Complete Works of William Faulkner

by William Faulkner

  ‘But they didn’t,’ his uncle said. ‘I dont think they will. And if they do, it wont really matter. They either will or they wont and if they dont it will be all right and if they do we will do the best we can, you and Mr Hampton and Legate and the rest of us, what we have to do, what we can do. So we dont need to worry about it. You see?’

  ‘Yes,’ the jailer said. Then he turned and went on, unsnapping his keyring from his belt under the pistol belt, to the heavy oak door which closed off the top of the stairs (It was one solid handhewn piece over two inches thick, locked with a heavy modern padlock in a handwrought iron bar through two iron slots which like the heavy risette-shaped hinges were handwrought too, hammered out over a hundred years ago in the blacksmith shop across the street where he had stood yesterday; one day last summer a stranger, a city man, an architect who reminded him somehow of his uncle, hatless and tieless, in tennis shoes and a pair of worn flannel trousers and what was left of a case of champagne in a convertible-top car which must have cost three thousand dollars, driving not through town but into it, not hurting anyone but just driving the car up onto the pavement and across it through a plate glass window, quite drunk, quite cheerful, with less than fifty cents in cash in his pocket but all sorts of identification cards and a check folder whose stubs showed a balance in a New York bank of over six thousand dollars, who insisted on being put in jail even though the marshal and the owner of the window both were just trying to persuade him to go to the hotel and sleep it off so he could write a check for the window and the wall: until the marshal finally put him in jail where he went to sleep at once like a baby and the garage sent for the car and the next morning the jailer telephoned the marshal at five oclock to come and get the man out because he had waked the whole household up talking from his cell across to the niggers in the bullpen. So the marshal came and made him leave and then he wanted to go out with the street gang to work and they wouldn’t let him do that and his car was ready too but he still wouldn’t leave, at the hotel that night and two nights later his uncle even brought him to supper, where he and his uncle talked for three hours about Europe and Paris and Vienna and he and his mother listening too though his father had excused himself: and still there two days after that, still trying from his uncle and the mayor and the board of aldermen and at last the board of supervisors themselves to buy the whole door or if they wouldn’t sell that, at least the bar and slots and the hinges.) and unlocked it and swung it back.

  But already they had passed out of the world of man, men: people who worked and had homes and raised families and tried to make a little more money than they perhaps deserved by fair means of course or at least by legal, to spend a little on fun and still save something against old age. Because even as the oak door swung back there seemed to rush out and down at him the stale breath of all human degradation and shame — a smell of creosote and excrement and stale vomit and incorrigibility and defiance and repudiation like something palpable against the thrust and lift of their bodies as they mounted the last steps and into a passage which was actually a part of the main room, the bullpen, cut off from the rest of the room by a wall of wire mesh like a chicken run or a dog-kennel, inside which in tiered bunks against the farther wall lay five Negroes, motionless, their eyes closed but no sound of snoring, no sound of any sort, lying there immobile orderly and composed under the dusty glare of the single shadeless bulb as if they had been embalmed, the jailer stopping again, his own hands gripped into the mesh while he glared at the motionless shapes. ‘Look at them,’ the jailer said in that voice too loud, too thin, just under hysteria: ‘Peaceful as lambs but aint a damned one of them asleep. And I dont blame them; with a mob of white men boiling in here at midnight with pistols and cans of gasoline. — Come on,’ he said and turned and went on. Just beyond there was a door in the mesh, not padlocked but just hooked with a hasp and staple such as you might see on a dog-kennel or a corn crib but the jailer passed it.

  ‘You put him in the cell, did you?’ his uncle said.

  ‘Hampton’s orders,’ the jailer said over his shoulder. ‘I dont know what the next white man that figgers he cant rest good until he kills somebody is going to think about it. I taken all the blankets off the cot though.’

  ‘Maybe because he wont be here long enough to have to go to sleep?’ his uncle said.

  ‘Ha ha,’ the jailer said in that strained high harsh voice without mirth: ‘Ha ha ha ha:’ and following behind his uncle he thought how of all human pursuits murder has the most deadly need of privacy; how man will go to almost any lengths to preserve the solitude in which he evacuates or makes love but he will go to any length for that in which he takes life, even to homicide, yet by no act can he more completely and irrevocably destroy it: a modern steel barred door this time with a built-in lock as large as a woman’s handbag which the jailer unlocked with another key on the ring and then turned, the sound of his feet almost as rapid as running back down the corridor until the sound of the oak door at the head of the stairs cut them off, and beyond it the cell lighted by another single dim dusty flyspecked bulb behind a wire screen cupped to the ceiling, not much larger than a broom closet and in fact just wide enough for the double bunk against the wall, from both beds of which not just the blankets but the mattresses too had been stripped, he and his uncle entering and still all he saw yet was the first thing he had seen: the hat and the black coat hanging neatly from a nail in the wall: and he would remember afterward how he thought in a gasp, a surge of relief: They’ve already got him. He’s gone. It’s too late. It’s already over now. Because he didn’t know what he had expected, except that it was not this: a careful spread of newspaper covering neatly the naked springs of the lower cot and another section as carefully placed on the upper one so it would shield his eyes from the light and Lucas himself lying on the spread papers, asleep, on his back, his head pillowed on one of his shoes and his hands folded on his breast, quite peacefully or as peacefully as old people sleep, his mouth open and breathing in faint shallow jerky gasps; and he stood in an almost unbearable surge not merely of outrage but of rage, looking down at the face which for the first time, defenceless at last for a moment, revealed its age, and the lax gnarled old man’s hands which only yesterday had sent a bullet into the back of another human being, lying still and peaceful on the bosom of the old-fashioned collarless boiled white shirt closed at the neck with the oxidising brass button shaped like an arrow and almost as large as the head of a small snake, thinking: He’s just a nigger after all for all his high nose and his stiff neck and his gold watch-chain and refusing to mean mister to anybody even when he says it. Only a nigger could kill a man, let alone shoot him in the back, and then sleep like a baby as soon as he found something flat enough to lie down on; still looking at him when without moving otherwise Lucas closed his mouth and his eyelids opened, the eyes staring up for another second, then still without the head moving at all the eyeballs turned until Lucas was looking straight at his uncle but still not moving: just lying there looking at him.

  ‘Well, old man,’ his uncle said. ‘You played hell at last.’ Then Lucas moved. He sat up stiffly and swung his legs stiffly over the edge of the cot, picking one of them up by the knee between his hands and swinging it around as you open or close a sagging gate, groaning, grunting not just frankly and unabashed and aloud but comfortably, as the old grunt and groan with some long familiar minor stiffness so used and accustomed as to be no longer even an ache and which if they were ever actually cured of it, they would be bereft and lost; he listening and watching still in that rage and now amazement too at the murderer not merely in the shadow of the gallows but of a lynch-mob, not only taking time to groan over a stiffness in his back but doing it as if he had all the long rest of a natural life in which to be checked each time he moved by the old familiar catch.

  ‘Looks like it,’ Lucas said. ‘That’s why I sent for you. What you going to do with me?’

  ‘Me?’ his uncle said. ‘Nothing. My name aint Gow
rie. It aint even Beat Four.’

  Moving stiffly again Lucas bent and peered about his feet, then he reached under the cot and drew out the other shoe and sat up again and began to turn creakily and stiffly to look behind him when his uncle reached and took the first shoe from the cot and dropped it beside the other. But Lucas didn’t put them on. Instead he sat again, immobile, his hands on his knees, blinking. Then with one hand he made a gesture which completely dismissed Gowries, mob, vengeance, holocaust and all. ‘I’ll worry about that when they walks in here,’ he said. ‘I mean the law. Aint you the county lawyer?’

  ‘Oh,’ his uncle said. ‘It’s the District Attorney that’ll hang you or send you to Parchman — not me.’

  Lucas was still blinking, not rapidly: just steadily. He watched him. And suddenly he realised that Lucas was not looking at his uncle at all and apparently had not been for three or four seconds.

  ‘I see,’ Lucas said. ‘Then you can take my case.’

  ‘Take your case? Defend you before the judge?’

  ‘I’m gonter pay you,’ Lucas said. ‘You dont need to worry.’

  ‘I dont defend murderers who shoot people in the back,’ his uncle said.

  Again Lucas made the gesture with one of the dark gnarled hands. ‘Let’s forgit the trial. We aint come to it yet.’ And now he saw that Lucas was watching his uncle, his head lowered so that he was watching his uncle upward from beneath through the grizzled tufts of his eyebrows — a look shrewd secret and intent. Then Lucas said: ‘I wants to hire somebody—’ and stopped. And watching him, he thought remembered an old lady, dead now, a spinster, a neighbor who wore a dyed transformation and had always on a pantry shelf a big bowl of homemade teacakes for all the children on the street, who one summer (he couldn’t have been over seven or eight then) taught all of them to play Five Hundred: sitting at the card table on her screened side gallery on hot summer mornings and she would wet her fingers and take a card from her hand and lay it on the table, her hand not still poised over it of course but just lying nearby until the next player revealed exposed by some movement or gesture of triumph or exultation or maybe by just simple increased hard breathing his intention to trump or overplay it, whereupon she would say quickly: ‘Wait. I picked up the wrong one’ and take up the card and put it back into her hand and play another one. That was exactly what Lucas had done. He had sat still before but now he was absolutely immobile. He didn’t even seem to be breathing.

  ‘Hire somebody?’ his uncle said. ‘You’ve got a lawyer. I had already taken your case before I came in here. I’m going to tell you what to do as soon as you have told me what happened.’

  ‘No,’ Lucas said. ‘I wants to hire somebody. It dont have to be a lawyer.’

  Now it was his uncle who stared at Lucas. ‘To do what?’

  He watched them. Now it was no childhood’s game of stakeless Five Hundred. It was more like the poker games he had overlooked. ‘Are you or aint you going to take the job?’ Lucas said.

  ‘So you aint going to tell me what you want me to do until after I have agreed to do it,’ his uncle said. ‘All right,’ his uncle said. ‘Now I’m going to tell you what to do. Just exactly what happened out there yesterday?’

  ‘So you dont want the job,’ Lucas said. ‘You aint said yes or no yet.’

  ‘No!’ his uncle said, harsh, too loud, catching himself but already speaking again before he had brought his voice back down to a sort of furious explicit calm: ‘Because you aint got any job to offer anybody. You’re in jail, depending on the grace of God to keep those damned Gowries from dragging you out of here and hanging you to the first lamp post they come to. Why they ever let you get to town in the first place I still dont understand — —’

  ‘Nemmine that now,’ Lucas said. ‘What I needs is — —’

  ‘Nemmine that!’ his uncle said. ‘Tell the Gowries to never mind it when they bust in here tonight. Tell Beat Four to just forget it — —’ He stopped; again with an effort you could almost see he brought his voice back to that furious patience. He drew a deep breath and expelled it. ‘Now. Tell me exactly what happened yesterday.’

  For another moment Lucas didn’t answer, sitting on the bunk, his hands on his knees, intractable and composed, no longer looking at his uncle, working his mouth faintly as if he were tasting something. He said: ‘They was two folks, partners in a sawmill. Leastways they was buying the lumber as the sawmill cut it — —’

  ‘Who were they?’ his uncle said.

  ‘Vinson Gowrie was one of um.’

  His uncle stared at Lucas for a long moment. But his voice was quite calm now. ‘Lucas,’ he said, ‘has it ever occurred to you that if you just said mister to white people and said it like you meant it, you might not be sitting here now?’

  ‘So I’m to commence now,’ Lucas said. ‘I can start off by saying mister to the folks that drags me out of here and builds a fire under me.’

  ‘Nothing’s going to happen to you — until you go before the judge,’ his uncle said. ‘Dont you know that even Beat Four dont take liberties with Mr Hampton — at least not here in town?’

  ‘Shurf Hampton’s home in bed now.’

  ‘But Mr Will Legate’s sitting downstairs with a shotgun.’

  ‘I aint ‘quainted with no Will Legate.’

  ‘The deer-hunter? The man that can hit a running rabbit with a thirty-thirty rifle?’

  ‘Hah,’ Lucas said. ‘Them Gowries aint deer. They might be cattymounts and panthers but they aint deer.’

  ‘All right,’ his uncle said. ‘Then I’ll stay here if you’ll feel better. Now. Go on. Vinson Gowrie and another man were buying lumber together. What other man?’

  ‘Vinson Gowrie’s the only one that’s public yet.’

  ‘And he got public by being shot in broad daylight in the back,’ his uncle said. ‘Well, that’s one way to do it. — All right,’ his uncle said. ‘Who was the other man?’

  Lucas didn’t answer. He didn’t move; he might not even have heard, sitting peaceful and inattentive, not even really waiting: just sitting there while his uncle watched him. Then his uncle said:

  ‘All right. What were they doing with it?’

  ‘They was yarding it up as the mill cut it, gonter sell it all at once when the sawing was finished. Only the other man was hauling it away at night, coming in late after dark with a truck and picking up a load and hauling it over to Glasgow or Hollymount and selling it and putting the money in his pocket.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I seen um. Watched um,’ Nor did he doubt this for a moment because he remembered Ephraim, Paralee’s father before he died, an old man, a widower who would pass most of the day dozing and waking in a rocking chair on Paralee’s gallery in summer and in front of the fire in winter and at night would walk the roads, not going anywhere, just moving, at times five and six miles from town before he would return at dawn to doze and wake all day in the chair again.

  ‘All right,’ his uncle said. ‘Then what?’

  ‘That’s all,’ Lucas said. ‘He was just stealing a load of lumber every night or so.’

  His uncle stared at Lucas for perhaps ten seconds. He said in a voice of calm, almost hushed amazement: ‘So you took your pistol and went to straighten it out. You, a nigger, took a pistol and went to rectify a wrong between two white men. What did you expect? What else did you expect?’

  ‘Nemmine expecting,’ Lucas said. ‘I wants — —’

  ‘You went to the store,’ his uncle said, ‘only you happened to find Vinson Gowrie first and followed him into the woods and told him his partner was robbing him and naturally he cursed you and called you a liar whether it was true or not, naturally he would have to do that; maybe he even knocked you down and walked on and you shot him in the back — —’

  ‘Never nobody knocked me down,’ Lucas said.

  ‘So much the worse,’ his uncle said. ‘So much the worse for you. It’s not even self-defense. You just shot him in the back.
And then you stood there over him with the fired pistol in your pocket and let the white folks come up and grab you. And if it hadn’t been for that little shrunk-up rheumatic constable who had no business being there in the first place and in the second place had no business whatever, at the rate of a dollar a prisoner every time he delivered a subpoena or served a warrant, having guts enough to hold off that whole damn Beat Four for eighteen hours until Hope Hampton saw fit or remembered or got around to bringing you in to jail —— holding off that whole countryside that you nor all the friends you could drum up in a hundred years — —’

  ‘I aint got friends,’ Lucas said with stern and inflexible pride, and then something else though his uncle was already talking:

  ‘You’re damned right you haven’t. And if you ever had that pistol shot would have blown them to kingdom come too —— What?’ his uncle said. ‘What did you say?’

  ‘I said I pays my own way,’ Lucas said.

  ‘I see,’ his uncle said. ‘You dont use friends; you pay cash. Yes. I see. Now you listen to me. You’ll go before the grand jury tomorrow. They’ll indict you. Then if you like I’ll have Mr Hampton move you to Mottstown or even further away than that, until court convenes next month. Then you’ll plead guilty; I’ll persuade the District Attorney to let you do that because you’re an old man and you never were in trouble before; I mean as far as the judge and the District Attorney will know since they dont live within fifty miles of Yoknapatawpha County. Then they wont hang you; they’ll send you to the penitentiary; you probably wont live long enough to be paroled but at least the Gowries cant get to you there. Do you want me to stay in here with you tonight?’