The Wild Palms: [If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem]

by William Faulkner

  “Dont move!” the doctor cried.

  “Put that thing down,” the wife said, in that same cold baritone. “I told you not to bring it. Give him the bag if he wants it and can do anything with it.”

  “No!” the doctor cried. “I’m a doctor. He is not. He’s not even a successful criminal!” Now the gray wife spoke to Wilbourne so abruptly that for a moment he did not even know he was being addressed:

  “Is there anything in that bag that would cure her?”

  “Cure her?”

  “Yes. Get her on her feet and get both of you out of this house.” The doctor turned on her now, speaking in that shrill voice on the point of breaking:

  “Cant you understand that this woman is dying?”

  “Let her die. Let them both die. But not in this house. Not in this town. Get them out of here and let them cut on one another and die as much as they please.” Now Wilbourne watched the doctor shaking the pistol in the wife’s face as the other had shaken it in his.

  “I will not be interfered with!” he cried. “This woman is dying and this man must suffer for it.”

  “Suffer fiddlesticks,” the wife said. “You’re mad because he used a scalpel without having a diploma. Or did something with it the Medical Association said he mustn’t. Put that thing down and give her whatever it is so she can get out of that bed. Then give them some money and call a taxi-cab, not an ambulance. Give him some of my money if you wont your own.”

  “Are you mad?” the doctor cried. “Are you insane?” The wife looked at him coldly with her gray face beneath the screws of gray hair.

  “So you will aid and abet him to the last, wont you? I’m not surprised. I never yet saw one man fail to back up another, provided what they wanted to do was just foolish enough.” Again she turned on (not to) Wilbourne with that cold abruptness which for an instant left him unaware that he was being addressed: “You haven’t eaten anything, I imagine. I’m going to heat some coffee. You’ll probably need it by the time he and those others get through with you.”

  “Thank you,” Wilbourne said. “I couldn’t—” But she was already gone. He caught himself about to say, “Wait, I’ll show you” then forgot this without even having to think that she would know the kitchen better than he since she owned it, moving aside as the doctor passed him and went to the bed, following the doctor, watching him set the bag down then seem to discover the pistol in his hand and look about for something to lay it upon before remembering, then remembering and turning over his shoulder his dishevelled face.

  “Dont you move!” he cried. “Dont you dare to move!”

  “Get your stethoscope,” Wilbourne said. “I had thought about something now, but maybe we had better wait. Because she will come out of it once more, wont she? She’ll rally another time. Of course she will. Go on. Get it out.”

  “You should have thought of that before!” The doctor still watched Wilbourne, glaring, still holding the pistol while he fumbled the bag open and extracted the stethoscope; then, still holding the pistol he ducked into the pronged tubes and leaned, seeming to forget the pistol again because he actually laid it on the bed, his hand still resting upon it but unconscious of the pistol, merely supporting his leaning weight, because there was peace in the room now, the fury gone; Wilbourne could now hear the gray wife at the stove in the kitchen and he could hear the black wind again, risible, jeering, constant, inattentive, and it even seemed to him that he could hear the wild dry clashing of the palms in it. Then he heard the ambulance, the first faint mounting wail, far away yet, on the highway from the village, and almost immediately the wife came in, carrying a cup.

  “Here comes your joyride,” she said. “It never had time to get hot. But it will be something in your stomach.”

  “I thank you,” Wilbourne said. “I do thank you. It wouldn’t stay down, you see.”

  “Nonsense. Drink it.”

  “I do thank you.” The ambulance was wailing louder, loud, it was coming fast, it was close now, the wail sinking into a grumble as it slowed, then rising into the wail again. It seemed to be just outside the house, loud and peremptory and with an illusion of speed and haste even though Wilbourne knew it was now merely crawling up the rutted weed-choked lane which led from the highway to the house; this time when it sank to the groan it was just outside the house, the sound now possessing a baffled grunting tone almost like the voice of an animal, a large one, bewildered, maybe even injured. “I do thank you. I realise there is always a certain amount of inevitable cleaning up in vacating a house. It would be foolish to add to it this late.” Now he heard the feet on the porch, hearing them above his heart, the profound strong ceaseless shallow dredging at air, breath on the point of escaping his lungs altogether; now (there was no knock) they were in the hall, the trampling; three men entered, in civilian clothes—a youth with a close cap of curly hair, in a polo shirt and no socks, a neat wiry man of no age and fully dressed even to a pair of horn glasses, pushing a wheeled stretcher, and behind them a third man with the indelible mark of ten thousand Southern deputy sheriffs, urban and suburban—the snapped hat-brim, the sadist’s eyes, the slightly and unmistakably bulged coat, the air not swaggering exactly but of a formally pre-absolved brutality. The two men with the stretcher wheeled it up to the bed in a business-like manner; it was the officer whom the doctor addressed, indicating Wilbourne with his hand, and now Wilbourne knew the other had really forgot that the hand still held the pistol.

  “This is your prisoner,” the doctor said. “I will prefer formal charges against him as soon as we get to town. As soon as I can.”

  “Look out, Doc— Evening, Miss Martha,” the officer said. “Put that thing down. It might go off at any time. That fellow you got it from might of pulled the trigger before he turned it over to you.” The doctor looked at the pistol, then Wilbourne seemed to remember him stowing it methodically into the scuffed bag along with the stethoscope; he just seemed to remember this because he had followed the stretcher to the bed.

  “Easy now,” he said. “Dont rouse her up. She wont—”

  “I’ll take charge of this,” the doctor said, in that weary voice which had become peaceful at last after a fashion, as if it had worn itself out yet which would have, could have risen again at need quick and easy, as if it had renewed itself, renewed the outragement. “This case has been turned over to me, remember that. I didn’t ask for it.” He approached the bed (it was now that Wilbourne seemed to remember him putting the pistol into the bag) and lifted Charlotte’s wrist. “Go as easy with her as you can. But hurry. Doctor Richardson will be there and I will follow in my car.” The two men lifted Charlotte onto the stretcher. It was on rubber-tired wheels; with the hatless youth pushing it seemed to cross the room and vanish into the hall with incredible rapidity, as though sucked there and not pushed (the very wheels making a sucking sound on the floor), by no human agency but by time perhaps, by some vent-pipe through which the irrevocable seconds were fleeing, crowding; even the night itself.

  “All right,” the officer said. “What’s your name? Wilson?”

  “Yes,” Wilbourne said. It went through the hall too that way, sucked through, where the wiry man now had a flashlight; the risible dark wind chuckled and murmured into the open door, leaning its weight against him like a black palpy hand, he leaning into it, onto it. There would be the porch, the steps beyond. “She’s light,” Wilbourne said in a thin anxious voice. “She’s lost a lot of weight lately. I could carry her if they would—”

  “They can too,” the officer said. “Besides, they are being paid for it. Take it easy.”

  “I know. But that short one, that small one with the light—”

  “He saves his strength for this. He likes it. You dont want to hurt his feelings. Take it easy.”

  “Look,” Wilbourne said thinly, murmuring, “why dont you put the handcuffs on me? Why dont you?”

  “Do you want them?” the officer said. And now the stretcher without stopping sucked off the
porch too, into space, still on the same parallel plane as though it possessed displacement perhaps but no weight; it didn’t even pause, the white shirt and trousers of the youth seemed merely to walk behind it as it moved on behind the flashlight, toward the corner of the house, toward what the man from whom he had rented the house called the drive. Now he could hear the threshing of the invisible palms, the wild dry sound of them.

  The hospital was a low building, vaguely Spanish (or Los Angeles), of stucco, almost hidden by a massy lushness of oleander. There were more of the shabby palms too, the ambulance turning in at speed, the siren’s wail dying into the grunting animal-like fall, the tires dry and sibilant in oyster shells; when he emerged from the ambulance he could hear the palms rustling and hissing again as if they were being played upon by a sand-blower and he could smell the sea still, the same black wind, but not so strong since the sea was four miles away, the stretcher coming out fast and smooth again as though sucked out, the feet of the four of them crisp in the dry fragile shells; and now in the corridor he began to blink again at his sanded lids, painfully in the electric light, the stretcher sucking on, the wheels whispering on the linoleum, so that it was between two blinks that he saw that the stretcher was now propelled by two nurses in uniform, a big one and a little one, he thinking how apparently there was no such thing as a matched stretcher team, how apparently all the stretchers in the world must be propelled not by two physical bodies in accord but rather by two matched desires to be present and see what was going on. Then he saw an open door fierce with light, a surgeon already in operating tunic beside it, the stretcher turning in, sucked through the door, the surgeon looking at him once, not with curiosity but as you memorise a face, then turning and following the stretcher as Wilbourne was about to speak to him, the door (it sounded rubber-tired too) clapping to soundlessly in his face, almost slapping his face, the officer at his elbow saying, “Take it easy.” Then there was another nurse; he had not heard her, she did not look at him at all, speaking briefly to the officer. “Okay,” the officer said. He touched Wilbourne’s elbow. “Straight ahead. Just take it easy.”

  “But let me—”

  “Sure. Just take it easy.” It was another door, the nurse turning and stepping aside, her skirts crisp and sibilant too like the oyster shells; she did not look at him at all. They entered, an office, a desk, another man in sterilised cap and tunic seated at the desk with a blank form and a fountain pen. He was older than the first one. He did not look at Wilbourne either.

  “Name?” he said.

  “Charlotte Rittenmeyer.”

  “Miss?”

  “Mistress.” The man at the desk wrote on the pad.

  “Husband?”

  “Yes.”

  “Name?”

  “Francis Rittenmeyer.” Then he told the address too. The pen flowed, smooth and crisp. Now it’s the fountain pen I cant breathe in Wilbourne thought. “Can I—”

  “He will be notified.” Now the man at the desk looked up at him. He wore glasses, the pupils behind them distorted slightly and perfectly impersonal. “How do you account for it? Instruments not clean?”

  “They were clean.”

  “You think so.”

  “I know it.”

  “Your first attempt?”

  “No. Second.”

  “Other one come off? But you wouldn’t know.”

  “Yes. I know. It did.”

  “Then how do you account for this failure?” He could have answered that: I loved her. He could have said it: A miser would probably bungle the blowing of his own safe too. Should have called in a professional, a cracksman who didn’t care, didn’t love the very iron flanks that held the money. So he said nothing at all, and after a moment the man at the desk looked down and wrote again, the pen travelling smoothly across the card. He said, still writing, without looking up: “Wait outside.”

  “I aint to take him in now?” the officer said.

  “No.” The man at the desk still did not look up.

  “Couldn’t I—” Wilbourne said. “Will you let.……” The pen stopped, but for a time longer the man at the desk looked at the card, perhaps reading what he had written. Then he looked up.

  “Why? She wouldn’t know you.”

  “But she might come back. Rouse one more time. So I could—we could.…” The other looked at him. The eyes were cold. They were not impatient, not quite palpably patient. They merely waited until Wilbourne’s voice ceased. Then the man at the desk spoke:

  “Do you think she will—Doctor?” For a moment Wilbourne blinked painfully at the neat scrawled card beneath the day-colored desk lamp, the clean surgeon’s hand holding the uncapped pen beside it.

  “No,” he said quietly. The man at the desk looked down again, at the card too since the hand holding the pen moved to it and wrote again.

  “You will be notified.” Now he spoke to the officer, not looking up, writing steadily: “That’s all.”

  “I better get him out of here before that husband blows in with a gun or something, hadn’t I, Doc?” the officer said.

  “You will be notified,” the man at the desk repeated without looking up.

  “All right, Jack,” the officer said. There was a bench, slotted and hard, like in old-time open trolley cars. From it he could see the rubber-tired door. It was blank, it looked final and impregnable as an iron portcullis; he saw with a kind of amazement that even from this angle it hung in its frame by only one side, lightly, so that for three-quarters of its circumference there was an unbroken line of Klieg light. But she might he thought. She might. “Jesus,” the officer said. He held an unlighted cigarette in his hand now (Wilbourne had felt the movement against his elbow). “—Jesus, you played—What did you say your name was? Webster?”

  “Yes,” Wilbourne said. I could get there. I could trip him if necessary and get there. Because I would know. I would. Surely They would not

  “You played hell, didn’t you. Using a knife. I’m old fashioned; the old way still suits me. I dont want variety.”

  “Yes,” Wilbourne said. There was no wind in here, no sound of it, though it seemed to him that he could smell, if not the sea, at least the dry and stubborn lingering of it in the oyster shells in the drive: and then suddenly the corridor became full of sound, the myriad minor voices of human fear and travail which he knew, remembered—the carbolised vacuums of linoleum and rubber soles like wombs into which human beings fled before something of suffering but mostly of terror, to surrender in little monastic cells all the burden of lust and desires and pride, even that of functional independence, to become as embryos for a time yet retaining still a little of the old incorrigible earthly corruption—the light sleeping at all hours, the boredom, the wakeful and fretful ringing of little bells between the hours of midnight and the dead slowing of dawn (finding perhaps at least this good use for the cheap money with which the world was now glutted and cluttered); this for a while, then to be born again, to emerge renewed, to bear the world’s weight for another while as long as courage lasted. He could hear them up and down the corridor—the tinkle of the bells, the immediate sibilance of rubber heels and starched skirts, the querulous murmur of voices about nothing. He knew it well: and now still another nurse came down the hall, already looking full at him, slowing as she passed, looking at him, her head turning as she went on like an owl’s head, her eyes quite wide and filled with something beyond just curiosity and not at all shrinking or horror, going on. The officer was running his tongue around inside his teeth as though seeking the remnants of food; possibly he had been eating somewhere when the call came. He still held the unlighted cigarette.

  “These doctors and nurses,” he said. “What a fellow hears about hospitals. I wonder if there’s as much laying goes on in them as you hear about.”

  “No,” Wilbourne said. “There never is any place.”

  “That’s so. But you think of a place like a hospital. All full of beds every which way you turn. And all the other folks
flat on their backs where they cant bother you. And after all doctors and nurses are men and women. And smart enough to take care of themselves or they wouldn’t be doctors and nurses. You know how it is. How you think.”

  “Yes,” Wilbourne said. “You’ve just told me.” Because after all he thought They are gentlemen. They must be. They are stronger than we are. Above all this. Above clowning. They dont need to be anything else but gentlemen And now the second doctor or surgeon—the one of the fountain pen—came out of the office and down the corridor, the skirts of his tunic sucking and snicking behind him too. He did not look at Wilbourne at all, even when Wilbourne, watching his face, rose as he passed and stepped toward him, about to speak, the officer rising hurriedly too, surging up. Then the doctor merely paused long enough to look back at the officer with one cold brief irascible glance through the glasses.

  “Aren’t you in charge of this man?” he said.

  “Sure, Doc,” the officer said.

  “Then what’s the trouble?”

  “Come on now, Watson,” the officer said. “Take it easy, I tell you.” The doctor turned; he had scarcely paused even. “How about smoking, Doc?” The doctor didn’t answer at all. He went on, his smock flicking. “Come on here,” the officer said. “Sit down before you get yourself in a jam or something.” Again the door went inward on its rubber tires and returned, clapped silently to with that iron finality and that illusion of iron impregnability which was so false since even from here he could see how it swung in its frame by one side only, so that a child, a breath, could move it. “Listen,” the officer said. “Just take it easy. They’ll fix her up. That was Doc Richardson himself. They brought a sawmill nigger in here couple three years ago where somebody hit him across the guts with a razor in a crap game. Well, what does Doc Richardson do, opens him up, cuts out the bad guts, sticks the two ends together like you’d vulcanise an inner tube, and the nigger’s back at work right now. Of course he aint got but one gut and it aint but two feet long so he has to run for the bushes almost before he quits chewing. But he’s all right. Doc’ll fix her up the same way. Aint that better than nothing? Huh?”