Look Homeward, Angel - Thomas Wolfe Read Free Page B

he had lost forever.
 
 
    The Pentland family, of which Eliza was a member, was
one of the strangest tribes that ever came out of the hills.  It
had no clear title to the name of Pentland: a Scotch-Englishman of
that name, who was a mining engineer, the grandfather of the present
head of the family, had come into the hills after the Revolution,
looking for copper, and lived there for several years, begetting
several children by one of the pioneer women.  When he
disappeared the woman took for herself and her children the name of
Pentland.
    The present chieftain of the tribe was Eliza's
father, the brother of the prophet Bacchus, Major Thomas Pentland. 
Another brother had been killed during the Seven Days.  Major
Pentland's military title was honestly if inconspicuously earned. 
While Bacchus, who never rose above the rank of Corporal, was
blistering his hard hands at Shiloh, the Major, as commander of two
companies of Home Volunteers, was guarding the stronghold of the
native hills.  This stronghold was never threatened until the
closing days of the war, when the Volunteers, ambuscaded behind
convenient trees and rocks, fired three volleys into a detachment of
Sherman's stragglers, and quietly dispersed to the defense of their
attendant wives and children.
    The Pentland family was as old as any in the
community, but it had always been poor, and had made few pretenses to
gentility.  By marriage, and by intermarriage among its own
kinsmen, it could boast of some connection with the great, of some
insanity, and a modicum of idiocy.  But because of its obvious
superiority, in intelligence and fibre, to most of the mountain
people it held a position of solid respect among them.
    The Pentlands bore a strong clan-marking.  Like
most rich personalities in strange families their powerful
group-stamp became more impressive because of their differences. 
They had broad powerful noses, with fleshy deeply scalloped wings,
sensual mouths, extraordinarily mixed of delicacy and coarseness,
which in the process of thinking they convolved with astonishing
flexibility, broad intelligent foreheads, and deep flat cheeks, a
trifle hollowed.  The men were generally ruddy of face, and
their typical stature was meaty, strong, and of middling height,
although it varied into gangling cadaverousness.
    Major Thomas Pentland was the father of a numerous
family of which Eliza was the only surviving girl.  A younger
sister had died a few years before of a disease which the family
identified sorrowfully as "poor Jane's scrofula." 
There were six boys:  Henry, the oldest, was now thirty, Will
was twenty-six, Jim was twenty-two, and Thaddeus, Elmer and Greeley
were, in the order named, eighteen, fifteen, and eleven.  Eliza
was twenty-four.
    The four oldest children, Henry, Will, Eliza, and
Jim, had passed their childhood in the years following the war. 
The poverty and privation of these years had been so terrible that
none of them ever spoke of it now, but the bitter steel had sheared
into their hearts, leaving scars that would not heal.
    The effect of these years upon the oldest children
was to develop in them an insane niggardliness, an insatiate love of
property, and a desire to escape from the Major's household as
quickly as possible.
 
 
    "Father," Eliza had said with ladylike
dignity, as she led Oliver for the first time into the sitting-room
of the cottage, "I want you to meet Mr. Gant."
    Major Pentland rose slowly from his rocker by the
fire, folded a large knife, and put the apple he had been peeling on
the mantel. Bacchus looked up benevolently from a whittled stick, and
Will, glancing up from his stubby nails which he was paring as usual,
greeted the visitor with a birdlike nod and wink.  The men
amused themselves constantly with pocket knives.
    Major Pentland advanced slowly toward Gant.  He
was a stocky fleshyman in the middle fifties, with a ruddy face, a
patriarchal beard, and the thick complacent features of his