I went on and saw my customers and had dinner, and in the afternoon I went to Stevens’ office. “I see you’ve got a new barber in town,” I said.
“Yes,” Stevens said. He looked at me a while, then he said, “You haven’t heard?”
“Heard what?” I said. Then he quit looking at me.
“I got your letter,” he said, “that Hawkshaw had paid off the mortgage and painted the house. Tell me about it.”
So I told him how I got to Division the day after Hawkshaw had left. They were talking about him on the porch of the store, wondering just when those Alabama Starnes would come in. He had painted the house himself, and he had cleaned up the two graves; I dont reckon he wanted to disturb Starnes by cleaning his. I went up to see them. He had even scrubbed the headstones, and he had set out an apple shoot over the girl’s grave.
It was in bloom, and what with the folks all talking about him, I got curious too, to see the inside of that house. The storekeeper had the key, and he said he reckoned it would be all right with Hawkshaw.
It was clean inside as a hospital. The stove was polished and the woodbox filled. The storekeeper told me Hawkshaw did that every year, filled the woodbox before he left. “Those Alabama kinsfolk will appreciate that,” I said. We went on back to the parlor. There was a melodeon in the corner, and a lamp and a Bible on the table.
The lamp was clean, the bowl empty and clean too; you couldn’t even smell oil on it. That wedding license was framed, hanging above the mantel like a picture. It was dated April 4, 1905.
“Here’s where he keeps that mortgage record,” the storekeeper (his name is Bidwell) said. He went to the table and opened the Bible. The front page was the births and deaths, two columns. The girl’s name was Sophie. I found her name in the birth column, and on the death side it was next to the last one. Mrs Starnes had written it. It looked like it might have taken her ten minutes to write it down. It looked like this:
Sofy starnes Dide april 16 th 1905
Hawkshaw wrote the last one himself; it was neat and well written, like a bookkeeper’s hand:
Mrs Will Starnes. April 23, 1916.
“The record will be in the back,” Bidwell said.
We turned to the back. It was there, in a neat column, in Hawkshaw’s hand. It began with April 16, 1917, $200.00. The next one was when he made the next payment at the bank: April 16, 1918, $200.00; and April 16, 1919, $200.00; and April 16, 1920, $200.00; and on to the last one: April 16, 1930, $200.00. Then he had totaled the column and written under it:
“Paid in full. April 16, 1930.”
It looked like a sentence written in a copy book in the old-time business colleges, like it had flourished, the pen had, in spite of him. It didn’t look like it was written boastful; it just flourished somehow, the end of it, like it had run out of the pen somehow before he could stop it.
“So he did what he promised her he would,” Stevens said.
“That’s what I told Bidwell,” I said.
Stevens went on like he wasn’t listening to me much.
“So the old lady could rest quiet. I guess that’s what the pen was trying to say when it ran away from him: that now she could lie quiet. And he’s not much over forty-five. Not so much anyway. Not so much but what, when he wrote ‘Paid in full’ under that column, time and despair rushed as slow and dark under him as under any garlanded boy or crownless and crestless girl.”
“Only the girl went bad on him,” I said. “Forty-five’s pretty late to set out to find another. He’ll be fifty-five at least by then.”
Stevens looked at me then. “I didn’t think you had heard,” he said.
“Yes,” I said. “That is, I looked in the barber shop when I passed. But I knew he would be gone. I knew all the time he would move on, once he had that mortgage cleared. Maybe he never knew about the girl, anyway. Or likely he knew and didn’t care.”
“You think he didn’t know about her?”
“I dont see how he could have helped it. But I dont know. What do you think?”
“I dont know. I dont think I want to know. I know something so much better than that.”
“What’s that?” I said. He was looking at me. “You keep on telling me I haven’t heard the news. What is it I haven’t heard?”
“About the girl,” Stevens said. He looked at me.
“On the night Hawkshaw came back from his last vacation, they were married. He took her with him this time.”
The End
That Evening Sun, William Faulkner
That Evening Sun
I
MONDAY IS NO different from any other weekday in Jefferson now. The streets are paved now, and the telephone and electric companies are cutting down more and more of the shade trees — the water oaks, the maples and locusts and elms — to make room for iron poles bearing clusters of bloated and ghostly and bloodless grapes, and we have a city laundry which makes the rounds on Monday morning, gathering the bundles of clothes into bright-colored, specially-made motor cars: the soiled wearing of a whole week now flees apparitionlike behind alert and irritable electric horns, with a long diminishing noise of rubber and asphalt like tearing silk, and even the Negro women who still take in white people’s washing after the old custom, fetch and deliver it in automobiles.
But fifteen years ago, on Monday morning the quiet, dusty, shady streets would be full of Negro women with, balanced on their steady, turbaned heads, bundles of clothes tied up in sheets, almost as large as cotton bales, carried so without touch of hand between the kitchen door of the white house and the blackened washpot beside a cabin door in Negro Hollow.
Nancy would set her bundle on the top of her head, then upon the bundle in turn she would set the black straw sailor hat which she wore winter and summer. She was tall, with a high, sad face sunken a little where her teeth were missing. Sometimes we would go a part of the way down the lane and across the pasture with her, to watch the balanced bundle and the hat that never bobbed nor wavered, even when she walked down into the ditch and up the other side and stooped through the fence. She would go down on her hands and knees and crawl through the gap, her head rigid, uptilted, the bundle steady as a rock or a balloon, and rise to her feet again and go on.
Sometimes the husbands of the washing women would fetch and deliver the clothes, but Jesus never did that for Nancy, even before father told him to stay away from our house, even when Dilsey was sick and Nancy would come to cook for us.
And then about half the time we’d have to go down the lane to Nancy’s cabin and tell her to come on and cook breakfast. We would stop at the ditch, because father told us to not have anything to do with Jesus — he was a short black man, with a razor scar down his face — and we would throw rocks at Nancy’s house until she came to the door, leaning her head around it without any clothes on.
“What yawl mean, chunking my house?” Nancy said. “What you little devils mean?”
“Father says for you to come on and get breakfast,” Caddy said. “Father says it’s over a half an hour now, and you’ve got to come this minute.”
“I aint studying no breakfast,” Nancy said. “I going to get my sleep out.”
“I bet you’re drunk,” Jason said. “Father says you’re drunk. Are you drunk, Nancy?”
“Who says I is?” Nancy said. “I got to get my sleep out. I aint studying no breakfast.”
So after a while we quit chunking the cabin and went back home. When she finally came, it was too late for me to go to school. So we thought it was whisky until that day they arrested her again and they were taking her to jail and they passed Mr Stovall. He was the cashier in the bank and a deacon in the Baptist church, and Nancy began to say:
“When you going to pay me, white man? When you going to pay me, white man? It’s been three times now since you paid me a cent—” Mr Stovall knocked her down, but she kept on saying, “When you going to pay me, white man? It’s been three times now since—” until Mr Stovall kicked her in the mouth with his heel and the marshal caught Mr Stovall back, and Nancy lying in the street, laughing. She turned her head and spat out some blood and teeth and said, “It’s been three times now since he paid me a cent.”
That was how she lost her teeth, and
