Yet there they were. Apparently they had neither brows, lashes nor hair; and clothing epidermis and all, they were of one identical sable, and the only way in which Rover or Grover could be distinguished from the other two was by Malcolm’s and James’ blue eyes. They stood looking at us in complete immobility until Mr. Faulkner said, again with that chastened gentleness and quietude which, granted my theory that the soul, plunged without warning into some unforeseen and outrageous catastrophe, comes out in its true colors, has been Mr. Faulkner’s true and hidden character all these years: “Go to the house.”
They turned and vanished immediately, since it had been only by the eyeballs that we had distinguished them from the stygian surface of the earth at all. They may have preceded us or we may have passed them. I do not know. At least, we did not see them again, because presently we quitted the sable plain which had witnessed our Gethsemane, and presently entered the barnlot where Mr. Faulkner turned and took the halter of the horse while Oliver led the cow into its private and detached domicile, from which there came presently the sound of chewing as, freed now of anguish and shame she ruminated, maiden meditant and — I hope — once more fancy free.
Mr. Faulkner stood in the door of the stable (within which, by and by, I could hear the larger and vicious horse, Stonewall, already at his food, stamp now and then or strike the board wall with his hoof as though even in the act of eating it could not forbear making sounds of threat and derision toward the very man whose food nourished it) and removed his clothing. Then, in full sight of the house and of whoever might care or not care to see, he lathered himself with saddle soap and then stood at the watering trough while Oliver doused or flushed him down with pail after pail of water. “Never mind the clothes just now,” he said to Oliver. “Get me a drink.”
“Make it two,” said I; I felt that the occasion justified, even though it may not have warranted, that temporary aberration into the vernacular of the fleeting moment. So presently, Mr. Faulkner now wearing a light summer horse blanket belonging to Stonewall, we sat again beneath the mulberry with the second julep of the afternoon.
“Well, Mr. Faulkner,” said I after a time, “shall we continue?”
“Continue what?” said Mr. Faulkner.
“Your suggestions for tomorrow,” said I. Mr. Faulkner said nothing at all. He just drank, with that static violence which was his familiar character, and so I knew that he was himself once more and that the real Mr. Faulkner which had appeared momentarily to Oliver and myself in the pasture had already retreated to that inaccessible bourne from which only the cow, Beulah, had ever evoked it, and that doubtless we would never see it again. So after a time I said, “Then, with your permission, tomorrow I shall venture into fact and employ the material which we ourselves have this afternoon created.”
“Do so,” Mr. Faulkner said — shortly, I thought.
“Only,” I continued, “I shall insist upon my prerogative and right to tell this one in my own diction and style, and not yours.”
“By —— !” said Mr. Faulkner. “You better had.”
The End
Sepulture South Gaslight, William Faulkner
Sepulture South: Gaslight
Harper’s Bazaar, December 1954
WHEN GRANDFATHER DIED, Father spoke what was probably his first reaction because what he said was involuntary because if he had taken time to think, he would not have said it: “Damn it, now we’ll lose Liddy.”
Liddy was the cook. She was one of the best cooks we had ever had and she had been with us ever since Grandmother died seven years ago when the cook before her had left; and now with another death in the family, she would move too, regretfully, because she liked us also. But that was the way Negroes did: left after a death in the family they worked for, as though obeying not a superstition but a rite: the rite of their freedom: not freedom from having to work, that would not occur to anyone for several years yet, not until W.P.A., but the freedom to move from one job to another, using a death in the family as the moment, the instigation, to move, since only death was important enough to exercise a right as important as freedom.
But she would not go yet; hers and Arthur’s (her husband’s) departure would be done with a dignity commensurate with the dignity of Grandfather’s age and position in our family and our town, and the commensurate dignity of his sepulture. Not to mention the fact that Arthur himself was now serving his apogee as a member of our household, as if the seven years he had worked for us had merely been the waiting for this moment, this hour, this day: sitting (not standing now: sitting) freshly shaved and with his hair trimmed this morning, in a clean white shirt and a necktie of Father’s and wearing his coat, in a chair in the back room of the jewelry store while Mr. Wedlow the jeweler inscribed on the sheet of parchment in his beautiful flowing Spencerian hand the formal notice of Grandfather’s death and the hour of his funeral, which, attached to the silver salver with knots of black ribbon and sprays of imitation immortelles, Arthur would bear from door to door (not back or kitchen doors but the front ones) through our town, to ring the bell and pass the salver in to whoever answered it, not as a servant bringing a formal notification now but as a member of our family performing a formal rite, since by this time the whole town knew that Grandfather was dead. So this was a rite, Arthur himself dominating the moment, dominating the entire morning in fact, because now he was not only no servant of ours, he was not even an envoy from us but rather a messenger from Death itself, saying to our town: “Pause, mortal; remember Me.”
Then Arthur would be busy for the rest of the day, too, now in the coachman’s coat and beaver hat which he had inherited from the husband of Liddy’s precessor who had inherited it in his turn from the husband of her precessor’s precessor, meeting with the surrey the trains on which our kin and connections would begin to arrive. And now the town would commence the brief, ritual formal calls, almost wordless and those in murmurs, whispers.
Because ritual said that Mother and Father must bear this first shock of bereavement in privacy, supporting and comforting one another. So the next of kin must receive the callers: Mother’s sister and her husband from Memphis because Aunt Alice, Father’s brother Charles’s wife, would have to be comforting and supporting Uncle Charley — as long as they could keep her upstairs, that is. And all this time the neighbor ladies would be coming to the kitchen door (not the front one now: the kitchen and back ones) without knocking, with their cooks or yardboys carrying the dishes and trays of food they had prepared to feed us and our influx of kin, and for a midnight supper for the men, Father’s friends that he hunted and played poker with, who would sit up all night with Grandfather’s coffin when the undertaker brought it and put him into it.
And all tomorrow too, while the wreaths and flowers arrived; and now all who wanted to could go into the parlor and look at Grandfather framed in white satin in his gray uniform with the three stars on the collar, freshly shaven too and with just a touch of rouge on his cheeks. And tomorrow too, until after our dinner, when Liddy said to Maggie and the other children: “Now you chillen go down to the pasture and play until I calls you. And you mind Maggie now.” Because it was not to me.
I was not only the oldest but a boy, the third generation of oldest son from Grandfather’s father; when Father’s turn came it would be me to say before I would have time to think: Damn it, now we’ll lose Julia or Florence or whatever her name would be by that time. I must be there too, in my Sunday clothes, with a band of crape on my arm, all of us except Mother and Father and Uncle Charley (Aunt Alice was though, because people excused her because she was always a good one to run things when she got a chance: and Uncle Rodney too although he was Father’s youngest brother too) in the back room which Grandfather called his office, to which the whisky decanter had been moved from the dining-room sideboard in deference to the funeral; yes, Uncle Rodney too, who had no wife — the dashing bachelor who wore silk shirts and used scented shaving lotion, who had been Grandmother’s favorite and that of a lot of other women too — the traveling salesman for the St. Louis wholesale house who brought into our town on his brief visits a breath, an odor, a glare almost of the metropolitan outland which was not for us: the teeming cities of hotel bellhops and girl shows and oyster-bars, my first
