Complete Works of William Faulkner

by William Faulkner

  Now you cant marry him.

  Why cant I marry him?

  Because he’s dead.

  Dead?

  Yes. I killed him.

  He (Quentin) couldn’t pass that. He was not even listening to her; he said, “Ma’am? What’s that? What did you say?”

  “There’s something in that house.”

  “In that house? It’s Clytie. Dont she — —”

  “No. Something living in it. Hidden in it. It has been out there for four years, living hidden in that house.”

  VI

  THERE WAS SNOW on Shreve’s overcoat sleeve, his ungloved blond square hand red and raw with cold, vanishing. Then on the table before Quentin, lying on the open text book beneath the lamp, the white oblong of envelope, the familiar blurred mechanical Jefferson Jan 10 1910 Miss and then, opened, the My dear son in his father’s sloped fine hand out of that dead dusty summer where he had prepared for Harvard so that his father’s hand could lie on a strange lamplit table in Cambridge; that dead summer twilight — the wistaria, the cigar-smell, the fireflies — attenuated up from Mississippi and into this strange room, across this strange iron New England snow:

  My dear son,

  Miss Rosa Coldfield was buried yesterday. She remained in the coma for almost two weeks and two days ago she died without regaining consciousness and without pain they say, and whatever they mean by that since it has always seemed to me that the only painless death must be that which takes the intelligence by violent surprise and from the rear so to speak, since if death be anything at all beyond a brief and peculiar emotional state of the bereaved it must be a brief and likewise peculiar state of the subject as well. And if aught can be more painful to any intelligence above that of a child or an idiot than a slow and gradual confronting with that which over a long period of bewilderment and dread it has been taught to regard as an irrevocable and unplumbable finality, I do not know it. And if there can be either access of comfort or cessation of pain in the ultimate escape from a stubborn and amazed outrage which over a period of forty-three years has been companionship and bread and fire and all, I do not know that either ——

  —— the letter bringing with it that very September evening itself (and he soon needing, required, to say “No, neither aunt, cousin, nor uncle, Rosa. Miss Rosa Coldfield, an old lady that died young of outrage in 1866 one summer” and then Shreve said, “You mean she was no kin to you, no kin to you at all, that there was actually one Southern Bayard or Guinevere who was no kin to you? then what did she die for?” and that not Shreve’s first time, nobody’s first time in Cambridge since September: Tell about the South. What’s it like there. What do they do there. Why do they live there. Why do they live at all) — that very September evening when Mr Compson stopped talking at last, he (Quentin) walked out of his father’s talking at last because it was now time to go, not because he had heard it all because he had not been listening, since he had something which he still was unable to pass: that door, that gaunt tragic dramatic self-hypnotized youthful face like the tragedian in a college play, an academic Hamlet waked from some trancement of the curtain’s falling and blundering across the dusty stage from which the rest of the cast had departed last Commencement, the sister facing him across the wedding dress which she was not to use, not even to finish, the two of them slashing at one another with twelve or fourteen words and most of these the same words repeated two or three times so that when you boiled it down they did it with eight or ten.

  And she (Miss Coldfield) had on the shawl, as he had known she would, and the bonnet (black once but faded now to that fierce muted metallic green of old peacock feathers) and the black reticule almost as large as a carpet-bag containing all the keys which the house possessed: cupboard closet and door, some of which would not even turn in locks which, shot home, could be solved by any child with a hairpin or a wad of chewing gum, some of which no longer even fitted the locks they had been made for like old married people who no longer have anything in common, to do or to talk about, save the same general weight of air to displace and breathe and general oblivious biding earth to bear their weight — That evening, the twelve miles behind the fat mare in the moonless September dust, the trees along the road not rising soaring as trees should but squatting like huge fowl, their leaves ruffled and heavily separate like the feathers of panting fowls, heavy with sixty days of dust, the roadside undergrowth coated with heat-vulcanized dust and, seen through the dustcloud in which the horse and buggy moved, appeared like masses straining delicate and rigid and immobly upward at perpendicular’s absolute in some old dead volcanic water refined to the oxygenless first principle of liquid, the dustcloud in which the buggy moved not blowing away because it had been raised by no wind and was supported by no air but evoked, materialized about them, instantaneous and eternal, cubic foot for cubic foot of dust to cubic foot for cubic foot of horse and buggy, peripatetic beneath the branch-shredded vistas of flat black fiercely and heavily starred sky, the dustcloud moving on, enclosing them with not threat exactly but maybe warning, bland, almost friendly, warning, as if to say, Come on if you like. But I will get there first; accumulating ahead of you I will arrive first, lifting, sloping gently upward under hooves and wheels so that you will find no destination but will merely abrupt gently onto a plateau and a panorama of harmless and inscrutable night and there will be nothing for you to do but return and so I would advise you not to go, to turn back now and let what is, be; he (Quentin) agreeing to this, sitting in the buggy beside the implacable doll-sized old woman clutching her cotton umbrella, smelling the heat-distilled old woman-flesh, the heat-distilled camphor in the old fold-creases of the shawl, feeling exactly like an electric bulb, blood and skin, since the buggy disturbed not enough air to cool him with motion, created not enough motion within him to make his skin sweat, thinking Good Lord yes, let’s dont find him or it, try to find him or it, risk disturbing him or it: then Shreve again, “Wait. Wait. You mean that this old gal, this Aunt Rosa — —”

  “Miss Rosa,” Quentin said.

  “All right all right. — that this old dame, this Aunt Rosa —

  “Miss Rosa, I tell you.”

  “All right all right all right. — that this old — this Aunt R —— All right all right all right all right. —— that hadn’t been out there, hadn’t set foot in the house even in forty-three years, yet who not only said there was somebody hidden in it but found somebody that would believe her, would drive that twelve miles out there in a buggy at midnight to see if she was right or not?”

  “Yes,” Quentin said.

  “That this old dame that grew up in a household like an overpopulated mausoleum, with no call or claim on her time but the hating of her father and aunt and her sister’s husband in peace and comfort and waiting for the day when they would prove not only to themselves but to everybody else that she had been right. So one night the aunt slid down the rainpipe with a horse-trader, and she was right about the aunt so that fixed that: then her father nailed himself up in the attic to keep from being drafted into the Rebel army and starved to death, so that fixed that except for the unavoidable possibility that when the moment came for him to admit to himself that she had been right he may not have been able to speak or may not have had anyone to tell it to: so she was right about the father too, since if he hadn’t made General Lee and Jeff Davis mad he wouldn’t have had to nail himself up and die and if he hadn’t died he wouldn’t have left her an orphan and a pauper and so situated, left susceptible to a situation where she could receive this mortal affront: and right about the brother-in-law because if he hadn’t been a demon his children wouldn’t have needed protection from him and she wouldn’t have had to go out there and be betrayed by the old meat and find instead of a widowed Agamemnon to her Cassandra an ancient stiff-jointed Pyramus to her eager though untried Thisbe who could approach her in this unbidden April’s compounded demonry and suggest that they breed together for test and sample and if it was a boy they would marry; woul
d not have had to be blown back to town on the initial blast of that horror and outrage to eat of gall and wormwood stolen through paling fences at dawn. So this was not fixed at all and forever because she couldn’t even tell it because of who her successor was, not because he found a successor by just turning around, and no day’s loss of time even, but because of who the successor was, that she might conceivably have ever suffered a situation where she could or would have to decline any office which her successor could have been deemed worthy, even by a demon, to fill; this not fixed at all since when the moment came for him to admit he had been wrong she would have the same trouble with him she had with her father, he would be dead too since she doubtless foresaw the scythe if for no other reason than that it would be the final outrage and affront like the hammer and nails in her father’s business — that scythe, symbolic laurel of a caesar’s triumph — that rusty scythe loaned by the demon himself to Jones more than two years ago to cut the weeds away from the shanty doorway to smooth the path for rutting — that rusty blade garlanded with each successive day’s gaudy ribbon or cheap bead for the (how did she put it? slut wasn’t all, was it?) to walk in — that scythe beyond whose symbolic shape he, even though dead, even when earth itself declined any longer to bear his weight, jeered at her?”

  “Yes,” Quentin said.

  “That this Faustus, this demon, this Beelzebub fled hiding from some momentary flashy glare of his Creditor’s outraged face exasperated beyond all endurance, hiding, scuttling into respectability like a jackal into a rockpile, so she thought at first, until she realized that he was not hiding, did not want to hide, was merely engaged in one final frenzy of evil and harm-doing before the Creditor overtook him next time for good and all — this Faustus who appeared suddenly one Sunday with two pistols and twenty subsidiary demons and skulldugged a hundred miles of land out of a poor ignorant Indian and built the biggest house on it you ever saw and went away with six wagons and came back with the crystal tapestries and the Wedgwood chairs to furnish it and nobody knew if he had robbed another steamboat or had just dug up a little more of the old loot, who hid horns and tail beneath human raiment and a beaver hat and chose (bought her, outswapped his father-in-law, wasn’t it) a wife after three years to scrutinize, weigh and compare, not from one of the local ducal houses but from the lesser baronage whose principality was so far decayed that there would be no risk of his wife bringing him for dowry delusions of grandeur before he should be equipped for it, yet not so far decayed but that she might keep them both from getting lost among the new knives and forks and spoons that he had bought — a wife who not only would consolidate the hiding but could would and did breed him two children to fend and shield both in themselves and in their progeny the brittle bones and tired flesh of an old man against the day when the Creditor would run him to earth for the last time and he couldn’t get away: and so sure enough the daughter fell in love, the son the agent for the providing of that living bulwark between him (the demon) and the Creditor’s bailiff hand until the son should marry and thus insure him doubled and compounded — and then the demon must turn square around and run not only the fiance out of the house and not only the son out of the house but so corrupt, seduce and mesmerize the son that he (the son) should do the office of the outraged father’s pistol-hand when fornication threatened: so that the demon should return from the war five years later and find accomplished and complete the situation he had been working for: son fled for good now with a noose behind him, daughter doomed to spinsterhood — and then almost before his foot was out of the stirrup he (the demon) set out and got himself engaged again in order to replace that progeny the hopes of which he had himself destroyed?”

  “Yes,” Quentin said.

  “Came back home and found his chances of descendants gone where his children had attended to that, and his plantation ruined, fields fallow except for a fine stand of weeds, and taxes and levies and penalties sowed by United States marshals and such and all his niggers gone where the Yankees had attended to that, and you would have thought he would have been satisfied: yet before his foot was out of the stirrup he not only set out to try to restore his plantation to what it used to be, like maybe he was hoping to fool the Creditor by illusion and obfuscation by concealing behind the illusion that time had not elapsed and change occurred the fact that he was now almost sixty years old, until he could get himself a new batch of children to bulwark him, but chose for this purpose the last woman on earth he might have hoped to prevail on, this Aunt R —— all right all right all right. — that hated him, that had always hated him, yet choosing her with a kind of outrageous bravado as if a kind of despairing conviction of his irresistibility or invulnerability were a part of the price he had got for whatever it was he had sold the Creditor, since according to the old dame he never had had a soul; proposed to her and was accepted — then three months later, with no date ever set for the wedding and marriage itself not mentioned one time since, and on the very day when he established definitely that he would be able to keep at least some of his land and how much, he approached her and suggested they breed a couple of dogs together, inventing with fiendish cunning the thing which husbands and fiances have been trying to invent for ten million years: the thing that without harming her or giving her grounds for civil or tribal action would not only blast the little dream-woman out of the dovecote but leave her irrevocably husbanded (and himself, husband or fiance, already safely cuckolded before she can draw breath) with the abstract carcass of outrage and revenge. He said it and was free now, forevermore now of threat or meddling from anyone since he had at last eliminated the last member of his late wife’s family, free now: son fled to Texas or California or maybe even South America, daughter doomed to spinsterhood to live until he died, since after that it wouldn’t matter, in that rotting house, caring for him and feeding him, raising chickens and peddling the eggs for the clothes she and Clytie couldn’t make: so that he didn’t even need to be a demon now but just mad impotent old man who had realized at last that his dream of restoring his Sutpen’s Hundred was not only vain but that what he had left of it would never support him and his family and so running his little crossroads store with a stock of plowshares and hame strings and calico and kerosene and cheap beads and ribbons and a clientele of freed niggers and (what is it? the word? white what? — Yes, trash) with Jones for clerk and who knows maybe what delusions of making money out of the store to rebuild the plantation; who had escaped twice now, got himself into it and been freed by the Creditor who set his children to destroying one another before he had posterity, and he decided that maybe he was wrong in being free and so got into it again and then decided that he was wrong in being unfree and so got out of it again — and then turned right around and bought his way back into it with beads and calico and striped candy out of his own showcase and off his shelves?”