Complete Works of William Faulkner
Page 313
“And now he dead.”
“Sold him to Pharaoh.”
“And now he dead.”
“I’m sorry,” Stevens said. “I ask you to forgive me. I should have known. I shouldn’t have come.”
“It’s all right,” Miss Worsham said. “It’s our grief.”
And on the next bright hot day but one the hearse and the two cars were waiting when the southbound train came in. There were more than a dozen cars, but it was not until the train came in that Stevens and the editor began to notice the number of people, Negroes and whites both. Then, with the idle white men and youths and small boys and probably half a hundred Negroes, men and women too, watching quietly, the Negro undertaker’s men lifted the grey-and-silver casket from the train and carried it to the hearse and snatched the wreaths and floral symbols of man’s ultimate and inevitable end briskly out and slid the casket in and flung the flowers back and clapped-to the door.
Then, with Miss Worsham and the old Negress in Stevens’s car with the driver he had hired and himself and the editor in the editor’s, they followed the hearse as it swung into the long hill up from the station, going fast in a whining lower gear until it reached the crest, going pretty fast still but with an unctuous, an almost bishoplike purr until it slowed into the square, crossing it, circling the Confederate monument and the courthouse while the merchants and clerks and barbers and professional men who had given Stevens the dollars and half-dollars and quarters and the ones who had not, watched quietly from doors and upstairs windows, swinging then into the street which at the edge of town would become the country road leading to the destination seventeen miles away, already picking up speed again and followed still by the two cars containing the four people — the high-headed erect white woman, the old Negress, the designated paladin of justice and truth and right, the Heidelberg Ph.D. — in formal component complement to the Negro murderer’s catafalque: the slain wolf.
When they reached the edge of town the hearse was going quite fast. Now they flashed past the metal sign which said Jefferson. Corporate Limit. and the pavement vanished, slanting away into another long hill, becoming gravel. Stevens reached over and cut the switch, so that the editor’s car coasted, slowing as he began to brake it, the hearse and the other car drawing rapidly away now as though in flight, the light and unrained summer dust spurting from beneath the fleeing wheels; soon they were gone. The editor turned his car clumsily, grinding the gears, sawing and filing until it was back in the road facing town again. Then he sat for a moment, his foot on the clutch.
“Do you know what she asked me this morning, back there at the station?” he said.
“Probably not,” Stevens said.
“She said, ‘Is you gonter put hit in de paper?’”
“What?”
“That’s what I said,” the editor said. “And she said it again: ‘Is you gonter put hit in de paper? I wants hit all in de paper. All of hit.’ And I wanted to say, ‘If I should happen to know how he really died, do you want that in too?’ And by Jupiter, if I had and if she had known what we know even, I believe she would have said yes. But I didn’t say it. I just said, ‘Why, you couldn’t read it, Aunty.’ And she said, ‘Miss Belle will show me whar to look and I can look at hit. You put hit in de paper. All of hit.’”
“Oh,” Stevens said. Yes, he thought. It doesn’t matter to her now. Since it had to be and she couldn’t stop it, and now that it’s all over and done and finished, she doesn’t care how he died. She just wanted him home, but she wanted him to come home right. She wanted that casket and those flowers and the hearse and she wanted to ride through town behind it in a car. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s get back to town. I haven’t seen my desk in two days.”
The Hamlet
Published in 1940, this novel forms part of what is now collectively known as the Snopes Trilogy, though it was originally a standalone novel. It was followed by The Town (1957) and The Mansion (1959). The novel incorporates revised versions of the previously-published short stories “Spotted Horses” (1931, Book Four’s Chapter One), “The Hound” (1931, Book Three’s Chapter Two), “Lizards in Jamshyd’s Courtyard” (1932, Book One’s Chapter Three and Book Four’s Chapter Two), and “Fool About a Horse” (1936, Book One’s Chapter Two). It also makes use of material from “Father Abraham” (abandoned 1927, pub. 1984, Book Four’s Chapter One), “Afternoon of a Cow” (1937, pub. 1943, Book Three’s Chapter Two), and “Barn Burning” (1939, Book One’s Chapter One).
The plot concerns the exploits of the Snopes family, beginning with Ab Snopes, who is introduced more fully in Faulkner’s The Unvanquished. Most of the novel centres on Frenchman’s Bend, into which the heirs of Ab and his family have migrated from parts unknown. In the beginning of the book, Ab, his wife, daughter and son Flem settle down as tenant farmers beholden to the powerful Varner family. As the narrative progresses, the Snopeses move from being poor outcasts to a controversial, if not dangerous, element in the life of the town. In contrast, V.K. Ratliff stands as the moral hero of the novel. Faulkner employs the eccentricities of the Snopeses to great comic effect, most notably in his description of Ike Snopes and his carnal inclinations toward a cow.
The first edition
CONTENTS
BOOK ONE. FLEM
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
BOOK TWO. EULA
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
BOOK THREE. THE LONG SUMMER
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
BOOK FOUR. THE PEASANTS
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
The 1958 film loosely based on the novel.
To
Phil Stone
BOOK ONE. FLEM
CHAPTER ONE
1
FRENCHMAN’S BEND WAS a section of rich river-bottom country lying twenty miles southeast of Jefferson. Hill-cradled and remote, definite yet without boundaries, straddling into two counties and owning allegiance to neither, it had been the original grant and site of a tremendous pre-Civil War plantation, the ruins of which — the gutted shell of an enormous house with its fallen stables and slave quarters and overgrown gardens and brick terraces and promenades — were still known as the Old Frenchman’s place, although the original boundaries now existed only on old faded records in the Chancery Clerk’s office in the county courthouse in Jefferson, and even some of the once-fertile fields had long since reverted to the cane-and-cypress jungle from which their first master had hewed them.
He had quite possibly been a foreigner, though not necessarily French, since to the people who had come after him and had almost obliterated all trace of his sojourn, anyone speaking the tongue with a foreign flavour or whose appearance or even occupation was strange, would have been a Frenchman regardless of what nationality he might affirm, just as to their more urban co-evals (if he had elected to settle in Jefferson itself, say) he would have been called a Dutchman. But now nobody knew what he had actually been, not even Will Varner, who was sixty years old and now owned a good deal of his original grant, including the site of his ruined mansion. Because he was gone now, the foreigner, the Frenchman, with his family and his slaves and his magnificence. His dream, his broad acres were parcelled out now into small shiftless mortgaged farms for the directors of Jefferson banks to squabble over before selling finally to Will Varner, and all that remained of him was the river bed which his slaves had straightened for almost ten miles to keep his land from flooding, and the skeleton of the tremendous house which his heirs-at-large had been pulling down and chopping up — walnut newel-posts and stair spindles, oak floors which fifty years later would have been almost priceless, the very clapboards themselves — for thirty years now for firewood. Even his name was forgotten, his pride but a legend about the land he had wrested from the jungle and tamed as a monument to that appellation which those who came after him in battered wagons and on mule-back and even on foot, with flintlock rifles and dogs and
children and home-made whiskey stills and Protestant psalm-books, could not even read, let alone pronounce, and which now had nothing to do with any once-living man at all — his dream and his pride now dust with the lost dust of his anonymous bones, his legend but the stubborn tale of the money he buried somewhere about the place when Grant overran the country on his way to Vicksburg.
The people who inherited from him came from the northeast, through the Tennessee mountains by stages marked by the bearing and raising of a generation of children. They came from the Atlantic seaboard and before that, from England and the Scottish and Welsh Marches, as some of the names would indicate — Turpin and Haley and Whittington, McCallum and Murray and Leonard and Littlejohn, and other names like Riddup and Armstid and Doshey which could have come from nowhere since certainly no man would deliberately select one of them for his own. They brought no slaves and no Phyfe and Chippendale highboys; indeed, what they did bring most of them could (and did) carry in their hands. They took up land and built one- and two-room cabins and never painted them, and married one another and produced children and added other rooms one by one to the original cabins and did not paint them either, but that was all. Their descendants still planted cotton in the bottom land and corn along the edge of the hills and in the secret coves in the hills made whiskey of the corn and sold what they did not drink. Federal officers went into the country and vanished. Some garment which the missing man had worn might be seen — a felt hat, a broadcloth coat, a pair of city shoes or even his pistol — on a child or an old man or woman. County officers did not bother them at all save in the heel of election years. They supported their own churches and schools, they married and committed infrequent adulteries and more frequent homicides among themselves and were their own courts judges and executioners. They were Protestants and Democrats and prolific; there was not one negro landowner in the entire section. Strange negroes would absolutely refuse to pass through it after dark.
Will Varner, the present owner of the Old Frenchman place, was the chief man of the country. He was the largest landholder and beat supervisor in one county and Justice of the Peace in the next and election commissioner in both, and hence the fountainhead if not of law at least of advice and suggestion to a countryside which would have repudiated the term constituency if they had ever heard it, which came to him, not in the attitude of What must I do but What do you think you would like for me to do if you was able to make me do it. He was a farmer, a usurer, a veterinarian; Judge Benbow of Jefferson once said of him that a milder-mannered man never bled a mule or stuffed a ballot box. He owned most of the good land in the country and held mortgages on most of the rest. He owned the store and the cotton gin and the combined grist mill and blacksmith shop in the village proper and it was considered, to put it mildly, bad luck for a man of the neighbourhood to do his trading or gin his cotton or grind his meal or shoe his stock anywhere else. He was thin as a fence rail and almost as long, with reddish-grey hair and moustaches and little hard bright innocently blue eyes; he looked like a Methodist Sunday School superintendent who on weekdays conducted a railroad passenger train or vice versa and who owned the church or perhaps the railroad or perhaps both. He was shrewd, secret and merry, of a Rabelaisian turn of mind and very probably still sexually lusty (he had fathered sixteen children to his wife, though only two of them remained at home, the others scattered, married and buried, from El Paso to the Alabama line) as the spring of his hair which even at sixty was still more red than grey, would indicate. He was at once active and lazy; he did nothing at all (his son managed all the family business) and spent all his time at it, out of the house and gone before the son had come down to breakfast even, nobody knew where save that he and the old fat white horse which he rode might be seen anywhere within the surrounding ten miles at any time, and at least once every month during the spring and summer and early fall, the old white horse tethered to an adjacent fence post, he would be seen by someone sitting in a home-made chair on the jungle-choked lawn of the Old Frenchman’s homesite. His blacksmith had made the chair for him by sawing an empty flour-barrel half through the middle and trimming out the sides and nailing a seat into it, and Varner would sit there chewing his tobacco or smoking his cob pipe, with a brusque word for passers cheerful enough but inviting no company, against his background of fallen baronial splendour. The people (those who saw him sitting there and those who were told about it) all believed that he sat there planning his next mortgage foreclosure in private, since it was only to an itinerant sewing-machine agent named Ratliff — a man less than half his age — that he ever gave a reason: “I like to sit here. I’m trying to find out what it must have felt like to be the fool that would need all this” — he did not move, he did not so much as indicate with his head the rise of old brick and tangled walks topped by the columned ruin behind him— “just to eat and sleep in.” Then he said — and he gave Ratliff no further clue to which might have been the truth— “For a while it looked like I was going to get shut of it, get it cleared up. But by God folks have got so lazy they won’t even climb a ladder to pull off the rest of the boards. It looks like they will go into the woods and even chop up a tree before they will reach above eye-level for a scantling of pine kindling. But after all, I reckon I’ll just keep what there is left of it, just to remind me of my one mistake. This is the only thing I ever bought in my life I couldn’t sell to nobody.”
The son, Jody, was about thirty, a prime bulging man, slightly thyroidic, who was not only unmarried but who emanated a quality of invincible and inviolable bachelordom as some people are said to breathe out the odour of sanctity or spirituality. He was a big man, already promising a considerable belly in ten or twelve years, though as yet he still managed to postulate something of the trig and unattached cavalier. He wore, winter and summer (save that in the warm season he dispensed with the coat) and Sundays and weekdays, a glazed collarless white shirt fastened at the neck with a heavy gold collar-button beneath a suit of good black broadcloth. He put on the suit the day it arrived from the Jefferson tailor and wore it every day and in all weathers thereafter until he sold it to one of the family’s negro retainers, so that on almost any Sunday night one whole one or some part of one of his old suits could be met — and promptly recognised — walking the summer roads, and replaced it with the new succeeding one. In contrast to the unvarying overalls of the men he lived among he had an air not funereal exactly but ceremonial — this because of that quality of invincible bachelorhood which he possessed: so that, looking at him you saw, beyond the flabbiness and the obscuring bulk, the perennial and immortal Best Man, the apotheosis of the masculine Singular, just as you discern beneath the dropsical tissue of the ‘09 half-back the lean hard ghost which once carried a ball. He was the ninth of his parents’ sixteen children. He managed the store of which his father was still titular owner and in which they dealt mostly in foreclosed mortgages, and the gin, and oversaw the scattered farm holdings which his father at first and later the two of them together had been acquiring during the last forty years.
One afternoon he was in the store, cutting lengths of plough-line from a spool of new cotton rope and looping them in neat seamanlike bights onto a row of nails in the wall, when at a sound behind him he turned and saw, silhouetted by the open door, a man smaller than common, in a wide hat and a frock-coat too large for him, standing with a curious planted stiffness. “You Varner?” the man said, in a voice not harsh exactly, or not deliberately harsh so much as rusty from infrequent use.
“I’m one Varner,” Jody said, in his bland, hard, quite pleasant voice. “What can I do for you?”
“My name is Snopes. I heard you got a farm to rent.”
“That so?” Varner said, already moving so as to bring the other’s face into the light. “Just where did you hear that?” Because the farm was a new one, which he and his father had acquired through a foreclosure sale not a week ago, and the man was a complete stranger. He had never even heard the name before.
“West.” He did not speak shortly. He merely pronounced the one word with a complete inflectionless finality, as if he had closed a door behind himself.
“You mean Texas?”
“No.”
“I see. Just west of here. How much family you got?”
“Six.” Now there was no perceptible pause, nor was there any hurrying on into the next word. But there was something. Varner sensed it even before the lifeless voice seemed deliberately to compound the inconsistency: “Boy and two girls. Wife and her sister.”
“That’s just five.”
“Myself,” the dead voice said.
“A man don’t usually count himself among his own field hands,” Varner said. “Is it five or is it seven?”
“I can put six hands into the field.”
Now Varner’s voice did not change either, still pleasant, still hard: “I don’t know as I will take on a tenant this year. It’s already almost first of May. I figure I might work it myself, with day labour. If I work it at all this year.”
“I’ll work that way,” the other said. Varner looked at him.
“Little anxious to get settled, ain’t you?” The other said nothing. Varner could not tell whether the man was looking at him or not. “What rent were you aiming to pay?”
“What do you rent for?”
“Third and fourth,” Varner said. “Furnish out of the store here. No cash.”
“I see. Furnish in six-bit dollars.”
“That’s right,” Varner said pleasantly. Now he could not tell if the man were looking at anything at all or not.