The Essential Faulkner

by William Faulkner

  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 ain’t 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 won’t 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 upslanted 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 recognize 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 won’t jump him here. Not this time. I don’t 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 co-ordinate 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 don’t 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. Don’t 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 don’t mean that; I mean I believed myself. I wasn’t even listening to him any more 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 don’t 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 pecker-woods. 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! Can’t 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-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 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 ain’t 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 don’t remember anything you ever knew or felt or even heard about love?”

  Then she was gone too. The waft of light and the murmer 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 millionaire’s mansions on Lake Shore 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 don’t 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.

  8

  THE UNDYING PAST

  Editor’s Note

  “The past is never dead,” Gavin Stevens says in Requiem for a Nun (1951), and he adds, “It’s not even past.” In this judgment as in many others, Stevens appears to be speaking for the author. Faulkner himself was obsessed with a feeling that the past endures in every moment of our lives. He kept scrutinizing the past with a sort of anguish, in the hope that it would explain a present dilemma. That was one reason for his writing inordinately long sentences. “My ambition,” he said, “is to put everything into one sentence—not only the present but the whole past on which it depends and which keeps overtaking the present, second by second.”