His Father’s Earth
Thomas Wolfe
As the boy stood looking at the circus with his brother, there came to him two
images, which had haunted his childhood and the life of every boy who ever
lived, but were now for the first time seen together with an instant and magic
congruence. And these two images were the images of the circus and his father’s
earth.
He thought then 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 England 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
were blazing real as life itself—were those of ticket seller, but in this tiny
show, everyone did several things: The performers helped put up and take down
the tents, load and unload the wagons, and the roustabouts and business people
worked wherever they were needed.
The boy sold tickets, but he also posted bills and bartered with tradesmen and
farmers in new places for fresh food. He became very shrewd and clever at this
work, and loved to do it—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 hunger, they would not accept
bad food and cooking, they fed stupendously, 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 of wagons, the cool sweet
prints of butter wrapped in clean wet cloths, with dew and starlight still on
them, the enormous battered cans foaming with fresh milk, the new laid eggs
which he bought by the gross and hundred dozens, the tender limy pullets by the
score, the rude country wagons laden to the rim with heaped abundancies—with
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
powerful winey odor of the apples, the peaches, and the cherries, the juicy corn
stacked up in shocks of living green, and the heavy blackened rinds of
home-cured hams and bacons.
As the market 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 tattoo5 of sledges on 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 flatcars. By now the
eating table 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, their strong readiness. There would
be the amber indescribable pungency of strong coffee, and the smell of buckwheat
batter.
And the circus people would come in for their breakfast: Hard and tough, for the
most part decent and serious people, the performers, the men and women, the
acrobats, the riders, the tumblers, the clowns, the jugglers, the
contortionists, and the balancers would come in quietly and eat with a savage
and inspired intentness.
The food they ate was as masculine and fragrant as the world they dwelt in: It
belonged to the stained world of mellow sun-warmed canvas, the clean and
healthful odor of the animals, and the mild sweet lyric nature of the land in
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
(if they pleased) with ropes of heavy black molasses, or with the lighter, freer
maple syrup.
They ate big steaks for breakfast, hot from the pan and lashed 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 gusts,
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 boiled chickens, only a mouthful for these ravenous jaws, 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, stacked like cordwood on two-foot platters,
tomatoes cut in slabs with wedges of okra and succotash, and raw onion, mashed
potatoes whipped to a creamy smother, boats swimming with pure beef gravy, new
carrots, turnips, fresh peas cooked in butter, and fat string beans seasoned
with the flavor of big chunks of cooking-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, eating its way across the flat farmlands of
the Pennsylvania Dutch colony, the eastern shore of Maryland and back again
across the states of Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Florida—eating all
good things that this enormous, this inevitably bountiful and abundant
cornucopia of a continent yielded.
They ate the cod, bass, mackerel, halibut, clams, and oysters of the New England
coast, the terrapin of Maryland, the fat beeves, porks, and cereals of the
Middle West, and they had, as well, the heavy juicy peaches, watermelons,
cantaloupes of Georgia, the fat sweet shad of the Carolina coasts, and the
rounded and exotic citrus fruits of the tropics: the oranges, tangerines,
bananas, kumquats, lemons, guavas down in Florida, together with a hundred other
fruits and meats—the Vermont turkeys, the mountain trout, the bunched heaviness
of the Concord grapes, the red winey bulk of the Oregon apples, as well as the
clawed, shelled, and crusted dainties, the crabs, the clams, the pink-meated
lobsters that grope their way along the sea floors of America.
The boy awoke at morning in three hundred towns with the glimmer of starlight on
his face; he was the moon’s man; then he saw light quicken in the east, he saw
the pale stars drown, he saw the birth of light, he heard the lark’s wing, the
bird tree, the first liquorous liquefied lutings, the ripe-aired trillings, the
plumskinned birdnotes, and he heard the hoof and wheel come down the streets of
the nation. He exulted in his work as food-producer for the circus people, and
they loved him for it. They said there had never been anyone like him—they
banqueted exultantly, with hoarse gulpings and with joy, and they loved him.
Slowly, day by day, the circus worked its way across America, through forty
states and through a dozen weathers. It was a little world that moved across the
enormous loneliness of the earth, a little world that each day began a new life
in new cities, and that left nothing to betray where it had been save a litter
of beaten papers, the droppings of the camel and the elephant in Illinois, a
patch of trampled grass, and a magical memory.
The circus men knew no other earth but this; the earth came to them with the
smell of the canvas and the lion’s roar. They saw the world behind the lights of
the carnival, and everything beyond these lights was phantasmal and unreal to
them; it lived for them within the circle of the tent as men and women who sat
on benches, as the posts they came to, and sometimes as the enemy.
Their life was filled with the strong joy of food, with the love of traveling,
and with danger and hard labor. Always there was the swift violence of change
and movement, of putting up and tearing down, and sometimes there was the misery
of rain and sleet, and mud above the ankles, of wind that shook their flimsy
residence, that ripped the tent stakes from their moorings in the earth and
lifted out the great center pole as if it were a match. Now they must wrestle
with the wind and hold their dwelling to the earth; now they must fight the
weariness of mud and push their heavy wagons through the slime; now, cold and
wet and wretched, they must sleep on piles of canvas, upon the flatcars in a
driving rain, and sometimes they must fight the enemy—the drunk, the savage, the
violent enemy, the bloody man, who dwelt in every place. Sometimes it was the
city thug, sometimes the mill hands of the South, sometimes the miners in a
Pennsylvania town—the circus people cried, “Hey, rube!” and fought them with
fist and foot, with pike and stake, and the boy saw and knew it all.
When the men in a little town barricaded the street against their parade, they
charged the barricade with their animals, and once the sheriff tried to stop the
elephant by saying: “Now, damn ye, if you stick your . . . damned trunk another
inch, I’ll shoot.”