Complete Works of William Faulkner

by William Faulkner

  “So that Sunday came, a year after that day and three years after he had suggested to Miss Rosa that they try it first and if it was a boy and lived, they would be married. It was before daylight and he was expecting his mare to foal to the black stallion, so when he left the house before day that morning Judith thought he was going to the stable. What Judith knew and how much about her father and Wash’s granddaughter nobody knew, how much she could not have helped but know from what Clytie must have known (may have or may not have told her, whether or no) since everybody else white or black in the neighborhood knew who had ever seen the girl pass in the ribbons and beads which they all recognized, how much she may have refused to discover during the fitting and sewing of that dress (Father said Judith actually did this; this was no lie that the girl told Wash: the two of them alone all day long for about a week in the house: and what they must have talked about, what Judith must have talked about while the girl stood around in what she possessed to call underclothes, with her sullen defiant secret watchful face, answering what, telling what that Judith may or may not have tried to shut her eyes to, nobody knew). So it was not until he failed to return at dinner time that she went or sent Clytie to the stable and found that the mare had foaled in the night but that her father was not there. And it was not until midafternoon that she found a half-grown boy and paid him a nickel to go down to the old fish camp and ask Wash where Sutpen was, and the boy walked whistling around the corner of the rotting cabin and saw maybe the scythe first, maybe the body first lying in the weeds which Wash had not yet cut, and as he screamed he looked up and saw Wash in the window, watching him. Then about a week later they caught the nigger, the midwife, and she told how she didn’t know that Wash was there at all that dawn when she heard the horse and then Sutpen’s feet and he came in and stood over the pallet where the girl and the baby were and said, ‘Penelope — —’ (that was the mare) ‘ —— foaled this morning. A damned fine colt. Going to be the spit and image of his daddy when I rode him North in ‘61. Do you remember?’ and the old nigger said she said, ‘Yes, Marster’ and that he jerked the riding whip toward the pallet and said, ‘Well? Damn your black hide: horse or mare?’ and that she told him and that he stood there for a minute and he didn’t move at all, with the riding whip against his leg and the lattices of sunlight from the unchinked wall falling upon him, across his white hair and his beard that hadn’t turned at all yet, and she said she saw his eyes and then his teeth inside his beard and that she would have run then only she couldn’t, couldn’t seem to make her legs bear to get up and run: and then he looked at the girl on the pallet again and said, ‘Well, Milly; too bad you’re not a mare too. Then I could give you a decent stall in the stable’ and turned and went out. Only she could not move even yet, and she didn’t even know that Wash was outside there; she just heard Sutpen say, ‘Stand back, Wash. Don’t you touch me, and then Wash, his voice soft and hardly loud enough to reach her: ‘I’m going to tech you, Kernel’: and Sutpen again: ‘Stand back, Wash!’ sharp now, and then she heard the whip on Wash’s face but she didn’t know if she heard the scythe or not because now she found out that she could move, get up, run out of the cabin and into the weeds, running — —”

  “Wait,” Shreve said; “wait. You mean that he had got the son at last that he wanted, yet still he — —”

  “ —— walked the three miles and back before midnight to fetch the old nigger, then sat on the sagging gallery until daylight came and the granddaughter stopped screaming inside the cabin and he even heard the baby once, waiting for Sutpen. And Father said his heart was quiet then too, even though he knew what they would be saying in every cabin about the land by nightfall, just as he had known what they were saying during the last four or five months while his granddaughter’s condition (which he had never tried to conceal) could no longer be mistaken: Wash Jones has fixed old Sutpen at last. It taken him twenty years to do it, but he has got a holt of old Sutpen at last where Sutpen will either have to tear meat or squeal That’s what Father said he was thinking while he waited outside on the gallery where the old nigger had sent him, ordered him out, standing there maybe by the very post where the scythe had leaned rusting for two years, while the granddaughter’s screams came steady as a clock now but his own heart quiet, not at all concerned nor alarmed; and Father said that maybe while he stood befogged in his fumbling and groping (that morality of his that was a good deal like Sutpen’s, that told him he was right in the face of all fact and usage and everything else) which had always been somehow mixed up and involved with galloping hoofs even during the old peace that nobody remembered, and in which during the four years of the war which he had not attended the galloping had been only the more gallant and proud and thunderous — Father said that maybe he got his answer; that maybe there broke free and plain in midgallop against the yellow sky of dawn the fine proud image of the man on the fine proud image of the stallion and that the fumbling and the groping broke clear and free too, not in justification or explanation or extenuation or excuse, Father said, but as the apotheosis lonely, explicable, beyond all human fouling: He is bigger than all them Yankees that killed us and ourn, that killed his wife and widowed his daughter and druv his son from home, that stole his niggers and ruined his land; bigger than this whole county that he fit for and in payment for which has brung him to keeping a little country store for his bread and meat; bigger than the scorn and denial which hit helt to his lips like the bitter cup in the Book. And how could I have lived nigh to him for twenty years without being touched and changed by him? Maybe I am not as big as he is and maybe I did not do any of the galloping. But at least I was drug along where he went. And me and him can still do hit and will ever so, if so be he will show me what he aims for me to do; and maybe still standing there and holding the stallion’s reins after Sutpen had entered the cabin, still hearing the galloping, watching the proud galloping image merge and pass, galloping through avatars which marked the accumulation of years, time, to the fine climax where it galloped without weariness or progress, forever and forever immortal beneath the brandished saber and the shot-torn flags rushing down a sky in color like thunder; stood there and heard Sutpen inside the house speak his single sentence of salutation, inquiry and farewell to the granddaughter, and Father said that for a second Wash must not have felt the very earth under his feet while he watched Sutpen emerge from the house, the riding whip in his hand, thinking quietly, like in a dream: I kaint have heard what I know I heard. I just know I kaint thinking That was what got him up. It was that colt. It aint me or mine either. It wasn’t even his own that got him out of bed maybe feeling no earth, no stability, even yet, maybe not even hearing his own voice when Sutpen saw his face (the face of the man who in twenty years he had no more known to make any move save at command than he had the stallion which he rode) and stopped: ‘You said if she was a mare you could give her a decent stall in the stable,’ maybe not even hearing Sutpen when he said, sudden and sharp: ‘Stand back. Dont you touch me’ only he must have heard that because he answered it: ‘I’m going to tech you, Kernel’ and Sutpen said ‘Stand back, Wash’ again before the old woman heard the whip. Only there were two blows with the whip; they found the two welts on Wash’s face that night. Maybe the two blows even knocked him down; maybe it was while he was getting up that he put his hand on the scythe — —”

  “Wait,” Shreve said; “for Christ’s sake wait. You mean that he — —”

  “ —— sat there all that day in the little window where he could watch the road; probably laid the scythe down and went straight into the house where maybe the granddaughter on the pallet asked querulously what it was and he answered, ‘Whut? Whut racket, honey?’ and maybe he tried to persuade her to eat too — the side meat he had probably brought home from the store Saturday night or maybe the candy, trying to tempt her with it maybe — the nickel’s worth of stale jellified glue out of a striped sack, and maybe ate and then sat at the window where he could look out above the body a
nd the scythe in the weeds below, and watch the road. Because he was sitting there when the half-grown boy came around the corner of the house whistling and saw him. And Father said he must have realized then that it would not be much after dark when it would happen; that he must have sat there and sensed, felt them gathering with the horses and dogs and guns — the curious and the vengeful — men of Sutpen’s own kind, who used to eat at his table with him back when he (Wash) had yet to approach nearer the house than the scuppernong arbor — men who had led the way, shown the other and lesser ones how to fight in battles, who might also possess signed papers from the generals saying that they were among the first and foremost of the brave — who had galloped also in the old days arrogant and proud on the fine horses about the fine plantations — symbol also of admiration and hope, instruments too of despair and grief; these it was whom he was expected to run from and it seeming to him probably that he had no less to run from than he had to run to; that if he ran he would be fleeing merely one set of bragging and evil shadows for another, since they (men) were all of a kind throughout all of earth which he knew, and he old, too old to run far even if he were to run who could never escape them, no matter how much or how far he ran; a man past sixty could not expect to run that far, far enough to escape beyond the boundaries of earth where such men lived, set the order and the rule of living: and Father said that maybe for the first time in his life he began to comprehend how it had been possible for Yankees or any other army to have whipped them — the gallant, the proud, the brave; the acknowledged and chosen best among them all to bear the courage and honor and pride. It would probably be about sunset now and probably he could feel them quite near now; Father said it probably seemed to him that he could even hear them: all the voices, the murmuring of tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow beyond the immediate fury: Old Wash Jones come a tumble at last. He thought he had Sutpen, but Sutpen fooled him. He thought he had him, but old Wash Jones got fooled and then maybe even saying it aloud, shouting it Father said: ‘But I never expected that, Kernel! You know I never!’ until maybe the granddaughter stirred and spoke querulously again and he went and quieted her and returned to talk to himself again but careful now, quiet now since Sutpen was close enough to hear him easy, without shouting: ‘You know I never. You know I never expected or asked or wanted nothing from arra living man but what I expected from you. And I never asked that. I didn’t think hit would need: I just said to myself I dont need to. What need has a fellow like Wash Jones to question or doubt the man that General Lee himself said in a hand-wrote ticket that he was brave? Brave’ (and maybe it would be loud again, forgetting again) ‘Brave! Better if narra one of them had ever rid back in ‘65’ thinking Better if his kind and mine too had never drawn the breath of life on this earth. Better that all who remain of us be blasted from the face of it than that another Wash Jones should see his whole life shredded from him and shrivel away like a dried shuck thrown onto the fire Then they rode up. He must have been listening to them as they came down the road, the dogs and the horses, and seen the lanterns since it was dark now. And Major de Spain who was sheriff then got down and saw the body, though he said he did not see Wash nor know that he was there until Wash spoke his name quietly from the window almost in his face: ‘That you, Major?’ De Spain told him to come on out and he said how Wash’s voice was quite quiet when he said he would be out in just a minute; it was too quiet, too calm; so much too quiet and calm that de Spain said he did not realize for a moment that it was too calm and quiet: ‘In just a minute. Soon as I see about my granddaughter.’ ‘We’ll see to her,’ de Spain said. ‘You come on out.’ ‘Sho, Major,’ Wash said, ‘In just a minute.’ So they waited in front of the dark house, and the next day Father said there were a hundred that remembered about the butcher knife that he kept hidden and razor-sharp — the one thing in his sloven life that he was ever known to take pride in or care of — only by the time they remembered all this it was too late. So they didn’t know what he was about. They just heard him moving inside the dark house, then they heard the granddaughter’s voice, fretful and querulous: ‘Who is it? Light the lamp, Grandpaw’ then his voice: ‘Hit wont need no light, honey. Hit wont take but a minute’ then de Spain drew his pistol and said, ‘You, Wash! Come out of there!’ and still Wash didn’t answer, murmuring still to the granddaughter: ‘Wher air you?’ and the fretful voice answering, ‘Right here. Where else would I be? What is — —’ then de Spain said, ‘Jones!’ and he was already fumbling at the broken steps when the granddaughter screamed; and now all the men there claimed that they heard the knife on both the neckbones, though de Spain didn’t. He just said he knew that Wash had come out onto the gallery and that he sprang back before he found out that it was not toward him Wash was running but toward the end of the gallery, where the body lay, but that he did not think about the scythe: he just ran backward a few feet when he saw Wash stoop and rise again and now Wash was running toward him. Only he was running toward them all, de Spain said, running into the lanterns so that now they could see the scythe raised above his head; they could see his face, his eyes too, as he ran with the scythe above his head, straight into the lanterns and the gun barrels, making no sound, no outcry while de Spain ran backward before him, saying, ‘Jones! Stop! Stop, or I’ll kill you. Jones! Jones! Jones!’ ”

  “Wait,” Shreve said. “You mean that he got the son he wanted, after all that trouble, and then turned right around and — —”

  “Yes. Sitting in Grandfather’s office that afternoon, with his head kind of flung back a little, explaining to Grandfather like he might have been explaining arithmetic to Henry back in the fourth grade: ‘You see, all I wanted was just a son. Which seems to me, when I look about at my contemporary scene, no exorbitant gift from nature or circumstance to demand — —’ ”

  “Will you wait?” Shreve said. “ —— that with the son he went to all that trouble to get lying right there behind him in the cabin, he would have to taunt the grandfather into killing first him and then the child too?”

  “ —— What?” Quentin said. “It wasn’t a son. It was a girl.”