Thomas Wolfe, page 450
He died four months later, and death was merciful, for he was a paralyzed gibbering idiot of a man when death released him.
That was the year the war came. And war brings death to men as well as life. To the old man it brings ruin, heart-break, hopelessness, and death. But to the young man it impends forever like a glorious and exultant prophesy in every blade and leaf and flower, in a woman’s laughter in the dark, and the all-enfolding mystery of velvet-breasted night. It fills his heart with thoughts of glory and exultant joy, with haunting memories of old time, and the lost voices and forgotten faces of his father’s youth. And it comes to him like madness in the night, whispering its dark and secret promises of fame, the fellowship of heroes, the love of glorious women, with flight and darkness, morning, and the earth.
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BOOM TOWN
[The American Mercury, May 1934]
I
Through the windows of the train he could see the flat, formless earth of New Jersey, loaded with its swarming weight of men and cities, with slum, swamp, and filthy tenement, with suburb and the ugliness of industry—cinder and yard and rust and waste, stubble and field and wood, steel and smoke-glazed glass and factory chimney, stroking forever past the moving windows into the infinite progressions of the stifled land. All through the early afternoon this flat uncharactered earth faded away into the powerful and weary hazes of the heat: the earth was parched and dusty looking, hot with coarse yellowed grasses and the withered stalks of flowerless weeds. Then, under a glazed and burning sky the train pounded down across the States of Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Maryland, paused for forty minutes in the fading glow of a weary day at Washington, and toward dark slowly rumbled over the Potomac and entered the broad heat-stricken Commonwealth of Virginia. It was the end of June: already the weather had grown very hot, and there had been no rain for weeks.
A gigantic panorama of a continent gasping for its breath unfolded as the train rushed on: everywhere within the hot green airless depth of the train and outside, at stations on the pauses of the journey, the talk was all of drought and heat: in great engines steaming slowly on the tracks, or passive as great cats, the engineers were wiping wads of blackened waste across their grimy faces, the wilted passengers in other trains fanned feebly at their faces a sheaf of languid paper, or sat in a soaked and sweltering dejection.
All through the night he lay in his dark berth and watched, as he had watched so many times before, the old earth of Virginia as it stroked past him in the dream-haunted silence of the moon. Field and hill and gulch and stream and bridge and dreaming wood, then field and hill and gulch and stream and wood again, the old earth, the everlasting earth of America, kept stroking past him in the steep silence of the moon.
All through the ghostly stillness of the land the train made on forever its tremendous noise fused of a thousand sounds and haunted by the spell of time. And that sound evoked for him a million images: old songs, old faces and forgotten memories, and all strange, wordless, and unspoken things men know and live and feel, and never find a language for, the legend of dark time, the sad brevity of their days, the strange and bitter miracle of life itself. And through the thousand rhythms of this one design he heard again, as he had heard ten thousand times in childhood, the pounding wheel, the tolling bell, the whistle wail. Far, faint, and lonely as a dream, it came to him again through that huge spell of time and silence and the earth, evoking for him, as it had always done, its tongueless prophecy of life, its wild and secret cry of joy and pain, and its intolerable promises of the new lands, morning and a shining city.
But now the strange and lonely cry of the great train, which had haunted his whole life and which, far and faint from some green mountain of the South, had come to him so often as a child at night, bringing to him huge promises of flight and darkness, was speaking to him with an equal strangeness of return. For he was going home again. And sudden, blind, and furious as all his wandering had been, was his return. He was going home again, and he did not know the reason for his going.
What was he looking for? What did he hope to find at home? He did not know. A restless wanderer, twenty-five years old, an obscure instructor at one of the universities in the city, a nameless atom in the terrific manswarm of the city’s life, he was not by any standard which his native town could know—“successful,” “a success.” And more than anything, he feared the sharp, the appraising eye, the worldly judgments of that little town. Yet now he was returning to it. Why?
Suddenly, a memory of his years away from home, the years of wandering in many lands and cities, returned to him. He remembered how many times he had thought of home with such an intensity of passion that he could close his eyes and see the scheme of every street in town, and every house upon each street, and the faces of ten thousand people, as well as the memory of all their words, the densely woven fabric of all their histories.
Why had he felt so, thought so, remembered with such blazing accuracy, if it had not mattered, and if, in the vast homeless unrest of his spirit, this little town, and the immortal hills around it, was not the only home he had on earth? He did not know. All that he knew was that the years flow by like water and that one day men come home again.
The train rushed onward through the moonlit land.
II
When he looked from the windows of the train the next morning, the hills were there again: they towered immense and magical into the blue weather, and suddenly coolness was there, the winey sparkle of the air and the shining brightness, and it seemed to him that he had never left them and that all which had passed in the years between was like a dream.
Above him was the huge bulk of the hills, the looming shapes around him, the dense massed green of the wilderness, the cloven cuts and gulches of the mountain passes, the dizzy steepness, and the sudden drops below. He could see the little huts stuck to the edge of bank and gulch and hollow, set far below him in the gorges, toy-small, yet closer, nearer than a dream. All this, so far, so near, so strange, and so familiar, refound like something we have always known and remembered, lost the instant that we find it, the everlasting stillness of the earth now meeting the intimate toiling slowness of the train as it climbed upward round the sinuous curves, was near and instant as a vision, more lost yet more familiar than his mother’s face.
At last the train came sweeping down the long sloping bend into the suburban junction two miles from town, where his family always met him when he came home. But even before the train had come to a full halt at the little station, he had looked out the windows and seen with this same sense of instant recognition the figures of his mother and his brother, waiting for him on the platform as he knew he would find them.
He could see his brother, Lee, teetering restlessly from one flat foot to another as his glance went back and forth along the windows of the train in search of him. He could see his mother’s strong short figure, planted solidly, her hands clasped across her waist in their loose and powerful grip, her white face with its delicate pursed mouth turned toward the windows of the train, her glance darting back and forth with the curious, startled, animal-like swiftness and intensity all her family had.
And even as he swung down from the car-steps of the Pullman and, valise in hand, strode toward the platform across the rock ballast of the roadbed and the powerful gleaming rails, he knew instantly, with this intuitive feeling of strangeness and recognition, just what they would say to him at the moment of their meeting.
Now his mother and his brother had seen him. He could see his mother speak excitedly to his brother, and motion toward him. And now his brother was coming toward him on the run, his broad clumsy hand extended in a gesture of welcome, his rich tenor shouting greetings at him as he came:
“How are you, boy?” he shouted. “Put it there!” he cried heartily as he came up and vigorously wrung him by the hand. “Glad to see you, John.”
And still shouting greetings, he reached over and attempted to take the valise. The inevitable argument, vehement and protesting, began immediately, and in another moment, as always, the older brother was in triumphant possession, and the two were walking together toward the platform, Lee shouting scornfully all the time in answer to the other’s protests: “Oh, for God’s sake! Forget about it! I’ll let you do as much for me when I come up to the Big Town to visit you! . . . Here’s mama!” he said abruptly, as they came up on the platform. “I know she’ll be glad to see you!”
She was waiting for him with the bridling and rather confused movement that was characteristic of her in moments of strong excitement. Her powerful and delicate mouth was smiling tremulously, her worn faded brown eyes were wet with the tears which the sight of a train arriving and departing always seemed to cause.
“Hello, mama,” he said, somewhat thickly and excitedly. “How are you, mama?”
He hugged her hard, planting a clumsy kiss on her white face. In a moment they released each other, and his mother, holding his hand in her strong warm clasp, stepped back a pace and regarded him with the old tremulous, half-bantering expression she had used so often when he was a child.
“Well, well, well!” she said. “Hm-m!” she said, making a little humming noise as she spoke. “My ba-aby!”
John reddened in the face, making an awkward and indefinite gesture, and could find nothing adequate to say. Then he looked quickly at his brother; for a moment they regarded each other with a tormented glance, then both began to grin at the same time, he sullenly, his brother with a wide, swiftly developing grin of wild exuberance, which suddenly split his handsome face with an idiotic and exultant glee. That grin was followed immediately by the tremendous chortling of mad laughter, the huge “Whah—whah-h!—Haw-w” his brother cried, smiting his forehead with the back of one clumsy hand. “‘My baby’—haw-w!” he cried again, and smote himself. “God-damn!”
“Well, now, sonny boy,” his mother now said briskly, “come on, now! I’ve got a good breakfast waiting for you when you get home!”
“How’s Helen, mama,” John broke in, somehow disturbed by the failure of his sister to meet him.
“Hah? What say? Helen?” she said quickly, in a sharp, surprised kind of tone. “Oh, she’s all right. And yes, now! She called up before we left this morning and said to give you her love and tell you she’d be over later. Said she wanted to come along to meet you but had to stay at home because Roy McIntyre had ’phoned her he had a prospect for that place of theirs on Weaver Street and wanted to bring him over right away to look at it. Of course, she and Hugh are anxious to sell, want to move out there and build on one of those lots they own on Grovewood Terrace. Say they’ll take eight thousand for the house—two thousand down, but I told her to take cash. I told her not to listen to Roy McIntyre if he tries to trade in on the deal any of those lots he’s got up there on the hill in Ridgewood.”
Here she gestured toward the hill that swept back in a slope of massed leafy green behind the railroad tracks, and with a short and almost compulsive tremor of her strong, pursed face, she shook her head in a movement of emphatic negation.
“Mama!” Lee, who during the course of these remarks had been teetering restlessly back and forth on his large feet, thrusting his fingers through his flashing hair in a distracted manner, and finally consulting his watch uneasily, now spoke in a tone of patient but somewhat strained courtesy:
“I think if we get started—”
“Why, yes!” she cried instantly in a tone of briskly cheerful but rather startled agreement. “That’s the very thing. This very minute, sir! I’m ready any time you are! Come on!” and she started to move off with a confused and bridling movement of her strong frame.
“But as I say, now,” she continued quickly, turning to John again, “I told her not to listen to him if he wants to swap. No, sir!” Here she shook her head emphatically. “I told her if that’s what he’s trying to do I’d pay no attention to him for a minute! Hm!”—she shook her head with a little scornful smile—“That’s what he was trying to do. Why, here, now! Yes! You see what he was up to, don’t you? Why, didn’t he try the same trick on me? Didn’t he come to me? Didn’t he try to trade with me? Oh, here, along you know the first part of last April,” she said impatiently with a dismissing gesture of her broad hand, as if all this splintered and explosive information must be perfectly clear to everyone—“with Dr. Gibbs, Rufe Mears, Erwin Featherstone, and all the rest of that crowd that’s in with him. Says: ‘I’ll tell you what I’ll do. We know you’re a good trader, we respect your judgment, and we want you in,’ he says, ‘and just to have you with us, why, I’ll trade you three fine lots I own up there on Pinecrest Road in Ridgewood for that house and lot you own on Preston Avenue.’
“Says: ‘You won’t have to put up a cent of your own money. Just to get you in with us I’ll make an even swap with you!’ ‘Well,’ I says—”
III
“Mama,” John broke in desperately, stunned and bewildered by this mad obsession which had so completely filled and conquered her that everything else on earth—home, friends, children, absence and return, the whole chronicle of her life—had been submerged and for the time forgotten:
“Mama,” he began desperately again, but bewildered, not knowing what to say, “don’t you think it would be better if . . .”
“Hah? What say?” Startled from that flood-tide of her obsession, she looked suddenly at him with the quick, instant attentiveness of a bird. “Well, as I say, you see now,” she went on, seeing that he did not answer. “Said to him when they first came to me—Roy McIntyre, old Gibbs, and then, of course, that’s so—” she went on reflectively, “Rufe Mears was there as . . .”
“Couldn’t we?” John blurted out with the blind confusion of a man who has suddenly come upon an undiscovered continent. “Why couldn’t we go home now, and eat our breakfast and then call up Helen—couldn’t we—”
“Why, yes! The very thing! I’m ready, sir!”
“I think, mama,” Lee now said gently with the tortured pleading, almost comic patience of exasperation, “I think that if we could—” and at this moment his tormented eyes suddenly met, stopped, rested for a moment on the astounded, bewildered look his brother gave him. For a minute they looked at each other with earnest, asking looks—then suddenly the bursting of wild glee upon his brother’s face.
“Haw-w,” Lee yelled, “haw-w,” prodding his brother in the ribs, “haw-w!” he cried. “You’ll see—oh, you’ll see, all right!” he gloated. “Frankly I have to laugh when I think about it. Frankly I do!” he said earnestly. Then, looking at the astonished face before him, he burst into the devastating roar again: “Haw-w! Whah-whah-h! You’ll see,” he said mysteriously and mockingly. “Oh, you’ll get it now,” he cried. “Nineteen hours a day, from daybreak to three o’clock in the morning—no holts barred!” he chortled. “They’ll be waiting for us when we get there,” he said. “They’re all lined up there on the front porch in a reception committee to greet you and to cut your throat, every damn mountain grill of a real estate man in town. Old Horse Face Hines, the undertaker; Skin-em-alive Roy McIntyre; Skunk-eye Rufe Mears the demon promoter; and old squeeze-your-heart’s-blood Gibbs, the widder and orphan man from Arkansas;—they’re all there!” he said gloatingly. “She told ’em you’re a prospect, and they’re waiting for you—every cut-throat swindler of a real estate man in town! It’s your turn now!” he yelled. “She’s told ’em that you’re on the way, and they’re drawin’ lots right now to see which one gets your shirt and which one takes the pants and B.V.D.s. Haw-w! Whah-whah-h!” he poked his younger brother in the ribs.
“They’ll get nothing from me,” John said angrily, “for I haven’t got it to begin with.”
“Haw-w! Whah-whah-h!” Lee yelled. “That doesn’t matter. If you’ve got an extra collar button, they’ll take that as the first installment, and then and then—haw-w!—they’ll collect your goddam cufflinks, socks, and your pants suspenders in easy installments,” he said gloatingly, “as the years roll on. Haw-w! Whah-h!” he yelled, prodding his brother with clumsy fingers as he saw the sullen and astounded look upon his face. Then, seeing his mother’s white, pursed, and reproving face, he suddenly prodded her in the ribs, at which she shrieked in a vexed manner and slapped his rough hand.
“I’ll vow, boy!” she cried fretfully. “What on earth’s the matter with you? Why, you act like a regular idiot. I’ll vow you do!”
“Haw! Whah-h!” he yelled again. Then, still grinning, he picked up the valise and started rapidly across the station platform toward his battered little car, which was parked at the curb not more than twenty yards away.
And in this manner, accompanied every foot of the way by his mother’s torrential discourse, which gave him with encyclopedic fullness the speculative history of every piece of real estate they passed, punctuated from time to time by his brother’s prodding fingers in his ribs, the limitless and exultant madness of his great “whah-whah-h,” the youthful native, after years of wandering, returned to his own town again—and found there a strange mad life, a glittering city, a wild and drunken fury he had never seen before.
IV
The streets were foaming with a mad exuberant life, crowded with strange expensive traffic, with a thousand points of glittering machinery, winking and blazing imperially in the hot bright air, filled with new faces he had never seen. And the faces of the people he had known shone forth from time to time like a remembered door, like a street he had gone to once, or like lights in the enormous darkness of a lonely coast. And yet on the faces of everyone, natives and strangers alike, there was burning the drunken glow of an unholy glee. Their feet swarmed and scampered on the pavements, their bodies darted, dodged, thrust, and twisted as if the leaping energy of some powerful drug was driving them on. For the first time he witnessed the incredible spectacle of an entire population which was drunk—drunk on the same powerful liquors, drunk with an intoxication which never wore off and which never made them weary, dead, or sodden, but which drove them on constantly to new heights of leaping and scampering exuberance.
