A Fable

by William Faulkner

  ‘Go on,’ Morache said to the old woman. ‘Get the hell out of here. Quick.’ Then she was gone. Morache re-entered the carriage. ‘How much was it?’ he said to Picklock.

  ‘I took a hundred francs,’ Picklock said.

  ‘A hundred francs?’ another said with incredulous amazement.

  ‘Yes,’ Picklock said. ‘And tomorrow I’ll be ashamed I took even that much. But that will be a bottle apiece.’ He handed the money to the man who had spoken last. ‘Go and get it.’ Then to the others: ‘Get that lid back on. What are you waiting for, anyway: for Landry to help you?’ They replaced the coffin lid and set the nails in the old holes. The absolute minimum of prudence would have dictated or at least suggested a weight of some kind, any kind in the coffin first, but they were not concerned with prudence. The ganymede returned, clasping a frayed wicker basket to his breast; they snatched it from him before he could even get into the carriage, the owner of the corkscrew opening the bottles rapidly as they were passed to him.

  ‘He said to bring the basket back,’ the ganymede said.

  ‘Take it back then,’ Picklock said: and then no more of that either; the hands snatching at the bottles almost before the corks were out, so that when the sergeant returned about an hour later, his outrage—not rage: outrage—knew no bounds. But this time he was impotent because they were indeed in coma now, sprawled and snoring in one inextricable filth of straw and urine and vomit and spilled brandy and empty bottles, invulnerable and immune in that nepenthe when toward the end of the afternoon an engine coupled onto the carriage and took it back to St Mihiel and set it off on another siding, and waking them only because of the glare of yellow light which now filled the carriage through the windows, and the sound of hammers against the outside of it, which roused Picklock.

  Clasping his throbbing head and shutting his eyes quickly against that unbearable glare, it seemed to him that there had never been so fierce a sunrise. It was almost like electricity; he didn’t see how he could move beneath it to rise, and even on his feet, staggering until he braced himself, he didn’t see how he had accomplished the feat, bracing himself against the wall while he kicked the others one by one into sentience or anyway consciousness. ‘Get up,’ he said. ‘Get up. We’ve got to get out of here.’

  ‘Where are we?’ one said.

  ‘Paris,’ Picklock said. ‘It’s already tomorrow.’

  ‘Oh Christ,’ a voice said. Because they were all awake now, waking not into remembering, since even comatose they had not really forgotten, but into simple realisation like sleepwalkers waking to find themselves standing on the outside of forty-storey window ledges. They were not drunk now. They didn’t even have time to be sick. ‘Christ yes,’ the voice said. They got up, staggering for balance, shaking and trembling, and stumbled through the door and huddled, blinking against the fierce glare until they could bear it. Except that it was electricity; it was still last night (or perhaps tomorrow night, for all they knew or for the moment cared even): two searchlights such as anti aircraft batteries had used against night-flying aeroplanes during the war, trained on the carriage and in the glare of which men on ladders were nailing long strips of black and funereal bunting along the eaves of the carriage: to whom—which—they paid no attention. Nor was it Paris either.

  ‘We’re still in Verdun,’ another said.

  ‘Then they’ve moved the station around to the other side of the tracks,’ Picklock said.

  ‘Anyway it’s not Paris,’ a third said. ‘I’ve got to have a drink.’

  ‘No,’ Picklock said. ‘You’ll take coffee and something to eat.’ He turned to the ganymede. ‘How much money have you got left?’

  ‘I gave it to you,’ the ganymede said.

  ‘Damn that,’ Picklock said, extending his hand. ‘Come on with it.’ The ganymede fumbled out a small wad of paper notes and coins. Picklock took and counted it rapidly. ‘It might do,’ he said. ‘Come on.’ There was a small bistro opposite the station. He led the way to it and inside—a small zinc bar at which a single man stood in a countryman’s corduroy coat, and two tables where other men in the rough clothes of farmers or laborers sat with glasses of coffee or wine, playing dominoes, all of them turning to look as Picklock led his party in and up to the bar, where a tremendous woman in black said,

  ‘Messieurs?’

  ‘Coffee, Madame, and bread if you have it,’ Picklock said.

  ‘I dont want coffee,’ the third said. ‘I want a drink.’

  ‘Sure,’ Picklock said in a calm and furious voice, even lowering it a little: ‘Stick around here until somebody comes and lifts that box, let alone opens it. I hear they always give you a drink before you climb the steps.’

  ‘Maybe we could find another—’ a fourth began.

  ‘Shut up,’ Picklock said. ‘Drink that coffee. I’ve got to think.’ Then a new voice spoke.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ it said. ‘You boys in trouble?’ It was the man who had been standing at the bar when they entered. They looked at him now—a solid stocky man, obviously a farmer, not quite as old as they had thought, with a round hard ungullible head and a ribbon in the lapel of the coat—not one of the best ones but still a good one, matching in fact one which Picklock himself wore; possibly that was why he spoke to them, he and Picklock watching one another for a moment.

  ‘Where’d you get it?’ Picklock said.

  ‘Combles,’ the stranger said.

  ‘So was I,’ Picklock said.

  ‘You in a jam of some sort?’ the stranger said.

  ‘What makes you think that?’ Picklock said.

  ‘Look, Buster,’ the stranger said. ‘Maybe you were under sealed orders when you left Paris, but there hasn’t been much secret about it since your sergeant got out of that carriage this afternoon. What is he, anyway? some kind of a reformist preacher, like they say they have in England and America? He was sure in a state. He didn’t seem to care a damn that you were drunk. What seemed to fry him was, how you managed to get twelve more bottles of brandy without him knowing how you did it.’

  ‘This afternoon?’ Picklock said. ‘You mean it’s still today? Where are we?’

  ‘St Mihiel. You lay over here tonight while they finish nailing enough black cloth on your carriage to make it look like a hearse. Tomorrow morning a special train will pick you up and take you on to Paris. What’s wrong? Did something happen?’

  Suddenly Picklock turned. ‘Come on back here,’ he said. The stranger followed. They stood slightly apart from the others now, in the angle of the bar and the rear wall. Picklock spoke rapidly yet completely, telling it all, the stranger listening quietly.

  ‘What you need is another body,’ the stranger said.

  ‘You’re telling me?’ Picklock said.

  ‘Why not? I’ve got one. In my field. I found it the first time I plowed. I reported it, but they haven’t done anything about it yet. I’ve got a horse and cart here; it will take about four hours to go and come.’ They looked at one another. ‘You’ve got all night—that is, now.’

  ‘All right,’ Picklock said. ‘How much?’

  ‘You’ll have to say. You’re the one that knows how bad you need it.’

  ‘We haven’t got any money.’

  ‘You break my heart,’ the stranger said. They looked at one another. Without removing his eyes, Picklock raised his voice a little. ‘Morache.’ Morache came up. ‘The watch,’ Picklock said.

  ‘Wait now,’ Morache said. It was a Swiss movement, in gold; he had wanted one ever since he saw one first, finding it at last on the wrist of a German officer lying wounded in a shell crater one night after he, Morache, had got separated from a patrol sent out to try for a live prisoner or at least one still alive enough to speak. He even saw the watch first, before he saw who owned it, having hurled himself into the crater just in time before a flare went up, seeing the glint of the watch first in the corpse-glare of the magnesium before he saw the man—a colonel, apparently shot through the spine since he s
eemed to be merely paralysed, quite conscious and not even in much pain; he would have been exactly what they had been sent out to find, except for the watch. So Morache murdered him with his trench knife (a shot here now would probably have brought a whole barrage down on him) and took the watch and lay just outside his own wire until the patrol came back (empty-handed) and found him. Though for a day or so he couldn’t seem to bring himself to wear the watch nor even look at it until he remembered that his face had been blackened at the time and the German could not have told what he was even, let alone who; besides that, the man was dead now. ‘Wait,’ he said. ‘Wait, now.’

  ‘Sure,’ Picklock said. ‘Wait in that carriage yonder until they come for that box. I dont know what they’ll do to you then, but I do know what they’ll do if you run because that will be desertion.’ He held out his hand. ‘The watch.’ Morache unstrapped the watch and handed it to Picklock.

  ‘At least get some brandy too,’ he said. The stranger reached for the watch in Picklock’s hand.

  ‘Whoa, look at it from there,’ Picklock said, holding the watch on his raised open palm.

  ‘Sure you can have brandy,’ the stranger said. Picklock closed his hand over the watch and let the hand drop.

  ‘How much?’ he said.

  ‘Fifty francs,’ the stranger said.

  ‘Two hundred,’ Picklock said.

  ‘A hundred francs.’

  ‘Two hundred,’ Picklock said.

  ‘Where’s the watch?’ the stranger said.

  ‘Where’s the cart?’ Picklock said. It took them a little over four hours (‘You’d have to wait anyhow until they finish nailing up that black cloth and get away from the carriage,’ the stranger said) and there were four of them (‘Two more will be enough,’ the stranger said. ‘We can drive right up to it.’)—himself and the stranger on the seat, Morache and another behind them in the cart, north and eastward out of the town into the country darkness, the horse itself taking the right road without guidance, knowing that it was going home, in the darkness the steady jounce of jogging horse and the thump and rattle of the cart a sound and a vibration instead of a progress, so that it was the roadside trees which seemed to move, wheeling up out of the darkness to rush slowly backward past them against the sky. But they were moving, even though it did seem (to Picklock) forever, the roadside trees ravelling suddenly into a straggle of posts, the horse, still without guidance, swinging sharply to the left.

  ‘Sector, huh?’ Picklock said.

  ‘Yeah,’ the stranger said. ‘The Americans broke it in September. Vienne-la-pucelle yonder,’ he said, pointing. ‘It caught it. It was right up in the tip. Not long now.’ But it was a little longer than that though at last they were there—a farm and its farmyard, lightless. The stranger stopped the horse and handed Picklock the lines. ‘I’ll get a shovel. I’m going to throw in a ground-sheet too.’ He was not long, passing the shovel and the folded ground-sheet to the two in the back and mounting the seat again and took the lines, the horse lurching forward and making a determined effort to turn in the farmyard gate until the stranger reined it sharply away. Then a gate in a hedgerow; Morache got down and opened it for the cart to pass. ‘Leave it open,’ the stranger said. ‘We’ll close it when we come out.’ Which Morache did and swung up and into the cart as it passed him; they were in a field now, soft from plowing, the unguided horse still choosing its own unerring way, no longer a straight course now but weaving, at times almost doubling on itself though Picklock could still see nothing. ‘Dud shells,’ the stranger explained. ‘Fenced off with flags until they finish getting them out. We just plow circles around them. According to the women and the old men who were here then, the whole war started up again after that recess they took last May, right in that field yonder. It belongs to some people named Demont. The man died that same summer; I guess two wars on his land only a week apart was too much for him. His widow works it now with a hired man. Not that she needs him; she can run a plow as good as he can. There’s another one, her sister. She does the cooking. She has flies up here.’ He was standing now, peering ahead; in silhouette against the sky he tapped the side of his head. Suddenly he swung the horse sharply away and presently stopped it. ‘Here we are,’ he said. ‘About fifty metres yonder on that bank dividing us, there used to be the finest beech tree in this country. My grandfather said that even his grandfather couldn’t remember when it was a sapling. It probably went that same day too. All right,’ he said. ‘Let’s get him up. You dont want to waste any time here either.’

  He showed them where his plow had first exposed the corpse and he had covered it again and marked the place. It was not deep and they could see nothing and after this length of time or perhaps because it was only one, there was little odor either, the long inextricable mass of light bones and cloth soon up and out and on and then into the folds of the ground-sheet and then in the cart itself, the horse thinking that this time surely it was destined for its stall, trying even in the soft earth of the plowing to resume its heavy muscle-bound jog, Morache closing the hedge gate and having to run now to catch the cart again because the horse was now going at a heavy canter even against the lines, trying again to swing into the farmyard until the stranger sawed it away, using the whip now until he got it straightened out on the road back to St Mihiel.

  A little more than four hours but perhaps it should have been. The town was dark now, and the bistro they had started from, a clump of shadow detaching itself from a greater mass of shadow and itself breaking into separate shapes as the nine others surrounded the cart, the cart itself not stopping but going steadily on toward where the carriage in its black pall of bunting had vanished completely into the night. But it was there; the ones who had remained in town had even drawn the nails again so that all necessary was to lift off the top and drag the ground-sheeted bundle through the window and dump it in and set the nails again. ‘Drive them in,’ Picklock said. ‘Who cares about noise now? Where is the brandy?’

  ‘It’s all right,’ a voice said.

  ‘How many bottles did you open?’

  ‘One,’ a voice said.

  ‘Counting from where?’

  ‘Why should we lie when all you’ve got to do to prove it is to count the others?’ the voice said.

  ‘All right,’ Picklock said. ‘Get out of here now and shut the window.’ Then they were on the ground again. The stranger had never quitted his cart and this time surely the horse was going home. But they didn’t wait for that departure. They turned as one, already running, clotting and jostling a little at the carriage door, but plunging at last back into their lightless catafalque as into the womb itself. They were safe now. They had a body, and drink to take care of the night. There was tomorrow and Paris of course, but God could take care of that.

  Carrying the gather of eggs in the loop of her apron, Marya, the elder sister, crossed the yard toward the house as though borne on a soft and tender cloud of white geese. They surrounded and enclosed her as though with a tender and eager yearning; two of them, one on either side, kept absolute pace with her, pressed against her skirts, their long undulant necks laid flat against her moving flanks, their heads tilted upward, the hard yellow beaks open slightly like mouths, the hard insentient eyes filmed over as with a sort of ecstasy: right up to the stoop itself when she mounted it and opened the door and stepped quickly through and closed it, the geese swarming and jostling around and over and onto the stoop itself to press against the door’s blank wood, their necks extended and the heads fallen a little back as though on the brink of swoons, making with their hoarse harsh unmusical voices faint tender cries of anguish and bereavement and unassuageable grief.

  This was the kitchen, already strong with the approaching mid-day’s soup. She didn’t even stop: putting the eggs away, lifting for a moment the lid of the simmering pot on the stove, then placed rapidly on the wooden table a bottle of wine, a glass, a soup bowl, a loaf, a napkin and spoon, then on through the house and out the front door gi
ving onto the lane and the field beyond it where she could already see them—the horse and harrow and the man guiding them, the hired man they had had since the death of her sister’s husband four years ago, and the sister herself moving across the land’s panorama like a ritual, her hand and arm plunging into the sack slung from her shoulder, to emerge in that long sweep which is the second oldest of man’s immemorial gestures or acts, she—Marya—running now, skirting among the old craters picketed off by tiny stakes bearing scraps of red cloth where the rank and lifeless grass grew above the unexploded shells, already saying, crying in her bright serene and carrying voice: ‘Sister! Here is the young Englishman come for the medal. There are two of them, coming up the lane.’

  ‘A friend with him?’ the sister said.

  ‘Not a friend,’ Marya said. ‘This one is looking for a tree.’

  ‘A tree?’ the sister said.

  ‘Yes, Sister. Cant you see him?’

  And, themselves in the lane now, they could see them both—two men obviously but, even at that distance, one of them moving not quite like a human being and, in time nearer, not like a human being at all beside the other’s tall and shambling gait, but at a slow and terrific lurch and heave like some kind of giant insect moving erect and seeming to possess no progress at all even before Marya said: ‘He’s on crutches:’ the single leg swinging metronome and indefatigable yet indomitable too between the rhythmic twin counterstrokes of the crutches; interminable yet indomitable too and indubitably coming nearer until they could see that the arm on that side was gone somewhere near the elbow also, and (quite near now) that what they looked at was not even a whole man since one half of his visible flesh was one furious saffron scar beginning at the ruined homburg hat and dividing his face exactly down the bridge of the nose, across the mouth and chin, to the collar of his shirt. But this seemed to be only outside because the voice was strong and unpitying and the French he addressed them in was fluid and good and it was only the man with him who was sick—a tall thin cadaver of a man, whole to be sure and looking no less like a tramp, but with a sick insolent intolerable face beneath a filthy hat from the band of which there stood a long and raking feather which made him at least eight feet tall.