The Essential Faulkner

by William Faulkner

  “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 urn 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.”

  “ ’Twon’t 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 won’t 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 scaired of the dark,” Nancy said. “I scaired 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, can’t 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.

  1918

  Ad Astra

  I don’t know what we were. With the exception of Comyn, we had started out Americans, but after three years, in our British tunics and British wings and here and there a ribbon, I don’t suppose we had even bothered in three years to wonder what we were, to think or to remember.

  And on that day, that evening, we were even less than that, or more than that: either beneath or beyond the knowledge that we had not even wondered in three years. The subadar—after a while he was there, in his turban and his trick major’s pips—said that we were like men trying to move in water. “But soon it will clear away,” he said. “The effluvium of hatred and of words. We are like men trying to move in water, with held breath watching our terrific and infinitesimal limbs, watching one another’s terrific stasis without touch, without contact, robbed of all save the impotence and the need.”

  We were in the car then, going to Amiens, Sartoris driving and Comyn sitting half a head above him in the front seat like a tackling dummy, the subadar, Bland and I in back, each with a bottle or two in his pockets. Except the subadar, that is. He was squat, small and thick, yet his sobriety was colossal. In that maelstrom of alcohol where the rest of us had fled our inescapable selves he was like a rock, talking quietly in a grave bass four sizes too big for him: “In my country I was prince. But all men are brothers.”

  But after twelve years I think of us as bugs in the surface of the water, isolant and aimless and unflagging. Not on the surface; in it, within that line of demarcation not air and not water, sometimes submerged, sometimes not. You have watched an unbreaking groundswell in a cove, the water shallow, the cove quiet, a little sinister with satiate familiarity, while beyond the darkling horizon the dying storm has raged on. That was the water, we the flotsam. Even after twelve years it is no clearer than that. It had no beginning and no ending. Out of nothing we howled, unwitting the storm which we had escaped and the foreign strand which we could not escape; that in the interval between two surges of the swell we died who had been too young to have ever lived.

  We stopped in the middle of the road to drink again. The land was dark and empty. And quiet: that was what you noticed, remarked. You could hear the earth breathe, like coming out of ether, like it did not yet know, believe, that it was awake. “But now it is peace,” the subadar said. “All men are brothers.”

  “You spoke before the Union once,” Bland said. He was blond and tall. When he passed through a room where women were he left a sighing wake like a ferry boat entering the slip. He was a Southerner, too, like Sartoris; but unlike Sartoris, in the five months he had been out, no one had ever found a bullet hole in his machine. But he had transferred out of an Oxford battalion—he was a Rhodes scholar—with a barnacle and wound-stripe. When he was tight he would talk about his wife, though we all knew that he was not married.

  He took the bottle from Sartoris and drank. “I’ve got the sweetest little wife,” he said. “Let me tell you about her.”

  “Don’t tell us,” Sartoris said. “Give her to Comyn. He wants a girl.”

  “All right,” Bland said. “You can have her, Comyn.”

  “Is she blonde?” Comyn said.

  “I don’t know,” Bland said. He turned back to the subadar. “You spoke before the Union once. I remember you.”

  “Ah,” the subadar said. “Oxford. Yes.”

  “He can attend their schools among the gentleborn, the bleach-skinned,” Bland said. “But he cannot hold their commission, because gentility is a matter of color and not lineage or behavior.”

  “Fighting is more important than truth,” the subadar said. “So we must restrict the prestige and privileges of it to the few so that it will not lose popularity with the many who have to die.”

  “Why more important?” I said. “I thought this one was being fought to end war forevermore.”

  The subadar made a brief gesture, dark, deprecatory, tranquil. “I was a white man also for that moment. It is more important for the Caucasian because he is only what he can do; it is the sum of him.”

  “So you see further than we see?”

  “A man sees further looking out of the dark upon the light than a man does in the light and looking out upon the light. That is the principle of the spyglass. The lens is only to tease him with that which the sense that suffers and desires can never affirm.

  “What do you see, then?” Bland said.

  “I see girls,” Comyn said. “I see acres and acres of the yellow hair of them like wheat and me among the wheat. Have ye ever watched a hidden dog quartering a wheat field, any of yez?”

  “Not hunting bitches,” Bland said.

  Comyn turned in the seat, thick and huge. He was big as all outdoors. To watch two mechanics shoehorning him into the cockpit of a Dolphin like two chambermaids putting an emergency bolster into a case too small for it, was a sight to see. “I will beat the head off ye for a shilling,” he said.

  “So you believe in the rightness of man?” I said.

  “I will beat the heads off yez all for a shilling,” Comyn said.

  “I believe in the pitiableness of man,” the subadar said. “That is better.”

  “I will give yez the shilling, then,” Comyn said.

  “All right,” Sartoris said. “Did you ever try a little whiskey for the night air, any of you all?”

  Comyn took the bottle and drank. “Acres and acres of them,” he said, “with their little round white woman parts gleaming among the moiling wheat.”

  So we drank again, on the lonely road between two beet fields, in the dark quiet, and the turn of the inebriation began to make. It came back from wherever it had gone, rolling down upon us and upon the grave sober rock of the subadar until his voice sounded remote and tranquil and dreamlike, saying that we were brothers. Monaghan was there then, standing beside our car in the full glare of the headlights of his car, in a R.F.C. cap and an American tunic with both shoulder straps flapping loose, drinking from Comyn’s bottle. Beside him stood a second man, also in a tunic shorter and trimmer than ours, with a bandage about his head.

  “I’ll fight you,” Comyn told Monaghan. “I’ll give you the shilling.”

  “All right,” Monaghan said. He drank again.

  “We are all brothers,” the subadar said. “Sometimes we pause at the wrong inn. We think it is night and we stop, when it is not night. That is all.”

  “I’ll give you a sovereign,” Comyn told Monaghan.

  “All right,” Monaghan said. He extended the bottle to the other man, the one with the bandaged head.

  “I thangk you,” the man said. “I haf plenty yet.”

  “I’ll fight him,” Comyn said.

  “It is because we can do only within the heart,” the subadar said. “While we see beyond the heart.”

  “I’ll be damned if you will,” Monaghan said. “He’s mine” He turned to the man with the bandaged head. “Aren’t you mine? Here; drink.”

  “I haf plenty, I thangk you, gentlemen,” the other said. But I don’t think any of us paid much attention to him until we were inside the Cloche-Clos. It was crowded, full of noise and smoke. When we entered all the noise ceased, like a string cut in two, the end raveling back into a sort of shocked consternation of pivoting faces, and the waiter—an old man in a dirty apron—falling back before us, slack-jawed, with an expression of outraged unbelief, like an atheist confronted with either Christ or the devil. We crossed the room, the waiter retreating before us, paced by the turning outraged faces, to a table adjacent to one where three French officers sat watching us with that same expression of astonishment and then outrage and then anger. As one they rose; the whole room, the silence, became staccato with voices, like machine guns. That was when I tu
rned and looked at Monaghan’s companion for the first time, in his green tunic and his black snug breeks and his black boots and his bandage. He had cut himself recently shaving, and with his bandaged head and his face polite and dazed and bloodless and sick, he looked like Monaghan had been using him pretty hard. Roundfaced, not old, with his immaculately turned bandage which served only to emphasize the generations of difference between him and the turbaned subadar, flanked by Monaghan with his wild face and wild tunic and surrounded by the French people’s shocked and outraged faces, he appeared to contemplate with a polite and alert concern his own struggle against the inebriation which Monaghan was forcing upon him. There was something Anthony-like about him: rigid, soldierly, with every button in place, with his unblemished bandage and his fresh razor cuts, he appeared to muse furiously upon a clear flame of a certain conviction of individual behavior above a violent and inexplicable chaos. Then I remarked Monaghan’s second companion: an American military policeman. He was not drinking. He sat beside the German, rolling cigarettes from a cloth sack.

  On the German’s other side Monaghan was filling his glass. “I brought him down this morning,” he said. “I’m going to take him home with me.”

  “Why?” Bland said. “What do you want with him?”

  “Because he belongs to me,” Monaghan said. He set the full glass before the German. “Here; drink.”

  “I once thought about taking one home to my wife,” Bland said. “So I could prove to her that I have only been to a war. But I never could find a good one. A whole one, I mean.”

  “Come on,” Monaghan said. “Drink.”

  “I haf plenty,” the German said. “All day I haf plenty.”

  “Do you want to go to America with him?” Bland said.

  “Yes. I would ligk it. Thanks.”

  “Sure you’ll like it,” Monaghan said. “I’ll make a man of you. Drink.”

  The German raised the glass, but he merely held it in his hand. His face was strained, deprecatory, yet with a kind of sereneness, like that of a man who has conquered himself. I imagine some of the old martyrs must have looked at the lions with that expression. He was sick, too. Not from the liquor: from his head. “I haf in Bayreuth a wife and a little wohn. Mine son. I haf not him yet seen.”