Complete Works of William Faulkner

by William Faulkner

  ‘Maybe I better go to work. Somebody’ll have to earn a little bread around here while the rest of you are playing cops and robbers:’ and went out and apparently the coffee had done something to what he called his thinking processes or anyway the processes of what people called thinking because now he knew the why for his father too — the rage which was relief after the event which had to express itself some way and chose anger not because he would have forbidden him to go but because he had had no chance to, the pseudo-scornful humorous impugnment of his and Aleck Sander’s courage which blinked not even as much at a rifled grave in the dark as it did at Miss Habersham’s will, — in fact the whole heavyhanded aspersion of the whole thing by reducing it to the terms of a kind of kindergarten witchhunt: which was probably merely the masculine form of refusing also to believe that he was what his uncle called big enough to button his pants and so he dismissed his father, hearing his mother about to emerge from the kitchen and pushing his chair back and getting up himself when suddenly he was thinking how coffee was already a good deal more than he had known but nobody had warned him that it produced illusions like cocaine or opium: seeing watching his father’s noise and uproar flick and vanish away like blown smoke or mist, not merely revealing but exposing the man who had begot him looking back at him from beyond the bridgeless abyss of that begetting not with just pride but with envy too; it was his uncle’s abnegant and rhetorical self-lacerating which was the phony one and his father was gnawing the true bitter irremediable bone of all which was dismatchment with time, being born too soon or late to have been himself sixteen and gallop a horse ten miles in the dark to save an old nigger’s insolent and friendless neck.

  But at least he was awake. The coffee had accomplished that anyway. He still needed to doze only now he couldn’t; the desire to sleep was there but it was wakefulness now he would have to combat and abate. It was after eight now; one of the county schoolbusses passed as he prepared to drive Miss Habersham’s truck away from the curb and the street would be full of children too fresh for Monday morning with books and paper bags of recess-time lunches and behind the schoolbus was a string of cars and trucks stained with country mud and dust so constant and unbroken that his uncle and his mother would already have reached the jail before he ever managed to cut into it because Monday was stock-auction day at the sales barns behind the Square and he could see them, the empty cars and trucks rank on dense rank along the courthouse curb like shoats at a feed-trough and the men with their stock-trader walking-sticks not even stopping but gone straight across the Square and along the alley to the sales barns to chew tobacco and unlighted cigars from pen to pen amid the ammonia-reek of manure and liniment and the bawling of calves and the stamp and sneeze of horses and mules and the second-hand wagons and plow-gear and guns and harness and watches and only the women (what few of them that is since stock-sale day unlike Saturday was a man’s time) remained about the Square and the stores so that the Square itself would be empty except for the parked cars and trucks until the men would come back for an hour at noon to meet them at the cafes and restaurants.

  Whereupon this time he jerked himself, no reflex now, not even out of sleep but illusion, who had carried hypnosis right out of the house with him even into the bright strong sun of day, even driving the pickup truck which before last night he would not even have recognised yet which since last night had become as inexpugnable a part of his memory and experience and breathing as hiss of shovelled dirt or the scrape of a metal blade on a pine box would ever be, through a mirage-vacuum in which not simply last night had not happened but there had been no Saturday either, remembering now as if he had only this moment seen it that there had been no children in the schoolbus but only grown people and in the stream of cars and trucks following it and now following him where he had finally cut in, a few of which even on stock-auction Monday (on Saturday half of the flat open beds would have been jammed and packed with them, men women and children in the cheap meagre finery in which they came to town) should have carried Negroes, there had not been one dark face.

  Nor one school-bound child on the street although he had heard without listening enough of his uncle at the telephone to know that the superintendent had called whether to have school today or not and his uncle had told him yes, and in sight of the Square now he could see already three more of the yellow busses supposed and intended to bring the county children in to school but which their owner-contractor-operators translated on Saturdays and holidays into pay-passenger transport and then the Square itself, the parked cars and trucks as always as should be but the Square itself anything but empty: no exodus of men toward the stock pens nor women into the stores so that as he drove the pickup into the curb behind his uncle’s car he could see already where visible and sense where not a moil and mass of movement, one dense pulse and hum filling the Square as when the crowd overflows the carnival midway or the football field, flowing into the street and already massed along the side opposite to the jail until the head of it had already passed the blacksmith’s where he had stood yesterday trying to be invisible as if they were waiting for a parade to pass (and almost in the middle of the street so that the still unbroken stream of cars and trucks had to detour around them a clump of a dozen or so more like the group in a reviewing stand in whose center in its turn he recognized the badged official cap of the town marshal who at this hour on this day would have been in front of the schoolhouse holding up traffic for children to cross the street and he did not have to remember that the marshal’s name was Ingrum, a Beat Four Ingrum come to town as the apostate sons of Beat Four occasionally did to marry a town girl and become barbers and bailiffs and nightwatchmen as petty Germanic princelings would come down out of their Brandenburg hills to marry the heiresses to European thrones) — the men and the women and not one child, the weathered country faces and sunburned necks and backs of hands, the clean faded tieless earthcolored shirts and pants and print cotton dresses thronging the Square and the street as though the stores themselves were closed and locked, not even staring yet at the blank front of the jail and the single barred window which had been empty and silent too for going on forty-eight hours now but just gathering, condensing, not expectant nor in anticipation nor even attentive yet but merely in that preliminary settling down like the before-curtain in a theatre: and he thought that was it: holiday: which meant a day for children yet here turned upside down: and suddenly he realised that he had been completely wrong; it was not Saturday which had never happened but only last night which to them had not happened yet, that not only they didn’t know about last night but there was nobody, not even Hampton, who could have told them because they would have refused to believe him; whereupon something like a skim or a veil like that which crosses a chicken’s eye and which he had not even known was there went flick! from his own and he saw them for the first time — the same weathered still almost inattentive faces and the same faded clean cotton shirts and pants and dresses but no crowd now waiting for the curtain to rise on a stage’s illusion but rather the one in the courtroom waiting for the sheriffs officer to cry Oyez Oyez Oyez This honorable court; not even impatient because the moment had not even come yet to sit in judgment not on Lucas Beauchamp, they had already condemned him but on Beat Four, come not to see what they called justice done nor even retribution exacted but to see that Beat Four should not fail its white man’s high estate.

  So that he had stopped the truck was out and had already started to run when he stopped himself: something of dignity something of pride remembering last night when he had instigated and in a way led and anyway accompanied the stroke which not one of the responsible elders but had failed even to recognise its value, let alone its need, and something of caution too remembering how his uncle had said almost nothing was enough to put a mob in motion so perhaps even a child running toward the jail would have been enough: then he remembered again the faces myriad yet curiously identical in their lack of individual identity, their complete relinquishment
of individual identity into one We not even impatient, not even hurryable, almost gala in its complete obliviousness of its own menace, not to be stampeded by a hundred running children: and then in the same flash the obverse: not to be halted or deflected by a hundred times a hundred of them, and having realised its sheer hopelessness when it was still only an intention and then its physical imponderability when it entered accomplishment he now recognised the enormity of what he had blindly meddled with and that his first instinctive impulse — to run home and fling saddle and bridle on the horse and ride as the crow flies into the last stagger of exhaustion and then sleep and then return after it was all over — had been the right one (who now simply because he happened not to be an orphan had not even that escape) because it seemed to him now that he was responsible for having brought into the light and glare of day something shocking and shameful out of the whole white foundation of the county which he himself must partake of too since he too was bred of it, which otherwise might have flared and blazed merely out of Beat Four and then vanished back into its darkness or at least invisibility with the fading embers of Lucas’ crucifixion.

  But it was too late now, he couldn’t even repudiate, relinquish, run: the jail door still open and opposite it now he could see Miss Habersham sitting in the chair Legate had sat in, the cardboard box on the floor at her feet and a garment of some sort across her lap; she was still wearing the hat and he could see the steady motion of her hand and elbow and it seemed to him he could even see the flash and flick of the needle in her hand though he knew he could not at this distance; but his uncle was in the way so he had to move further along the walk but at that moment his uncle turned and came out the door and recrossed the veranda and then he could see her too in the second chair beside Miss Habersham; a car drew up to the curb behind him and stopped and now without haste she chose a sock from the basket and slipped the darningegg into it; she even had the needle already threaded stuck in the front of her dress and now he could distinguish the flash and glint of it and maybe that was because he knew so well the motion, the narrow familiar suppleness of the hand which he had watched all his life but at least no man could have disputed him that it was his sock.

  ‘Who’s that?’ the sheriff said behind him. He turned. The sheriff sat behind the wheel of his car, his neck and shoulders bowed and hunched so he could peer out below the top of the window-frame. The engine was still running and he saw in the back of the car the handles of two shovels and the pick too which they would not need and on the back seat quiet and motionless save for the steady glint and blink of their eyewhites, two Negroes in blue jumpers and the soiled black-ringed convict pants which the street gangs wore.

  ‘Who would it be?’ his uncle said behind him too but he didn’t turn this time nor did he even listen further because three men came suddenly out of the street and stopped beside the car and as he watched five or six more came up and in another moment the whole crowd would begin to flow across the street; already a passing car had braked suddenly (and then the following one behind it) at first to keep from running over them and then for its occupants to lean out looking at the sheriff’s car where the first man to reach it had already stooped to peer into it, his brown farmer’s hands grasping the edge of the open window, his brown weathered face thrust into the car curious divinant and abashless while behind him his massed duplicates in their felt hats and sweat-stained panamas listened.

  ‘What you up to, Hope?’ the man said. ‘Dont you know the Grand Jury’ll get you, wasting county money this way? Aint you heard about that new lynch law the Yankees passed? the folks that lynches the nigger is supposed to dig the grave?’

  ‘Maybe he’s taking them shovels out there for Nub Gowrie and them boys of his to practice with,’ the second said.

  ‘Then it’s a good thing Hope’s taking shovel hands too,’ the third said. ‘If he’s depending on anybody named Gowrie to dig a hole or do anything else that might bring up a sweat, he’ll sure need them.’

  ‘Or maybe they aint shovel hands,’ the fourth said. ‘Maybe it’s them the Gowries are going to practice on.’ Yet even though one guffawed they were not laughing, more than a dozen now crowded around the car to take one quick allcomprehensive glance into the back of it where the two Negroes sat immobile as carved wood staring straight ahead at nothing and no movement even of breathing other than an infinitesimal widening and closing of the whites around their eyeballs, then looking at the sheriff again with almost exactly the expression he had seen on the faces waiting for the spinning tapes behind a slotmachine’s glass to stop.

  ‘I reckon that’ll do,’ the sheriff said. He thrust his head and one vast arm out the window and with the arm pushed the nearest ones back and away from the car as effortlessly as he would have opened a curtain, raising his voice but not much: ‘Willy.’ The marshal came up; he could already hear him:

  ‘Gangway, boys. Lemme see what the high sheriff’s got on his mind this morning.’

  ‘Why dont you get these folks out of the street so them cars can get to town?’ the sheriff said. ‘Maybe they want to stand around and look at the jail too.’

  ‘You bet,’ the marshal said. He turned, shoving his hands at the nearest ones, not touching them, as if he were putting into motion a herd of cattle. ‘Now boys,’ he said.

  They didn’t move, looking past the marshal still at the sheriff, not at all defiant, not really daring anyone: just tolerant, goodhumored, debonair almost.

  ‘Why, Sheriff,’ a voice said, then another:

  ‘It’s a free street, aint it, Sheriff? You town folks wont mind us just standing on it long as we spend our money with you, will you?’

  ‘But not to block off the other folks trying to get to town to spend a little,’ the sheriff said. ‘Move on now. Get them out of the street, Willy.’

  ‘Come on, boys,’ the marshal said. ‘There’s other folks besides you wants to get up where they can watch them bricks.’ They moved then but still without haste, the marshal herding them back across the street like a woman driving a flock of hens across a pen, she to control merely the direction not the speed and not too much of that, the fowls moving ahead of her flapping apron not recalcitrant, just unpredictable, fearless of her and not yet even alarmed; the halted car and the ones behind it moved too, slowly, dragging at creeping pace their loads of craned faces; he could hear the marshal shouting at the drivers: ‘Get on. Get on. There’s cars behind you — —’

  The sheriff was looking at his uncle again. ‘Where’s the other one?’

  ‘The other what?’ his uncle said.

  ‘The other detective. The one that can see in the dark.’

  ‘Aleck Sander,’ his uncle said. ‘You want him too?’

  ‘No,’ the sheriff said. ‘I just missed him. I was just surprised to find one human in this county with taste and judgment enough to stay at home today. You ready? Let’s get started.’

  ‘Right,’ his uncle said. The sheriff was notorious as a driver who used up a car a year as a heavyhanded sweeper wears out brooms: not by speed but by simple friction; now the car actually shot away from the curb and almost before he could watch it, was gone. His uncle went to theirs and opened the door. ‘Jump in,’ his uncle said.

  Then he said it; at least this much was simple: ‘I’m not going.’

  His uncle paused and now he saw watching him the quizzical saturnine face, the quizzical eyes which given a little time didn’t miss much; had in fact as long as he had known them never missed anything until last night.

  ‘Ah,’ his uncle said. ‘Miss Habersham is of course a lady but this other female is yours.’

  ‘Look at them,’ he said, not moving, barely moving his lips even. ‘Across the street. On the Square too and nobody but Willy Ingrum and that damn cap — —’

  ‘Didn’t you hear them talking to Hampton?’ his uncle said.

  ‘I heard them,’ he said. ‘They were not even laughing at their own jokes. They were laughing at him.’

 
‘They were not even taunting him,’ his uncle said. ‘They were not even jeering at him. They were just watching him. Watching him and Beat Four, to see what would happen. These people just came to town to see what either or both of them are going to do.’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘More than that.’

  ‘All right,’ his uncle said, quite soberly too now. ‘Granted. Then what?’

  ‘Suppose — —’ But his uncle interrupted:

  ‘Suppose Beat Four comes in and picks up your mother’s and Miss Habersham’s chairs and carries them out into the yard where they’ll be out of the way? Lucas aint in that cell. He’s in Mr Hampton’s house, probably sitting in the kitchen right now eating his breakfast. What did you think Will Legate was doing coming in by the back door within fifteen minutes of when we got there and told Mr Hampton? Aleck Sander even heard him telephoning.’

  ‘Then what’s Mr Hampton in such a hurry for?’ he said: and his uncle’s voice was quite sober now: but just sober, that was all:

  ‘Because the best way to stop having to suppose or deny either is for us to get out there and do what we have to do and get back here. Jump in the car.’

  Chapter Seven

  THEY NEVER SAW the sheriff’s car again until they reached the church. Nor for him was the reason sleep who in spite of the coffee might have expected that and in fact had. Up to the moment when at the wheel of the pickup he had got near enough to see the Square and then the mass of people lining the opposite side of the street in front of the jail he had expected that as soon as he and his uncle were on the road back to the church, coffee or no coffee he would not even be once more fighting sleep but on the contrary would relinquish and accept it and so in the nine miles of gravel and the one of climbing dirt regain at least a half-hour of the eight he had lost last night and — it seemed to him now — the three or four times that many he had spent trying to quit thinking about Lucas Beauchamp the night before.