Free Look Homeward, Angel - Thomas Wolfe by Thomas Wolfe Page B

beer were bitter, if there were not a period of
initiation into the pleasures of this great beverage.
    Faces from the old half-forgotten world floated in
from time to time.  Some of the Altamont people came and stayed
at Eliza's house.  One day, with sudden recollective horror he
looked up into the brutal shaven face of Jim Lyda.  He was the
Altamont sheriff; he lived at the foot of the hill below Gant. 
Once, when Eugene was past two, Eliza had gone to Piedmont as witness
in a trial.  She was away two days; he was left in care of Mrs.
Lyda.  He had never forgotten Lyda's playful cruelty the first
night.
    Now, one day, this monster appeared again, by
devilish sleight, and Eugene looked up into the heavy evil of his
face.  Eugene saw Eliza standing near Jim; and as the terror in
the small face grew, Jim made as if to put his hand violently upon
her.  At his cry of rage and fear, they both laughed: for a
blind moment or two Eugene for the first time hated her: he was mad,
impotent with jealousy and fear.
    At night the boys, Steve, Ben, and Grover, who had
been sent out at once to seek employment by Eliza, returned from the
Fair Grounds, chattering with the lively excitement of the day's
bustle. Sniggering furtively, they talked suggestively about the
Hoochy-Koochy: Eugene understood it was a dance.  Steve hummed a
monotonous, suggestive tune, and writhed sensually.  They sang a
song; the plaintive distant music haunted him.  He learned it:
 
         "Meet me in
Saint--Lou--iss, loo--ee,
      Meet me at the Fair,
      If you see the boys and girlies,
      Tell them I'll be there.
      We will dance the Hoochy-Koochy--"
 
    and so on.
    Sometimes, lying on a sunny quilt, Eugene grew
conscious of a gentle peering face, a soft caressing voice, unlike
any of the others in kind and quality, a tender olive skin, black
hair, sloeblack eyes, exquisite, rather sad, kindliness.  He
nuzzled his soft face next to Eugene's, fondled and embraced him. 
On his brown neck he was birth-marked with a raspberry: Eugene
touched it again and again with wonder.  This was Grover--the
gentlest and saddest of the boys.
    Eliza sometimes allowed them to take him on
excursions.  Once, they made a voyage on a river steamer: he
went below and from the side-openings looked closely upon the
powerful yellow snake, coiling slowly and resistlessly past.
    The boys worked on the Fair Grounds.  They were
call-boys at a place called the Inside Inn.  The name charmed
him: it flashed constantly through his brain.  Sometimes his
sisters, sometimes Eliza, sometimes the boys pulled him through the
milling jungle of noise and figures, past the rich opulence and
variety of the life of the Fair.  He was drugged in fantasy as
they passed the East India tea-house, and as he saw tall turbaned men
who walked about within and caught for the first time, so that he
never forgot, the slow incense of the East.  Once in a huge
building roaring with sound, he was rooted before a mighty
locomotive, the greatest monster he had ever seen, whose wheels spun
terrifically in grooves, whose blazing furnaces, raining hot red
coals into the pit beneath, were fed incessantly by two grimed
fire-painted stokers. The scene burned in his brain like some huge
splendor out of Hell: he was appalled and fascinated by it.
    Again, he stood at the edge of the slow, terrific
orbit of the Ferris Wheel, reeled down the blaring confusion of the
midway, felt his staggering mind converge helplessly into all the mad
phantasmagoria of the carnival; he heard Luke's wild story of the
snake-eater, and shrieked in agony when they threatened to take him
in.
    Once Daisy, yielding to the furtive cat-cruelty below
her mild placidity, took him with her through the insane horrors of
the scenic railway; they plunged bottomlessly from light into roaring
blackness, and as his first yell ceased with a slackening of the car,
rolled gently into a monstrous lighted gloom peopled