Thomas Wolfe, page 485
III
They were filled with folly, love, and jubilation, and they would not have cared how their words might sound to anyone on earth—how foolish, mad, or sensual. They looted their lives out with an insatiate desire, they loved, embraced, and clung and questioned, imagined, answered, believed, denied, giving the full measure of their lives and then beginning all over with a quenchless thirst—but it was like a great fire burning all the time. They lived ten thousand hours together, and each hour was like the full course of a packed and crowded life. And always it was like hunger: it began like hunger, and it went on forever like a hunger that was never satisfied—he felt a literal, physical, and insatiate hunger that could have eaten her alive. When she was with him, he was mad because he could not have her and consume her utterly as he desired, and when she had left him, he would go mad with thinking of her.
She was central, like an inexorable presence, to every action, every feeling, every memory of his life. It was not that he thought directly of her at all times. It was not that he was unable for a moment to free his brain of an all-obsessing image on which the whole energy of his life was focused. No. Her conquest was ten thousand times more formidable than this. For had she dwelt there in the courts of the heart only as some proud empress throned in the temporal images of the brain, she could perhaps have been expelled by some effort of the will, some savage act of violence and dismissal, some oblivion of debauch, or some deliberate scourging of the soul to hate. But she had entered into the porches of the blood, she had soaked through all the tissues of the flesh, she had permeated the convolutions of the brain until now she inhabited his flesh, his blood, his life, like a subtle and powerful spirit that could never again be driven out any more than a man could drive out of him the blood of his mother, secrete unto himself the blood and tissue of his father’s life.
Thus, whether he thought of her with deliberate consciousness or not, she was now present, with a damnable and inescapable necessity, in every act and moment of his life. Nothing was his own any more, not even the faintest, farthest memories of his childhood. She inhabited his life relentlessly to its remotest sources, haunting his memory like a witness to every proud and secret thing that had been his own. She was founded in the center of his life now so that she could never for a second be forgotten, and as if she had dwelt there forever. She was mixed and mingled with his flesh, diffused through all the channels of his life, coming and going with every breath he took with respiring hues of brightness, beating and moving in every pulse.
And sometimes she was the subtle, potent bait of life, the fabled lure of proud evil cities, cunningly painted with the hues of innocence and morning, the evil snare that broke the backs of youth, and spread corruption in the hearts of living men, and took all of their visions and their strength in fee.
And sometimes she was like morning, joy, and triumph, the lights of April, and the glorious and wholesome succulence of good food. Thus, as he stood there, he would smell suddenly and remember again the food she was cooking in the kitchen, and a wild and limitless gluttony, which somehow identified her with the food she cooked, would well up in him. He would grip her savagely in a powerful vise of knees and hands, and cry out in a hoarse and passionate tone: “Food! Food! Food!”
Then he would loosen her from the vise-like grip: they would embrace more gently, she would kiss him and say in a tender and eager tone:
“Are you hungry, are you hungry, my dear?”
“Oh, if music be the food of love, play on Macduff, and damned be him that first cries hold, enough!”
“I’ll feed you,” she said eagerly. “I’ll cook for you; I’ll get the food for you, my dear.”
“You are my food!” he cried, seizing her again. “You are meat, drink, butter, and bread and wine to me!” he said, with a feeling of hunger and madness rising up in him. “You are my cake, my caviar, you are my onion soup!”
“Shall I make you some onion soup?” she then said eagerly. “Is that what you would like?”
Again the glorious smell of the food would come to him, and he would say: “You are my Yankee pot roast, my broiled tenderloin, my delicate and succulent chop!” shaking her gently to and fro, and covering her small glowing face with kisses.
“Shall I make you a Yankee pot roast? Would you like a chop? Shall I broil you a steak?” she said eagerly.
“Why, you—you—you!” he cried, with a movement of convulsive difficulty. “You are my fresh fruit salad, you are my big yellow salad bowl, you are my crisp green leaves of lettuce, my great ripe pears and oranges, my celery, pineapple, cherries, apples, and the rich French dressing that goes with it.”
“Shall I make you one?” she said.
“You are my dinner and my cook in one: you are my girl with the subtle soul and the magical hand, you are the one who feeds me, and now, my sweet pet, now, my delicate darling,” he cried, seizing her and drawing her to him, “now my jolly and juicy wench, I am going to have my dinner.”
“Yes!” the woman cried, lifting her glowing face and staring straight before her, in a tranced and focal cry of complete surrender. “Yes!”
“Are you my girl? Are you my tender, rich, and juicy girl?” he said.
“Yes,” she said.
“Are you my delicate damned darling and my dear?”
“Yes,” she said, “I am your darling and you dear!”
“Are you my duck?” he crowed with a fierce exultant joy. “Are you my darling and my duck?”
“Yes,” she said, “I am your darling and your duck. I am the duck that loves you,” she said.
“Is that my arm?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Is that my haunch? Is that my velvet thigh? Are those my ribs? Is that my tender satin hide? Is that my neck? Is that my warm round throat, are these my delicate fingers and my apple-cheeks? Is that my red-rose lip, and the sweet liquor of my juicy tongue?”
“Yes!” she said. “Yes, it is all yours!”
“Can I beat you, my duck?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Can I eat you, my sweet pet? Can I broil you, roast you, stew you, have you with a little parsley and a golden buttered sauce?”
“Yes,” she said, “in any way you like!”
“Can I devour you? Can I feed my hunger on you? Can I entomb you in my flesh forever?”
And for a moment, a black convulsion of madness, shame, and death swept through his brain as he bent with ravening hunger over her, and he cried out the burden of his hatred and despair:
“Can I feed, replenish, and fill with all the fountains of my life all the unsated ocean of your hot desire? Oh, tell me now! Can I wring from you as a reward for ruin and defeat the yolky cries of prayerful pleading, rich satiety? Can I depend upon you now to drive me mad with shame and horror and defeat, to feed the dead men with the life and passion of a living man? Will you stab me to the entrails of my life in the cruel green of Spring, lapse languorously with soft lying words of noble giving to the embraces of your lovers, betray me to my enemies in April, defeat me with the pride of scorn and the ruinous lusts of the old faithless race of man?”
“Oh, you are mad,” she cried, “and your mind is black and twisted with its evil.”
But instantly the wave of death and horror would pass out of him as quickly as it came, as if he had not heard her voice—and he would say again with swelling joy and certitude:
“Or can I feed my life on your rich flower, get all your life and richness into me, walk about with you inside me, breathe you into my lungs like harvest, absorb you, eat you, melt you, have you in my brain, my heart, my pulse, my blood forever, to confound the enemy and to laugh at death, to love and comfort me, to strengthen me with certitude and wisdom, to make my life prevail, and to make me sound, strong, glorious, and triumphant with your love forever!”
“Yes!” the woman cried out strongly, with the final, fierce, and absolute surrender of her conquest. “Yes! . . . Yes! . . . Yes! . . . Forever!”
And the cat crept trembling at its merciless stride along the ridges of the backyard fence. The young leaves turned and rustled in the light winds of April, and the sunlight came and went with all its sudden shifting hues into the pulsing heart of that enchanted green. The hoof and the wheel went by upon the street as they had done forever, the man-swarm milled and threaded in the million-footed stupefaction of the streets, and the high, immortal sounds of time, murmurous and everlasting, brooded forever in the upper air above the fabulous walls and towers of the city. And the woman looked at it again and put her hand upon her breast and cried, “Forever!” And all as if it was just the same as it had always been, and both of them were certain it was true.
[¬]
THE CHILD BY TIGER
[The Saturday Evening Post, September 11, 1937]
Tiger, tiger, burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
One day after school, twenty-five years ago, several of us were playing with a football in the yard at Randy Shepperton’s. Randy was calling signals and handling the ball. Nebraska Crane was kicking it. Augustus Potterham was too clumsy to run or kick or pass, so we put him at center, where all he’d have to do would be to pass the ball back to Randy when he got the signal.
It was late in October, and there was a smell of smoke, of leaves, of burning in the air. Nebraska had just kicked to us. It was a good kick, too—a high, soaring punt that spiraled out above my head, behind me. I ran back and tried to get it, but it was far and away “over the goal line”—that is to say, out in the street. It hit the street and bounded back and forth with that peculiarly erratic bounce a football has.
The ball rolled away from me down toward the corner. I was running out to get it when Dick Prosser, Shepperton’s new Negro man, came along, gathered it up neatly in his great black paw and tossed it to me. He turned in then, and came on down the alleyway, greeting us as he did. He called all of us “Mister” except Randy, and Randy was always “Cap’n”—“Cap’n Shepperton.” This formal address—“Mr.” Crane, “Mr.” Potterham, “Mr.” Spangler, “Cap’n” Shepperton—pleased us immensely, gave us a feeling of mature importance and authority.
“Cap’n Shepperton” was splendid! It had a delightful military association, particularly when Dick Prosser said it. Dick had served a long enlistment in the United States Army. He had been a member of a regiment of crack Negro troops upon the Texas border, and the stamp of the military man was evident in everything he did. It was a joy, for example, just to watch him split kindling. He did it with a power, a kind of military order, that was astounding. Every stick he cut seemed to be exactly the same length and shape as every other one. He had all of them neatly stacked against the walls of the Shepperton basement with such a regimented faultlessness that it almost seemed a pity to disturb their symmetry for the use for which they were intended.
It was the same with everything else he did. His little whitewashed basement room was as spotless as a barracks room. The bare board floor was always cleanly swept, a plain bare table and a plain straight chair were stationed exactly in the center of the room. On the table there was always just one object: an old Bible almost worn out by constant use, for Dick was a deeply religious man. There was a little cast-iron stove and a little wooden box with a few lumps of coal and a neat stack of kindling in it. And against the wall, to the left, there was an iron cot, always precisely made and covered cleanly with a coarse gray blanket.
The Sheppertons were delighted with him. He had come there looking for work just a month or two before, and modestly presented his qualifications. He had, he said, only recently received his discharge from the Army and was eager to get employment, at no matter what wage. He could cook, he could tend the furnace, he knew how to drive a car—in fact, it seemed to us boys that there was very little that Dick Prosser could not do. He could certainly shoot. He gave a modest demonstration of his prowess one afternoon, with Randy’s .22, that left us gasping. He just lifted that little rifle in his powerful black hands as if it were a toy, without seeming to take aim, pointed it toward a strip of tin on which we had crudely marked out some bull’s-eye circles, and he simply peppered the center of the bull’s eye, putting twelve holes through a space one inch square, so fast that we could not even count the shots.
He knew how to box, too. I think he had been a regimental champion. At any rate, he was as cunning and crafty as a cat. He never boxed with us, of course, but Randy had two sets of gloves, and Dick used to coach us while we sparred. There was something amazingly tender and watchful about him. He taught us many things—how to lead, to hook, to counter and to block—but he was careful to see that we did not hurt each other.
He knew about football, too, and today he paused, a powerful, respectable-looking Negro man of thirty years or more, and watched us for a moment as we played.
Randy took the ball and went up to him. “How do you hold it, Dick?” he said. “Is this right?”
Dick watched him attentively as he gripped the ball, and held it back over his shoulder. The Negro nodded approvingly and said, “That’s right, Cap’n Shepperton. You’ve got it. Only,” he said gently, and now took the ball in his own powerful hand, “when you get a little oldah, yo’ handses gits biggah and you gits a bettah grip.”
His own great hand, in fact, seemed to hold the ball as easily as if it were an apple. And holding it so a moment, he brought it back, aimed over his outstretched left hand as if he were pointing a gun, and rifled it in a beautiful, whizzing spiral thirty yards or more to Gus. He then showed us how to kick, how to get the ball off the toe in such a way that it would rise and spiral cleanly. He knew how to do this, too. He must have got off kicks there, in the yard at the Sheppertons’, that traveled fifty yards.
He showed us how to make a fire, how to pile the kindling so that the flames shot up cone-wise, cleanly, without smoke or waste. He showed us how to strike a match with the thumbnail of one hand and keep and hold the flame in the strongest wind. He showed us how to lift a weight, how to tote a burden on our shoulders in the easiest way. There was nothing that he did not know. We were all so proud of him. Mr. Shepperton himself declared that Dick was the best man he’d ever had, the smartest darkey that he’d ever known.
And yet? He went too softly, at too swift a pace. He was there upon you sometimes like a cat. Looking before us, sometimes, seeing nothing but the world before us, suddenly we felt a shadow at our backs and, looking up, would find that Dick was there. And there was something moving in the night. We never saw him come or go. Sometimes we would waken, startled, and feel that we had heard a board creak, the soft clicking of a latch, a shadow passing swiftly. All was still.
“Young white fokes, oh, young white gent’mun,”—his soft voice ending in a moan, a kind of rhythm in his hips—“Oh, young white fokes, Ise tellin’ you”—that soft low moan again—“you gotta love each othah like a brothah.” He was deeply religious and went to church three times a week. He read his Bible every night. It was the only object on his square board table.
Sometimes Dick would come out of his little basement room, and his eyes would be red, as if he had been weeping. We would know, then, that he had been reading his Bible. There would be times when he would almost moan when he talked to us, a kind of hymnal chant that came from some deep and fathomless intoxication of the spirit, and that transported him. For us, it was a troubling and bewildering experience. We tried to laugh it off and make jokes about it. But there was something in it so dark and strange and full of feeling that we could not fathom that our jokes were hollow, and the trouble in our minds and in our hearts remained.
Sometimes on these occasions his speech would be made up of some weird jargon of Biblical phrases, of which he seemed to have hundreds, and which he wove together in this strange pattern of his emotion in a sequence that was meaningless to us, but to which he himself had the coherent clue. “Oh, young white fokes,” he would begin, moaning gently, “de dry bones in de valley. I tell you, white fokes, de day is comin’ when He’s comin’ on dis earth again to sit in judgment. He’ll put the sheep upon de right hand and de goats upon de left. Oh, white fokes, white fokes, de Armageddon day’s a comin’, white fokes, an de dry bones in de valley.”
Or again, we could hear him singing as he went about his work, in his deep rich voice, so full of warmth and strength, so full of Africa, singing hymns that were not only of his own race but familiar to us all. I don’t know where he learned them. Perhaps they were remembered from his Army days. Perhaps he had learned them in the service of former masters. He drove the Sheppertons to church on Sunday morning, and would wait for them throughout the morning service. He would come up to the side door of the church while the service was going on, neatly dressed in his good dark suit, holding his chauffeur’s hat respectfully in his hand, and stand there humbly and listen during the course of the entire sermon.
And then, when the hymns were sung and the great rich sound would swell and roll out into the quiet air of Sunday, Dick would stand and listen, and sometimes he would join in quietly in the song. A number of these favorite Presbyterian hymns we heard him singing many times in a low rich voice as he went about his work around the house. He would sing “Who Follows in His Train?” or “Alexander’s Glory Song,” or “Rock of Ages,” or “Onward, Christian Soldiers!”
And yet? Well, nothing happened—there was just “a flying hint from here and there,” and the sense of something passing in the night. Turning into the square one day as Dick was driving Mr. Shepperton to town, Lon Everett skidded murderously around the corner, sideswiped Dick, and took the fender off. The Negro was out of the car like a cat and got his master out. Shepperton was unhurt. Lon Everett climbed out and reeled across the street, drunk as a sot at three o’clock. He swung viciously, clumsily, at the Negro, smashing him in the face. Blood trickled from the flat black nostrils and from the thick liver-colored lips. Dick did not move. But suddenly the whites of his eyes were shot with red, his bleeding lips bared for a moment over the white ivory of his teeth. Lon smashed at him again. The Negro took it full in the face again; his hands twitched slightly, but he did not move. They collared the drunken sot and hauled him off and locked him up. Dick stood there for a moment; then he wiped his face and turned to see what damage had been done to the car. No more now, but there were those who saw it who remembered later how the eyes went red.
