Complete Works of William Faulkner

by William Faulkner

  He returned to the house and took the shotgun from its corner. It was covered now almost completely over with a thin, snuff-coloured frost of rust, as though the very tedious care of that first night’s wiping had overreached itself, had transferred the water from the gun to the shirt then back from the shirt to the gun again. And it did not breech, break, but opened slowly to steady force, exposing the thick, chocolate-coloured soap-like mass of congealed animal fat, so that at last he dismantled it and boiled water in the coffee-pot and scalded the grease away and laid the dismembered sections along the edge of the back porch where the sun fell on them as long as there was sun. Then he reassembled it and loaded it with two of the three remaining shells and leaned it against the wall beside the chair, and again he watched the night emerge from the bottom and mount through the bitten corn, taking corn, taking the house itself at last and, still rising, become as two up-opening palms releasing the westward-flying ultimate bird of evening. Below him, beyond the corn, the fireflies winked and drifted against the breast of darkness; beyond, within it, the steady booming of the frogs was the steady pulse and beat of the dark heart of night, so that at last when the unvarying moment came — that moment as unvarying from one dusk to the next as the afternoon’s instant when he would awake — the beat of that heart seemed to fall still too, emptying silence for the first deep cry of strong and invincible grief. He reached his hand backward and took up the gun.

  This time he used the hound’s voice for a bearing from the start. When he entered the bottom he thought about wind and paused to test it. But there was no wind, so he went straight on toward the howling, not fast now since he was trying for silence, yet not slow either since this would not take long and then he could return home and lie down before midnight, long before midnight, telling himself as he moved cautiously and steadily toward the howling: Now I can go back to sleeping at night again. The howling was quite near now. He slanted the gun forward, his thumb on the two hammers. Then the dog’s voice stopped, again in mid-howl; again for an instant he saw the two yellow points of eyes before the gun-muzzle blotted them. In the glare of the explosion he saw the whole animal sharp in relief, leaping. He saw the charge strike and hurl it backward into the loud welter of following darkness. By an actual physical effort he restrained his finger before it contracted on the second trigger and with the gun still at his shoulder he crouched, holding his breath and glaring into the sightless dark while the tremendous silence which had been broken three nights ago when the first cry of the hound reached him and which had never once been restored, annealed, even while he slept, roared down about him and, still roaring, began to stiffen and set like cement, not only in his hearing but in his lungs, his breathing, inside and without him too, solidifying from tree-trunk to tree-trunk, among which the shattered echoes of the shot died away in strangling murmurs, caught in that cooling solidity before they had had time to cease. With the gun still cocked and presented, he advanced toward the place where he had seen the dog fall, panting through his bared clenched teeth, feeling about with his feet in the undergrowth. Then he realised suddenly that he had already passed the spot and that he was still advancing. He knew that he was about to start running and then he was running, blindly in the pitch darkness, speaking, hissing to himself: Stop. Stop. You’ll bust your damn brains out. He stopped, panting. He got his bearings anew on a patch of sky, yet he forced himself to remain motionless until even the panting stopped. Then he let the hammer of the gun down and went on, walking now. Now he had the booming of the frogs to guide him, blending and fading then rising again in choral climax, each separate voice not a single note but an octave, almost a chord, in bass, growing louder and louder and nearer and nearer, then ceasing abruptly too into a second of frozen immobility followed by a swift random patter of small splashes like hands striking the water, so that when he saw the water it was already shattered into fluid ceaseless gleams across which reflected stars slid and vanished and recovered. He flung the gun. For an instant he saw it, spinning slowly. Then it splashed, not sinking but disintegrating among that shattered scurrying of broken stars.

  When he reached home, it was not even midnight yet. Now he removed not only the shoes but the overalls too which had not passed his knees in seventy-two hours, and lay down on the pallet. But at once he knew he was not going to sleep, not because of the seventy-two hours’ habit of reversed days and nights, not because of any twitching and jerking of spent and ungovernable nerves and muscles, but because of that silence which the first gunshot had broken and the second one had made whole again. So he lay again, rigid and composed on his back, his arms at his sides and his eyes open in the darkness and his head and lungs filled with that roaring silence across which the random and velvet-shod fireflies drifted and winked and beyond which the constant frogs pulsed and beat, until the rectangle of sky beyond the oblique door of the room and the open end of the hallway began to turn grey and then primrose, and already he could see three buzzards soaring in it. Now I must get up, he told himself; I will have to start staying up all day if I aim to begin sleeping again at night. Then he began to say, Wake up. Wake up, until he waked at last, with the yellow square of window-shaped sun lying once more on the floor where each unvarying afternoon it would lie. Resting upon the quilt not an inch from his face was a folded scrap of brown paper; when he rose, he found in the dust at the doorsill the print of the little boy’s naked foot. The note was in pencil, on a scrap torn from a paper sack, unsigned: Come on in here your wifes got some money for you. He stood, unshaven, in his shirt, blinking at it. Now I can go, he thought, and something began to happen in his heart. He raised his head, blinking almost painfully, looking for the first time in three days beyond the desolate and foodless cabin which symbolised the impasse his life had reached, into the limitless freedom of the sunny sky. He spoke aloud. “Now I can — —” he said. Then he saw the buzzards. At dawn he had seen three. Now he might possibly have counted them, though he did not. He just watched the black concentric spiralling as if they followed an invisible funnel, disappearing one by one below the trees. He spoke aloud again. “It’s the dog,” he said, knowing it was not the dog. And it didn’t matter. Because I’ll be gone then, he thought. It was not that something lifted from his heart; it was as though he had become aware for the first time of the weight which lay on it.

  It was almost sunset when, shaved and with the shoes and overalls washed again, he mounted to the empty gallery and entered the store. His kinsman was behind the open candy-case, in the act of putting something into his mouth.

  “Where — —” he said.

  The cousin closed the case, chewing. “You durned fool, I sent word to you two days ago to get away from there before that pussel-gutted Hampton come prowling around here with that surrey full of deputies. A nigger grabbling in that slough found that durn gun before the water even quit shaking.”

  “It’s not mine,” he said. “I have no gun. Where — —”

  “Hell fire, everybody knows it’s yours. There ain’t another one of them old hammer-lock ten-gauge Hadleys in this country but that one. That’s why I never told no lie about it, let alone that durn Hampton sitting right out there on that bench when the nigger come up the steps with it. I says, ‘Sure it’s Mink’s gun. He’s been hunting for it ever since last fall.’ Then I turns to the nigger. ‘What the hell you mean, you black son of a bitch,’ I says, ‘borrowing Mr. Snopes’s gun last fall to go squirl hunting and letting it fall in that ere slough and claiming you couldn’t find it?’ Here.” The cousin stooped beneath the counter and rose and laid the gun on the counter. It had been wiped off save for a patch of now-dried mud on the stock.

  He did not even look at it. “It’s not mine,” he said. “Where is — —”

  “But that’s all right now. I fixed that in time. What Hampton expected was for me to deny it was yours. Then he would a had you. But I fixed that. I throwed the suspicion right onto the nigger fore Hampton could open his mouth. I figger about tonight or
maybe tomorrow night I’ll take a few of the boys and go to the nigger’s house with a couple of trace chains or maybe a little fire under his feet. And even if he don’t confess nothing, folks will hear that he has done been visited at night and there’s too many votes out here for Hampton to do nothing else but take him on in and send him to the penitentiary, even if he can’t quite risk hanging him, and Hampton knows it. So that’s all right. Besides, what I sent you that first message for was about your wife.”

  “Yes,” he said. “Where — —”

  “She’s going to get you in trouble. She’s done already got you in trouble. That’s how come that durn vote-sucking sheriff noseying around out here. His nigger found the horse, with him and the dog both missing, but that was all right until folks begun to remember how she turned up here that same night, with them two kids and that bundle of clothes and blood still running out of her busted mouth until folks couldn’t help but know you had run her out of the house. And even that might have been all right if she hadn’t started in telling everybody that would listen that you never done it. Just a horse with a empty saddle; no body and no blood neither found yet, and here she is trying to help you by telling everybody she meets that you never done something that nobody knows for sure has even been done yet. Why in hell ain’t you got out of here? Didn’t you have sense enough to do that the first day?”

  “On what?” he said.

  The cousin had been blinking rapidly at him. Now the little eyes stopped blinking. “On what?” he said. The other did not answer. He had not moved since he entered, small, immobile, in the middle of the floor opposite the entrance, through which the dying sunlight stained him from head to foot with a thin wash like diluted blood. “You mean you ain’t got any money? You mean to stand there and tell me he never had nothing in his pocket? Because I don’t believe it. By God, I know better. I saw inside his purse that same morning. He never carried a cent less than fifty. . . .” The voice ceased, died. Then it spoke in a dawning incredulous amazement and no louder than a whisper: “Do you mean to tell me you never even looked? never even looked?” The other did not answer. He might not have even heard, motionless, looking at nothing while the last of the copper light, mounting like rising water up his body, gathered for an instant in concentrated and dying crimson upon the calm and unwavering and intractable mask of his face, and faded, and the dusk, the twilight, gathered along the ranked shelves and in the shadowy corners and the old strong smells of cheese and leather and kerosene, condensed and thickened among the rafters above his head like the pall of oblivion itself. The cousin’s voice seemed to emerge from it, sourceless, unlocatable, without even the weight of breath to give it volume: “Where did you put him?” and again, the cousin outside the counter now, facing him, almost breast to breast with him, the fierce repressed breathing murmuring on his face now: “By God, he had at least fifty dollars. I know. I seen it. Right here in this store. Where did you — —”

  “No,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “No.” Their faces were not a foot apart, their breathing steady and audible. Then the other face moved back, larger than his, higher than his, beginning to become featureless in the fading light.

  “All right,” the cousin said. “I’m glad you don’t need money. Because if you come to me expecting any you’d just have to keep on expecting. You know what Will Varner pays his clerks. You know about how much any man working for Will Varner’s wages could get ahead in ten years, let alone two months. So you won’t even need that ten dollars your wife’s got. So that’ll be just fine, won’t it?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Where — —”

  “Staying at Will Varner’s.” He turned at once and went toward the door. As he passed out of it the cousin spoke again out of the shadows behind him: “Tell her to ask Will or Jody to lend her another ten to go with that one she’s already got.”

  Although it was not quite dark yet, there was already a light in the Varner house. He could see it even at this distance, and it was as if he were standing outside of himself, watching the distance steadily shorten between himself and the light. And then that’s all, he thought. All them days and nights that looked like they wasn’t going to have no end, come down to the space of a little piece of dusty road between me and a lighted door. And when he put his hand on Varner’s gate, it was as if she had been waiting, watching the road for him. She came out of the front door, running, framed again for an instant by the lighted doorway as when he had first seen her that night at the lumber camp to which, even nine years afterward, he did not like to remember how, by what mischance, he had come. The feeling was no less strong now than it had ever been. He did not dread to remember it nor did he try not to, and not in remorse for the deed he had done, because he neither required nor desired absolution for that. He merely wished he did not have to remember the fiasco which had followed the act, contemptuous of the body or the intellect which had failed the will to do, not writhing with impotent regret on remembering it and not snarling, because he never snarled; but just cold, indomitable, and intractable. He had lived in a dozen different sorry and ill-made rented cabins as his father had moved from farm to farm, without himself ever having been more than fifteen or twenty miles away from any one of them. Then suddenly and at night he had had to leave the roof he called home and the only land and people and customs he knew, without even time to gather up anything to take with him, if there had been anything to take, nor to say farewell to anyone if there had been anyone to say farewell to, to find himself weeks later and still on foot, more than two hundred miles away. He was seeking the sea; he was twenty-three then, that young. He had never seen it; he did not know certainly just where it was, except that it was to the south. He had never thought of it before and he could not have said why he wanted to go to it — what of repudiation of the land, the earth, where his body or intellect had faulted somehow to the cold undeviation of his will to do — seeking what of that iodinic proffer of space and oblivion of which he had no intention of availing himself, would never avail himself, as if, by deliberately refusing to cut the wires of remembering, to punish that body and intellect which had failed him. Perhaps he was seeking only the proffer of this illimitable space and irremediable forgetting along the edge of which the contemptible teeming of his own earth-kind timidly seethed and recoiled, not to accept the proffer but merely to bury himself in this myriad anonymity beside the impregnable haven of all the drowned intact golden galleons and the unattainable deathless seamaids. Then, almost there and more than twenty-four hours without food, he saw a light and approached it and heard the loud voices and saw her framed in the open door, immobile, upright and unlistening, while those harsh loud manshouts and cries seemed to rise toward her like a roaring incense. He went no further. The next morning he was at work there, an axeman, without even knowing whom he was working for, asking only incidentally of the foreman who hired him and who told him bluntly that he was too small, too light, to swing his end of a cross-cut saw, what his wage would be. He had never seen convicts’ stripes before either, so it was not with that first light but only after several succeeding ones that he learned where he was — a tract of wild-catted virgin timber in process of being logged by a roaring man of about fifty who was no taller than he was, with strong, short iron-grey hair and a hard prominent belly, who through political influence or bribery or whatever got his convict labour from the State for the price of their board and keep; a widower who had lost his wife years ago at the birth of their first child and now lived openly with a magnificent quadroon woman most of whose teeth were gold and who superintended the kitchen where other convicts did the actual work, in a separate house set among the plank-and-canvas barracks in which the convicts lived. The woman in the lighted door was that child. She lived in the same house with her father and the quadroon, in a separate wing with an entrance of its own, and her hair was black then — a splendid heavy mane of it which whatever present one out of foremen and armed guards and convict labou
rers, and himself in his turn, after his summons came and he had long since discovered the reason for the separate entrance, contributed to keep cut almost man-short with razors. It was strong and short and not fine, either in the glare of that first evening’s lamp or in the next day’s sunlight when, the axe lifted for the stroke, he turned and she was sitting a big, rangy, well-kept horse behind and above him, in overalls, looking at him not brazenly and not speculatively, but intently and boldly, as a bold and successful man would. That was what he saw: the habit of success — that perfect marriage of will and ability with a single undiffused object — which set her not as a feminine garment but as one as masculine as the overalls and her height and size and the short hair; he saw not a nympholept but the confident lord of a harem. She did not speak that time. She rode on, and now he discovered that that separate entrance was not used only at night. Sometimes she would ride past on the horse and stop and speak briefly to the foreman and ride on; sometimes the quadroon would appear on the horse and speak a name to the foreman and return, and the foreman would call that name and the man would drop his axe or saw and follow the horse. Then he, still swinging his axe and not even looking up, would seem to follow and watch that man enter the private door and then watch him emerge later and return to work — the nameless, the identical, highwayman, murderer, thief, among whom there appeared to be no favourites and no jealousy. That was to be his, alone, apparently. But even before his summons came, he was resigned to the jealousy and cognisant of his fate. He had been bred by generations to believe invincibly that to every man, whatever his past actions, whatever depths he might have reached, there was reserved one virgin, at least for him to marry; one maidenhead, if only for him to deflower and destroy. Yet he not only saw that he must compete for mere notice with men among whom he saw himself not only as a child but as a child of another race and species, but that when he did approach her at last he would have to tear aside not garments alone but the ghostly embraces of thirty or forty men; and this not only once but each time and hence (he foresaw even then his fate) forever: no room, no darkness, no desert even ever large enough to contain the two of them and the constant stallion-ramp of those inexpugnable shades. Then his turn, his summons came at last, as he had known it would. He obeyed it with foreknowledge but without regret. He entered not the hot and quenchless bed of a barren and lecherous woman, but the fierce simple cave of a lioness — a tumescence which surrendered nothing and asked no quarter, and which made a monogamist of him forever, as opium and homicide do of those whom they once accept. That was early one afternoon. The hot sun of July falling through the shadeless and even curtainless windows open to all outdoors, upon a bed made by hand of six-inch unplaned timbers cross-braced with light steel cables, yet which nevertheless would advance in short steady skidding jerks across the floor like a light and ill-balanced rocking-chair. Five months later they were married. They did not plan it. Never at any time afterward did he fail to affirm, even to himself, that the marriage had been no scheme or even intention of hers. What did it was the collapse of her father’s enterprise, which even he had been able to see was inherent with its own inevitable bankruptcy which the crash of each falling tree brought one stick nearer. Afterward it seemed to him that that afternoon’s bedding had been the signal for that entire furious edifice of ravished acres and shotgun houses and toiling men and mules which had been erected overnight and founded on nothing, to collapse overnight into nothing, back into the refuse — the sawdust heaps, the lopped dead limbs and tree-butts and all the grief of wood — of its own murdering. He had most of his five months’ pay. They walked to the nearest county-seat and bought a licence; the Justice of the Peace who sold it to them removed his chew of tobacco and, holding it damp in his hand, called in two passing men and pronounced them man and wife. They returned to his native country, where he rented a small farm on shares. They had a second-hand stove, a shuck mattress on the floor, the razor with which he still kept her hair cut short, and little else. At that time they needed little else. She said: “I’ve had a hundred men, but I never had a wasp before. That stuff comes out of you is rank poison. It’s too hot. It burns itself and my seed both up. It’ll never make a kid.” But three years afterward it did. Five years later it had made two; and he would watch them as they approached across whatever sorry field or patch, fetching his cold meagre dinner of the jug of fresh water, or as they played with blocks of wood or rusted harness buckles or threadless and headless plough-bolts which even he could no longer use, in the dust before whatever rented porch he sat on while the sweat cooled out of him, and in a resurgence of the old hot quick invincible fury still as strong and fierce and brief as on the first time, he would think, By God, they better be mine. Then, quieter, on the pallet bed where she would already be asleep although his own spent body had not yet ceased to jerk and twitch, he would think how, even if they were not, it was the same thing. They served to shackle her too, more irrevocably than he himself was shackled, since on her fate she had even put the seal of a formal acquiescence by letting her hair grow out again and dyeing it.