The Essential Faulkner

by William Faulkner

  “Little toddy before we start?” Mr. Hubert said.

  “I don’t drink,” Uncle Buddy said.

  “That’s right,” Mr. Hubert said. “I knew there was something else besides just being woman-weak that makes ’Filus seem human. But no matter.” He batted his eyes twice at Uncle Buddy. “Buck McCaslin against the land and niggers you have heard me promise as Sophonsiba’s dowry on the day she marries. If I beat you, ’Filus marries Sibbey without any dowry. If you beat me, you get ’Filus. But I still get the three hundred dollars ’Filus owes me for Tennie. Is that correct?”

  “That’s correct,” Uncle Buddy said.

  “Stud,” Mr. Hubert said. “One hand. You to shuffle, me to cut, this boy to deal.”

  “No,” Uncle Buddy said. “Not Cass. He’s too young. I don’t want him mixed up in any gambling.”

  “Hah,” Mr. Hubert said. “It’s said that a man playing cards with Amodeus McCaslin ain’t gambling. But no matter.” But he was still looking at Uncle Buddy; he never even turned his head when he spoke: “Go to the back door and holler. Bring the first creature that answers, animal mule or human, that can deal ten cards.”

  So he went to the back door. But he didn’t have to call because Tomey’s Turl was squatting against the wall just outside the door, and they returned to the dining-room where Mr. Hubert still sat with his arms folded on his side of the table and Uncle Buddy sat with his hands in his lap on his side and the deck of cards face-down under the lamp between them. Neither of them even looked up when he and Tomey’s Turl entered. “Shuffle,” Mr. Hubert said. Uncle Buddy shuffled and set the cards back under the lamp and put his hands back into his lap and Mr. Hubert cut the deck and folded his arms back onto the table-edge. “Deal,” he said. Still neither he nor Uncle Buddy looked up. They just sat there while Tomey’s Turl’s saddle-colored hands came into the light and took up the deck and dealt, one card face-down to Mr. Hubert and one face-down to Uncle Buddy, and one face-up to Mr. Hubert and it was a king, and one face-up to Uncle Buddy and it was a six.

  “Buck McCaslin against Sibbey’s dowry,” Mr. Hubert said. “Deal.” And the hand dealt Mr. Hubert a card and it was a three, and Uncle Buddy a card and it was a two. Mr. Hubert looked at Uncle Buddy. Uncle Buddy rapped once with his knuckles on the table.

  “Deal,” Mr. Hubert said. And the hand dealt Mr. Hubert a card and it was another three, and Uncle Buddy a card and it was a four. Mr. Hubert looked at Uncle Buddy’s cards. Then he looked at Uncle Buddy and Uncle Buddy rapped on the table again with his knuckles.

  “Deal,” Mr. Hubert said, and the hand dealt him an ace and Uncle Buddy a five and now Mr. Hubert just sat still. He didn’t look at anything or move for a whole minute; he just sat there and watched Uncle Buddy put one hand onto the table for the first time since he shuffled and pinch up one corner of his face-down card and look at it and then put his hand back into his lap. “Check,” Mr. Hubert said.

  “I’ll bet you them two niggers,” Uncle Buddy said. He didn’t move either. He sat there just like he sat in the wagon or on a horse or in the rocking chair he cooked from.

  “Against what?” Mr. Hubert said.

  “Against the three hundred dollars Theophilus owes you for Tennie, and the three hundred you and Theophilus agreed on for Tomey’s Turl,” Uncle Buddy said.

  “Hah,” Mr. Hubert said, only it wasn’t loud at all this time, nor even short. Then he said “Hah. Hah. Hah” and not loud either. Then he said, “Well.” Then he said, “Well, well.” Then he said: “We’ll check up for a minute. If I win, you take Sibbey without dowry and the two niggers, and I don’t owe ’Filus anything. If you win—–”

  “—Theophilus is free. And you owe him the three hundred dollars for Tomey’s Turl,” Uncle Buddy said.

  “That’s just if I call you,” Mr. Hubert said. “If I don’t call you, ’Filus won’t owe me nothing and I won’t owe ’Filus nothing, unless I take that nigger which I have been trying to explain to you and him both for years that I won’t have on my place. We will be right back where all this foolishness started from, except for that. So what it comes down to is, I either got to give a nigger away, or risk buying one that you done already admitted you can’t keep at home.” Then he stopped talking. For about a minute it was like he and Uncle Buddy had both gone to sleep. Then Mr. Hubert picked up his face-down card and turned it over. It was another three, and Mr. Hubert sat there without looking at anything at all, his fingers beating a tattoo, slow and steady and not very loud, on the table. “H’m,” he said. “And you need a trey and there ain’t but four of them and I already got three. And you just shuffled. And I cut afterward. And if I call you, I will have to buy that nigger. Who dealt these cards, Amodeus?” Only he didn’t wait to be answered. He reached out and tilted the lamp-shade, the light moving up Tomey’s Turl’s arms that were supposed to be black but were not quite white, up his Sunday shirt that was supposed to be white but wasn’t quite either, that he put on every time he ran away just as Uncle Buck put on the necktie each time he went to bring him back, and on to his face; and Mr. Hubert sat there, holding the lampshade and looking at Tomey’s Turl. Then he tilted the shade back down and took up his cards and turned them face-down and pushed them toward the middle of the table. “I pass, Amodeus,” he said.

  III

  He was still too worn out for sleep to sit on a horse, so this time he and Uncle Buddy and Tennie all three rode in the wagon, while Tomey’s Turl led the pony from old Jake. And when they got home just after daylight, this time Uncle Buddy never even had time to get breakfast started and the fox never even got out of the crate, because the dogs were right there in the room. Old Moses went right into the crate with the fox, so that both of them went right on through the back end of it. That is, the fox went through, because when Uncle Buddy opened the door to come in, old Moses was still wearing most of the crate around his neck until Uncle Buddy kicked it off of him. So they just made one run, across the front gallery and around the house and they could hear the fox’s claws when he went scrabbling up the lean-pole, onto the roof—a fine race while it lasted, but the tree was too quick.

  “What in damn’s hell do you mean,” Uncle Buddy said, “casting that damn thing with all the dogs right in the same room?”

  “Damn the fox,” Uncle Buck said. “Go on and start breakfast. It seems to me I’ve been away from home a whole damn month.”

  2

  THE UNVANQUISHED

  Editor’s Note

  The Chickasaws moved westward to Oklahoma in President Jackson’s time. Only a few of them adopted the white man’s ways and stayed behind, as dependents of a half-French chieftain named François Vidal (or Frank Weddel), who turned the last of their land into a rich plantation. The Man remained with this branch of the tribe, losing his theocratic honors and becoming a sort of plantation overseer. There was only Sam Fathers—Had-Two-Fathers—living in the slave quarters, who was faithful to the old customs of the tribe.

  Uncle Buck McCaslin married Miss Sophonsiba. When the war came, Uncle Buck and Uncle Buddy played three hands of poker to see which of them would enlist. Uncle Buck lost and stayed at home with his wife, while Uncle Buddy went off to Virginia, as a sergeant in the regiment raised and commanded by Colonel John Sartoris. In Virginia, the regiment held a new election of officers and Colonel Sartoris was demoted to major; Thomas Sutpen took over his command. Sartoris resigned from the regiment and came home to lead an irregular troop of cavalry attached to General Forrest’s highly irregular army.

  Of the three stories in this section, “Raid” and “An Odor of Verbena” are both taken from The Unvanquished (1938), the novel or connected series of stories that Faulkner devotes to the Sartoris clan in the Civil War and reconstruction. Faulkner always turns romantic when writing about the Sartorises. He says of the family name, in one of his most overwritten sentences, “There is death in the sound of it, and a glamorous fatality, like silver pennons downrushing at sunset or a dying fall of horns along th
e road to Roncevaux.” And yet, in “An Odor of Verbena,” he is pretty hard and unsentimental about the character of Colonel John Sartoris, who happens to be one of the few figures in his novels copied from a historical person. His prototype was Colonel William Falkner, the author’s great-grandfather, who organized and for a time commanded the Second Mississippi Infantry, who built the first railroad in his section, who wrote several books (including one successful novel, The White Rose of Memphis), and who was killed in a duel.

  “Wash,” the second story in this section, describes the death of Colonel Sutpen. Its first book publication was in Doctor Martino and Other Stories (1934). At that time Faulkner was working on a whole cycle of stories about poor whites and backwoods farmers, in preparation for writing his novel The Hamlet; but he found that “Wash” didn’t belong in the cycle. It seems to have been the germ out of which developed another novel, Absalom, Absalom!

  1864

  Raid

  I

  Granny Millard wrote the note with pokeberry juice. “Take it straight to Mrs. Compson and come straight back,” she said to me and Ringo. “Don’t you-all stop anywhere.”

  “You mean we got to walk?” Ringo said. “You gonter make us walk all them four miles to Jefferson and back, with them two horses standing in the lot doing nothing?”

  “They are borrowed horses,” Granny said. “I’m going to take care of them until I can return them.”

  “I reckon you calls starting out to be gone you don’t know where and you don’t know how long taking care of—–” Ringo said.

  Louvinia was standing there; she was Joby’s wife and Ringo’s grandmother. “Do you want me to whup you?” she said.

  “Nome,” Ringo said.

  We walked to Jefferson and gave Mrs. Compson the note, and got the hat and the parasol and the hand mirror, and walked back home. That afternoon we greased the wagon, and that night after supper Granny got the pokeberry juice again and wrote on a scrap of paper, “Colonel Nathaniel G. Dick, —–th Ohio Cavalry,” and folded it and pinned it inside her dress. “Now I won’t forget it,” she said.

  “If you was to, I reckon these hellion boys can remind you,” Louvinia said. “I reckon they ain’t forgot him. Walking in that door just in time to keep them others from snatching them out from under your dress and nailing them to the barn door like two coon hides.”

  “Yes,” Granny said. “Now we’ll go to bed.”

  Now that the house was burned, we lived in Joby’s cabin, with a red quilt nailed by one edge to a rafter and hanging down to make two rooms. Joby was waiting with the wagon when Granny came out with Mrs. Compson’s hat on, and got into the wagon and told Ringo to open the parasol and took up the reins. Then we all stopped and watched Joby stick something into the wagon beneath the quilts; it was the barrel and the iron parts of the musket that Ringo and I found in the ashes of the house.

  “What’s that?” Granny said. Joby didn’t look at her.

  “Maybe if they just seed the end of hit they mought think hit was the whole gun,” he said.

  “Then what?” Granny said. Joby didn’t look at anybody now.

  “I was just doing what I could to help git the silver and the mules back,” he said.

  Louvinia didn’t say anything either. She and Granny just looked at Joby. After a while he dug beneath the quilts again and took the musket barrel out of the wagon. Granny gathered up the reins.

  “Take him with you,” Louvinia said. “Leastways he can tend the horses.”

  “No,” Granny said. “Don’t you see I have got about all I can look after now?”

  “Then you stay here and lemme go,” Louvinia said. “I’ll git um back.”

  “No,” Granny said. “I’ll be all right. I shall inquire until I find Colonel Dick, and then we will load the chest in the wagon and Loosh can lead the mules and we will come back home.”

  Louvinia stood there holding to the wagon wheel and looked at Granny from under Father’s old hat, and began to holler.

  “Don’t you waste no time on colonels or nothing!” she hollered. “You tell them niggers to send Loosh to you, and you tell him to get that chest and them mules, and then you whup him!” The wagon was moving now; she had turned loose the wheel, and she walked along beside it, hollering at Granny: “Take that pairsawl and wear hit out on him!”

  “All right,” Granny said. The wagon went on; we passed the ash pile and the chimneys standing up out of it; Ringo and I found the insides of the big clock too. The sun was just coming up, shining back on the chimneys; I could still see Louvinia between them, standing in front of the cabin, shading her eyes with her hand to watch us. Joby was still standing behind her, holding the musket barrel. They had broken the gates clean off; and then we were in the road.

  “Don’t you want me to drive?” I said.

  “I’ll drive,” Granny said. “These are borrowed horses.”

  “Case even Yankee could look at um and tell they couldn’t keep up with even a walking army,” Ringo said. “And I like to know how anybody can hurt this team lessen he ain’t got strength enough to keep um from laying down in the road and getting run over with they own wagon.”

  We drove until dark, and camped. By sunup we were on the road again. “You better let me drive a while,” I said.

  “I’ll drive,” Granny said. “I was the one who borrowed them.”

  “You can tote this pairsawl a while, if you want something to do,” Ringo said. “And give my arm a rest.” I took the parasol and he laid down in the wagon and put his hat over his eyes. “Call me when we gitting nigh to Hawkhurst,” he said, “so I can commence to look out for that railroad you tells about.”

  That was how he travelled for the next six days—lying on his back in the wagon bed with his hat over his eyes, sleeping, or taking his turn holding the parasol over Granny and keeping me awake by talking of the railroad which he had never seen though I had seen it that Christmas we spent at Hawkhurst. That’s how Ringo and I were. We were almost the same age, and Father always said that Ringo was a little smarter than I was, but that didn’t count with us, any more than the difference in the color of our skins counted. What counted was, what one of us had done or seen that the other had not, and ever since that Christmas I had been ahead of Ringo because I had seen a railroad, a locomotive. Only I know now it was more than that with Ringo, though neither of us were to see the proof of my belief for some time yet and we were not to recognize it as such even then. It was as if Ringo felt it too and that the railroad, the rushing locomotive which he hoped to see symbolized it—the motion, the impulse to move which had already seethed to a head among his people, darker than themselves, reasonless, following and seeking a delusion, a dream, a bright shape which they could not know since there was nothing in their heritage, nothing in the memory even of the old men to tell the others, “This is what we will find”; he nor they could not have known what it was yet it was there—one of those impulses inexplicable yet invincible which appear among races of people at intervals and drive them to pick up and leave all security and familiarity of earth and home and start out, they don’t know where, emptyhanded, blind to everything but a hope and a doom.

  We went on; we didn’t go fast. Or maybe it seemed slow because we had got into a country where nobody seemed to live at all; all that day we didn’t even see a house. I didn’t ask and Granny didn’t say; she just sat there under the parasol with Mrs. Compson’s hat on and the horses walking and even our own dust moving ahead of us; after a while even Ringo sat up and looked around.

  “We on the wrong road,” he said. “Ain’t even nobody live here, let alone pass here.”

  But after a while the hills stopped, the road ran out flat and straight; and all of a sudden Ringo hollered, “Look out! Here they come again to git these uns!” We saw it, too, then—a cloud of dust away to the west, moving slow—too slow for men riding—and then the road we were on ran square into a big broad one running straight on into the east, as the railr
oad at Hawkhurst did when Granny and I were there that Christmas before the war; all of a sudden I remembered it.

  “This is the road to Hawkhurst,” I said. But Ringo was not listening; he was looking at the dust, and the wagon stopped now with the horses’ heads hanging and our dust overtaking us again and the big dust cloud coming slow up in the west.

  “Can’t you see um coming?” Ringo hollered. “Git on away from here!”

  “They ain’t Yankees,” Granny said. “The Yankees have already been here.” Then we saw it, too—a burned house like ours, three chimneys standing above a mound of ashes, and then we saw a white woman and a child looking at us from a cabin behind them. Granny looked at the dust cloud, then she looked at the empty broad road going on into the east. “This is the way,” she said.

  We went on. It seemed like we went slower than ever now, with the dust cloud behind us and the burned houses and gins and thrown-down fences on either side, and the white women and children—we never saw a nigger at all—watching us from the nigger cabins where they lived now like we lived at home; we didn’t stop. “Poor folks,” Granny said. “I wish we had enough to share with them.”

  At sunset we drew off the road and camped; Ringo was looking back. “Whatever hit is, we done went off and left hit,” he said. “I don’t see no dust.” We slept in the wagon this time, all three of us. I don’t know what time it was, only that all of a sudden I was awake. Granny was already sitting up in the wagon. I could see her head against the branches and the stars. All of a sudden all three of us were sitting up in the wagon, listening. They were coming up the road. It sounded like about fifty of them; we could hear the feet hurrying, and a kind of panting murmur. It was not singing exactly; it was not that loud. It was just a sound, a breathing, a kind of gasping, murmuring chant and the feet whispering fast in the deep dust. I could hear women, too, and then all of a sudden I began to smell them.