One day, Steve forged a check on his father. It was some days before Gant discovered it: the amount was only three dollars, but his anger was bitter. In a pronouncement at home, delivered loudly enough to publish the boy’s offense to the neighborhood, he spoke of the penitentiary, of letting him go to jail, of being disgraced in his old age—a period of his life at which he had not yet arrived, but which he used to his advantage in times of strife.
He paid the check, of course, but another name—that of “forger”—was added to the vocabulary of his abuse. Steve sneaked in and out of the house, eating his meals alone for several days. When he met his father little was said by either: behind the hard angry glaze of their eyes, they both looked depthlessly into each other; they knew that they could withhold nothing from each other, that the same sores festered in each, the same hungers and desires, the same crawling appetites polluted their blood. And knowing this, something in each of them turned away in grievous shame.
Gant added this to his tirades against Eliza; all that was bad in the boy his mother had given him.
“Mountain Blood! Mountain Blood!” he yelled. “He’s Greeley Pentland all over again. Mark my words,” he continued, after striding feverishly about the house, muttering to himself and bursting finally into the kitchen, “mark my words, he’ll wind up in the penitentiary.”
And, her nose reddened by the spitting grease, she would purse her lips, saying little, save, when goaded, to make some return calculated to infuriate and antagonize him.
“Well, maybe if he hadn’t been sent to every dive in town to pull his daddy out, he would turn out better.”
“You lie, Woman! By God, you lie!” he thundered magnificently but illogically.
Gant drank less: save for a terrifying spree every six or eight weeks, which bound them all in fear for two or three days, Eliza had little to complain of on this score. But her enormous patience was wearing very thin because of the daily cycle of abuse. They slept now in separate rooms upstairs: he rose at six or six-thirty, dressed and went down to build the fires. As he kindled a blaze in the range, and a roaring fire in the sitting-room, he muttered constantly to himself, with an occasional oratorical rise and fall of his voice. In this way he composed and polished the flood of his invective: when the demands of fluency and emphasis had been satisfied he would appear suddenly before her in the kitchen, and deliver himself without preliminary, as the grocer’s negro entered with pork chops or a thick steak:
“Woman, would you have had a roof to shelter you today if it hadn’t been for me? Could you have depended on your worthless old father, Tom Pentland, to give you one? Would Brother Will, or Brother Jim give you one? Did you ever hear of them giving anyone anything? Did you ever hear of them caring for anything but their own miserable hides? Did you? Would any of them give a starving beggar a crust of bread? By God, no! Not even if he ran a bakery shop! Ah me! ’Twas a bitter day for me when I first came into this accursed country: little did I know what it would lead to. Mountain Grills! Mountain Grills!” and the tide would reach its height.
At times, when she tried to reply to his attack, she would burst easily into tears. This pleased him: he liked to see her cry. But usually she made an occasional nagging retort: deep down, between their blind antagonistic souls, an ugly and desperate war was being waged. Yet, had he known to what lengths these daily assaults might drive her, he would have been astounded: they were part of the deep and feverish discontent of his spirit, the rooted instinct to have an object for his abuse.
Moreover, his own feeling for order was so great that he had a passionate aversion for what was slovenly, disorderly, diffuse. He was goaded to actual fury at times when he saw how carefully she saved bits of old string, empty cans and bottles, paper, trash of every description: the mania for acquisition, as yet an undeveloped madness in Eliza, enraged him.
“In God’s name!” he would cry with genuine anger. “In God’s name! Why don’t you get rid of some of this junk?” And he would move destructively toward it.
“No you don’t, Mr. Gant!” she would answer sharply. “You never know when those things will come in handy.”
It was, perhaps, a reversal of custom that the deep-hungering spirit of quest belonged to the one with the greatest love of order, the most pious regard for ritual, who wove into a pattern even his daily tirades of abuse, and that the sprawling blot of chaos, animated by one all-mastering desire for possession, belonged to the practical, the daily person.
Gant had the passion of the true wanderer, of him who wanders from a fixed point. He needed the order and the dependence of a home—he was intensely a family man: their clustered warmth and strength about him was life. After his punctual morning tirade at Eliza, he went about the rousing of the slumbering children. Comically, he could not endure feeling, in the morning, that he was the only one awake and about.
His waking cry, delivered by formula, with huge comic gruffness from the foot of the stairs, took this form:
“Steve! Ben! Grover! Luke! You damned scoundrels: get up! In God’s name, what will become of you! You’ll never amount to anything as long as you live.”
He would continue to roar at them from below as if they were wakefully attentive above.
“When I was your age, I had milked four cows, done all the chores, and walked eight miles through the snow by this time.”
Indeed, when he described his early schooling, he furnished a
