Thomas Wolfe: Of Time and the River, You Can't Go Home Again & Look Homeward, Angel. Thomas Wolfe

many’s the time we didn’t have food in the house for the next meal. — Well, as I was saying, your grandfather (addressing Eugene) came home one night and said — Look here, what about it? — Who do you suppose I saw today? — I remember him just as plain as if I saw him standing here — I had a feeling —(addressing Leonard with a doubtful smile) I don’t know what you’d call it but it’s pretty strange when you come to think about it, isn’t it? — I had just finished helping Aunt Jane set the table — she had come all the way from Yancey County to visit your grandmother — when all of a sudden it flashed over me — mind you (to Leonard) I never looked out the window or anything but I knew just as well as I knew anything that he was coming — mercy I cried — here comes — why what on earth are you talking about, Eliza? said your grandma — I remember she went to the door and looked out down the path — there’s no one there — He’s acoming, I said — wait and see — Who? said your grandmother — Why, father, I said — he’s carrying something on his shoulder — and sure enough — I had no sooner got the words out of my mouth than there he was just acoming it for all he was worth, up the path, with a tow-sack full of apples on his back — you could tell by the way he walked that he had news of some sort — well — sure enough — without stopping to say howdy-do — I remembered he began to talk almost before he got into the house — O father, I called out — you’ve brought the apples — it was the year after I had almost died of pneumonia — I’d been spitting up blood ever since — and having hemorrhages — and I asked him to bring me some apples — Well sir, mother said to him, and she looked mighty queer, I can tell you — that’s the strangest thing I ever heard of — and she told him what had happened — Well, he looked pretty serious and said — Yes, I’ll never forget the way he said it — I reckon she saw me. I wasn’t there but I was thinking of being there and coming up the path at that very moment — I’ve got news for you he said — who do you suppose I saw today — why, I’ve no idea, I said — why old Professor Truman — he came rushing up to me in town and said, see here: where’s Eliza — I’ve got a job for her if she wants it, teaching school this winter out on Beaverdam — why, pshaw, said your grandfather, she’s never taught school a day in her life — and Professor Truman laughed just as big as you please and said never you mind about that — Eliza can do anything she sets her mind on — well sir, that’s the way it all came about.” High-sorrowful and sad, she paused for a moment, adrift, her white face slanting her life back through the aisled grove of years.

      “Well, sir!” said Mr. Leonard vaguely, rubbing his chin. “You young rascal, you!” he said, giving Eugene another jerk, and beginning to laugh with narcissistic pleasure.

      Eliza pursed her lips slowly.

      “Well,” she said, “I’ll send him to you for a year.” That was the way she did business. Tides run deep in Sargasso.

      So, on the hairline of million-minded impulse, destiny bore down on his life again.

      Mr. Leonard had leased an old prewar house, set on a hill wooded by magnificent trees. It faced west and south, looking toward Biltburn, and abruptly down on South End, and the negro flats that stretched to the depot. One day early in September he took Eugene there. They walked across town, talking weightily of politics, across the Square, down Hatton Avenue, south into Church, and southwesterly along the bending road that ended in the schoolhouse on the abutting hill. The huge trees made sad autumn music as they entered the grounds. In the broad hall of the squat rambling old house Eugene for the first time saw Margaret Leonard. She held a broom in her hands, and was aproned. But his first impression was of her shocking fragility.

      Margaret Leonard at this time was thirty-four years old. She had borne two children, a son who was now six years old, and a daughter who was two. As she stood there, with her long slender fingers splayed about the broomstick, he noted, with a momentary cold nausea, that the tip of her right index finger was flattened out as if it had been crushed beyond healing by a hammer. But it was years before he knew that tuberculars sometimes have such fingers.

      Margaret Leonard was of middling height, five feet six inches perhaps. As the giddiness of his embarrassment wore off he saw that she could not weigh more than eighty or ninety pounds. He had heard of the children. Now he remembered them, and Leonard’s white muscular bulk, with a sense of horror. His swift vision leaped at once to the sexual relation, and something in him twisted aside, incredulous and afraid.

      She had on a dress of crisp gray gingham, not loose or lapping round her wasted figure, but hiding every line in her body, like a draped stick.

      As his mind groped out of the pain of impression he heard her voice and, still feeling within him the strange convulsive shame, he lifted his eyes to her face. It was the most tranquil and the most passionate face he had ever seen. The skin was sallow with a dead ashen tinge; beneath, the delicate bone-carving of face and skull traced itself clearly: the cadaverous tightness of those who are about to die had been checked. She had won her way back just far enough to balance carefully in the scales of disease and recovery. It was necessary for her to measure everything she did.

      Her thin face was given a touch of shrewdness and decision by the straight line of her nose, the fine long carving of her chin. Beneath the sallow minute pitted skin in her cheeks, and about her mouth, several frayed nerve-centres twitched from moment to moment, jarring the skin slightly without contorting or destroying the passionate calm beauty that fed her inexhaustibly from within. This face was the constant field of conflict, nearly always calm, but always reflecting the incessant struggle and victory of the enormous energy that inhabited her, over the thousand jangling devils of depletion and weariness that tried to pull her apart. There was always written upon her the epic poetry of beauty and repose out of struggle — he never ceased to feel that she had her hand around the reins of her heart, that gathered into her grasp were all the straining wires and sinews of disunion which would scatter and unjoint her members, once she let go. Literally, physically, he felt that, the great tide of valiance once flowed out of her, she would immediately go to pieces. She was like some great general, famous, tranquil, wounded unto death, who, with his fingers clamped across a severed artery, stops for an hour the ebbing of his life — sends on the battle.

      Her hair was coarse and dull-brown, fairly abundant, tinged lightly with gray: it was combed evenly in the middle and bound tightly in a knot behind. Everything about her was very clean, like a scrubbed kitchen board: she took his hand, he felt the firm nervous vitality of her fingers, and he noticed how clean and scrubbed her thin somewhat labor-worn hands were. If he noticed her emaciation at all now, it was only with a sense of her purification: he felt himself in union not with disease, but with the greatest health he had ever known. She made a high music in him. His heart lifted.

      “This,” said Mr. Leonard, stroking him gently across the kidneys, “is Mister Eugene Gant.”

      “Well, sir,” she said, in a low voice, in which a vibrant wire was thrumming, “I’m glad to know you.” The voice had in it that quality of quiet wonder that he had sometimes heard in the voices of people who had seen or were told of some strange event, or coincidence, that seemed to reach beyond life, beyond nature — a note of acceptance; and suddenly he knew that all life seemed eternally strange to this woman, that she looked directly into the beauty and the mystery and the tragedy in the hearts of men, and that he seemed beautiful to her.

      Her face darkened with the strange passionate vitality that left no print, that lived there bodiless like life; her brown eyes darkened into black as if a bird had flown through them and left the shadow of its wings. She saw his small remote face burning strangely at the end of his long unfleshed body, she saw the straight thin shanks, the big feet turned awkwardly inward, the dusty patches on his stockings at the knees, and his thin wristy arms that stuck out painfully below his cheap ill-fitting jacket; she saw the thin hunched line of his shoulders, the tangled mass of hair — and she did not laugh.

      He turned his face up to her as a prisoner who recovers light, as a man long pent in darkness who bathes himself in the great pool of dawn, as a blind man who feels upon his eyes the white core and essence of immutable brightness. His body drank in her great light as a famished castaway the rain: he closed his eyes and let the great light bathe him, and when he opened them again, he saw