Thomas Wolfe, page 20
“Here’s your patient,” said Coker softly, “the Constipated Cop.”
Aloud, with great cordiality, they all said: “How are you, Les?”
“Oh, tolable, tolable,” said the policeman mournfully. As draggled as his mustaches, he passed on, hocking into the gutter a slimy gob of phlegm.
“Well, good morning, gentlemen,” said Horse Hines, making to go.
“Remember what I told you, Horse. Be good to Coker, your best friend.” McGuire jerked a thumb toward Coker.
Beneath his thin joviality Horse Hines was hurt.
“I do remember,” said the undertaker gravely. “We are both members of honorable professions: in the hour of death when the storm-tossed ship puts into its haven of rest, we are the trustees of the Almighty.”
“Why, Horse!” Coker exclaimed, “this is eloquence!”
“The sacred rites of closing the eyes, of composing the limbs, and of preparing for burial the lifeless repository of the departed soul is our holy mission; it is for us, the living, to pour balm upon the broken heart of Grief, to soothe the widow’s ache, to brush away the orphan’s tears; it is for us, the living, to highly resolve that——”
“—Government of the people, for the people, and by the people,” said Hugh McGuire.
“Yes, Horse,” said Coker, “you are right. I’m touched. And what’s more, we do it all for nothing. At least,” he added virtuously, “I never charge for soothing the widow’s ache.”
“What about embalming the broken heart of Grief?” asked McGuire.
“I said balm,” Horse Hines remarked coldly.
“Say, Horse,” said Harry Tugman, who had listened with great interest, “didn’t you make a speech with all that in it last summer at the Undertakers’ Convention?”
“What’s true then is true now,” said Horse Hines bitterly, as he left the place.
“Jesus!” said Harry Tugman, “we’ve got him good and sore. I thought I’d bust a gut, doc, when you pulled that one about embalming the broken heart of Grief.”
At this moment Dr. Ravenel brought his Hudson to a halt across the street before the Post Office, and walked over rapidly, drawing his gauntlets off. He was bareheaded; his silver aristocratic hair was thinly rumpled; his surgical gray eyes probed restlessly below the thick lenses of his spectacles. He had a famous, calm, deeply concerned face, shaven, ashen, lean, lit gravely now and then by humor.
“Oh Christ!” said Coker. “Here comes Teacher!”
“Good morning, Hugh,” he said as he entered. “Are you going into training again for the bughouse?”
“Look who’s here!” McGuire roared hospitably. “Dead-eye Dick, the literary sawbones, whose private collection of gallstones is the finest in the world. When d’jew get back, son?”
“Just in time, it seems,” said Ravenel, holding a cigarette cleanly between his long surgical fingers. He looked at his watch. “I believe you have a little engagement at the Ravenel hospital in about half an hour. Is that right?”
“By God, Dick, you’re always right,” McGuire yelled enthusiastically. “What’d you tell ’em up there, boy?”
“I told them,” said Dick Ravenel, whose affection was like a flower that grew behind a wall, “that the best surgeon in America when he was sober was a lousy bum named Hugh McGuire who was always drunk.”
“Now wait, wait. Hold on a minute!” said McGuire, holding up his thick hand. “I protest, Dick. You meant well, son, but you got that mixed up. You mean the best surgeon in America when he’s not sober.”
“Did you read one of your papers?” said Coker.
“Yes,” said Dick Ravenel. “I read one on carcinoma of the liver.”
“How about one on pyorrhea of the toe-nails?” said McGuire. “Did you read that one?”
Harry Tugman laughed heavily, not wholly knowing why. McGuire belched into the silence loudly and was witlessly adrift for a moment.
“Literature, literature, Dick,” he returned portentously. “It’s been the ruin of many a good surgeon. You read too much, Dick. Yon Cassius hath a lean and hungry look. You know too much. The letter killeth the spirit, you know. Me—Dick, did you ever know me to take anything out that I didn’t put back? Anyway, don’t I always leave ’em something to go on with? I’m no scholar, Dick. I’ve never had your advantages. I’m a self-made butcher. I’m a carpenter, Dick. I’m an interior decorator. I’m a mechanic, a plumber, an electrician, a butcher, a tailor, a jeweller. I’m a jewel, a gem, a diamond in the rough, Dick. I’m a practical man. I take out their works, spit upon them, trim off the dirty edges, and send them on their way again. I economize, Dick; I throw away everything I can’t use, and use everything I throw away. Who made the Pope a tailbone from his knuckle? Who made the dog howl? Aha—that’s why the governor looks so young. We are filled up with useless machinery, Dick. Efficiency, economy, power! Have you a Little Fairy in your Home? You haven’t! Then let the Gold Dust Twins do the work! Ask Ben—he knows!”
“O my God!” laughed Ben thinly, “listen to that, won’t you?”
Two doors below, directly before the Post Office, Pete Mascari rolled upward with corrugated thunder the shutters of his fruit shop. The pearl light fell coolly upon the fruity architecture, on the pyramided masonry of spit-bright winesaps, the thin sharp yellow of the Florida oranges, the purple Tokays, sawdust-bedded. There was a stale fruity odor from the shop of ripening bananas, crated apples, and the acrid tang of powder; the windows are filled with Roman candles, crossed rockets, pinwheels, squat green Happy Hooligans, and multilating Jack Johnsons, red cannoncrackers, and tiny acrid packets of crackling spattering firecrackers. Light fell a moment on the ashen corpsiness of his face and on the liquid Sicilian poison of his eyes.
“Don’ pincha da grape. Pinch da banan’!”
A street-car, toy-green with new Spring paint, went squareward.
“Dick,” said McGuire more soberly, “take the job, if you like.”
Ravenel shook his head.
“I’ll stand by,” said he. “I won’t operate. I’m afraid of one like this. It’s your job, drunk or sober.”
“Removing a tumor from a woman, ain’t you?” said Coker.
“No,” said Dick Ravenel, “removing a woman from a tumor.”
“Bet you it weighs fifty pounds, if it weighs an ounce,” said McGuire with sudden professional interest.
Dick Ravenel winced ever so slightly. A cool spurt of young wind, clean as a kid, flowed by him. McGuire’s meaty shoulders recoiled burlily as if from the cold shock of water. He seemed to waken.
“I’d like a bath,” he said to Dick Ravenel, “and a shave.” He rubbed his hand across his blotched hairy face.
“You can use my room, Hugh, at the hotel,” said Jeff Spaugh, looking at Ravenel somewhat eagerly.
“I’ll use the hospital,” he said.
“You’ll just have time,” said Ravenel.
“In God’s name, let’s get a start on,” he cried impatiently.
“Did you see Kelly do this one at Hopkins?” asked McGuire.
“Yes,” said Dick Ravenel, “after a very long prayer. That’s to give power to his elbow. The patient died.”
“Damn the prayers!” said McGuire. “They won’t do much good to this one. She called me a low-down lickered-up whisky-drinking bastard last night: if she still feels like that she’ll get well.”
“These mountain women take a lot of killing,” said Jeff Spaugh sagely.
“Do you want to come along?” McGuire asked Coker.
“No, thanks. I’m getting some sleep,” he answered. “The old girl took a hell of a time. I thought she’d never get through dying.”
They started to go.
“Ben,” said McGuire, with a return to his former manner, “tell the Old Man I’ll beat hell out of him if he doesn’t give Helen a rest. Is he staying sober?”
“In heaven’s name, McGuire, how should I know?” Ben burst out irritably. “Do you think that’s all I’ve got to do—watching your licker-heads?”
“That’s a great girl, boy,” said McGuire sentimentally. “One in a million.”
“Hugh, for God’s sake, come on,” cried Dick Ravenel.
The four medical men went out into the pearl light. The town emerged from the lilac darkness with a washed renascent cleanliness. All the world seemed as young as Spring. McGuire walked across to Ravenel’s car, and sank comfortably with a sense of invigoration into the cool leathers. Jeff Spaugh plunged off violently with a ripping explosion of his engine and a cavalier wave of his hand.
Admiringly Harry Tugman’s face turned to the slumped burly figure of Hugh McGuire.
“By God!” he boasted, “I bet he does the damnedest piece of operating you ever heard of.”
“Why, hell,” said the counterman loyally, “he ain’t worth a damn until he’s got a quart of corn licker under his belt. Give him a few drinks and he’ll cut off your damned head and put it on again without your knowing it.”
As Jeff Spaugh roared off Harry Tugman said jealously: “Look at that bastard. Mr. Vanderbilt. He thinks he’s hell, don’t he? A big pile of bull. Ben, do you reckon he was really out at the Hilliards to-night?”
“Oh for God’s sake,” said Ben irritably, “how the hell should I know! What difference does it make?” he added furiously.
“I guess Little Maudie will fill up the column to-morrow with some of her crap,” said Harry Tugman. “‘The Younger Set,’ she calls it! Christ! It goes all the way from every little bitch old enough to wear drawers, to Old Man Redmond. If Saul Gudger belongs to the Younger Set, Ben, you and I are still in the third grade. Why, hell, yes,” he said with an air of conviction to the grinning counterman, “he was bald as a pig’s knuckle when the Spanish American War broke out.”
The counterman laughed.
Foaming with brilliant slapdash improvisation Harry Tugman declaimed:
“Members of the Younger Set were charmingly entertained last night at a dinner dance given at Snotwood, the beautiful residence of Mr. and Mrs. Clarence Firkins, in honor of their youngest daughter, Gladys, who made her debutt this season. Mr. and Mrs. Firkins, accompanied by their daughter, greeted each of the arriving guests at the threshhold in a manner reviving the finest old traditions of Southern aristocracy, while Mrs. Firkins’ accomplished sister, Miss Catherine Hipkiss, affectionately known to members of the local younger set as Roaring Kate, supervised the checking of overcoats, evening wraps, jock-straps, and jewelry.
“Dinner was served promptly at eight o’clock, followed by coffee and Pluto Water at eight forty-five. A delicious nine-course collation had been prepared by Artaxerxes Papadopolos, the well-known confectioner and caterer, and proprietor of the Bijou Café for Ladies and Gents.
“After first-aid and a thorough medical examination by Dr. Jefferson Reginald Alfonso Spaugh, the popular gin-ecologist, the guests adjourned to the Ball Room where dance music was provided by Zeke Buckner’s Upper Hominy Stringed Quartette, Mr. Buckner himself officiating at the trap drum and tambourine.
“Among those dancing were the Misses Aline Titsworth, Lena Ginster, Ophelia Legg, Gladys Firkins, Beatrice Slutsky, Mary Whitesides, Helen Shockett, and Lofta Barnes.
“Also the Messrs. I. C. Bottom, U. B. Freely, R. U. Reddy, O. I. Lovett, Cummings Strong, Sansom Horney, Preston Updyke, Dows Wicket, Pettigrew Biggs, Otis Goode, and J. Broad Stern.”
Ben laughed noiselessly, and bent his pointed face into the mug again. Then, he stretched his thin arms out, extending his body sensually upward, and forcing out in a wide yawn the night-time accumulation of weariness, boredom, and disgust.
“Oh-h-h-h my God!”
Virginal sunlight crept into the street in young moteless shafts. At this moment Gant awoke.
He lay quietly on his back for a moment in the pleasant yellow-shaded dusk of the sitting-room, listening to the rippling flutiness of the live piping birdy morning. He yawned cavernously and thrust his right hand scratching into the dense hairthicket of his breast.
The fast cackle-cluck of sensual hens. Come and rob us. All through the night for you, master. Rich protesting yielding voices of Jewesses. Do it, don’t it. Break an egg in them.
Sleepless, straight, alert, the counterpane moulded over his gaunt legs, he listened to the protesting invitations of the hens.
From the warm dust, shaking their fat feathered bodies, protesting but satisfied they staggered up. For me. The earth too and the vine. The moist new earth cleaving like cut pork from the plough. Or like water from a ship. The spongy sod spaded cleanly and rolled back like flesh. Or the earth loosened and hoed gently around the roots of the cherry trees. The earth receives my seed. For me the great lettuces. Spongy and full of sap now like a woman. The thick grapevine—in August the heavy clustered grapes—How there? Like milk from a breast. Or blood through a vein. Fattens and plumps them.
All through the night the blossoms dropping. Soon now the White Wax. Green apples end of May. Isaacs’ June Apple hangs half on my side. Bacon and fried green apples.
With sharp whetted hunger he thought of breakfast. He threw the sheet back cleanly, swung in an orbit to a sitting position and put his white somewhat phthisic feet on the floor. Standing up tenderly, he walked over to his leather rocker and put on a pair of clean white-footed socks. Then he pulled his nightgown over his head, looking for a moment in the dresser mirror at his great boned structure, the long stringy muscles of his arms, and his flat-meated hairy chest. His stomach sagged paunchily. He thrust his white flaccid calves quickly through the shrunken legs of a union suit, stretched it out elasticly with a comfortable widening of his shoulders and buttoned it. Then he stepped into his roomy sculpturally heavy trousers and drew on his soft-leathered laceless shoes. Crossing his suspender braces over his shoulders, he strode into the kitchen and had a brisk fire of oil and pine snapping in the range within three minutes. He was stimulated and alive in all the fresh wakefulness of the Spring morning.
Through Birdseye Gap, in the dewy richness of Lunn’s Cove, Judge Webster Tayloe, the eminent, prosperous, and aristocratic corporation counsel (retired, but occasional consultations), rose in the rich walnut twilight of his bedchamber, noted approvingly, through the black lenses of the glasses that gave his long, subtle, and contemptuous face its final advantage over the rabble, that one of his country bumpkins was coming from the third pasture with a slopping pail of new milk, another was sharpening a scythe in the young glint of the sun, and another, emulating his more intelligent fellow, the horse, was backing a buggy slowly under the carriage shed.
Approvingly he watched his young mulatto son come over the lawn with lazy cat-speed, noting with satisfaction the grace and quickness of his movements, the slender barrel strength of his torso, his smallboned resiliency. Also the well-shaped intelligent head, the eager black eyes, the sensitive oval face, and the beautiful coprous olive of the skin. He was very like a better-class Spaniard. Quod potui perfeci. By this fusion, perhaps, men like men.
By the river the reed-pipes, the muse’s temple, the sacred wood again. Why not? As in this cove. I, too, have lived in Arcady.
He took off his glasses for a moment and looked at the ptotic malevolence of his left eye, and the large harlequinesque wart in the cheek below it. The black glasses gave the suggestion that he was half-masked; they added a touch of unsearchable mystery to the subtle, sensual and disquieting intelligence of his face. His negro man appeared at this moment and told him his bath was ready. He drew the long thin nightgown over his freckled Fitzsimmons body and stepped vigorously into tepid water. Then for ten minutes he was sponged, scraped, and kneaded, upon a long table by the powerful plastic hands of the negro. He dressed in fresh laundered underwear and newly pressed clothes of black. He tied a black string carelessly below the wide belt of starched collar and buttoned across his straight long figure a frock coat that reached his knees. He took a cigarette from a box on his table and lighted it.
Bouncing tinnily down the coiling road that came through the Gap from the town, a flivver glinted momently through the trees. Two men were in it. His face hardened against it, he watched it go by his gates on the road with a scuffle of dust. Dimly he saw their lewd red mountain faces, and completed the image with sweat and corduroy. And in the town their city cousins. Brick, stucco, the white little eczema of Suburbia. Federated Half-Breeds of the World.
Into my Valley next with lawnmowers and front lawns. He ground out the life of the cigarette against an ashtray, and began a rapid window calculation of his horses, asses, kine, swine, and hens; the stored plenitude of his great barn, the heavy fruitage of his fields and orchards. A man came toward the house with a bucket of eggs in one hand and a bucket of butter in the other; each cake was stamped with a sheaf of wheat and wrapped loosely in clean white linen cloths. He smiled grimly: if attacked he could withstand a prolonged siege.
At Dixieland, Eliza slept soundly in a small dark room with a window opening on the uncertain light of the back porch. Her chamber was festooned with a pendant wilderness of cord and string; stacks of old newspapers and magazines were piled in the corners; and every shelf was loaded with gummed, labelled, half-filled medicine bottles. There was a smell in the air of mentholatum, Vick’s Pneumonia Cure, and sweet glycerine. The negress arrived, coming under the built-up house and climbing lazily the steep tunnel of back steps. She knocked at the door.
“Who’s there!” cried Eliza sharply, waking at once, and coming forward to the door. She wore a gray flannel nightgown over a heavy woollen undershirt that Ben had discarded: the pendant string floated gently to and fro as she opened the door, like some strange seamoss floating below the sea. Upstairs, in the small front room with the sleeping-porch, slept Miss Billie Edwards, twenty-four, of Missouri, the daring and masterful liontamer of Johnny L. Jones Combined Shows, then playing in the field on the hill behind the Plum Street School. Next to her, in the large airy room at the corner, Mrs. Marie Pert, forty-one, the wife of an itinerant and usually absent drug salesman, lay deep in the pit of alcoholic slumber. Upon each end of the mantel was a small snapshot in a silver frame—one of her absent daughter, Louise, eighteen, and one of Benjamin Gant, lying on the grass-bank in front of the house, propped on his elbow and wearing a wide straw hat that shaded all his face except his mouth. Also, in other chambers, front and back, Mr. Conway Richards, candy-wheel concessionaire with the Johnny L. Jones Combined Shows, Miss Lily Mangum, twenty-six, trained nurse, Mr. William H. Baskett, fifty-three, of Hattiesburg, Mississippi, cotton grower, banker, and sufferer from malaria, and his wife; in the large room at the head of the stairs Miss Annie Mitchell, nineteen, of Valdosta, Georgia, Miss Thelma Cheshire, twenty-one, of Florence, South Carolina, and Mrs. Rose Levin, twenty-eight, of Chicago, Illinois, all members of the chorus of “Molasses” Evans and His Broadway Beauties, booked out of Atlanta, Georgia, by the Piedmont Amusement Agency.
