Thomas Wolfe, page 452
Near the cemetery they passed a place beside the road where an unpaved road of clay went upward among fields toward some lonely pines. The place beside the road was flanked by two portaled shapes of hewn granite blocks set there like markers of a splendid city yet unbuilt which would rise grandly from the hills that swept back into the green wilderness from the river—this and a large sign planted in the field was all.
But even as they passed by this loneliness of field and pine and waning light, they read some words upon the sign. The large word on the top was RIVERCREST—and down below they saw in small letters the word “Dedicated.”
“Hah? What say?” she cried out in a sharply startled tone. “What does it say below? Dedicated?”
“Wait a minute!” Lee cried abruptly, jamming his large flat foot onto the brake so violently that they were flung forward with a stunning jolt. They halted with a jarring skid and peered out at the letters of the sign:
RIVERCREST
Dedicated to All the People of This Section and to the Glory of the Greater City They Will Build.
They read the words in silence for a moment, and then she repeated them slowly and with obvious satisfaction. “Ah-hah!” she said, nodding her head slowly with deliberate agreement, “that’s just exactly it!” Then they started to move on again.
“Dedicated!” Lee muttered to himself. “Dedicated to all the people of this section,” he muttered distractedly, pushing his clumsy fingers through his hair. “To the glory of the Greater City they will build. . . . Uh-huh! Ah-hah!” he sang out madly. “Dedicated! . . . Now ain’t that nice,” he said slowly, and in a tone of mincing and delicate refinement. “Dedicated to the service of all the people of this section.” The crazy grin split wide and sudden on his handsome face. “Haw-w!” he yelled suddenly and smote himself upon the temple with the heel of his large and clumsy hand. “Dedicated to cutting your goddamn throat and bleeding you white of every nickel that you’ve got. Dedicated! Haw-w! Whah whah!”
When they got to the cemetery, they drove slowly in around a circling road and at length came to a halt on the rounded crest of the hill where the family burial lot was situated. It was a good lot—perhaps the best one on the hill—and it looked out across the deep dense green of the wooded slopes and hollows toward the central business part of town. The ramparts, spires, and buildings of the town, the old ones as well as the splendid new ones—the hotels, office buildings, garages, and arcades and concrete squares of boom development which exploded from the old design with glittering violence—were plainly visible. It was a fine view.
For a moment, after getting out of the car, the mother stood looking at the burial lot, her strong hands loosely clasped across her waist. Then shaking her head rapidly with a pursed mouth of depreciation and regret, she said: “Hm! Hm! Hm! Too bad, too bad, too bad!”
“What’s that, mama?” Lee said. “What’s too bad?”
“Why, that they should have ever chosen such a place as this for the cemetery,” she said regretfully. “Why, as I told Frank Candler just the other day, they’ve gone and deliberately given away the two best building sites in town to the niggers and the dead people! That’s just exactly what they’ve done! I’ve always said as much—that the two finest building sites in town for natural beauty are Niggertown and Riverview Cemetery. I could have told them that long years ago—they should have known as much themselves if any of them could have seen an inch beyond his nose—that someday the town would grow up and this would be valuable property! Why, why on earth! When they were looking for a cemetery site—why on earth didn’t they think of findin’ one across the river, up there on Patton Hill, say, where you get a beautiful view—out of town somewhere, where property is not so valuable? But this!” she cried. “This by rights is building property! And as for the niggers, I’ve always said that they’d have been better off if they were put down there on those old flats in the depot section! Now it’s too late, of course,—nothin’ can be done—but it was certainly a grave mistake,” she said, and shook her head. “I’ve always known it.”
“Well, I guess you’re right,” Lee muttered absently. “I never thought of it before, but I guess you’re right.”
“And to think,” the mother went on in a moment, with that curious fragmentary semblance of irrelevance which was not irrelevant at all, “—and to think that he would go and move her—to think that any man could be so hard-hearted as to—o-oh!” She shuddered with a brief convulsive pucker of revulsion. “It makes my blood run cold to think of it—and I told him so!—to think he would have no more mercy in him than to go and move her from the place where she lay buried.”
“Why, who was that, mama?” Lee said absently. “Move who?”
“Why, Lydia, of course, child!” she said impatiently, gesturing briefly to the old and weather-rusted stone beneath which her husband’s first wife lay buried. “That’s the thing that started all this moving! We’d never have thought of coming here if it hadn’t been for Lydia!—And here,” she cried fretfully, “the woman had been dead and in her grave more than a year when he gets this notion in his head he’s got to move her—and you couldn’t reason wuth him! You couldn’t argue wuth him!” she cried with vehement surprise. “I tried to talk to him about it, but it was like talking to a stone wall—no, sir!” Here, with a movement of strong decision, she shook her head. “He’d made up his mind, he was determined—and he wouldn’t budge from it an inch! . . . ‘But see here, man,’ I said. ‘The thing’s not right!—The woman ought to stay where she’s buried!’ I didn’t like the look of it! ‘Even the dead have got their rights,’ I said”—again the powerful short tremor of the face—“‘Where the tree falls there let it lie!’—but no! he wouldn’t listen, you couldn’t talk to him. He says, ‘I’ll move her if it’s the last thing I ever live to do! I’ll move her if I have to dig her up myself and carry the coffin on my back to Riverview—but that’s where she’s going, and you needn’t argue any more!’ Well, I saw then that he had his mind made up and that it wouldn’t do any good to talk to him about it. But oh! an awful mistake, an awful mistake!” she muttered with the powerful short movement of the head—“All that moving and expense for nothing—if he’d felt that way he should have gone to Riverview in the beginning when she died—but that’s when he bought this lot, all right,” she now said tranquilly—“And that’s the reason that the rest of them are buried here. That’s how it was all right,” she said, “but I’ve always regretted it! I was against it from the start.”
And for a moment she was silent, looking with the contemplation of a grave-eyed memory at the weather-rusted stone.
“Well, as I say, then,” she went on calmly, “when I saw he had his mind made up and that there was no use to try to change him—Well, I went out to the old cemetery the day they moved her—oh! one of those raw windy days you get in March! The very kind of day she died on. And old Mrs. Wrenn and Amy Williamson—of course, they had both been good friends of Lydia’s—they went along, too. And, of course, when we got out there, they were curious, they wanted to have a look, you know,” she went on calmly, describing this grisly desire with no surprise whatever, “and they tried to get me to take a look at it, too. ‘No,’ I said. ‘You go on and satisfy your curiosity if that’s what you want to do, but I won’t look at it!’ I said, ‘I’d rather remember her the way she was.’ Well, they went ahead and did it, then. They got old Prov—you know, he was the old nigger man that worked for us—to open up the coffin, and I turned my back and walked away a little piece until they got through lookin’,” she said tranquilly, “and pretty soon, I heard them comin’. Well, I turned around and looked at them, and let me tell you something,” she said gravely, “their faces were a study. Oh, they turned pale and they trembled. ‘Well, are you satisfied?’ I said. ‘Did you find what you were lookin’ for?’ ‘Oh-h,’ says old Mrs. Wrenn, pale as a ghost, shakin’ and wringin’ her hands, you know, ‘Oh, Delia,’ she says, ‘it was awful. I’m sorry that I looked,’ she said.
“‘Ah-hah!’ I says. ‘What did I tell you! You see, don’t you?’ Says, ‘Oh-h, it was all gone—all gone—all rotted away to nothing so you couldn’t recognize her. The face was all gone until you could see the teeth, and the nails had all grown out long—but Delia!’ she says, ‘the hair!—the hair!—oh! I tell you what,’ she says, ‘the hair was beautiful! It had grown out until it covered everything—the finest head of hair I ever saw on anyone. But the rest of it—oh! I’m sorry that I looked!’ she says. ‘Well, I thought so! I thought so!’ I said. ‘I knew you’d be sorry, so I wouldn’t look!’—But that’s the way it was all right,” she concluded with the tranquil satisfaction of omniscience.
VIII
At one corner of the burial lot a tall locust tree was growing: its pleasant shade was divided between the family lot and the adjacent one where members of the mother’s family, the Pentlands, had been buried. The gravestones in the family lot (which was set on a gentle slope) were arranged in two parallel rows. In the first row were buried John’s brothers, Arthur McFarlane Hawke and Edward Madison Hawke, who were twins: also his mother’s first child, Margaret Ann.
Facing these was the family monument. It was a square massive chunk of gray metallic granite, brilliantly burnished, one of the finest and most imposing monuments in the cemetery. It bore the family name in raised letters upon its shining surface, and on each end were inscriptions for his father and his mother. His father was buried at the end of the monument which faced the town. His inscription read: “William Oliver Hawke—Born near Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, April 16, 1851—Died, Altamont, Old Catawba, June 21, 1922.” The mother’s inscription was at the other end of the monument, facing her own people, and read: “Delia Elizabeth Hawke—née Pentland—Born at the Forks of Ivy, Old Catawba, February 16, 1860—Died—”
All of the monuments, save his father’s and mother’s, had, in addition to the name and birth and death inscription, a little elegiac poem, carved in a fine italicized script, and reading somewhat as follows:
Still is the voice we knew so well
Vanished the face we love
Flown his spirit pure to dwell
With Angels up above.
Ours is the sorrow, ours the pain
And ours the joy alone
To clasp him in our arms again
In Heaven by God’s throne.
In the drowsy waning light of the late afternoon, John could see people moving across the great hill of the dead, among the graves and monuments of other burial lots. The place had the brooding hush a cemetery has on a summer day, and in the fading light even the figures of the people had a dream-like and almost phantasmal quality as they moved about.
The mother stood surveying the scene reflectively, her hands held at the waist in their loose strong clasp. She looked at the gravestones in the family lot, reading the little elegiac verses, and although she had read these banal phrases a thousand times, she did so again with immense satisfaction, framing the words with her lips and then nodding her head slowly and deliberately in a movement of emphatic affirmation, as if to say: “Ah-hah! That’s it exactly!”
For a moment longer, she stood looking at the stones. Then she went over to Ed’s grave, picked up a wreath of laurel leaves which someone had left there a few weeks before, and which had already grown withered and faded looking, and set it at the head of the grave against the base of the stone. Then she moved about among the graves, bending with a blunt, strong movement and weeding out tufts of the coarse grass which had grown weedily about the bases of some of the monuments.
When she had finished, she stood looking down at Margaret’s stone, which was weathered, stained, and rusty looking. She read the inscription of the old faded letters, and then turning to her youngest son, spoke quietly:
“This morning at eight o’clock, thirty-nine years ago, I lost the first child that I ever had. Your sister Margaret died today—July the fourteenth—four days less than nine months old. She was the most perfect baby I ever saw—the brightest and most sensible child for her age.” And again she nodded her head slowly and deliberately, in a movement of powerful affirmation.
“Time went on, I had other children, kept my hands full, and to a certain degree,” she said reflectively, “kept my mind off sorrow. No time for sorrow!” cried the mother, with the strong convulsive tremor of the head. “Too much to do for sorrow! . . . Then, when years had passed, the hardest blow of all fell. Arthur was taken. It seemed I had given up all. Could have borne as well if all the others had been taken! I can’t understand why!” And for a moment her brown worn eyes were wet. “But it had grown a part of me—felt somehow that he was to lead the others, and when I realized that he was gone, it seemed that everything was lost.
“I never got to know Ed,” she said quietly. “I always wanted to talk to him, but could not. I felt a part of him was gone—maybe he felt so, too. It was hard to give Ed up, but I had suffered the first great loss in giving up his twin, the other part.”
She paused, looking down at the two tombstones for a moment, and then said gravely and proudly: “I believe that they have joined each other, and if they are happy, I’ll be reconciled. I believe I’ll meet them in a Higher Sphere, along with all the members of our family—all happy and all leading a new life.”
She was silent for another moment, and then, with a movement of strong decision, she turned away and looked out toward the town where already the evening lights were going on, were burning hard and bright and steady in the dusk.
“Come now, my sonny boys!” she cried briskly and cheerfully. “It’s getting dark, and there are people waiting for us.
“Son,” she said, laying her broad hand on John’s shoulder in a warm, strong, and easy gesture, and speaking in the old half-bantering manner that she had used so often when he was a child, “I’ve been a long time livin’ on this earth, and as the fellow says, the world do move. You’ve got your life ahead of you, and lots to learn and many things to do, but let me tell you something, boy!” and for a moment she looked at him in a sudden, straight, and deadly fashion, with a faint smile around the edges of her mouth. “Go out and see the world, and get your fill of wanderin’, and then,” she cried, “come back and tell me if you’ve found a better place than home! I’ve seen great changes in my time, and I’ll see many more before I die, and there are great things yet in store for us—great progress, great inventions, it will all come true. Perhaps I’ll not live to see it, but you will! We’ve got a fine town here, and we’ve got fine people here to make it go, and we’re not done yet. I’ve seen it all grow up out of a country village—and some day we will have a great city here.”
IX
A great city? These words, he knew, had come straight from his mother’s heart, from all the invincible faith of her brave spirit which had endured the anguish, grief, and suffering of a hundred lives and which would never change. That unshaken spirit would, he knew, face toward the future to the last hour of her life with this same unyielding confidence, and would be triumphant over all the ruinous error and mischance of life. And for her, he knew, this “great city” that she spoke of now was the city of her heart, her faith, her spirit—the city of the everlasting future, and her quenchless hope, the fortunate, good, and happy life that some day she was sure would be found here on the earth for all men living.
But that other city, this glittering and explosive shape of man’s destructive fury which now stood sharply in their vision in the evening light—what did the future hold for that place and its people? In this strange and savage hunger for what she had spoken of as a better life, a greater city, in this delirium of intoxication which drove them on, there was really a fatal and desperate quality, as if what they hungered for was ruin and death. It seemed to him that they were ruined: it seemed that even when they laughed and shouted and smote one another on the back, the knowledge of their ruin was in them—and they did not care, they were drunk and mad and amorous of death.
But under all their flash and play of life, the paucity of their designs—the starved meagerness of their lives—was already apparent to them. The better life resolved itself into a few sterile and baffled gestures—they built an ugly and expensive house and bought a car and joined a country club; they built a larger, uglier, and more expensive house, bought a more expensive car, and joined a larger and more expensive country club—they pursued this routine through all the repetitions of an idiot monotony, building new houses, new streets, new country clubs with a frenzied haste, a wild extravagance, but nowhere was there food to feed their hunger, drink to assuage their thirst. They were stricken and lost, starved squirrels chasing furiously the treadmill of a revolving cage, and they saw it, and they knew it.
A wave of ruinous and destructive energy had welled up in them—they had squandered fabulous sums in meaningless streets and bridges, they had torn down the ancient public buildings, court house, and city hall, and erected new ones, fifteen stories tall and large enough to fill the needs of a city of a million people; they had leveled hills and bored through mountains, building magnificent tunnels paved with double roadways and glittering with shining tiles—tunnels which leaped out on the other side into Arcadian wilderness. It was mad, infuriate, ruinous; they had flung away the earnings of a lifetime and mortgaged those of a generation to come; they had ruined themselves, their children and their city, and nothing could be done to stop them.
