leaves in their hair, and a good fog of rye upon their breaths, and with brave set smiles around their determined mouths.
As they approached the polls, glancing, like surrounded knights, for an embattled brother, the church women of the town, bent like huntresses above the straining leash, gave the word to the eager children of the Sunday schools. Dressed all in white, and clutching firmly in their small hands the tiny stems of American flags, the pigmies, monstrous as only children can be when they become the witless mouths of slogans and crusades, charged hungrily, uttering their shrill cries, upon their Gulliver.
"There he is, children. Go get him."
Swirling around the marked man in wild elves' dance, they sang with piping empty violence:
"We are some fond mother's treasure,
Men and women of to-morrow,
For a moment's empty pleasure
Would you give us lifelong sorrow?
Think of sisters, wives, and mothers,
Of helpless babes in some low slum,
Think not of yourself, but others,
Vote against the Demon Rum."
Eugene shuddered, and looked up at Gant's white emblem with coy pride. They walked happily by unhappy alcoholics, deltaed in foaming eddies of innocence, and smiling murderously down at some fond mother's treasure.
If they were mine I'd warm their little tails, they thought--privately.
Outside the corrugated walls of the warehouse, Gant paused for a moment to acknowledge the fervent congratulation of a group of ladies from the First Baptist Church: Mrs. Tarkinton, Mrs. Fagg Sluder, Mrs. C. M. McDonnel, and Mrs. W. H. (Pert) Pentland, who, heavily powdered, trailed her long skirt of gray silk with a musty rustle, and sneered elegantly down over her whaleboned collar. She was very fond of Gant.
"Where's Will?" he asked.
"Feathering the pockets of the licker interests, when he ought to be down here doing the Lord's Work," she replied with Christian bitterness. "Nobody but you knows what I've had to put up with, Mr. Gant. You've had to put up with the queer Pentland streak, in your own home," she added with lucid significance.
He shook his head regretfully, and stared sorrowfully at the gutter.
"Ah, Lord, Pett! We've been through the mill--both of us."
A smell of drying roots and sassafras twisted a sharp spiral from the warehouse into the thin slits of his nostrils.
"When the time comes to speak up for the right," Pett announced to several of the ladies, "you'll always find Will Gant ready to do his part."
With far-seeing statesmanship he looked westward toward Pisgah.
"Licker," he said, "is a curse and a care. It has caused the sufferings of untold millions--"
"Amen, Amen," Mrs. Tarkinton chanted softly, swaying her wide hips rhythmically.
"--it has brought poverty, disease, and suffering to hundreds of thousands of homes, broken the hearts of wives and mothers, and taken bread from the mouths of little orphaned children."
"Amen, brother."
"It has been," Gant began, but at this moment his uneasy eye lighted upon the broad red face of Tim O'Doyle and the fierce whiskered whiskiness of Major Ambrose Nethersole, two prominent publicans, who were standing near the entrance not six feet away and listening attentively.
"Go on!" Major Nethersole urged, with the deep chest notes of a bullfrog. "Go on, W. O., but for God's sake, don't belch!"
"Begod!" said Tim O'Doyle, wiping a tiny rill of tobacco juice from the thick simian corner of his mouth, "I've seen him start for the door and step through the windey. When we see him coming we hire two extra bottle openers. He used to give the barman a bonus to get up early."
"Pay no attention to them, ladies, I beg of you," said Gant scathingly. "They are the lowest of the low, the whisky-besotted dregs of humanity, who deserve to bear not even the name of men, so far have they retrograded backwards."
With a flourishing sweep of his slouch hat he departed into the warehouse.
"By God!" said Ambrose Nethersole approvingly. "It takes W. O. to tie a knot in the tail of the English language. It always did."
But within two months he moaned bitterly his unwetted thirst. For several years he ordered, from time to time, the alloted quota?a gallon of whisky every two weeks--from Baltimore. It was the day of the blind tiger. The town was mined thickly with them. Bad rye and moonshine corn were the prevailing beverages. He grew old, he was sick, he still drank.
A slow trickle of lust crawled painfully down the parched gulley of desire, and ended feebly in dry fumbling lechery. He made pretty young summer widows at Dixieland presents of money, underwear, and silk stockings, which he drew on over their shapely legs in the dusty gloom of his little office. Smiling with imperturbable tenderness, Mrs. Selborne thrust out her heavy legs slowly to swell with warm ripe smack his gift of flowered green-silk garters.Wetting his thumb with sly thin aftersmile, he told.
A grass widow, forty-nine, with piled hair of dyed henna, corseted breasts and hips architecturally protuberant in a sharp diagonal, meaty mottled arms, and a gulched face of leaden flaccidity puttied up brightly with cosmetics, rented the upstairs of Woodson Street while Helen was absent.
"She looks like an adventuress, hey?" said Gant hopefully.
She had a son. He was fourteen, with a round olive face, a soft white body, and thin legs. He bit his nails intently. His hair and eyes were dark, his face full of sad stealth. He was wise and made himself unobtrusively scarce at proper times.
Gant came home earlier. The widow rocked brightly on the porch. He bowed sweepingly, calling her Madam. Coy-kittenish, she talked down at him, slogged against the creaking stair rail. She leered cosily at him. She came and went freely through his sitting-room, where he now slept. One evening, just after he had entered, she came in from the bathroom, scented lightly with the best soap, and beefily moulded into a flame-red kimono.
A handsome woman yet, he thought. Good evening, madam.
He got up from his rocker, put aside the crackling sheets of the evening paper (Republican), and undipped his steel-rimmed glasses from the great blade of his nose.
She came over with sprightly gait to the empty hearth, clasping her wrapper tightly with veinous hands.
Swiftly, with a gay leer, she opened the garment, disclosing her thin legs, silkshod, and her lumpy hips, gaudily clothed in ruffled drawers of blue silk.
"Aren't they pretty?" she twittered invitingly but obscurely. Then, as he took an eager stride forward, she skipped away like a ponderous maenad
soliciting Bacchic pursuit.
"A pair of pippins," he agreed, inclusively.
After this, she prepared breakfast for him. From Dixieland, Eliza surveyed them with a bitter eye. He had no talent for concealment. His visits morning and evening were briefer, his tongue more
benevolent.
"I know what you're up to down there," she said. "You needn't think I don't."
He grinned sheepishly and wet his thumb. Her mouth worked silently at attempted speech for a moment. She speared a frying steak and flipped it over on its raw back, smiling vengefully in a mounting column of greasy blue vapor. He poked her clumsily with his stiff fingers; she shrieked a protest mixed of anger and amusement, and moved awkwardly out of his reach with bridling gait.
"Get away! I don't want you round me! It's too late for that." She laughed with nagging mockery.
"Don't you wish you could, though? I'll vow!" she continued, kneading her lips for several seconds in an effort to speak. "I'd be ashamed. Every one's laughing at you behind your back."
"You lie! By God, you lie!" he thundered magnificently, touched. Hammer-hurling Thor.
But he tired very quickly of his new love. He was weary, and frightened by his depletion. For a time he gave the widow small sums of money, and forgot the rent. He transferred to her his storming abuse, muttered ominously to himself in long aisle-pacings at his shop, when he saw that he had lost the ancient freedom of his house and saddled himself with a tyrannous hag. One evening he returned insanely drunk, routed her out of her chamber and pursued her unfrocked, untoothed, unputtied, with a fluttering length of kimono in her palsied hand, driving her finally into the yard beneath the big cherry tree, which he circled, howling, making frantic lunges for her as she twittered with fear, casting splintered glances all over the listening neighborhood as she put on the crumpled wrapper, hid partially the indecent jigging of her breasts, and implored succor. It did not come.
"You bitch!" he screamed. "I'll kill you. You have drunk my heart's-blood, you have driven me to the brink of destruction, and you gloat upon my misery, listening with fiendish delight to my death-rattle, bloody and unnatural monster that you are."
She kept the tree deftly between them and, when his attention was diverted for a moment to the flood of anathema, tore off on fear-quick feet, streetward to the haven of the Tarkintons' house. As she rested there, in Mrs. Tarkinton's consolatory arms, weeping hysterically and dredging gullies in her poor painted face, they heard his chaotic footsteps blundering within his house, the heavy crash of furniture, and his fierce curses when he fell.
"He'll kill himself! He'll kill himself!" she cried. "He doesn't know what he's doing. Oh, my God!" she wept. "I've never been talked to that way by any man in my life!"
Gant fell heavily within his house. There was silence. She rose fearfully.
"He's not a bad man," she whispered.
One morning in early summer, after Helen had returned, Eugene was wakened by scuffling feet and excited cries along the small boardwalk that skirted the house on its upper side and led to the playhouse, a musty little structure of pine with a single big room, which he could almost touch from the sloping roof that flowed about his gabled backroom window. The playhouse was another of the strange extravagancies of Gantian fancy: it had been built for the children when they were young. It had been for many years closed, it was a retreat of delight; its imprisoned air, stale and cool, was scented permanently with old pine boards, cased books, and dusty magazines.
For some weeks now it had been occupied by Mrs. Selborne's South Carolina cook, Annie, a plump comely negress of thirty-five, with a rich coppery skin. The woman had come into the mountains for the summer: she was a good cook and expected work at hotels or boarding-houses. Helen engaged her for five dollars a week. It was an act of pride.
That morning, Gant had wakened earlier and stared at his ceiling thoughtfully. He had risen, dressed, and wearing his leather slippers, walked softly back, along the boards, to the playhouse. Helen was roused by Annie's loud protests. Tingling with premonition she came down stairs, and found Gant wringing his hands and moaning as he walked up and down the washroom. Through the open doors she heard the negress complaining loudly to herself as she banged out drawers and slammed her belongings together.
"I ain't used to no such goins-on. I'se a married woman, I is. I ain't goin' to say in dis house anothah minnit."
Helen turned furiously upon Gant and shook him.
"You rotten old thing, you!" she cried. "How dare you!"
"Merciful God!" he whined, stamping his foot like a child, and pacing up and down. "Why did this have to come upon me in my old age!" He began to sniffle affectedly. "Boo-hoo-hoo! O Jesus, it's fearful, it's awful, it's cruel that you should put this affliction on me." His contempt for reason was Parnassian. He accused God for exposing him; he wept because he had been caught.
Helen rushed out to the playhouse and with large gesture and hearty entreaty strove to appease outraged Annie.
"Come on, Annie," she coaxed. "I'll give you a dollar a week more if you stay. Forget about it!"
"No'm," said Annie stubbornly. "I cain't stay heah any longer. I'se afraid of dat man."
Gant paused in his distracted pacing from time to time long enough to cock an eager ear. At each iteration of Annie's firm refusals, he fetched out a deep groan and took up his lament again.
Luke, who had descended, had fidgeted about in a nervous prance from one large bare foot to another. Now he went to the door and looked out, bursting suddenly into a large Whah-Whah as he caught sight of the sullen respectability of the negress' expression. Helen came back into the house with an angry perturbed face.
"She'll tell this all over town," she announced.
Gant moaned in lengthy exhalations. Eugene, shocked at first, and frightened, flung madly across the kitchen linoleum in twisting leaps, falling catlike on his bare soles. He squealed ecstatically at Ben who loped in scowling, and began to snicker in short contemptuous fragments.
"And of course she'll tell Mrs. Selborne all about it, as soon as she goes back to Henderson," Helen continued.
"O my God!" Gant whined, "why was this put on me--"
"O gotohell! Gotohell!" she said comically, her wrath loosened suddenly by a ribald and exasperated smile. They howled.
"I shall dy-ee."
Eugene choked in faint hiccoughs and began to slide gently down the kitchen-washroom door jamb.
"Ah! you little idiot!" Ben snarled, lifting his white hand sharply. He turned away quickly with a flickering smile.
At this moment, Annie appeared on the walk outside the door, with a face full of grieved decorum.
Luke looked nervously and gravely from his father to the negress, fidgeting from one big foot to the other.
"I'se a married woman," said Annie. "I ain't used to nothin' like dis. I wants my money."
Luke blew up in an explosion of wild laughter.
"Whah-whah!" He pronged her larded ribs with scooped fingers. She moved away angrily, muttering.
Eugene lolled about feebly on the floor, kicking one leg out gently as if he had just been decapitated, and fumbling blindly at the neckband of his nightshirt. A faint clucking sound came at intervals from his wide-open mouth.
They laughed wildly, helplessly, draining into mad laughter all the welled and agglutinated hysteria that had gathered in them, washing out in a moment of fierce surrender all the fear and fatality of their lives, the pain of age and death.
Dying, he walked among them, whining his lament against God's lidless stare, gauging their laughter cautiously with uneasy prying eyes, a faint tickled grin playing craftily about his wailing mouth.
Roofing the deep tides, swinging in their embrace, rocked Eliza's life Sargassic, as when, at morning, a breath of kitchen air squirmed through her guarded crack of door, and fanned the pendant clusters of old string in floating rhythm. She rubbed the sleep gently from her small weak eyes, smiling dimly as she thought, unwakened, of ancient
losses. Her worn fingers still groped softly in the bed beside her, and when she found it vacant, she awoke. Remembered. My youngest, my oldest, final bitter fruit, O dark of soul, O far and lonely, where? Remembered O his face! Death-son, partner of my peril, last coinage of my flesh, who warmed my flanks and nestled to my back. Gone? Cut off from me? When? Where?
The screen slammed, the market boy dumped ground sausage on the table, a negress fumbled at the stove. Awake now.
Ben moved quietly, but not stealthily, about, confessing and denying nothing. His thin laughter pierced the darkness softly above the droning creak of the wooden porch-swing. Mrs. Pert laughed gently, comfortingly. She was forty-three: a large woman of gentle manners, who drank a great deal. When she was drunk, her voice was soft, low, and fuzzy, she laughed uncertainly, mildly, and walked with careful alcoholic gravity. She dressed well: she was well fleshed, but not sensual-looking. She had good features, soft oaken hair, blue eyes, a little bleared. She laughed with a comfortable, happy chuckle. They were all very fond of her. Helen called her "Fatty."
Her husband was a drug salesman: he travelled through Tennessee, Arkansas, and Mississippi, and returned to Altamont for a fortnight every four months. Her daughter, Catherine, who was almost Ben's age, came to Dixieland for a few weeks each summer. She was a school-teacher in a public school in a Tennessee village. Ben squired both.
Mrs. Pert chuckled softly when she spoke to him, and called him "Old Ben." In the darkness he sat, talking a little, humming a little, laughing occasionally in his thin minor key, quietly, with a cigarette between his forked ivory fingers, drawing deeply. He would buy a flask of whisky and they would drink it very quietly. Perhaps they talked a little more. But they were never riotous. Occasionally, they would rise at midnight from the swing, and go out into the street, departing under leafy trees. They would not return during the night. Eliza, ironing out a great pile of rumpled laundry in the kitchen, would listen. Presently, she would mount the stairs, peer carefully into Mrs. Pert's room, and descend, her lips thoughtfully kneaded.