A Rose for Emily and Other Stories, William Faulkner

Contents
A Rose for Emily
The Hound
Turn About
That Evening Sun
Dry September
Delta Autumn
Barn Burning
An Odor of Verbena

 
A Rose for Emily, William Faulkner

A Rose for Emily

I

When Miss Emily Grierson died, our whole town went to her funeral: the men through a sort of respectful affection for a fallen monument, the women mostly out of curiosity to see the inside of her house, which no one save an old manservant—a combined gardener and cook—had seen in at least ten years.

It was a big, squarish frame house that had once been white, decorated with cupolas and spires and scrolled balconies in the heavily lightsome style of the seventies, set on what had once been our most select street. 

But garages and cotton gins had encroached and obliterated even the august names of that neighborhood; only Miss Emily’s house was left, lifting its stubborn and coquettish decay above the cotton wagons and the gasoline pumps — an eyesore among eyesores. 

And now Miss Emily had gone to join the representatives of those august names where they lay in the cedar-bemused cemetery among the ranked and anonymous graves of Union and Confederate soldiers who fell at the battle of Jefferson.

Alive, Miss Emily had been a tradition, a duty, and a care; a sort of hereditary obligation upon the town, dating from that day in 1894 when Colonel Sartoris, the mayor — he who fathered the edict that no Negro woman should appear on the streets without an apron — remitted her taxes, the dispensation dating from the death of her father on into perpetuity. 

Not that Miss Emily would have accepted charity. Colonel Sartoris invented an involved tale to the effect that Miss Emily’s father had loaned money to the town, which the town, as a matter of business, preferred this way of repaying. Only a man of Colonel Sartoris’ generation and thought could have invented it, and only a woman could have believed it.

When the next generation, with its more modern ideas, became mayors and aldermen, this arrangement created some little dissatisfaction. On the first of the year they mailed her a tax notice. February came, and there was no reply. 

They wrote her a formal letter, asking her to call at the sheriff’s office at her convenience. A week later the mayor wrote her himself, offering to call or to send his car for her, and received in reply a note on paper of an archaic shape, in a thin, flowing calligraphy in faded ink, to the effect that she no longer went out at all. The tax notice was also enclosed, without comment.

They called a special meeting of the Board of Aldermen. A deputation waited upon her, knocked at the door through which no visitor had passed since she ceased giving china-painting lessons eight or ten years earlier. They were admitted by the old Negro into a dim hall from which a stairway mounted into still more shadow. It smelled of dust and disuse — a close, dank smell. 

The Negro led them into the parlor. It was furnished in heavy, leather-covered furniture. When the Negro opened the blinds of one window, they could see that the leather was cracked; and when they sat down, a faint dust rose sluggishly about their thighs, spinning with slow motes in the single sun-ray. On a tarnished gilt easel before the fireplace stood a crayon portrait of Miss Emily’s father.

They rose when she entered — a small, fat woman in black, with a thin gold chain descending to her waist and vanishing into her belt, leaning on an ebony cane with a tarnished gold head. 

Her skeleton was small and spare; perhaps that was why what would have been merely plumpness in another was obesity in her. She looked bloated, like a body long submerged in motionless water, and of that pallid hue. Her eyes, lost in the fatty ridges of her face, looked like two small pieces of coal pressed into a lump of dough as they moved from one face to another while the visitors stated their errand.

She did not ask them to sit. She just stood in the door and listened quietly until the spokesman came to a stumbling halt. Then they could hear the invisible watch ticking at the end of the gold chain.

Her voice was dry and cold. “I have no taxes in Jefferson. Colonel Sartoris explained it to me. Perhaps one of you can gain access to the city records and satisfy yourselves.”
“But we have. We are the city authorities, Miss Emily. Didn’t you get a notice from the sheriff, signed by him?”

“I received a paper, yes,” Miss Emily said. “Perhaps he considers himself the sheriff . . . I have no taxes in Jefferson.”
“But there is nothing on the books to show that, you see. We must go by the—”

“See Colonel Sartoris. I have no taxes in Jefferson.”
“But, Miss Emily—”
“See Colonel Sartoris.” (Colonel Sartoris had been dead almost ten years.) “I have no taxes in Jefferson. Tobe!” The Negro appeared. “Show these gentlemen out.”

II

So she vanquished them, horse and foot, just as she had vanquished their fathers thirty years before about the smell. That was two years after her father’s death and a short time after her sweetheart — the one we believed would marry her — had deserted her. After her father’s death she went out very little; after her sweetheart went away, people hardly saw her at all. A few of the ladies had the temerity to call, but were not received, and the only sign of life about the place was the Negro man — a young man then — going in and out with a market basket.

“Just as if a man — any man — could keep a kitchen properly,” the ladies said; so they were not surprised when the smell developed. It was another link between the gross, teeming world and the high and mighty Griersons.

A neighbor, a woman, complained to the mayor, Judge Stevens, eighty years old.
“But what will you have me do about it, madam?” he said.
“Why, send her word to stop it,” the woman said. “Isn’t there a law?”

“I’m sure that won’t be necessary,” Judge Stevens said. “It’s probably just a snake or a rat that nigger of hers killed in the yard. I’ll speak to him about it.”
The next day he received two more complaints, one from a man who came in diffident deprecation. “We really must do something about it, Judge. I’d be the last one in the world to bother Miss Emily, but we’ve got to do something.” That night the Board of Aldermen met — three graybeards and one younger man, a member of the rising generation.

“It’s simple enough,” he said. “Send her word to have her place cleaned up. Give her a certain time to do it in, and if she don’t . . .”
“Dammit, sir,” Judge Stevens said, “will you accuse a lady to her face of smelling bad?”

So the next night, after midnight, four men crossed Miss Emily’s lawn and slunk about the house like burglars, sniffing along the base of the brickwork and at the cellar openings while one of them performed a regular sowing motion with his hand out of a sack slung from his shoulder. They broke open the cellar door and sprinkled lime there, and in all the outbuildings. 

As they recrossed the lawn, a window that had been dark was lighted and Miss Emily sat in it, the light behind her, and her upright torso motionless as that of an idol. They crept quietly across the lawn and into the shadow of the locusts that lined the street. After a week or two the smell went away.

That was when people had begun to feel really sorry for her. People in our town, remembering how old lady Wyatt, her great-aunt, had gone completely crazy at last, believed that the Griersons held themselves a little too high for what they really were. None of the young men were quite good enough for Miss Emily and such. 

We had long thought of them as a tableau, Miss Emily a slender figure in white in the background, her father a spraddled silhouette in the foreground, his back to her and clutching a horsewhip, the two of them framed by the back-flung front door. So when she got to be thirty and was still single, we were not pleased exactly, but vindicated; even with insanity in the family she wouldn’t have turned down all of her chances if they had really materialized.

When her father died, it got about that the house was all that was left to her; and in a way, people were glad. At last they could pity Miss Emily. Being left alone, and a pauper, she had become humanized. Now she too would know the old thrill and the old despair of a penny more or less.

The day after his death all the ladies prepared to call at the house and offer condolence and aid, as is our custom. Miss Emily met them at the door, dressed as usual and with no trace of grief on her face. She told them that her father was not dead. She did that for three days, with the ministers calling on her, and the doctors, trying to persuade her to let them dispose of the body. Just as they were about to resort to law and force, she broke down, and they buried her father quickly.

We did not say she was crazy then. We believed she had to do that. We remembered all the young men her father had driven away, and we knew that with nothing left, she would have to cling to that which had robbed her, as people will.

III

She was sick for a long time. When we saw her again, her hair was cut short, making her look like a girl, with a vague resemblance to those angels in colored church windows — sort of tragic and serene.

The town had just let the contracts for paving the sidewalks, and in the summer after her father’s death they began the work. The construction company came with niggers and mules and machinery, and a foreman named Homer Barron, a Yankee — a big, dark, ready man, with a big voice and eyes lighter than his face. The little boys would follow in groups to hear him cuss the niggers, and the niggers singing in time to the rise and fall of picks. Pretty soon he knew everybody in town. 

Whenever you heard a lot of laughing anywhere about the square, Homer Barron would be in the center of the group. Presently we began to see him and Miss Emily on Sunday afternoons driving in the yellow-wheeled buggy and the matched team of bays from the livery stable.

At first we were glad that Miss Emily would have an interest, because the ladies all said, “Of course a Grierson would not think seriously of a Northerner, a day laborer.” But there were still others, older people, who said that even grief could not cause a real lady to forget noblesse oblige — without calling it noblesse oblige. They just said, “Poor Emily. 

Her kinsfolk should come to her.” She had some kin in Alabama; but years ago her father had fallen out with them over the estate of old lady Wyatt, the crazy woman, and there was no communication between the two families. They had not even been represented at the funeral.

And as soon as the old people said, “Poor Emily,” the whispering began. “Do you suppose it’s really so?” they said to one another. “Of course it is. What else could . . .” This behind their hands; rustling of craned silk and satin behind jalousies closed upon the sun of Sunday afternoon as the thin, swift clop-clop-clop of the matched team passed: “Poor Emily.”

She carried her head high enough — even when we believed that she was fallen. It was as if she demanded more than ever the recognition of her dignity as the last Grierson; as if it had wanted that touch of earthiness to reaffirm her imperviousness. Like when she bought the rat poison, the arsenic. That was over a year after they had begun to say “Poor Emily,” and while the two female cousins were visiting her.

“I want some poison,” she said to the druggist. She was over thirty then, still a slight woman, though thinner than usual, with cold, haughty black eyes in a face the flesh of which was strained across the temples and about the eye-sockets as you imagine a lighthouse-keeper’s face ought to look. “I want some poison,” she said.

“Yes, Miss Emily. What kind? For rats and such? I’d recom—”
“I want the best you have. I don’t care what kind.”

The druggist named several. “They’ll kill anything up to an elephant. But what you want is—”
“Arsenic,” Miss Emily said. “Is that a good one?”
“Is . . . arsenic? Yes, ma’am. But what you want—”

“I want arsenic.”
The druggist looked down at her. She looked back at him, erect, her face like a strained flag. “Why, of course,” the druggist said. “If that’s what you want. But the law requires you to tell what you are going to use it for.”

Miss Emily just stared at him, her head tilted back in order to look him eye for eye, until he looked away and went and got the arsenic and wrapped it up. The Negro delivery boy brought her the package; the druggist didn’t come back. When she opened the package at home there was written on the box, under the skull and bones: “For rats.”

IV

So the next day we all said, “She will kill herself”; and we said it would be the best thing. When she had first begun to be seen with Homer Barron, we had said, “She will marry him.” Then we said, “She will persuade him yet,” because Homer himself had remarked — he liked men, and it was known that he drank with the younger men in the Elks’ Club — that he was not a marrying man. Later we said, “Poor Emily” behind the jalousies as they passed on Sunday afternoon in the glittering buggy, Miss Emily with her head high and Homer Barron with his hat cocked and a cigar in his teeth, reins and whip in a yellow glove.

Then some of the ladies began to say that it was a disgrace to the town and a bad example to the young people. The men did not want to interfere, but at last the ladies forced the Baptist minister — Miss Emily’s people were Episcopal — to call upon her. He would never divulge what happened during that interview, but he refused to go back again. The next Sunday they again drove about the streets, and the following day the minister’s wife wrote to Miss Emily’s relations in Alabama.

So she had blood-kin under her roof again and we sat back to watch developments. At first nothing happened. Then we were sure that they were to be married. We learned that Miss Emily had been to the jeweler’s and ordered a man’s toilet set in silver, with the letters H. B. on each piece. Two days later we learned that she had bought a complete outfit of men’s clothing, including a nightshirt, and we said, “They are married.” We were really glad. We were glad because the two female cousins were even more Grierson than Miss Emily had ever been.

So we were not surprised when Homer Barron — the streets had been finished some time since — was gone. We were a little disappointed that there was not a public blowing-off, but we believed that he had gone on to prepare for Miss Emily’s coming, or to give her a chance to get rid of the cousins. (By that time it was a cabal, and we were all Miss Emily’s allies to help circumvent the cousins.) Sure enough, after another week they departed. And, as we had expected all along, within three days Homer Barron was back in town. A neighbor saw the Negro man admit him at the kitchen door at dusk one evening.

And that was the last we saw of Homer Barron. And of Miss Emily for some time. The Negro man went in and out with the market basket, but the front door remained closed. Now and then we would see her at a window for a moment, as the men did that night when they sprinkled the lime, but for almost six months she did not appear on the streets. Then we knew that this was to be expected too; as if that quality of her father which had thwarted her woman’s life so many times had been too virulent and too furious to die.

When we next saw Miss Emily, she had grown fat and her hair was turning gray. During the next few years it grew grayer and grayer until it attained an even pepper-and-salt iron-gray, when it ceased turning. Up to the day of her death at seventy-four it was still that vigorous iron-gray, like the hair of an active man.

From that time on her front door remained closed, save for a period of six or seven years, when she was about forty, during which she gave lessons in china-painting. She fitted up a studio in one of the downstairs rooms, where the daughters and granddaughters of Colonel Sartoris’ contemporaries were sent to her with the same regularity and in the same spirit that they were sent to church on Sundays with a twenty-five-cent piece for the collection plate. Meanwhile her taxes had been remitted.

Then the newer generation became the backbone and the spirit of the town, and the painting pupils grew up and fell away and did not send their children to her with boxes of color and tedious brushes and pictures cut from the ladies’ magazines. The front door closed upon the last one and remained closed for good. When the town got free postal delivery, Miss Emily alone refused to let them fasten the metal numbers above her door and attach a mailbox to it. She would not listen to them.

Daily, monthly, yearly we watched the Negro grow grayer and more stooped, going in and out with the market basket. Each December we sent her a tax notice, which would be returned by the post office a week later, unclaimed. Now and then we would see her in one of the downstairs windows — she had evidently shut up the top floor of the house — like the carven torso of an idol in a niche, looking or not looking at us, we could never tell which. Thus she passed from generation to generation — dear, inescapable, impervious, tranquil, and perverse.

And so she died. Fell ill in the house filled with dust and shadows, with only a doddering Negro man to wait on her. We did not even know she was sick; we had long since given up trying to get any information from the Negro He talked to no one, probably not even to her, for his voice had grown harsh and rusty, as if from disuse.

She died in one of the downstairs rooms, in a heavy walnut bed with a curtain, her gray head propped on a pillow yellow and moldy with age and lack of sunlight.

V

The Negro met the first of the ladies at the front door and let them in, with their hushed, sibilant voices and their quick, curious glances, and then he disappeared. He walked right through the house and out the back and was not seen again.

The two female cousins came at once. They held the funeral on the second day, with the town coming to look at Miss Emily beneath a mass of bought flowers, with the crayon face of her father musing profoundly above the bier and the ladies sibilant and macabre; and the very old men men — some in their brushed Confederate uniforms — on the porch and the lawn, talking of Miss Emily as if she had been a contemporary of theirs, believing that they had danced with her and courted her perhaps, confusing time with its mathematical progression, as the old do, to whom all the past is not a diminishing road but, instead, a huge meadow which no winter ever quite touches, divided from them now by the narrow bottle-neck of the most recent decade of years.

Already we knew that there was one room in that region above stairs which no one had seen in forty years, and which would have to be forced. They waited until Miss Emily was decently in the ground before they opened it.

The violence of breaking down the door seemed to fill this room with pervading dust. A thin, acrid pall as of the tomb seemed to lie everywhere upon this room decked and furnished as for a bridal: upon the valance curtains of faded rose color, upon the rose-shaded lights, upon the dressing table, upon the delicate array of crystal and the man’s toilet things backed with tarnished silver, silver so tarnished that the monogram was obscured. Among them lay a collar and tie, as if they had just been removed, which, lifted, left upon the surface a pale crescent in the dust. Upon a chair hung the suit, carefully folded; beneath it the two mute shoes and the discarded socks.

The man himself lay in the bed.

For a long while we just stood there, looking down at the profound and fleshless grin. The body had apparently once lain in the attitude of an embrace, but now the long sleep that outlasts love, that conquers even the grimace of love, had cuckolded him. What was left of him, rotted beneath what was left of the nightshirt, had become inextricable from the bed in which he lay; and upon him and upon the pillow beside him lay that even coating of the patient and biding dust.

Then we noticed that in the second pillow was the indentation of a head. One of us lifted something from it, and leaning forward, that faint and invisible dust dry and acrid in the nostrils, we saw a long strand of iron-gray hair.


The End
 

The Hound, William Faulkner

The Hound

Harper’s, August 1931. Later revised for ‘The Hamlet’

TO COTTON THE shot was the loudest thing he had ever heard in his life. It was too loud to be heard all at once. It continued to build up about the thicket, the dim, faint road, long after the hammerlike blow of the ten-gage shotgun had shocked into his shoulder and long after the smoke of the black powder with which it was charged had dissolved, and after the maddened horse had whirled twice and then turned galloping, diminishing, the empty stirrups clashing against the empty saddle.

It made too much noise. It was outrageous, unbelievable — a gun which he had owned for twenty years. It stunned him with amazed outrage, seeming to press him down into the thicket, so that when he could make the second shot, it was too late and the hound too was gone.

Then he wanted to run. He had expected that. He had coached himself the night before. “Right after it you’ll want to run,” he told himself. “But you can’t run. You got to finish it. You got to clean it up. It will be hard, but you got to do it. You got to set there in the bushes and shut your eyes and count slow until you can make to finish it.”

He did that. He laid the gun down and sat where he had lain behind the log. His eyes were closed. He counted slowly, until he had stopped shaking and until the sound of the gun and the echo of the galloping horse had died out of his ears. He had chosen his place well. It was a quiet road, little used, marked not once in three months save by that departed horse; a short cut between the house where the owner of the horse lived and Varner’s store; a quiet, fading, grass-grown trace along the edge of the river bottom, empty save for the two of them, the one squatting in the bushes, the other lying on his face in the road.

Cotton was a bachelor. He lived in a chinked log cabin floored with clay on the edge of the bottom, four miles away. It was dusk when he reached home. In the well-house at the back he drew water and washed his shoes. They were not muddier than usual, and he did not wear them save in severe weather, but he washed them carefully. Then he cleaned the shotgun and washed it too, barrel and stock; why, he could not have said, since he had never heard of finger prints, and immediately afterward he picked up the gun again and carried it into the house and put it away. He kept firewood, a handful of charred pine knots, in the chimney corner. 

He built a fire on the clay hearth and cooked his supper and ate and went to bed. He slept on a quilt pallet on the floor; he went to bed by barring the door and removing his overalls and lying down. It was dark after the fire burned out; he lay in the darkness. He thought about nothing at all save that he did not expect to sleep. He felt no triumph, vindication, nothing. He just lay there, thinking about nothing at all, even when he began to hear the dog. Usually at night he would hear dogs, single dogs ranging alone in the bottom, or coon- or cat-hunting packs. Having nothing else to do, his life, his heredity, and his heritage centered within a five-mile radius of Varner’s store. 

He knew almost any dog he would hear by its voice, as he knew almost any man he would hear by his voice. He knew this dog’s voice. It and the galloping horse with the flapping stirrups and the owner of the horse had been inseparable: where he saw one of them, the other two would not be far away — a lean, rangy brute that charged savagely at anyone who approached its master’s house, with something of the master’s certitude and overbearance; and to-day was not the first time he had tried to kill it, though only now did he know why he had not gone through with it. “I never knowed my own luck,” he said to himself, lying on the pallet. “I never knowed. If I had went ahead and killed it, killed the dog.…”

He was still not triumphant. It was too soon yet to be proud, vindicated. It was too soon. It had to do with death. He did not believe that a man could pick up and move that irrevocable distance at a moment’s notice. He had completely forgotten about the body. So he lay with his gaunt, underfed body empty with waiting, thinking of nothing at all, listening to the dog. The cries came at measured intervals, timbrous, sourceless, with the sad, peaceful, abject quality of a single hound in the darkness, when suddenly he found himself sitting bolt upright on the pallet.

“Nigger talk,” he said. He had heard (he had never known a negro himself, because of the antipathy, the economic jealousy, between his kind and negroes) how negroes claimed that a dog would howl at the recent grave of its master. “Hit’s nigger talk,” he said all the time he was putting on his overalls and his recently cleaned shoes. He opened the door. From the dark river bottom below the hill on which the cabin sat the howling of the dog came, bell-like and mournful. From a nail just inside the door he took down a coiled plowline and descended the slope.

Against the dark wall of the jungle fireflies winked and drifted; from beyond the black wall came the booming and grunting of frogs. When he entered the timber he could not see his own hand. The footing was treacherous with slime and creepers and bramble. They possessed the perversity of inanimate things, seeming to spring out of the darkness and clutch him with spiky tentacles. From the musing impenetrability ahead the voice of the hound came steadily. He followed the sound, muddy again; the air was chill, yet he was sweating. He was quite near the sound. The hound ceased. He plunged forward, his teeth drying under his dry lip, his hands clawed and blind, toward the ceased sound, the faint phosphorescent glare of the dog’s eyes. The eyes vanished. He stopped, panting, stooped, the plowline in his hand, looking for the eyes. He cursed the dog, his voice a dry whisper. He could hear silence but nothing else.

He crawled on hands and knees, telling where he was by the shape of the trees on the sky. After a time, the brambles raking and slashing at his face, he found a shallow ditch. It was rank with rotted leaves; he waded ankle-deep in the pitch darkness, in something not earth and not water, his elbow crooked before his face. He stumbled upon something; an object with a slack feel. When he touched it, something gave a choked, infantlike cry, and he started back, hearing the creature scuttle away. “Just a possum,” he said. “Hit was just a possum.”

He wiped his hands on his flanks in order to pick up the shoulders. His flanks were foul with slime. He wiped his hands on his shirt, across his breast, then he picked up the shoulders. He walked backward, dragging it. From time to time he would stop and wipe his hands on his shirt. He stopped beside a tree, a rotting cypress shell, topless, about ten feet tall. He had put the coiled plowline into his bosom. He knotted it about the body and climbed the stump. The top was open, rotted out. He was not a large man, not as large as the body, yet he hauled it up to him hand over hand, bumping and scraping it along the stump, until it lay across the lip like a half-filled meal sack. The knot in the rope had slipped tight. At last he took out his knife and cut the rope and tumbled the body into the hollow stump.

It didn’t fall far. He shoved at it, feeling around it with his hands for the obstruction; he tied the rope about the stub of a limb and held the end of it in his hands and stood on the body and began to jump up and down upon it, whereupon it fled suddenly beneath him and left him dangling on the rope.

He tried to climb the rope, rasping off with his knuckles the rotten fiber, a faint, damp powder of decay like snuff in his nostrils. He heard the stub about which the rope was tied crack and felt it begin to give. He leaped upward from nothing, scrabbling at the rotten wood, and got one hand over the edge. The wood crumbled beneath his fingers; he climbed perpetually without an inch of gain, his mouth cracked upon his teeth, his eyes glaring at the sky.

The wood stopped crumbling. He dangled by his hands, breathing. He drew himself up and straddled the edge. He sat there for a while. Then he climbed down and leaned against the hollow trunk.

When he reached his cabin he was tired, spent. He had never been so tired. He stopped at the door. Fireflies still blew along the dark band of timber, and owls hooted and the frogs still boomed and grunted. “I ain’t never been so tired,” he said, leaning against the house, the wall which he had built log by log. “Like ever thing had got outen hand. Climbing that stump, and the noise that shot made. Like I had got to be somebody else without knowing it, in a place where noise was louder, climbing harder to climb, without knowing it.” He went to bed. He took off the muddy shoes, the overalls, and lay down; it was late then. He could tell by a summer star that came into the square window at two o’clock and after.

Then, as if it had waited for him to get settled and comfortable, the hound began to howl again. Lying in the dark, he heard the first cry come up from the river bottom, mournful, timbrous, profound.

Five men in overalls squatted against the wall of Varner’s store. Cotton made the sixth. He sat on the top step, his back against a gnawed post which supported the wooden awning of the veranda. The seventh man sat in the single splint chair; a fat, slow man in denim trousers and a collarless white shirt, smoking a cob pipe. He was past middle-age. He was sheriff of the county. The man about whom they were talking was named Houston.

“He hadn’t no reason to run off,” one said. “To disappear. To send his horse back home with a empty saddle. He hadn’t no reason. Owning his own land, his house. Making a good crop ever year. He was as well-fixed as ere a man in the county. A bachelor too. He hadn’t no reason to disappear. You can mark it. He never run. I don’t know what; but Houston never run.”

“I don’t know,” a second said. “You can’t tell what a man has got in his mind. Houston might a had reason that we don’t know, for making it look like something had happened to him. For clearing outen the country and leaving it to look like something had happened to him. 

It’s been done before. Folks before him has had reason to light out for Texas with a changed name.”
Cotton sat a little below their eyes, his face lowered beneath his worn, stained, shabby hat. He was whittling at a stick, a piece of pine board.
“But a fellow can’t disappear without leaving no trace,” a third said. “Can he, Sheriff?”

“Well, I don’t know,” the Sheriff said. He removed the cob pipe and spat neatly across the porch into the dust. “You can’t tell what a man will do when he’s pinched. Except it will be something you never thought of. Never counted on. But if you can find just what pinched him you can pretty well tell what he done.”

“Houston was smart enough to do ere a thing he taken a notion to,” the second said. “If he’d wanted to disappear, I reckon we’d a known about what we know now.”

“And what’s that?” the third said.
“Nothing,” the second said.
“That’s a fact,” the first said. “Houston was a secret man.”

“He wasn’t the only secret man around here,” a fourth said. To Cotton it sounded sudden, since the fourth man had said no word before. He sat against the post, his hat slanted forward so that his face was invisible, believing that he could feel their eyes. He watched the sliver peel slow and smooth from the stick, ahead of his worn knife-blade. “I got to say something,” he told himself.

“He warn’t no smarter than nobody else,” he said. Then he wished he had not spoken. He could see their feet beneath his hat-brim. He trimmed the stick, watching the knife, the steady sliver. “It’s got to trim off smooth,” he told himself. “It don’t dast to break.” He was talking; he could hear his voice: “Swelling around like he was the biggest man in the county. 

Setting that ere dog on folks’ stock.” He believed that he could feel their eyes, watching their feet, watching the sliver trim smooth and thin and unhurried beneath the knife blade. Suddenly he thought about the gun, the loud crash, the jarring shock. “Maybe I’ll have to kill them all,” he said to himself — a mild man in worn overalls, with a gaunt face and lack-luster eyes like a sick man, whittling a stick with a thin hand, thinking about killing them. 

“Not them; just the words, the talk.” But the talk was familiar, the intonation, the gestures; but so was Houston. He had known Houston all his life: that prosperous and overbearing man. “With a dog,” Cotton said, watching the knife return and bite into another sliver. “A dog that et better than me. I work, and eat worse than his dog. If I had been his dog, I would not have … We’re better off without him,” he said, blurted. He could feel their eyes, sober, intent.
“He always did rile Ernest,” the first said.

“He taken advantage of me,” Cotton said, watching the infallible knife. “He taken advantage of ever man he could.”
“He was a overbearing man,” the Sheriff said.
Cotton believed that they were still watching him, hidden behind their detached voices.

“Smart, though,” the third said.
“He wasn’t smart enough to win that suit against Ernest over that hog.”
“That’s so. How much did Ernest get outen that lawing? He ain’t never told, has he?”

Cotton believed that they knew how much he had got from the suit. The hog had come into his lot one October. He penned it up; he tried by inquiry to find the owner. But none claimed it until he had wintered it on his corn. In the spring Houston claimed the hog. They went to court. Houston was awarded the hog, though he was assessed a sum for the wintering of it, and one dollar as pound-fee for a stray. “I reckon that’s Ernest’s business,” the Sheriff said after a time.

Again Cotton heard himself talking, blurting. “It was a dollar,” he said, watching his knuckles whiten about the knife handle. “One dollar.” He was trying to make his mouth stop talking. “After all I taken offen him.…”

“Juries does queer things,” the Sheriff said, “in little matters. But in big matters they’re mostly right.”
Cotton whittled, steady and deliberate. “At first you’ll want to run,” he told himself. “But you got to finish it. You got to count a hundred, if it needs, and finish it.”

“I heard that dog again last night,” the third said.
“You did?” the Sheriff said.
“It ain’t been home since the day the horse come in with the saddle empty,” the first said.
“It’s out hunting, I reckon,” the Sheriff said. “It’ll come in when it gets hungry.”

Cotton trimmed at the stick. He did not move.
“Niggers claim a hound’ll howl till a dead body’s found,” the second said.
“I’ve heard that,” the Sheriff said. After a time a car came up and the Sheriff got into it. The car was driven by a deputy. “We’ll be late for supper,” the Sheriff said. The car mounted the hill; the sound died away. It was getting toward sundown.

“He ain’t much bothered,” the third said.
“Why should he be?” the first said. “After all, a man can leave his house and go on a trip without telling everybody.”

“Looks like he’d a unsaddled that mare, though,” the second said. “And there’s something the matter with that dog. It ain’t been home since, and it ain’t treed. I been hearing it ever night. It ain’t treed. It’s howling. It ain’t been home since Tuesday. And that was the day Houston rid away from the store here on that mare.”

Cotton was the last one to leave the store. It was after dark when he reached home. He ate some cold bread and loaded the shotgun and sat beside the open door until the hound began to howl. Then he descended the hill and entered the bottom.

The dog’s voice guided him; after a while it ceased, and he saw its eyes. They were now motionless; in the red glare of the explosion he saw the beast entire in sharp relief. He saw it in the act of leaping into the ensuing welter of darkness; he heard the thud of its body. But he couldn’t find it. He looked carefully, quartering back and forth, stopping to listen. 

But he had seen the shot strike it and hurl it backward, and he turned aside for about a hundred yards in the pitch darkness and came to a slough. He flung the shotgun into it, hearing the sluggish splash, watching the vague water break and recover, until the last ripple died. He went home and to bed.

He didn’t go to sleep though, although he knew he would not hear the dog. “It’s dead,” he told himself, lying on his quilt pallet in the dark. “I saw the bullets knock it down. I could count the shot. The dog is dead.” But still he did not sleep. He did not need sleep; he did not feel tired or stale in the mornings, though he knew it was not the dog. He knew he would not hear the dog again, and that sleep had nothing to do with the dog. So he took to spending the nights sitting up in a chair in the door, watching the fireflies and listening to the frogs and the owls.

He entered Varner’s store. It was in mid-afternoon; the porch was empty, save for the clerk, whose name was Snopes. “Been looking for you for two-three days,” Snopes said. “Come inside.”
Cotton entered. The store smelled of cheese and leather and new earth. Snopes went behind the counter and reached from under the counter a shotgun. It was caked with mud. “This is yourn, ain’t it?” Snopes said. “Vernon Tull said it was. A nigger squirl hunter found it in a slough.”

Cotton came to the counter and looked at the gun. He did not touch it; he just looked at it. “It ain’t mine,” he said.
“Ain’t nobody around here got one of them old Hadley ten-gages except you,” Snopes said. “Tull says it’s yourn.”

“It ain’t none of mine,” Cotton said. “I got one like it. But mine’s to home.”
Snopes lifted the gun. He breeched it. “It had one empty and one load in it,” he said. “Who you reckon it belongs to?”

“I don’t know,” Cotton said. “Mine’s to home.” He had come to purchase food. He bought it: crackers, cheese, a tin of sardines. It was not dark when he reached home, yet he opened the sardines and ate his supper. When he lay down he did not even remove his overalls. It was as though he waited for something, stayed dressed to move and go at once. He was still waiting for whatever it was when the window turned gray and then yellow and then blue; when, framed by the square window, he saw against the fresh morning a single soaring speck. By sunrise there were three of them, and then seven.

All that day he watched them gather, wheeling and wheeling, drawing their concentric black circles, watching the lower ones wheel down and down and disappear below the trees. He thought it was the dog. “They’ll be through by noon,” he said. “It wasn’t a big dog.”

When noon came they had not gone away; there were still more of them, while still the lower ones dropped down and disappeared below the trees. He watched them until dark came, until they went away, flapping singly and sluggishly up from beyond the trees. “I got to eat,” he said. “With the work I got to do to-night.” He went to the hearth and knelt and took up a pine knot, and he was kneeling, nursing a match into flame, when he heard the hound again; the cry deep, timbrous, unmistakable, and sad. He cooked his supper and ate.

With his axe in his hand he descended through his meager corn patch. The cries of the hound could have guided him, but he did not need it. He had not reached the bottom before he believed that his nose was guiding him. The dog still howled. He paid it no attention, until the beast sensed him and ceased, as it had done before; again he saw its eyes. He paid no attention to them. He went to the hollow cypress trunk and swung his axe into it, the axe sinking helve-deep into the rotten wood. While he was tugging at it something flowed silent and savage out of the darkness behind him and struck him a slashing blow. 

The axe had just come free; he fell with the axe in his hand, feeling the hot reek of the dog’s breath on his face and hearing the click of its teeth as he struck it down with his free hand. It leaped again; he saw its eyes now. He was on his knees, the axe raised in both hands now. He swung it, hitting nothing, feeling nothing; he saw the dog’s eyes, crouched. He rushed at the eyes; they vanished. He waited a moment, but heard nothing. He returned to the tree.

At the first stroke of the axe the dog sprang at him again. He was expecting it, so he whirled and struck with the axe at the two eyes and felt the axe strike something and whirl from his hands. He heard the dog whimper, he could hear it crawling away. On his hands and knees he hunted for the axe until he found it.

He began to chop at the base of the stump, stopping between blows to listen. But he heard nothing, saw nothing. Overhead the stars were swinging slowly past; he saw the one that looked into his window at two o’clock. He began to chop steadily at the base of the stump.

The wood was rotten; the axe sank helve-deep at each stroke, as into sand or mud; suddenly Cotton knew that it was not imagination he smelled. He dropped the axe and began to tear at the rotten wood with his hands. The hound was beside him, whimpering; he did not know it was there, not even when it thrust its head into the opening, crowding against him, howling.

“Git away,” he said, still without being conscious that it was the dog. He dragged at the body, feeling it slough upon its own bones, as though it were too large for itself; he turned his face away, his teeth glared, his breath furious and outraged and restrained. He could feel the dog surge against his legs, its head in the orifice, howling.

When the body came free, Cotton went over backward. He lay on his back on the wet ground, looking up at a faint patch of starry sky. “I ain’t never been so tired,” he said. The dog was howling, with an abject steadiness. “Shut up,” Cotton said. “Hush. Hush.” The dog didn’t hush. “It’ll be daylight soon,” Cotton said to himself. “I got to get up.”

He got up and kicked at the dog. It moved away, but when he stooped and took hold of the legs and began to back away, the dog was there again, moaning to itself. When he would stop to rest, the dog would howl again; again he kicked at it. Then it began to be dawn, the trees coming spectral and vast out of the miasmic darkness. He could see the dog plainly. It was gaunt, thin, with a long bloody gash across its face. 

“I’ll have to get shut of you,” he said. Watching the dog, he stooped and found a stick. It was rotten, foul with slime. He clutched it. When the hound lifted its muzzle to howl, he struck. The dog whirled; there was a long fresh scar running from shoulder to flank. It leaped at him, without a sound; he struck again. The stick took it fair between the eyes. He picked up the ankles and tried to run.

It was almost light. When he broke through the undergrowth upon the river bank the channel was invisible; a long bank of what looked like cotton batting, though he could hear the water beneath it somewhere. There was a freshness here; the edges of the mist licked into curling tongues. He stooped and lifted the body and hurled it into the bank of mist. At the instant of vanishing he saw it — a sluggish sprawl of three limbs instead of four, and he knew why it had been so hard to free from the stump. 

“I’ll have to make another trip,” he said; then he heard a pattering rush behind him. He didn’t have time to turn when the hound struck him and knocked him down. It didn’t pause. Lying on his back, he saw it in midair like a bird, vanish into the mist with a single short, choking cry.

He got to his feet and ran. He stumbled and caught himself and ran again. It was full light. He could see the stump and the black hole which he had chopped in it; behind him he could hear the swift, soft feet of the dog. As it sprang at him he stumbled and fell and saw it soar over him, its eyes like two cigar-coals; it whirled and leaped at him again before he could rise. 

He struck at its face with his bare hands and began to run. Together they reached the tree. It leaped at him again, slashing his arm as he ducked into the tree, seeking that member of the body which he did not know was missing until after he had released it into the mist, feeling the dog surging about his legs. Then the dog was gone. Then a voice said:
“We got him. You can come out, Ernest.”

The countyseat was fourteen miles away. They drove to it in a battered Ford. On the back seat Cotton and the Sheriff sat, their inside wrists locked together by handcuffs. They had to drive for two miles before they reached the highroad. It was hot, ten o’clock in the morning. “You want to swap sides out of the sun?” the Sheriff said.
“I’m all right,” Cotton said.

At two o’clock they had a puncture. Cotton and the Sheriff sat under a tree while the driver and the second deputy went across a field and returned with a glass jar of buttermilk and some cold food. They ate, repaired the tire, and went on.

When they were within three or four miles of town, they began to pass wagons and cars going home from market day in town, the wagon teams plodding homeward in their own inescapable dust. The Sheriff greeted them with a single gesture of his fat arm. “Home for supper, anyway,” he said. “What’s the matter, Ernest? Feeling sick? Here, Joe; pull up a minute.”

“I’ll hold my head out,” Cotton said. “Never mind.” The car went on. Cotton thrust his head out the V strut of the top stanchion. The Sheriff shifted his arm, giving him play. “Go on,” Cotton said, “I’ll be all right.” 

The car went on. Cotton slipped a little farther down in the seat. By moving his head a little he could wedge his throat into the apex of the iron V, the uprights gripping his jaws beneath the ears. He shifted again until his head was tight in the vise, then he swung his legs over the door, trying to bring the weight of his body sharply down against his imprisoned neck. He could hear his vertebrae; he felt a kind of rage at his own toughness; he was struggling then against the jerk on the manacle, the hands on him.

Then he was lying on his back beside the road, with water on his face and in his mouth, though he could not swallow. He couldn’t speak, trying to curse, cursing in no voice. Then he was in the car again, on the smooth street where children played in the big, shady yards in small bright garments, and men and women went home toward supper, to plates of food and cups of coffee in the long twilight of summer.

They had a doctor for him in his cell. When the doctor had gone he could smell supper cooking somewhere — ham and hot bread and coffee. He was lying on a cot; the last ray of copper sunlight slid through a narrow window, stippling the bars upon the wall above his head. His cell was near the common room, where the minor prisoners lived, the ones who were in jail for minor offenses or for three meals a day; the stairway from below came up into that room. 

It was occupied for the time by a group of negroes from the chain-gang that worked the streets, in jail for vagrancy or for selling a little whiskey or shooting craps for ten or fifteen cents. One of the negroes was at the window above the street, yelling down to someone. The others talked among themselves, their voices rich and murmurous, mellow and singsong. Cotton rose and went to the door of his cell and held to the bars, looking at the negroes.

“Hit,” he said. His voice made no sound. He put his hand to his throat; he produced a dry croaking sound, at which the negroes ceased talking and looked at him, their eyeballs rolling. “It was all right,” Cotton said, “until it started coming to pieces on me. I could a handled that dog.” He held his throat, his voice harsh, dry, and croaking. “But it started coming to pieces on me.…”

“Who him?” one of the negroes said. They whispered among themselves, watching him, their eyeballs white in the dusk.
“It would a been all right,” Cotton said, “but it started coming to pieces.…”
“Hush up, white man,” one of the negroes said. “Don’t you be telling us no truck like that.”

“Hit would a been all right,” Cotton said, his voice harsh, whispering. Then it failed him again altogether. He held to the bars with one hand, holding his throat with the other, while the negroes watched him, huddled, their eyeballs white and sober. 

Then with one accord they turned and rushed across the room, toward the staircase; he heard slow steps and then he smelled food, and he clung to the bars, trying to see the stairs. “Are they going to feed them niggers before they feed a white man?” he said, smelling the coffee and the ham.


The End



Turnabout, William Faulkner

Turnabout

THE AMERICAN — THE older one — wore no pink Bedfords. His breeches were of plain whipcord, like the tunic. And the tunic had no long London-cut skirts, so that below the Sam Browne the tail of it stuck straight out like the tunic of a military policeman beneath his holster belt. 

And he wore simple puttees and the easy shoes of a man of middle age, instead of Savile Row boots, and the shoes and the puttees did not match in shade, and the ordnance belt did not match either of them, and the pilot’s wings on his breast were just wings. But the ribbon beneath them was a good ribbon, and the insigne on his shoulders were the twin bars of a captain. 

He was not tall. His face was thin, a little aquiline; the eyes intelligent and a little tired. He was past twenty-five; looking at him, one thought, not Phi Beta Kappa exactly, but Skull and Bones perhaps, or possibly a Rhodes scholarship.

One of the men who faced him probably could not see him at all. He was being held on his feet by an American military policeman. He was quite drunk, and in contrast with the heavy-jawed policeman who held him erect on his long, slim, boneless legs, he looked like a masquerading girl. 

He was possibly eighteen, tall, with a pink-and-white face and blue eyes, and a mouth like a girl’s mouth. He wore a pea-coat, buttoned awry and stained with recent mud, and upon his blond head, at that unmistakable and rakish swagger which no other people can ever approach or imitate, the cap of a Royal Naval Officer.

“What’s this, corporal?” the American captain said. “What’s the trouble? He’s an Englishman. You’d better let their M. P.’s take care of him.”
“I know he is,” the policeman said. He spoke heavily, breathing heavily, in the voice of a man under physical strain; for all his girlish delicacy of limb, the English boy was heavier — or more helpless — than he looked. “Stand up!” the policeman said. “They’re officers!”

The English boy made an effort then. He pulled himself together, focusing his eyes. He swayed, throwing his arms about the policeman’s neck, and with the other hand he saluted, his hand flicking, fingers curled a little, to his right ear, already swaying again and catching himself again. “Cheer-o, sir,” he said. “Name’s not Beatty, I hope.”
“No,” the captain said.

“Ah,” the English boy said. “Hoped not. My mistake. No offense, what?”
“No offense,” the captain said quietly. But he was looking at the policeman. The second American spoke. He was a lieutenant, also a pilot. But he was not twenty-five and he wore the pink breeches, the London boots, and his tunic might have been a British tunic save for the collar.

“It’s one of those navy eggs,” he said. “They pick them out of the gutters here all night long. You don’t come to town often enough.”

“Oh,” the captain said. “I’ve heard about them. I remember now.” He also remarked now that, though the street was a busy one — it was just outside a popular café — and there were many passers, soldier, civilian, women, yet none of them so much as paused, as though it were a familiar sight. He was looking at the policeman. “Can’t you take him to his ship?”

“I thought of that before the captain did,” the policeman said. “He says he can’t go aboard his ship after dark because he puts the ship away at sundown.”
“Puts it away?”

“Stand up, sailor!” the policeman said savagely, jerking at his lax burden. “Maybe the captain can make sense out of it. Damned if I can. He says they keep the boat under the wharf. Run it under the wharf at night, and that they can’t get it out again until the tide goes out tomorrow.”

“Under the wharf? A boat? What is this?” He was now speaking to the lieutenant. “Do they operate some kind of aquatic motorcycles?”
“Something like that,” the lieutenant said. “You’ve seen them — the boats. Launches, camouflaged and all. Dashing up and down the harbor. You’ve seen them. They do that all day and sleep in the gutters here all night.”

“Oh,” the captain said. “I thought those boats were ship commanders’ launches. You mean to tell me they use officers just to—”
“I don’t know,” the lieutenant said. “Maybe they use them to fetch hot water from one ship to another. Or buns. Or maybe to go back and forth fast when they forget napkins or something.”
“Nonsense,” the captain said. He looked at the English boy again.

“That’s what they do,” the lieutenant said. “Town’s lousy with them all night long. Gutters full, and their M. P.’s carting them away in batches, like nursemaids in a park. Maybe the French give them the launches to get them out of the gutters during the day.”

“Oh,” the captain said, “I see.” But it was clear that he didn’t see, wasn’t listening, didn’t believe what he did hear. He looked at the English boy. “Well, you can’t leave him here in that shape,” he said.

Again the English boy tried to pull himself together. “Quite all right, ‘sure you,” he said glassily, his voice pleasant, cheerful almost, quite courteous. “Used to it. Confounded rough pavé, though. Should force French do something about it. Visiting lads jolly well deserve decent field to play on, what?”

“And he was jolly well using all of it too,” the policeman said savagely. “He must think he’s a one-man team, maybe.”
At that moment a fifth man came up. He was a British military policeman. “Nah then,” he said. “What’s this? What’s this?” Then he saw the Americans’ shoulder bars. He saluted. At the sound of his voice the English boy turned, swaying, peering.

“Oh, hullo, Albert,” he said.
“Nah then, Mr. Hope,” the British policeman said. He said to the American policeman, over his shoulder: “What is it this time?”
“Likely nothing,” the American said. “The way you guys run a war. But I’m a stranger here. Here. Take him.”
“What is this, corporal?” the captain said. “What was he doing?”

“He won’t call it nothing,” the American policeman said, jerking his head at the British policeman. “He’ll just call it a thrush or a robin or something. I turn into this street about three blocks back a while ago, and I find it blocked with a line of trucks going up from the docks, and the drivers all hollering ahead what the hell the trouble is. 

So I come on, and I find it is about three blocks of them, blocking the cross streets too; and I come on to the head of it where the trouble is, and I find about a dozen of the drivers out in front, holding a caucus or something in the middle of the street, and I come up and I say, ‘What’s going on here?’ and they leave me through and I find this egg here laying—”

“Yer talking about one of His Majesty’s officers, my man,” the British policeman said.
“Watch yourself, corporal,” the captain said. “And you found this officer—”

“He had done gone to bed in the middle of the street, with an empty basket for a pillow. Laying there with his hands under his head and his knees crossed, arguing with them about whether he ought to get up and move or not. He said that the trucks could turn back and go around by another street, but that he couldn’t use any other street, because this street was his.”
“His street?”

The English boy had listened, interested, pleasant. “Billet, you see,” he said. “Must have order, even in war emergency. Billet by lot. This street mine; no poaching, eh? Next street Jamie Wutherspoon’s. But trucks can go by that street because Jamie not using it yet. Not in bed yet. Insomnia. Knew so. Told them. Trucks go that way. See now?”

“Was that it, corporal?” the captain said.
“He told you. He wouldn’t get up. He just laid there, arguing with them. He was telling one of them to go somewhere and bring back a copy of their articles of war—”
“King’s Regulations; yes,” the captain said.

“ — and see if the book said whether he had the right of way, or the trucks. And then I got him up, and then the captain come along. And that’s all. And with the captain’s permission I’ll now hand him over to His Majesty’s wet nur—”

“That’ll do, corporal,” the captain said. “You can go. I’ll see to this.” The policeman saluted and went on. The British policeman was now supporting the English boy. “Can’t you take him?” the captain said. “Where are their quarters?”

“I don’t rightly know, sir, if they have quarters or not. We — I usually see them about the pubs until daylight. They don’t seem to use quarters.”
“You mean, they really aren’t off of ships?”

“Well, sir, they might be ships, in a manner of speaking. But a man would have to be a bit sleepier than him to sleep in one of them.”
“I see,” the captain said. He looked at the policeman. “What kind of boats are they?”

This time the policeman’s voice was immediate, final and completely inflectionless. It was like a closed door. “I don’t rightly know, sir.”
“Oh,” the captain said. “Quite. Well, he’s in no shape to stay about pubs until daylight this time.”

“Perhaps I can find him a bit of a pub with a back table, where he can sleep,” the policeman said. But the captain was not listening. He was looking across the street, where the lights of another café fell across the pavement. The English boy yawned terrifically, like a child does, his mouth pink and frankly gaped as a child’s.

The captain turned to the policeman:
“Would you mind stepping across there and asking for Captain Bogard’s driver? I’ll take care of Mr. Hope.”

The policeman departed. The captain now supported the English boy, his hand beneath the other’s arm. Again the boy yawned like a weary child. “Steady,” the captain said. “The car will be here in a minute.”

“Right,” the English boy said through the yawn.

II

Once in the car, he went to sleep immediately with the peaceful suddenness of babies, sitting between the two Americans. But though the aerodrome was only thirty minutes away, he was awake when they arrived, apparently quite fresh, and asking for whisky. 

When they entered the mess he appeared quite sober, only blinking a little in the lighted room, in his raked cap and his awry-buttoned pea-jacket and a soiled silk muffler, embroidered with a club insignia which Bogard recognized to have come from a famous preparatory school, twisted about his throat.

“Ah,” he said, his voice fresh, clear now, not blurred, quite cheerful, quite loud, so that the others in the room turned and looked at him. “Jolly. Whisky, what?” He went straight as a bird dog to the bar in the corner, the lieutenant following. Bogard had turned and gone on to the other end of the room, where five men sat about a card table.

“What’s he admiral of?” one said.
“Of the whole Scotch navy, when I found him,” Bogard said.

Another looked up. “Oh, I thought I’d seen him in town.” He looked at the guest. “Maybe it’s because he was on his feet that I didn’t recognize him when he came in. You usually see them lying down in the gutter.”

“Oh,” the first said. He, too, looked around. “Is he one of those guys?”
“Sure. You’ve seen them. Sitting on the curb, you know, with a couple of limey M. P.’s hauling at their arms.”

“Yes. I’ve seen them,” the other said. They all looked at the English boy. He stood at the bar, talking, his voice loud, cheerful. “They all look like him too,” the speaker said. “About seventeen or eighteen. They run those little boats that are always dashing in and out.”

“Is that what they do?” a third said. “You mean, there’s a male marine auxiliary to the Waacs? Good Lord, I sure made a mistake when I enlisted. But this war never was advertised right.”
“I don’t know,” Bogard said. “I guess they do more than just ride around.”

But they were not listening to him. They were looking at the guest. “They run by clock,” the first said. “You can see the condition of one of them after sunset and almost tell what time it is. But what I don’t see is, how a man that’s in that shape at one o’clock every morning can even see a battleship the next day.”

“Maybe when they have a message to send out to a ship,” another said, “they just make duplicates and line the launches up and point them toward the ship and give each one a duplicate of the message and let them go. And the ones that miss the ship just cruise around the harbor until they hit a dock somewhere.”

“It must be more than that,” Bogard said.
He was about to say something else, but at that moment the guest turned from the bar and approached, carrying a glass. He walked steadily enough, but his color was high and his eyes were bright, and he was talking, loud, cheerful, as he came up.

“I say. Won’t you chaps join—” He ceased. He seemed to remark something; he was looking at their breasts. “Oh, I say. You fly. All of you. Oh, good gad! Find it jolly, eh?”
“Yes,” somebody said. “Jolly.”

“But dangerous, what?”
“A little faster than tennis,” another said. The guest looked at him, bright, affable, intent.
Another said quickly, “Bogard says you command a vessel.”

“Hardly a vessel. Thanks, though. And not command. Ronnie does that. Ranks me a bit. Age.”
“Ronnie?”
“Yes. Nice. Good egg. Old, though. Stickler.”
“Stickler?”

“Frightful. You’d not believe it. Whenever we sight smoke and I have the glass, he sheers away. Keeps the ship hull down all the while. No beaver then. Had me two down a fortnight yesterday.”

The Americans glanced at one another. “No beaver?”
“We play it. With basket masts, you see. See a basket mast. Beaver! One up. The Ergenstrasse doesn’t count any more, though.”

The men about the table looked at one another. Bogard spoke. “I see. When you or Ronnie see a ship with basket masts, you get a beaver on the other. I see. What is the Ergenstrasse?”

“She’s German. Interned. Tramp steamer. Foremast rigged so it looks something like a basket mast. Booms, cables, I dare say. I didn’t think it looked very much like a basket mast, myself. But Ronnie said yes. Called it one day. Then one day they shifted her across the basin and I called her on Ronnie. So we decided to not count her any more. See now, eh?”

“Oh,” the one who had made the tennis remark said, “I see. You and Ronnie run about in the launch, playing beaver. H’m’m. That’s nice. Did you ever pl—”
“Jerry,” Bogard said. The guest had not moved. He looked down at the speaker, still smiling, his eyes quite wide.

The speaker still looked at the guest. “Has yours and Ronnie’s boat got a yellow stern?”
“A yellow stern?” the English boy said. He had quit smiling, but his face was still pleasant.
“I thought that maybe when the boats had two captains, they might paint the sterns yellow or something.”

“Oh,” the guest said. “Burt and Reeves aren’t officers.”
“Burt and Reeves,” the other said, in a musing tone. “So they go, too. Do they play beaver too?”

“Jerry,” Bogard said. The other looked at him. Bogard jerked his head a little. “Come over here.” The other rose. They went aside. “Lay off of him,” Bogard said. “I mean it, now. He’s just a kid. When you were that age, how much sense did you have? Just about enough to get to chapel on time.”

“My country hadn’t been at war going on four years, though,” Jerry said. “Here we are, spending our money and getting shot at by the clock, and it’s not even our fight, and these limeys that would have been goose-stepping twelve months now if it hadn’t been—”

“Shut it,” Bogard said. “You sound like a Liberty Loan.”
“ — taking it like it was a fair or something. ‘Jolly.’” His voice was now falsetto, lilting. “‘But dangerous, what?’”

“Sh-h-h-h,” Bogard said.
“I’d like to catch him and his Ronnie out in the harbor, just once. Any harbor. London’s. I wouldn’t want anything but a Jenny, either. Jenny? Hell, I’d take a bicycle and a pair of water wings! I’ll show him some war.”

“Well, you lay off him now. He’ll be gone soon.”
“What are you going to do with him?”

“I’m going to take him along this morning. Let him have Harper’s place out front. He says he can handle a Lewis. Says they have one on the boat. Something he was telling me — about how he once shot out a channel-marker light at seven hundred yards.”

“Well, that’s your business. Maybe he can beat you.”
“Beat me?”
“Playing beaver. And then you can take on Ronnie.”

“I’ll show him some war, anyway,” Bogard said. He looked at the guest. “His people have been in it three years now, and he seems to take it like a sophomore in town for the big game.” He looked at Jerry again. “But you lay off him now.”

As they approached the table, the guest’s voice was loud and cheerful: “. . . if he got the glasses first, he would go in close and look, but when I got them first, he’d sheer off where I couldn’t see anything but the smoke. Frightful stickler. Frightful. But Ergenstrasse not counting any more. And if you make a mistake and call her, you lose two beaver from your score. If Ronnie were only to forget and call her we’d be even.”

III

At two o’clock the English boy was still talking, his voice bright, innocent and cheerful. He was telling them how Switzerland had been spoiled by 1914, and instead of the vacation which his father had promised him for his sixteenth birthday, when that birthday came he and his tutor had had to do with Wales. 

But that he and the tutor had got pretty high and that he dared to say — with all due respect to any present who might have had the advantage of Switzerland, of course — that one could see probably as far from Wales as from Switzerland. 

“Perspire as much and breathe as hard, anyway,” he added. And about him the Americans sat, a little hard-bitten, a little sober, somewhat older, listening to him with a kind of cold astonishment. 

They had been getting up for some time now and going out and returning in flying clothes, carrying helmets and goggles. An orderly entered with a tray of coffee cups, and the guest realized that for some time now he had been hearing engines in the darkness outside.

At last Bogard rose. “Come along,” he said. “We’ll get your togs.” When they emerged from the mess, the sound of the engines was quite loud — an idling thunder. In alignment along the invisible tarmac was a vague rank of short banks of flickering blue-green fire suspended apparently in mid-air. They crossed the aerodrome to Bogard’s quarters, where the lieutenant, McGinnis, sat on a cot fastening his flying boots. Bogard reached down a Sidcott suit and threw it across the cot. “Put this on,” he said.

“Will I need all this?” the guest said. “Shall we be gone that long?”
“Probably,” Bogard said. “Better use it. Cold upstairs.”

The guest picked up the suit. “I say,” he said. “I say, Ronnie and I have a do ourselves, tomor — today. Do you think Ronnie won’t mind if I am a bit late? Might not wait for me.”
“We’ll be back before teatime,” McGinnis said. He seemed quite busy with his boot. “Promise you.” The English boy looked at him.

“What time should you be back?” Bogard said.
“Oh, well,” the English boy said, “I dare say it will be all right. They let Ronnie say when to go, anyway. He’ll wait for me if I should be a bit late.”
“He’ll wait,” Bogard said. “Get your suit on.”

“Right,” the other said. They helped him into the suit. “Never been up before,” he said, chattily, pleasantly. “Dare say you can see farther than from mountains, eh?”
“See more, anyway,” McGinnis said. “You’ll like it.”

“Oh, rather. If Ronnie only waits for me. Lark. But dangerous, isn’t it?”
“Go on,” McGinnis said. “You’re kidding me.”

“Shut your trap, Mac,” Bogard said. “Come along. Want some more coffee?” He looked at the guest, but McGinnis answered:
“No. Got something better than coffee. Coffee makes such a confounded stain on the wings.”

“On the wings?” the English boy said. “Why coffee on the wings.”
“Stow it, I said, Mac,” Bogard said. “Come along.”

They recrossed the aerodrome, approaching the muttering banks of flame. When they drew near, the guest began to discern the shape, the outlines, of the Handley-Page. It looked like a Pullman coach run upslanted aground into the skeleton of the first floor of an incomplete skyscraper. The guest looked at it quietly.

“It’s larger than a cruiser,” he said in his bright, interested voice. “I say, you know. This doesn’t fly in one lump. You can’t pull my leg. Seen them before. It comes in two parts: Captain Bogard and me in one; Mac and ‘nother chap in other. What?”

“No,” McGinnis said. Bogard had vanished. “It all goes up in one lump. Big lark, eh? Buzzard, what?”
“Buzzard?” the guest murmured. “Oh, I say. A cruiser. Flying. I say, now.”

“And listen,” McGinnis said. His hand came forth; something cold fumbled against the hand of the English boy — a bottle. “When you feel yourself getting sick, see? Take a pull at it.”
“Oh, shall I get sick?”

“Sure. We all do. Part of flying. This will stop it. But if it doesn’t. See?”
“What? Quite. What?”

“Not overside. Don’t spew it overside.”
“Not overside?”

“It’ll blow back in Bogy’s and my face. Can’t see. Bingo. Finished. See?”
“Oh, quite. What shall I do with it?” Their voices were quiet, brief, grave as conspirators.
“Just duck your head and let her go.”
“Oh, quite.”

Bogard returned. “Show him how to get into the front pit, will you?” he said. McGinnis led the way through the trap. Forward, rising to the slant of the fuselage, the passage narrowed; a man would need to crawl.

“Crawl in there and keep going,” McGinnis said.
“It looks like a dog kennel,” the guest said.
“Doesn’t it, though?” McGinnis agreed cheerfully. “Cut along with you.” Stooping, he could hear the other scuttling forward. “You’ll find a Lewis gun up there, like as not,” he said into the tunnel.

The voice of the guest came back: “Found it.”
“The gunnery sergeant will be along in a minute and show you if it is loaded.”

“It’s loaded,” the guest said; almost on the heels of his words the gun fired, a brief staccato burst. There were shouts, the loudest from the ground beneath the nose of the aeroplane. “It’s quite all right,” the English boy’s voice said. “I pointed it west before I let it off. Nothing back there but Marine office and your brigade headquarters. Ronnie and I always do this before we go anywhere. Sorry if I was too soon. Oh, by the way,” he added, “my name’s Claude. Don’t think I mentioned it.”

On the ground, Bogard and two other officers stood. They had come up running. “Fired it west,” one said. “How in hell does he know which way is west?”
“He’s a sailor,” the other said. “You forgot that.”

“He seems to be a machine gunner too,” Bogard said.
“Let’s hope he doesn’t forget that,” the first said.

IV

Nevertheless, Bogard kept an eye on the silhouetted head rising from the round gunpit in the nose ten feet ahead of him. “He did work that gun, though,” he said to McGinnis beside him. “He even put the drum on himself, didn’t he?”

“Yes,” McGinnis said. “If he just doesn’t forget and think that that gun is him and his tutor looking around from a Welsh alp.”

“Maybe I should not have brought him,” Bogard said. McGinnis didn’t answer. Bogard jockeyed the wheel a little. Ahead, in the gunner’s pit, the guest’s head moved this way and that continuously, looking. “We’ll get there and unload and haul air for home,” Bogard said. “Maybe in the dark — Confound it, it would be a shame for his country to be in this mess for four years and him not even to see a gun pointed in his direction.”

“He’ll see one tonight if he don’t keep his head in,” McGinnis said.

But the boy did not do that. Not even when they had reached the objective and McGinnis had crawled down to the bomb toggles. And even when the searchlights found them and Bogard signaled to the other machines and dived, the two engines snarling full speed into and through the bursting shells, he could see the boy’s face in the searchlight’s glare, leaned far overside, coming sharply out as a spotlighted face on a stage, with an expression upon it of child-like interest and delight. 

“But he’s firing that Lewis,” Bogard thought. “Straight too”; nosing the machine farther down, watching the pinpoint swing into the sights, his right hand lifted, waiting to drop into McGinnis’ sight. He dropped his hand; above the noise of the engines he seemed to hear the click and whistle of the released bombs as the machine, freed of the weight, shot zooming in a long upward bounce that carried it for an instant out of the light. 

Then he was pretty busy for a time, coming into and through the shells again, shooting athwart another beam that caught and held long enough for him to see the English boy leaning far over the side, looking back and down past the right wing, the undercarriage. “Maybe he’s read about it somewhere,” Bogard thought, turning, looking back to pick up the rest of the flight.

Then it was all over, the darkness cool and empty and peaceful and almost quiet, with only the steady sound of the engines. McGinnis climbed back into the office, and standing up in his seat, he fired the colored pistol this time and stood for a moment longer, looking backward toward where the searchlights still probed and sabered. He sat down again.

“O.K.,” he said. “I counted all four of them. Let’s haul air.” Then he looked forward. “What’s become of the King’s Own? You didn’t hang him onto a bomb release, did you?” Bogard looked. The forward pit was empty. It was in dim silhouette again now, against the stars, but there was nothing there now save the gun. “No,” McGinnis said: “there he is. See? Leaning overside. Dammit, I told him not to spew it! There he comes back.” The guest’s head came into view again. But again it sank out of sight.

“He’s coming back,” Bogard said. “Stop him. Tell him we’re going to have every squadron in the Hun Channel group on top of us in thirty minutes.”

McGinnis swung himself down and stooped at the entrance to the passage. “Get back!” he shouted. The other was almost out; they squatted so, face to face like two dogs, shouting at one another above the noise of the still-unthrottled engines on either side of the fabric walls. The English boy’s voice was thin and high.
“Bomb!” he shrieked.

“Yes,” McGinnis shouted, “they were bombs! We gave them hell! Get back, I tell you! Have every Hun in France on us in ten minutes! Get back to your gun!”
Again the boy’s voice came, high, faint above the noise: “Bomb! All right?”
“Yes! Yes! All right. Back to your gun, damn you!”

McGinnis climbed back into the office. “He went back. Want me to take her awhile?”
“All right,” Bogard said. He passed McGinnis the wheel. “Ease her back some. I’d just as soon it was daylight when they come down on us.”

“Right,” McGinnis said. He moved the wheel suddenly. “What’s the matter with that right wing?” he said. “Watch it. . . . See? I’m flying on the right aileron and a little rudder. Feel it.”
Bogard took the wheel a moment. “I didn’t notice that. Wire somewhere, I guess. I didn’t think any of those shells were that close. Watch her, though.”

“Right,” McGinnis said. “And so you are going with him on his boat tomorrow — today.”
“Yes. I promised him. Confound it, you can’t hurt a kid, you know.”

“Why don’t you take Collier along, with his mandolin? Then you could sail around and sing.”
“I promised him,” Bogard said. “Get that wing up a little.”
“Right,” McGinnis said.

Thirty minutes later it was beginning to be dawn; the sky was gray. Presently McGinnis said: “Well, here they come. Look at them! They look like mosquitoes in September. I hope he don’t get worked up now and think he’s playing beaver. If he does he’ll just be one down to Ronnie, provided the devil has a beard. . . . Want the wheel?”

V

At eight o’clock the beach, the Channel, was beneath them. Throttled back, the machine drifted down as Bogard ruddered it gently into the Channel wind. His face was strained, a little tired.

McGinnis looked tired, too, and he needed a shave.
“What do you guess he is looking at now?” he said. For again the English boy was leaning over the right side of the cockpit, looking backward and downward past the right wing.
“I don’t know,” Bogard said. “Maybe bullet holes.” He blasted the port engine. “Must have the riggers—”

“He could see some closer than that,” McGinnis said. “I’ll swear I saw tracer going into his back at one time. Or maybe it’s the ocean he’s looking at. But he must have seen that when he came over from England.” Then Bogard leveled off; the nose rose sharply, the sand, the curling tide edge fled alongside. 

Yet still the English boy hung far overside, looking backward and downward at something beneath the right wing, his face rapt, with utter and childlike interest. 

Until the machine was completely stopped he continued to do so. Then he ducked down, and in the abrupt silence of the engines they could hear him crawling in the passage. He emerged just as the two pilots climbed stiffly down from the office, his face bright, eager; his voice high, excited.

“Oh, I say! Oh, good gad! What a chap. What a judge of distance! If Ronnie could only have seen! Oh, good gad! Or maybe they aren’t like ours — don’t load themselves as soon as the air strikes them.”

The Americans looked at him. “What don’t what?” McGinnis said. “The bomb. It was magnificent; I say, I shan’t forget it. Oh, I say, you know! It was splendid!”

After a while McGinnis said, “The bomb?” in a fainting voice. Then the two pilots glared at each other; they said in unison: “That right wing!” Then as one they clawed down through the trap and, with the guest at their heels, they ran around the machine and looked beneath the right wing. 

The bomb, suspended by its tail, hung straight down like a plumb bob beside the right wheel, its tip just touching the sand. And parallel with the wheel track was the long delicate line in the sand where its ultimate tip had dragged. Behind them the English boy’s voice was high, clear, childlike:
“Frightened, myself. Tried to tell you. But realized you knew your business better than I. Skill. Marvelous. Oh, I say, I shan’t forget it.”

VI

A Marine with a bayoneted rifle passed Bogard onto the wharf and directed him to the boat. The wharf was empty, and he didn’t even see the boat until he approached the edge of the wharf and looked directly down into it and upon the backs of two stooping men in greasy dungarees, who rose and glanced briefly at him and stooped again.

It was about thirty feet long and about three feet wide. It was painted with gray-green camouflage. It was quarter-decked forward, with two blunt, raked exhaust stacks. “Good Lord,” Bogard thought, “if all that deck is engine—” Just aft the deck was the control seat; he saw a big wheel, an instrument panel. 

Rising to a height of about a foot above the free-board, and running from the stern forward to where the deck began, and continuing on across the after edge of the deck and thence back down the other gunwale to the stern, was a solid screen, also camouflaged, which inclosed the boat save for the width of the stern, which was open. Facing the steersman’s seat like an eye was a hole in the screen about eight inches in diameter. 

And looking down into the long, narrow, still, vicious shape, he saw a machine gun swiveled at the stern, and he looked at the low screen — including which the whole vessel did not sit much more than a yard above water level — with its single empty forward-staring eye, and he thought quietly: “It’s steel. It’s made of steel.” And his face was quite sober, quite thoughtful, and he drew his trench coat about him and buttoned it, as though he were getting cold.

He heard steps behind him and turned. But it was only an orderly from the aerodrome, accompanied by the marine with the rifle. The orderly was carrying a largish bundle wrapped in paper.
“From Lieutenant McGinnis to the captain,” the orderly said.

Bogard took the bundle. The orderly and the marine retreated. He opened the bundle. It contained some objects and a scrawled note. The objects were a new yellow silk sofa cushion and a Japanese parasol, obviously borrowed, and a comb and a roll of toilet paper. The note said:
Couldn’t find a camera anywhere and Collier wouldn’t let me have his mandolin. But maybe Ronnie can play on the comb.

MAC.

Bogard looked at the objects. But his face was still quite thoughtful, quite grave. He rewrapped the things and carried the bundle on up the wharf and dropped it quietly into the water.
As he returned toward the invisible boat he saw two men approaching. 

He recognized the boy at once — tall, slender, already talking, voluble, his head bent a little toward his shorter companion, who plodded along beside him, hands in pockets, smoking a pipe. 

The boy still wore the pea-coat beneath a flapping oilskin, but in place of the rakish and casual cap he now wore an infantryman’s soiled Balaclava helmet, with, floating behind him as though upon the sound of his voice, a curtainlike piece of cloth almost as long as a burnous.
“Hullo, there!” he cried, still a hundred yards away.

But it was the second man that Bogard was watching, thinking to himself that he had never in his life seen a more curious figure. There was something stolid about the very shape of his hunched shoulders, his slightly down-looking face. He was a head shorter than the other. 

His face was ruddy, too, but its mold was of a profound gravity that was almost dour. It was the face of a man of twenty who has been for a year trying, even while asleep, to look twenty-one. 

He wore a high-necked sweater and dungaree slacks; above this a leather jacket; and above this a soiled naval officer’s warmer that reached almost to his heels and which had one shoulder strap missing and not one remaining button at all. 

On his head was a plaid fore-and-aft deer stalker’s cap, tied on by a narrow scarf brought across and down, hiding his ears, and then wrapped once about his throat and knotted with a hangman’s noose beneath his left ear. 

It was unbelievably soiled, and with his hands elbow-deep in his pockets and his hunched shoulders and his bent head, he looked like someone’s grandmother hung, say, for a witch. Clamped upside down between his teeth was a short brier pipe.

“Here he is!” the boy cried. “This is Ronnie. Captain Bogard.”

“How are you?” Bogard said. He extended his hand. The other said no word, but his hand came forth, limp. It was quite cold, but it was hard, calloused. But he said no word; he just glanced briefly at Bogard and then away. But in that instant Bogard caught something in the look, something strange — a flicker; a kind of covert and curious respect, something like a boy of fifteen looking at a circus trapezist.

But he said no word. He ducked on; Bogard watched him drop from sight over the wharf edge as though he had jumped feet first into the sea. He remarked now that the engines in the invisible boat were running.

“We might get aboard too,” the boy said. He started toward the boat, then he stopped. He touched Bogard’s arm. “Yonder!” he hissed. “See?” His voice was thin with excitement.
“What?” Bogard also whispered; automatically he looked backward and upward, after old habit. The other was gripping his arm and pointing across the harbor.

“There! Over there. The Ergenstrasse. They have shifted her again.” Across the harbor lay an ancient, rusting, swaybacked hulk. It was small and nondescript, and, remembering, Bogard saw that the foremast was a strange mess of cables and booms, resembling — allowing for a great deal of license or looseness of imagery — a basket mast. Beside him the boy was almost chortling. “Do you think that Ronnie noticed?” he hissed. “Do you?”

“I don’t know,” Bogard said.
“Oh, good gad! If he should glance up and call her before he notices, we’ll be even. Oh, good gad! But come along.” He went on; he was still chortling. “Careful,” he said. “Frightful ladder.”

He descended first, the two men in the boat rising and saluting. Ronnie had disappeared, save for his backside, which now filled a small hatch leading forward beneath the deck. Bogard descended gingerly.
“Good Lord,” he said. “Do you have to climb up and down this every day?”

“Frightful, isn’t it?” the other said, in his happy voice. “But you know yourself. Try to run a war with makeshifts, then wonder why it takes so long.” The narrow hull slid and surged, even with Bogard’s added weight. “Sits right on top, you see,” the boy said. “Would float on a lawn, in a heavy dew. Goes right over them like a bit of paper.”
“It does?” Bogard said.

“Oh, absolutely. That’s why, you see.” Bogard didn’t see, but he was too busy letting himself gingerly down to a sitting posture. There were no thwarts; no seats save a long, thick, cylindrical ridge which ran along the bottom of the boat from the driver’s seat to the stern. Ronnie had backed into sight. He now sat behind the wheel, bent over the instrument panel. 

But when he glanced back over his shoulder he did not speak. His face was merely interrogatory. Across his face there was now a long smudge of grease. The boy’s face was empty, too, now.
“Right,” he said. He looked forward, where one of the seamen had gone. “Ready forward?” he said.

“Aye, sir,” the seaman said.
The other seaman was at the stern line. “Ready aft?”
“Aye, sir.”

“Cast off.” The boat sheered away, purring, a boiling of water under the stern. The boy looked down at Bogard. “Silly business. Do it shipshape, though. Can’t tell when silly fourstriper—” His face changed again, immediate, solicitous. “I say. Will you be warm? I never thought to fetch—”

“I’ll be all right,” Bogard said. But the other was already taking off his oilskin. “No, no,” Bogard said. “I won’t take it.”
“You’ll tell me if you get cold?”

“Yes. Sure.” He was looking down at the cylinder on which he sat. It was a half cylinder — that is, like the hotwater tank to some Gargantuan stove, sliced down the middle and bolted, open side down, to the floor plates. It was twenty feet long and more than two feet thick. Its top rose as high as the gunwales and between it and the hull on either side was just room enough for a man to place his feet to walk.

“That’s Muriel,” the boy said.
“Muriel?”
“Yes. The one before that was Agatha. After my aunt. The first one Ronnie and I had was Alice in Wonderland. Ronnie and I were the White Rabbit. Jolly, eh?”

“Oh, you and Ronnie have had three, have you?”
“Oh, yes,” the boy said. He leaned down. “He didn’t notice,” he whispered. His face was again bright, gleeful. “When we come back,” he said. “You watch.”

“Oh,” Bogard said. “The Ergenstrasse.” He looked astern, and then he thought: “Good Lord! We must be going — traveling.” He looked out now, broadside, and saw the harbor line fleeing past, and he thought to himself that the boat was well-nigh moving at the speed at which the Handley-Page flew, left the ground. 

They were beginning to bound now, even in the sheltered water, from one wave crest to the next with a distinct shock. His hand still rested on the cylinder on which he sat. He looked down at it again, following it from where it seemed to emerge beneath Ronnie’s seat, to where it beveled into the stern. “It’s the air in her, I suppose,” he said.

“The what?” the boy said.
“The air. Stored up in her. That makes the boat ride high.”

“Oh, yes. I dare say. Very likely. I hadn’t thought about it.” He came forward, his burnous whipping in the wind, and sat down beside Bogard. Their heads were below the top of the screen.
Astern the harbor fled, diminishing, sinking into the sea. 

The boat had begun to lift now, swooping forward and down, shocking almost stationary for a moment, then lifting and swooping again; a gout of spray came aboard over the bows like a flung shovelful of shot. “I wish you’d take this coat,” the boy said.

Bogard didn’t answer. He looked around at the bright face. “We’re outside, aren’t we?” he said quietly.
“Yes. . . . Do take it, won’t you?”

“Thanks, no. I’ll be all right. We won’t be long, anyway, I guess.”
“No. We’ll turn soon. It won’t be so bad then.”

“Yes. I’ll be all right when we turn.” Then they did turn. The motion became easier. That is, the boat didn’t bang head-on, shuddering, into the swells. They came up beneath now, and the boat fled with increased speed, with a long, sickening, yawing motion, first to one side and then the other. But it fled on, and Bogard looked astern with that same soberness with which he had first looked down into the boat. “We’re going east now,” he said.

“With just a spot of north,” the boy said. “Makes her ride a bit better, what?”
“Yes,” Bogard said. Astern there was nothing now save empty sea and the delicate needlelike cant of the machine gun against the boiling and slewing wake, and the two seamen crouching quietly in the stern. “Yes. It’s easier.” Then he said: “How far do we go?”

The boy leaned closer. He moved closer. His voice was happy, confidential, proud, though lowered a little: “It’s Ronnie’s show. He thought of it. Not that I wouldn’t have, in time. Gratitude and all that. But he’s the older, you see. Thinks fast. Courtesy, noblesse oblige — all that. Thought of it soon as I told him this morning. I said, ‘Oh, I say. I’ve been there. 

I’ve seen it’; and he said, ‘Not flying’; and I said, ‘Strewth’; and he said ‘How far? No lying now’; and I said, ‘Oh, far. Tremendous. Gone all night’; and he said, ‘Flying all night. That must have been to Berlin’; and I said, ‘I don’t know. I dare say’; and he thought. 

I could see him thinking. Because he is the older, you see. More experience in courtesy, right thing. And he said, ‘Berlin. No fun to that chap, dashing out and back with us.’ And he thought and I waited, and I said, ‘But we can’t take him to Berlin. Too far. Don’t know the way, either’; and he said — fast, like a shot — said, ‘But there’s Kiel’; and I knew—”

“What?” Bogard said. Without moving, his whole body sprang. “Kiel? In this?”
“Absolutely. Ronnie thought of it. Smart, even if he is a stickler. Said at once, ‘Zeebrugge no show at all for that chap. Must do best we can for him. Berlin,’ Ronnie said. ‘My Gad! Berlin.’”

“Listen,” Bogard said. He had turned now, facing the other, his face quite grave. “What is this boat for?”
“For?”

“What does it do?” Then, knowing beforehand the answer to his own question, he said, putting his hand on the cylinder: “What is this in here? A torpedo, isn’t it?”
“I thought you knew,” the boy said.

“No,” Bogard said. “I didn’t know.” His voice seemed to reach him from a distance, dry, cricketlike: “How do you fire it?”
“Fire it?”

“How do you get it out of the boat? When that hatch was open a while ago I could see the engines. They were right in front of the end of this tube.”

“Oh,” the boy said. “You pull a gadget there and the torpedo drops out astern. As soon as the screw touches the water it begins to turn, and then the torpedo is ready, loaded. Then all you have to do is turn the boat quickly and the torpedo goes on.”

“You mean—” Bogard said. After a moment his voice obeyed him again. “You mean you aim the torpedo with the boat and release it and it starts moving, and you turn the boat out of the way and the torpedo passes through the same water that the boat just vacated?”

“Knew you’d catch on,” the boy said. “Told Ronnie so. Airman. Tamer than yours, though. But can’t be helped. Best we can do, just on water. But knew you’d catch on.”

“Listen,’ Bogard said. His voice sounded to him quite calm. The boat fled on, yawing over the swells. He sat quite motionless. It seemed to him that he could hear himself talking to himself: “Go on. Ask him. Ask him what? Ask him how close to the ship do you have to be before you fire. . . . Listen,” he said, in that calm voice. “Now, you tell Ronnie, you see. 

You just tell him — just say—” He could feel his voice ratting off on him again, so he stopped it. He sat quite motionless, waiting for it to come back; the boy leaning now, looking at his face. Again the boy’s voice was solicitous:
“I say. You’re not feeling well. These confounded shallow boats.”
“It’s not that,” Bogard said. “I just — Do your orders say Kiel?”

“Oh, no. They let Ronnie say. Just so we bring the boat back. This is for you. Gratitude. Ronnie’s idea. Tame, after flying. But if you’d rather, eh?”
“Yes, some place closer. You see, I—”

“Quite. I see. No vacations in wartime. I’ll tell Ronnie.” He went forward. Bogard did not move. The boat fled in long, slewing swoops. Bogard looked quietly astern, at the scudding sea, the sky.
“My God!” he thought. “Can you beat it? Can you beat it?”

The boy came back; Bogard turned to him a face the color of dirty paper. “All right now,” the boy said. “Not Kiel. Nearer place, hunting probably just as good. Ronnie says he knows you will understand.” He was tugging at his pocket. He brought out a bottle. “Here. Haven’t forgot last night. Do the same for you. Good for the stomach, eh?”

Bogard drank, gulping — a big one. He extended the bottle, but the boy refused. “Never touch it on duty,” he said. “Not like you chaps. Tame here.”

The boat fled on. The sun was already down the west. But Bogard had lost all count of time, of distance. Ahead he could see white seas through the round eye opposite Ronnie’s face, and Ronnie’s hand on the wheel and the granitelike jut of his profiled jaw and the dead upside-down pipe. The boat fled on.

Then the boy leaned and touched his shoulder. He half rose. The boy was pointing. The sun was reddish; against it, outside them and about two miles away, a vessel — a trawler, it looked like — at anchor swung a tall mast.

“Lightship!” the boy shouted. “Theirs.” Ahead Bogard could see a low, flat mole — the entrance to a harbor. “Channel!” the boy shouted. He swept his arm in both directions. “Mines!” His voice swept back on the wind. “Place filthy with them. All sides. Beneath us too. Lark, eh?”

VII

Against the mole a fair surf was beating. Running before the seas now, the boat seemed to leap from one roller to the next; in the intervals while the screw was in the air the engine seemed to be trying to tear itself out by the roots. But it did not slow; when it passed the end of the mole the boat seemed to be standing almost erect on its rudder, like a sailfish. 

The mole was a mile away. From the end of it little faint lights began to flicker like fireflies. The boy leaned. “Down,” he said. “Machine guns. Might stop a stray.”
“What do I do?” Bogard shouted. “What can I do?”

“Stout fellow! Give them hell, what? Knew you’d like it!”
Crouching, Bogard looked up at the boy, his face wild. “I can handle the machine gun!”

“No need,” the boy shouted back. “Give them first innings. Sporting. Visitors, eh?” He was looking forward. “There she is. See?” They were in the harbor now, the basin opening before them. Anchored in the channel was a big freighter. 

Painted midships of the hull was a huge Argentine flag. “Must get back to stations!” the boy shouted down to him. Then at that moment Ronnie spoke for the first time. The boat was hurtling along now in smoother water. Its speed did not slacken and Ronnie did not turn his head when he spoke. He just swung his jutting jaw and the clamped cold pipe a little, and said from the side of his mouth a single word:
“Beaver.”

The boy, stooped over what he had called his gadget, jerked up, his expression astonished and outraged. Bogard also looked forward and saw Ronnie’s arm pointing to starboard. It was a light cruiser at anchor a mile away. She had basket masts, and as he looked a gun flashed from her after turret. “Oh, damn!” the boy cried. “Oh, you putt! 

Oh, confound you, Ronnie! Now I’m three down!” But he had already stooped again over his gadget, his face bright and empty and alert again; not sober; just calm, waiting. 

Again Bogard looked forward and felt the boat pivot on its rudder and head directly for the freighter at terrific speed, Ronnie now with one hand on the wheel and the other lifted and extended at the height of his head.

But it seemed to Bogard that the hand would never drop. He crouched, not sitting, watching with a kind of quiet horror the painted flag increase like a moving picture of a locomotive taken from between the rails. Again the gun crashed from the cruiser behind them, and the freighter fired point-blank at them from its poop. Bogard heard neither shot.

“Man, man!” he shouted. “For God’s sake!”

Ronnie’s hand dropped. Again the boat spun on its rudder. Bogard saw the bow rise, pivoting; he expected the hull to slam broadside on into the ship. But it didn’t. It shot off on a long tangent. He was waiting for it to make a wide sweep, heading seaward, putting the freighter astern, and he thought of the cruiser again. “Get a broadside, this time, once we clear the freighter,” he thought. 

Then he remembered the freighter, the torpedo, and he looked back toward the freighter to watch the torpedo strike, and saw to his horror that the boat was now bearing down on the freighter again, in a skidding turn. 

Like a man in a dream, he watched himself rush down upon the ship and shoot past under her counter, still skidding, close enough to see the faces on her decks. “They missed and they are going to run down the torpedo and catch it and shoot it again,” he thought idiotically.

So the boy had to touch his shoulder before he knew he was behind him. The boy’s voice was quite calm: “Under Ronnie’s seat there. A bit of a crank handle. If you’ll just hand it to me—”
He found the crank. 

He passed it back; he was thinking dreamily: “Mac would say they had a telephone on board.” But he didn’t look at once to see what the boy was doing with it, for in that still and peaceful horror he was watching Ronnie, the cold pipe rigid in his jaw, hurling the boat at top speed round and round the freighter, so near that he could see the rivets in the plates. 

Then he looked aft, his face wild, importunate, and he saw what the boy was doing with the crank. He had fitted it into what was obviously a small windlass low on one flank of the tube near the head. He glanced up and saw Bogard’s face. “Didn’t go that time!” he shouted cheerfully.

“Go?” Bogard shouted. “It didn’t — The torpedo—”
The boy and one of the seamen were quite busy, stooping over the windlass and the tube. “No. Clumsy. Always happening. Should think clever chaps like engineers — Happens, though. Draw her in and try her again.”

“But the nose, the cap!” Bogard shouted. “It’s still in the tube, isn’t it? It’s all right, isn’t it?”
“Absolutely. But it’s working now. Loaded. Screw’s started turning. Get it back and drop it clear. If we should stop or slow up it would overtake us. Drive back into the tube. Bingo! What?”

Bogard was on his feet now, turned, braced to the terrific merry-go-round of the boat. High above them the freighter seemed to be spinning on her heel like a trick picture in the movies. “Let me have that winch!” he cried.

“Steady!” the boy said. “Mustn’t draw her back too fast. Jam her into the head of the tube ourselves. Same bingo! Best let us. Every cobbler to his last, what?”

“Oh, quite,” Bogard said. “Oh, absolutely.” It was like someone else was using his mouth. He leaned, braced, his hands on the cold tube, beside the others. He was hot inside, but his outside was cold. 

He could feel all his flesh jerking with cold as he watched the blunt, grained hand of the seaman turning the windlass in short, easy, inch-long arcs, while at the head of the tube the boy bent, tapping the cylinder with a spanner, lightly, his head turned with listening delicate and deliberate as a watchmaker. The boat rushed on in those furious, slewing turns. Bogard saw a long, drooping thread loop down from somebody’s mouth, between his hands, and he found that the thread came from his own mouth.

He didn’t hear the boy speak, nor notice when he stood up. He just felt the boat straighten out, flinging him to his knees beside the tube. The seaman had gone back to the stern and the boy stooped again over his gadget. Bogard knelt now, quite sick. 

He did not feel the boat when it swung again, nor hear the gun from the cruiser which had not dared to fire and the freighter which had not been able to fire, firing again. He did not feel anything at all when he saw the huge, painted flag directly ahead and increasing with locomotive speed, and Ronnie’s lifted hand drop. But this time he knew that the torpedo was gone; in pivoting and spinning this time the whole boat seemed to leave the water; he saw the bow of the boat shoot skyward like the nose of a pursuit ship going into a wingover. 

Then his outraged stomach denied him. He saw neither the geyser nor heard the detonation as he sprawled over the tube. He felt only a hand grasp him by the slack of his coat, and the voice of one of the seamen: “Steady all, sir. I’ve got you.”

VIII

A voice roused him, a hand. He was half sitting in the narrow starboard runway, half lying across the tube. He had been there for quite a while; quite a while ago he had felt someone spread a garment over him. But he had not raised his head. “I’m all right,” he had said. “You keep it.”
“Don’t need it,” the boy said. “Going home now.”

“I’m sorry I—” Bogard said.
“Quite. Confounded shallow boats. Turn any stomach until you get used to them. Ronnie and I both, at first. Each time. You wouldn’t believe it. Believe human stomach hold so much. Here.” It was the bottle. “Good drink. Take enormous one. Good for stomach.”

Bogard drank. Soon he did feel better, warmer. When the hand touched him later, he found that he had been asleep.
It was the boy again. The pea-coat was too small for him; shrunken, perhaps. Below the cuffs his long, slender, girl’s wrists were blue with cold. Then Bogard realized what the garment was that had been laid over him. But before Bogard could speak, the boy leaned down, whispering; his face was gleeful: “He didn’t notice!”

“What?”
“Ergenstrasse! He didn’t notice that they had shifted her. Gad, I’d be just one down, then.” He watched Bogard’s face with bright, eager eyes. “Beaver, you know. I say. Feeling better, eh?”
“Yes,” Bogard said, “I am.”
“He didn’t notice at all. Oh, gad! Oh, Jove!”

Bogard rose and sat on the tube. The entrance to the harbor was just ahead; the boat had slowed a little. It was just dusk. He said quietly: “Does this often happen?” The boy looked at him. Bogard touched the tube. “This. Failing to go out.”

“Oh, yes. Why they put the windlass on them. That was later. Made first boat; whole thing blew up one day. So put on windlass.”
“But it happens sometimes, even now? I mean, sometimes they blow up, even with the windlass?”

“Well, can’t say, of course. Boats go out. Not come back. Possible. Not ever know, of course. Not heard of one captured yet, though. Possible. Not to us, though. Not yet.”

“Yes,” Bogard said. “Yes.” They entered the harbor, the boat moving still fast, but throttled now and smooth, across the dusk-filled basin. Again the boy leaned down, his voice gleeful.
“Not a word, now!” he hissed. “Steady all!” He stood up; he raised his voice: “I say, Ronnie.” Ronnie did not turn his head, but Bogard could tell that he was listening. “That Argentine ship was amusing, eh? In there. How do you suppose it got past us here? 

Might have stopped here as well. French would buy the wheat.” He paused, diabolical — Machiavelli with the face of a strayed angel. “I say. How long has it been since we had a strange ship in here? Been months, eh?” Again he leaned, hissing. “Watch, now!” But Bogard could not see Ronnie’s head move at all. “He’s looking, though!” the boy whispered, breathed. And Ronnie was looking, though his head had not moved at all. 

Then there came into view, in silhouette against the dusk-filled sky, the vague, basket-like shape of the interned vessel’s foremast. At once Ronnie’s arm rose, pointing; again he spoke without turning his head, out of the side of his mouth, past the cold, clamped pipe, a single word:
“Beaver.”

The boy moved like a released spring, like a heeled dog freed. “Oh, damn you!” he cried. “Oh, you putt! It’s the Ergenstrasse! Oh, confound you! I’m just one down now!” He had stepped in one stride completely over Bogard, and he now leaned down over Ronnie. “What?” The boat was slowing in toward the wharf, the engine idle. “Aren’t I, Ronnie? Just one down now?”
The boat drifted in; the seaman had again crawled forward onto the deck. Ronnie spoke for the third and last time. “Right,” he said.

IX

“I want,” Bogard said, “a case of Scotch. The best we’ve got. And fix it up good. It’s to go to town. And I want a responsible man to deliver it.” The responsible man came. “This is for a child,” Bogard said, indicating the package. “You’ll find him in the Street of the Twelve Hours, somewhere near the Café Twelve Hours. 

He’ll be in the gutter. You’ll know him. A child about six feet long. Any English M. P. will show him to you. If he is asleep, don’t wake him. Just sit there and wait until he wakes up. Then give him this. Tell him it is from Captain Bogard.”

X

About a month later a copy of the English Gazette which had strayed onto an American aerodrome carried the following item in the casualty lists:
MISSING: Torpedo Boat XOOI. Midshipmen R. Boyce Smith and L. C. W. Hope, R. N. R., Boatswain’s Mate Burt and Able Seaman Reeves. Channel Fleet, Light Torpedo Division. Failed to return from coast patrol duty.

Shortly after that the American Air Service headquarters also issued a bulletin:
For extraordinary valor over and beyond the routine of duty, Captain H. S. Bogard, with his crew, composed of Second Lieutenant Darrel McGinnis and Aviation Gunners Watts and Harper, on a daylight raid and without scout protection, destroyed with bombs an ammunition depot several miles behind the enemy’s lines. From here, beset by enemy aircraft in superior numbers, these men proceeded with what bombs remained to the enemy’s corps headquarters at Blank and partially demolished this château, and then returned safely without loss of a man.

And regarding which exploit, it might have added, had it failed and had Captain Bogard come out of it alive, he would have been immediately and thoroughly court-martialed.

Carrying his remaining two bombs, he had dived the Handley-Page at the château where the generals sat at lunch, until McGinnis, at the toggles below him, began to shout at him, before he ever signaled. He didn’t signal until he could discern separately the slate tiles of the roof. 

Then his hand dropped and he zoomed, and he held the aeroplane so, in its wild snarl, his lips parted, his breath hissing, thinking: “God! God! If they were all there — all the generals, the admirals, the presidents and the kings — theirs, ours — all of them.”


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 all that day they told about Nancy and Mr Stovall, and all that night the ones that passed the jail could hear Nancy singing and yelling. They could see her hands holding to the window bars, and a lot of them stopped along the fence, listening to her and to the jailer trying to make her stop. 

She didn’t shut up until almost daylight, when the jailer began to hear a bumping and scraping upstairs and he went up there and found Nancy hanging from the window bar. He said that it was cocaine and not whisky, because no nigger would try to commit suicide unless he was full of cocaine, because a nigger full of cocaine wasn’t a nigger any longer.

The jailer cut her down and revived her; then he beat her, whipped her. She had hung herself with her dress. She had fixed it all right, but when they arrested her she didn’t have on anything except a dress and so she didn’t have anything to tie her hands with and she couldn’t make her hands let go of the window ledge. So the jailer heard the noise and ran up there and found Nancy hanging from the window, stark naked, her belly already swelling out a little, like a little balloon.

When Dilsey was sick in her cabin and Nancy was cooking for us, we could see her apron swelling out; that was before father told Jesus to stay away from the house. Jesus was in the kitchen, sitting behind the stove, with his razor scar on his black face like a piece of dirty string. He said it was a watermelon that Nancy had under her dress.

“It never come off of your vine, though,” Nancy said.
“Off of what vine?” Caddy said.
“I can cut down the vine it did come off of,” Jesus said.

“What makes you want to talk like that before these chillen?” Nancy said. “Whyn’t you go on to work? You done et. You want Mr Jason to catch you hanging around his kitchen, talking that way before these chillen?”

“Talking what way?” Caddy said. “What vine?”
“I cant hang around white man’s kitchen,” Jesus said. “But white man can hang around mine. White man can come in my house, but I cant stop him. When white man want to come in my house, I aint got no house. I cant stop him, but he cant kick me outen it. He cant do that.”

Dilsey was still sick in her cabin.” Father told Jesus to stay off our place. Dilsey was still sick. It was a long time. We were in the library after supper.

“Isn’t Nancy through in the kitchen yet?” mother said. “It seems to me that she has had plenty of time to have finished the dishes.”
“Let Quentin go and see,” father said. “Go and see if Nancy is through, Quentin. Tell her she can go on home.”

I went to the kitchen. Nancy was through. The dishes were put away and the fire was out. Nancy was sitting in a chair, close to the cold stove. She looked at me.
“Mother wants to know if you are through,” I said.

“Yes,” Nancy said. She looked at me. “I done finished.” She looked at me.
“What is it?” I said. “What is it?”
“I aint nothing but a nigger,” Nancy said. “It aint none of my fault.”

She looked at me, sitting in the chair before the cold stove, the sailor hat on her head. I went back to the library. It was the cold stove and all, when you think of a kitchen being warm and busy and cheerful. And with a cold stove and the dishes all put away, and nobody wanting to eat at that hour.

“Is she through?” mother said.
“Yessum,” I said.
“What is she doing?” mother said.

“She’s not doing anything. She’s through.”
“I’ll go and see,” father said.
“Maybe she’s waiting for Jesus to come and take her home,” Caddy said.

“Jesus is gone,” I said. Nancy told us how one morning she woke up and Jesus was gone.
“He quit me,” Nancy said. “Done gone to Memphis, I reckon. Dodging them city po-lice for a while, I reckon.”

“And a good riddance,” father said. “I hope he stays there.”
“Nancy’s scaired of the dark,” Jason said.
“So are you,” Caddy said.

“I’m not,” Jason said.
“Scairy cat,” Caddy said.
“I’m not,” Jason said.
“You, Candace!” mother said. Father came back.

“I am going to walk down the lane with Nancy,” he said. “She says that Jesus is back.”
“Has she seen him?” mother said.

“No. Some Negro sent her word that he was back in town. I wont be long.”
“You’ll leave me alone, to take Nancy home?” mother said. “Is her safety more precious to you than mine?”

“I wont be long,” father said.
“You’ll leave these children unprotected, with that Negro about?”
“I’m going too,” Caddy said. “Let me go, Father.”

“What would he do with them, if he were unfortunate enough to have them?” father said.
“I want to go, too,” Jason said.

“Jason!” mother said. She was speaking to father. You could tell that by the way she said the name. Like she believed that all day father had been trying to think of doing the thing she wouldn’t like the most, and that she knew all the time that after a while he would think of it. 

I stayed quiet, because father and I both knew that mother would want him to make me stay with her if she just thought of it in time. So father didn’t look at me. I was the oldest. I was nine and Caddy was seven and Jason was five.

“Nonsense,” father said. “We wont be long.”
Nancy had her hat on. We came to the lane. “Jesus always been good to me,” Nancy said. “Whenever he had two dollars, one of them was mine.” We walked in the lane. “If I can just get through the lane,” Nancy said, “I be all right then.”

The lane was always dark. “This is where Jason got scared on Hallowe’en,” Caddy said.
“I didn’t,” Jason said.

“Cant Aunt Rachel do anything with him?” father said. Aunt Rachel was old. She lived in a cabin beyond Nancy’s, by herself. She had white hair and she smoked a pipe in the door, all day long; she didn’t work any more. They said she was Jesus’ mother. Sometimes she said she was and sometimes she said she wasn’t any kin to Jesus.

“Yes, you did,” Caddy said. “You were scairder than Frony. You were scairder than T.P. even. Scairder than niggers.”
“Cant nobody do nothing with him,” Nancy said. “He say I done woke up the devil in him and aint but one thing going to lay it down again.”

“Well, he’s gone now,” father said. “There’s nothing for you to be afraid of now. And if you’d just let white men alone.”
“Let what white men alone?” Caddy said. “How let them alone?”

“He aint gone nowhere,” Nancy said. “I can feel him. I can feel him now, in this lane. He hearing us talk, every word, hid somewhere, waiting. I aint seen him, and I aint going to see him again but once more, with that razor in his mouth. That razor on that string down his back, inside his shirt. And then I aint going to be even surprised.”
“I wasn’t scaired,” Jason said.

“If you’d behave yourself, you’d have kept out of this,” father said. “But it’s all right now. He’s probably in St. Louis now. Probably got another wife by now and forgot all about you.”
“If he has, I better not find out about it,” Nancy said. “I’d stand there right over them, and every time he wropped her, I’d cut that arm off. I’d cut his head off and I’d slit her belly and I’d shove—”

“Hush,” father said.
“Slit whose belly, Nancy?” Caddy said.
“I wasn’t scaired,” Jason said. “I’d walk right down this lane by myself.”
“Yah,” Caddy said. “You wouldn’t dare to put your foot down in it if we were not here too.”

II

Dilsey was still sick, so we took Nancy home every night until mother said, “How much longer is this going on? I to be left alone in this big house while you take home a frightened Negro?”
We fixed a pallet in the kitchen for Nancy. One night we waked up, hearing the sound. It was not singing and it was not crying, coming up the dark stairs. There was a light in mother’s room and we heard father going down the hall, down the back stairs, and Caddy and I went into the hall. The floor was cold. Our toes curled away from it while we listened to the sound. It was like singing and it wasn’t like singing, like the sounds that Negroes make.

Then it stopped and we heard father going down the back stairs, and we went to the head of the stairs. Then the sound began again, in the stairway, not loud, and we could see Nancy’s eyes halfway up the stairs, against the wall. They looked like cat’s eyes do, like a big cat against the wall, watching us. 

When we came down the steps to where she was, she quit making the sound again, and we stood there until father came back up from the kitchen, with his pistol in his hand. He went back down with Nancy and they came back with Nancy’s pallet.

We spread the pallet in our room. After the light in mother’s room went off, we could see Nancy’s eyes again. “Nancy,” Caddy whispered, “are you asleep, Nancy?”

Nancy whispered something. It was oh or no, I dont know which. Like nobody had made it, like it came from nowhere and went nowhere, until it was like Nancy was not there at all; that I had looked so hard at her eyes on the stairs that they had got printed on my eyeballs, like the sun does when you have closed your eyes and there is no sun. “Jesus,” Nancy whispered. “Jesus.”
“Was it Jesus?” Caddy said. “Did he try to come into the kitchen?”

“Jesus,” Nancy said. Like this: Jeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeesus, until the sound went out, like a match or a candle does.

“It’s the other Jesus she means,” I said.
“Can you see us, Nancy?” Caddy whispered. “Can you see our eyes too?”
“I aint nothing but a nigger,” Nancy said. “God knows. God knows.”
“What did you see down there in the kitchen?” Caddy whispered. “What tried to get in?”

“God knows,” Nancy said. We could see her eyes. “God knows.”
Dilsey got well. She cooked dinner. “You’d better stay in bed a day or two longer,” father said.

“What for?” Dilsey said. “If I had been a day later, this place would be to rack and ruin. Get on out of here now, and let me get my kitchen straight again.”
Dilsey cooked supper too. And that night, just before dark, Nancy came into the kitchen.

“How do you know he’s back?” Dilsey said. “You aint seen him.”
“Jesus is a nigger,” Jason said.
“I can feel him,” Nancy said. “I can feel him laying yonder in the ditch.”

“Tonight?” Dilsey said. “Is he there tonight?”
“Dilsey’s a nigger too,” Jason said.
“You try to eat something,” Dilsey said.
“I dont want nothing,” Nancy said.
“I aint a nigger,” Jason said.

“Drink some coffee,” Dilsey said. She poured a cup of coffee for Nancy. “Do you know he’s out there tonight? How come you know it’s tonight?”
“I know,” Nancy said. “He’s there, waiting. I know. I done lived with him too long. I know what he is fixing to do fore he know it himself.”

“Drink some coffee,” Dilsey said. Nancy held the cup to her mouth and blew into the cup. Her mouth pursed out like a spreading adder’s, like a rubber mouth, like she had blown all the color out of her lips with blowing the coffee.

“I aint a nigger,” Jason said. “Are you a nigger, Nancy?”
“I hellborn, child,” Nancy said. “I wont be nothing soon. I going back where I come from soon.”

III

She began to drink the coffee. While she was drinking, holding the cup in both hands, she began to make the sound again. She made the sound into the cup and the coffee sploshed out onto her hands and her dress. Her eyes looked at us and she sat there, her elbows on her knees, holding the cup in both hands, looking at us across the wet cup, making the sound. “Look at Nancy,” Jason said. “Nancy cant cook for us now. Dilsey’s got well now.”

“You hush up,” Dilsey said. Nancy held the cup in both hands, looking at us, making the sound, like there were two of them: one looking at us and the other making the sound. “Whyn’t you let Mr Jason telefoam the marshal?” Dilsey said. Nancy stopped then, holding the cup in her long brown hands. She tried to drink some coffee again, but it sploshed out of the cup, onto her hands and her dress, and she put the cup down. Jason watched her.

“I cant swallow it,” Nancy said. “I swallows but it wont go down me.”
“You go down to the cabin,” Dilsey said. “Frony will fix you a pallet and I’ll be there soon.”
“Wont no nigger stop him,” Nancy said.

“I aint a nigger,” Jason said. “Am I, Dilsey?”
“I reckon not,” Dilsey said. She looked at Nancy. “I dont reckon so. What you going to do, then?”

Nancy looked at us. Her eyes went fast, like she was afraid there wasn’t time to look, without hardly moving at all. She looked at us, at all three of us at one time. “You member that night I stayed in yawls’ room?” she said. 

She told about how we waked up early the next morning, and played. We had to play quiet, on her pallet, until father woke up and it was time to get breakfast. “Go and ask your maw to let me stay here tonight,” Nancy said. “I wont need no pallet. We can play some more.”

Caddy asked mother. Jason went too. “I cant have Negroes sleeping in the bedrooms,” mother said. Jason cried. He cried until mother said he couldn’t have any dessert for three days if he didn’t stop. Then Jason said he would stop if Dilsey would make a chocolate cake. Father was there.

“Why dont you do something about it?” mother said. “What do we have officers for?”
“Why is Nancy afraid of Jesus?” Caddy said. “Are you afraid of father, mother?”

“What could the officers do?” father said. “If Nancy hasn’t seen him, how could the officers find him?”
“Then why is she afraid?” mother said.

“She says he is there. She says she knows he is there tonight.”
“Yet we pay taxes,” mother said. “I must wait here alone in this big house while you take a Negro woman home.”
“You know that I am not lying outside with a razor,” father said.

“I’ll stop if Dilsey will make a chocolate cake,” Jason said. Mother told us to go out and father said he didn’t know if Jason would get a chocolate cake or not, but he knew what Jason was going to get in about a minute. We went back to the kitchen and told Nancy.

“Father said for you to go home and lock the door, and you’ll be all right,” Caddy said. “All right from what, Nancy? Is Jesus mad at you?” Nancy was holding the coffee cup in her hands again, her elbows on her knees and her hands holding the cup between her knees. She was looking into the cup. “What have you done that made Jesus mad?” Caddy said. 

Nancy let the cup go. It didn’t break on the floor, but the coffee spilled out, and Nancy sat there with her hands still making the shape of the cup. She began to make the sound again, not loud. Not singing and not unsinging. We watched her.

“Here,” Dilsey said. “You quit that, now. You get aholt of yourself. You wait here. I going to get Versh to walk home with you.” Dilsey went out.
We looked at Nancy. Her shoulders kept shaking, but she quit making the sound. We watched her. “What’s Jesus going to do to you?” Caddy said. “He went away.”

Nancy looked at us. “We had fun that night I stayed in yawls’ room, didn’t we?”
“I didn’t,” Jason said. “I didn’t have any fun.”

“You were asleep in mother’s room,” Caddy said. “You were not there.”
“Let’s go down to my house and have some more fun,” Nancy said.
“Mother wont let us,” I said. “It’s too late now.”

“Dont bother her,” Nancy said. “We can tell her in the morning. She wont mind.”
“She wouldn’t let us,” I said.
“Dont ask her now,” Nancy said. “Dont bother her now.”

“She didn’t say we couldn’t go,” Caddy said.
“We didn’t ask,” I said.
“If you go, I’ll tell,” Jason said.

“We’ll have fun,” Nancy said. “They won’t mind, just to my house. I been working for yawl a long time. They won’t mind.”
“I’m not afraid to go,” Caddy said. “Jason is the one that’s afraid. He’ll tell.”
“I’m not,” Jason said.

“Yes, you are,” Caddy said. “You’ll tell.”
“I won’t tell,” Jason said. “I’m not afraid.”
“Jason ain’t afraid to go with me,” Nancy said. “Is you, Jason?”

“Jason is going to tell,” Caddy said. The lane was dark. We passed the pasture gate. “I bet if something was to jump out from behind that gate, Jason would holler.”
“I wouldn’t,” Jason said. We walked down the lane. Nancy was talking loud.

“What are you talking so loud for, Nancy?” Caddy said.

“Who; me?” Nancy said. “Listen at Quentin and Caddy and Jason saying I’m talking loud.”
“You talk like there was five of us here,” Caddy said. “You talk like father was here too.”

“Who; me talking loud, Mr Jason?” Nancy said.
“Nancy called Jason ‘Mister,’” Caddy said.
“Listen how Caddy and Quentin and Jason talk,” Nancy said.

“We’re not talking loud,” Caddy said. “You’re the one that’s talking like father—”
“Hush,” Nancy said; “hush, Mr Jason.”
“Nancy called Jason ‘Mister’ aguh—”

“Hush,” Nancy said. She was talking loud when we crossed the ditch and stooped through the fence where she used to stoop through with the clothes on her head. Then we came to her house. We were going fast then. She opened the door. The smell of the house was like the lamp and the smell of Nancy was like the wick, like they were waiting for one another to begin to smell. She lit the lamp and closed the door and put the bar up. Then she quit talking loud, looking at us.

“What’re we going to do?” Caddy said.
“What do yawl want to do?” Nancy said.
“You said we would have some fun,” Caddy said.

There was something about Nancy’s house; something you could smell besides Nancy and the house. Jason smelled it, even. “I don’t want to stay here,” he said. “I want to go home.”
“Go home, then,” Caddy said.

“I don’t want to go by myself,” Jason said.
“We’re going to have some fun,” Nancy said.
“How?” Caddy said.

Nancy stood by the door. She was looking at us, only it was like she had emptied her eyes, like she had quit using them. “What do you want to do?” she said.
“Tell us a story,” Caddy said. “Can you tell a story?”
“Yes,” Nancy said.

“Tell it,” Caddy said. We looked at Nancy. “You don’t know any stories.”
“Yes,” Nancy said. “Yes, I do.”

She came and sat in a chair before the hearth. There was a little fire there. Nancy built it up, when it was already hot inside. She built a good blaze. She told a story. She talked like her eyes looked, like her eyes watching us and her voice talking to us did not belong to her. Like she was living somewhere else, waiting somewhere else. 

She was outside the cabin. Her voice was inside and the shape of her, the Nancy that could stoop under a barbed wire fence with a bundle of clothes balanced on her head as though without weight, like a balloon, was there. But that was all. “And so this here queen come walking up to the ditch, where that bad man was hiding. She was walking up to the ditch, and she say, ‘If I can just get past this here ditch,’ was what she say . . .”

“What ditch?” Caddy said. “A ditch like that one out there? Why did a queen want to go into a ditch?”
“To get to her house,” Nancy said. She looked at us. “She had to cross the ditch to get into her house quick and bar the door.”
“Why did she want to go home and bar the door?” Caddy said.

IV

Nancy looked at us. She quit talking. She looked at us. Jason’s legs stuck straight out of his pants where he sat on Nancy’s lap. “I don’t think that’s a good story,” he said. “I want to go home.”

“Maybe we had better,” Caddy said. She got up from the floor. “I bet they are looking for us right now.” She went toward the door.
“No,” Nancy said. “Don’t open it.” She got up quick and passed Caddy. She didn’t touch the door, the wooden bar.
“Why not?” Caddy said.

“Come back to the lamp,” Nancy said. “We’ll have fun. You don’t have to go.”
“We ought to go,” Caddy said. “Unless we have a lot of fun.” She and Nancy came back to the fire, the lamp.
“I want to go home,” Jason said. “I’m going to tell.”

“I know another story,” Nancy said. She stood close to the lamp. She looked at Caddy, like when your eyes look up at a stick balanced on your nose. She had to look down to see Caddy, but her eyes looked like that, like when you are balancing a stick.

“I won’t listen to it,” Jason said. “I’ll bang on the floor.”
“It’s a good one,” Nancy said. “It’s better than the other one.”

“What’s it about?” Caddy said. Nancy was standing by the lamp. Her hand was on the lamp, against the light, long and brown.
“Your hand is on that hot globe,” Caddy said. “Don’t it feel hot to your hand?”

Nancy looked at her hand on the lamp chimney. She took her hand away, slow. She stood there, looking at Caddy, wringing her long hand as though it were tied to her wrist with a string.
“Let’s do something else,” Caddy said.

“I want to go home,” Jason said.
“I got some popcorn,” Nancy said. She looked at Caddy and then at Jason and then at me and then at Caddy again. “I got some popcorn.”
“I don’t like popcorn,” Jason said. “I’d rather have candy.”

Nancy looked at Jason. “You can hold the popper.” She was still wringing her hand; it was long and limp and brown.
“All right,” Jason said. “I’ll stay a while if I can do that. Caddy can’t hold it. I’ll want to go home again if Caddy holds the popper.”

Nancy built up the fire. “Look at Nancy putting her hands in the fire,” Caddy said. “What’s the matter with you, Nancy?”
“I got popcorn,” Nancy said. “I got some.” She took the popper from under the bed. It was broken. Jason began to cry.

“Now we can’t have any popcorn,” he said.
“We ought to go home, anyway,” Caddy said. “Come on, Quentin.”

“Wait,” Nancy said; “wait. I can fix it. Don’t you want to help me fix it?”
“I don’t think I want any,” Caddy said. “It’s too late now.”
“You help me, Jason,” Nancy said. “Don’t you want to help me?”

“No,” Jason said. “I want to go home.”
“Hush,” Nancy said; “hush. Watch. Watch me. I can fix it so Jason can hold it and pop the corn.” She got a piece of wire and fixed the popper.

“It won’t hold good,” Caddy said.
“Yes, it will,” Nancy said. “Yawl watch. Yawl help me shell some corn.”
The popcorn was under the bed too. We shelled it into the popper and Nancy helped Jason hold the popper over the fire.

“It’s not popping,” Jason said. “I want to go home.”
“You wait,” Nancy said. “It’ll begin to pop. We’ll have fun then.” She was sitting close to the fire. The lamp was turned up so high it was beginning to smoke.
“Why don’t you turn it down some?” I said.

“It’s all right,” Nancy said. “I’ll clean it. Yawl wait. The popcorn will start in a minute.”
“I don’t believe it’s going to start,” Caddy said. “We ought to start home, anyway. They’ll be worried.”

“No,” Nancy said. “It’s going to pop. Dilsey will tell um yawl with me. I been working for yawl long time. They won’t mind if yawl at my house. You wait, now. It’ll start popping any minute now.”

Then Jason got some smoke in his eyes and he began to cry. He dropped the popper into the fire. Nancy got a wet rag and wiped Jason’s face, but he didn’t stop crying.
“Hush,” she said. “Hush.” But he didn’t hush. Caddy took the popper out of the fire.

“It’s burned up,” she said. “You’ll have to get some more popcorn, Nancy.”
“Did you put all of it in?” Nancy said.
“Yes,” Caddy said. Nancy looked at Caddy. Then she took the popper and opened it and poured the cinders into her apron and began to sort the grains, her hands long and brown, and we watching her.

“Haven’t you got any more?” Caddy said.
“Yes,” Nancy said; “yes. Look. This here ain’t burnt. All we need to do is—”
“I want to go home,” Jason said. “I’m going to tell.”

“Hush,” Caddy said. We all listened. Nancy’s head was already turned toward the barred door, her eyes filled with red lamplight. “Somebody is coming,” Caddy said.

Then Nancy began to make that sound again, not loud, sitting there above the fire, her long hands dangling between her knees; all of a sudden water began to come out on her face in big drops, running down her face, carrying in each one a little turning ball of firelight like a spark until it dropped off her chin. “She’s not crying,” I said.

“I ain’t crying,” Nancy said. Her eyes were closed. “I ain’t crying. Who is it?”
“I don’t know,” Caddy said. She went to the door and looked out. “We’ve got to go now,” she said. “Here comes father.”
“I’m going to tell,” Jason said. “Yawl made me come.”

The water still ran down Nancy’s face. She turned in her chair. “Listen. Tell him. Tell him we going to have fun. Tell him I take good care of yawl until in the morning. Tell him to let me come home with yawl and sleep on the floor. Tell him I won’t need no pallet. We’ll have fun. You member last time how we had so much fun?”
“I didn’t have fun,” Jason said. “You hurt me. You put smoke in my eyes. I’m going to tell.”

V

Father came in. He looked at us. Nancy did not get up.
“Tell him,” she said.

“Caddy made us come down here,” Jason said. “I didn’t want to.”
Father came to the fire. Nancy looked up at him. “Can’t you go to Aunt Rachel’s and stay?” he said. Nancy looked up at father, her hands between her knees. “He’s not here,” father said. “I would have seen him. There’s not a soul in sight.”

“He in the ditch,” Nancy said. “He waiting in the ditch yonder.”
“Nonsense,” father said. He looked at Nancy. “Do you know he’s there?”
“I got the sign,” Nancy said.
“What sign?”

“I got it. It was on the table when I come in. It was a hogbone, with blood meat still on it, laying by the lamp. He’s out there. When yawl walk out that door, I gone.”
“Gone where, Nancy?” Caddy said.
“I’m not a tattletale,” Jason said.
“Nonsense,” father said.

“He out there,” Nancy said. “He looking through that window this minute, waiting for yawl to go. Then I gone.”
“Nonsense,” father said. “Lock up your house and we’ll take you on to Aunt Rachel’s.”

“‘Twont do no good,” Nancy said. She didn’t look at father now, but he looked down at her, at her long, limp, moving hands. “Putting it off wont do no good.”
“Then what do you want to do?” father said.

“I don’t know,” Nancy said. “I can’t do nothing. Just put it off. And that don’t do no good. I reckon it belong to me. I reckon what I going to get ain’t no more than mine.”
“Get what?” Caddy said. “What’s yours?”

“Nothing,” father said. “You all must get to bed.”
“Caddy made me come,” Jason said.
“Go on to Aunt Rachel’s,” father said.

“It won’t do no good,” Nancy said. She sat before the fire, her elbows on her knees, her long hands between her knees. “When even your own kitchen wouldn’t do no good. When even if I was sleeping on the floor in the room with your chillen, and the next morning there I am, and blood—”

“Hush,” father said. “Lock the door and put out the lamp and go to bed.”
“I scared of the dark,” Nancy said. “I scared for it to happen in the dark.”

“You mean you’re going to sit right here with the lamp lighted?” father said. Then Nancy began to make the sound again, sitting before the fire, her long hands between her knees. “Ah, damnation,” father said. “Come along, chillen. It’s past bedtime.”

“When yawl go home, I gone,” Nancy said. She talked quieter now, and her face looked quiet, like her hands. “Anyway, I got my coffin money saved up with Mr. Lovelady.” Mr. Lovelady was a short, dirty man who collected the Negro insurance, coming around to the cabins or the kitchens every Saturday morning, to collect fifteen cents. He and his wife lived at the hotel. 

One morning his wife committed suicide. They had a child, a little girl. He and the child went away. After a week or two he came back alone. We would see him going along the lanes and the back streets on Saturday mornings.

“Nonsense,” father said. “You’ll be the first thing I’ll see in the kitchen tomorrow morning.”
“You’ll see what you’ll see, I reckon,” Nancy said. “But it will take the Lord to say what that will be.”

VI

We left her sitting before the fire.
“Come and put the bar up,” father said. But she didn’t move. She didn’t look at us again, sitting quietly there between the lamp and the fire. From some distance down the lane we could look back and see her through the open door.

“What, Father?” Caddy said. “What’s going to happen?”
“Nothing,” father said. Jason was on father’s back, so Jason was the tallest of all of us. We went down into the ditch. I looked at it, quiet. I couldn’t see much where the moonlight and the shadows tangled.

“If Jesus is hid here, he can see us, cant he?” Caddy said.
“He’s not there,” father said. “He went away a long time ago.”
“You made me come,” Jason said, high; against the sky it looked like father had two heads, a little one and a big one. “I didn’t want to.”

We went up out of the ditch. We could still see Nancy’s house and the open door, but we couldn’t see Nancy now, sitting before the fire with the door open, because she was tired. “I just done got tired,” she said. “I just a nigger. It ain’t no fault of mine.”

But we could hear her, because she began just after we came up out of the ditch, the sound that was not singing and not unsinging. “Who will do our washing now, Father?” I said.
“I’m not a nigger,” Jason said, high and close above father’s head.

“You’re worse,” Caddy said, “you are a tattletale. If something was to jump out, you’d be scairder than a nigger.”

“I wouldn’t,” Jason said.
“You’d cry,” Caddy said.
“Caddy,” father said.
“I wouldn’t!” Jason said.
“Scairy cat,” Caddy said.
“Candace!” father said.


The End


Dry September, William Faulkner

Dry September

I

THROUGH THE BLOODY September twilight, aftermath of sixty-two rainless days, it had gone like a fire in dry grass — the rumor, the story, whatever it was. Something about Miss Minnie Cooper and a Negro. 

Attacked, insulted, frightened: none of them, gathered in the barber shop on that Saturday evening where the ceiling fan stirred, without freshening it, the vitiated air, sending back upon them, in recurrent surges of stale pomade and lotion, their own stale breath and odors, knew exactly what had happened.

“Except it wasn’t Will Mayes,” a barber said. He was a man of middle age; a thin, sand-colored man with a mild face, who was shaving a client. “I know Will Mayes. He’s a good nigger. And I know Miss Minnie Cooper, too.”

“What do you know about her?” a second barber said.
“Who is she?” the client said. “A young girl?”

“No,” the barber said. “She’s about forty, I reckon. She aint married. That’s why I dont believe—”
“Believe, hell!” a hulking youth in a sweat-stained silk shirt said. “Wont you take a white woman’s word before a nigger’s?”
“I dont believe Will Mayes did it,” the barber said. “I know Will Mayes.”

“Maybe you know who did it, then. Maybe you already got him out of town, you damn niggerlover.”
“I dont believe anybody did anything. I dont believe anything happened. I leave it to you fellows if them ladies that get old without getting married dont have notions that a man cant—”
“Then you are a hell of a white man,” the client said. He moved under the cloth. The youth had sprung to his feet.

“You dont?” he said. “Do you accuse a white woman of lying?”
The barber held the razor poised above the half-risen client. He did not look around.

“It’s this durn weather,” another said. “It’s enough to make a man do anything. Even to her.”
Nobody laughed. The barber said in his mild, stubborn tone: “I aint accusing nobody of nothing. I just know and you fellows know how a woman that never—”
“You damn niggerlover!” the youth said.

“Shut up, Butch,” another said. “We’ll get the facts in plenty of time to act.”
“Who is? Who’s getting them?” the youth said. “Facts, hell! I—”

“You’re a fine white man,” the client said. “Aint you?” In his frothy beard he looked like a desert rat in the moving pictures. “You tell them, Jack,” he said to the youth. “If there aint any white men in this town, you can count on me, even if I aint only a drummer and a stranger.”

“That’s right, boys,” the barber said. “Find out the truth first. I know Will Mayes.”
“Well, by God!” the youth shouted. “To think that a white man in this town—”
“Shut up, Butch,” the second speaker said. “We got plenty of time.”

The client sat up. He looked at the speaker. “Do you claim that anything excuses a nigger attacking a white woman? Do you mean to tell me you are a white man and you’ll stand for it? You better go back North where you came from. The South dont want your kind here.”

“North what?” the second said. “I was born and raised in this town.”
“Well, by God!” the youth said. He looked about with a strained, baffled gaze, as if he was trying to remember what it was he wanted to say or to do. He drew his sleeve across his sweating face. “Damn if I’m going to let a white woman—”

“You tell them, Jack,” the drummer said. “By God, if they—”
The screen door crashed open. A man stood in the floor, his feet apart and his heavy-set body poised easily. His white shirt was open at the throat; he wore a felt hat. His hot, bold glance swept the group. His name was McLendon. He had commanded troops at the front in France and had been decorated for valor.

“Well,” he said, “are you going to sit there and let a black son rape a white woman on the streets of Jefferson?”
Butch sprang up again. The silk of his shirt clung flat to his heavy shoulders. At each armpit was a dark halfmoon. “That’s what I been telling them! That’s what I—”

“Did it really happen?” a third said. “This aint the first man scare she ever had, like Hawkshaw says. Wasn’t there something about a man on the kitchen roof, watching her undress, about a year ago?”

“What?” the client said. “What’s that?” The barber had been slowly forcing him back into the chair; he arrested himself reclining, his head lifted, the barber still pressing him down.
McLendon whirled on the third speaker. “Happen? What the hell difference does it make? Are you going to let the black sons get away with it until one really does it?”
“That’s what I’m telling them!” Butch shouted. He cursed, long and steady, pointless.

“Here, here,” a fourth said. “Not so loud. Dont talk so loud.”
“Sure,” McLendon said; “no talking necessary at all. I’ve done my talking. Who’s with me?” He poised on the balls of his feet, roving his gaze.

The barber held the drummer’s face down, the razor poised. “Find out the facts first, boys. I know Willy Mayes. It wasn’t him. Let’s get the sheriff and do this thing right.”
McLendon whirled upon him his furious, rigid face. The barber did not look away. They looked like men of different races. The other barbers had ceased also above their prone clients. “You mean to tell me,” McLendon said, “that you’d take a nigger’s word before a white woman’s? Why, you damn niggerloving—”

The third speaker rose and grasped McLendon’s arm; he too had been a soldier. “Now, now. Let’s figure this thing out. Who knows anything about what really happened?”
“Figure out hell!” McLendon jerked his arm free. “All that’re with me get up from there. The ones that aint—” He roved his gaze, dragging his sleeve across his face.

Three men rose. The drummer in the chair sat up. “Here,” he said, jerking at the cloth about his neck; “get this rag off me. I’m with him. I dont live here, but by God, if our mothers and wives and sisters—” He smeared the cloth over his face and flung it to the floor. McLendon stood in the floor and cursed the others. Another rose and moved toward him. The remainder sat uncomfortable, not looking at one another, then one by one they rose and joined him.

The barber picked the cloth from the floor. He began to fold it neatly. “Boys, dont do that. Will Mayes never done it. I know.”

“Come on,” McLendon said. He whirled. From his hip pocket protruded the butt of a heavy automatic pistol. They went out. The screen door crashed behind them reverberant in the dead air.
The barber wiped the razor carefully and swiftly, and put it away, and ran to the rear, and took his hat from the wall. 

“I’ll be back as soon as I can,” he said to the other barbers. “I cant let—” He went out, running. The two other barbers followed him to the door and caught it on the rebound, leaning out and looking up the street after him. The air was flat and dead. It had a metallic taste at the base of the tongue.

“What can he do?” the first said. The second one was saying “Jees Christ, Jees Christ” under his breath. “I’d just as lief be Will Mayes as Hawk, if he gets McLendon riled.”
“Jees Christ, Jees Christ,” the second whispered.
“You reckon he really done it to her?” the first said.

II

She was thirty-eight or thirty-nine. She lived in a small frame house with her invalid mother and a thin, sallow, unflagging aunt, where each morning between ten and eleven she would appear on the porch in a lace-trimmed boudoir cap, to sit swinging in the porch swing until noon. After dinner she lay down for a while, until the afternoon began to cool. 

Then, in one of the three or four new voile dresses which she had each summer, she would go downtown to spend the afternoon in the stores with the other ladies, where they would handle the goods and haggle over the prices in cold, immediate voices, without any intention of buying.

She was of comfortable people — not the best in Jefferson, but good people enough — and she was still on the slender side of ordinary looking, with a bright, faintly haggard manner and dress. When she was young she had had a slender, nervous body and a sort of hard vivacity which had enabled her for a time to ride upon the crest of the town’s social life as exemplified by the high school party and church social period of her contemporaries while still children enough to be unclassconscious.

She was the last to realize that she was losing ground; that those among whom she had been a little brighter and louder flame than any other were beginning to learn the pleasure of snobbery — male — and retaliation — female. That was when her face began to wear that bright, haggard look. 

She still carried it to parties on shadowy porticoes and summer lawns, like a mask or a flag, with that bafflement of furious repudiation of truth in her eyes. One evening at a party she heard a boy and two girls, all schoolmates, talking. She never accepted another invitation.

She watched the girls with whom she had grown up as they married and got homes and children, but no man ever called on her steadily until the children of the other girls had been calling her “aunty” for several years, the while their mothers told them in bright voices about how popular Aunt Minnie had been as a girl. Then the town began to see her driving on Sunday afternoons with the cashier in the bank. 

He was a widower of about forty — a high-colored man, smelling always faintly of the barber shop or of whisky. He owned the first automobile in town, a red runabout; Minnie had the first motoring bonnet and veil the town ever saw. Then the town began to say: “Poor Minnie.” “But she is old enough to take care of herself,” others said. That was when she began to ask her old schoolmates that their children call her “cousin” instead of “aunty.”

It was twelve years now since she had been relegated into adultery by public opinion, and eight years since the cashier had gone to a Memphis bank, returning for one day each Christmas, which he spent at an annual bachelors’ party at a hunting club on the river. 

From behind their curtains the neighbors would see the party pass, and during the over-the-way Christmas day visiting they would tell her about him, about how well he looked, and how they heard that he was prospering in the city, watching with bright, secret eyes her haggard, bright face. Usually by that hour there would be the scent of whisky on her breath. It was supplied her by a youth, a clerk at the soda fountain: “Sure; I buy it for the old gal. I reckon she’s entitled to a little fun.”

Her mother kept to her room altogether now; the gaunt aunt ran the house. Against that background Minnie’s bright dresses, her idle and empty days, had a quality of furious unreality. She went out in the evenings only with women now, neighbors, to the moving pictures. 

Each afternoon she dressed in one of the new dresses and went downtown alone, where her young “cousins” were already strolling in the late afternoons with their delicate, silken heads and thin, awkward arms and conscious hips, clinging to one another or shrieking and giggling with paired boys in the soda fountain when she passed and went on along the serried store fronts, in the doors of which the sitting and lounging men did not even follow her with their eyes any more.

III

The barber went swiftly up the street where the sparse lights, insect-swirled, glared in rigid and violent suspension in the lifeless air. The day had died in a pall of dust; above the darkened square, shrouded by the spent dust, the sky was as clear as the inside of a brass bell. Below the east was a rumor of the twice-waxed moon.

When he overtook them McLendon and three others were getting into a car parked in an alley. McLendon stooped his thick head, peering out beneath the top. “Changed your mind, did you?” he said. “Damn good thing; by God, tomorrow when this town hears about how you talked tonight—”

“Now, now,” the other ex-soldier said. “Hawkshaw’s all right. Come on, Hawk; jump in.”
“Will Mayes never done it, boys,” the barber said. “If anybody done it. Why, you all know well as I do there aint any town where they got better niggers than us. And you know how a lady will kind of think things about men when there aint any reason to, and Miss Minnie anyway—”

“Sure, sure,” the soldier said. “We’re just going to talk to him a little; that’s all.”
“Talk hell!” Butch said. “When we’re through with the—”
“Shut up, for God’s sake!” the soldier said. “Do you want everybody in town—”

“Tell them, by God!” McLendon said. “Tell every one of the sons that’ll let a white woman—”

“Let’s go; let’s go: here’s the other car.” The second car slid squealing out of a cloud of dust at the alley mouth. McLendon started his car and took the lead. Dust lay like fog in the street. The street lights hung nimbused as in water. They drove on out of town.

A rutted lane turned at right angles. Dust hung above it too, and above all the land. The dark bulk of the ice plant, where the Negro Mayes was night watchman, rose against the sky. “Better stop here, hadn’t we?” the soldier said. McLendon did not reply. He hurled the car up and slammed to a stop, the headlights glaring on the blank wall.

“Listen here, boys,” the barber said; “if he’s here, dont that prove he never done it? Dont it? If it was him, he would run. Dont you see he would?” The second car came up and stopped. McLendon got down; Butch sprang down beside him. “Listen, boys,” the barber said.

“Cut the lights off!” McLendon said. The breathless dark rushed down. There was no sound in it save their lungs as they sought air in the parched dust in which for two months they had lived; then the diminishing crunch of McLendon’s and Butch’s feet, and a moment later McLendon’s voice:
“Will! . . . Will!”

Below the east the wan hemorrhage of the moon increased. It heaved above the ridge, silvering the air, the dust, so that they seemed to breathe, live, in a bowl of molten lead. There was no sound of nightbird nor insect, no sound save their breathing and a faint ticking of contracting metal about the cars. Where their bodies touched one another they seemed to sweat dryly, for no more moisture came. “Christ!” a voice said; “let’s get out of here.”

But they didn’t move until vague noises began to grow out of the darkness ahead; then they got out and waited tensely in the breathless dark. There was another sound: a blow, a hissing expulsion of breath and McLendon cursing in undertone. They stood a moment longer, then they ran forward. They ran in a stumbling clump, as though they were fleeing something. “Kill him, kill the son,” a voice whispered. McLendon flung them back.

“Not here,” he said. “Get him into the car.” “Kill him, kill the black son!” the voice murmured. They dragged the Negro to the car. The barber had waited beside the car. He could feel himself sweating and he knew he was going to be sick at the stomach.

“What is it, captains?” the Negro said. “I aint done nothing. ‘Fore God, Mr John.” Someone produced handcuffs. They worked busily about the Negro as though he were a post, quiet, intent, getting in one another’s way. He submitted to the handcuffs, looking swiftly and constantly from dim face to dim face. “Who’s here, captains?” he said, leaning to peer into the faces until they could feel his breath and smell his sweaty reek. He spoke a name or two. “What you all say I done, Mr John?”

McLendon jerked the car door open. “Get in!” he said.

The Negro did not move. “What you all going to do with me, Mr John? I aint done nothing. White folks, captains, I aint done nothing: I swear ‘fore God.” He called another name.

“Get in!” McLendon said. He struck the Negro. The others expelled their breath in a dry hissing and struck him with random blows and he whirled and cursed them, and swept his manacled hands across their faces and slashed the barber upon the mouth, and the barber struck him also. “Get him in there,” McLendon said. They pushed at him. He ceased struggling and got in and sat quietly as the others took their places. 

He sat between the barber and the soldier, drawing his limbs in so as not to touch them, his eyes going swiftly and constantly from face to face. Butch clung to the running board. The car moved on. The barber nursed his mouth with his handkerchief.

“What’s the matter, Hawk?” the soldier said.
“Nothing,” the barber said. They regained the highroad and turned away from town. The second car dropped back out of the dust. They went on, gaining speed; the final fringe of houses dropped behind.

“Goddamn, he stinks!” the soldier said.
“We’ll fix that,” the drummer in front beside McLendon said. On the running board Butch cursed into the hot rush of air. The barber leaned suddenly forward and touched McLendon’s arm.
“Let me out, John,” he said.

“Jump out, niggerlover,” McLendon said without turning his head. He drove swiftly. Behind them the sourceless lights of the second car glared in the dust. Presently McLendon turned into a narrow road. It was rutted with disuse. 

It led back to an abandoned brick kiln — a series of reddish mounds and weed- and vine-choked vats without bottom. It had been used for pasture once, until one day the owner missed one of his mules. Although he prodded carefully in the vats with a long pole, he could not even find the bottom of them.

“John,” the barber said.
“Jump out, then,” McLendon said, hurling the car along the ruts. Beside the barber the Negro spoke:
“Mr Henry.”

The barber sat forward. The narrow tunnel of the road rushed up and past. Their motion was like an extinct furnace blast: cooler, but utterly dead. The car bounded from rut to rut.
“Mr Henry,” the Negro said.

The barber began to tug furiously at the door. “Look out, there!” the soldier said, but the barber had already kicked the door open and swung onto the running board. The soldier leaned across the Negro and grasped at him, but he had already jumped. The car went on without checking speed.

The impetus hurled him crashing through dust-sheathed weeds, into the ditch. Dust puffed about him, and in a thin, vicious crackling of sapless stems he lay choking and retching until the second car passed and died away. 

Then he rose and limped on until he reached the highroad and turned toward town, brushing at his clothes with his hands. The moon was higher, riding high and clear of the dust at last, and after a while the town began to glare beneath the dust. He went on, limping. 

Presently he heard cars and the glow of them grew in the dust behind him and he left the road and crouched again in the weeds until they passed. McLendon’s car came last now. There were four people in it and Butch was not on the running board.

They went on; the dust swallowed them; the glare and the sound died away. The dust of them hung for a while, but soon the eternal dust absorbed it again. The barber climbed back onto the road and limped on toward town.

IV

As she dressed for supper on that Saturday evening, her own flesh felt like fever. Her hands trembled among the hooks and eyes, and her eyes had a feverish look, and her hair swirled crisp and crackling under the comb. While she was still dressing the friends called for her and sat while she donned her sheerest underthings and stockings and a new voile dress. “Do you feel strong enough to go out?” they said, their eyes bright too, with a dark glitter. “When you have had time to get over the shock, you must tell us what happened. What he said and did; everything.”

In the leafed darkness, as they walked toward the square, she began to breathe deeply, something like a swimmer preparing to dive, until she ceased trembling, the four of them walking slowly because of the terrible heat and out of solicitude for her. But as they neared the square she began to tremble again, walking with her head up, her hands clenched at her sides, their voices about her murmurous, also with that feverish, glittering quality of their eyes.

They entered the square, she in the center of the group, fragile in her fresh dress. She was trembling worse. She walked slower and slower, as children eat ice cream, her head up and her eyes bright in the haggard banner of her face, passing the hotel and the coatless drummers in chairs along the curb looking around at her: “That’s the one: see? The one in pink in the middle.” “Is that her? What did they do with the nigger? Did they — ?” “Sure. He’s all right.” “All right, is he?” “Sure. 

He went on a little trip.” Then the drug store, where even the young men lounging in the doorway tipped their hats and followed with their eyes the motion of her hips and legs when she passed.

They went on, passing the lifted hats of the gentlemen, the suddenly ceased voices, deferent, protective. “Do you see?” the friends said. Their voices sounded like long, hovering sighs of hissing exultation. “There’s not a Negro on the square. Not one.”

They reached the picture show. It was like a miniature fairyland with its lighted lobby and colored lithographs of life caught in its terrible and beautiful mutations. Her lips began to tingle. In the dark, when the picture began, it would be all right; she could hold back the laughing so it would not waste away so fast and so soon. So she hurried on before the turning faces, the undertones of low astonishment, and they took their accustomed places where she could see the aisle against the silver glare and the young men and girls coming in two and two against it.

The lights flicked away; the screen glowed silver, and soon life began to unfold, beautiful and passionate and sad, while still the young men and girls entered, scented and sibilant in the half dark, their paired backs in silhouette delicate and sleek, their slim, quick bodies awkward, divinely young, while beyond them the silver dream accumulated, inevitably on and on. 

She began to laugh. In trying to suppress it, it made more noise than ever; heads began to turn. Still laughing, her friends raised her and led her out, and she stood at the curb, laughing on a high, sustained note, until the taxi came up and they helped her in.

They removed the pink voile and the sheer underthings and the stockings, and put her to bed, and cracked ice for her temples, and sent for the doctor. He was hard to locate, so they ministered to her with hushed ejaculations, renewing the ice and fanning her. While the ice was fresh and cold she stopped laughing and lay still for a time, moaning only a little. But soon the laughing welled again and her voice rose screaming.

“Shhhhhhhhhhh! Shhhhhhhhhhhhhh!” they said, freshening the icepack, smoothing her hair, examining it for gray; “poor girl!” Then to one another: “Do you suppose anything really happened?” their eyes darkly aglitter, secret and passionate. “Shhhhhhhhhh! Poor girl! Poor Minnie!”

V

It was midnight when McLendon drove up to his neat new house. It was trim and fresh as a birdcage and almost as small, with its clean, green-and-white paint. He locked the car and mounted the porch and entered. His wife rose from a chair beside the reading lamp. McLendon stopped in the floor and stared at her until she looked down.

“Look at that clock,” he said, lifting his arm, pointing. She stood before him, her face lowered, a magazine in her hands. Her face was pale, strained, and weary-looking. “Haven’t I told you about sitting up like this, waiting to see when I come in?”

“John,” she said. She laid the magazine down. Poised on the balls of his feet, he glared at her with his hot eyes, his sweating face.
“Didn’t I tell you?” He went toward her. She looked up then. He caught her shoulder. She stood passive, looking at him.
“Don’t, John. I couldn’t sleep . . . The heat; something. Please, John. You’re hurting me.”

“Didn’t I tell you?” He released her and half struck, half flung her across the chair, and she lay there and watched him quietly as he left the room.

He went on through the house, ripping off his shirt, and on the dark, screened porch at the rear he stood and mopped his head and shoulders with the shirt and flung it away. He took the pistol from his hip and laid it on the table beside the bed, and sat on the bed and removed his shoes, and rose and slipped his trousers off. 

He was sweating again already, and he stooped and hunted furiously for the shirt. At last he found it and wiped his body again, and, with his body pressed against the dusty screen, he stood panting. There was no movement, no sound, not even an insect. The dark world seemed to lie stricken beneath the cold moon and the lidless stars.


The End


Delta Autumn, William Faulkner

Delta Autumn

Soon now they would enter the Delta. The sensation was familiar to him. It had been renewed like this each last week in November for more than fifty years—the last hill, at the foot of which the rich unbroken alluvial flatness began as the sea began at the base of its cliffs, dissolving away beneath the unhurried November rain as the sea itself would dissolve away.

At first they had come in wagons: the guns, the bedding, the dogs, the food, the whisky, the keen heart-lifting anticipation of hunting; the young men who could drive all night and all the following day in the cold rain and pitch a camp in the rain and sleep in the wet blankets and rise at daylight the next morning and hunt. 

There had been bear then. A man shot a doe or a fawn as quickly as he did a buck, and in the afternoons they shot wild turkey with pistols to test their stalking skill and marksmanship, feeding all but the breast to the dogs. 

But that time was gone now. Now they went in cars, driving faster and faster each year because the roads were better and they had farther and farther to drive, the territory in which game still existed drawing yearly inward as his life was drawing inward, until now he was the last of those who had once made the journey in wagons without feeling it and now those who accompanied him were the sons and even grandsons of the men who had ridden for twenty-four hours in the rain or sleet behind the steaming mules. 

They called him ‘Uncle Ike’ now, and he no longer told anyone how near eighty he actually was because he knew as well as they did that he no longer had any business making such expeditions, even by car.

In fact, each time now, on that first night in camp, lying aching and sleepless in the harsh blankets, his blood only faintly warmed by the single thin whisky-and-water which he allowed himself, he would tell himself that this would be his last. 

But he would stand that trip—he still shot almost as well as he ever had, still killed almost as much of the game he saw as he ever killed; he no longer even knew how many deer had fallen before his gun—and the fierce long heat of the next summer would renew him. 

Then November would come again, and again in the car with two of the sons of his old companions, whom he had taught not only how to distinguish between the prints left by a buck or a doe but between the sound they made in moving, he would look ahead past the jerking are of the windshield wiper and see the land flatten suddenly and swoop, dissolving away beneath the rain as the sea itself would dissolve, and he would say, “Well, boys, there it is again,”

This time though, he didn’t have time to speak. The driver of the car stopped it, slamming it to a skidding halt on the greasy pavement without warning, actually flinging the two passengers forward until they caught themselves with their braced hands against the dash. “What the hell, Roth!” the man in the middle said. “Can’t you whistle first when you do that? Hurt you, Uncle Ike?”

“No,” the old man said. “What’s the matter?” The driver didn’t answer. Still leaning forward, the old man looked sharply past the face of the man between them, at the face of his kinsman. It was the youngest face of them all, aquiline, saturnine, a little ruthless, the face of his ancestor too, tempered a little, altered a little, staring sombrely through the streaming windshield across which the twin wipers flicked and flicked.

“I didn’t intend to come back in here this time,” he said suddenly and harshly.

“You said that back in Jefferson last week,” the old man said. “Then you changed your mind. Have you changed it again? This aint a very good time to——”

“Oh, Roth’s coming,” the man in the middle said. His name was Legate. He seemed to be speaking to no one, as he was looking at neither of them. “If it was just a buck he was coming all this distance for, now. But he’s got a doe in here. 

Of course a old man like Uncle Ike cant be interested in no doe, not one that walks on two legs—when she’s standing up, that is. Pretty light-colored, too. The one he was after them nights last fall when he said he was coon-hunting, Uncle Ike. The one I figured maybe he was still running when he was gone all that month last January. But of course a old man like Uncle Ike aint got no interest in nothing like that.” He chortled, still looking at no one, not completely jeering.

“What?” the old man said. “What’s that?” But he had not even so much as glanced at Legate. He was still watching his kinsman’s face. The eyes behind the spectacles were the blurred eyes of an old man, but they were quite sharp too; eyes which could still see a gun-barrel and what ran beyond it as well as any of them could. He was remembering himself now: how last year, during the final stage by motor boat in to where they camped, a box of food had been lost overboard and how on the next day his kinsman had gone back to the nearest town for supplies and had been gone overnight. 

And when he did return, something had happened to him. He would go into the woods with his rifle each dawn when the others went, but the old man, watching him, knew that he was not hunting. “All right,” he said. “Take me and Will on to shelter where we can wait for the truck, and you can go on back.”

“I’m going in,” the other said harshly. “Don’t worry. Because this will be the last of it.”
“The last of deer hunting, or of doe hunting?” Legate said. This time the old man paid no attention to him even by speech. He still watched the young man’s savage and brooding face.
“Why?” he said.

“After Hitler gets through with it? Or Smith or Jones or Roosevelt or Willkie or whatever he will call himself in this country?”
“We’ll stop him in this country,” Legate said. “Even if he calls himself George Washington.”

“How?” Edmonds said. “By singing God bless America in bars at midnight and wearing dime-store flags in our lapels?”

“So that’s what’s worrying you,” the old man said. “I aint noticed this country being short of defenders yet, when it needed them. You did some of it yourself twenty-odd years ago, before you were a grown man even. This country is a little mite stronger than any one man or group of men, outside of it or even inside of it either. 

I reckon, when the time comes and some of you have done got tired of hollering we are whipped if we dont go to war and some more are hollering we are whipped if we do, it will cope with one Austrian paper-hanger, no matter what he will be calling himself.

My pappy and some other better men than any of them you named tried once to tear it in two with a war, and they failed.”

“And what have you got left?” the other said. “Half the people without jobs and half the factories closed by strikes. Half the people on public dole that wont work and half that couldn’t work even if they would. Too much cotton and corn and hogs, and not enough for people to eat and wear. The country full of people to tell a man how he cant raise his own cotton whether he will or wont, and Sally Rand with a sergeant’s stripe and not even the fan couldn’t fill the army rolls. Too much not-butter and not even the guns——”

“We got a deer camp—if we ever get to it,” Legate said. “Not to mention does.”

“It’s a good time to mention does,” the old man said. “Does and fawns both. The only fighting anywhere that ever had anything of God’s blessing on it has been when men fought to protect does and fawns. If it’s going to come to fighting, that’s a good thing to mention and remember too.”

“Haven’t you discovered in—how many years more than seventy is it?—that women and children are one thing there’s never any scarcity of?” Edmonds said.

“Maybe that’s why all I am worrying about right now is that ten miles of river we still have got to run before fore we can make camp,” the old man said. “So let’s get on.”

They went on. Soon they were going fast again, as Edmonds always drove, consulting neither of them about the speed just as he had given neither of them any warning when he slammed the car to stop. The old man relaxed again. He watched, as he did each recurrent November while more than sixty of them passed, the land which he had seen change. 

At first there had been only the old towns along the River and the old towns along the hills, from each of which the planters with their gangs of slaves and then of hired laborers had wrested from the impenetrable jungle of water-standing cane and cypress, gum and holly and oak and ash, cotton patches which as the years passed became fields and then plantations. 

The paths made by deer and bear became roads and then highways, with towns in turn springing up along them and along the rivers Tallahatchie and Sunflower which joined and became the Yazoo, the River of the Dead of the Choctaws—the thick, slow, black, unsunned streams almost without current, which once each year ceased to flow at all and then reversed, spreading, drowning the rich land and subsiding again, leaving it still richer.

Most of that was gone now. Now a man drove two hundred miles from Jefferson before he found wilderness to hunt in. Now the land lay open from the cradling hills on the East to the rampart of levee on the West, standing horseman-tall with cotton for the world’s looms—the rich black land, imponderable and vast, fecund up to the very doorsteps of the Negroes who worked it and of the white men who owned it; which exhausted the hunting life of a dog in one year, the working life of a mule in five and of a man in twenty—the land in which neon flashed past them from the little countless towns and countless shining this-year’s automobiles sped past them on the broad plumb-ruled highways, yet in which the only permanent mark of man’s occupation seemed to be the tremendous gins, constructed in sections of sheet iron and in a week’s time though they were, since no man, millionaire though he be, would build more than a roof and walls to shelter the camping equipment he lived from when he knew that once each ten years or so his house would be flooded to the second storey and all within it ruined;—the land across which there came now no scream of panther but instead the long hooting of locomotives: trains of incredible length and drawn by a single engine, since there was no gradient anywhere and no elevation save those raised by forgotten aboriginal hands as refuges from the yearly water and used by their Indian successors to sepulchre their fathers’ bones, and all that remained of that old time were the Indian names on the little towns and usually pertaining to water—Aluschaskuna, Tillatoba, Homochitto, Yazoo.

By early afternoon, they were on water. At the last little Indian-named town at the end of pavement they waited until the other car and the two trucks—the one carrying the bedding and tents and food, the other the horses—overtook them. They left the concrete and, after another mile or so, the gravel too. 

In caravan they ground on through the ceaselessly dissolving afternoon, with skid chains on the wheels now, lurching and splashing and sliding among the ruts, until presently it seemed to him that the retrograde of his remembering had gained an inverse velocity from their own slow progress, that the land had retreated not in minutes from the last spread of gravel but in years, decades, back toward what it had been when he first knew it: the road they now followed once more the ancient pathway of bear and deer, the diminishing fields they now passed once more scooped punily and terrifically by axe and saw and muledrawn plow from the wilderness’ flank, out of the brooding and immemorial tangle, in place of ruthless mile-wide parallelograms wrought by ditching the dyking machinery.

They reached the river landing and unloaded, the horses to go overland down stream to a point opposite the camp and swim the river, themselves and the bedding and food and dogs and guns in the motor launch. 

It was himself, though no horseman, no farmer, not even a countryman save by his distant birth and boyhood, who coaxed and soothed the two horses, drawing them by his own single frail hand until, backing, filling, trembling a little, they surged, halted, then sprang scrambling down from the truck, possessing no affinity for them as creatures, beasts, but being merely insulated by his years and time from the corruption of steel and oiled moving parts which tainted the others.

Then, his old hammer double gun which was only twelve years younger than he standing between his knees, he watched even the last puny marks of man—cabin, clearing, the small and irregular fields which a year ago were jungle and in which the skeleton stalks of this year’s cotton stood almost as tall and rank as the old cane had stood, as if man had had to marry his planting to the wilderness in order to conquer it—fall away and vanish. 

The twin banks marched with wilderness as he remembered it—the tangle of brier and cane impenetrable even to sight twenty feet away, the tall tremendous soaring of oak and gum and ash and hickory which had rung to no axe save the hunter’s, had echoed to no machinery save the beat of old-time steam boats traversing it or to the snarling of launches like their own of people going into it to dwell for a week or two weeks because it was still wilderness. There was some of it left, although now it was two hundred miles from Jefferson when once it had been thirty. 

He had watched it, not being conquered, destroyed, so much as retreating since its purpose was served now and its time an outmoded time, retreating southward through this inverted-apex, this  -shaped section of earth between hills and River until what was left of it seemed now to be gathered and for the time arrested in one tremendous density of brooding and inscrutable impenetrability at the ultimate funnelling tip.

They reached the site of their last year’s camp with still two hours left of light. “You go on over under that driest tree and set down,” Legate told him. “—if you can find it. Me and these other young boys will do this.” He did neither. He was not tired yet. 

That would come later. Maybe it wont come at all this time, he thought, as he had thought at this point each November for the last five or six of them. Maybe I will go out on stand in the morning too; knowing that he would not, not even if he took the advice and sat down under the driest shelter and did nothing until camp was made and supper cooked. 

Because it would not be the fatigue. It would be because he would not sleep tonight but would lie instead wakeful and peaceful on the cot amid the tent-filling snoring and the rain’s whisper as he always did on the first night in camp; peaceful, without regret or fretting, telling himself that was all right too, who didn’t have so many of them left as to waste one sleeping.

In his slicker he directed the unloading of the boat—the tents, the stove, the bedding, the food for themselves and the dogs until there should be meat in camp. He sent two of the Negroes to cut firewood; he had the cook-tent raised and the stove up and a fire going and supper cooking while the big tent was still being staked down. Then in the beginning of dusk he crossed in the boat to where the horses waited, backing and snorting at the water. 

He took the lead-ropes and with no more weight than that and his voice, he drew them down into the water and held them beside the boat with only their heads above the surface, as though they actually were suspended from his frail and strengthless old man’s hands, while the boat recrossed and each horse in turn lay prone in the shallows, panting and trembling, its eyes rolling in the dusk, until the same weightless hand and unraised voice gathered it surging upward, splashing and thrashing up the bank.

Then the meal was ready. The last of light was gone now save the thin stain of it snared somewhere between the river’s surface and the rain. He had the single glass of thin whisky-and-water, then, standing in the churned mud beneath the stretched tarpaulin, he said grace over the fried slabs of pork, the hot soft shapeless bread, the canned beans and molasses and coffee in iron plates and cups,—the town food, brought along with them—then covered himself again, the others following. “Eat,” he said. “Eat it all up. I dont want a piece of town meat in camp after breakfast tomorrow. 

Then you boys will hunt. You’ll have to. When I first started hunting in this bottom sixty years ago with old General Compson and Major de Spain and Roth’s grandfather and Will Legate’s too, Major de Spain wouldn’t allow but two pieces of foreign grub in his camp. That was one side of pork and one ham of beef. And not to eat for the first supper and breakfast neither. It was to save until along toward the end of camp when everybody was so sick of bear meat and coon and venison that we couldn’t even look at it.”

“I thought Uncle Ike was going to say the pork and beef was for the dogs,” Legate said, chewing. “But that’s right; I remember. You just shot the dogs a mess of wild turkey every evening when they got tired of deer guts.”

“Times are different now,” another said. “There was game here then.”
“Yes,” the old man said quietly. “There was game here then.”

“Besides, they shot does then too,” Legate said. “As it is now, we aint got but one doe-hunter in——”

“And better men hunted it,” Edmonds said. He stood at the end of the rough plank table, eating rapidly and steadily as the others ate. But again the old man looked sharply across at the sullen, handsome, brooding face which appeared now darker and more sullen still in the light of the smoky lantern. “Go on. Say it.”

“I didn’t say that,” the old man said. “There are good men everywhere, at all times. Most men are. Some are just unlucky, because most men are a little better than their circumstances give them a chance to be. And I’ve known some that even the circumstances couldn’t stop.”
“Well, I wouldn’t say—” Legate said.

“So you’ve lived almost eighty years,” Edmonds said. “And that’s what you finally learned about the other animals you lived among. I suppose the question to ask you is, where have you been all the time you were dead?”

There was a silence; for the instant even Legate’s jaw stopped chewing while he gaped at Edmonds. “Well, by God, Roth—” the third speaker said. But it was the old man who spoke, his voice still peaceful and untroubled and merely grave:
“Maybe so,” he said. “But if being what you call alive would have learned me any different, I reckon I’m satisfied, wherever it was I’ve been.”
“Well, I wouldn’t say that Roth—” Legate said.

The third speaker was still leaning forward a little over the table, looking at Edmonds. “Meaning that it’s only because folks happen to be watching him that a man behaves at all,” he said. “Is that it?”

“Yes,” Edmonds said. “A man in a blue coat, with a badge on it watching him. Maybe just the badge.”
“I deny that,” the old man said. “I dont——”

The other two paid no attention to him. Even Legate was listening to them for the moment, his mouth still full of food and still open a little, his knife with another lump of something balanced on the tip of the blade arrested halfway to his mouth. “I’m glad I dont have your opinion of folks,” the third speaker said. “I take it you include yourself.”

“I see,” Edmonds said. “You prefer Uncle Ike’s opinion of circumstances. All right. Who makes the circumstances?”

“Luck,” the third said. “Chance, Happen-so. I see what you are getting at. But that’s just what Uncle Ike said: that now and then, maybe most of the time, man is a little better than the net result of his and his neighbors’ doings, when he gets the chance to be.”

This time Legate swallowed first. He was not to be stopped this time. “Well, I wouldn’t say that Roth Edmonds can hunt one doe every day and night for two weeks and was a poor hunter or a unlucky one neither. A man that still have the same doe left to hunt on again next year ——”

“Have some meat,” the man next to him said.
“—aint no unlucky— What?” Legate said.
“Have some meat.” The other offered the dish.
“I got some,” Legate said.

“Have some more,” the third speaker said. “You and Roth Edmonds both. Have a heap of it. Clapping your jaws together that way with nothing to break the shock.” 

Someone chortled. Then they all laughed, with relief, the tension broken. But the old man was speaking, even into the laughter, in that peaceful and still untroubled voice:
“I still believe. I see proof everywhere. I grant that man made a heap of his circumstances, him and his living neighbors between them. 

He even inherited some of them already made, already almost ruined even. A while ago Henry Wyatt there said how there used to be more game here. There was. So much that we even killed does. I seem to remember Will Legate mentioning that too—” Someone laughed, a single guffaw, stillborn. It ceased, and they all listened, gravely, looking down at their plates. Edmonds was drinking his coffee, sullen, brooding, inattentive.

“Some folks still kill does,” Wyatt said. “There wont be just one buck hanging in this bottom tomorrow night without any head to fit it.”
“I didn’t say all men,” the old man said. “I said most men. And not just because there is a man with a badge to watch us. We probably wont even see him unless maybe he will stop here about noon tomorrow and eat dinner with us and check our licenses——”

“We dont kill does because if we did kill does in a few years there wouldn’t even be any bucks left to kill, Uncle Ike,” Wyatt said.

“According to Roth yonder, that’s one thing we wont never have to worry about,” the old man said. “He said on the way here this morning that does and fawns—I believe he said women and children—are two things this world aint ever lacked. But that aint all of it,” he said. “That’s just the mind’s reason a man has to give himself because the heart dont always have time to bother with thinking up words that fit together. 

God created man and He created the world for him to live in and I reckon He created the kind of world He would have wanted to live in if He had been a man—the ground to walk on, the big woods, the trees and the water, and the game to live in it. And maybe He didn’t put the desire to hunt and kill game in man but I reckon He knew it was going to be there, that man was going to teach it to himself, since he wasn’t quite God himself yet——”

“When will he be?” Wyatt said.

“I think that every man and woman, at the instant when it dont even matter whether they marry or not, I think that whether they marry then or afterward or dont never, at that instant the two of them together were God.”

“Then there are some Gods in this world I wouldn’t want to touch, and with a damn long stick,” Edmonds said. He set his coffee cup down and looked at Wyatt. “And that includes, myself, if that’s what you want to know. I’m going to bed.” He was gone. There was a general movement among the others. 

But it ceased and they stood again about the table, not looking at the old man, apparently held there yet by his quiet and peaceful voice as the heads of the swimming horses had been held above the water by his weightless hand. The three Negroes—the cook and his helper and old Isham—were sitting quietly in the entrance of the kitchen tent, listening too, the three faces dark and motionless and musing.

“He put them both here: man, and the game he would follow and kill, foreknowing it. I believe He said, ‘So be it.’ I reckon He even foreknew the end. But He said, ‘I will give him his chance. I will give him warning and foreknowledge too, along with the desire to follow and the power to slay. 

The woods and fields he ravages and the game he devastates will be the consequence and signature of his crime and guilt, and his punishment.’—Bed time,” he said. His voice and inflection did not change at all. “Breakfast at four oclock, Isham. We want meat on the ground by sunup time.”

There was a good fire in the sheet-iron heater; the tent was warm and was beginning to dry out, except for the mud underfoot. Edmonds was already rolled into his blankets, motionless, his face to the wall. 

Isham had made up his bed too—the strong, battered iron cot, the stained mattress which was not quite soft enough, the worn, often-washed blankets which, as the years passed were less and less warm enough. But the tent was warm; presently, when the kitchen was cleaned up and readied for breakfast, the young Negro would come in to lie down before the heater, where he could be roused to put fresh wood into it from time to time. 

And then, he knew now he would not sleep tonight anyway; he no longer needed to tell himself that perhaps he would. But it was all right now. The day was ended now and night faced him, but alarmless, empty of fret. Maybe I came for this, he thought: Not to hunt, but for this. 

I would come anyway, even if only to go back home tomorrow. Wearing only his bagging woolen underwear, his spectacles folded away in the worn case beneath the pillow where he could reach them readily and his lean body fitted easily into the old worn groove of mattress and blankets, he lay on his back, his hands crossed on his breast and his eyes closed while the others undressed and went to bed and the last of the sporadic talking died into snoring. 

Then he opened his eyes and lay peaceful and quiet as a child, looking up at the motionless belly of rain-murmured canvas upon which the glow of the heater was dying slowly away and would fade still further until the young Negro, lying on two planks before it, would sit up and stoke it and lie back down again.

They had a house once. That was sixty years ago, when the Big Bottom was only thirty miles from Jefferson and old Major de Spain, who had been his father’s cavalry commander in ’61 and ’2 and ’3 and ’4, and his cousin (his older brother; his father too) had taken him into the woods for the first time. 

Old Sam Fathers was alive then, born in slavery, son of a Negro slave and a Chickasaw chief, who had taught him how to shoot, not only when to shoot but when not to; such a November dawn as tomorrow would be and the old man led him straight to the great cypress and he had known the buck would pass exactly there because there was something running in Sam Fathers’ veins which ran in the veins of the buck too, and they stood there against the tremendous trunk, the old man of seventy and the boy of twelve, and there was nothing save the dawn until suddenly the buck was there, smoke-colored out of nothing, magnificent with speed: and Sam Fathers said, ‘Now. 

Shoot quick and shoot slow:’ and the gun levelled rapidly without haste and crashed and he walked to the buck lying still intact and still in the shape of that magnificent speed and bled it with Sam’s knife and Sam dipped his hands into the hot blood and marked his face forever while he stood trying not to tremble, humbly and with pride too though the boy of twelve had been unable to phrase it then: I slew you; my bearing must not shame your quitting life. 

My conduct forever onward must become your death; marking him for that and for more than that: that day and himself and McCaslin juxtaposed not against the wilderness but against the tamed land, the old wrong and shame itself, in repudiation and denial at least of the land and the wrong and shame even if he couldn’t cure the wrong and eradicate the shame, who at fourteen when he learned of it had believed he could do both when he became competent and when at twenty-one he became competent he knew that he could do neither but at least he could repudiate the wrong and shame, at least in principle, and at least the land itself in fact, for his son at least: and did, thought he had: then (married then) in a rented cubicle in a back-street stock-traders’ boarding-house, the first and last time he ever saw her naked body, himself and his wife juxtaposed in their turn against that same land, that same wrong and shame from whose regret and grief he would at least save and free his son and, saving and freeing his son, lost him. 

They had the house then. That roof, the two weeks of each November which they spent under it, had become his home. 

Although since that time they had lived during the two fall weeks in tents and not always in the same place two years in succession and now his companions were the sons and even the grandsons of them with whom he had lived in the house and for almost fifty years now the house itself had not even existed, the conviction, the sense and feeling of home, had been merely transferred into the canvas. 

He owned a house in Jefferson, a good house though small, where he had had a wife and lived with her and lost her, ay, lost her even though he had lost her in the rented cubicle before he and his old clever dipsomaniac partner had finished the house for them to move into it: but lost her, because she loved him. But women hope for so much. 

They never live too long to still believe that anything within the scope of their passionate wanting is likewise within the range of their passionate hope: and it was still kept for him by his dead wife’s widowed niece and her children and he was comfortable in it, his wants and needs and even the small trying harmless crochets of an old man looked after by blood at least related to the blood which he had elected out of all the earth to cherish. 

But he spent the time within those walls waiting for November, because even this tent with its muddy floor and the bed which was not wide enough nor soft enough nor even warm enough, was his home and these men, some of whom he only saw during these two November weeks and not one of whom even bore any name he used to know—De Spain and Compson and Ewell and Hogganbeck—were more his kin than any. Because this was his land——

The shadow of the youngest Negro loomed. It soared, blotting the heater’s dying glow from the ceiling, the wood billets thumping into the iron maw until the glow, the flame, leaped high and bright across the canvas. But the Negro’s shadow still remained, by its length and breadth, standing, since it covered most of the ceiling, until after a moment he raised himself on one elbow to look. It was not the Negro, it was his kinsman; when he spoke the other turned sharp against the red firelight the sullen and ruthless profile.

“Nothing,” Edmonds said. “Go on back to sleep.”

“Since Will Legate mentioned it,” McCaslin said, “I remember you had some trouble sleeping in here last fall too. Only you called it coon-hunting then. Or was it Will Legate called it that?” The other didn’t answer. Then he turned and went back to his bed. McCaslin, still propped on his elbow, watched until the other’s shadow sank down the wall and vanished, became one with the mass of sleeping shadows. “That’s right,” he said. “Try to get some sleep. We must have meat in camp tomorrow. You can do all the setting up you want to after that.” 

He lay down again, his hands crossed again on his breast, watching the glow of the heater on the canvas ceiling. It was steady again now, the fresh wood accepted, being assimilated; soon it would begin to fade again, taking with it the last echo of that sudden upflare of a young man’s passion and unrest. Let him lie awake for a little while, he thought; He will lie still some day for a long time without even dissatisfaction to disturb him. 

And lying awake here, in these surroundings, would soothe him if anything could, if anything could soothe a man just forty years old. Yes, he thought; Forty years old or thirty, or even the trembling and sleepless ardor of a boy; already the tent, the rain-murmured canvas globe, was once more filled with it. 

He lay on his back, his eyes closed, his breathing quiet and peaceful as a child’s, listening to it—that silence which was never silence but was myriad. He could almost see it, tremendous, primeval, looming, musing downward upon this puny evanescent clutter of human sojourn which after a single brief week would vanish and in another week would be completely healed, traceless in the unmarked solitude. 

Because it was his land, although he had never owned a foot of it. He had never wanted to, not even after he saw plain its ultimate doom, watching it retreat year by year before the onslaught of axe and saw and log-lines and then dynamite and tractor plows, because it belonged to no man. It belonged to all; they had only to use it well, humbly and with pride. 

Then suddenly he knew why he had never wanted to own any of it, arrest at least that much of what people called progress, measure his longevity at least against that much of its ultimate fate. It was because there was just exactly enough of it. 

He seemed to see the two of them—himself and the wilderness—as coevals, his own span as a hunter, a woodsman, not contemporary with his first breath but transmitted to him, assumed by him gladly, humbly, with joy and pride, from that old Major de Spain and that old Sam Fathers who had taught him to hunt, the two spans running out together, not toward oblivion, nothingness, but into a dimension free of both time and space where once more the untreed land warped and wrung to mathematical squares of rank cotton for the frantic old-world people to turn into shells to shoot at one another, would find ample room for both—the names, the faces of the old men he had known and loved and for a little while outlived, moving again among the shades of tall unaxed trees and sightless brakes where the wild strong immortal game ran forever before the tireless belling immortal hounds, falling and rising phoenix-like to the soundless guns.

He had been asleep. The lantern was lighted now. Outside in the darkness the oldest Negro, Isham, was beating a spoon against the bottom of a tin pan and crying, “Raise up and get yo foa clock coffy. Raise up and get yo foa clock coffy,” and the tent was full of low talk and of men dressing, and Legate’s voice, repeating: “Get out of here now and let Uncle Ike sleep; If you wake him up, he’ll go out with us. And he aint got any business in the woods this morning.”

So he didn’t move. He lay with his eyes closed, his breathing gentle and peaceful, and heard them one by one leave the tent. He listened to the breakfast sounds from the table beneath the tarpaulin and heard them depart—the horses, the dogs, the last voice until it died away and there was only the sounds of the Negroes clearing breakfast away. 

After a while he might possibly even hear the first faint clear cry of the first hound ring through the wet woods from where the buck had bedded, then he would go back to sleep again— The tent-flap swung in and fell. 

Something jarred sharply against the end of the cot and a hand grasped his knee through the blanket before he could open his eyes. It was Edmonds, carrying a shotgun in place of his rifle. He spoke in a harsh, rapid voice:
“Sorry to wake you. There will be a——”

“I was awake,” McCaslin said. “Are you going to shoot that shotgun today?”
“You just told me last night you want meat,” Edmonds said. “There will be a——”
“Since when did you start having trouble getting meat with your rifle?”

“All right,” the other said, with that harsh, restrained, furious impatience. Then McCaslin saw in his hand a thick oblong: an envelope. “There will be a message here some time this morning, looking for me. Maybe it wont come. If it does, give the messenger this and tell h—— say I said No.”

“A what?” McCaslin said. “Tell who?” He half rose onto his elbow as Edmonds jerked the envelope onto the blanket, already turning toward the entrance, the envelope striking solid and heavy and without noise and already sliding from the bed until McCaslin caught it, divining by feel through the paper as instantaneously and conclusively as if he had opened the envelope and looked, the thick sheaf of banknotes. “Wait,” he said. 

“Wait”—more than the blood kinsman, more even than the senior in years, so that the other paused, the canvas lifted, looking back, and McCaslin saw that outside it was already day. “Tell her No,” he said. “Tell her.” They stared at one another—the old face, wan, sleep-raddled above the tumbled bed, the dark and sullen younger one at once furious and cold. 

“Will Legate was right. This is what you called coon-hunting. And now this.” He didn’t raise the envelope. He made no motion, no gesture to indicate it. “What did you promise her that you haven’t the courage to face her and retract?”

“Nothing!” the other said. “Nothing! This is all of it. Tell her I said No.” He was gone. The tent flap lifted on an in-waft of faint light and the constant murmur of rain, and fell again, leaving the old man still half-raised onto one elbow, the envelope clutched in the other shaking hand. 

Afterward it seemed to him that he had begun to hear the approaching boat almost immediately, before the other could have got out of sight even. 

It seemed to him that there had been no interval whatever: the tent flap falling on the same out-waft of faint and rain-filled light like the suspiration and expiration of the same breath and then in the next second lifted again—the mounting snarl of the outboard engine, increasing, nearer and nearer and louder and louder then cut short off, ceasing with the absolute instantaneity of a blown-out candle, into the lap and plop of water under the bows as the skiff slid in to the bank, the youngest Negro, the youth, raising the tent flap beyond which for that instant he saw the boat—a small skiff with a Negro man sitting in the stern beside the up-slanted motor—then the woman entering, in a man’s hat and a man’s slicker and rubber boots, carrying the blanket-swaddled bundle on one arm and holding the edge of the unbuttoned raincoat over it with the other hand: and bringing something else, something intangible, an effluvium which he knew he would recognise in a moment because Isham had already told him, warned him, by sending the young Negro to the tent to announce the visitor instead of coming himself, the flap falling at last on the young Negro and they were alone—the face indistinct and as yet only young and with dark eyes, queerly colorless but not ill and not that of a country woman despite the garments she wore, looking down at him where he sat upright on the cot now, clutching the envelope, the soiled undergarment bagging about him and the twisted blankets huddled about his hips.

“Is that his?” he cried. “Don’t lie to me!”
“Yes,” she said. “He’s gone.”

“Yes. He’s gone. You wont jump him here. Not this time. I dont reckon even you expected that. He left you this. Here.” He fumbled at the envelope. It was not to pick it up, because it was still in his hand; he had never put it down. It was as if he had to fumble somehow to coordinate physically his heretofore obedient hand with what his brain was commanding of it, as if he had never performed such an action before, extending the envelope at last, saying again, “Here. 

Take it. Take it:” until he became aware of her eyes, or not the eyes so much as the look, the regard fixed now on his face with that immersed contemplation, that bottomless and intent candor, of a child. If she had ever seen either the envelope or his movement to extend it, she did not show it.

“You’re Uncle Isaac,” she said.

“Yes,” he said. “But never mind that. Here. Take it. He said to tell you No.” She looked at the envelope, then she took it. It was sealed and bore no superscription. Nevertheless, even after she glanced at the front of it, he watched her hold it in the one free hand and tear the corner off with her teeth and manage to rip it open and tilt the neat sheaf of bound notes onto the blanket without even glancing at them and look into the empty envelope and take the edge between her teeth and tear it completely open before she crumpled and dropped it.

“That’s just money,” she said.

“What did you expect? What else did you expect? You have known him long enough or at least often enough to have got that child, and you dont know him any better than that?”

“Not very often. Not very long. Just that week here last fall, and in January he sent for me and we went West, to New Mexico. We were there six weeks, where I could at least sleep in the same apartment where I cooked for him and looked after his clothes——”

“But not marriage,” he said. “Not marriage. He didn’t promise you that. Dont lie to me. He didn’t have to.”

“No. He didn’t have to. I didn’t ask him to. I knew what I was doing. I knew that to begin with, long before honor I imagine he called it told him the time had come to tell me in so many words what his code I suppose he would call it would forbid him forever to do. And we agreed. Then we agreed again before he left New Mexico, to make sure. That that would be all of it. I believed him. No, I dont mean that; I mean I believed myself. 

I wasn’t even listening to him anymore by then because by that time it had been a long time since he had had anything else to tell me for me to have to hear. By then I wasn’t even listening enough to ask him to please stop talking. I was listening to myself. 

And I believed it. I must have believed it. I dont see how I could have helped but believe it, because he was gone then as we had agreed and he didn’t write as we had agreed, just the money came to the bank in Vicksburg in my name but coming from nobody as we had agreed. So I must have believed it. 

I even wrote him last month to make sure again and the letter came back unopened and I was sure. So I left the hospital and rented myself a room to live in until the deer season opened so I could make sure myself and I was waiting beside the road yesterday when your car passed and he saw me and so I was sure.”

“Then what do you want?” he said. “What do you want? What do you expect?”

“Yes,” she said. And while he glared at her, his white hair awry from the pillow and his eyes, lacking the spectacles to focus them, blurred and irisless and apparently pupilless, he saw again that grave, intent, speculative and detached fixity like a child watching him. 

“His great great—Wait a minute—great great great grandfather was your grandfather. McCaslin. Only it got to be Edmonds. Only it got to be more than that. Your cousin McCaslin was there that day when your father and Uncle Buddy won Tennie from Mr Beauchamp for the one that had no name but Terrel so you called him Tomey’s Terrel, to marry. But after that it got to be Edmonds.” 

She regarded him, almost peacefully, with that unwinking and heatless fixity—the dark wide bottomless eyes in the face’s dead and toneless pallor which to the old man looked anything but dead, but young and incredibly and even ineradicably alive—as though she were not only not looking at anything, she was not even speaking to anyone but herself. “I would have made a man of him. He’s not a man yet. You spoiled him. You, and Uncle Lucas and Aunt Mollie. But mostly you.”

“Me?” he said. “Me?”

“Yes. When you gave to his grandfather that land which didn’t belong to him, not even half of it by will or even law.”

“And never mind that too,” he said. “Never mind that too. You,” he said. “You sound like you have been to college even. You sound almost like a Northerner even, not like the draggle-tailed women of these Delta peckerwoods. Yet you meet a man on the street one afternoon just because a box of groceries happened to fall out of a boat. 

And a month later you go off with him and live with him until he got a child on you: and then, by your own statement, you sat there while he took his hat and said goodbye and walked out. Even a Delta peckerwood would look after even a draggle-tail better than that. Haven’t you got any folks at all?”

“Yes,” she said. “I was living with one of them. My aunt, in Vicksburg. I came to live with her two years ago when my father died; we lived in Indianapolis then. But I got a job, teaching school here in Aluschaskuna, because my aunt was a widow, with a big family, taking in washing to sup——”

“Took in what?” he said. “Took in washing?” He sprang, still seated even, flinging himself backward onto one arm, awry-haired, glaring. Now he understood what it was she had brought into the tent with her, what old Isham had already told him by sending the youth to bring her in to him—the pale lips, the skin pallid and dead-looking yet not ill, the dark and tragic and foreknowing eyes. 

Maybe in a thousand or two thousand years in America, he thought. But not now! Not now! He cried, not loud, in a voice of amazement, pity, and outrage: “You’re a nigger!”
“Yes,” she said. “James Beauchamp—you called him Tennie’s Jim though he had a name—was my grandfather. I said you were Uncle Isaac.”

“And he knows?”
“No,” she said. “What good would that have done?”
“But you did,” he cried. “But you did. Then what do you expect here?”
“Nothing.”

“Then why did you come here? You said you were waiting in Aluschaskuna yesterday and he saw you. Why did you come this morning?”
“I’m going back North. Back home. My cousin brought me up the day before yesterday in his boat. He’s going to take me on to Leland to get the train.”

“Then go,” he said. Then he cried again in that thin not loud and grieving voice: “Get out of here! I can do nothing for you! Cant nobody do nothing for you!” She moved; she was not looking at him again, toward the entrance. “Wait,” he said. She paused again, obediently still, turning. He took up the sheaf of banknotes and laid it on the blanket at the foot of the cot and drew his hand back beneath the blanket. “There,” he said.

Now she looked at the money, for the first time, one brief blank glance, then away again. “I don’t need it. He gave me money last winter. Besides the money he sent to Vicksburg. Provided. Honor and code too. That was all arranged.”

“Take it,” he said. His voice began to rise again, but he stopped it. “Take it out of my tent.” She came back to the cot and took up the money; whereupon once more he said, “Wait:” although she had not turned, still stooping, and he put out his hand. 

But, sitting, he could not complete the reach until she moved her hand, the single hand which held the money, until he touched it. He didn’t grasp it, he merely touched it—the gnarled, bloodless, bone-light bone-dry old man’s fingers touching for a second the smooth young flesh where the strong old blood ran after its long lost journey back to home. 

“Tennie’s Jim,” he said. “Tennie’s Jim.” He drew the hand back beneath the blanket again: he said harshly now: “It’s a boy, I reckon. They usually are, except that one that was its own mother too.”

“Yes,” she said. “It’s a boy.” She stood for a moment longer, looking at him. Just for an instant her free hand moved as though she were about to lift the edge of the raincoat away from the child’s face. But she did not. She turned again when once more he said Wait and moved beneath the blanket.

“Turn your back,” he said. “I am going to get up. I aint got my pants on.” Then he could not get up. He sat in the huddled blanket, shaking, while again she turned and looked down at him in dark interrogation. “There,” he said harshly, in the thin and shaking old man’s voice. “On the nail there. The tent-pole.”

“What?” she said.

“The horn!” he said harshly. “The horn.” She went and got it, thrust the money into the slicker’s side pocket as if it were a rag, a soiled handkerchief, and lifted down the horn, the one which General Compson had left him in his will, covered with the unbroken skin from a buck’s shank and bound with silver.

“What?” she said.
“It’s his. Take it.”
“Oh,” she said. “Yes. Thank you.”

“Yes,” he said, harshly, rapidly, but not so harsh now and soon not harsh at all but just rapid, urgent, until he knew that his voice was running away with him and he had neither intended it nor could stop it: “That’s right. Go back North. Marry: a man in your own race. 

That’s the only salvation for you—for a while yet, maybe a long while yet. We will have to wait. Marry a black man. You are young, handsome, almost white; you could find a black man who would see in you what it was you saw in him, who would ask nothing of you and expect less and get even still less than that, if it’s revenge you want. 

Then you will forget all this, forget it ever happened, that he ever existed—” until he could stop it at last and did, sitting there in his huddle of blankets during the instant when, without moving at all, she blazed silently down at him. Then that was gone too. She stood in the gleaming and still dripping slicker, looking quietly down at him from under the sodden hat.

“Old man,” she said, “have you lived so long and forgotten so much that you dont remember anything you ever knew or felt or even heard about love?”

Then she was gone too. The waft of light and the murmur of the constant rain flowed into the tent and then out again as the flap fell. Lying back once more, trembling, panting, the blanket huddled to his chin and his hands crossed on his breast, he listened to the pop and snarl, the mounting then fading whine of the motor until it died away and once again the tent held only silence and the sound of rain. 

And cold too: he lay shaking faintly and steadily in it, rigid save for the shaking. This Delta, he thought: This Delta. This land which man has deswamped and denuded and derivered in two generations so, that white men can own plantations and commute every night to Memphis and black men own plantations and ride in jim crow cars to Chicago to live in millionaires’ mansions on Lakeshore Drive, where white men rent farms and live like niggers and niggers crop on shares and live like animals, where cotton is planted and grows man-tall in the very cracks of the sidewalks, and usury and mortgage and bankruptcy and measureless wealth, Chinese and African and Aryan and Jew, all breed and spawn together until no man has time to say which one is which nor cares.… No wonder the ruined woods I used to know dont cry for retribution! he thought: The people who have destroyed it will accomplish its revenge.

The tent flap jerked rapidly in and fell. He did not move save to turn his head and open his eyes. It was Legate. He went quickly to Edmonds’ bed and stooped, rummaging hurriedly among the still-tumbled blankets.

“What is it?” he said.
“Looking for Roth’s knife,” Legate said. “I come back to get a horse. We got a deer on the ground.” He rose, the knife in his hand, and hurried toward the entrance.
“Who killed it?” McCaslin said. “Was it Roth?”

“Yes,” Legate said, raising the flap.

“Wait,” McCaslin said. He moved, suddenly, onto his elbow. “What was it?” Legate paused for an instant beneath the lifted flap. He did not look back.

“Just a deer, Uncle Ike,” he said impatiently. “Nothing extra.” He was gone; again the flap fell behind him, wafting out of the tent again the faint light and the constant and grieving rain. McCaslin lay back down, the blanket once more drawn to his chin, his crossed hands once more weightless on his breast in the empty tent.

“It was a doe,” he said.



The End










Barn Burning, William Faulkner

Barn Burning

THE STORE IN which the Justice of the Peace’s court was sitting smelled of cheese. The boy, crouched on his nail keg at the back of the crowded room, knew he smelled cheese, and more: from where he sat he could see the ranked shelves close-packed with the solid, squat, dynamic shapes of tin cans whose labels his stomach read, not from the lettering which meant nothing to his mind but from the scarlet devils and the silver curve of fish — this, the cheese which he knew he smelled and the hermetic meat which his intestines believed he smelled coming in intermittent gusts momentary and brief between the other constant one, the smell and sense just a little of fear because mostly of despair and grief, the old fierce pull of blood. 

He could not see the table where the Justice sat and before which his father and his father’s enemy (our enemy he thought in that despair; ourn! mine and hisn both! He’s my father!) stood, but he could hear them, the two of them that is, because his father had said no word yet:
“But what proof have you, Mr. Harris?”

“I told you. The hog got into my corn. I caught it up and sent it back to him. He had no fence that would hold it. I told him so, warned him. The next time I put the hog in my pen. When he came to get it I gave him enough wire to patch up his pen. The next time I put the hog up and kept it. I rode down to his house and saw the wire I gave him still rolled on to the spool in his yard. 

I told him he could have the hog when he paid me a dollar pound fee. That evening a nigger came with the dollar and got the hog. He was a strange nigger. He said, ‘He say to tell you wood and hay kin burn.’ I said, ‘What?’ ‘That whut he say to tell you,’ the nigger said. ‘Wood and hay kin burn.’ That night my barn burned. I got the stock out but I lost the barn.”

“Where is the nigger? Have you got him?”
“He was a strange nigger, I tell you. I don’t know what became of him.”
“But that’s not proof. Don’t you see that’s not proof?”

“Get that boy up here. He knows.” For a moment the boy thought too that the man meant his older brother until Harris said, “Not him. The little one. The boy,” and, crouching, small for his age, small and wiry like his father, in patched and faded jeans even too small for him, with straight, uncombed, brown hair and eyes gray and wild as storm scud, he saw the men between himself and the table part and become a lane of grim faces, at the end of which he saw the Justice, a shabby, collarless, graying man in spectacles, beckoning him. He felt no floor under his bare feet; he seemed to walk beneath the palpable weight of the grim turning faces. 

His father, stiff in his black Sunday coat donned not for the trial but for the moving, did not even look at him. He aims for me to lie, he thought, again with that frantic grief and despair. And I will have to do hit.

“What’s your name, boy?” the Justice said.
“Colonel Sartoris Snopes,” the boy whispered.

“Hey?” the Justice said. “Talk louder. Colonel Sartoris? I reckon anybody named for Colonel Sartoris in this country can’t help but tell the truth, can they?” The boy said nothing. Enemy! Enemy! he thought; for a moment he could not even see, could not see that the Justice’s face was kindly nor discern that his voice was troubled when he spoke to the man named Harris: “Do you want me to question this boy?” But he could hear, and during those subsequent long seconds while there was absolutely no sound in the crowded little room save that of quiet and intent breathing it was as if he had swung outward at the end of a grape vine, over a ravine, and at the top of the swing had been caught in a prolonged instant of mesmerized gravity, weightless in time.

“No!” Harris said violently, explosively. “Damnation! Send him out of here!” Now time, the fluid world, rushed beneath him again, the voices coming to him again through the smell of cheese and sealed meat, the fear and despair and the old grief of blood:
“This case is closed. I can’t find against you, Snopes, but I can give you advice. Leave this country and don’t come back to it.”

His father spoke for the first time, his voice cold and harsh, level, without emphasis: “I aim to. I don’t figure to stay in a country among people who . . .” he said something unprintable and vile, addressed to no one.

“That’ll do,” the Justice said. “Take your wagon and get out of this country before dark. Case dismissed.”

His father turned, and he followed the stiff black coat, the wiry figure walking a little stiffly from where a Confederate provost’s man’s musket ball had taken him in the heel on a stolen horse thirty years ago, followed the two backs now, since his older brother had appeared from somewhere in the crowd, no taller than the father but thicker, chewing tobacco steadily, between the two lines of grim-faced men and out of the store and across the worn gallery and down the sagging steps and among the dogs and half-grown boys in the mild May dust, where as he passed a voice hissed:
“Barn burner!”

Again he could not see, whirling; there was a face in a red haze, moonlike, bigger than the full moon, the owner of it half again his size, he leaping in the red haze toward the face, feeling no blow, feeling no shock when his head struck the earth, scrabbling up and leaping again, feeling no blow this time either and tasting no blood, scrabbling up to see the other boy in full flight and himself already leaping into pursuit as his father’s hand jerked him back, the harsh, cold voice speaking above him: “Go get in the wagon.”

It stood in a grove of locusts and mulberries across the road. His two hulking sisters in their Sunday dresses and his mother and her sister in calico and sunbonnets were already in it, sitting on and among the sorry residue of the dozen and more movings which even the boy could remember — the battered stove, the broken beds and chairs, the clock inlaid with mother-of-pearl, which would not run, stopped at some fourteen minutes past two o’clock of a dead and forgotten day and time, which had been his mother’s dowry. She was crying, though when she saw him she drew her sleeve across her face and began to descend from the wagon. “Get back,” the father said.
“He’s hurt. I got to get some water and wash his . . .”

“Get back in the wagon,” his father said. He got in too, over the tail-gate. His father mounted to the seat where the older brother already sat and struck the gaunt mules two savage blows with the peeled willow, but without heat. It was not even sadistic; it was exactly that same quality which in later years would cause his descendants to over-run the engine before putting a motor car into motion, striking and reining back in the same movement. The wagon went on, the store with its quiet crowd of grimly watching men dropped behind; a curve in the road hid it. Forever he thought. Maybe he’s done satisfied now, now that he has . . . stopping himself, not to say it aloud even to himself. His mother’s hand touched his shoulder.

“Does hit hurt?” she said.
“Naw,” he said. “Hit don’t hurt. Lemme be.”

“Can’t you wipe some of the blood off before hit dries?”
“I’ll wash to-night,” he said. “Lemme be, I tell you.”

The wagon went on. He did not know where they were going. None of them ever did or ever asked, because it was always somewhere, always a house of sorts waiting for them a day or two days or even three days away. Likely his father had already arranged to make a crop on another farm before he . . . Again he had to stop himself. He (the father) always did. 

There was something about his wolflike independence and even courage when the advantage was at least neutral which impressed strangers, as if they got from his latent ravening ferocity not so much a sense of dependability as a feeling that his ferocious conviction in the rightness of his own actions would be of advantage to all whose interest lay with his.

That night they camped, in a grove of oaks and beeches where a spring ran. The nights were still cool and they had a fire against it, of a rail lifted from a nearby fence and cut into lengths — a small fire, neat, niggard almost, a shrewd fire; such fires were his father’s habit and custom always, even in freezing weather. 

Older, the boy might have remarked this and wondered why not a big one; why should not a man who had not only seen the waste and extravagance of war, but who had in his blood an inherent voracious prodigality with material not his own, have burned everything in sight? 

Then he might have gone a step farther and thought that that was the reason: that niggard blaze was the living fruit of nights passed during those four years in the woods hiding from all men, blue or gray, with his strings of horses (captured horses, he called them). And older still, he might have divined the true reason: that the element of fire spoke to some deep mainspring of his father’s being, as the element of steel or of powder spoke to other men, as the one weapon for the preservation of integrity, else breath were not worth the breathing, and hence to be regarded with respect and used with discretion.

But he did not think this now and he had seen those same niggard blazes all his life. He merely ate his supper beside it and was already half asleep over his iron plate when his father called him, and once more he followed the stiff back, the stiff and ruthless limp, up the slope and on to the starlit road where, turning, he could see his father against the stars but without face or depth — a shape black, flat, and bloodless as though cut from tin in the iron folds of the frockcoat which had not been made for him, the voice harsh like tin and without heat like tin:
“You were fixing to tell them. You would have told him.” He didn’t answer. His father struck him with the flat of his hand on the side of the head, hard but without heat, exactly as he had struck the two mules at the store, exactly as he would strike either of them with any stick in order to kill a horse fly, his voice still without heat or anger: “You’re getting to be a man. You got to learn. You got to learn to stick to your own blood or you ain’t going to have any blood to stick to you. 

Do you think either of them, any man there this morning, would? Don’t you know all they wanted was a chance to get at me because they knew I had them beat? Eh?” Later, twenty years later, he was to tell himself, “If I had said they wanted only truth, justice, he would have hit me again.” But now he said nothing. He was not crying. He just stood there. “Answer me,” his father said.

“Yes,” he whispered. His father turned.
“Get on to bed. We’ll be there tomorrow.”

To-morrow they were there. In the early afternoon the wagon stopped before a paintless two-room house identical almost with the dozen others it had stopped before even in the boy’s ten years, and again, as on the other dozen occasions, his mother and aunt got down and began to unload the wagon, although his two sisters and his father and brother had not moved.
“Likely hit ain’t fitten for hawgs,” one of the sisters said.

“Nevertheless, fit it will and you’ll hog it and like it,” his father said. “Get out of them chairs and help your Ma unload.”
The two sisters got down, big, bovine, in a flutter of cheap ribbons; one of them drew from the jumbled wagon bed a battered lantern, the other a worn broom. His father handed the reins to the older son and began to climb stiffly over the wheel. “When they get unloaded, take the team to the barn and feed them.” Then he said, and at first the boy thought he was still speaking to his brother: “Come with me.”

“Me?” he said.
“Yes,” his father said. “You.”
“Abner,” his mother said. His father paused and looked back — the harsh level stare beneath the shaggy, graying, irascible brows.
“I reckon I’ll have a word with the man that aims to begin to-morrow owning me body and soul for the next eight months.”

They went back up the road. A week ago — or before last night, that is — he would have asked where they were going, but not now. His father had struck him before last night but never before had he paused afterward to explain why; it was as if the blow and the following calm, outrageous voice still rang, repercussed, divulging nothing to him save the terrible handicap of being young, the light weight of his few years, just heavy enough to prevent his soaring free of the world as it seemed to be ordered but not heavy enough to keep him footed solid in it, to resist it and try to change the course of its events.

Presently he could see the grove of oaks and cedars and the other flowering trees and shrubs where the house would be, though not the house yet. They walked beside a fence massed with honeysuckle and Cherokee roses and came to a gate swinging open between two brick pillars, and now, beyond a sweep of drive, he saw the house for the first time and at that instant he forgot his father and the terror and despair both, and even when he remembered his father again (who had not stopped) the terror and despair did not return. Because, for all the twelve movings, they had sojourned until now in a poor country, a land of small farms and fields and houses, and he had never seen a house like this before. 

Hit’s big as a courthouse he thought quietly, with a surge of peace and joy whose reason he could not have thought into words, being too young for that: They are safe from him. People whose lives are a part of this peace and dignity are beyond his touch, he no more to them than a buzzing wasp: capable of stinging for a little moment but that’s all; the spell of this peace and dignity rendering even the barns and stable and cribs which belong to it impervious to the puny flames he might contrive . . . this, the peace and joy, ebbing for an instant as he looked again at the stiff black back, the stiff and implacable limp of the figure which was not dwarfed by the house, for the reason that it had never looked big anywhere and which now, against the serene columned backdrop, had more than ever that impervious quality of something cut ruthlessly from tin, depthless, as though, sidewise to the sun, it would cast no shadow. 

Watching him, the boy remarked the absolutely undeviating course which his father held and saw the stiff foot come squarely down in a pile of fresh droppings where a horse had stood in the drive and which his father could have avoided by a simple change of stride. But it ebbed only for a moment, though he could not have thought this into words either, walking on in the spell of the house, which he could even want but without envy, without sorrow, certainly never with that ravening and jealous rage which unknown to him walked in the ironlike black coat before him: Maybe he will feel it too. Maybe it will even change him now from what maybe he couldn’t help but be.

They crossed the portico. Now he could hear his father’s stiff foot as it came down on the boards with clocklike finality, a sound out of all proportion to the displacement of the body it bore and which was not dwarfed either by the white door before it, as though it had attained to a sort of vicious and ravening minimum not to be dwarfed by anything — the flat, wide, black hat, the formal coat of broadcloth which had once been black but which had now that friction-glazed greenish cast of the bodies of old house flies, the lifted sleeve which was too large, the lifted hand like a curled claw. The door opened so promptly that the boy knew the Negro must have been watching them all the time, an old man with neat grizzled hair, in a linen jacket, who stood barring the door with his body, saying, “Wipe yo foots, white man, fo you come in here. Major ain’t home nohow.”

“Get out of my way, nigger,” his father said, without heat too, flinging the door back and the Negro also and entering, his hat still on his head. And now the boy saw the prints of the stiff foot on the doorjamb and saw them appear on the pale rug behind the machinelike deliberation of the foot which seemed to bear (or transmit) twice the weight which the body compassed. 

The Negro was shouting “Miss Lula! Miss Lula!” somewhere behind them, then the boy, deluged as though by a warm wave by a suave turn of carpeted stair and a pendant glitter of chandeliers and a mute gleam of gold frames, heard the swift feet and saw her too, a lady — perhaps he had never seen her like before either — in a gray, smooth gown with lace at the throat and an apron tied at the waist and the sleeves turned back, wiping cake or biscuit dough from her hands with a towel as she came up the hall, looking not at his father at all but at the tracks on the blond rug with an expression of incredulous amazement.

“I tried,” the Negro cried. “I tole him to . . .”
“Will you please go away?” she said in a shaking voice. “Major de Spain is not at home. Will you please go away?”

His father had not spoken again. He did not speak again. He did not even look at her. He just stood stiff in the center of the rug, in his hat, the shaggy iron-gray brows twitching slightly above the pebble-colored eyes as he appeared to examine the house with brief deliberation. Then with the same deliberation he turned; the boy watched him pivot on the good leg and saw the stiff foot drag round the arc of the turning, leaving a final long and fading smear. His father never looked at it, he never once looked down at the rug. The Negro held the door. 

It closed behind them, upon the hysteric and indistinguishable woman-wail. His father stopped at the top of the steps and scraped his boot clean on the edge of it. At the gate he stopped again. He stood for a moment, planted stiffly on the stiff foot, looking back at the house. “Pretty and white, ain’t it?” he said. “That’s sweat. Nigger sweat. Maybe it ain’t white enough yet to suit him. Maybe he wants to mix some white sweat with it.”

Two hours later the boy was chopping wood behind the house within which his mother and aunt and the two sisters (the mother and aunt, not the two girls, he knew that; even at this distance and muffled by walls the flat loud voices of the two girls emanated an incorrigible idle inertia) were setting up the stove to prepare a meal, when he heard the hooves and saw the linen-clad man on a fine sorrel mare, whom he recognized even before he saw the rolled rug in front of the Negro youth following on a fat bay carriage horse — a suffused, angry face vanishing, still at full gallop, beyond the corner of the house where his father and brother were sitting in the two tilted chairs; and a moment later, almost before he could have put the axe down, he heard the hooves again and watched the sorrel mare go back out of the yard, already galloping again. Then his father began to shout one of the sisters’ names, who presently emerged backward from the kitchen door dragging the rolled rug along the ground by one end while the other sister walked behind it.

“If you ain’t going to tote, go on and set up the wash pot,” the first said.

“You, Sarty!” the second shouted. “Set up the wash pot!” His father appeared at the door, framed against that shabbiness, as he had been against that other bland perfection, impervious to either, the mother’s anxious face at his shoulder.

“Go on,” the father said. “Pick it up.” The two sisters stooped, broad, lethargic; stooping, they presented an incredible expanse of pale cloth and a flutter of tawdry ribbons.
“If I thought enough of a rug to have to git hit all the way from France I wouldn’t keep hit where folks coming in would have to tromp on hit,” the first said. They raised the rug.

“Abner,” the mother said. “Let me do it.”
“You go back and git dinner,” his father said. “I’ll tend to this.”

From the woodpile through the rest of the afternoon the boy watched them, the rug spread flat in the dust beside the bubbling wash-pot, the two sisters stooping over it with that profound and lethargic reluctance, while the father stood over them in turn, implacable and grim, driving them though never raising his voice again. 

He could smell the harsh homemade lye they were using; he saw his mother come to the door once and look toward them with an expression not anxious now but very like despair; he saw his father turn, and he fell to with the axe and saw from the corner of his eye his father raise from the ground a flattish fragment of field stone and examine it and return to the pot, and this time his mother actually spoke: “Abner. Abner. Please don’t. Please, Abner.”

Then he was done too. It was dusk; the whippoorwills had already begun. He could smell coffee from the room where they would presently eat the cold food remaining from the mid-afternoon meal, though when he entered the house he realized they were having coffee again probably because there was a fire on the hearth, before which the rug now lay spread over the backs of the two chairs. The tracks of his father’s foot were gone. Where they had been were now long, water-cloudy scoriations resembling the sporadic course of a lilliputian mowing machine.

It still hung there while they ate the cold food and then went to bed, scattered without order or claim up and down the two rooms, his mother in one bed, where his father would later lie, the older brother in the other, himself, the aunt, and the two sisters on pallets on the floor. 

But his father was not in bed yet. The last thing the boy remembered was the depthless, harsh silhouette of the hat and coat bending over the rug and it seemed to him that he had not even closed his eyes when the silhouette was standing over him, the fire almost dead behind it, the stiff foot prodding him awake. “Catch up the mule,” his father said.

When he returned with the mule his father was standing in the black door, the rolled rug over his shoulder. “Ain’t you going to ride?” he said.
“No. Give me your foot.”

He bent his knee into his father’s hand, the wiry, surprising power flowed smoothly, rising, he rising with it, on to the mule’s bare back (they had owned a saddle once; the boy could remember it though not when or where) and with the same effortlessness his father swung the rug up in front of him. Now in the starlight they retraced the afternoon’s path, up the dusty road rife with honeysuckle, through the gate and up the black tunnel of the drive to the lightless house, where he sat on the mule and felt the rough warp of the rug drag across his thighs and vanish.

“Don’t you want me to help?” he whispered. His father did not answer and now he heard again that stiff foot striking the hollow portico with that wooden and clocklike deliberation, that outrageous overstatement of the weight it carried. The rug, hunched, not flung (the boy could tell that even in the darkness) from his father’s shoulder struck the angle of wall and floor with a sound unbelievably loud, thunderous, then the foot again, unhurried and enormous; a light came on in the house and the boy sat, tense, breathing steadily and quietly and just a little fast, though the foot itself did not increase its beat at all, descending the steps now; now the boy could see him.

“Don’t you want to ride now?” he whispered. “We kin both ride now,” the light within the house altering now, flaring up and sinking. He’s coming down the stairs now, he thought. He had already ridden the mule up beside the horse block; presently his father was up behind him and he doubled the reins over and slashed the mule across the neck, but before the animal could begin to trot the hard, thin arm came round him, the hard, knotted hand jerking the mule back to a walk.

In the first red rays of the sun they were in the lot, putting plow gear on the mules. This time the sorrel mare was in the lot before he heard it at all, the rider collarless and even bareheaded, trembling, speaking in a shaking voice as the woman in the house had done, his father merely looking up once before stooping again to the hame he was buckling, so that the man on the mare spoke to his stooping back:
“You must realize you have ruined that rug. Wasn’t there anybody here, any of your women . . .” he ceased, shaking, the boy watching him, the older brother leaning now in the stable door, chewing, blinking slowly and steadily at nothing apparently. “It cost a hundred dollars. But you never had a hundred dollars. You never will. So I’m going to charge you twenty bushels of corn against your crop. I’ll add it in your contract and when you come to the commissary you can sign it. That won’t keep Mrs. de Spain quiet but maybe it will teach you to wipe your feet off before you enter her house again.”

Then he was gone. The boy looked at his father, who still had not spoken or even looked up again, who was now adjusting the logger-head in the hame.

“Pap,” he said. His father looked at him — the inscrutable face, the shaggy brows beneath which the gray eyes glinted coldly. Suddenly the boy went toward him, fast, stopping as suddenly. “You done the best you could!” he cried. “If he wanted hit done different why didn’t he wait and tell you how? He won’t git no twenty bushels! He won’t git none! We’ll gether hit and hide hit! I kin watch . . .”

“Did you put the cutter back in that straight stock like I told you?”
“No, sir,” he said.
“Then go do it.”

That was Wednesday. During the rest of that week he worked steadily, at what was within his scope and some which was beyond it, with an industry that did not need to be driven nor even commanded twice; he had this from his mother, with the difference that some at least of what he did he liked to do, such as splitting wood with the half-size axe which his mother and aunt had earned, or saved money somehow, to present him with at Christmas. 

In company with the two older women (and on one afternoon, even one of the sisters), he built pens for the shoat and the cow which were a part of his father’s contract with the landlord, and one afternoon, his father being absent, gone somewhere on one of the mules, he went to the field.

They were running a middle buster now, his brother holding the plow straight while he handled the reins, and walking beside the straining mule, the rich black soil shearing cool and damp against his bare ankles, he thought Maybe this is the end of it. 

Maybe even that twenty bushels that seems hard to have to pay for just a rug will be a cheap price for him to stop forever and always from being what he used to be; thinking, dreaming now, so that his brother had to speak sharply to him to mind the mule: Maybe he even won’t collect the twenty bushels. 

Maybe it will all add up and balance and vanish — corn, rug, fire; the terror and grief, the being pulled two ways like between two teams of horses — gone, done with for ever and ever.

Then it was Saturday; he looked up from beneath the mule he was harnessing and saw his father in the black coat and hat. “Not that,” his father said. “The wagon gear.” And then, two hours later, sitting in the wagon bed behind his father and brother on the seat, the wagon accomplished a final curve, and he saw the weathered paintless store with its tattered tobacco- and patent-medicine posters and the tethered wagons and saddle animals below the gallery. 

He mounted the gnawed steps behind his father and brother, and there again was the lane of quiet, watching faces for the three of them to walk through. He saw the man in spectacles sitting at the plank table and he did not need to be told this was a Justice of the Peace; he sent one glare of fierce, exultant, partisan defiance at the man in collar and cravat now, whom he had seen but twice before in his life, and that on a galloping horse, who now wore on his face an expression not of rage but of amazed unbelief which the boy could not have known was at the incredible circumstance of being sued by one of his own tenants, and came and stood against his father and cried at the Justice: “He ain’t done it! He ain’t burnt . . .”

“Go back to the wagon,” his father said.
“Burnt?” the Justice said. “Do I understand this rug was burned too?”

“Does anybody here claim it was?” his father said. “Go back to the wagon.” But he did not, he merely retreated to the rear of the room, crowded as that other had been, but not to sit down this time, instead, to stand pressing among the motionless bodies, listening to the voices:
“And you claim twenty bushels of corn is too high for the damage you did to the rug?”

“He brought the rug to me and said he wanted the tracks washed out of it. I washed the tracks out and took the rug back to him.”
“But you didn’t carry the rug back to him in the same condition it was in before you made the tracks on it.”

His father did not answer, and now for perhaps half a minute there was no sound at all save that of breathing, the faint, steady suspiration of complete and intent listening.

“You decline to answer that, Mr. Snopes?” Again his father did not answer. “I’m going to find against you, Mr. Snopes. I’m going to find that you were responsible for the injury to Major de Spain’s rug and hold you liable for it. But twenty bushels of corn seems a little high for a man in your circumstances to have to pay. Major de Spain claims it cost a hundred dollars. 

October corn will be worth about fifty cents. I figure that if Major de Spain can stand a ninety-five dollar loss on something he paid cash for, you can stand a five-dollar loss you haven’t earned yet. I hold you in damages to Major de Spain to the amount of ten bushels of corn over and above your contract with him, to be paid to him out of your crop at gathering time. Court adjourned.”

It had taken no time hardly, the morning was but half begun. He thought they would return home and perhaps back to the field, since they were late, far behind all other farmers. 

But instead his father passed on behind the wagon, merely indicating with his hand for the older brother to follow with it, and crossed the road toward the blacksmith shop opposite, pressing on after his father, overtaking him, speaking, whispering up at the harsh, calm face beneath the weathered hat: “He won’t git no ten bushels neither. 

He won’t git one. We’ll . . .” until his father glanced for an instant down at him, the face absolutely calm, the grizzled eyebrows tangled above the cold eyes, the voice almost pleasant, almost gentle:
“You think so? Well, we’ll wait till October anyway.”

The matter of the wagon — the setting of a spoke or two and the tightening of the tires — did not take long either, the business of the tires accomplished by driving the wagon into the spring branch behind the shop and letting it stand there, the mules nuzzling into the water from time to time, and the boy on the seat with the idle reins, looking up the slope and through the sooty tunnel of the shed where the slow hammer rang and where his father sat on an upended cypress bolt, easily, either talking or listening, still sitting there when the boy brought the dripping wagon up out of the branch and halted it before the door.

“Take them on to the shade and hitch,” his father said. He did so and returned. His father and the smith and a third man squatting on his heels inside the door were talking, about crops and animals; the boy, squatting too in the ammoniac dust and hoof-parings and scales of rust, heard his father tell a long and unhurried story out of the time before the birth of the older brother even when he had been a professional horsetrader. 

And then his father came up beside him where he stood before a tattered last year’s circus poster on the other side of the store, gazing rapt and quiet at the scarlet horses, the incredible poisings and convolutions of tulle and tights and the painted leers of comedians, and said, “It’s time to eat.”

But not at home. Squatting beside his brother against the front wall, he watched his father emerge from the store and produce from a paper sack a segment of cheese and divide it carefully and deliberately into three with his pocket knife and produce crackers from the same sack. They all three squatted on the gallery and ate, slowly, without talking; then in the store again, they drank from a tin dipper tepid water smelling of the cedar bucket and of living beech trees. 

And still they did not go home. It was a horse lot this time, a tall rail fence upon and along which men stood and sat and out of which one by one horses were led, to be walked and trotted and then cantered back and forth along the road while the slow swapping and buying went on and the sun began to slant westward, they — the three of them — watching and listening, the older brother with his muddy eyes and his steady, inevitable tobacco, the father commenting now and then on certain of the animals, to no one in particular.

It was after sundown when they reached home. They ate supper by lamplight, then, sitting on the doorstep, the boy watched the night fully accomplish, listening to the whippoorwills and the frogs, when he heard his mother’s voice: “Abner! No! No! Oh, God. Oh, God. Abner!” and he rose, whirled, and saw the altered light through the door where a candle stub now burned in a bottle neck on the table and his father, still in the hat and coat, at once formal and burlesque as though dressed carefully for some shabby and ceremonial violence, emptying the reservoir of the lamp back into the five-gallon kerosene can from which it had been filled, while the mother tugged at his arm until he shifted the lamp to the other hand and flung her back, not savagely or viciously, just hard, into the wall, her hands flung out against the wall for balance, her mouth open and in her face the same quality of hopeless despair as had been in her voice. Then his father saw him standing in the door.

“Go to the barn and get that can of oil we were oiling the wagon with,” he said. The boy did not move. Then he could speak.
“What . . .” he cried. “What are you . . .”
“Go get that oil,” his father said. “Go.”

Then he was moving, running, outside the house, toward the stable: this the old habit, the old blood which he had not been permitted to choose for himself, which had been bequeathed him willy nilly and which had run for so long (and who knew where, battening on what of outrage and savagery and lust) before it came to him. I could keep on, he thought. I could run on and on and never look back, never need to see his face again. 

Only I can’t. I can’t, the rusted can in his hand now, the liquid sploshing in it as he ran back to the house and into it, into the sound of his mother’s weeping in the next room, and handed the can to his father.
“Ain’t you going to even send a nigger?” he cried. “At least you sent a nigger before!”

This time his father didn’t strike him. The hand came even faster than the blow had, the same hand which had set the can on the table with almost excruciating care flashing from the can toward him too quick for him to follow it, gripping him by the back of his shirt and on to tiptoe before he had seen it quit the can, the face stooping at him in breathless and frozen ferocity, the cold, dead voice speaking over him to the older brother who leaned against the table, chewing with that steady, curious, sidewise motion of cows:
“Empty the can into the big one and go on. I’ll catch up with you.”
“Better tie him up to the bedpost,” the brother said.

“Do like I told you,” the father said. Then the boy was moving, his bunched shirt and the hard, bony hand between his shoulder-blades, his toes just touching the floor, across the room and into the other one, past the sisters sitting with spread heavy thighs in the two chairs over the cold hearth, and to where his mother and aunt sat side by side on the bed, the aunt’s arms about his mother’s shoulders.

“Hold him,” the father said. The aunt made a startled movement. “Not you,” the father said. “Lennie. Take hold of him. I want to see you do it.” His mother took him by the wrist. “You’ll hold him better than that. If he gets loose don’t you know what he is going to do? He will go up yonder.” He jerked his head toward the road. “Maybe I’d better tie him.”
“I’ll hold him,” his mother whispered.

“See you do then.” Then his father was gone, the stiff foot heavy and measured upon the boards, ceasing at last.
Then he began to struggle. His mother caught him in both arms, he jerking and wrenching at them. He would be stronger in the end, he knew that. But he had no time to wait for it. “Lemme go!” he cried. “I don’t want to have to hit you!”

“Let him go!” the aunt said. “If he don’t go, before God, I am going up there myself!”
“Don’t you see I can’t?” his mother cried. “Sarty! Sarty! No! No! Help me, Lizzie!”

Then he was free. His aunt grasped at him but it was too late. He whirled, running, his mother stumbled forward on to her knees behind him, crying to the nearer sister: “Catch him, Net! Catch him!” But that was too late too, the sister (the sisters were twins, born at the same time, yet either of them now gave the impression of being, encompassing as much living meat and volume and weight as any other two of the family) not yet having begun to rise from the chair, her head, face, alone merely turned, presenting to him in the flying instant an astonishing expanse of young female features untroubled by any surprise even, wearing only an expression of bovine interest. 

Then he was out of the room, out of the house, in the mild dust of the starlit road and the heavy rifeness of honeysuckle, the pale ribbon unspooling with terrific slowness under his running feet, reaching the gate at last and turning in, running, his heart and lungs drumming, on up the drive toward the lighted house, the lighted door. He did not knock, he burst in, sobbing for breath, incapable for the moment of speech; he saw the astonished face of the Negro in the linen jacket without knowing when the Negro had appeared.

“De Spain!” he cried, panted. “Where’s . . .” then he saw the white man too emerging from a white door down the hall. “Barn!” he cried. “Barn!”
“What?” the white man said. “Barn?”
“Yes!” the boy cried. “Barn!”
“Catch him!” the white man shouted.

But it was too late this time too. The Negro grasped his shirt, but the entire sleeve, rotten with washing, carried away, and he was out that door too and in the drive again, and had actually never ceased to run even while he was screaming into the white man’s face.

Behind him the white man was shouting, “My horse! Fetch my horse!” and he thought for an instant of cutting across the park and climbing the fence into the road, but he did not know the park nor how high the vine-massed fence might be and he dared not risk it. 

So he ran on down the drive, blood and breath roaring; presently he was in the road again though he could not see it. He could not hear either: the galloping mare was almost upon him before he heard her, and even then he held his course, as if the very urgency of his wild grief and need must in a moment more find him wings, waiting until the ultimate instant to hurl himself aside and into the weed-choked roadside ditch as the horse thundered past and on, for an instant in furious silhouette against the stars, the tranquil early summer night sky which, even before the shape of the horse and rider vanished, stained abruptly and violently upward: a long, swirling roar incredible and soundless, blotting the stars, and he springing up and into the road again, running again, knowing it was too late yet still running even after he heard the shot and, an instant later, two shots, pausing now without knowing he had ceased to run, crying “Pap! Pap!”, running again before he knew he had begun to run, stumbling, tripping over something and scrabbling up again without ceasing to run, looking backward over his shoulder at the glare as he got up, running on among the invisible trees, panting, sobbing, “Father! Father!”

At midnight he was sitting on the crest of a hill. He did not know it was midnight and he did not know how far he had come. But there was no glare behind him now and he sat now, his back toward what he had called home for four days anyhow, his face toward the dark woods which he would enter when breath was strong again, small, shaking steadily in the chill darkness, hugging himself into the remainder of his thin, rotten shirt, the grief and despair now no longer terror and fear but just grief and despair. Father. My father, he thought. “He was brave!” he cried suddenly, aloud but not loud, no more than a whisper: “He was! He was in the war! He was in Colonel Sartoris’ cav’ry!” not knowing that his father had gone to that war a private in the fine old European sense, wearing no uniform, admitting the authority of and giving fidelity to no man or army or flag, going to war as Malbrouck himself did: for booty — it meant nothing and less than nothing to him if it were enemy booty or his own.

The slow constellations wheeled on. It would be dawn and then sun-up after a while and he would be hungry. But that would be to-morrow and now he was only cold, and walking would cure that. His breathing was easier now and he decided to get up and go on, and then he found that he had been asleep because he knew it was almost dawn, the night almost over. He could tell that from the whippoorwills. They were everywhere now among the dark trees below him, constant and inflectioned and ceaseless, so that, as the instant for giving over to the day birds drew nearer and nearer, there was no interval at all between them. He got up. He was a little stiff, but walking would cure that too as it would the cold, and soon there would be the sun. 

He went on down the hill, toward the dark woods within which the liquid silver voices of the birds called unceasing — the rapid and urgent beating of the urgent and quiring heart of the late spring night. He did not look back.


The End


An Odor of Verbena, William Faulkner

An Odor of Verbena
  
1

It was just after supper. I had just opened my Coke on the table beneath the lamp; I heard Professor Wilkins’ feet in the hall and then the instant of silence as he put his hand to the door knob, and I should have known. People talk glibly of presentiment, but I had none. 

I heard his feet on the stairs and then in the hall approaching and there was nothing in the feet because although I had lived in his house for three college years now and although both he and Mrs. Wilkins called me Bayard in the house, he would no more have entered my room without knocking than I would have entered his—or hers. 

Then he flung the door violently inward against the doorstop with one of those gestures with or by which an almost painfully unflagging preceptory of youth ultimately aberrates, and stood there saying, “Bayard. Bayard, my son, my dear son.”

I should have known; I should have been prepared. Or maybe I was prepared because I remember how I closed the book carefully, even marking the place, before I rose. He (Professor Wilkins) was doing something, bustling at something; it was my hat and cloak which he handed me and which I took although I would not need the cloak, unless even then I was thinking (although it was October, the equinox had not occurred) that the rains and the cool weather would arrive before I should see this room again and so I would need the cloak anyway to return to it if I returned, thinking ‘God, if he had only done this last night, flung that door crashing and bouncing against the stop last night without knocking so I could have gotten there before it happened, been there when it did, beside him on whatever spot, wherever it was that he would have to fall and lie in the dust and dirt.

“Your boy is downstairs in the kitchen,” he said. It was not until years later that he told me (someone did; it must have been Judge Wilkins) how Ringo had apparently flung the cook aside and come on into the house and into the library where he and Mrs. Wilkins were sitting and said without preamble and already turning to withdraw: “They shot Colonel Sartoris this morning. 

Tell him I be waiting in the kitchen” and was gone before either of them could move. “He has ridden forty miles yet he refuses to eat anything.” We were moving toward the door now—the door on my side of which I had lived for three years now with what I knew, what I knew now I must have believed and expected, yet beyond which I had heard the approaching feet yet heard nothing in the feet. “If there was just anything I could do.”

“Yes, sir,” I said. “A fresh horse for my boy. He will want to go back with me.”

“By all means take mine—Mrs. Wilkins’,” he cried. His tone was no different yet he did cry it and I suppose that at the same moment we both realised that was funny—a short-legged deep-barrelled mare who looked exactly like a spinster music teacher, which Mrs. Wilkins drove to a basket phaeton—which was good for me, like being doused with a pail of cold water would have been good for me.

“Thank you, sir,” I said. “We won’t need it. I will get a fresh horse for him at the livery stable when I get my mare.” Good for me, because even before I finished speaking I knew that would not be necessary either, that Ringo would have stopped at the livery stable before he came out to the college and attended to that and that the fresh horse for him and my mare both would be saddled and waiting now at the side fence and we would not have to go through Oxford at all. 

Loosh would not have thought of that if he had come for me, he would have come straight to the college, to Professor Wilkins’, and told his news and then sat down and let me take charge from then on. But not Ringo.

He followed me from the room. From now until Ringo and I rode away into the hot thick dusty darkness quick and strained for the overdue equinox like a laboring delayed woman, he would be somewhere either just beside me or just behind me and I never to know exactly nor care which. He was trying to find the words with which to offer me his pistol too. 

I could almost hear him: “Ah, this unhappy land, not ten years recovered from the fever yet still men must kill one another, still we must pay Gain’s price in his own coin.” But he did not actually say it. He just followed me, somewhere beside or behind me as we descended the stairs toward where Mrs. Wilkins waited in the hall beneath the chandelier—a thin gray woman who reminded me of Granny, not that she looked like Granny probably but because she had known Granny—a lifted anxious still face which was thinking Who lives by the sword shall die by it just as Granny would have thought, toward which I walked, had to walk not because I was Granny’s grandson and had lived in her house for three college years and was about the age of her son when he was killed in almost the last battle nine years ago, but because I was now The Sartoris. (The Sartoris: that had been one of the concomitant flashes, along with the at last it has happened when Professor Wilkins opened my door.) 

She didn’t offer me a horse and pistol, not because she liked me any less than Professor Wilkins but because she was a woman and so wiser than any man, else the men would not have gone on with the War for two years after they knew they were whipped. She just put her hands (a small woman, no bigger than Granny had been) on my shoulders and said, “Give my love to Drusilla and your Aunt Jenny. And come back when you can.”

“Only I don’t know when that will be,” I said. “I don’t know how many things I will have to attend to.” Yes, I lied even to her; it had not been but a minute yet since he had flung that door bouncing into the stop yet already I was beginning to realise, to become aware of that which I still had no yardstick to measure save that one consisting of what, despite myself, despite my raising and background (or maybe because of them) I had for some time known I was becoming and had feared the test of it; I remember how I thought while her hands still rested on my shoulders: At least this will be my chance to find out if I am what I think I am or if I just hope; if I am going to do what I have taught myself is right or if I am just going to wish I were.

We went on to the kitchen, Professor Wilkins still somewhere beside or behind me and still offering me the pistol and horse in a dozen different ways. Ringo was waiting; I remember how I thought then that no matter what might happen to either of us, I would never be The Sartoris to him. He was twenty-four too, but in a way he had changed even less than I had since that day when we had nailed Grumby’s body to the door of the old compress. Maybe it was because he had outgrown me, had changed so much that summer while he and Granny traded mules with the Yankees that since then I had had to do most of the changing just to catch up with him. 

He was sitting quietly in a chair beside the cold stove, spent-looking too who had ridden forty miles (at one time, either in Jefferson or when he was alone at last on the road somewhere, he had cried; dust was now caked and dried in the tear-channels on his face) and would ride forty more yet would not eat, looking up at me a little red-eyed with weariness (or maybe it was more than just weariness and so I would never catch up with him) then rising without a word and going on toward the door and I following and Professor Wilkins still offering the horse and the pistol without speaking the words and still thinking (I could feel that too) Dies by the sword. Dies by the sword.

Ringo had the two horses saddled at the side gate, as I had known he would—the fresh one for himself and my mare father had given me three years ago, that could do a mile under two minutes any day and a mile every eight minutes all day long. He was already mounted when I realised that what Professor Wilkins wanted was to shake my hand. 

We shook hands; I knew he believed he was touching flesh which might not be alive tomorrow night and I thought for a second how if I told him what I was going to do, since we had talked about it, about how if there was anything at all in the Book, anything of hope and peace for His blind and bewildered spawn which He had chosen above all others to offer immortality, Thou shalt not kill must be it, since maybe he even believed that he had taught it to me except that he had not, nobody had, not even myself since it went further than just having been learned. But I did not tell him. 

He was too old to be forced so, to condone even in principle such a decision; he was too old to have to stick to principle in the face of blood and raising and background, to be faced without warning and made to deliver like by a highwayman out of the dark: only the young could do that—one still young enough to have his youth supplied him gratis as a reason (not an excuse) for cowardice.

So I said nothing. I just shook his hand and mounted too, and Ringo and I rode on. We would not have to pass through Oxford now and so soon (there was a thin sickle of moon like the heel print of a boot in wet sand) the road to Jefferson lay before us, the road which I had travelled for the first time three years ago with Father and travelled twice at Christmas time and then in June and September and twice at Christmas time again and then June and September again each college term since alone on the mare, not even knowing that this was peace; and now this time and maybe last time who would not die (I knew that) but who maybe forever after could never again hold up his head. 

The horses took the gait which they would hold for forty miles. My mare knew the long road ahead and Ringo had a good beast too, had talked Hilliard at the livery stable out of a good horse too. 

Maybe it was the tears, the channels of dried mud across which his strain-reddened eyes had looked at me, but I rather think it was that same quality which used to enable him to replenish his and Granny’s supply of United States Army letter-heads during that time—some outrageous assurance gained from too long and too close association with white people: the one whom he called Granny, the other with whom he had slept from the time we were born until Father rebuilt the house. 

We spoke one time, then no more:
“We could bushwhack him,” he said. “Like we done Grumby that day. But I reckon that wouldn’t suit that white skin you walks around in.”

“No,” I said. We rode on; it was October; there was plenty of time still for verbena although I would have to reach home before I would realise there was a need for it; plenty of time for verbena yet from the garden where Aunt Jenny puttered beside old Joby, in a pair of Father’s old cavalry gauntlets, among the coaxed and ordered beds, the quaint and odorous old names, for though it was October no rain had come yet and hence no frost to bring (or leave behind) the first half-warm half-chill nights of Indian Summer—the drowsing air cool and empty for geese yet languid still with the old hot dusty smell of fox grape and sassafras—the nights when before I became a man and went to college to learn law Ringo and I, with lantern and axe and crokersack and six dogs (one to follow the trail and five more just for the tonguing, the music) would hunt possum in the pasture where, hidden, we had seen our first Yankee that afternoon on the bright horse, where for the last year now you could hear the whistling of the trains which had no longer belonged to Mr. Redmond for a long while now and which at some instant, some second during the morning Father too had relinquished along with the pipe which Ringo said he was smoking, which slipped from his hand as he fell. 

We rode on, toward the house where he would be lying in the parlor now, in his regimentals (sabre too) and where Drusilla would be waiting for me beneath all the festive glitter of the chandeliers, in the yellow ball gown and the sprig of verbena in her hair, holding the two loaded pistols (I could see that too, who had had no presentiment; I could see her, in the formal brilliant room arranged formally for obsequy, not tall, not slender as a woman is but as a youth, a boy, is, motionless, in yellow, the face calm, almost bemused, the head simple and severe, the balancing sprig of verbena above each ear, the two arms bent at the elbows, the two hands shoulder high, the two identical duelling pistols lying upon, not clutched in, one to each: the Greek amphora priestess of a succinct and formal violence).

2

Drusilla said that he had a dream. I was twenty then and she and I would walk in the garden in the summer twilight while we waited for Father to ride in from the railroad. I was just twenty then: that summer before I entered the University to take the law degree which Father decided I should have and four years after the one, the day, the evening when Father and Drusilla had kept old Cash Benbow from becoming United States Marshal and returned home still unmarried and Mrs. 

Habersham herded them into her carriage and drove them back to town and dug her husband out of his little dim hole in the new bank and made him sign Father’s peace bond for killing the two carpet baggers, and took Father and Drusilla to the minister herself and saw that they were married. 

And Father had rebuilt the house too, on the same blackened spot, over the same cellar, where the other had burned, only larger, much larger: Drusilla said that the house was the aura of Father’s dream just as a bride’s trousseau and veil is the aura of hers. 

And Aunt Jenny had come to live with us now so we had the garden (Drusilla would no more have bothered with flowers than Father himself would have, who even now, even four years after it was over, still seemed to exist, breathe, in that last year of it while she had ridden in man’s clothes and with her hair cut short like any other member of Father’s troop, across Georgia and both Carolinas in front of Sherman’s army) for her to gather sprigs of verbena from to wear in her hair because she said verbena was the only scent you could smell above the smell of horses and courage and so it was the only one that was worth the wearing. 

The railroad was hardly begun then and Father and Mr. Redmond were not only still partners, they were still friends, which as George Wyatt said was easily a record for Father, and he would leave the house at daybreak on Jupiter, riding up and down the unfinished line with two saddlebags of gold coins borrowed on Friday to pay the men on Saturday, keeping just two cross-ties ahead of the sheriff as Aunt Jenny said. 

So we walked in the dusk, slowly between Aunt Jenny’s flower beds while Drusilla (in a dress now, who still would have worn pants all the time if Father had let her) leaned lightly on my arm and I smelled the verbena in her hair as I had smelled the rain in it and in Father’s beard that night four years ago when he and Drusilla and Uncle Buck McCaslin found Grumby and then came home and found Ringo and me more than just asleep: escaped into that oblivion which God or Nature or whoever it was had supplied us with for the time being, who had had to perform more than should be required of children because there should be some limit to the age, the youth at least below which one should not have to kill. 

This was just after the Saturday night when he returned and I watched him clean the derringer and reload it and we learned that the dead man was almost a neighbor, a hill man who had been in the first infantry regiment when it voted Father out of command: and we never to know if the man actually intended to rob Father or not because Father had shot too quick, but only that he had a wife and several children in a dirt-floored cabin in the hills, to whom Father the next day sent some money and she (the wife) walked into the house two days later while we were sitting at the dinner table and flung the money at Father’s face.

“But nobody could have more of a dream than Colonel Sutpen,” I said. He had been Father’s second-in-command in the first regiment and had been elected colonel when the regiment deposed Father after Second Manassas, and it was Sutpen and not the regiment whom father never forgave. He was underbred, a cold ruthless man who had come into the country about thirty years before the War, nobody knew from where except Father said you could look at him and know he would not dare to tell. 

He had got some land and nobody knew how he did that either, and he got money from somewhere—Father said they all believed he robbed steamboats, either as a card sharper or as an out-and-out highwayman—and built a big house and married and set up as a gentleman. Then he lost everything in the War like everybody else, all hope of descendants too (his son killed his daughter’s fiancé on the eve of the wedding and vanished) yet he came back home and set out singlehanded to rebuild his plantation. 

He had no friends to borrow from and he had nobody to leave it to and he was past sixty years old, yet he set out to rebuild his place like it used to be; they told how he was too busy to bother with politics or anything; how when Father and the other men organised the night riders to keep the carpet baggers from organising the Negroes into an insurrection, he refused to have anything to do with it. Father stopped hating him long enough to ride out to see Sutpen himself and he (Sutpen) came to the door with a lamp and did not even invite them to come in and discuss it; Father said, “Are you with us or against us?” and he said, “I’m for my land. 

If every man of you would rehabilitate his own land, the country will take care of itself” and Father challenged him to bring the lamp out and set it on a stump where they could both see to shoot and Sutpen would not. “Nobody could have more of a dream than that.”

“Yes. But his dream is just Sutpen. John’s is not. He is thinking of this whole country which he is trying to raise by its bootstraps, so that all the people in it, not just his kind nor his old regiment, but all the people, black and white, the women and children back in the hills who don’t even own shoes—Don’t you see?”

“But how can they get any good from what he wants to do for them if they are—after he has—”

“Killed some of them? I suppose you include those two carpet baggers he had to kill to hold that first election, don’t you?”
“They were men. Human beings.”

“They were Northerners, foreigners who had no business here. They were pirates.” We walked on, her weight hardly discernible on my arm, her head just reaching my shoulder. I had always been a little taller than she, even on that night at Hawkhurst while we listened to the niggers passing in the road, and she had changed but little since—the same boy-hard body, the close implacable head with its savagely cropped hair which I had watched from the wagon above the tide of crazed singing niggers as we went down into the river—the body not slender as women are but as boys are slender. 

“A dream is not a very safe thing to be near, Bayard. I know; I had one once. It’s like a loaded pistol with a hair trigger: if it stays alive long enough, somebody is going to be hurt. But if it’s a good dream, it’s worth it. There are not many dreams in the world, but there are a lot of human lives. And one human life or two dozen——”

“Are not worth anything?”

“No. Not anything.—Listen. I hear Jupiter. I’ll beat you to the house.” She was already running, the skirts she did not like to wear lifted almost to her knees, her legs beneath it running as boys run just as she rode like men ride.

I was twenty then. But the next time I was twenty-four; I had been three years at the University and in another two weeks I would ride back to Oxford for the final year and my degree. It was just last summer, last August, and Father had just beat Redmond for the State legislature. 

The railroad was finished now and the partnership between Father and Redmond had been dissolved so long ago that most people would have forgotten they were ever partners if it hadn’t been for the enmity between them. 

There had been a third partner but nobody hardly remembered his name now; he and his name both had vanished in the fury of the conflict which set up between Father and Redmond almost before they began to lay the rails, between Father’s violent and ruthless dictatorialness and will to dominate (the idea was his; he did think of the railroad first and then took Redmond in) and that quality in Redmond (as George Wyatt said, he was not a coward or Father would never have teamed with him) which permitted him to stand as much as he did from Father, to bear and bear and bear until something (not his will nor his courage) broke in him. 

During the War Redmond had not been a soldier, he had had something to do with cotton for the Government; he could have made money himself out of it but he had not and everybody knew he had not, Father knew it, yet Father would even taunt him with not having smelled powder. 

He was wrong; he knew he was when it was too late for him to stop just as a drunkard reaches a point where it is too late for him to stop, where he promises himself that he will and maybe believes he will or can but it is too late. Finally they reached the point (they had both put everything they could mortgage or borrow into it for Father to ride up and down the line, paying the workmen and the waybills on the rails at the last possible instant) where even Father realised that one of them would have to get out. 

So (they were not speaking then; it was arranged by Judge Benbow) they met and agreed to buy or sell, naming a price which, in reference to what they had put into it, was ridiculously low but which each believed the other could not raise—at least Father claimed that Redmond did not believe he could raise it. 

So Redmond accepted the price, and found out that Father had the money. And according to Father, that’s what started it, although Uncle Buck McCaslin said Father could not have owned a half interest in even one hog, let alone a railroad, and not dissolve the business either sworn enemy or death-pledged friend to his recent partner. So they parted and Father finished the road. 

By that time, seeing that he was going to finish it, some Northern people sold him a locomotive on credit which he named for Aunt Jenny, with a silver oil can in the cab with her name engraved on it; and last summer the first train ran into Jefferson, the engine decorated with flowers and Father in the cab blowing blast after blast on the whistle when he passed Redmond’s house; and there were speeches at the station, with more flowers and a Confederate flag and girls in white dresses and red sashes and a band, and Father stood on the pilot of the engine and made a direct and absolutely needless allusion to Mr. Redmond. That was it. He wouldn’t let him alone. George Wyatt came to me right afterward and told me.

“Right or wrong,” he said, “us boys and most of the other folks in this county know John’s right. But he ought to let Redmond alone. I know what’s wrong: he’s had to kill too many folks, and that’s bad for a man. We all know Colonel’s brave as a lion, but Redmond ain’t no coward either and there ain’t any use in making a brave man that made one mistake eat crow all the time. Can’t you talk to him?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’ll try.” But I had no chance. That is, I could have talked to him and he would have listened, but he could not have heard me because he had stepped straight from the pilot of that engine into the race for the Legislature. 

Maybe he knew that Redmond would have to oppose him to save his face even though he (Redmond) must have known that, after that train ran into Jefferson, he had no chance against Father, or maybe Redmond had already announced his candidacy and Father entered the race just because of that, I don’t remember. Anyway they ran, a bitter contest in which Father continued to badger Redmond without reason or need, since they both knew it would be a landslide for Father. 

And it was, and we thought he was satisfied. Maybe he thought so himself, as the drunkard believes that he is done with drink; and it was that afternoon and Drusilla and I walked in the garden in the twilight and I said something about what George Wyatt had told me and she released my arm and turned me to face her and said, “This from you? You? Have you forgotten Grumby?”
“No,” I said. “I never will forget him.”

“You never will. I wouldn’t let you. There are worse things than killing men, Bayard. There are worse things than being killed. Sometimes I think the finest thing that can happen to a man is to love something, a woman preferably, well, hard hard hard, then to die young because he believed what he could not help but believe and was what he could not (could not? would not) help but be.” 

Now she was looking at me in a way she never had before. I did not know what it meant then and was not to know until tonight since neither of us knew then that two months later Father would be dead. I just knew that she was looking at me as she never had before and that the scent of the verbena in her hair seemed to have increased a hundred times, to have got a hundred times stronger, to be everywhere in the dusk in which something was about to happen which I had never dreamed of. Then she spoke. “Kiss me, Bayard.”

“No. You are Father’s wife.”
“And eight years older than you are. And your fourth cousin too. And I have black hair. Kiss me, Bayard.”
“No.”

“Kiss me, Bayard.” So I leaned my face down to her. But she didn’t move, standing so, bent lightly back from me from the waist, looking at me; now it was she who said, “No.” So I put my arms around her. 

Then she came to me, melted as women will and can, the arms with the wrist- and elbow-power to control horses about my shoulders, using the wrists to hold my face to hers until there was no longer need for the wrists; I thought then of the woman of thirty, the symbol of the ancient and eternal Snake and of the men who have written of her, and I realised then the immitigable chasm between all life and all print—that those who can, do, those who cannot and suffer enough because they can’t, write about it. 

Then I was free, I could see her again, I saw her still watching me with that dark inscrutable look, looking up at me now across her down-slanted face; I watched her arms rise with almost the exact gesture with which she had put them around me as if she were repeating the empty and formal gesture of all promise so that I should never forget it, the elbows angling outward as she put her hands to the sprig of verbena in her hair, I standing straight and rigid facing the slightly bent head, the short jagged hair, the rigid curiously formal angle of the bare arms gleaming faintly in the last of light as she removed the verbena sprig and put it into my lapel, and I thought how the War had tried to stamp all the women of her generation and class in the South into a type and how it had failed—the suffering, the identical experience (hers and Aunt Jenny’s had been almost the same except that Aunt Jenny had spent a few nights with her husband before they brought him back home in an ammunition wagon while Gavin Breckbridge was just Drusilla’s fiancé) was there in the eyes, yet beyond that was the incorrigibly individual woman: not like so many men who return from wars to live on Government reservations like so many steers, emasculate and empty of all save an identical experience which they cannot forget and dare not, else they would cease to live at that moment, almost interchangeable save for the old habit of answering to a given name.

“Now I must tell Father,” I said.

“Yes,” she said. “You must tell him. Kiss me.” So again it was like it had been before. No. Twice, a thousand times and never like—the eternal and symbolical thirty to a young man, a youth, each time both cumulative and retroactive, immitigably unrepetitive, each wherein remembering excludes experience, each wherein experience antedates remembering; the skill without weariness, the knowledge virginal to surfeit, the cunning secret muscles to guide and control just as within the wrists and elbows lay slumbering the mastery of horses: she stood back, already turning, not looking at me when she spoke, never having looked at me, already moving swiftly on in the dusk: “Tell John. Tell him tonight.”

I intended to. I went to the house and into the office at once; I went to the center of the rug before the cold hearth, I don’t know why, and stood there rigid like soldiers stand, looking at eye level straight across the room and above his head and said “Father” and then stopped. 

Because he did not even hear me. He said, “Yes, Bayard?” but he did not hear me although he was sitting behind the desk doing nothing, immobile, as still as I was rigid, one hand on the desk with a dead cigar in it, a bottle of brandy and a filled and un-tasted glass beside his hand, clothed quiet and bemused in whatever triumph it was he felt since the last overwhelming return of votes had come in late in the afternoon. 

So I waited until after supper. We went to the diningroom and stood side by side until Aunt Jenny entered and then Drusilla, in the yellow ball gown, who walked straight to me and gave me one fierce inscrutable look then went to her place and waited for me to draw her chair while Father drew Aunt Jenny’s. 

He had roused by then, not to talk himself but rather to sit at the head of the table and reply to Drusilla as she talked with a sort of feverish and glittering volubility—to reply now and then to her with that courteous intolerant pride which had lately become a little forensic, as if merely being in a political contest filled with fierce and empty oratory had retroactively made a lawyer of him who was anything and everything except a lawyer. 

Then Drusilla and Aunt Jenny rose and left us and he said, “Wait” to me who had made no move to follow and directed Joby to bring one of the bottles of wine which he had fetched back from New Orleans when he went there last to borrow money to liquidate his first private railroad bonds. 

Then I stood again like soldiers stand, gazing at eye level above his head while he sat half-turned from the table, a little paunchy now though not much, a little grizzled too in the hair though his beard was as strong as ever, with that spurious forensic air of lawyers and the intolerant eyes which in the last two years had acquired that transparent film which the eyes of carnivorous animals have and from behind which they look at a world which no ruminant ever sees, perhaps dares to see, which I have seen before on the eyes of men who have killed too much, who have killed so much that never again as long as they live will they ever be alone. I said again, “Father,” then I told him.

“Hah?” he said. “Sit down.” I sat down, I looked at him, watched him fill both glasses and this time I knew it was worse with him than not hearing: it didn’t even matter. “You are doing well in the law, Judge Wilkins tells me. I am pleased to hear that. I have not needed you in my affairs so far, but from now on I shall. I have now accomplished the active portion of my aims in which you could not have helped me; I acted as the land and the time demanded and you were too young for that, I wished to shield you. 

But now the land and the time too are changing; what will follow will be a matter of consolidation, of pettifogging and doubtless chicanery in which I would be a babe in arms but in which you, trained in the law, can hold your own—our own. Yes. I have accomplished my aim, and now I shall do a little moral housecleaning. I am tired of killing men, no matter what the necessity nor the end. Tomorrow, when I go to town and meet Ben Redmond, I shall be unarmed.”

3

We reached home just before midnight; we didn’t have to pass through Jefferson either. Before we turned in the gates I could see the lights, the chandeliers—hall, parlor, and what Aunt Jenny (without any effort or perhaps even design on her part) had taught even Ringo to call the drawing room, the light falling outward across the portico, past the columns. 

Then I saw the horses, the faint shine of leather and buckle-glints on the black silhouettes and then the men too—Wyatt and others of Father’s old troop—and I had forgot that they would be there. I had forgot that they would be there; I remember how I thought, since I was tired and spent with strain, Now it will have to begin tonight. 

I won’t even have until tomorrow in which to begin to resist. They had a watchman, a picquet out, I suppose, because they seemed to know at once that we were in the drive. Wyatt met me, I halted the mare, I could look down at him and at the others gathered a few yards behind him with that curious vulture-like formality which Southern men assume in such situations.

“Well, boy,” George said.
“Was it—” I said. “Was he——”

“It was all right. It was in front. Redmond ain’t no coward. John had the derringer inside his cuff like always, but he never touched it, never made a move toward it.” I have seen him do it, he showed me once: the pistol (it was not four inches long) held flat inside his left wrist by a clip he made himself of wire and an old clock spring; he would raise both hands at the same time, cross them, fire the pistol from beneath his left hand almost as if he were hiding from his own vision what he was doing; when he killed one of the men he shot a hole through his own coat sleeve. 

“But you want to get on to the house,” Wyatt said. He began to stand aside, then he spoke again: “We’ll take this off your hands, any of us. Me.” I hadn’t moved the mare yet and I had made no move to speak, yet he continued quickly, as if he had already rehearsed all this, his speech and mine, and knew what I would say and only spoke himself as he would have removed his hat on entering a house or used ‘sir’ in conversing with a stranger: “You’re young, just a boy, you ain’t had any experience in this kind of thing. Besides, you got them two ladies in the house to think about. He would understand, all right.”

“I reckon I can attend to it,” I said.

“Sure,” he said; there was no surprise, nothing at all, in his voice because he had already rehearsed this: “I reckon we all knew that’s what you would say.” He stepped back then; almost it was as though he and not I bade the mare to move on. 

But they all followed, still with that unctuous and voracious formality. Then I saw Drusilla standing at the top of the front steps, in the light from the open door and the windows like a theatre scene, in the yellow ball gown and even from here I believed that I could smell the verbena in her hair, standing there motionless yet emanating something louder than the two shots must have been—something voracious too and passionate. 

Then, although I had dismounted and someone had taken the mare, I seemed to be still in the saddle and to watch myself enter that scene which she had postulated like another actor while in the background for chorus Wyatt and the others stood with the unctuous formality which the Southern man shows in the presence of death—that Roman holiday engendered by mistborn Protestantism grafted into this land of violent sun, of violent alteration from snow to heat-stroke which has produced a race impervious to both. 

I mounted the steps toward the figure straight and yellow and immobile as a candle which moved only to extend one hand; we stood together and looked down at them where they stood clumped, the horses too gathered in a tight group beyond them at the rim of light from the brilliant door and windows. One of them stamped and blew his breath and jangled his gear.

“Thank you, gentlemen,” I said. “My aunt and my—Drusilla thank you. There’s no need for you to stay. Goodnight.” They murmured, turning. George Wyatt paused, looking back at me.
“Tomorrow?” he said.

“Tomorrow.” Then they went on, carrying their hats and tiptoeing, even on the ground, the quiet and resilient earth, as though anyone in that house awake would try to sleep, anyone already asleep in it whom they could have wakened. Then they were gone and Drusilla and I turned and crossed the portico, her hand lying light on my wrist yet discharging into me with a shock like electricity that dark and passionate voracity, the face at my shoulder—the jagged hair with a verbena sprig above each ear, the eyes staring at me with that fierce exaltation. We entered the hall and crossed it, her hand guiding me without pressure, and entered the parlor. 

Then for the first time I realised it—the alteration which is death—not that he was now just clay but that he was lying down. But I didn’t look at him yet because I knew that when I did I would begin to pant; I went to Aunt Jenny who had just risen from a chair behind which Louvinia stood. She was Father’s sister, taller than Drusilla but no older, whose husband had been killed at the very beginning of the War, by a shell from a Federal frigate at Fort Moultrie, come to us from Carolina six years ago. Ringo and I went to Tennessee Junction in the wagon to meet her. 

It was January, cold and clear and with ice in the ruts; we returned just before dark with Aunt Jenny on the seat beside me holding a lace parasol and Ringo in the wagon bed nursing a hamper basket containing two bottles of old sherry and the two jasmine cuttings which were bushes in the garden now, and the panes of colored glass which she had salvaged from the Carolina house where she and Father and Uncle Bayard were born and which Father had set in a fanlight about one of the drawing room windows for her—who came up the drive and Father (home now from the railroad) went down the steps and lifted her from the wagon and said, “Well, Jenny,” and she said, “Well, Johnny,” and began to cry. 

She stood too, looking at me as I approached—the same hair, the same high nose, the same eyes as Father’s except that they were intent and very wise instead of intolerant. She said nothing at all, she just kissed me, her hands light on my shoulders. Then Drusilla spoke, as if she had been waiting with a sort of dreadful patience for the empty ceremony to be done, in a voice like a bell: clear, unsentient, on a single pitch, silvery and triumphant: “Come, Bayard.”

“Hadn’t you better go to bed now?” Aunt Jenny said.

“Yes,” Drusilla said in that silvery ecstatic voice, “Oh yes. There will be plenty of time for sleep.” I followed her, her hand again guiding me without pressure; now I looked at him. It was just as I had imagined it—sabre, plumes, and all—but with that alteration, that irrevocable difference which I had known to expect yet had not realised, as you can put food into your stomach which for a while the stomach declines to assimilate—the illimitable grief and regret as I looked down at the face which I knew—the nose, the hair, the eyelids closed over the intolerance—the face which I realised I now saw in repose for the first time in my life; the empty hands still now beneath the invisible stain of what had been (once, surely) needless blood, the hands now appearing clumsy in their very inertness, too clumsy to have performed the fatal actions which forever afterward he must have waked and slept with and maybe was glad to lay down at last—those curious appendages clumsily conceived to begin with yet with which man has taught himself to do so much, so much more than they were intended to do or could be forgiven for doing, which had now surrendered that life to which his intolerant heart had fiercely held; and then I knew that in a minute I would begin to pant. 

So Drusilla must have spoken twice before I heard her and turned and saw in the instant Aunt Jenny and Louvinia watching us, hearing Drusilla now, the unsentient bell quality gone now, her voice whispering into that quiet death-filled room with a passionate and dying fall: “Bayard.” She faced me, she was quite near; again the scent of the verbena in her hair seemed to have increased a hundred times as she stood holding out to me, one in either hand, the two duelling pistols. “Take them, Bayard,” she said, in the same tone in which she had said “Kiss me” last summer, already pressing them into my hands, watching me with that passionate and voracious exaltation, speaking in a voice fainting and passionate with promise: “Take them. 

I have kept them for you. I give them to you. Oh you will thank me, you will remember me who put into your hands what they say is an attribute only of God’s, who took what belongs to heaven and gave it to you. Do you feel them? the long true barrels true as justice, the triggers (you have fired them) quick as retribution, the two of them slender and invincible and fatal as the physical shape of love?” Again I watched her arms angle out and upward as she removed the two verbena sprigs from her hair in two motions faster than the eye could follow, already putting one of them into my lapel and crushing the other in her other hand while she still spoke in that rapid passionate voice not much louder than a whisper: “There. 

One I give to you to wear tomorrow (it will not fade), the other I cast away, like this—” dropping the crushed bloom at her feet. “I abjure it. I abjure verbena forever more; I have smelled it above the odor of courage; that was all I wanted. Now let me look at you.” She stood back, staring at me—the face tearless and exalted, the feverish eyes brilliant and voracious.

“How beautiful you are: do you know it? How beautiful: young, to be permitted to kill, to be permitted vengeance, to take into your bare hands the fire of heaven that cast down Lucifer. No; I. I gave it to you; I put it into your hands; Oh you will thank me, you will remember me when I am dead and you are an old man saying to himself, ‘I have tasted all things.’—It will be the right hand, won’t it?” She moved; she had taken my right hand which still held one of the pistols before I knew what she was about to do; she had bent and kissed it before I comprehended why she took it. 

Then she stopped dead still, still stooping in that attitude of fierce exultant humility, her hot lips and her hot hands still touching my flesh, light on my flesh as dead leaves yet communicating to it that battery charge dark, passionate and damned forever of all peace. Because they are wise, women are—a touch, lips or fingers, and the knowledge, even clairvoyance, goes straight to the heart without bothering the laggard brain at all. She stood erect now, staring at me with intolerable and amazed incredulity which occupied her face alone for a whole minute while her eyes were completely empty; it seemed to me that I stood there for a full minute while Aunt Jenny and Louvinia watched us, waiting for her eyes to fill. 

There was no blood in her face at all, her mouth open a little and pale as one of those rubber rings women seal fruit jars with. Then her eyes filled with an expression of bitter and passionate betrayal. “Why, he’s not—” she said. “He’s not—And I kissed his hand,” she said in an aghast whisper; “I kissed his hand!” beginning to laugh, the laughter rising, becoming a scream yet still remaining laughter, screaming with laughter, trying herself to deaden the sound by putting her hand over her mouth, the laughter spilling between her fingers like vomit, the incredulous betrayed eyes still watching me across the hand.

“Louvinia!” Aunt Jenny said. They both came to her. Louvinia touched and held her and Drusilla turned her face to Louvinia.

“I kissed his hand, Louvinia!” she cried. “Did you see it? I kissed his hand!” the laughter rising again, becoming the scream again yet still remaining laughter, she still trying to hold it back with her hand like a small child who has filled its mouth too full.

“Take her upstairs,” Aunt Jenny said. But they were already moving toward the door, Louvinia half-carrying Drusilla, the laughter diminishing as they neared the door as though it waited for the larger space of the empty and brilliant hall to rise again. Then it was gone; Aunt Jenny and I stood there and I knew soon that I would begin to pant. I could feel it beginning like you feel regurgitation beginning, as though there were not enough air in the room, the house, not enough air anywhere under the heavy hot low sky where the equinox couldn’t seem to accomplish, nothing in the air for breathing, for the lungs. Now it was Aunt Jenny who said “Bayard” twice before I heard her. “You are not going to try to kill him. All right.”

“All right?” I said.
“Yes. All right. Don’t let it be Drusilla, a poor hysterical young woman. And don’t let it be him, Bayard, because he’s dead now. And don’t let it be George Wyatt and those others who will be waiting for you tomorrow morning. I know you are not afraid.”

“But what good will that do?” I said. “What good will that-do?” It almost began then; I stopped it just in time. “I must live with myself, you see.”
“Then it’s not just Drusilla? Not just him? Not just George Wyatt and Jefferson?”

“No,” I said.

“Will you promise to let me see you before you go to town tomorrow?” I looked at her; we looked at one another for a moment. Then she put her hands on my shoulders and kissed me and released me, all in one motion. “Goodnight, son,” she said. Then she was gone too and now it could begin. I knew that in a minute I would look at him and it would begin and I did look at him, feeling the long-held breath, the hiatus before it started, thinking how maybe I should have said, “Goodbye, Father” but did not. 

Instead I crossed to the piano and laid the pistols carefully on it, still keeping the panting from getting too loud too soon. Then I was outside on the porch and (I don’t know how long it had been) I looked in the window and saw Simon squatting on a stool beside him. Simon had been his body servant during the War and when they came home Simon had a uniform too—a Confederate private’s coat with a Yankee brigadier’s star on it and he had put it on now too, like they had dressed Father, squatting on the stool beside him, not crying, not weeping the facile tears which are the white man’s futile trait and which Negroes know nothing about but just sitting there, motionless, his lower lip slacked down a little; he raised his hand and touched the coffin, the black hand rigid and fragile-looking as a clutch of dead twigs, then dropped the hand; once he turned his head and I saw his eyes roll red and unwinking in his skull like those of a cornered fox. 

It had begun by that time; I panted, standing there, and this was it—the regret and grief, the despair out of which the tragic mute insensitive bones stand up that can bear anything, anything.

4

After a while the whippoorwills stopped and I heard the first day bird, a mockingbird. It had sung all night too but now it was the day song, no longer the drowsy moony fluting. Then they all began—the sparrows from the stable, the thrush that lived in Aunt Jenny’s garden, and I heard a quail too from the pasture and now there was light in the room. But I didn’t move at once. I still lay on the bed (I hadn’t undressed) with my hands under my head and the scent of Drusilla’s verbena faint from where my coat lay on a chair, watching the light grow, watching it turn rosy with the sun. 

After a while I heard Louvinia come up across the back yard and go into the kitchen; I heard the door and then the long crash of her armful of stovewood into the box. Soon they would begin to arrive—the carriages and buggies in the drive-but not for a while yet because they too would wait first to see what I was going to do. 

So the house was quiet when I went down to the diningroom, no sound in it except Simon snoring in the parlor, probably still sitting on the stool though I didn’t look in to see. Instead I stood at the diningroom window and drank the coffee which Louvinia brought me, then I went to the stable; I saw Joby watching me from the kitchen door as I crossed the yard and in the stable Loosh looked up at me across Betsy’s head, a curry comb in his hand, though Ringo didn’t look at me at all. 

We curried Jupiter then. I didn’t know if we would be able to without trouble or not, since always Father would come in first and touch him and tell him to stand and he would stand like a marble horse (or pale bronze rather) while Loosh curried him. But he stood for me too, a little restive but he stood, then that was done and now it was almost nine o’clock and soon they would begin to arrive and I told Ringo to bring Betsy on to the house.

I went on to the house and into the hall. I had not had to pant in some time now but it was there, waiting, a part of the alteration, as though by being dead and no longer needing air he had taken all of it, all that he had compassed and claimed and postulated between the walls which he had built, along with him. Aunt Jenny must have been waiting; she came out of the diningroom at once, without a sound, dressed, the hair that was like Father’s combed and smooth above the eyes that were different from Father’s eyes because they were not intolerant but just intent and grave and (she was wise too) without pity. “Are you going now?” she said.

“Yes.” I looked at her. Yes, thank God, without pity. “You see, I want to be thought well of.”
“I do,” she said. “Even if you spend the day hidden in the stable loft, I still do.”
“Maybe if she knew that I was going. Was going to town anyway.”

“No,” she said. “No, Bayard.” We looked at one another. Then she said quietly, “All right. She’s awake.” So I mounted the stairs. I mounted steadily, not fast because if I had gone fast the panting would have started again or I might have had to slow for a second at the turn or at the top and I would not have gone on. 

So I went slowly and steadily, across the hall to her door and knocked and opened it. 

She was sitting at the window, in something soft and loose for morning in her bedroom only she never did look like morning in a bedroom because here was no hair to fall about her shoulders. She looked up, she sat there looking at me with her feverish brilliant eyes and I remembered I still had the verbena sprig in my lapel and suddenly she began to laugh again. 

It seemed to come not from her mouth but to burst out all over her face like sweat does and with a dreadful and painful convulsion as when you have vomited until it hurts you yet still you must vomit again—burst out all over her face except her eyes, the brilliant incredulous eyes looking at me out of the laughter as if they belonged to somebody else, as if they were two inert fragments of tar or coal lying on the bottom of a receptacle filled with turmoil: “I kissed his hand! I kissed his hand!” Louvinia entered, Aunt Jenny must have sent her directly after me; again I walked slowly and steadily so it would not start yet, down the stairs where Aunt Jenny stood beneath the chandelier in the hall as Mrs. Wilkins had stood yesterday at the University. She had my hat in her hand. “Even if you hid all day in the stable, Bayard,” she said. 

I took the hat; she said quietly, pleasantly, as if she were talking to a stranger, a guest: “I used to see a lot of blockade runners in Charleston. They were heroes in a way, you see—not heroes because they were helping to prolong the Confederacy but heroes in the sense that David Crockett or John Sevier would have been to small boys or fool young women. 

There was one of them, an Englishman. He had no business there; it was the money of course, as with all of them. But he was the Davy Crockett to us because by that time we had all forgot what money was, what you could do with it. He must have been a gentleman once or associated with gentlemen before he changed his name, and he had a vocabulary of seven words, though I must admit he got along quite well with them. 

The first four were, ‘I’ll have rum, thanks,’ and then, when he had the rum, he would use the other three—across the champagne, to whatever ruffled bosom or low gown: ‘No bloody moon.’ No bloody moon, Bayard.”

Ringo was waiting with Betsy at the front steps. Again he did not look at me, his face sullen, downcast even while he handed me the reins. But he said nothing, nor did I look back. And sure enough I was just in time; I passed the Compson carriage at the gates, General Compson lifted his hat as I did mine as we passed. It was four miles to town but I had not gone two of them when I heard the horse coming up behind me and I did not look back because I knew it was Ringo. 

I did not look back; he came up on one of the carriage horses, he rode up beside me and looked me full in the face for one moment, the sullen determined face, the eyes rolling at me defrant and momentary and red; we rode on. 

Now we were in town—the long shady street leading to the square, the new courthouse at the end of it; it was eleven o’clock now: long past breakfast and not yet noon so there were only women on the street, not to recognize me perhaps or at least not the walking stopped sudden and dead in midwalking as if the legs contained the sudden eyes, the caught breath, that not to begin until we reached the square and I thinking If I could only be invisible until I reach the stairs to his office and begin to mount. 

But I could not, I was not; we rode up to the Holston House and I saw the row of feet along the gallery rail come suddenly and quietly down and I did not look at them, I stopped Betsy and waited until Ringo was down then I dismounted and gave him the reins. “Wait for me here,” I said.

“I’m going with you,” he said, not loud; we stood there under the still circumspect eyes and spoke quietly to one another like two conspirators. Then I saw the pistol, the outline of it inside his shirt, probably the one we had taken from Grumby that day we killed him.

“No you ain’t,” I said.
“Yes I am.”

“No you ain’t.” So I walked on, along the street in the hot sun. It was almost noon now and I could smell nothing except the verbena in my coat, as if it had gathered all the sun, all the suspended fierce heat in which the equinox could not seem to occur and were distilling it so that I moved in a cloud of verbena as I might have moved in a cloud of smoke from a cigar. Then George Wyatt was beside me (I don’t know where he came from) and five or six others of Father’s old troop a few yards behind, George’s hand on my arm, drawing me into a doorway out of the avid eyes like caught breaths.

“Have you got that derringer?” George said.
“No,” I said.

“Good,” George said. “They are tricky things to fool with. Couldn’t nobody but Colonel ever handle one right; I never could. So you take this. I tried it this morning and I know it’s right. Here.” 

He was already fumbling the pistol into my pocket, then the same thing seemed to happen to him that happened to Drusilla last night when she kissed my hand—something communicated by touch straight to the simple code by which he lived, without going through the brain at all: so that he too stood suddenly back, the pistol in his hand, staring at me with his pale outraged eyes and speaking in a whisper thin with fury: “Who are ou? Is your name Sartoris? By God, if you don’t kill him, I’m going to.” 

Now it was not panting, it was a terrible desire to laugh, to laugh as Drusilla had, and say, “That’s what Drusilla said.” But I didn’t. I said,
“I’m tending to this. You stay out of it. I don’t need any help.” Then his fierce eyes faded gradually, exactly as you turn a lamp down.

“Well,” he said, putting the pistol back into his pocket. “You’ll have to excuse me, son. I should have knowed you wouldn’t do anything that would keep John from laying quiet. We’ll follow you and wait at the foot of the steps. 

And remember: he’s a brave man, but he’s been sitting in that office by himself since yesterday morning waiting for you and his nerves are on edge.”
“I’ll remember,” I said. “I don’t need any help.” I had started on when suddenly I said it without having any warning that I was going to: “No bloody moon.”

“What?” he said. I didn’t answer. I went on across the square itself now, in the hot sun, they following though not close so that I never saw them again until afterward, surrounded by the remote still eyes not following me yet either, just stopped where they were before the stores and about the door to the courthouse, waiting. I walked steadily on enclosed in the now fierce odor of the verbena sprig. 

Then shadow fell upon me; I did not pause, I looked once at the small faded sign nailed to the brick B. J. Redmond. Atty at Law and began to mount the stairs, the wooden steps scuffed by the heavy bewildered boots of countrymen approaching litigation and stained by tobacco spit, on down the dim corridor to the door which bore the name again, B. J. Redmond and knocked once and opened it. 

He sat behind the desk, not much taller than Father but thicker as a man gets who spends most of his time sitting and listening to people, freshly shaven and with fresh linen; a lawyer yet it was not a lawyer’s face—a face much thinner than the body would indicate, strained (and yes, tragic; I know that now) and exhausted beneath the neat recent steady strokes of the razor, holding a pistol flat on the desk before him, loose beneath his hand and aimed at nothing. 

There was no smell of drink, not even of tobacco in the neat clean dingy room although I knew he smoked. I didn’t pause. I walked steadily toward him. It was not twenty feet from door to desk yet I seemed to walk in a dreamlike state in which there was neither time nor distance, as though the mere act of walking was no more intended to encompass space than was his sitting. 

We didn’t speak. It was as if we both knew what the passage of words would be and the futility of it; how he might have said, “Go out, Bayard. Go away, boy” and then, “Draw then. I will allow you to draw” and it would have been the same as if he had never said it. So we did not speak; I just walked steadily toward him as the pistol rose from the desk. 

I watched it, I could see the foreshortened slant of the barrel and I knew it would miss me though his hand did not tremble. I walked toward him, toward the pistol in the rocklike hand, I heard no bullet. 

Maybe I didn’t even hear the explosion though I remember the sudden orange bloom and smoke as they appeared against his white shirt as they had appeared against Grumby’s greasy Confederate coat; I still watched that foreshortened slant of barrel which I knew was not aimed at me and saw the second orange flash and smoke and heard no bullet that time either. Then I stopped; it was done then. 

I watched the pistol descend to the desk in short jerks; I saw him release it and sit back, both hands on the desk, I looked at his face and I knew too what it was to want air when there was nothing in the circumambience for the lungs. 

He rose, shoved the chair back with a convulsive motion and rose, with a queer ducking motion of his head; with his head still ducked aside and one arm extended as though he couldn’t see and the other hand resting on the desk as if he couldn’t stand alone, he turned and crossed to the wall and took his hat from the rack and with his head still ducked aside and one hand extended he blundered along the wall and passed me and reached the door and went through it. 

He was brave; no one denied that. He walked down those stairs and out onto the street where George Wyatt and the other six of Father’s old troop waited and where the other men had begun to run now; he walked through the middle of them with his hat on and his head up (they told me how someone shouted at him: “Have you killed that boy too?”), saying no word, staring straight ahead and with his back to them, on to the station where the south-bound train was just in and got on it with no baggage, nothing, and went away from Jefferson and from Mississippi and never came back.

I heard their feet on the stairs then in the corridor then in the room, but for a while yet (it wasn’t that long, of course) I still sat behind the desk as he had sat, the flat of the pistol still warm under my hand, my hand growing slowly numb between the pistol and my forehead. 

Then I raised my head; the little room was full of men. “My God!” George Wyatt cried. “You took the pistol away from him and then missed him, missed him twice?” 

Then he answered himself—that same rapport for violence which Drusilla had and which in George’s case was actual character judgment: “No; wait. You walked in here without even a pocket knife and let him miss you twice. My God in heaven.” He turned, shouting: “Get to hell out of here! 

You, White, ride out to Sartoris and tell his folks it’s all over and he’s all right. Ride!” So they departed, went away; presently only George was left, watching me with that pale bleak stare which was speculative yet not at all ratiocinative. “Well by God,” he said. “—Do you want a drink?”

“No,” I said. “I’m hungry. I didn’t eat any breakfast.”
“I reckon not, if you got up this morning aiming to do what you did. Come on. We’ll go to the Holston House.”
“No,” I said. “No. Not there.”

“Why not? You ain’t done anything to be ashamed of. I wouldn’t have done it that way, myself. I’d a shot at him once, anyway. But that’s your way or you wouldn’t have done it.”
“Yes,” I said. “I would do it again.”

“Be damned if I would.—You want to come home with me? We’ll have time to eat and then ride out there in time for the——” But I couldn’t do that either.
“No,” I said. “I’m not hungry after all. I think I’ll go home.”

“Don’t you want to wait and ride out with me?”
“No. I’ll go on.”

“You don’t want to stay here, anyway.” He looked around the room again, where the smell of powder smoke still lingered a little, still lay somewhere on the hot dead air though invisible now, blinking a little with his fierce pale unintroverted eyes. “Well by God,” he said again. 

“Maybe you’re right, maybe there has been enough killing in your family without—Come on.” We left the office. I waited at the foot of the stairs and soon Ringo came up with the horses. 

We crossed the square again. There were no feet on the Holston House railing now (it was twelve o’clock) but a group of men stood before the door who raised their hats and I raised mine and Ringo and I rode on.

We did not go fast. Soon it was one, maybe after; the carriages and buggies would begin to leave the square soon, so I turned from the road at the end of the pasture and I sat the mare, trying to open the gate without dismounting, until Ringo dismounted and opened it. 

We crossed the pasture in the hard fierce sun; I could have seen the house now but I didn’t look. Then we were in the shade, the close thick airless shade of the creek bottom; the old rails still lay in the undergrowth where we had built the pen to hide the Yankee mules. Presently I heard the water, then I could see the sunny glints. We dismounted. I lay on my back, I thought Now it can begin again if it wants to. But it did not. 

I went to sleep. I went to sleep almost before I had stopped thinking. I slept for almost five hours and I didn’t dream anything at all yet I waked myself up crying, crying too hard to stop it. 

Ringo was squatting beside me and the sun was gone though there was a bird of some sort still singing somewhere and the whistle of the north-bound evening train sounded and the short broken puffs of starting where it had evidently stopped at our flag station. After a while I began to stop and Ringo brought his hat full of water from the creek but instead I went down to the water myself and bathed my face.

There was still a good deal of light in the pasture, though the whippoorwills had begun, and when we reached the house there was a mockingbird singing in the magnolia, the light song now, the drowsy moony one, and again the moon like the rim print of a heel in wet sand. 

There was just one light in the hall now and so it was all over though I could still smell the flowers even above the verbena in my coat. I had not looked at him again. 

I had started to before I left the house but I did not, I did not see him again and all the pictures we had of him were bad ones because a picture could no more have held him dead than the house could have kept his body. But I didn’t need to see him again because he was there, he would always be there; maybe what Drusilla meant by his dream was not something which he possessed but something which he had bequeathed us which we could never forget, which would even assume the corporeal shape of him whenever any of us, black or white, closed our eyes. 

I went into the house. There was no light in the drawing room except the last of the afterglow which came through the western window where Aunt Jenny’s colored glass was; I was about to go on up stairs when I saw her sitting there beside the window. 

She didn’t call me and I didn’t speak Drusilla’s name, I just went to the door and stood there. “She’s gone,” Aunt Jenny said. “She took the evening train. She has gone to Montgomery, to Dennison.” Denny had been married about a year now; he was living in Montgomery, reading law.

“I see,” I said. “Then she didn’t——” But there wasn’t any use in that either; Jed White must have got there before one o’clock and told them. And besides, Aunt Jenny didn’t answer. She could have lied to me but she didn’t, she said,
“Come here.” I went to her chair. “Kneel down. I can’t see you.”

“Don’t you want the lamp?”

“No. Kneel down.” So I knelt beside the chair. “So you had a perfectly splendid Saturday afternoon, didn’t you? Tell me about it.” Then she put her hands on my shoulders. I watched them come up as though she were trying to stop them; I felt them on my shoulders as if they had a separate life of their own and were trying to do something which for my sake she was trying to restrain, prevent. 

Then she gave up or she was not strong enough because they came up and took my face between them, hard, and suddenly the tears sprang and streamed down her face like Drusilla’s laughing had. “Oh, damn you Sartorises!” she said. “Damn you! Damn you!”

As I passed down the hall the light came up in the diningroom and I could hear Louvinia laying the table for supper. So the stairs were lighted quite well. But the upper hall was dark. I saw her open door (that unmistakable way in which an open door stands open when nobody lives in the room any more) and I realised I had not believed that she was really gone. So I didn’t look into the room. I went on to mine and entered. And then for a long moment I thought it was the verbena in my lapel which I still smelled. 

I thought that until I had crossed the room and looked down at the pillow on which it lay—the single sprig of it (without looking she would pinch off a half dozen of them and they would be all of a size, almost all of a shape, as if a machine had stamped them out) filling the room, the dusk, the evening with that odor which she said you could smell alone above the smell of horses.



The end