Snopes: The Hamlet, the Town, the Mansion

by William Faulkner

  “On what?” he said. “Where? Lump said—”

  “I know you didn’t have any money, like I know you haven’t had anything to eat except the dust in that barrel. You could have hidden! In the woods—anywhere, until I would have time to—God damn you! God damn you! If they would just let me do the hanging!” She shook him, her face bent to his, her hard, hot, panting breath on his face. “Not for killing him, but for doing it when you had no money to get away on if you ran, and nothing to eat if you stayed. If they’d just let me do it: hang you just enough to take you down and bring you to and hang you again just enough to cut you down and bring you to—” He slashed out again, viciously. But she had already released him, standing on one foot now, the other foot angled upward from the knee to meet her reaching hand. She took something from her shoe and put it into his hand. He knew at once what it was—a banknote, folded and refolded small and square and still warm with body-heat. And it was just one note. It’s one dollar, he thought, knowing it was not. It was I. O. and Eck, he told himself, knowing it was not, just as he knew there was but one man in the country who would have ten dollars in one bill—or at the most, two men; now he even heard what his cousin had said as he walked out of the store fifteen minutes ago. He didn’t even look toward his hand.

  “Did you sell Will something for it, or did you just take it out of his pants while he was asleep? Or was it Jody?”

  “What if I did? What if I can sell enough more of it tonight to get ten more? Only for God’s sake dont go back to the house. Stay in the woods. Then tomorrow morning—” He did not move; she saw only the slight jerk of his hand and wrist—no coin to ring against his thumbnail or to make any sound among the dust-stiffened roadside weeds where gouts of dusty cotton clung. When he went on, she began to run after him. “Mink!” she said. He walked steadily on. She was at his shoulder, running, though he continued to walk. “For God’s sake,” she said. “For God’s sake.” Then she caught his shoulder and swung him to face her. This time he slashed free and sprang into the weeds, stooping, and rose with a stick lifted in his hand and walked toward her again with that patient and implacable weariness, until she turned. He lowered the stick, but he continued to stand there until he could no longer distinguish her, even against the pale dust of the road. Then he tossed the stick into the weeds and turned. The cousin was standing behind him. If the other had been smaller or he larger he would have stepped on him, walked him down. The other stepped aside and turned with him, the faint rasp of the repressed breathing at his shoulder.

  “So you throwed that ay too,” the cousin said. He didn’t answer. They went on side by side in the thick, ankle-deep dust. Their feet made no sound in it. “He had at least fifty dollars. I tell you I saw it. And you expect me to believe you aint got it.” He didn’t answer. They walked steadily on, not fast, like two people walking without destination or haste, for pleasure or exercise. “All right. I’m going to do what wouldn’t no other man living do: I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt that you aint got it, actually never looked. Now where did you put him?” He didn’t answer nor pause. The cousin caught him by the shoulder, stopping him; now there was in the fierce baffled breathing, the whispering voice, not only the old amazement but a sort of cold and desperate outrage, like one trying to reach through a fleeing crisis to the comprehension of an idiot: “Are you going to let that fifty dollars lay there for Hampton and them deputies to split up between them?”

  He struck the hand off. “Let me alone,” he said.

  “All right. I’ll do this. I’ll give you twenty-five dollars now. I’ll go with you, all you got to do is hand me the wallet, sight unseen. Or hand me his pants, if you dont want to take it out of them. You wont even touch or even see the money.” He turned to go on again. “All right. If you are too puke-stomached to do it yourself, tell me where it is. When I come back, I’ll give you ten dollars, though a fellow that just throwed away a ten-dollar bill dont—” He walked on. Again the hand caught his shoulder and swung him about; the tense fierce voice murmured from nowhere and everywhere out of the breathless dark: “Wait. Listen. Listen good. Suppose I look up Hampton; he’s been around here all day; he’s probably still somewhere here tonight. Suppose I tell him I done recollected a mistake, that that gun wasn’t lost last fall because you come in the store and bought a nickel’s worth of powder just last week. Then you can explain how you was aiming to swap Houston the powder for the pound-fee on that yearling—”

  This time he did not fling the hand off. He merely began to walk toward the other with that patient and invincible weariness which the other did not recognise, walking steadily toward the cousin as the other gave ground. His voice was not loud either; it was flat, absolutely toneless: “I ask you to let me alone,” he said. “I dont tell you; I ask you to let me alone. Not for my sake. Because I’m tired. I ask you to let me alone.” The other backed away before him, moving slightly faster, so that the distance between them increased. When he stopped, it continued to increase until he could no longer see the other and only the whisper, furious and outraged, came back:

  “All right, you durn little tight-fisted murderer. See if you get away with it.”

  Approaching the village again, his feet made no sound in the dust and, in the darkness, seemingly no progress either, though the light in Mrs Littlejohn’s kitchen window just beyond the store’s dark bulk—the only light anywhere—drew steadily nearer. Just beyond it the lane turned off which led to his cabin four miles away. That’s where I would have kept straight on, to Jefferson and the railroad, he thought; and suddenly, now that it was too late, now that he had lost all hope of alternative between planned and intelligent escape and mere blind desperate harried fleeing and doubling through the swamp and jungle of the botm like a spent and starving beast cut off from its den, he knew that for three days now he had not only hoped but had actually believed that opportunity to choose would be given him. And he had not only lost that privilege of choice, but due to the blind mischance which had permitted his cousin either to see or guess what was in the wallet, even the bitter alternative was deferred for another night. It began to seem to him now that that puny and lonely beacon not only marked no ultimate point for even desperate election but was the period to hope itself, and that all which remained to him of freedom lay in the shortening space between it and his advancing foot. I thought that when you killed a man, that finished it, he told himself. But it dont. It just starts then.

  When he reached home, he did not enter it. Instead, he went around to the woodpile and got his axe and stood for a moment to examine the stars. It was not much past nine; he could allow himself until midnight. Then he circled the house and entered the corn-patch. Halfway down the slope he paused, listening, then he went on. He did not enter the bottom either; he stepped behind the first tree large enough to conceal him and leaned the axe carefully against it where he could find it again and stood there, motionless, breathing quietly, and listened to the heavy body running with hurried and cautious concern among the clashing cornstalks, the tense and hurried panting drawing rapidly nearer, then the quick indraw of breath when the other ran past the tree, checking, as he stepped out from behind it and turned back up the slope.

  They went back through the corn, in single file and five feet apart. He could hear the clumsy body behind him stumbling and thrashing among the sibilant rows, and the breathing fierce, outraged, and repressed. His own passage made no noise, even in the trigger-set dryness of the corn, as if his body had no substance. “Listen,” the cousin said. “Let’s look at this thing like two reasonable …” They emerged from the corn and crossed the yard and entered the house, still five feet apart. He went on to the kitchen and lit the lamp and squatted before the stove, preparing to start the fire. The cousin stood in the door, breathing heavily and watching while the other coaxed the chips into a blaze and took the coffee-pot from the stove and filled it from the water pail and set it back. “Aint you even got nothing to eat?” the cousin sai
d. The other did not answer. “You got some feed corn, aint you? We could parch some of that.” The fire was burning well now. The other laid his hand on the pot, though of course it had not even begun to be warm yet. The cousin watched the back of his head. “All right,” he said. “Let’s go get some of it.”

  The other removed his hand from the pot. He did not look back. “Get it,” he said. “I’m not hungry.” The cousin breathed in the door, watching the still, slanted face. His breath made a faint, steady, rasping sound.

  “All right,” he said. “I’ll go to the barn and get some.” He left the door and walked heavily down the hallway and onto the back porch and stepped down to the earth, already running. He ran frantically in the blind darkness and on tiptoe, around toward the front of the house and stopped, peering around the corner toward the front door, holding his breath, then ran again, on to the steps, where he could see into the hallway lighted faintly by the lamp in the kitchen, and paused again for an instant, crouched, glaring. The son of a bitch tricked me, he thought; He went out the back: and ran up the steps, stumbling heavily and recoveringand thundered down the hall to the kitchen door and saw, in the instant of passing it, the other standing beside the stove as he had left him, his hand again on the coffeepot. The murdering little son of a bitch, he thought. I wouldn’t have believed it. I wouldn’t have believed a man would have to go through all this even for five hundred dollars.

  But when he stood in the door again, save for the slightly increased rasp and tempo of his breathing, he might never have left it. He watched the other fetch to the stove a cracked china cup, a thick glass tumbler, a tin can containing a little sugar, and a spoon; when he spoke, he might have been talking to his employer’s wife over a tea-table: “It’s done made up its mind at last to get hot, has it?” The other did not answer. He filled the cup from the pot and spooned sugar into it and stirred it and stood beside the stove, turned three quarters from the cousin, his head bent, sipping from the cup. After a moment the cousin approached and filled the tumbler and put sugar into it and sipped, wry-faced, his features all seeming to flee from the tumbler’s rim, upward, gathering, eyes, nose, even mouth, toward his forehead, as if the skin in which they were embedded was attached to his skull only at one point somewhere in the back. “Listen,” the cousin said. “Just try to look at this thing like two reasonable people. There’s that fifty dollars laying out there, not belonging to nobody. And you cant go and get it without taking me, because I aint going to let you. And I cant go get it without taking you, because I dont know where it’s at. Yet here we are, setting around this house while every minute we waste is bringing that durn sheriff and them deputies just that much closer to finding it. It’s just a matter of pure and simple principle. Aint no likes and dislikes about it. If I had my way, I’d keep all of it myself, the same as you would. But you cant and I cant. Yet here we are, setting here—” The other tilted the cup and drained it.

  “What time is it?” he said. From the creased bulge of his waistband the cousin wrenched a dollar watch on a thong of greasy leather and looked at it and prized it back into the fob-pocket.

  “Twenty-eight past nine. And it aint going to stay that forever. And I got to open the store at six oclock in the morning. And I got to walk five miles tonight before I can go to bed. But never mind that. Dont pay no attention to that, because there aint nothing personal in this because it is a pure and simple business matter. Think about your—” The other set the empty cup on the stove.

  “Checkers?” he said.

  “—self. You got—What?” The cousin stopped talking. He watched the other cross the room and lift from among the shadows in the corner a short, broad piece of plank. From the shelf above it he took another tin can and brought them to the table. The board was marked off with charcoal into alternate staggered squares; the can contained a handful of small china- and glass-fragments in two colors, apparently from a broken plate and a blue glass bottle. He laid the board beside the lamp and began to oppose the men. The cousin watched him, the tumbler arrested halfway to his mouth. For an instant he ceased to breathe. Then he breathed again. “Why, sholy,” he said. He set the glass on the stove and drew up a chair opposite. Sitting, he seemed to be on the point of enveloping not only the chair but the table too in a collapsing mass of flabby and badly-filled flesh, like a collapsing balloon. “We’ll play a nickel a game against that fifty dollars,” he said. “All right?”

  “Move,” the other said. They began to play—the one with a cold and deadly deliberation and economy of moves, the other with a sort of clumsy speed and dash. It was that amateurish, that almost childlike, lack of premeditation and plan or even foresight of one who, depending on manipulation and not intellect in games of chance, finds himself involved in one where dexterity cannot avail, yet nevertheless attempting to cheat even at bald and simple draughts with an incredible optimism, an incorrigible dishonesty long since become pure reflex and probably now beyond his control, making his dashing and clumsy moves then withdrawing his closed fist to sit watching with his little intent unwinking eyes the still, wasted, down-looking face opposite, talking steadily about almost everything except money and death, the fist resting on the table-edge still closed about the pawn or the king’s crown which it had palmed. The trouble with checkers is, he thought, It aint nothing but checkers. At the end of an hour he was thirteen games ahead.

  “Make it a quarter,” he said.

  “What time is it?” the other said. The cousin wrung the watch from his waistband again and returned it.

  “Four minutes to eleven.”

  “Move,” the other said. They played on. The cousin was not talking now. He was keeping score now with a chewed pencil stub on the edge of the board. Thus when, thirty minutes later, he totted up the score, the pencil presented to his vision not a symbol but a sum complete with decimal and dollar mark, which seemed in the next instant to leap upward and strike comprehension with an impact almost audible; he became dead still, for an instant he did not breathe indeed, thinking rapidly: Hell fire. Hell fire. Of course he never caught me. He didn’t want to. Because when I have won all of his share, he’ll figure he wont need to risk going where it’s at. So now he had to completely reverse his entire tactics. And now for the first time the crawling hands on the face of the watch which he now produced without being asked and laid face-up beside the board, assumed a definite significance. Because this here just cant go on forever, he thought in a resurgence of the impotent rage. It just cant. A man just cant be expected to go through much more of this even for all of fifty dollars. So he reversed himself. Whereupon it was as if even dishonesty had foresworn him. He would make the dashing, clumsy, calculated moves; he would sit back with his own pawn or king’s crown in his fist now. Only now the other’s thin hard hand would be gripping that wrist while the cold, flat, dead voice demonstrated how a certain pawn could not possibly have arrived at the square on which it suddenly appeared to be, and lived, or even rapping the knuckles of that gripped hand on the table until it disgorged. Yet he would attempt it again, with that baffled and desperate optimism and hope, and be caught again and then try it again, until at the end of the next hour his movements on the board were not even childlike, they were those of an imbecile or a blind person. And he was talking again now: “Listen. There’s that fifty dollars that dont belong to nobody because he never had no kin, nobody to claim it. Just laying out there for the first man that comes along to—”

  “Move,” the other said. He moved a pawn. “No,” the other said. “Jump.” He made the jade thee other moved a second pawn.

  “—and here you are needing money to keep from being hung maybe and you cant go and get it because I wont leave. And me that cant get up and go on home and get to bed so I can get up, and go to work tomorrow because you wont show me where that money’s at—”

  “Move,” the other said. The cousin moved a pawn. “No,” the other said. “Jump.” The cousin took the jump. Then he watched the gaunt black-hai
red fingers holding the scrap of blue glass clear the board in five jumps.

  “And now it’s after midnight. It will be light in six hours. And Hampton and them durn deputies—” The cousin ceased. The other was now standing, looking down at him; the cousin rose quickly. They stared at one another across the table. “Well?” the cousin said. His breath began to make the harsh, tense, rasping sound again, not triumphant yet. “Well?” he said. “Well?” But the other was not looking at him, he was looking down, the face still, wasted, seemingly without life.

  “I ask you to go,” the other said. “I ask you to leave me alone.”

  “Sholy,” the cousin said, his voice no louder than the other’s. “Quit now? after I done gone through all this?” The other turned toward the door. “Wait,” the cousin said. The other did not pause. The cousin blew out the lamp and overtook the other in the hallway. He was talking again, whispering now. “If you’d just listened to me six hours ago. We’d a done had it and been back, in bed, instead of setting up here half the night. Dont you see how it was tit for tat all the time? You had me and I had you, and couldn’t neither—Where we going?” The other didn’t answer. He went steadily on across the yard, toward the barn, the cousin following; again he heard just behind him the tense, fierce adenoidal breathing, the whispering voice: “Hell fire, maybe you dont want me to have half of it and maybe I dont want nobody to have half of it neither. But hell fire, aint just half of it better than to think of that durn Hampton and them deputies—” He entered the barn and opened the door to the crib and stepped up into it, the cousin stopping just outside the door behind him, and reached down from its nail in the wall a short, smooth white-oak stick eyed at the end with a loop of hemp rope—a twister which Houston had used with his stallion, which Snopes had found when he rented the foreclosed portion of Houston’s farm from the Varners—and turned and struck all in one motion and dropped the cudgel and caught the heavy body as it fell so that its own weight helped to carry it into the crib and all he needed to do was to drag it on in until the feet cleared the door. He unbuckled a hame-string and the check-rein from his plow gear and bound the other’s hands and feet and tore a strip from the tail of his shirt and made a gag with it.