5
Luke got well after cursing doctor, nurse, and family for several weeks: it was stubborn typhoid.
Gant was now head of a numerous family, which rose ladderwise from infancy to the adolescent Steve — who was eighteen — and the maidenly Daisy. She was seventeen and in her last year at high school. She was a timid, sensitive girl, looking like her name — Daisy-ish industrious and thorough in her studies: her teachers thought her one of the best students they had ever known. She had very little fire, or denial in her; she responded dutifully to instructions; she gave back what had been given to her. She played the piano without any passionate feeling for the music; but she rendered it honestly with a beautiful rippling touch. And she practised hours at a time.
It was apparent, however, that Steve was lacking in scholarship. When he was fourteen, he was summoned by the school principal to his little office, to take a thrashing for truancy and insubordination. But the spirit of acquiescence was not in him: he snatched the rod from the man’s hand, broke it, smote him solidly in the eye, and dropped gleefully eighteen feet to the ground.
This was one of the best things he ever did: his conduct in other directions was less fortunate. Very early, as his truancy mounted, and after he had been expelled, and as his life hardened rapidly in a defiant viciousness, the antagonism between the boy and Gant grew open and bitter. Gant recognized perhaps most of his son’s vices as his own: there was little, however, of his redeeming quality. Steve had a piece of tough suet where his heart should have been.
Of them all, he had had very much the worst of it. Since his childhood he had been the witness of his father’s wildest debauches. He had not forgotten. Also, as the oldest, he was left to shift for himself while Eliza’s attention focussed on her younger children. She was feeding Eugene at her breast long after Steve had taken his first two dollars to the ladies of Eagle Crescent.
He was inwardly sore at the abuse Gant heaped on him; he was not insensitive to his faults, but to be called a “good-for-nothing bum,” “a worthless degenerate,” “a pool-room loafer,” hardened his outward manner of swagger defiance. Cheaply and flashily dressed, with peg-top yellow shoes, flaring striped trousers, and a broad-brimmed straw hat with a colored band, he would walk down the avenue with a preposterous lurch, and a smile of strained assurance on his face, saluting with servile cordiality all who would notice him. And if a man of property greeted him, his lacerated but overgrown vanity would seize the crumb, and he would boast pitifully at home: “They all know Little Stevie! He’s got the respect of all the big men in this town, all right, all right! Every one has a good word for Little Stevie except his own people. Do you know what J. T. Collins said to me today?”
“What say? Who’s that? Who’s that?” asked Eliza with comic rapidity, looking up from her darning.
“J. T. Collins — that’s who! He’s only worth about two hundred thousand. ‘Steve,’ he said, just like that, ‘if I had your brains’"— He would continue in this way with moody self-satisfaction, painting a picture of future success when all who scorned him now would flock to his standard.
“Oh, yes,” said he, “they’ll all be mighty anxious then to shake Little Stevie’s hand.”
Gant, in a fury, gave him a hard beating when he had been expelled from school. He had never forgotten. Finally, he was told to go to work and support himself: he found desultory employment as a soda-jerker, or as delivery boy for a morning paper. Once, with a crony, Gus Moody, son of a foundry-man, he had gone off to see the world. Grimy from vagabondage they had crawled off a freight-train at Knoxville, Tennessee, spent their little money on food, and in a brothel, and returned, two days later, coal-black but boastful of their exploit.
“I’ll vow,” Eliza fretted, “I don’t know what’s to become of that boy.” It was the tragic flaw of her temperament to get to the vital point too late: she pursed her lips thoughtfully, wandered off in another direction, and wept when misfortune came. She always waited. Moreover, in her deepest heart, she had an affection for her oldest son, which, if it was not greater, was at least different in kind from what she bore for the others. His glib boastfulness, his pitiable brag, pleased her: they were to her indications of his “smartness,” and she often infuriated her two studious girls by praising them. Thus, looking at a specimen of his handwriting, she would say:
“There’s one thing sure: he writes a better hand than any of the rest of you, for all your schooling.”
Steve had early tasted the joys of the bottle, stealing, during the days when he was a young attendant of his father’s debauch, a furtive swallow from the strong rank whisky in a half-filled flask: the taste nauseated him, but the experience made good boasting for his fellows.
At fifteen, he had found, while smoking cigarettes with Gus Moody, in a neighbor’s barn, a bottle wrapped in an oats sack by the worthy citizen, against the too sharp examination of his wife. When the man had come for secret potation some time later, and found his bottle half-empty, he had grimly dosed the remainder with Croton oil: the two boys were nauseously sick for several days.
One day, Steve forged a check on his father. It was some days before Gant discovered it: the amount was only three dollars, but his anger was bitter. In a pronouncement at home, delivered loudly enough to publish the boy’s offense to the neighborhood, he spoke of the penitentiary, of letting him go to jail, of being disgraced in his old age — a period of his life at which he had not yet arrived, but which he used to his advantage in times of strife.
He paid the check, of course, but another name — that of “forger”— was added to the vocabulary of his abuse. Steve sneaked in and out of the house, eating his meals alone for several days. When he met his father little was said by either: behind the hard angry glaze of their eyes, they both looked depthlessly into each other; they knew that they could withhold nothing from each other, that the same sores festered in each, the same hungers and desires, the same crawling appetites polluted their blood. And knowing this, something in each of them turned away in grievous shame.
Gant added this to his tirades against Eliza; all that was bad in the boy his mother had given him.
“Mountain Blood! Mountain Blood!” he yelled. “He’s Greeley Pentland all over again. Mark my words,” he continued, after striding feverishly about the house, muttering to himself and bursting finally into the kitchen, “mark my words, he’ll wind up in the penitentiary.”
And, her nose reddened by the spitting grease, she would purse her lips, saying little, save, when goaded, to make some return calculated to infuriate and antagonize him.
“Well, maybe if he hadn’t been sent to every dive in town to pull his daddy out, he would turn out better.”
“You lie, Woman! By God, you lie!” he thundered magnificently but illogically.
Gant drank less: save for a terrifying spree every six or eight weeks, which bound them all in fear for two or three days, Eliza had little to complain of on this score. But her enormous patience was wearing very thin because of the daily cycle of abuse. They slept now in separate rooms upstairs: he rose at six or six-thirty, dressed and went down to build the fires. As he kindled a blaze in the range, and a roaring fire in the sitting-room, he muttered constantly to himself, with an occasional oratorical rise and fall of his voice. In this way he composed and polished the flood of his invective: when the demands of fluency and emphasis had been satisfied he would appear suddenly before her in the kitchen, and deliver himself without preliminary, as the grocer’s negro entered with pork chops or a thick steak:
“Woman, would you have had a roof to shelter you today if it hadn’t been for me? Could you have depended on your worthless old father, Tom Pentland, to give you one? Would Brother Will, or Brother Jim give you one? Did you ever hear of them giving any one anything? Did you ever hear of them caring for anything but their own miserable hides? DID you? Would any of them give a starving beggar a crust of bread? By God, no!