Scowling, he cast the cigarette from his ivory hand, and loped out into the office.
Eaton remained a moment to laugh with the City Editor.
O rare Ben Gant!
Sometimes, returning late at night to Woodson Street, in the crowded summer season, he slept with Eugene in the front room upstairs where they had all been born.
Propped high on pillows in the old cream-colored bed, painted gaily at head and foot with round medals of clustering fruit, he read aloud in a quiet puzzled voice, fumbling over pronunciation, the baseball stories of Ring Lardner.
“You know me, Al.”
Just outside the windows the flat veranda roof was still warm from its daytime exhalations of tar-calked tin.
Rich cob-webbed grapes hung in packed clusters among the broad leaves.
“I didn’t raise my boy to be a southpaw.
I’ve a good mind to give Gleason a sock in the eye.”
Ben read painfully, pausing a moment later to snicker.
Thus, like a child, he groped intently at all meanings, with scowling studiousness.
Women liked to see him scowl and study so.
He was sudden only in anger, and in his quick communications with his angel.
22
Toward the beginning of Eugene’s fourteenth year, when he had been a student at Leonard’s for two years, Ben got work for him as a paper carrier.
Eliza grumbled at the boy’s laziness.
She complained that she could get him to do little or nothing for her.
In fact, he was not lazy, but he hated all the dreariness of boarding-house routine.
Her demands on him were not heavy, but they were frequent and unexpected.
He was depressed at the uselessness of effort in Dixieland, at the total erasure of all daily labor.
If she had given him position, the daily responsibility of an ordered task, he could have fulfilled it with zeal.
But her own method was much too random: she wanted to keep him on tap for an occasional errand, and he did not have her interest.
Dixieland was the heart of her life.
It owned her.
It appalled him.
When she sent him to the grocer’s for bread, he felt wearily that the bread would be eaten by strangers, that nothing out of the effort of their lives grew younger, better, or more beautiful, that all was erased in a daily wash of sewage.
She sent him forth in the rank thicket of her garden to hoe out the swarming weeds that clustered about her vegetables, which flourished, as did all the earth, under her careless touch.
He knew, as he chopped down in a weary frenzy, that the weeds would grow again in the hot sun-stench, that her vegetables — weeded or not — would grow fat and be fed to her boarders, and that her life, hers alone, would endure to something.
As he looked at her, he felt the weariness and horror of time: all but her must die in a smothering Sargasso.
Thus, flailing the clotted earth drunkenly, he would be brought to suddenly by her piercing scream from the high back porch, and realize that he had destroyed totally a row of young bladed corn.
“Why, what on earth, boy!” she fretted angrily, peering down at him through a shelving confusion of wash-tubs, limp drying stockings, empty milk-bottles, murky and unwashed, and rusty lard-buckets.
“I’ll vow!” she said, turning to Mr. Baskett, the Hattiesburg cotton merchant, who grinned down malarially through his scraggly mustaches, “what am I going to do with him?
He’s chopped down every stock of corn in the row.”
“Yes,” Mr. Baskett said, peering over, “and missed every weed.
Boy,” he added judicially, “you need two months on a farm.”
The bread that I fetch will be eaten by strangers.
I carry coal and split up wood for fires to warm them.
Smoke.
Fuimas fumus.
All of our life goes up in smoke.
There is no structure, no creation in it, not even the smoky structure of dreams.
Come lower, angel; whisper in our ears.
We are passing away in smoke and there is nothing today but weariness to pay for yesterday’s toil.
How may we save ourselves?
He was given the Niggertown route — the hardest and least profitable of all.
He was paid two cents a copy for weekly deliveries, given ten per cent of his weekly collections, and ten cents for every new subscription.
Thus, he was able to earn four or five dollars a week.
His thin undeveloped body drank sleep with insatiable thirst, but it was now necessary for him to get up at half-past three in the morning with darkness and silence making an unreal humming in his drugged ears.
Strange aerial music came fluting out of darkness, or over his slow-wakening senses swept the great waves of symphonic orchestration.