“Oh,” Temple said. “No wonder they’re scared. Let them stay under there. They wont bother me.”
“Reckon I have to. Mr Binford aint going to leave this room, not if he know it.” She stood again, looking at Temple. “Eat that supper,” she said. “You feel better. I done slip you a drink of gin, too.”
“I dont want any,” Temple said, turning her face away. She heard Minnie leave the room. The door closed quietly. Under the bed the dogs crouched against the wall in that rigid and furious terror.
The light hung from the center of the ceiling, beneath a fluted shade of rose-colored paper browned where the bulb bulged it. The floor was covered by a figured maroon-tinted carpet tacked down in strips; the olive-tinted walls bore two framed lithographs. From the two windows curtains of machine lace hung, dust-colored, like strips of lightly congealed dust set on end. The whole room had an air of musty stodginess, decorum; in the wavy mirror of a cheap varnished dresser, as in a stagnant pool, there seemed to linger spent ghosts of voluptuous gestures and dead lusts. In the corner, upon a faded scarred strip of oilcloth tacked over the carpet, sat a washstand bearing a flowered bowl and pitcher and a row of towels; in the corner behind it sat a slop jar dressed also in fluted rose-colored paper.
Beneath the bed the dogs made no sound. Temple moved slightly; the dry complaint of mattress and springs died into the terrific silence in which they crouched. She thought of them, woolly, shapeless; savage, petulant, spoiled, the flatulent monotony of their sheltered lives snatched up without warning by an incomprehensible moment of terror and fear of bodily annihilation at the very hands which symbolised by ordinary the licensed tranquillity of their lives.
The house was full of sounds. Indistinguishable, remote, they came in to her with a quality of awakening, resurgence, as though the house itself had been asleep, rousing itself with dark; she heard something which might have been a burst of laughter in a shrill woman voice. Steamy odors from the tray drifted across her face. She turned her head and looked at it, at the covered and uncovered dishes of thick china. In the midst of them sat the glass of pale gin, a pack of cigarettes and a box of matches. She rose on her elbow, catching up the slipping gown. She lifted the covers upon a thick steak, potatoes, green peas; rolls; an anonymous pinkish mass which some sense — elimination, perhaps — identified as a sweet. She drew the slipping gown up again, thinking about them eating down at school in a bright uproar of voices and clattering forks; of her father and brothers at the supper table at home; thinking about the borrowed gown and Miss Reba saying that they would go shopping tomorrow. And I’ve just got two dollars, she thought.
When she looked at the food she found that she was not hungry at all, didn’t even want to look at it. She lifted the glass and gulped it empty, her face wry, and set it down and turned her face hurriedly from the tray, fumbling for the cigarettes. When she went to strike the match she looked at the tray again and took up a strip of potato gingerly in her fingers and ate it. She ate another, the unlighted cigarette in her other hand. Then she put the cigarette down and took up the knife and fork and began to eat, pausing from time to time to draw the gown up onto her shoulder.
When she finished eating she lit the cigarette. She heard the bell again, then another in a slightly different key. Across a shrill rush of a woman’s voice a door banged. Two people mounted the stairs and passed the door; she heard Miss Reba’s voice booming from somewhere and listened to her toiling slowly up the stairs. Temple watched the door until it opened and Miss Reba stood in it, the tankard in her hand. She now wore a bulging house dress and a widow’s bonnet with a veil. She entered on the flowered felt slippers. Beneath the bed the two dogs made a stiffed concerted sound of utter despair.
The dress, unfastened in the back, hung lumpily about Miss Reba’s shoulders. One ringed hand lay on her breast, the other held the tankard high. Her open mouth, studded with gold-fillings gaped upon the harsh labor of her breathing.
“Oh God oh God,” she said. The dogs surged out from beneath the bed and hurled themselves toward the door in a mad scrabble. As they rushed past her she turned and flung the tankard at them. It struck the door jamb, splashing up the wall, and rebounded with a forlorn clatter. She drew her breath whistling, clutching her breast. She came to the bed and looked down at Temple through the veil. “We was happy as two doves,” she wailed, choking, her rings smoldering in hot glints within her billowing breast. “Then he had to go and die on me.” She drew her breath whistling, her mouth gaped, shaping the hidden agony of her thwarted lungs, her eyes pale and round with stricken bafflement, protuberant. “As two doves,” she roared in a harsh, choking voice.
Again time had overtaken the dead gesture behind the clock crystal: Temple’s watch on the table beside the bed said half-past-ten. For two hours she had lain undisturbed, listening. She could distinguish voices now from below stairs. She had been hearing them for some time, lying in the room’s musty isolation. Later a mechanical piano began to play. Now and then she heard automobile brakes in the street beneath the window; once two voices quarreling bitterly came up and beneath the shade.
She heard two people — a man and a woman — mount the stairs and enter the room next hers. Then she heard Miss Reba toil up the stairs and pass her door, and lying in the bed, her eyes wide and still, she heard Miss Reba hammering at the next door with the metal tankard and shouting into the wood. Beyond the door the man and woman were utterly quiet, so quiet that Temple thought of the dogs again, thought of them crouching against the wall under the bed in that rigid fury of terror and despair. She listened to Miss Reba’s voice shouting hoarsely into the blank wood. It died away into terrific gasping, then it rose again in the gross and virile cursing of a man. Beyond the wall the man and woman made no sound. Temple lay staring at the wall beyond which Miss Reba’s voice rose again as she hammered at the door with the tankard.
Temple neither saw nor heard her door when it opened. She just happened to look toward it after how long she did not know, and saw Popeye standing there, his hat slanted across his face. Still without making any sound he entered and shut the door and shot the bolt and came toward the bed. As slowly she began to shrink into the bed, drawing the covers up to her chin, watching him across the covers. He came and looked down at her. She writhed slowly in a cringing movement, cringing upon herself in as complete an isolation as though she were bound to a church steeple. She grinned at him, her mouth warped over the rigid, placative porcelain of her grimace.
When he put his hand on her she began to whimper. “No, no,” she whispered, “he said I cant now he said . . .” He jerked the covers back and flung them aside. She lay motionless, her palms lifted, her flesh beneath the envelope of her loins cringing rearward in furious disintegration like frightened people in a crowd. When he advanced his hand again she thought he was going to strike her. Watching his face, she saw it beginning to twitch and jerk like that of a child about to cry, and she heard him begin to make a whimpering sound. He gripped the top of the gown. She caught his wrists and began to toss from side to side, opening her mouth to scream. His hand clapped over her mouth, and gripping his wrist, the saliva drooling between his fingers, her body thrashing furiously from thigh to thigh, she saw him crouching beside the bed, his face wrung above his absent chin, his bluish lips protruding as though he were blowing upon hot soup, making a high whinnying sound like a horse. Beyond the wall Miss Reba filled the hall, the house, with a harsh choking uproar of obscene cursing.
xix
“BUT THAT GIRL,” Horace said. “She was all right. You know she was all right when you left the house. When you saw her in the car with him. He was just giving her a lift to town. She was all right. You know she was all right.”
The woman sat on the edge of the bed, looking down at the child. It lay beneath the faded, clean blanket, its hands upflung beside its head, as though it had died in the presence of an unbearable agony which had not had time to touch it. Its eyes were half open, the balls rolled bac
k into the skull so that only the white showed, in color like weak milk. Its face was still damp with perspiration, but its breathing was easier. It no longer breathed in those weak, whistling gasps as it had when Horace entered the room. On a chair beside the bed sat a tumbler half full of faintly discolored water, with a spoon in it. Through the open window came the myriad noises of the square — cars, wagons, footsteps on the pavement beneath — and through it Horace could see the courthouse, with men pitching dollars back and forth between holes in the bare earth beneath the locust and water oaks.
The woman brooded above the child. “Nobody wanted her out there. Lee has told them and told them they must not bring women out there, and I told her before it got dark they were not her kind of people and to get away from there. It was that fellow that brought her. He was out there on the porch with them, still drinking, because when he came in to supper he couldn’t hardly walk, even. He hadn’t even tried to wash the blood off of his face. Little shirt-tail boys that think because Lee breaks the law, they can come out there and treat our house like a . . . Grown people are bad, but at least they take buying whiskey like buying anything else; it’s the ones like him, the ones that are too young to realise that people dont break the law just for a holiday.” Horace could see her clenched hands writhing in her lap. “God, if I had my way, I’d hang every man that makes it or buys it or drinks it, every one of them.
“But why must it have been me, us? What had I ever done to her, to her kind? I told her to get away from there. I told her not to stay there until dark. But that fellow that brought her was getting drunk again, and him and Van picking at each other. If she’d just stopped running around where they had to look at her. She wouldn’t stay anywhere. She’d just dash out one door, and in a minute she’d come running in from the other direction. And if he’d just let Van alone, because Van had to go back on the truck at midnight, and so Popeye would have made him behave. And Saturday night too, and them sitting up all night drinking anyway, and I had gone through it and gone through it and I’d tell Lee to let’s get away, that he was getting nowhere, and he would have these spells like last night, and no doctor, no telephone. And then she had to come out there, after I had slaved for him, slaved for him.” Motionless, her head bent and her hands still in her lap, she had that spent immobility of a chimney rising above the ruin of a house in the aftermath of a cyclone.
“Standing there in the corner behind the bed, with that raincoat on. She was that scared, when they brought the fellow in, all bloody again. They laid him on the bed and Van hit him again and Lee caught Van’s arm, and her standing there with her eyes like the holes in one of these masks. The raincoat was hanging on the wall, and she had it on, over her coat. Her dress was all folded up on the bed. They threw the fellow right on top of it, blood and all, and I said ‘God, are you drunk too?’ But Lee just looked at me and I saw that his nose was white already, like it gets when he’s drunk.
“There wasn’t any lock on the door, but I thought that pretty soon they’d have to go and see about the truck and then I could do something. Then Lee made me go too, and he took the lamp out, so I had to wait until they went back to the porch before I could go back. I stood just inside the door. The fellow was snoring, in the bed there, breathing hard, with his nose and mouth all battered up again, and I could hear them on the porch. Then they would be outdoors, around the house and at the back too I could hear them. Then they got quiet.
“I stood there, against the wall. He would snore and choke and catch his breath and moan, sort of, and I would think about that girl lying there in the dark, with her eyes open, listening to them, and me having to stand there, waiting for them to go away so I could do something. I told her to go away. I said ‘What fault is it of mine if you’re not married? I dont want you here a bit more than you want to be here.’ I said ‘I’ve lived my life without any help from people of your sort; what right have you got to look to me for help?’ Because I’ve done everything for him. I’ve been in the dirt for him. I’ve put everything behind me and all I asked was to be let alone.
“Then I heard the door open. I could tell Lee by the way he breathes. He went to the bed and said ‘I want the raincoat. Sit up and take it off’ and I could hear the shucks rattling while he took it off of her, then he went out. He just got the raincoat and went out. It was Van’s coat.
“And I have walked around that house so much at night, with those men there, men living off of Lee’s risk, men that wouldn’t lift a finger for him if he got caught, until I could tell any of them by the way they breathed, and I could tell Popeye by the smell of that stuff on his hair. Tommy was following him. He came in the door behind Popeye and looked at me and I could see his eyes, like a cat. Then his eyes went away and I could feel him sort of squatting against me, and we could hear Popeye over where the bed was and that fellow snoring and snoring.
“I could just hear little faint sounds, from the shucks, so I knew it was all right yet, and in a minute Popeye came on back, and Tommy followed him out, creeping along behind him, and I stood there until I heard them go down to the truck. Then I went to the bed. When I touched her she began to fight. I was trying to put my hand over her mouth so she couldn’t make a noise, but she didn’t anyway. She just lay there, thrashing about, rolling her head from one side to the other, holding to the coat.
“ ’You fool!’ I says ‘It’s me — the woman.’ ”
“But that girl,” Horace said. “She was all right. When you were coming back to the house the next morning after the baby’s bottle, you saw her and knew she was all right.” The room gave onto the square. Through the window he could see the young men pitching dollars in the courthouse yard, and the wagons passing or tethered about the hitching chains, and he could hear the footsteps and voices of people on the slow and unhurried pavement below the window; the people buying comfortable things to take home and eat at quiet tables. “You know she was all right.”
That night Horace went out to his sister’s, in a hired car; he did not telephone. He found Miss Jenny in her room. “Well,” she said. “Narcissa will—”
“I dont want to see her,” Horace said. “Her nice, well-bred young man. Her Virginia gentleman. I know why he didn’t come back.”
“Who? Gowan?”
“Yes; Gowan. And, by the Lord, he’d better not come back. By God, when I think that I had the opportunity—”
“What? What did he do?”
“He carried a little fool girl out there with him that day and got drunk and ran off and left her. That’s what he did. If it hadn’t And when I think of people like that walking been for that woman — the earth with impunity just because he has a balloon-tailed suit and went through the astonishing experience of having attended Virginia . . . On any train or in any hotel, on the street; anywhere, mind you—”
“Oh,” Miss Jenny said. “I didn’t understand at first who you meant. Well,” she said. “You remember that last time he was here, just after you came? the day he wouldn’t stay for supper and went to Oxford?”
“Yes. And when I think how I could have—”
“He asked Narcissa to marry him. She told him that one child was enough for her.”
“I said she has no heart. She cannot be satisfied with less than insult.”
“So he got mad and said he would go to Oxford, where there was a woman he was reasonably confident he would not appear ridiculous to: something like that. Well.” She looked at him, her neck bowed to see across her spectacles. “I’ll declare, a male parent is a funny thing, but just let a man have a hand in the affairs of a female that’s no kin to him . . . What is it that makes a man think that the female flesh he marries or begets might misbehave, but all he didn’t marry or get is bound to?”
“Yes,” Horace said, “and thank God she isn’t my flesh and blood. I can reconcile myself to her having to be exposed to a scoundrel now and then, but to think that at any moment she may become involved with a fool.”
“Well, what a
re you going to do about it? Start some kind of roach campaign?”
“I’m going to do what she said: I’m going to have a law passed making it obligatory upon everyone to shoot any man less than fifty years old that makes, buys, sells or thinks whiskey . . . scoundrel I can face, but to think of her being exposed to any fool. . . .”
He returned to town. The night was warm, the darkness filled with the sound of newfledged cicadas. He was using a bed, one chair, a bureau on which he had spread a towel and upon which lay his brushes, his watch, his pipe and tobacco pouch, and, propped against a book, a photograph of his step-daughter, Little Belle. Upon the glazed surface a highlight lay. He shifted the photograph until the face came clear. He stood before it, looking at the sweet, inscrutable face which looked in turn at something just beyond his shoulder, out of the dead cardboard. He was thinking of the grape arbor in Kinston, of summer twilight and the murmur of voices darkening into silence as he approached, who meant them, her, no harm; who meant her less than harm, good God; darkening into the pale whisper of her white dress, of the delicate and urgent mammalian whisper of that curious small flesh which he had not begot and in which appeared to be vatted delicately some seething sympathy with the blossoming grape.
He moved, suddenly. As of its own accord the photograph had shifted, slipping a little from its precarious balancing against the book. The image blurred into the highlight, like something familiar seen beneath disturbed though clear water; he looked at the familiar image with a kind of quiet horror and despair, at a face suddenly older in sin than he would ever be, a face more blurred than sweet, at eyes more secret than soft. In reaching for it, he knocked it flat; whereupon once more the face mused tenderly behind the rigid travesty of the painted mouth, contemplating something beyond his shoulder. He lay in bed, dressed, with the light burning, until he heard the courthouse clock strike three. Then he left the house, putting his watch and his tobacco pouch into his pocket.
Complete Works of William Faulkner Page 118
