The Web and the Rock

by Thomas Wolfe

  Thus, each night he paid his punctual duty to "their" dark authorities, in order to keep himself in "their" good graces, to assure himself that "they" would not forsake him, that "they" would still be for him, not against him, that "they"--immortal, secret, "they" that will not give us rest!--would keep him, guard him, make his life prevail, frustrate his evil enemies, and guide him on to all the glory, love, and triumph, and to that great door, the huge, hinged, secret wall of life--that immanent and unutterable world of joy which was so near, so strangely, magically, and intolerably near, which he would find at any moment, and for which his life was panting.

  One day a circus came to town, and as the boy stood looking at it there came to him two images which were to haunt all the rest of his childhood, but which were now for the first time seen together with an instant and a magic congruence. And these were the images of the circus and his father's earth.

  He thought he had joined a circus and started on the great tour of the nation with it. It was Spring: the circus had started in New Eng land, and worked westward and then southward as the Summer and Autumn came on. His nominal duties--for in his vision every incident, each face and voice and circumstance, was blazing real as life itself were those of ticket seller. But in this tiny show everyone did several things, so he also posted bills, and bartered with the tradesmen and farmers in new places for fresh food. He became very clever at this work--some old, sharp, buried talent for shrewd trading that had come to him from his mountain blood now aided him. He could get the finest, freshest meats and vegetables at the lowest prices. The circus people were tough and hard, they always had a fierce and ravenous hun ger, they would not accept bad food and cooking, they fed stupen dously, and they always had the best of everything.

  Usually the circus would arrive at a new town very early in the morning, before daybreak. He would go into town immediately: he would go to the markets, or with farmers who had come in for the circus. He felt and saw the purity of first light, he heard the sweet and sudden lutings of first birds, and suddenly he was filled with the earth and morning in new towns, among new men. He walked among the farmers' wagons, and he dealt with them on the spot for the prodigal plenty of their wares--the country melons bedded in sweet hay, the cool, sweet pounds of butter wrapped in clean, wet cloths, with dew and starlight still upon them, the enormous battered cans foaming with fresh milk, the new-laid eggs which he bought by the gross and hundred dozen, the tender, limey pullets by the score, the delicate bunches of green scallions, the heavy red ripeness of huge tomatoes, the sweet-leaved lettuces, crisp as celery, the fresh-podded peas and the succulent young beans, as well as the potatoes spotted with the loamy earth, the winy apples, the peaches, and the cherries, the juicy corn stacked up in shocks of luring green, and the heavy, blackened rinds of the home-cured hams and bacons.

  As the markets opened, he would begin to trade and dicker with the butchers for their finest cuts of meat. They would hold great roasts up in their gouted fingers, they would roll up tubs of fresh-ground sausage, they would smack with their long palms the flanks of beeves and porks.

  He would drive back to the circus with a wagon full of meat and vegetables.

  At the circus ground the people were already in full activity. He could hear the wonderful timed tattoo of sledges on the driven stakes, the shouts of men riding animals down to water, the slow clank and pull of mighty horses, the heavy rumble of the wagons as they rolled down off the circus flat cars. By now the eating tent would be erected, and, as he arrived, he could see the cooks already busy at their ranges, the long tables set up underneath the canvas with their rows of benches, their tin plates and cups. There would be the amber pungency of strong coffee, and the smell of buckwheat batter.

  Then the circus people would come in for breakfast. The food they ate was as masculine and fragrant as the world they dwelt in. It be longed to the warmed, stained world of canvas, the clean and healthful odor of the animals, and the wild, sweet, lyric nature of the land on which they lived as wanderers. And it was there for the asking with a fabulous and stupefying plenty, golden and embrowned. They ate stacks of buckwheat cakes, smoking hot, soaked in hunks of yellow butter, which they carved at will with a wide, free gesture from the piled prints on the table, and which they garnished with ropes of heavy black molasses, or with maple syrup. They ate big steaks for breakfast, hot from the pan and thick with onions; they ate whole melons, crammed with the ripeness of the deep-pink meat, rashers of bacon, and great platters of fried eggs, or eggs scrambled with calves brains. They helped themselves from pyramids of fruit piled up at intervals on the table--plums, peaches, apples, cherries, grapes, oranges, and bananas.

  They had great pitchers of thick cream to pour on everything, and they washed their hunger down with pint mugs of strong, deep-savored coffee.

  For their midday meal they would eat fiercely, hungrily, with wolfish gusto, mightily with knit brows and convulsive movements of their corded throats. They would eat great roasts of beef with crackled hides, browned in their juices, rare and tender; hot chunks of delicate pork with hems of fragrant fat; delicate young broiled chickens; twelve pound pot roasts, cooked for hours in an iron pot with new carrots, onions, sprouts, and young potatoes; together with every vegetable that the season yielded--huge roasting ears of corn, smoking hot, piled like cordwood on two-foot platters, tomatoes cut in slabs with wedges of okra and succotash, and raw onions, mashed potatoes whipped to a creamy batter, turnips, fresh peas cooked in butter, and fat, strong beans seasoned with the flavor of big chunks of pork. In addition they had every fruit that the place and time afforded: hot crusty apple, peach, and cherry pies, encrusted with cinnamon; puddings and cakes of every sort; and blobbering cobblers inches deep.

  Thus the circus moved across America, from town to town, from state to state, eating its way from Maine into the great plains of the West, eating its way along the Hudson and the Mississippi Rivers, eating its way across the prairies and from the North into the South.

  Abroad in this ocean of earth and vision, the boy thought of his father's land, of its great red barns, its clear familiarity and its haunting strangeness, and its lovely and tragic beauty. He thought of its smell of harbors and its rumors of the sea, the city, and the ships, its wine ripe apples and its brown-red soil, its snug, weathered houses, its lyric, unutterable ecstasy.

  A wonderful thing happened. One morning he awoke suddenly to find himself staring straight up at the pulsing splendor of the stars.

  At first he did not know where he was. The circus train had stopped in the heart of the country, for what reason he did not know. He could hear the languid and intermittent breathing of the engine, the strangeness of men's voices in the dark, the casual stamp of the horses in their cars, and all around him the attentive and vital silence of the earth.

  Suddenly he raised himself from the pile of canvas on which he slept.

  It was the moment just before dawn: against the east the sky had al ready begun to whiten with the first faint luminosity of day, the invading tides of light crept up the sky, drowning the stars out as they went. The train had halted by a little river, which ran swift and deep close to the tracks, and now he knew that what at first he thought had been the sound of silence was the swift and ceaseless music of the river.

  There had been rain the night before, and now the river was filled with the sweet, clean smell of earthy deposits. He could see the delicate white glimmer of young birch trees leaning from the banks, and on the other side he saw the winding whiteness of a road. Beyond the road, and bordering it, there was an orchard with a wall of lichened stone.

  As the wan light grew, the earth and all its contours emerged sharply.

  He saw the worn and ancient design of lichened rocks, the fertile soil of the ploughed fields; he saw the kept order, the frugal cleanliness, with its mild tang of opulent greenery. Here was an earth with fences as big as a man's heart, but not so great as his desire, and this earth was like a room he once had lived in.
He returned to it as a sailor to a small, closed harbor, as a man, spent with the hunger of his wandering, comes home.

  Instantly he recognized the scene. He knew he had come at last into his father's land. Here was his home, brought back to him while he slept, like a forgotten dream. Here was his heart's desire, his father's country, the earth his spirit dwelt in. He knew every inch of the land scape, and he knew past reason, doubt, or argument that home was not three miles away.

  He got up at once and leaped down to the earth: he knew where he would go. Along the track there was the slow swing and dance of the brakemen's lamps. Already the train was in motion, its bell tolled, and the heavy trucks rumbled away from him. He began to walk back along the tracks, for less than a mile away, he knew, where the stream boiled over the lip of a dam, there was a bridge. When he reached the bridge a deeper light had come: the old red brick of the mill emerged sharply and fell sheer into bright, shining waters.

  He crossed the bridge and turned left along the road. Here it moved away from the river, among fields and through dark wood--dark woods bordered with stark poignancy of fir and pine, with the noble spread of maples, shot with the naked whiteness of birch. Sharp thrum mings, woodland flitters, broke the silence. The tongue-trilling chirrs arose now, and little brainless cries, liquefied lutings. Smooth drops and nuggets of bright gold they were.

  He went along that road where, he knew, the house of his father's blood and kin lay hidden. At length, he came around a bending of the road, he left the wooded land, he passed by hedges, and saw the old white house, set in the shoulder of the hill, clean and cool below the dark shelter of its trees. A twist of morning smoke coiled through its chimney.

  Then he turned into the road that led up to the house, and at this moment the enormous figure of a powerful old man appeared around the corner, prophetically bearing a smoked ham in one huge hand.

  And when the boy saw the old man, a cry of greeting burst from his throat, and the old man answered with a roar of welcome that shook the earth. The old man dropped his ham, and waddled forward to meet the boy: they met half down the road, and the old man crushed him in his hug. They tried to speak but could not, they embraced again and in an instant all the pain of loneliness and the fierce hungers of desire were scoured away like a scum of frost from a bright glass.

  At this moment also, two young men burst from the house and came running down the road to greet him. They were powerful and heavy youths, and, like their father, they recognized the boy instantly, and in a moment he was engulfed in their mighty energies, borne up among them to the house. As they ate breakfast, he told them of his circus wanderings and they told him what had befallen them. And they understood all that he wanted to say but could not speak, and they surrounded him with love and lavish heapings of his plate.

  Such were the twin images of the circus and his father's land which now, as he stood there looking at the circus, fused instantly to a living whole and came to him in a blaze of light. And in this way, before he had ever seen or set his foot upon it, he came for the first time to his father's earth.

  Thus, day by day, in the taut and tangled web of this boy's life, the two hemispheres that touched but never joined, contended, separated, recombined, and wove again. First came the old dark memory of time haunted man and the lost voices in the hills a hundred years ago, the world-lost and hill-haunted sorrow of the time-triumphant Joyners.

  Then his spirit flamed beyond the hills, beyond lost time and sorrow, to his father and his father's earth; and when he thought of him his heart grew warm, the hot blood thudded in his veins, he leapt all barriers of the here and now, and northward, gleaming brightly there beyond the hills, he saw a vision of the golden future in new lands.

  4

  The Golden City

  ALWAYS AND FOREVER WHEN THE BOY THOUGHT OF HIS FATHER, AND OF the proud, the cold, the secret North, he thought, too, of the city.

  His father had not come from there, yet strangely, through some subtle chemistry of his imagination, some magic of his boy's mind and heart, he connected his father's life and figure with the bright and shining city of the North.

  In his child's picture of the world, there were no waste or barren places: there was only the rich tapestry of an immense and limitlessly fertile domain forever lyrical as April, and forever ready for the harvest, touched with the sorcery of a magic green, bathed forever in a full-hued golden light. And at the end, forever at the end of all the fabled earth, there hung the golden vision of the city, itself more fertile, richer, more full of joy and bounty than the earth it rested on. Far-off and shining, it rose upward in his vision from an opalescent mist, upborne and sustained as lightly as a cloud, yet firm and soaring with full golden light. It was a vision simple, unperplexed, carved from deep substances of light and shade, and exultant with its prophecy of glory, love, and triumph.

  He heard, far off, the deep and beelike murmur of its million-footed life, and all the mystery of the earth and time was in that sound. He saw its thousand streets peopled with a flashing, beautiful, infinitely varied life. The city flashed before him like a glorious jewel, blazing with countless rich and brilliant facets of a life so good, so bountiful, so strangely and constantly beautiful and interesting, that it seemed intolerable that he should miss a moment of it. He saw the streets swarming with the figures of great men and glorious women, and he walked among them like a conqueror, winning fiercely and exultantly by his talent, courage, and merit the greatest tributes that the city had to offer, the highest prize of power, wealth, and fame, and the great emolument of love. There would be villainy and knavery as black and sinister as hell, but he would smash it with a blow, and drive it cringing to its hole. There would be heroic men and lovely women, and he would win and take a place among the highest and most fortunate people on the earth.

  Thus, in a vision hued with all the strange and magic colors of his adolescence, the boy walked the streets of his great legendary city.

  Sometimes he sat among the masters of the earth in rooms of manlike opulence: dark wood, heavy leathers of solid, lavish brown, were all around him. Again he walked in great chambers of the night, rich with the warmth of marble and the majesty of great stairs, sustained on swell ing columns of a rich-toned onyx, soft and deep with crimson carpets in which the foot sank down with noiseless tread. And through this room, filled with a warm and undulant music, the deep and mellow thrum of violins, there walked a hundred beautiful women, and all were his, if he would have them. And the loveliest of them all was his.

  Long of limb and slender, yet lavish and deep of figure, they walked with proud, straight looks on their fragile and empty faces, holding their gleaming shoulders superbly, and their clear, depthless eyes alive with love and tenderness. A firm and golden light fell over them, and over all his love.

  He also walked in steep and canyoned streets, blue and cool with a frontal steepness of money and great business, brown and rich some how with the sultry and exultant smell of coffee, the good green smell of money, and the fresh, half-rotten odor of the harbor with its tide of ships.

  Such was his vision of the city--adolescent, fleshly, and erotic, but drunk with innocence and joy, and made strange and wonderful by the magic lights of gold and green and lavish brown in which he saw it. For, more than anything, it was the light. The light was golden with the flesh of women, lavish as their limbs, true, depthless, tender as their glorious eyes, fine-spun and maddening as their hair, as unutterable with desire as their fragrant nests of spicery, their deep melon-heavy breasts. The light was golden like a morning light that shines through ancient glass into a room of old dark brown. The light was rich brown shot with gold, lavish brown like old stone houses gulched in morning on a city street. The light was also blue, like morning under neath the frontal cliff of buildings, vertical, cool blue, hazed with thin morning mist, cold-flowing harbor blue of clean, cool waters, rimed brightly with a dancing morning gold.

  The light was amber-brown in vast, dark chambers shu
ttered from young light, where, in great walnut beds, the glorious women stirred in sensual warmth their lavish limbs. The light was brown-gold like ground coffee, merchants, and the walnut houses where they lived; brown-gold like old brick buildings grimed with money and the smell of trade; brown-gold like morning in great gleaming bars of swart mahogany, the fresh wet beer-wash, lemon rind, and the smell of Angostura bitters. Then it was full-golden in the evening in the the atres, shining with full-golden warmth and body on full-golden figures of the women, on fat red plush, and on the rich, faded, slightly stale smell, and on the gilt sheaves and cupids and the cornucopias, on the fleshly, potent, softly-golden smell of all the people. And in great restaurants the light was brighter gold, but full and round like warm onyx columns, smooth, warmly-tinted marble, old wine in dark, rounded, age-cncrusted bottles, and the great blonde figures of naked women on rose-clouded ceilings. Then the light was full and rich, brown-golden like great fields in Autumn; it was full-swelling golden light like mown fields, bronze-red picked out with fat, rusty-golden sheaves of corn, and governed by huge barns of red and the mellow, winy fragrance of the apples.

  That vision of the city was gathered from a thousand isolated sources, from the pages of books, the words of a traveler, a picture of Brooklyn Bridge with its great, winglike sweep, the song and music of its cables, even the little figures of the men with derby hats as they advanced across it. These and a thousand other things all built the picture of the city in his mind, until now it possessed him and had got somehow, powerfully, exultantly, ineradicably, into everything he did or thought or felt.