Thomas Wolfe, page 275
There was a short silence after this, as if the others wished it understood that the Mayor had voiced their sentiments, too. Then, this mark of respect to the dead being accomplished, Jarvis Riggs spoke up heartily:
“You ought to stay around a while, Webber. You wouldn’t know the town. Things are booming down our way. Why, only the other day Mack Judson paid three hundred thousand for the Draper Block. The building is a dump, of course—what he paid for was the land. That’s five thousand a foot. Pretty good for Libya Hill, eh? The Reeves estate has bought up all the land on Parker Street below Parker Hill. They’re going to build the whole thing up with business property. That’s the way it is all over town. Within a few years Libya Hill is going to be the largest and most beautiful city in the state. You mark my words.”
“Yes,” agreed Parson Flack, nodding his head ponderously, knowingly, “and I hear they’ve been trying to buy your uncle’s property on South Main Street, there at the corner of the Square. A syndicate wants to tear down the hardware store and put up a big hotel. Your uncle wouldn’t sell. He’s smart.”
George returned to his seat feeling confused and bewildered. He was going back home for the first time in several years, and he wanted to see the town as he remembered it. Evidently he would find it considerably changed. But what was this that was happening to it? He couldn’t make it out. It disturbed him vaguely, as one is always disturbed and shaken by the sudden realization of Time’s changes in something that one has known all one’s life.
The train had hurtled like a projectile through its tube beneath the Hudson River to emerge in the dazzling sunlight of a September afternoon, and now it was racing across the flat desolation of the Jersey meadows. George sat by the window and saw the smoldering dumps, the bogs, the blackened factories slide past, and felt that one of the most wonderful things in the world is the experience of being on a train. It is so different from watching a train go by. To anyone outside, a speeding train is a thunderbolt of driving rods, a hot hiss of steam, a blurred flash of coaches, a wall of movement and of noise, a shriek, a wail, and then just emptiness and absence, with a feeling of “There goes everybody!” without knowing who anybody is. And all of a sudden the watcher feels the vastness and loneliness of America, and the nothingness of all those little lives hurled past upon the immensity of the continent. But if one is inside the train, everything is different. The train itself is a miracle of man’s handiwork, and everything about it is eloquent of human purpose and direction. One feels the brakes go on when the train is coming to a river, and one knows that the old gloved hand of cunning is at the throttle. One’s own sense of manhood and of mastery is heightened by being on a train. And all the other people, how real they are! One sees the fat black porter with his ivory teeth and the great swollen gland on the back of his neck, and one warms with friendship for him. One looks at all the pretty girls with a sharpened eye and an awakened pulse. One observes all the other passengers with lively interest, and feels that he has known them forever. In the morning most of them will be gone out of his life; some will drop out silently at night through the dark, drugged snoring of the sleepers; but now all are caught upon the wing and held for a moment in the peculiar intimacy of this pullman car which has become their common home for a night.
Two traveling salesmen have struck up a chance acquaintance in the smoking room, entering immediately the vast confraternity of their trade, and in a moment they are laying out the continent as familiarly as if it were their own backyard. They tell about running into So-and-So in St. Paul last July, and——
“Who do you suppose I met coming out of Brown’s Hotel in Denver just a week ago?”
“You don’t mean it! I haven’t seen old Joe in years!”
“And Jim Withers—they’ve transferred him to the Atlanta office!”
“Going to New Orleans?”
“No, I’ll not make it this trip. I was there in May.”
With such talk as this one grows instantly familiar. One enters naturally into the lives of all these people, caught here for just a night and hurtled down together across the continent at sixty miles an hour, and one becomes a member of the whole huge family of the earth.
Perhaps this is our strange and haunting paradox here in America—that we are fixed and certain only when we are in movement. At any rate, that is how it seemed to young George Webber, who was never so assured of his purpose as when he was going somewhere on a train. And he never had the sense of home so much as when he felt that he was going there. It was only when he got there that his homelessness began.
At the far end of the car a man stood up and started back down the aisle toward the washroom. He walked with a slight limp and leaned upon a cane, and with his free hand he held onto the backs of the seats to brace himself against the lurching of the train. As he came abreast of George, who sat there gazing out the window, the man stopped abruptly. A strong, good-natured voice, warm, easy, bantering, unafraid, unchanged—exactly as it was when it was fourteen years of age—broke like a flood of living light upon his consciousness:
“Well I’ll be dogged! Hi, there, Monkus! Where you goin’?”
At the sound of the old jesting nickname George looked up quickly. It was Nebraska Crane. The square, freckled, sunburned visage had the same humorous friendliness it had always had, and the tar-black Cherokee eyes looked out with the same straight, deadly fearlessness. The big brown paw came out and they clasped each other firmly. And, instantly, it was like coming home to a strong and friendly place. In another moment they were seated together, talking with the familiarity of people whom no gulf of years and distance could alter or separate.
George had seen Nebraska Crane only once in all the years since he himself had first left Libya Hill and gone away to college. But he had not lost sight of him. Nobody had lost sight of Nebraska Crane. That wiry, fearless little figure of the Cherokee boy who used to come down the hill on Locust Street with the bat slung over his shoulder and the well-oiled fielder’s mitt protruding from his hip pocket had been prophetic of a greater destiny, for Nebraska had become a professional baseball player, he had crashed into the big leagues, and his name had been emblazoned in the papers every day.
The newspapers had had a lot to do with his seeing Nebraska that other time. It was in August 1925, just after George had returned to New York from his first trip abroad. That very night, in fact, a little before midnight, as he was seated in a Childs Restaurant with smoking wheatcakes, coffee, and an ink-fresh copy of next morning’s Herald-Tribune before him, the headline jumped out at him: “Crane Slams Another Homer.” He read the account of the game eagerly, and felt a strong desire to see Nebraska again and to get back in his blood once more the honest tang of America. Acting on a sudden impulse, he decided to call him up. Sure enough, his name was in the book, with an address way up in the Bronx. He gave the number and waited. A man’s voice answered the phone, but at first he didn’t recognize it.
“Hello! . . . Hello! . . . Is Mr. Crane there? . . . Is that you, Bras?”
“Hello.” Nebraska’s voice was hesitant, slow, a little hostile, touched with the caution and suspicion of mountain people when speaking to a stranger. “Who is that? . . . Who? . . . Is that you, Monk?”—suddenly and quickly, as he recognized who it was. “Well I’ll be dogged!” he cried. His tone was delighted, astounded, warm with friendly greeting now, and had the somewhat high and faintly howling quality that mountain people’s voices often have when they are talking to someone over the telephone: the tone was full, sonorous, countrified, and a little puzzled, as if he were yelling to someone on an adjoining mountain peak on a gusty day in autumn when the wind was thrashing through the trees. “Where’d you come from? How the hell are you, boy?” he yelled before George could answer. “Where you been all this time, anyway?”
“I’ve been in Europe. I just got back this morning.”
“Well I’ll be dogged!”—still astounded, delighted, full of howling friendliness. “When am I gonna see you? How about comin’ to the game tomorrow? I’ll fix you up. And say,” he went on rapidly, “if you can stick aroun’ after the game, I’ll take you home to meet the wife and kid. How about it?”
So it was agreed. George went to the game and saw Nebraska knock another home run, but he remembered best what happened afterwards. When the player had had his shower and had dressed, the two friends left the ball park, and as they went out a crowd of young boys who had been waiting at the gate rushed upon them. They were those dark-faced, dark-eyed, dark-haired little urchins who spring up like dragon seed from the grim pavements of New York, but in whose tough little faces and raucous voices there still remains, curiously, the innocence and faith of children everywhere.
“It’s Bras!” the children cried. “Hi, Bras! Hey, Bras!” In a moment they were pressing round him in a swarming horde, deafening the ears with their shrill cries, begging, shouting, tugging at his sleeves, doing everything they could to attract his attention, holding dirty little scraps of paper toward him, stubs of pencils, battered little notebooks, asking him to sign his autograph.
He behaved with the spontaneous warmth and kindliness of his character. He scrawled his name out rapidly on a dozen grimy bits of paper, skillfully working his way along through the yelling, pushing, jumping group, and all the time keeping up a rapid fire of banter, badinage, and good-natured reproof:
“All right—give it here, then! . . . Why don’t you fellahs pick on somebody else once in a while? . . . Say, boy!” he said suddenly, turning to look down at one unfortunate child, and pointing an accusing finger at him—“What you doin’ aroun’ here again today? I signed my name fer you at least a dozen times!”
“No sir, Misteh Crane!” the urchin earnestly replied. “Honest—not me!”
“Ain’t that right?” Nebraska said, appealing to the other children. “Don’t this boy keep comin’ back here every day?”
They grinned, delighted at the chagrin of their fellow petitioner. “Dat’s right, Misteh Crane! Dat guy’s got a whole book wit’ nuttin’ but yoeh name in it!”
“Ah-h!” the victim cried, and turned upon his betrayers bitterly. “What youse guys tryin’ to do—get wise or somep’n? Honest, Misteh Crane!”—he looked up earnestly again at Nebraska—“Don’t believe ’em! I jest want yoeh ottygraph! Please, Misteh Crane, it’ll only take a minute!”
For a moment more Nebraska stood looking down at the child with an expression of mock sternness; at last he took the outstretched notebook, rapidly scratched his name across a page, and handed it back. And as he did so, he put his big paw on the urchin’s head and gave it a clumsy pat; then, gently and playfully, he shoved it from him, and walked off down the street.
The apartment where Nebraska lived was like a hundred thousand others in the Bronx. The ugly yellow brick building had a false front, with meaningless little turrets at the corners of the roof, and a general air of spurious luxury about it. The rooms were rather small and cramped, and were made even more so by the heavy, overstuffed Grand Rapids furniture. The walls of the living room, painted a mottled, rusty cream, were bare except for a couple of sentimental colored prints, while the place of honor over the mantel was reserved for an enlarged and garishly tinted photograph of Nebraska’s little son at the age of two, looking straight and solemnly out at all comers from a gilded oval frame.
Myrtle, Nebraska’s wife, was small and plump, and pretty in a doll-like way. Her corn-silk hair was frizzled in a halo about her face, and her chubby features were heavily accented by rouge and lipstick. But she was simple and natural in her talk and bearing, and George liked her at once. She welcomed him with a warm and friendly smile and said she had heard a lot about him.
They all sat down. The child, who was three or four years old by this time, and who had been shy, holding onto his mother’s dress and peeping out from behind her, now ran across the room to his father and began climbing all over him. Nebraska and Myrtle asked George a lot of questions about himself, what he had been doing, where he had been, and especially what countries he had visited in Europe. They seemed to think of Europe as a place so far away that anyone who had actually been there was touched with an unbelievable aura of strangeness and romance.
“Whereall did you go over there, anyway?” asked Nebraska.
“Oh, everywhere, Bras,” George said—“France, England, Holland, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Italy—all over the place.”
“Well I’ll be dogged!”—in frank astonishment. “You sure do git aroun’, don’t you?”
“Not the way you do, Bras. You’re traveling most of the time.”
“Who—me? Oh, hell, I don’t git anywhere—just the same ole places. Chicago, St. Looie, Philly—I seen ’em all so often I could find my way blindfolded!” He waved them aside with a gesture of his hand. Then, suddenly, he looked at George as though he were just seeing him for the first time, and he reached over and slapped him on the knee and exclaimed: “Well I’ll be dogged! How you doin’, anyway, Monkus?”
“Oh, can’t complain. How about you? But I don’t need to ask that. I’ve been reading all about you in the papers.”
“Yes, Monkus,” he said. “I been havin’ a good year. But, boy!”—he shook his head suddenly and grinned—“Do the ole dogs feel it!”
He was silent a moment, then he went on quietly:
“I been up here since 1919—that’s seven years, and it’s a long time in this game. Not many of ’em stay much longer. When you been shaggin’ flies as long as that you may lose count, but you don’t need to count—your legs’ll tell you.”
“But, good Lord, Bras, you’re all right! Why, the way you got around out there today you looked like a colt!”
“Yeah,” Nebraska said, “maybe I looked like a colt, but I felt like a plough horse.” He fell silent again, then he tapped his friend gently on the knee with his brown hand and said abruptly: “No, Monkus. When you been in this business as long as I have, you know it.”
“Oh, come on, Bras, quit your kidding!” said George, remembering that the player was only two years older than himself. “You’re still a young man. Why, you’re only twenty-seven!”
“Sure, sure,” Nebraska answered quietly. “But it’s like I say. You cain’t stay in this business much longer than I have. Of course, Cobb an’ Speaker an’ a few like that—they was up here a long time. But eight years is about the average, an’ I been here seven already. So if I can hang on a few years more, I won’t have no kick to make. . . . Hell!” he said in a moment, with the old hearty ring in his voice, “I ain’t got no kick to make, no-way. If I got my release tomorrow, I’d still feel I done all right. . . . Ain’t that so, Buzz?” he cried genially to the child, who had settled down on his knee, at the same time seizing the boy and cradling him comfortably in his strong arm. “Ole Bras has done all right, ain’t he?”
“That’s the way me an’ Bras feel about it,” remarked Myrtle, who during this conversation had been rocking back and forth, placidly ruminating on a wad of gum. “Along there last year it looked once or twice as if Bras might git traded. He said to me one day before the game, ‘Well, ole lady, if I don’t git some hits today somethin’ tells me you an’ me is goin’ to take a trip.’ So I says, ‘Trip where?’ An’ he says, ‘I don’t know, but they’re goin’ to sell me down the river if I don’t git goin’, an’ somethin’ tells me it’s now or never!’ So I just looks at him,” continued Myrtle placidly, “an’ I says, ‘Well, what do you want me to do? Do you want me to come today or not?’ You know, gener’ly, Bras won’t let me come when he ain’t hittin’—he says it’s bad luck. But he just looks at me a minute, an’ I can see him sort of studyin’ it over, an’ all of a sudden he makes up his mind an’ says, ‘Yes, come on if you want to; I couldn’t have no more bad luck than I been havin’, no-way, an’ maybe it’s come time fer things to change, so you come on.’ Well, I went—an’ I don’t know whether I brought him luck or not, but somethin’ did,” said Myrtle, rocking in her chair complacently.
“Dogged if she didn’t!” Nebraska chuckled. “I got three hits out of four times up that day, an’ two of ’em was home runs!”
“Yeah,” Myrtle agreed, “an’ that Philadelphia fast-ball thrower was throwin’ ’em, too.”
“He sure was!” said Nebraska.
“I know,” went on Myrtle, chewing placidly, “because I heard some of the boys say later that it was like he was throwin’ ’em up there from out of the bleachers, with all them men in shirt-sleeves right behind him, an’ the boys said half the time they couldn’t even see the ball. But Bras must of saw it—or been lucky—because he hit two home runs off of him, an’ that pitcher didn’t like it, either. The second one Bras got, he went stompin’ an’ tearin’ around out there like a wild bull. He sure did look mad,” said Myrtle in her customary placid tone.
“Maddest man I ever seen!” Nebraska cried delightedly. “I thought he was goin’ to dig a hole plumb through to China. . . . But that’s the way it was. She’s right about it. That was the day I got goin’. I know one of the boys said to me later, ‘Bras,’ he says, ‘we all thought you was goin’ to take a ride, but you sure dug in, didn’t you?’ That’s the way it is in this game. I seen Babe Ruth go fer weeks when he couldn’t hit a balloon, an’ all of a sudden he lams into it. Seems like he just cain’t miss from then on.”
All this had happened four years ago. Now the two friends had met again, and were seated side by side in the speeding train, talking and catching up on one another. When George explained the reason for his going home, Nebraska turned to him with open-mouthed astonishment, genuine concern written in the frown upon his brown and homely face.
