I reckon it wasn’t scared of the dogs. I reckon it had fooled them so much it wasn’t worried about them. I reckon he was what worried it. I reckon him and it knowed one another after these three years same as you maybe knowed your maw or your wife maybe, only you ain’t never been married none to speak of.
Anyway it was on the ditch-bank, and he knowed it was there and he cut straight across the field without giving it no spell to breathe in. I reckon maybe yawl seen him, riding straight across that field like he could see like a hawk and smell like a dog.
And the fox was there, where it had done fooled the dogs. But it never had no spell to breathe in, and when it had to run again and dropped over the ditch-bank, it dropped into the briers, I reckon, and it was too tired to get out and run. And he come up and jumped that ditch, just like that fox aimed for him to.
Only the fox was still in the briers, and while he was going through the air he looked down and seen the fox and he clumb off the horse while it was jumping and dropped feet first into the briers like the fox done. Maybe it dodged some then; I don’t know. He says it just swirled and jumped at his face and he knocked it down with his fist and trompled it dead with his boot-heels.
The dogs hadn’t got there then. But it so happened he never needed them.” He ceased talking and sat for a moment longer, sloven and inert upon the shabby, patient mule, his face shadowed beneath his hat. “Well,” he said, “I reckon I’ll get on. I ain’t had ne’er a bite of breakfast yet. I’ll bid yawl good morning.” He put his mule into motion, the second mule following. He did not look back.
But the youth did. He looked back at the man on the bay horse, the cigarette burning in his hand, the plume of smoke faint and windless in the sunny silence, and at the woman on the chestnut, her arms lifted and her hands busy in her bright, cloudy hair; projecting, trying to project, himself, after the way of the young, toward that remote and inaccessible she, trying to encompass the vain and inarticulate instant of division and despair which, being young, was very like rage: rage at the lost woman, despair of the man in whose shape there walked the tragic and inescapable earth her ruin. “She was crying,” he said, then he began to curse, savagely, without point or subject.
“Come on,” the older man said. He did not look back. “I reckon them hunt breakfast hoe-cakes will be about ready time we get home.”
The End
Pennsylvania Station, William Faulkner
Pennsylvania Station
THEY SEEMED TO bring with them the smell of the snow falling in Seventh Avenue. Or perhaps the other people who had entered before them had done it, bringing it with them in their lungs and exhaling it, filling the arcade with a stale chill like that which might lie unwinded and spent upon the cold plains of infinity itself.
In it the bright and serried shopwindows had a fixed and insomniac glare like the eyes of people drugged with coffee, sitting up with a strange corpse.
In the rotunda, where the people appeared as small and intent as ants, the smell and sense of snow still lingered, though high now among the steel girders, spent and vitiated too and filled here with a weary and ceaseless murmuring, like the voices of pilgrims upon the infinite plain, like the voices of all the travelers who had ever passed through it quiring and ceaseless as lost children.
They went on toward the smoking room. It was the old man who looked in the door. “All right,” he said. He looked sixty, though he was probably some age like forty-eight or fifty-two or fifty-eight. He wore a long overcoat with a collar which had once been fur, and a cap with earflaps like the caricature of an up-State farmer. His shoes were not mates. “There ain’t many here yet.
It will be some time now.” While they stood there three other men came and looked into the smoking room with that same air not quite diffident and not quite furtive, with faces and garments that seemed to give off that same effluvium of soup kitchens and Salvation Army homes.
They entered; the old man led the way toward the rear of the room, among the heavy, solid benches on which still more men of all ages sat in attitudes of thought or repose and looking as transient as scarecrows blown by a departed wind upon a series of rock ledges. The old man chose a bench and sat down, making room for the young man beside him.
“I used to think that if you sat somewhere about the middle, he might skip you. But I found out that it don’t make much difference where you sit.”
“Nor where you lie, either,” the young man said. He wore an army overcoat, new, and a pair of yellow army brogans of the sort that can be bought from so-called army stores for a dollar or so. He had not shaved in some time. “And it don’t make a hell of a lot of difference whether you are breathing or not while you are lying there. I wish I had a cigarette. I have got used to not eating but be damned if I don’t hate to get used to not smoking.”
“Sure now,” the old man said. “I wish I had a cigarette to give you. I ain’t used tobacco myself since I went to Florida. That was funny: I hadn’t smoked in ten years, yet as soon as I got back to New York, that was the first thing I thought about. Isn’t that funny?”
“Yes,” the young man said. “Especially if you never had any tobacco when you thought about wanting it again.”
“Wanting it and not having it couldn’t have worried me then,” the old man said. “I was all right then. Until I—” He settled himself. Into his face came that rapt expression of the talkative old, without heat or bewilderment or rancor. “What confused me was I thought all the time that the burying money was all right. As soon as I found out about Danny’s trouble I come right back to New York—”
II
“Who is this Danny, anyway?” the young man said.
“Didn’t I tell you? He’s Sister’s boy. There wasn’t any of us left but Sister and Danny and me. Yet I was the weakly one. The one they all thought wouldn’t live. I was give up to die twice before I was fifteen, yet I outlived them all. Outlived all eight of them when Sister died three years ago.
That was why I went to Florida to live. Because I thought I couldn’t stand the winters here. Yet I have stood three of them now since Sister died. But sometimes it looks like a man can stand just about anything if he don’t believe he can stand it. Don’t you think so?”
“I don’t know,” the young man said. “Which trouble was this?”
“Which?”
“Which trouble was Danny in now?”
“Don’t get me wrong about Danny. He wasn’t bad; just wild, like any young fellow. But not bad.”
“All right,” the young man said. “It wasn’t any trouble then.”
“No. He’s a good boy. He’s in Chicago now. Got a good job now. The lawyer in Jacksonville got it for him right after I come back to New York. I didn’t know he had it until I tried to wire him that Sister was dead. Then I found that he was in Chicago, with a good job.
He sent Sister a wreath of flowers that must have cost two hundred dollars. Sent it by air; that cost something, too. He couldn’t come himself because he had just got the job and his boss was out of town and he couldn’t get away. He was a good boy. That was why when that trouble come up about that woman on the floor below that accused him of stealing the clothes off her clothes-line, that I told Sister I would send him the railroad fare to Jacksonville, where I could look after him. Get him clean away from them low-life boys around the saloons and such.
I come all the way from Florida to see about him. That was how I happened to go with Sister to see Mr. Pinckski, before she ever begun to pay on the coffin. She wanted me to go with her. Because you know how an old woman is. Only she wasn’t old, even if her and me had outlived all the other seven.
But you know how an old woman seems to get comfort out of knowing she will be buried right in case there isn’t any of her kin there to ‘tend to it. I guess maybe that keeps a lot of them going.”
“And especially with Danny already too busy to see if she was buried at all, himself.”
The old man, his mouth already shaped for further speech, paused and looked at the young man. “What?”
“I say, if getting into the ground at last don’t keep some of them going, I don’t know what it is that does.”
“Oh. Maybe so. That ain’t never worried me. I guess because I was already give up to die twice before I was fifteen. Like now every time a winter gets through, I
