“Yes, sir,” Miss Jenny said, “Gowan Stevens has thrown her down. He didn’t even come back from that Oxford dance to say goodbye. He just wrote her a letter.” She began to search about her in the chair. “And now I flinch every time the doorbell rings, thinking that his mother—”
“Miss Jenny,” Narcissa said, “you give me my letter.”
“Wait,” Miss Jenny said, “here it is. Now, what do you think of that for a delicate operation on the human heart without anaesthetic? I’m beginning to believe all this I hear, about how young folks learn all the things in order to get married, that we had to get married in order to learn.”
Horace took the single sheet.
Narcissa my dear
This has no heading. I wish it could have no date. But if my heart were as blank as this page, this would not be necessary at all. I will not see you again. I cannot write it, for I have gone through with an experience which I cannot face. I have but one rift in the darkness, that is that I have injured no one save myself by my folly, and that the extent of that folly you will never learn. I need not say that the hope that you never learn it is the sole reason why I will not see you again. Think as well of me as you can. I wish I had the right to say, if you learn of my folly think not the less of me.
G.
Horace read the note, the single sheet. He held it between his hands. He did not say anything for a while.
“Good Lord,” Horace said. “Someone mistook him for a Mississippi man on the dance floor.”
“I think, if I were you—” Narcissa said. After a moment she said: “How much longer is this going to last, Horace?”
“Not any longer than I can help. If you know of any way in which I can get him out of that jail by tomorrow . . .”
“There’s only one way,” she said. She looked at him a moment. Then she turned toward the door. “Which way did Bory go? Dinner’ll be ready soon.” She went out.
“And you know what that way is,” Miss Jenny said. “If you aint got any backbone.”
“I’ll know whether or not I have any backbone when you tell me what the other way is.”
“Go back to Belle,” Miss Jenny said. “Go back home.”
The Negro murderer was to be hanged on a Saturday without pomp, buried without circumstance: one night he would be singing at the barred window and yelling down out of the soft myriad darkness of a May night; the next night he would be gone, leaving the window for Goodwin. Goodwin had been bound over for the June term of court, without bail. But still he would not agree to let Horace divulge Popeye’s presence at the scene of the murder.
“I tell you, they’ve got nothing on me,” Goodwin said.
“How do you know they haven’t?” Horace said.
“Well, no matter what they think they have on me, I stand a chance in court. But just let it get to Memphis that I said he was anywhere around there, what chance do you think I’d have to get back to this cell after I testified?”
“You’ve got the law, justice, civilization.”
“Sure, if I spend the rest of my life squatting in that corner yonder. Come here.” He led Horace to the window. “There are five windows in that hotel yonder that look into this one. And I’ve seen him light matches with a pistol at twenty feet. Why, damn it all, I’d never get back here from the courtroom the day I testified that.”
“But there’s such a thing as obstruct—”
“Obstructing damnation. Let them prove I did it. Tommy was found in the barn, shot from behind. Let them find the pistol. I was there, waiting. I didn’t try to run. I could have, but I didn’t. It was me notified the sheriff. Of course my being there alone except for her and Pap looked bad. If it was a stall, dont common sense tell you I’d have invented a better one?”
“You’re not being tried by common sense,” Horace said. “You’re being tried by a jury.”
“Then let them make the best of it. That’s all they’ll get. The dead man is in the barn, hadn’t been touched; me and my wife and child and Pap in the house; nothing in the house touched; me the one that sent for the sheriff. No, no; I know I run a chance this way, but let me just open my head about that fellow, and there’s no chance to it. I know what I’ll get.”
“But you heard the shot,” Horace said. “You have already told that.”
“No,” he said, “I didn’t. I didn’t hear anything. I dont know anything about it. . . . Do you mind waiting outside a minute while I talk to Ruby?”
It was five minutes before she joined him. He said:
“There’s something about this that I dont know yet; that you and Lee haven’t told me. Something he just warned you not to tell me. Isn’t there?” She walked beside him, carrying the child. It was still whimpering now and then, tossing its thin body in sudden jerks. She tried to soothe it, crooning to it, rocking it in her arms. “Maybe you carry it too much,” Horace said; “maybe if you could leave it at the hotel . . .”
“I guess Lee knows what to do,” she said.
“But the lawyer should know all the facts, everything. He is the one to decide what to tell and what not to tell. Else, why have one? That’s like paying a dentist to fix your teeth and then refusing to let him look into your mouth, dont you see? You wouldn’t treat a dentist or a doctor this way.” She said nothing, her head bent over the child. It wailed.
“Hush,” she said, “hush, now.”
“And worse than that, there’s such a thing called obstructing justice. Suppose he swears there was nobody else there, suppose he is about to be cleared — which is not likely — and somebody turns up who saw Popeye about the place, or saw his car leaving. Then they’ll say, if Lee didn’t tell the truth about an unimportant thing, why should we believe him when his neck’s in danger?”
They reached the hotel. He opened the door for her. She did not look at him. “I guess Lee knows best,” she said, going in. The child wailed, a thin, whimpering, distressful cry. “Hush,” she said. “Shhhhhhhhhhhh.”
Isom had been to fetch Narcissa from a party; it was late when the car stopped at the corner and picked him up. A few of the lights were beginning to come on, and men were already drifting back toward the square after supper, but it was still too early for the Negro murderer to begin to sing. “And he’d better sing fast, too,” Horace said. “He’s only got two days more.” But he was not there yet. The jail faced west; a last faint copper-colored light lay upon the dingy grating and upon the small, pale blob of a hand, and in scarce any wind a blue wisp of tobacco floated out and dissolved raggedly away. “If it wasn’t bad enough to have her husband there, without that poor brute counting his remaining breaths at the top of his voice. . . .”
“Maybe they’ll wait and hang them both together,” Narcissa said. “They do that sometimes, dont they?”
That night Horace built a small fire in the grate. It was not cool. He was using only one room now, taking his meals at the hotel; the rest of the house was locked again. He tried to read, then he gave up and undressed and went to bed, watching the fire die in the grate. He heard the town clock strike twelve. “When this is over, I think I’ll go to Europe,” he said. “I need a change. Either I, or Mississippi, one.”
Maybe a few of them would still be gathered along the fence, since this would be his last night; the thick, small-headed shape of him would be clinging to the bars, gorilla-like, singing, while upon his shadow, upon the checkered orifice of the window, the ragged grief of the heaven-tree would pulse and change, the last bloom fallen now in viscid smears upon the sidewalk. Horace turned again in the bed. “They ought to clean that damn mess off the sidewalk,” he said. “Damn. Damn. Damn.”
He was sleeping late the next morning; he had seen daylight. He was wakened by someone knocking at the door. It was half-past six. He went to the door. The Negro porter of the hotel stood there.
“What?” Horace said. “Is it Mrs Goodwin?”
“She say for you to come when you up,” the Negro said.
“Tell her I’ll be there in ten minut
es.”
As he entered the hotel he passed a young man with a small black bag, such as doctors carry. Horace went on up. The woman was standing in the half-open door, looking down the hall.
“I finally got the doctor,” she said. “But I wanted anyway. . . .” The child lay on the bed, its eyes shut, flushed and sweating, its curled hands above its head in the attitude of one crucified, breathing in short, whistling gasps. “He was sick all last night. I went and got some medicine and I tried to keep him quiet until daylight. At last I got the doctor.” She stood beside the bed, looking down at the child. “There was a woman there,” she said. “A young girl.”
“A—” Horace said. “Oh,” he said. “Yes. You’d better tell me about it.”
xviii
POPEYE DROVE SWIFTLY but without any quality of haste or of flight, down the clay road and into the sand. Temple was beside him. Her hat was jammed onto the back of her head, her hair escaping beneath the crumpled brim in matted clots. Her face looked like a sleepwalker’s as she swayed limply to the lurching of the car. She lurched against Popeye, lifting her hand in limp reflex. Without releasing the wheel he thrust her back with his elbow. “Brace yourself,” he said. “Come on, now.”
Before they came to the tree they passed the woman. She stood beside the road, carrying the child, the hem of her dress folded back over its face, and she looked at them quietly from beneath the faded sunbonnet, flicking swiftly in and out of Temple’s vision without any motion, any sign.
When they reached the tree Popeye swung the car out of the road and drove it crashing into the undergrowth and through the prone tree-top and back into the road again in a running popping of cane-stalks like musketry along a trench, without any diminution of speed. Beside the tree Gowan’s car lay on its side. Temple looked vaguely and stupidly at it as it too shot behind.
Popeye swung back into the sandy ruts. Yet there was no flight in the action: he performed it with a certain vicious petulance, that was all. It was a powerful car. Even in the sand it held forty miles an hour, and up the narrow gulch to the highroad, where he turned north. Sitting beside him, braced against jolts that had already given way to a smooth increasing hiss of gravel, Temple gazed dully forward as the road she had traversed yesterday began to flee backward under the wheels as onto a spool, feeling her blood seeping slowly inside her loins. She sat limp in the corner of the seat, watching the steady backward rush of the land — pines in opening vistas splashed with fading dogwood; sedge; fields green with new cotton and empty of any movement, peaceful, as though Sunday were a quality of atmosphere, of light and shade — sitting with her legs close together, listening to the hot minute seeping of her blood, saying dully to herself, I’m still bleeding. I’m still bleeding.
It was a bright, soft day, a wanton morning filled with that unbelievable soft radiance of May, rife with a promise of noon and of heat, with high fat clouds like gobs of whipped cream floating lightly as reflections in a mirror, their shadows scudding sedately across the road. It had been a lavender spring. The fruit trees, the white ones, had been in small leaf when the blooms matured; they had never attained that brilliant whiteness of last spring, and the dogwood had come into full bloom after the leaf also, in green retrograde before crescendo. But lilac and wistaria and redbud, even the shabby heaven-trees, had never been finer, fulgent, with a burning scent blowing for a hundred yards along the vagrant air of April and May. The bougainvillaea against the veranda would be large as basketballs and lightly poised as balloons, and looking vacantly and stupidly at the rushing roadside Temple began to scream.
It started as a wail, raising, cut suddenly off by Popeye’s hand. With her hands lying on her lap, sitting erect, she screamed, tasting the gritty acridity of his fingers while the car slewed squealing in the gravel, feeling her secret blood. Then he gripped her by the back of the neck and she sat motionless, her mouth round and open like a small empty cave. He shook her head.
“Shut it,” he said, “shut it”; gripping her silent. “Look at yourself. Here.” With the other hand he swung the mirror on the windshield around and she looked at her image, at the uptilted hat and her matted hair and her round mouth. She began to fumble at her coat pockets, looking at her reflection. He released her and she produced the compact and opened it and peered into the mirror, whimpering a little. She powdered her face and rouged her mouth and straightened her hat, whimpering into the tiny mirror on her lap while Popeye watched her. He lit a cigarette. “Aint you ashamed of yourself?” he said.
“It’s still running,” she whimpered. “I can feel it.” With the lipstick poised she looked at him and opened her mouth again. He gripped her by the back of the neck.
“Stop it, now. You going to shut it?”
“Yes,” she whimpered.
“See you do, then. Come on. Get yourself fixed.”
She put the compact away. He started the car again.
The road began to thicken with pleasure cars Sunday-bent — small, clay-crusted Fords and Chevrolets; an occasional larger car moving swiftly, with swathed women, and dust-covered hampers; trucks filled with wooden-faced country people in garments like a colored wood meticulously carved; now and then a wagon or a buggy. Before a weathered frame church on a hill the grove was full of tethered teams and battered cars and trucks. The woods gave away to fields; houses became more frequent. Low above the skyline, above roofs and a spire or two, smoke hung. The gravel became asphalt and they entered Dumfries.
Temple began to look about, like one waking from sleep. “Not here!” she said. “I cant—”
“Hush it, now,” Popeye said.
“I cant — I might—” she whimpered. “I’m hungry,” she said. “I haven’t eaten since . . .”
“Ah, you aint hungry. Wait till we get to town.”
She looked about with dazed, glassy eyes. “There might be people here . . .” He swung in toward a filling station. “I cant get out,” she whimpered. “It’s still running, I tell you!”
“Who told you to get out?” He descended and looked at her across the wheel. “Dont you move.” She watched him go up the street and enter a door. It was a dingy confectionery. He bought a pack of cigarettes and put one in his mouth. “Gimme a couple of bars of candy,” he said.
“What kind?”
“Candy,” he said. Under a glass bell on the counter a plate of sandwiches sat. He took one and flipped a dollar on the counter and turned toward the door.
“Here’s your change,” the clerk said.
“Keep it,” he said. “You’ll get rich faster.”
When he saw the car it was empty. He stopped ten feet away and changed the sandwich to his left hand, the unlighted cigarette slanted beneath his chin. The mechanic, hanging the hose up, saw him and jerked his thumb toward the corner of the building.
Beyond the corner the wall made an offset. In the niche was a greasy barrel half full of scraps of metal and rubber. Between the barrel and the wall Temple crouched. “He nearly saw me!” she whispered. “He was almost looking right at me!”
“Who?” Popeye said. He looked back up the street. “Who saw you?”
“He was coming right toward me! A boy. At school. He was looking right toward—”
“Come on. Come out of it.”
“He was look—” Popeye took her by the arm. She crouched in the corner, jerking at the arm he held, her wan face craned around the corner.
“Come on, now.” Then his hand was at the back of her neck, gripping it.
“Oh,” she wailed in a choked voice. It was as though he were lifting her slowly erect by that one hand. Excepting that, there was no movement between them. Side by side, almost of a height, they appeared as decorous as two acquaintances stopped to pass the time of day before entering church.
“Are you coming?” he said. “Are you?”
“I cant. It’s down to my stocking now. Look.” She lifted her skirt away in a shrinking gesture, then she dropped the skirt and rose again, her torso arching bac
kward, her soundless mouth open as he gripped her. He released her.
“Will you come now?”
She came out from behind the barrel. He took her arm.
“It’s all over the back of my coat,” she whimpered. “Look and see.”
“You’re all right. I’ll get you another coat tomorrow. Come on.”
They returned to the car. At the corner she hung back again. “You want some more of it, do you?” he whispered, not touching her. “Do you?” She went on and got in the car quietly. He took the wheel. “Here, I got you a sandwich.” He took it from his pocket and put it in her hand. “Come on, now. Eat it.” She took a bite obediently. He started the car and took the Memphis road. Again, the bitten sandwich in her hand, she ceased chewing and opened her mouth in that round, hopeless expression of a child; again his hand left the wheel and gripped the back of her neck and she sat motionless, gazing straight at him, her mouth open and the half chewed mass of bread and meat lying upon her tongue.
They reached Memphis in midafternoon. At the foot of the bluff below Main Street Popeye turned into a narrow street of smoke-grimed frame houses with tiers of wooden galleries, set a little back in grassless plots, with now and then a forlorn and hardy tree of some shabby species — gaunt, lopbranched magnolias, a stunted elm or a locust in grayish, cadaverous bloom — interspersed by rear ends of garages; a scrap-heap in a vacant lot; a low doored cavern of an equivocal appearance where an oilcloth-covered counter and a row of backless stools, a metal coffee-urn and a fat man in a dirty apron with a toothpick in his mouth, stood for an instant out of the gloom with an effect as of a sinister and meaningless photograph poorly made. From the bluff, beyond a line of office buildings terraced sharply against the sunfilled sky, came a sound of traffic — motor horns, trolleys — passing high overhead on the river breeze; at the end of the street a trolley materialised in the narrow gap with an effect as of magic and vanished with a stupendous clatter. On a second storey gallery a young Negro woman in her underclothes smoked a cigarette sullenly, her arms on the balustrade.
Complete Works of William Faulkner Page 116
