Now it was Sutpen who looked away, turning suddenly, brusquely. “Get the jug,” he said sharply.
“Sho, Kernel,” Wash said.
So on that Sunday dawn two years later, having watched the Negro midwife, which he had walked three miles to fetch, enter the crazy door beyond which his granddaughter lay wailing, his heart was still quiet though concerned. He knew what they had been saying — the Negroes in cabins about the land, the white men who loafed all day long about the store, watching quietly the three of them: Sutpen, himself, his granddaughter with her air of brazen and shrinking defiance as her condition became daily more and more obvious, like three actors that came and went upon a stage. “I know what they say to one another,” he thought. “I can almost hyear them: Wash Jones has fixed old Sutpen at last. Hit taken him twenty years, but he has done hit at last.”
It would be dawn after a while, though not yet. From the house, where the lamp shone dim beyond the warped doorframe, his granddaughter’s voice came steadily as though run by a clock, while thinking went slowly and terrifically, fumbling, involved somehow with a sound of galloping hooves, until there broke suddenly free in mid-gallop the fine proud figure of the man on the fine proud stallion, galloping; and then that at which thinking fumbled, broke free too and quite clear, not in justification nor even explanation, but as the apotheosis, lonely, explicable, beyond all fouling by human touch: “He is bigger than all them Yankees that kilt his son and his wife and taken his niggers and ruined his land, bigger than this hyer durn country that he fit for and that has denied him into keeping a little country store; bigger than the denial which hit helt to his lips like the bitter cup in the Book.
And how could I have lived this nigh to him for twenty years without being teched and changed by him? Maybe I ain’t as big as him and maybe I ain’t done none of the galloping. But at least I done been drug along. Me and him kin do hit, if so be he will show me what he aims for me to do.”
Then it was dawn. Suddenly he could see the house, and the old Negress in the door looking at him. Then he realized that his granddaughter’s voice had ceased. “It’s a girl,” the Negress said. “You can go tell him if you want to.” She re-entered the house.
“A girl,” he repeated; “a girl”; in astonishment, hearing the galloping hooves, seeing the proud galloping figure emerge again. He seemed to watch it pass, galloping through avatars which marked the accumulation of years, time, to the climax where it galloped beneath a brandished saber and a shot-torn flag rushing down a sky in color like thunderous sulphur, thinking for the first time in his life that perhaps Sutpen was an old man like himself. “Gittin a gal,” he thought in that astonishment; then he thought with the pleased surprise of a child: “Yes, sir. Be dawg if I ain’t lived to be a great-grandpaw after all.”
He entered the house. He moved clumsily, on tiptoe, as if he no longer lived there, as if the infant which had just drawn breath and cried in light had dispossessed him, be it of his own blood too though it might. But even above the pallet he could see little save the blur of his granddaughter’s exhausted face. Then the Negress squatting at the hearth spoke, “You better gawn tell him if you going to. Hit’s daylight now.”
But this was not necessary. He had no more than turned the corner of the porch where the scythe leaned which he had borrowed three months ago to clear away the weeds through which he walked, when Sutpen himself rode up on the old stallion. He did not wonder how Sutpen had got the word. He took it for granted that this was what had brought the other out at this hour on Sunday morning, and he stood while the other dismounted, and he took the reins from Sutpen’s hand, an expression on his gaunt face almost imbecile with a kind of weary triumph, saying, “Hit’s a gal, Kernel.
I be dawg if you ain’t as old as I am—” until Sutpen passed him and entered the house. He stood there with the reins in his hand and heard Sutpen cross the floor to the pallet. He heard what Sutpen said, and something seemed to stop dead in him before going on.
The sun was now up, the swift sun of Mississippi latitudes, and it seemed to him that he stood beneath a strange sky, in a strange scene, familiar only as things are familiar in dreams, like the dreams of falling to one who has never climbed.
“I kain’t have heard what I thought I heard,” he thought quietly. “I know I kain’t.” Yet the voice, the familiar voice which had said the words was still speaking, talking now to the old Negress about a colt foaled that morning. “That’s why he was up so early,” he thought. “That was hit. Hit ain’t me and mine. Hit ain’t even his that got him outen bed.”
Sutpen emerged. He descended into the weeds, moving with that heavy deliberation which would have been haste when he was younger. He had not yet looked full at Wash. He said, “Dicey will stay and tend to her. You better—” Then he seemed to see Wash facing him and paused. “What?” he said.
“You said—” To his own ears Wash’s voice sounded flat and ducklike, like a deaf man’s. “You said if she was a mare, you could give her a good stall in the stable.”
“Well?” Sutpen said. His eyes widened and narrowed, almost like a man’s fists flexing and shutting, as Wash began to advance towards him, stooping a little. Very astonishment kept Sutpen still for the moment, watching that man whom in twenty years he had no more known to make any motion save at command than he had the horse which he rode. Again his eyes narrowed and widened; without moving he seemed to rear suddenly upright. “Stand back,” he said suddenly and sharply. “Don’t you touch me.”
“I’m going to tech you, Kernel,” Wash said in that flat, quiet, almost soft voice, advancing.
Sutpen raised the hand which held the riding whip; the old Negress peered around the crazy door with her black gargoyle face of a worn gnome. “Stand back, Wash,” Sutpen said. Then he struck. The old Negress leaped down into the weeds with the agility of a goat and fled. Sutpen slashed Wash again across the face with the whip, striking him to his knees. When Wash rose and advanced once more he held in his hands the scythe which he had borrowed from Sutpen three months ago and which Sutpen would never need again.
When he reëntered the house his granddaughter stirred on the pallet bed and called his name fretfully. “What was that?” she said.
“What was what, honey?”
“That ere racket out there.”
“‘Twarn’t nothing,” he said gently. He knelt and touched her hot forehead clumsily. “Do you want ara thing?”
“I want a sup of water,” she said querulously. “I been laying here wanting a sup of water a long time, but don’t nobody care enough to pay me no mind.”
“Sho now,” he said soothingly. He rose stiffly and fetched the dipper of water and raised her head to drink and laid her back and watched her turn to the child with an absolutely stonelike face. But a moment later he saw that she was crying quietly. “Now, now,” he said, “I wouldn’t do that. Old Dicey says hit’s a right fine gal. Hit’s all right now. Hit’s all over now. Hit ain’t no need to cry now.”
But she continued to cry quietly, almost sullenly, and he rose again and stood uncomfortably above the pallet for a time, thinking as he had thought when his own wife lay so and then his daughter in turn: “Women. Hit’s a mystry to me. They seem to want em, and yit when they git em they cry about hit. Hit’s a mystry to me. To ara man.” Then he moved away and drew a chair up to the window and sat down.
Through all that long, bright, sunny forenoon he sat at the window, waiting. Now and then he rose and tiptoed to the pallet. But his granddaughter slept now, her face sullen and calm and weary, the child in the crook of her arm. Then he returned to the chair and sat again, waiting, wondering why it took them so long, until he remembered that it was Sunday.
He was sitting there at mid-afternoon when a half-grown white boy came around the corner of the house upon the body and gave a choked cry and looked up and glared for a mesmerized instant at Wash in the window before he turned and fled. Then Wash rose and tiptoed again to the pallet.
The granddaughter was awake now, wakened perhaps by the boy’s cry without hearing it. “Milly,” he said, “air you hungry?” She didn’t answer, turning her face away. He built up the fire on the hearth and cooked the food which he had brought home the day before: fatback it was, and cold corn pone; he poured water into the stale coffee pot and heated it. But she would not eat when he carried the plate to her, so he ate himself, quietly, alone, and left the dishes as they were and returned
