“I guess I won’t look at the paper today,” she said. “Thank you just the same.” She returned to the living room. Save for the chair, it was exactly as it had been when she first saw it that day when her son brought her into it and told her that it was now her home and that her daughter-in-law and her grandchildren were now her family. It had changed very little, and that which had altered was the part which her son knew nothing about, and that too had changed not at all in so long that she could not even remember now when she had added the last coin to the hoard. This was in a china vase on the mantel. She knew what was in it to the penny; nevertheless, she took it down and sat in the chair which she had brought all the way from Nebraska and emptied the coins and the worn timetable into her lap. The timetable was folded back at the page on which she had folded it the day she walked downtown to the ticket office and got it fifteen years ago, though that was so long ago now that the pencil circle about the name of the nearest junction point to Ewing, Nebraska, had faded away. But she did not need that either; she knew the distance to the exact halfmile, just as she knew the fare to the penny, and back in the early twenties when the railroads began to become worried and passenger fares began to drop, no broker ever watched the grain and utilities market any closer than she watched the railroad advertisements and quotations. Then at last the fares became stabilized with the fare back to Ewing thirteen dollars more than she had been able to save, and at a time when her source of income had ceased. This was the two grandchildren. When she entered the house that day twenty years ago and looked at the two babies for the first time, it was with diffidence and eagerness both. She would be dependent for the rest of her life, but she would give something in return for it. It was not that she would attempt to make another Ira and Samantha Ewing of them; she had made that mistake with her own son and had driven him from home. She was wiser now; she saw now that it was not the repetition of hardship: she would merely take what had been of value in hers and her husband’s hard lives—that which they had learned through hardship and endurance of honor and courage and pride—and transmit it to the children without their having to suffer the hardship at all, the travail and the despairs. She had expected that there would be some friction between her and the young daughter-in-law, but she had believed that her son, the actual Ewing, would be her ally; she had even reconciled herself after a year to waiting, since the children were still but babies; she was not alarmed, since they were Ewings too: after she had looked that first searching time at the two puttysoft little faces feature by feature, she had said it was because they were babies yet and so looked like no one. So she was content to bide and wait; she did not even know that her son was planning to move until he told her that the other house was bought and that the present one was to be hers until she died. She watched them go; she said nothing; it was not to begin then. It did not begin for five years, during which she watched her son making money faster and faster and easier and easier, gaining with apparent contemptible and contemptuous ease that substance for which in niggard amounts her husband had striven while still clinging with undeviating incorruptibility to honor and dignity and pride, and spending it, squandering it, in the same way. By that time she had given up the son and she had long since learned that she and her daughter-in-law were irrevocable and implacable moral enemies. It was in the fifth year. One day in her son’s home she saw the two children take money from their mother’s purse lying on a table. The mother did not even know how much she had in the purse; when the grandmother told her about it she became angry and dared the older woman to put it to the test. The grandmother accused the children, who denied the whole affair with perfectly straight faces. That was the actual break between herself and her son’s family; after that she saw the two children only when the son would bring them with him occasionally on his unfailing daily visits. She had a few broken dollars which she had brought from Nebraska and had kept intact for five years, since she had no need for money here; one day she planted one of the coins while the children were there, and when she went back to look, it was gone too. The next morning she tried to talk to her son about the children, remembering her experience with the daughter-in-law and approaching the matter indirectly, speaking generally of money. “Yes,” the son said. “I’m making money. I’m making it fast while I can. I’m going to make a lot of it. I’m going to give my children luxuries and advantages that my father never dreamed a child might have.”
“That’s it,” she said. “You make money too easy. This whole country is too easy for us Ewings. It may be all right for them that have been born here for generations; I don’t know about that. But not for us.”
“But these children were born here.”
“Just one generation. The generation before that they were born in a sodroofed dugout on the Nebraska wheat frontier. And the one before that in a log house in Missouri. And the one before that in a Kentucky blockhouse with Indians around it. This world has never been easy for Ewings. Maybe the Lord never intended it to be.”
“But it is from now on,” he said; he spoke with a kind of triumph. “For you and me too. But mostly for them.”
And that was all. When he was gone she sat quietly in the single Nebraska chair which she had taken out of storage—the first chair which the older Ira Ewing had bought for her after he built a house and in which she had rocked the younger Ira to sleep before he could walk, while the older Ira himself sat in the chair which he had made out of a flour barrel, grim, quiet and incorruptible, taking his earned twilight ease between a day and a day—telling herself quietly that that was all. Her next move was curiously direct; there was something in it of the actual pioneer’s opportunism, of taking immediate and cold advantage of Spartan circumstance; it was as though for the first time in her life she was able to use something, anything, which she had gained by bartering her youth and strong maturity against the Nebraska immensity, and this not in order to live further but in order to die; apparently she saw neither paradox in it nor dishonesty. She began to make candy and cake of the materials which her son bought for her on credit, and to sell them to the two grandchildren for the coins which their father gave them or which they perhaps purloined also from their mother’s purse, hiding the coins in the vase with the timetable, watching the niggard hoard grow. But after a few years the children outgrew candy and cake, and then she had watched railroad fares go down and down and then stop thirteen dollars away. But she did not give up, even then. Her son had tried to give her a servant years ago and she had refused; she believed that when the time came, the right moment, he would not refuse to give her at least thirteen dollars of the money which she had saved him. Then this had failed. “Maybe it wasn’t the right time,” she thought. “Maybe I tried it too quick. I was surprised into it,” she told herself, looking down at the heap of small coins in her lap. “Or maybe he was surprised into saying No. Maybe when he has had time …” She roused; she put the coins back into the vase and set it on the mantel again, looking at the clock as she did so. It was just four, two hours yet until time to start supper. The sun was high; she could see the water from the sprinkler flashing and glinting in it as she went to the window. It was still high, still afternoon; the mountains stood serene and drab against it; the city, the land, lay sprawled and myriad beneath it—the land, the earth which spawned a thousand new faiths, nostrums and cures each year but no disease to even disprove them on—beneath the golden days unmarred by rain or weather, the changeless monotonous beautiful days without end countless out of the halcyon past and endless into the halcyon future.
“I will stay here and live forever,” she said to herself.
There Was a Queen
ELNORA entered the back yard, coming up from her cabin. In the long afternoon the huge, square house, the premises, lay somnolent, peaceful, as they had lain for almost a hundred years, since John Sartoris had come from Carolina and built it. And he had died in it and his son Bayard had died in it, and Bayard’s son John and John’s son Bayard in turn h
ad been buried from it even though the last Bayard didn’t die there.
So the quiet was now the quiet of womenfolks. As Elnora crossed the back yard toward the kitchen door she remembered how ten years ago at this hour old Bayard, who was her half-brother (though possibly but not probably neither of them knew it, including Bayard’s father), would be tramping up and down the back porch, shouting stableward for the Negro men and for his saddle mare. But he was dead now, and his grandson Bayard was also dead at twenty-six years old, and the Negro men were gone: Simon, Elnora’s mother’s husband, in the graveyard too, and Caspey, Elnora’s husband, in the penitentiary for stealing, and Joby, her son, gone to Memphis to wear fine clothes on Beale Street. So there were left in the house only the first John Sartoris’ sister, Virginia, who was ninety years old and who lived in a wheel chair beside a window above the flower garden, and Narcissa, young Bayard’s widow, and her son. Virginia Du Pre had come out to Mississippi in ’69, the last of the Carolina family, bringing with her the clothes in which she stood and a basket containing a few panes of colored glass from a Carolina window and a few flower cuttings and two bottles of port. She had seen her brother die and then her nephew and then her great-nephew and then her two great-great-nephews, and now she lived in the unmanned house with her great-great-nephew’s wife and his son, Benbow, whom she persisted in calling Johnny after his uncle, who was killed in France. And for Negroes there were Elnora who cooked, and her son Isom who tended the grounds, and her daughter Saddie who slept on a cot beside Virginia Du Pre’s bed and tended her as though she were a baby.
But that was all right. “I can take care of her,” Elnora thought, crossing the back yard. “I don’t need no help,” she said aloud, to no one—a tall, coffee-colored woman with a small, high, fine head. “Because it’s a Sartoris job. Cunnel knowed that when he died and tole me to take care of her. Tole me. Not no outsiders from town.” She was thinking of what had caused her to come up to the house an hour before it was necessary. This was that, while busy in her cabin, she had seen Narcissa, young Bayard’s wife, and the ten-year-old boy going down across the pasture in the middle of the afternoon. She had come to her door and watched them—the boy and the big young woman in white going through the hot afternoon, down across the pasture toward the creek. She had not wondered where they were going, nor why, as a white woman would have wondered. But she was half black, and she just watched the white woman with that expression of quiet and grave contempt with which she contemplated or listened to the orders of the wife of the house’s heir even while he was alive. Just as she had listened two days ago when Narcissa had informed her that she was going to Memphis for a day or so and that Elnora would have to take care of the old aunt alone. “Like I ain’t always done it,” Elnora thought. “It’s little you done for anybody since you come out here. We never needed you. Don’t you never think it.” But she didn’t say this. She just thought it, and she helped Narcissa prepare for the trip and watched the carriage roll away toward town and the station without comment. “And you needn’t to come back,” she thought, watching the carriage disappear. But this morning Narcissa had returned, without offering to explain the sudden journey or the sudden return, and in the early afternoon Elnora from her cabin door had watched the woman and the boy go down across the pasture in the hot June sunlight.
“Well, it’s her business where she going,” Elnora said aloud, mounting the kitchen steps. “Same as it her business how come she went off to Memphis, leaving Miss Jenny setting yonder in her chair without nobody but niggers to look after her,” she added, aloud still, with brooding inconsistency. “I ain’t surprised she went. I just surprised she come back. No. I ain’t even that. She ain’t going to leave this place, now she done got in here.” Then she said quietly, aloud, without rancor, without heat: “Trash. Town trash.”
She entered the kitchen. Her daughter Saddie sat at the table, eating from a dish of cold turnip greens and looking at a thumbed and soiled fashion magazine. “What you doing back here?” she said. “Why ain’t you up yonder where you can hear Miss Jenny if she call you?”
“Miss Jenny ain’t need nothing,” Saddie said. “She setting there by the window.”
“Where did Miss Narcissa go?”
“I don’t know’m,” Saddie said. “Her and Bory went off somewhere. Ain’t come back yet.”
Elnora grunted. Her shoes were not laced, and she stepped out of them in two motions and left the kitchen and went up the quiet, high-ceiled hall filled with scent from the garden and with the drowsing and myriad sounds of the June afternoon, to the open library door. Beside the window (the sash was raised now, with its narrow border of colored Carolina glass which in the winter framed her head and bust like a hung portrait) an old woman sat in a wheel chair. She sat erect; a thin, upright woman with a delicate nose and hair the color of a whitewashed wall. About her shoulders lay a shawl of white wool, no whiter than her hair against her black dress. She was looking out the window; in profile her face was high-arched, motionless. When Elnora entered she turned her head and looked at the Negress with an expression immediate and interrogative.
“They ain’t come in the back way, have they?” she said.
“Nome,” Elnora said. She approached the chair.
The old woman looked out the window again. “I must say I don’t understand this at all. Miss Narcissa’s doing a mighty lot of traipsing around all of a sudden. Picking up and—”
Elnora came to the chair. “A right smart,” she said in her cold, quiet voice, “for a woman lazy as her.”
“Picking up—” the old woman said. She ceased. “You stop talking that way about her.”
“I ain’t said nothing but the truth,” Elnora said.
“Then you keep it to yourself. She’s Bayard’s wife. A Sartoris woman, now.”
“She won’t never be a Sartoris woman,” Elnora said.
The other was looking out the window. “Picking up all of a sudden two days ago and going to Memphis to spend two nights, that hadn’t spent a night away from that boy since he was born. Leaving him for two whole nights, mind you, without giving any reason, and then coming home and taking him off to walk in the woods in the middle of the day. Not that he missed her. Do you think he missed her at all while she was gone?”
“Nome,” Elnora said. “Ain’t no Sartoris man never missed nobody.”
“Of course he didn’t.” The old woman looked out the window. Elnora stood a little behind the chair. “Did they go on across the pasture?”
“I don’t know. They went out of sight, still going. Toward the creek.”
“Toward the creek? What in the world for?”
Elnora didn’t answer. She stood a little behind the chair, erect, still as an Indian. The afternoon was drawing on. The sun was now falling level across the garden below the window, and soon the jasmine in the garden began to smell with evening, coming into the room in slow waves almost palpable; thick, sweet, oversweet. The two women were motionless in the window: the one leaning a little forward in the wheel chair, the Negress a little behind the chair, motionless too and erect as a caryatid.
The light in the garden was beginning to turn copper-colored when the woman and the boy entered the garden and approached the house. The old woman in the chair leaned suddenly forward. To Elnora it seemed as if the old woman in the wheel chair had in that motion escaped her helpless body like a bird and crossed the garden to meet the child; moving forward a little herself Elnora could see on the other’s face an expression fond, immediate, and oblivious. So the two people had crossed the garden and were almost to the house when the old woman sat suddenly and sharply back. “Why, they’re wet!” she said. “Look at their clothes. They have been in the creek with their clothes on!”
“I reckon I better go and get supper started,” Elnora said.
II
IN THE kitchen Elnora prepared the lettuce and the tomatoes, and sliced the bread (not honest cornbread, not even biscuit) which the woman whose very
name she did not speak unless it was absolutely necessary, had taught her to bake. Isom and Saddie sat in two chairs against the wall. “I got nothing against her,” Elnora said. “I nigger and she white. But my black children got more blood than she got. More behavior.”
“You and Miss Jenny both think ain’t nobody been born since Miss Jenny,” Isom said.
“Who is been?” Elnora said.
“Miss Jenny get along all right with Miss Narcissa,” Isom said. “Seem to me like she the one to say. I ain’t heard her say nothing about it.”
“Because Miss Jenny quality,” Elnora said. “That’s why. And that’s something you don’t know nothing about, because you born too late to see any of it except her.”
“Look to me like Miss Narcissa good quality as anybody else,” Isom said. “I don’t see no difference.”
Elnora moved suddenly from the table. Isom as suddenly sprang up and moved his chair out of his mother’s path. But she only went to the cupboard and took a platter from it and returned to the table, to the tomatoes. “Born Sartoris or born quality of any kind ain’t is, it’s does.” She talked in a level, inflectionless voice above her limber, brown, deft hands. When she spoke of the two women she used “she” indiscriminately, putting the least inflection on the one which referred to Miss Jenny. “Come all the way here by Herself, and the country still full of Yankees. All the way from Cal-lina, with Her folks all killed and dead except old Marse John, and him two hundred miles away in Missippi—”
“It’s moren two hundred miles from here to Cal-lina,” Isom said. “Learnt that in school. It’s nigher two thousand.”
Collected Stories Page 66
