His Father’s Earth
Thomas Wolfe
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.”
The circus moved across America foot by foot, mile by mile. He came to know the
land. It was rooted in his blood and his brain forever—its food, its fruit, its
fields and forests, its deserts, and its mountains, its savage lawlessness. He
saw the crimes and the violence of the people with pity, with mercy, and with
tenderness: He thought of them as if they were children. They smashed their
neighbors’ brains out with an ax, they disemboweled one another with knives,
they were murderous and lost upon this earth they dwelt upon as strangers.
The tongueless blood of the murdered men ran down into the earth, and the earth
received it. Upon this enormous and indifferent earth the little trains rattled
on over ill-joined rails that loosely bound the sprawling little towns together.
Lost and lonely, brief sawings of wood and plaster and cheap brick ugliness, the
little towns were scattered like encampments through the wilderness. Only the
earth remained, which all these people had barely touched, which all these
people dwelt upon but could not possess.
Only the earth remained, the savage and lyrical earth with its rude potency, its
thousand vistas, its heights and slopes and levels, with all its violence and
delicacy, the terrible fecundity,decay, and growth, its fierce colors, its vital
bite and sparkle, its exultancy of space and wandering. And the memory of this
earth, the memory of all this universe of sight and sense, was rooted in this
boy’s heart and brain forever. It fed the hungers of desire and wandering, it
breached the walls of his secret and withdrawn spirit. And for every memory of
place and continent, of enormous coffee-colored rivers and eight hundred miles
of bending wheat, of Atlantic coast and midland prairie, of raw red Piedmont and
tropic flatness, there was always the small, fecund, perfect memory of his
father’s land, the dark side of his soul and his heart’s desire, which he had
never seen, but which he knew with every atom of his life, the strange
phantasmal haunting of man’s memory. It was a fertile, nobly swelling land, and
it was large enough to live in, walled with fulfilled desire.
Abroad in this ocean of earth and vision he thought of his father’s land, of its
great red barns and nobly swelling earth, its clear familiarity and its haunting
strangeness, and its dark and secret heart, its magnificent, its lovely and
tragic beauty. He thought of its smell of harbors and its rumors of the seas,
the city, and the ships, its wine-red apples and its brown-red soil, its snug
weathered houses, and 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, but he knew instantly, even before he looked about him, that
he had visited this place before. 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 already 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 next to the tracks, and now he knew that what at first
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 rain-drenched 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 the road. Beyond the road, and bordering it,
there was an orchard with a wall of lichened stone: A row of apple trees,
gnarled and sweet, spread their squat twisted branches out across the road, and
in the faint light he saw that they were dense with blossoms: The cool
intoxication of their fragrance overpowered him.
As the wan light grew, the earth and all its contours emerged sharply, and he
saw again the spare, gaunt loneliness of the earth at dawn, with all its sweet
and sudden cries of spring. He saw the worn and ancient design of lichened
rocks, the fertile soil of the baked fields, he saw the kept order, the frugal
cleanliness, with its springtime overgrowth, the mild tang of opulent greenery.
There was an earth with fences, as big as a man’s heart, but not so great as his
desire, and after his giant wanderings over the prodigal fecundity of the
continent, 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 that he had come at last into his
father’s land. It was a magic that he knew but could not speak; he stood upon
the lip of time, and all of his life now seemed the mirage of some wizard’s
spell—the spell of canvas and the circus ring, the spell of the tented world
which had possessed him. Here was his home, brought back to him while he slept,
like a forgotten dream. Here was the dark side of his soul, his heart’s desire,
his father’s country, the earth his spirit dwelt on as a child. He knew every
inch of the landscape, 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, that
moving, mournful, and beautiful cloud of light along the rails of the earth,
that he had seen so many times. Already the train was in motion; its bell tolled
and its 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 with the tone and temper
of deep joy 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 woods—dark woods bordered with stark
poignancy of fir and pine, with the noble spread of maples, shot with the naked
whiteness of birch. Here was the woodland maze: the sweet density of the brake
and growth. Sharp thrummings, woodland flitters broke the silence. His steps
grew slow, he sat upon a wall, he waited.
Now rose the birdsong in first light, and suddenly he heard each sound the
birdsong made. Like a flight of shot the sharp fast skaps of sound arose. With
chittering bicker, fast-fluttering skirrs of sound, the palmy honeyed bird-cries
came. Smooth drops and nuggets of bright gold they were. Now sang the birdtrees
filled with lutings in bright air: The thrums, the lark’s wing, and
tongue-trilling chirrs arose now. The little nameless cries arose and fell with
liquorous liquefied lutings, with lirruping chirp, plumbellied smoothness, sweet
lucidity.
And now there was the rapid kweet kweet kweet kweet kweet of homing birds and
their pwee pwee pwee: others with sharp cricketing stitch, a mosquito buzz with
thin metallic tongues, while some with rusty creakings, high shrew’s caws, with
eerie rasp, with harsh far calls—all birds that are awake in the sweet woodland
tangles: And above, there passed the whirr of hidden wings, the strange lost cry
of the unknown birds, in full flight now; in which the sweet confusion of their
cries was mingled.
Then he got up and went along that road where, he knew, like the prophetic
surmise of a dream, the house of his father’s blood and kin lay hidden. At
length, he came around a bending in the road, he left the wooded land, he passed
by hedges and saw the old white house, set in the shoulder of the hill, worn
like care and habit in the earth; clean and cool, it sat below the clean dark
shelter of its trees: A twist of morning smoke coiled through its chimney.
Then he turned in to the rutted 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.
Then 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 years of wandering,
the pain of loneliness and the fierce hungers of desire, were scoured away like
a scum of frost from a bright glass.
He was a child again, he was a child that had stood upon the lip and leaf of
time and heard the quiet tides that move us to our death, and he knew that the
child could not be born again, the book of the days could never be turned back,
old errors and confusions never righted. And he wept with sorrow for all that
was lost and could never be regained, and with joy for all that had been
recovered.
Suddenly he saw his youth as men on hilltops might look at the whole winding
course of rivers to the sea, he saw the blind confusions of his wanderings
across the earth, the horror of man’s little stricken mote of earth against
immensity, and he remembered the proud exultancy of his childhood when all the
world lay like a coin between his palms, when he could have touched the horned
rim of the moon, when heroes and great actions bent before him.
And he wept, not for himself, but out of love and pity for every youth that ever
hoped and wandered and was alone. He had become a man, and he had in him unique
glory that belongs to men alone, and that makes them great, and from which they
shape their mightiest songs and legends. For out of their pain they utter first
a cry for wounded self, then, as their vision deepens, widens, the universe of
their marvelous sense leaps out and grips the universe; they feel contempt for
gods, respect for men alone, and with the indifference of a selfless passion,
enact earth out of a lyric cry.
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 young men, already beginning
to show signs of that epic and sensual grossness that distinguished their
father. 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. And
they understood all he wanted to say, but could not speak, and they surrounded
him with love and lavish heapings of his plate. And the boy knew the strange
miracle of return to the dark land of his heart’s desire, the father’s land
which haunts men like a dream they never knew.
Such were the twin images of the circus and his father’s land which were to
haunt his dreams and waking memory and which now, as he stood there with his
brother 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 set foot upon it, he came for the first time
to his father’s earth.
Making Meanings
His Father’s Earth
1. Look back over the notes you made while reading. What words would you use to
describe your response to this story
2. Wolfe depicts the father as a nurturer—a male version of the “earth mother.”
What details help create that picture?
3. How does the world of the circus differ from “his father’s earth”? What
similarities are there in what the boy does and what the father represents?
4. How do descriptions of birdsong bring together descriptions of circus life
and of home?
5. Wolfe is famous for evocative descriptions that are presented like the
catalogs of Walt Whitman. Select one passage of description in Wolfe’s story,
and identify the sense or senses to which each image appeals: sight, taste,
smell, hearing, or touch.