But all of it wasn’t. We crossed a hall with trees growing in it and went into a little room without nothing in it but a nigger dressed up in a uniform a heap shinier than them soldiers had, and the nigger shut the door, and then I hollered, “Look out!” and grabbed, but it was all right; that whole little room jest went right on up and stopped and the door opened and we was in another hall, and the lady unlocked a door and we went in, and there was another soldier, a old feller, with a britching strop, too, and a silver-colored bird on each shoulder.
“Here we are,” the lady said. “This is Colonel McKellogg. Now, what would you like for dinner?”
“I reckon I’ll jest have some ham and eggs and coffee,” I said.
She had done started to pick up the telephone. She stopped. “Coffee?” she said. “When did you start drinking coffee?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I reckon it was before I could remember.”
“You’re about eight, aren’t you?” she said.
“Nome,” I said. “I’m eight and ten months. Going on eleven months.”
She telephoned then. Then we set there and I told them how Pete had jest left that morning for Pearl Harbor and I had aimed to go with him, but I would have to go back home to take care of maw and look after Pete’s ten acres, and she said how they had a little boy about my size, too, in a school in the East. Then a nigger, another one, in a short kind of shirttail coat, rolled a kind of wheelbarrer in. It had my ham and eggs and a glass of milk and a piece of pie, too, and I thought I was hungry. But when I taken the first bite I found out I couldn’t swallow it, and I got up quick.
“I got to go,” I said.
“Wait,” she said.
“I got to go,” I said.
“Just a minute,” she said. “I’ve already telephoned for the car. It won’t be but a minute now. Can’t you drink the milk even? Or maybe some of your coffee?”
“Nome,” I said. “I ain’t hungry. I’ll eat when I git home.” Then the telephone rung. She never even answered it.
“There,” she said. “There’s the car.” And we went back down in that ’ere little moving room with the dressed-up nigger. This time it was a big car with a soldier driving it. I got into the front with him. She give the soldier a dollar. “He might get hungry,” she said. “Try to find a decent place for him.”
“O.K., Mrs. McKellogg,” the soldier said.
Then we was gone again. And now I could see Memphis good, bright in the sunshine, while we was swinging around it. And first thing I knowed, we was back on the same highway the bus run on this morning — the patches of stores and them big gins and sawmills, and Memphis running on for miles, it seemed like to me, before it begun to give out. Then we was running again between the fields and woods, running fast now, and except for that soldier, it was like I hadn’t never been to Memphis a-tall.
We was going fast now. At this rate, before I knowed it we would be home again, and I thought about me riding up to Frenchman’s Bend in this big car with a soldier running it, and all of a sudden I begun to cry. I never knowed I was fixing to, and I couldn’t stop it. I set there by that soldier, crying. We was going fast.
The End
Shall Not Perish, William Faulkner
Shall Not Perish
WHEN THE MESSAGE came about Pete, Father and I had already gone to the field. Mother got it out of the mailbox after we left and brought it down to the fence, and she already knew beforehand what it was because she didn’t even have on her sunbonnet, so she must have been watching from the kitchen window when the carrier drove up. And I already knew what was in it too.
Because she didn’t speak. She just stood at the fence with the little pale envelope that didn’t even need a stamp on it in her hand, and it was me that hollered at Father, from further away across the field than he was, so that he reached the fence first where Mother waited even though I was already running. “I know what it is,” Mother said. “But I can’t open it. Open it.”
“No it ain’t!” I hollered, running. “No it ain’t!” Then I was hollering, “No, Pete! No, Pete!” Then I was hollering, “God damn them Japs! God damn them Japs!” and then I was the one Father had to grab and hold, trying to hold me, having to wrastle with me like I was another man instead of just nine.
And that was all. One day there was Pearl Harbor. And the next week Pete went to Memphis, to join the army and go there and help them; and one morning Mother stood at the field fence with a little scrap of paper not even big enough to start a fire with, that didn’t even need a stamp on the envelope, saying, A ship was. Now it is not.
Your son was one of them. And we allowed ourselves one day to grieve, and that was all. Because it was April, the hardest middle push of planting time, and there was the land, the seventy acres which were our bread and fire and keep, which had outlasted the Griers before us because they had done right by it, and had outlasted Pete because while he was here he had done his part to help and would outlast Mother and Father and me if we did ours.
Then it happened again. Maybe we had forgotten that it could and was going to, again and again, to people who loved sons and brothers as we loved Pete, until the day finally came when there would be an end to it. After that day when we saw Pete’s name and picture in the Memphis paper, Father would bring one home with him each time he went to town. And we would see the pictures and names of soldiers and sailors from other counties and towns in Mississippi and Arkansas and Tennessee, but there wasn’t another from ours, and so after a while it did look like Pete was going to be all.
Then it happened again. It was late July, a Friday. Father had gone to town early on Homer Bookwright’s cattletruck and now it was sundown. I had just come up from the field with the light sweep and I had just finished stalling the mule and come out of the barn when Homer’s truck stopped at the mailbox and Father got down and came up the lane, with a sack of flour balanced on his shoulder and a package under his arm and the folded newspaper in his hand.
And I took one look at the folded paper and then no more. Because I knew it too, even if he always did have one when he came back from town. Because it was bound to happen sooner or later; it would not be just us out of all Yoknapatawpha County who had loved enough to have sole right to grief. So I just met him and took part of the load and turned beside him, and we entered the kitchen together where our cold supper waited on the table and Mother sat in the last of sunset in the open door, her hand and arm strong and steady on the dasher of the churn.
When the message came about Pete, Father never touched her. He didn’t touch her now. He just lowered the flour onto the table and went to the chair and held out the folded paper. “It’s Major de Spain’s boy,” he said. “In town. The av-aytor. That was home last fall in his officer uniform. He run his airplane into a Japanese battleship and blowed it up. So they knowed where he was at.” And Mother didn’t stop the churn for a minute either, because even I could tell that the butter had almost come. Then she got up and went to the sink and washed her hands and came back and sat down again.
“Read it,” she said.
So Father and I found out that Mother not only knew all the time it was going to happen again, but that she already knew what she was going to do when it did, not only this time but the next one too, and the one after that and the one after that, until the day finally came when all the grieving about the earth, the rich and the poor too, whether they lived with ten nigger servants in the fine big painted houses in town or whether they lived on and by seventy acres of not extra good land like us or whether all they owned was the right to sweat today for what they would eat tonight, could say, At least this there was some point to why we grieved.
We fed and milked and came back and ate the cold supper, and I built a fire in the stove and Mother put on the kettle and whatever else would heat enough water for two, and I fetched in the washtub from the back porch, and while Mother washed the dishes and cleaned up the kitchen, Father and I sat on the front steps. This was about the time of day that Pete and
