First is Jefferson, the center, radiating weakly its puny glow into space; beyond it, enclosing it, spreads the County, tied by the diverging roads to that center as is the rim to the hub by its spokes, yourself detached as God himself for this moment above the cradle of your nativity and of the men and women who made you, the record and annal of your native land proffered for your perusal in ring by concentric ring like the ripples on living water above the dreamless slumber of your past; you to preside unanguished and immune above this miniature of man’s passions and hopes and disasters — ambition and fear and lust and courage and abnegation and pity and honor and sin and pride — all bound, precarious and ramshackle held together, by the web, the iron-thin warp and woof of his rapacity but withal yet dedicated to his dreams.
They are all here, supine beneath you, stratified and superposed, osseous and durable with the frail dust and the phantoms: — the rich alluvial river-bottom land of old Issetibbeha, the wild Chickasaw king, with his Negro slaves and his sister’s son called Doom who murdered his way to the throne and, legend said (record itself said since there were old men in the county in my own childhood who had actually seen it), stole an entire steamboat and had it dragged intact eleven miles overland to convert into a palace proper to aggrandise his state; the same fat black rich plantation earth still synonymous of the proud fading white plantation names whether we — I mean of course they — ever actually owned a plantation or not: Sutpen and Sartoris and Compson and Edmonds and McCaslin and Beauchamp and Grenier and Habersham and Holston and Stevens and De Spain, generals and governors and judges, soldiers (even if only Cuban lieutenants) and statesmen failed or not, and simple politicians and over-reachers and just simple failures, who snatched and grabbed and passed and vanished, name and face and all.
Then the roadless, almost pathless perpendicular hill-country of McCallum and Gowrie and Frazier and Muir translated intact with their pot stills and speaking only the old Gaelic and not much of that, from Culloden to Carolina, then from Carolina to Yoknapatawpha still intact and not speaking much of anything except that they now called the pots ‘kettles’ though the drink (even I can remember this) was still usquebaugh; then and last on to where Frenchman’s Bend lay beyond the south-eastern horizon, cradle of Varners and ant-heap for the north-east crawl of Snopes.
And you stand there — you, the old man, already white-headed (because it doesn’t matter if they call your gray hairs premature because life itself is always premature which is why it aches and anguishes) and pushing forty, only a few years from forty — while there rises up to you, proffered up to you, the spring darkness, the unsleeping darkness which, although it is of the dark itself declines the dark since dark is of the little death called sleeping. Because look how, even though the last of west is no longer green and all of firmament is now one unlidded studded slow-wheeling arc and the last of earth-pooled visibility has drained away, there still remains one faint diffusion since everywhere you look about the dark panorama you still see them, faint as whispers: the faint and shapeless lambence of blooming dogwood returning loaned light to light as the phantoms of candles would.
And you, the old man, standing there while there rises to you, about you, suffocating you, the spring dark peopled and myriad two and two seeking never at all solitude but simply privacy, the privacy decreed and created for them by the spring darkness, the spring weather, the spring which an American poet, a fine one, a woman and so she knows, called girls’ weather and boys’ luck. Which was not the first day at all, not Eden morning at all because girls’ weather and boys’ luck is the sum of all the days: the cup, the bowl proffered once to the lips in youth and then no more; proffered to quench or sip or drain that lone one time and even that sometimes premature, too soon. Because the tragedy of life is, it must be premature, inconclusive and inconcludable, in order to be life; it must be before itself, in advance of itself, to have been at all.
And now for truth was the one last chance to choose, decide: whether or not to say Why me? Why bother me? Why cant you let me alone? Why must it be my problem whether I was right and your husband just wants your lover’s scalp, or Ratliff is right and your husband doesn’t care a damn about you or his honor either and just wants De Spain’s bank? — the Square empty beneath the four identical faces of the courthouse clock saying ten minutes to ten to the north and east and south and west, vacant now beneath the arclight-stippled shadows of fledged leaves like small bites taken out of the concrete paving, the drugstores closed and all still moving now were the late last homeward stragglers from the second running of the picture show. Or better still, what she herself should have thought without my needing to say it: Take Manfred de Spain in whatever your new crisis is, since you didn’t hesitate to quench with him your other conflagration eighteen years ago. Or do you already know in advance he will be no good this time, since a bank is not a female but neuter?
And of course Otis Harker. “Evening, Mr Stevens,” he said. “When you drove up I almost hoped maybe it was a gang come to rob the postoffice or the bank or something to bring us a little excitement for a change.”
“But it was just another lawyer,” I said, “and lawyers dont bring excitement: only misery?”
“I dont believe I quite said that, did I?” he said. “But leastways lawyers stays awake so if you’re going to be around a while, maybe I’ll jest mosey back to the station and maybe take a nap while you watch them racing clock-hands a spell for me.” Except that he was looking at me. No: he wasn’t looking at me at all: he was watching me, deferent to my white hairs as a well-’raised’ Mississippian should be, but not my representative position as his employer; not quite servile, not quite impudent, waiting maybe or calculating maybe.
“Say it,” I said. “Except that—”
“Except that Mr Flem Snopes and Mr Manfred de Spain might cross the Square any time now with old Will Varner chasing them both out of town with that pistol.”
“Good night,” I said. “If I dont see you again.”
“Good night,” he said. “I’ll likely be somewhere around. I mean around awake. I wouldn’t want Mr Buck himself to have to get up out of bed and come all the way to town to catch me asleep.”
You see? You cant beat it. Otis Harker too, who, assuming he does keep awake all night as he is paid to do, should have been at home all day in bed asleep. But of course, he was there; he actually saw old Varner cross the Square at four this morning on his way to Flem’s house. Yes. You cant beat it: the town itself officially on record now in the voice of its night marshal; the county itself had spoken through one of its minor clowns; eighteen years ago when Manfred de Spain thought he was just bedding another loose-girdled bucolic Lilith, he was actually creating a piece of buffoon’s folklore.
Though there were still ten minutes, and it would take Otis Harker at least twenty-five to “round up” the gin and compress and their purlieus and get back to the Square. And I know now that I already smelled tobacco smoke even before I put my hand on what I thought was an unlocked door for the reason that I myself had made a special trip back to leave it unlocked, still smelling the tobacco while I still tried to turn the knob, until the latch clicked back from inside and the door opened, she standing there against the dark interior in what little there was of light. Though it was enough to see her hair, that she had been to the beauty parlor: who according to Maggie had never been to one, the hair not bobbed of course, not waved, but something, I dont know what it was except that she had been to the beauty parlor that afternoon.
“Good for you for locking it,” I said. “We wont need to risk a light either. Only I think that Otis Harker already—”
“That’s all right,” she said. So I closed the door and locked it again and turned on the desk lamp. “Turn them all on if you want to,” she said. “I wasn’t trying to hide. I just didn’t want to have to talk to somebody.”
“Yes,” I said, and sat behind the desk. She had been in the client’s chair, sitting in the dark smoking; the cigarette was still burning in the little tray with two other stubs. Now she was sitting again in the client’s chair at the end of the desk where the light fell upon her from the shoulder down but mostly on her hands lying quite still on the bag on her lap. Though I could
