Of Time and the River by Thomas Wolfe Page B

they’re fleshy people, but you’ve got the old man’s frame. You may make a bigger man than he is when you put on weight and widen out—but it wasn’t that your father was so big—I think he looked bigger than he really was—it was something else about him—about the way he gave orders to the niggers and went about his work,” said Mr. Candler, in a rather puzzled tone. “I don’t know what it was, but I’d never seen any one like him before. For one thing he was dressed so good!” he said suddenly. “He always wore his good clothes when he worked—I’d never seen a man who did hard labour with his hands who dressed that way. Here he was, you know, sweating over those big blocks of stone with those two niggers and wearing better clothes than you and me would go to church in. Of course, he had his coat off, and his cuffs rolled back, and he was wearing one of those big striped aprons that go the whole way up across the shoulders—but you could see his clothes were GOOD,” said Mr. Candler. “Looked like black broadcloth that had been made by a tailor and wearing a BOILED shirt, mind you, and one of those wing collars with a black silk neck-tie—and not afraid to work, either! Why, the first thing I saw him do,” said Mr. Candler, laughing, “he let out a string of words at those niggers you could have heard from here to yonder because they were sweating and straining to get a big hunk of marble up on the rollers, that they hadn’t been able to budge an inch. ‘Merciful God,’ he says, that’s just the way he talked, you know—‘Merciful God! Has it come to this that I must do everything for myself while you stand there gloating at my agony? I could as soon look for help from a couple of God-damned wooden Indians! In the name of God, stand back. I’ll do it myself, sick and feeble as I am!’ Well,” said Mr. Candler, chuckling with the recollection, “with that he reaches down and gets a grip on that big hunk of stone and gives a heave and up she comes on to the rolling pins as nice and easy as anything you ever saw. Well, sir, you should have seen the look upon those niggers’ faces—I thought their eyes were going to pop out of their heads. And that’s the first time I ever spoke to him, you know. I can remember the very words I said. I said to him, ‘Well, if you call that being sick and feeble, most of the folks up in this part of the country are already dead and in their graves.’”
    The man’s story had stirred in the boy’s mind a thousand living memories of his father. For a moment it seems to him that the lost world which these words evoked has never died, lives yet in all the radiant and enchanted colour of his childhood, in all its proud, dense, and single fabric of passion, fury, certitude and joy. Every memory that the story brought to life is part of him. There are a thousand buried, nameless and forgotten lives, ten thousand strange and secret tongues alive now, urgent, swarming in his blood, and thronging at the gateways of his memory. They are the lives of the lost wilderness, his mother’s people; they are the tongues, the faces of the secret land, the dark half of his heart’s desire, the fertile golden earth from which his father came.
    He knows the farmer boy who stood beside the road and watched the dusty rebels marching past towards Gettysburg. He smells the sweet fragrance of that lavish countryside, he hears the oaths, the jests, the laughter of the marching soldiers, he hears the cricketing stitch of noon in drowsy fields, the myriad woodnotes, secret, green, and cool, the thrumming noises. He feels the brooding wait and murmur of hot afternoon, the trembling of the distant guns in the hot air, and the vast, oncoming hush and peace and silence of the dusk.
    And then he is lying beside his father in the little gabled room upstairs. He is there beside his father and his father’s brothers in the darkness—waiting, silent, waiting—with an unspoken single