“No, I tell you. You don’t love me. I don’t love you. We’ve never said we did.”
“All right. Not love, then. Will you marry me without it? Remember, it will be too late.”
“No. I will not.”
“But why? Why, Paul?” He didn’t answer. The car fled on. Now it was the first sign which she had noticed; she thought quietly, ‘We must be almost there now. It is the next curve.’ She said aloud, speaking across the deafness of the old woman between them: “Why not, Paul? If it’s that story about nigger blood, I don’t believe it. I don’t care.” ‘Yes,’ she thought, ‘this is the curve.’ The road entered the curve, descending.
She sat back, and then she found her grandmother looking full at her. But she did not try now to veil her face, her eyes, any more than she would have tried to conceal her voice: “Suppose I have a child?”
“Suppose you do? I can’t help it now. You should have thought of that. Remember, you sent for me; I didn’t ask to come back.”
“No. You didn’t ask. I sent for you. I made you. And this is the last time. Will you? Quick!”
“No.”
“All right,” she said. She sat back; at that instant the road seemed to poise and pause before plunging steeply downward beside the precipice; the white fence began to flicker past. As Elly flung the robe aside she saw her grandmother still watching her; as she lunged forward across the old woman’s knees they glared eye to eye — the haggard and desperate girl and the old woman whose hearing had long since escaped everything and whose sight nothing escaped — for a profound instant of despairing ultimatum and implacable refusal.
“Then die!” she cried into the old woman’s face; “die!” grasping at the wheel as Paul tried to fling her back. But she managed to get her elbow into the wheel spokes with all her weight on it, sprawling across her grandmother’s body, holding the wheel hard over as Paul struck her on the mouth with his fist.
“Oh,” she screamed, “you hit me. You hit me!” When the car struck the railing it flung her free, so that for an instant she lay lightly as an alighting bird upon Paul’s chest, her mouth open, her eyes round with shocked surprise.
“You hit me!” she wailed. Then she was falling free, alone in a complete and peaceful silence like a vacuum. Paul’s face, her grandmother, the car, had disappeared, vanished as though by magic; parallel with her eyes the shattered ends of white railing, the crumbling edge of the precipice where dust whispered and a faint gout of it hung like a toy balloon, rushed mutely skyward.
Overhead somewhere a sound passed, dying away — the snore of an engine, the long hissing of tires in gravel, then the wind sighed in the trees again, shivering the crests against the sky. Against the bole of one of them the car lay in an inextricable and indistinguishable mass, and Elly sat in a litter of broken glass, staring dully at it.
“Something happened,” she whimpered. “He hit me. And now they are dead; it’s me that’s hurt, and nobody will come.” She moaned a little, whimpering. Then with an air of dazed astonishment she raised her hand.
The palm was red and wet. She sat whimpering quietly, digging stupidly at her palm. “There’s glass all in it and I can’t even see it,” she said, whimpered, gazing at her palm while the warm blood stained slowly down upon her skirt. Again the sound rushed steadily past high overhead, and died away. She looked up, following it. “There goes another one,” she whimpered.
“They won’t even stop to see if I am hurt.”
The End
Uncle Willy, William Faulkner
Uncle Willy
I KNOW WHAT they said. They said I didn’t run away from home but that I was tolled away by a crazy man who, if I hadn’t killed him first, would have killed me inside another week. But if they had said that the women, the good women in Jefferson had driven Uncle Willy out of town and I followed him and did what I did because I knew that Uncle Willy was on his last go-round and this time when they got him again it would be for good and forever, they would have been right.
Because I wasn’t tolled away and Uncle Willy wasn’t crazy, not even after all they had done to him. I didn’t have to go; I didn’t have to go any more than Uncle Willy had to invite me instead of just taking it for granted that I wanted to come.
I went because Uncle Willy was the finest man I ever knew, because even women couldn’t beat him, because in spite of them he wound up his life getting fun out of being alive and he died doing the thing that was the most fun of all because I was there to help him. And that’s something that most men and even most women too don’t get to do, not even the women that call meddling with other folks’ lives fun.
He wasn’t anybody’s uncle, but all of us, and grown people too, called him (or thought of him) as Uncle Willy. He didn’t have any kin at all except a sister in Texas married to an oil millionaire.
He lived by himself in a little old neat white house where he had been born on the edge of town, he and an old nigger named Job Wylie that was older than he was even, that cooked and kept the house and was the porter at the drugstore which Uncle Willy’s father had established and which Uncle Willy ran without any other help than old Job; and during the twelve or fourteen years (the life of us as children and then boys), while he just used dope, we saw a lot of him. We liked to go to his store because it was always cool and dim and quiet inside because he never washed the windows; he said the reason was that he never had to bother to dress them because nobody could see in anyway, and so the heat couldn’t get in either.
And he never had any customers except country people buying patent medicines that were already in bottles, and niggers buying cards and dice, because nobody had let him fill a prescription in forty years I reckon, and he never had any soda fountain trade because it was old Job who washed the glasses and mixed the syrups and made the ice cream ever since Uncle Willy’s father started the business in eighteen-fifty-something and so old Job couldn’t see very well now, though papa said he didn’t think that old Job took dope too, it was from breathing day and night the air which Uncle Willy had just exhaled.
But the ice cream tasted all right to us, especially when we came in hot from the ball games. We had a league of three teams in town and Uncle Willy would give the prize, a ball or a bat or a mask, for each game though he would never come to see us play, so after the game both teams and maybe all three would go to the store to watch the winner get the prize.
And we would eat the ice cream and then we would all go behind the prescription case and watch Uncle Willy light the little alcohol stove and fill the needle and roll his sleeve up over the little blue myriad punctures starting at his elbow and going right on up into his shirt.
And the next day would be Sunday and we would wait in our yards and fall in with him as he passed from house to house and go on to Sunday school, Uncle Willy with us, in the same class with us, sitting there while we recited. Mr. Barbour from the Sunday school never called on him. Then we would finish the lesson and we would talk about baseball until the bell rang and Uncle Willy still not saying anything, just sitting there all neat and clean, with his clean collar and no tie and weighing about a hundred and ten pounds and his eyes behind his glasses kind of all run together like broken eggs. Then we would all go to the store and eat the ice cream that was left over from Saturday and then go behind the prescription case and watch him again: the little stove and his Sunday shirt rolled up and the needle going slow into his blue arm and somebody would say, “Don’t it hurt?” and he would say, “No. I like it.”
II
Then they made him quit dope. He had been using it for forty years, he told us once, and now he was sixty and he had about ten years more at the outside, only he didn’t tell us that because he didn’t need to tell even fourteen-year-old boys that. But they made him quit. It didn’t take them long.
It began one Sunday morning and it was finished by the next Friday; we had just sat down in our class and Mr. Barbour had just begun, when all of a sudden Reverend Schultz, the minister, was there, leaning over Uncle Willy and already hauling him out of his seat when we looked around, hauling him up and saying in that tone in which preachers speak to fourteen-year-old boys that I don’t believe even pansy boys like: “Now, Brother Christian, I know you
