Complete Works of William Faulkner
Page 110
“Jack.”
The man looked at Gowan. His jaw dropped into an expression of imbecile glee. What teeth he had were stained and ragged within his soft, tawny beard.
“You, Jack, up there,” the voice said.
“Hyear him?” the man whispered, shaking with silent glee. “Callin me Jack. My name’s Tawmmy.”
“Come on,” the voice said. “I know you’re there.”
“I reckon we better,” Tommy said. “He jest lief take a shot up through the flo as not.”
Here,” he ”For Christ’s sake,” Gowan said, “why didn’t you — shouted, “here we come!”
Popeye stood in the door, his forefingers in his vest. The sun had set. When they descended and appeared in the door Temple stepped from the back porch. She paused, watching them, then she came down the hill. She began to run.
“Didn’t I tell you to get on down that road?” Popeye said.
“Me an him jest stepped down hyer a minute,” Tommy said.
“Did I tell you to get on down that road, or didn’t I?”
“Yeuh,” Tommy said. “You told me.” Popeye turned without so much as a glance at Gowan. Tommy followed. His back still shook with secret glee. Temple met Popeye halfway to the house. Without ceasing to run she appeared to pause. Even her flapping coat did not overtake her, yet for an appreciable instant she faced Popeye with a grimace of taut, toothed coquetry. He did not stop; the finicking swagger of his narrow back did not falter. Temple ran again. She passed Tommy and clutched Gowan’s arm.
You’ve been drinking ”Gowan, I’m scared. She said for me not to — She says for us again; you haven’t even washed the blood — to go away from here . . .” Her eyes were quite black, her face small and wan in the dusk. She looked toward the house. Popeye was just turning the corner. “She has to walk all the way to a spring They’ve got the cutest little baby in a box behind for water; she — the stove. Gowan, she said for me not to be here after dark. She said to ask him. He’s got a car. She said she didn’t think he—”
“Ask who?” Gowan said. Tommy was looking back at them. Then he went on.
“That black man. She said she didn’t think he would, but he might. Come on.” They went toward the house. A path led around it to the front. The car was parked between the path and the house, in the tall weeds. Temple faced Gowan again, her hand lying upon the door of the car. “It wont take him any time, in this. I know a boy at home has one. It will run eighty. All he would have to do is just drive us to a town, because she said if we were married and I had to say we were. Just to a railroad. Maybe there’s one closer than Jefferson,” she whispered, staring at him, stroking her hand along the edge of the door.
“Oh,” Gowan said, “I’m to do the asking. Is that it? You’re all nuts. Do you think that ape will? I’d rather stay here a week than go anywhere with him.”
“She said to. She said for me not to stay here.”
“You’re crazy as a loon. Come on here.”
“You wont ask him? You wont do it?”
“No. Wait till Lee comes, I tell you. He’ll get us a car.”
They went on in the path. Popeye was leaning against a post, lighting a cigarette. Temple ran on up the broken steps. “Say,” she said, “dont you want to drive us to town?”
He turned his head, the cigarette in his mouth, the match cupped between his hands. Temple’s mouth was fixed in that cringing grimace. Popeye leaned the cigarette to the match. “No,” he said.
“Come on,” Temple said. “Be a sport. It wont take you any time in that Packard. How about it? We’ll pay you.”
Popeye inhaled. He snapped the match into the weeds. He said, in his soft, cold voice: “Make your whore lay off of me, Jack.”
Gowan moved thickly, like a clumsy, good-tempered horse goaded suddenly. “Look here, now,” he said. Popeye exhaled, the smoke jetting downward in two thin spurts. “I dont like that,” Gowan said. “Do you know who you’re talking to?” He continued that thick movement, like he could neither stop it nor complete it. “I dont like that.” Popeye turned his head and looked at Gowan. Then he quit looking at him and Temple said suddenly:
“What river did you fall in with that suit on? Do you have to shave it off at night?” Then she was moving toward the door with Gowan’s hand in the small of her back, her head reverted, her heels clattering. Popeye leaned motionless against the post, his head turned over his shoulder in profile.
“Do you want—” Gowan hissed.
“You mean old thing!” Temple cried. “You mean old thing!”
Gowan shoved her into the house. “Do you want him to slam your damn head off?” he said.
“You’re scared of him!” Temple said. “You’re scared!”
“Shut your mouth!” Gowan said. He began to shake her. Their feet scraped on the bare floor as though they were performing a clumsy dance, and clinging together they lurched into the wall. “Look out,” he said, “you’re getting all that stuff stirred up in me again.” She broke free, running. He leaned against the wall and watched her in silhouette run out the back door.
She ran into the kitchen. It was dark save for a crack of light about the fire door of the stove. She whirled and ran out the door and saw Gowan going down the hill toward the barn. He’s going to drink some more, she thought; he’s getting drunk again. That makes three times today. Still more dusk had grown in the hall. She stood on tiptoe, listening, thinking I’m hungry, I haven’t eaten all day; thinking of the school, the lighted windows, the slow couples strolling toward the sound of the supper bell, and of her father sitting on the porch at home, his feet on the rail, watching a Negro mow the lawn. She moved quietly on tiptoe. In the corner beside the door the shotgun leaned and she crowded into the corner beside it and began to cry.
Immediately she stopped and ceased breathing. Something was moving beyond the wall against which she leaned. It crossed the room with minute, blundering sounds, preceded by a dry tapping. It emerged into the hall and she screamed, feeling her lungs emptying long after all the air was expelled, and her diaphragm laboring long after her chest was empty, and watched the old man go down the hall at a wide-legged shuffling trot, the stick in one hand and the other elbow cocked at an acute angle from his middle. Running, she passed him — a dim, spraddled figure standing at the edge of the porch — and ran on into the kitchen and darted into the corner behind the stove. Crouching, she drew the box out and drew it before her. Her hand touched the child’s face, then she flung her arms around the box, clutching it, staring across it at the pale door and trying to pray. But she could not think of a single designation for the heavenly father, so she began to say “My father’s a judge; my father’s a judge” over and over until Goodwin ran lightly into the room. He struck a match and held it overhead and looked down at her until the flame reached his fingers.
“Hah,” he said. She heard his light, swift feet twice, then his hand touched her cheek and he lifted her from behind the box by the scruff of the neck, like a kitten. “What are you doing in my house?” he said.
vii
FROM SOMEWHERE HERE beyond the lamplit hall she could hear the voices — a word; now and then a laugh: the harsh, derisive laugh of a man easily brought to mirth by youth or by age, cutting across the spluttering of frying meat on the stove where the woman stood. Once she heard two of them come down the hall in their heavy shoes, and a moment later the clatter of the dipper in the galvanised pail and the voice that had laughed, cursing. Holding her coat close she peered around the door with the wide, abashed curiosity of a child, and saw Gowan and a second man in khaki breeches. He’s getting drunk again, she thought. He’s got drunk four times since we left Taylor.
“Is he your brother?” she said.
“Who?” the woman said. “My what?” She turned the meat on the hissing skillet.
“I thought maybe your young brother was here.”
“God,” the woman said. She turned the meat with a wire fork. “I hope not.”
The woman opened the oven and looked in. “Nobody asked you to come out here. I didn’t ask you to stay. I told you to go while it was daylight.”
“How could I? I asked him. Gowan wouldn’t, so I had to ask him.”
The woman closed the oven and turned and looked at Temple, her back to the light. “How could you? Do you know how I get my water? I walk after it. A mile. Six times a day. Add that up. Not because I am somewhere I am afraid to stay.” She went to the table and took up a pack of cigarettes and shook one out.
“May I have one?” Temple said. The woman flipped the pack along the table. She removed the chimney from the lamp and lit hers at the wick. Temple took up the pack and stood listening to Gowan and the other man go back into the house. “There are so many of them,” she said in a wailing tone, watching the cigarette crush slowly in her fingers. “But maybe, with so many of them . . .” The woman had gone back to the stove. She turned the meat. “Gowan kept on getting drunk again. He got drunk three times today. He was drunk when I got off the train at Taylor and I am on probation and I told him what would happen and I tried to get him to throw the jar away and when we stopped at that little country store to buy a shirt he got drunk again. And so we hadn’t eaten and we stopped at Dumfries and he went into the restaurant but I was too worried to eat and I couldn’t find him and then he came up another street and I felt the bottle in his pocket before he knocked my hand away. He kept on saying I had his lighter and then when he lost it and I told him he had, he swore he never owned one in his life.”
The meat hissed and spluttered in the skillet. “He got drunk three separate times,” Temple said. “Three separate times in one day. Buddy — that’s Hubert, my youngest brother — said that if he ever caught me with a drunk man, he’d beat hell out of me. And now I’m with one that gets drunk three times in one day.” Leaning her hip against the table, her hand crushing the cigarette, she began to laugh. “Dont you think that’s funny?” she said. Then she quit laughing by holding her breath, and she could hear the faint guttering the lamp made, and the meat in the skillet and the hissing of the kettle on the stove, and the voices, the harsh, abrupt, meaningless masculine sounds from the house. “And you have to cook for all of them every night. All those men eating here, the house full of them at night, in the dark . . .” She dropped the crushed cigarette. “May I hold the baby? I know how; I’ll hold him good.” She ran to the box, stooping, and lifted the sleeping child. It opened its eyes, whimpering. “Now, now; Temple’s got it.” She rocked it, held high and awkward in her thin arms. “Listen,” she said, looking at the woman’s back, “will you ask him? your husband, I mean. He can get a car and take me somewhere. Will you? Will you ask him?” The child had stopped whimpering. Its lead-colored eyelids showed a thin line of eyeball. “I’m not afraid,” Temple said. “Things like that dont happen. Do they? They’re just like other people. You’re just like other people. With a little baby. And besides, my father’s a ju-judge. The gu-governor comes What a cute little bu-ba-a-by,” she wailed, to our house to e-eat — lifting the child to her face; “if bad mans hurts Temple, us’ll tell the governor’s soldiers, wont us?”
“Like what people?” the woman said, turning the meat. “Do you think Lee hasn’t anything better to do than chase after every one of you cheap little—” She opened the fire door and threw her cigarette in and slammed the door. In nuzzling at the child Temple had pushed her hat onto the back of her head at a precarious dissolute angle above her clotted curls. “Why did you come here?”
“It was Gowan. I begged him. We had already missed the ball game, but I begged him if he’d just get me to Starkville before the special started back, they wouldn’t know I wasn’t on it, because the ones that saw me get off wouldn’t tell. But he wouldn’t. He said we’d stop here just a minute and get some more whiskey and he was already drunk then. He had gotten drunk again since we left Taylor and I’m on probation and Daddy would just die. But he wouldn’t do it. He got drunk again while I was begging him to take me to a town anywhere and let me out.”
“On probation?” the woman said.
“For slipping out at night. Because only town boys can have cars, and when you had a date with a town boy on Friday or Saturday or Sunday, the boys in school wouldn’t have a date with you, because they cant have cars. So I had to slip out. And a girl that didn’t like me told the Dean, because I had a date with a boy she liked and he never asked her for another date. So I had to.”
“If you didn’t slip out, you wouldn’t get to go riding,” the woman said. “Is that it? And now when you slipped out once too often, you’re squealing.”
“Gowan’s not a town boy. He’s from Jefferson. He went to Virginia. He kept on saying how they had taught him to drink like a gentleman, and I begged him just to let me out anywhere and lend me enough money for a ticket because I only had two dollars, but he—”
“Oh, I know your sort,” the woman said. “Honest women. Too good to have anything to do with common people. You’ll slip out at night with the kids, but just let a man come along.” She turned the meat. “Take all you can get, and give nothing. ‘I’m a pure girl; I dont do that.’ You’ll slip out with the kids and burn their gasoline and eat their food, but just let a man so much as look at you and you faint away because your father the judge and your four brothers might not like it. But just let you get into a jam, then who do you come crying to? to us, the ones that are not good enough to lace the judge’s almighty shoes.” Across the child Temple gazed at the woman’s back, her face like a small pale mask beneath the precarious hat.
“My brother said he would kill Frank. He didn’t say he would give me a whipping if he caught me with him; he said he would kill the goddam son of a bitch in his yellow buggy and my father cursed my brother and said he could run his family a while longer and he drove me into the house and locked me in and went down to the bridge to wait for Frank. But I wasn’t a coward. I climbed down the gutter and headed Frank off and told him. I begged him to go away, but he said we’d both go. When we got back in the buggy I knew it had been the last time. I knew it, and I begged him again to go away, but he said he’d drive me home to get my suitcase and we’d tell father. He wasn’t a coward either. My father was sitting on the porch. He said ‘Get out of that buggy’ and I got out and I begged Frank to go on, but he got out too and we came up the path and father reached around inside the door and got the shotgun. I got in front of Frank and father said ‘Do you want it too?’ and I tried to stay in front but Frank shoved me behind him and held me and father shot him and said ‘Get down there and sup your dirt, you whore.’ ”
“I have been called that,” Temple whispered, holding the sleeping child in her high thin arms, gazing at the woman’s back.
“But you good women. Cheap sports. Giving nothing, then when you’re caught . . . Do you know what you’ve got into now?” she looked across her shoulder, the fork in her hand. “Do you think you’re meeting kids now? kids that give a damn whether you like it or not? Let me tell you whose house you’ve come into without being asked or wanted; who you’re expecting to drop everything and carry you back where you had no business ever leaving. When he was a soldier in the Philippines he killed another soldier over one of those nigger women and they sent him to Leavenworth. Then the war came and they let him out to go to it. He got two medals, and when it was over they put him back in Leavenworth until the lawyer got a congressman to get him out. Then I could quit jazzing again—”
“Jazzing?” Temple whispered, holding the child, looking herself no more than an elongated and leggy infant in her scant dress and uptilted hat.
“Yes, putty-fa
ce!” the woman said. “How do you suppose I paid that lawyer? And that’s the sort of man you think will care that much—” with the fork in her hand she came and snapped her fingers softly and viciously in Temple’s face “ — what happens to you. And you, you little doll-faced slut, that think you cant come into a room where a man is without him . . .” Beneath the faded garment her breast moved deep and full. With her hands on her hips she looked at Temple with cold, blazing eyes. “Man? You’ve never seen a real man. You dont know what it is to be wanted by a real man. And thank your stars you haven’t and never will, for then you’d find just what that little putty face is worth, and all the rest of it you think you are jealous of when you’re just scared of it. And if he is just man enough to call you whore, you’ll say Yes Yes and you’ll crawl naked in the dirt and the mire for him to call you that. . . . Give me that baby.” Temple held the child, gazing at the woman, her mouth moving as if she were saying Yes Yes Yes. The woman threw the fork onto the table. “Turn loose,” she said, lifting the child. It opened its eyes and wailed. The woman drew a chair out and sat down, the child upon her lap. “Will you hand me one of those diapers on the line yonder?” she said. Temple stood in the floor, her lips still moving. “You’re scared to go out there, aren’t you?” the woman said. She rose.
“No,” Temple said; “I’ll get—”
“I’ll get it.” The unlaced brogans scuffed across the kitchen. She returned and drew another chair up to the stove and spread the two remaining cloths and the undergarment on it, and sat again and laid the child across her lap. It wailed. “Hush,” she said, “hush, now,” her face in the lamplight taking a serene, brooding quality. She changed the child and laid it in the box. Then she took a platter down from a cupboard curtained by a split towsack and took up the fork and came and looked into Temple’s face again.