Complete Works of William Faulkner

by William Faulkner

  ‘Stop, men! I’m going to count three!’ and began to count: ‘One — Two — —’ staring, even glaring at the faces which were not rushing at him nor did they even seem to walk at him, but rather towered down and over him, feeling again the pistol neither wrenched nor snatched but just wrung firmly from him and then other hands had him too. ‘You durn fools!’ he cried, struggling. But how say it? how tell them? You had to be honorable about money, no matter who had it; if you were not honorable about money, pitying the weak did them no good because about all they got from you then was just pity. Besides, it was already too late to try to tell them, even if there had been no other reason, the firm, quite kind, almost gentle hands not only holding him up but even lifting, raising him, and then they were even carrying him as two kinless bachelors might carry a child between them, his feet remembering earth but no longer touching it; then raising him still further until he could see, between and past the heads and shoulders, the ringed circumference of faces not grim and never angry: just unanimous and attentive, and in the center of it the old Negro in the worn frock coat and the thin chocolate-colored adolescent boy with eyeballs of that pure incredible white which Flemish painters knew how to grind; then the owner of the calm irascible voice spoke again and now for the first time the turnkey could see and recognise him: no lawyer or merchant or banker or any other civic leader, but himself a gambler who bucked from choice the toughest game of all: ownership of a small peripatetic sawmill where he had gone to work at the age of fifteen as the sole support of a widowed mother and three unmarried sisters, and now at forty owned the mill and a wife and two daughters and one grand-daughter of his own, speaking at last into a silence in which there was not even the sound of breathing:

  ‘How much did you and that fellow really win on that horse? A hundred dollars?’

  ‘More,’ the old Negro said.

  ‘A thousand?’

  ‘More than that’: and now indeed there was no stir, no breath: only one vast suspension as if the whole bright April morning leaned:

  ‘Was it forty thousand?.… All right. Was it half of forty thousand? How much did you see? How much did you count? Can you count to a thousand dollars?’

  ‘It was a heap,’ the old Negro said: and now they breathed: one stir, one exhalation, one movement; the day, the morning once more relinquished, the voice its valedictory:

  ‘There’ll be a train at the depot in twenty-five minutes. You be on it when it leaves and dont come back. We dont like rich niggers here.’

  ‘So we got on the train,’ the old Negro said, ‘and rode to the next station. Then we got out and walked. It was a far piece, but we knowed where he would be now, if they would just let him alone—’ the blue haze-cradled valley where the corners of Georgia and Tennessee and Carolina meet, where he had appeared suddenly from nowhere that day last summer with a three-legged racehorse and an old Negro preacher and the Negro child who rode the horse, and stayed two weeks during which the horse outran every other one within fifty miles, and finally one brought all the way from Knoxville to try to cope with it, then (the four of them) vanished again overnight six hours ahead of a horde of Federal agents and sheriffs and special officers like the converging packs of a state- or nationwide foxhunt.

  ‘And we was right; he must a come straight back there from the Missouri jail because it was still June. They told us about it: a Sunday morning in the church and likely it was the preacher that seen him first because he was already facing that way, before the rest of them turned their heads and recognised him too standing against the back wall just inside the door like he hadn’t never left—’ the runner seeing it too, seeing almost as much as the Federal ex-deputy would have seen if he had been there: — the morose, savage, foul-mouthed, almost inarticulate (only the more so for the fact that occasionally a fragment of what he spoke sounded a little like what the valley knew as English) foreigner who moved, breathed, not merely in an aura of bastardy and bachelordom but of homelessness too, like a halfwild pedigreeless pariah dog: fatherless, wifeless, sterile and perhaps even impotent too, mis-shapen, savage and foul: the world’s portionless and intractable and inconsolable orphan, who brought without warning into that drowsing vacuum an aggregation bizarre, mobile and amazing as a hippodrome built around a comet: two Negroes and the ruined remnant of the magnificent and incredible horse whose like even on four legs the valley or the section either had never seen before, into a country where a horse was any milkless animal capable of pulling a plow or a cart on weekdays and carrying sacks of corn to the mill on Saturdays and bearing as many of the family as could cling to its gaunt ridgepole to the church on Sundays, and where there not only were none, but there never had been any Negroes; whose people, man and boy from sixty-odd down to fourteen and thirteen, had fifty years ago quitted their misty unmapped eyries to go for miles and even weeks on foot to engage in a war in which they had no stake and, if they had only stayed at home, no contact, in order to defend their land from Negroes; not content merely to oppose and repudiate their own geopolitical kind and their common economic derivation, they must confederate with its embattled enemies, stealing, creeping (once at a crossroads tavern a party of them fought something resembling a pitched battle with a Confederate recruiting party) by night through the Confederate lines to find and join a Federal army, to fight not against slavery but against Negroes, to abolish the Negro by freeing him from them who might bring Negroes among them exactly as they would have taken their rifles down from the pegs or deer antlers above hearth and doorway to repel, say, a commercial company talking about bringing the Indians back.

  Hearing it too: ‘Except it wasn’t two weeks we was there that first time. It was fifteen days. The first two they spent just looking at us. They would come from all up and down the valley, walking or on horses and mules or the whole family in the wagon, to set in the road in front of the store where we would be squatting on the gallery eating cheese and crackers and sardines, looking at us. Then the men and boys would go around behind the store where we had built a pen out of rails and scraps of boards and pieces of rope, to stand and look at the horse. Then we begun to run and by the fifth day we had outrun every horse in the whole valley and had done won even one mortgage on a ten-acre corn-patch up on the mountain, and by the seventh day we was running against horses brought all the way in from the next counties across what they called the Gap. Then six days more, with the folks in the valley betting on our horse now, until the fifteenth day when they brought that horse from Knoxville that had run at Churchill Downs back home once, and this time it was not just the valley folks but folks from all that part of Tennessee watching that three-legged horse without even no saddle (we never used no bridle neither: just a one-rein hackamore and a belly-band for this boy to hold on to) outrun that Knoxville horse the first time at five furlongs and the next time at a full mile for double stakes, with not just the folks in the valley but the folks from the other counties too betting on it now, so that everybody or anyway every family in that part of Tennessee had a share in what it won—’

  ‘That’s when he was taken into the Masons,’ the runner said. ‘During that two weeks.’

  ‘Fifteen days,’ the old Negro said. ‘Yes, there was a lodge there. — then just before daylight the next morning a man on a mule rid down from the Gap, just about a hour ahead of them—’ the runner hearing this too as the old Negro himself had heard it a year afterward: when the sun rose the automobile itself stood in front of the store — the first automobile which the soil of the valley had ever emprinted and which some of the old people and children had ever seen, driven part of the way over the gap trail but indubitably hauled and pushed and probably even carried here and there for the rest of the distance, and inside the store the sheriff of the county and the city strangers in their city hats and neckties and shoes smelling, stinking of excise officers, revenuers, while already the horses and mules and wagons of yesterday flowed back down from the coves and hills, the riders and occupants dismounting
at once now, to pause for a moment to look quietly and curiously at the automobile as though at a medium-sized rattlesnake, then crowding into the store until it would hold no more of them, facing not the city strangers standing in a tight wary clump in front of the cold spit-marked stove in its spit-marked sandbox, they had looked at them once and then no more, but rather the sheriff, so that, since the sheriff was one of them, bore one of the names which half the valley bore and the valley had all voted for him and in fact, except for his dime-store cravat and their overalls, even looked like them, it was as though the valley merely faced itself.

  ‘They stole the horse,’ the sheriff said. ‘All the man wants is just to get it back.’ But no reply: only the quiet, grave, courteous, not really listening but just waiting faces, until one of the city strangers said in a bitter city voice:

  ‘Wait — —’ already stepping quickly past the sheriff, his hand already inside the buttoned front of his city coat when the sheriff said in his flat hill voice:

  ‘You wait,’ his hand inside the other’s buttoned coat too, already covering the other smaller one, plucking it out of the coat and holding easily in the one grasp both the small city hand and the flat city pistol so that they looked like toys in it, not wrenching but merely squeezing the pistol out of the hand and dropping it into his own coat pocket, and said, ‘Well boys, let’s get on,’ moving, walking, his companions in their white shirts and coat sleeves and pants legs and shoes creased and polished two days ago in Chattanooga hotels, heeling him, compact and close, while the faces, the lane opened: through the store, the lane, the faces closing behind: across the gallery and down the steps, the silent lane still opening and closing behind them until they reached the automobile; 1914 then, and young mountain men had not yet learned how to decommission an automobile simply by removing the distributor or jamming the carburetor. So they had used what they did know: a ten-pound hammer from the blacksmith’s shop, not knowing even then the secret of the thing’s life beneath the hood and so over-finding it: the fine porcelain dust of shattered plugs and wrenched and battered wires and dented pipes and even the mute half-horse-shoe prints of the hammer punctuating the spew of oil and gasoline and even the hammer itself immobile against an overalled leg in plain view; and now the city man, cursing in his furious bitter voice, was scrabbling with both hands at the sheriff’s coat until the sheriff grasped both of them in his one and held the man so; and, facing them now across the ruined engine, again it was merely the valley facing itself. ‘The automobile dont belong to the government,’ the sheriff said. ‘It belongs to him. He will have to pay to have it fixed.’

  Nor anything yet for a moment. Then a voice: ‘How much?’

  ‘How much?’ the sheriff said over his shoulder.

  ‘How much?’ the city man said. ‘A thousand dollars, for all I know. Maybe two thousand — —’

  ‘We’ll call it fifty,’ the sheriff said, releasing the hands and removing the trim pearl-colored city hat from the city head and with his other hand took from his trousers pocket a small crumple of banknotes and separated one and dropped it into the hat, holding the hat upside down and as though baited with the single bill, toward the nearest of the crowd: ‘Next,’ he said.

  ‘Except that they had to look quick, because before the preacher could say the benediction so they could get up and even tell him howdy, he was done gone from there too. But quick as he left, it wasn’t before the word could begin to spread:’ telling that too: thirty-seven in the church that morning so in effect the whole valley was and by midafternoon or sundown anyway every cove and hill and run knew he was back: alone: without the horse: and broke, and hungry; not gone again: just disappeared, out of sight: for the time: so that they knew they had only to wait, to bide until the moment, which was that night in the loft above the postoffice-store— ‘It was the lodge-room. They used it for they politic too, and for the court, but mostly for the poker- and crap-games that they claimed had been running there ever since the valley was first settled and the store was built. There was a regular outside staircase going up to it that the lawyers and judges and politicians and Masons and Eastern Stars used, but mainly it was a ladder nailed flat to the back wall outside, leading up to a back window, that everybody in the valley knowed about but not one of them would ever claim he even seen, let alone climbed. And inside there was a jug always full of white mountain whisky setting on the shelf with the water-bucket and the gourd, that everybody in the valley knowed was there just like they done the ladder but that nobody could see while the court or the lodge or a meeting was going on:’ telling it:

  An hour after dark when the six or seven men (including the store’s clerk) squatting around the spread blanket on the floor beneath the lantern (‘It was Sunday night. They just shot craps on Sunday night. They wouldn’t allow no poker.’) heard his feet on the ladder and watched him crawl through the window and then didn’t look at him anymore while he went to the jug and poured himself a drink into the gourd dipper, not watching him exactly as not one of them would have offered him as a gift the actual food or as a loan the money to buy it with, not even when he turned and saw the coin, the half-dollar, on the floor beside his foot where ten seconds ago no coin had been, nor when he picked it up and interrupted the game for two or three minutes while he compelled them one by one to disclaim the coin’s ownership, then knelt into the circle and bet the coin and cast the dice and drew down the original half-dollar and pyramided for two more casts, then passed the dice and, rising, left the original coin on the floor where he had found it and went to the trap door and the ladder which led down into the store’s dark interior and with no light descended and returned with a wedge of cheese and a handful of crackers and interrupted the game again to hand the clerk one of the coins he had won and took his change and, squatting against the wall and with no sound save the steady one of his chewing, ate what the valley knew was his first food since he returned to it, reappeared in the church ten hours ago; and — suddenly — the first since he had vanished with the horse and the two Negroes ten months ago.

  ‘They just took him back, like he hadn’t never even been away. It was more than that. It was like there never had been no more than what they seen now: no horse to win races on three legs and never had been because they probably never even asked him what had become of it, never no two niggers like me and this boy, never no money to ask him how much of it he won like all them folks back there in Missouri done, not even no time between that one a year ago last summer and this one—’ no interval of fall and winter and spring, no flame of oak and hickory nor drive of sleet nor foam and rush of laurel and rhododendron down the mountainsides into summer again; the man himself (the runner seeing this too out of the listening, the hearing) unchanged and not even any dirtier: just alone this time (though not as well as the Federal ex-deputy could have seen it) — the same savage and bandy misanthrope in the foul raked checked cap and the cheap imitation tweed jacket and the bagging Bedford cords (‘He called them jodhpurs. They would have held three of him. He said they was made in a place called Savile Row for what he called the second largest duke in the Irish peerage.’) squatting on the store’s front gallery beneath the patent medicine and tobacco and baking powder placards and the announcements and adjurations of candidates for sheriff and representative and district attorney (this was 1914, an even year; they had already been defeated and forgotten and there remained only their fading photographs joblotted from the lowest bidder and not looking like them anyway, which no one had expected, but merely like any candidate, which was all that any hoped, dotting the countryside on telephone poles and fences and the wooden rails of bridges and the flanks of barns and already fading beneath the incrementation of time and weather, like ejaculations: a warning: a plea: a cry):

  ‘Just squatting there at first, not doing nothing and not nobody bothering him, even to try to talk to him, until Sunday when he would be in the church again, setting in the last pew at the back where he could get out first after
the benediction. He was sleeping on a straw tick in the lodge room over the store and eating out of the store too because he had won that much that first night. He could have had a job; they told me about that too: him squatting on the gallery one morning when some fellow brought a horse in to the blacksmith that he had tried to shoe himself and quicked it in the nigh hind, the horse plunging and kicking and squealing every time they tried to touch it until at last they was trying to cross-tie it up and maybe even have to throw it to pull the quick shoe, until he got up and went in and laid his hand on its neck a minute and talked to it and then just tied the halter rein in the ring and picked up the foot and pulled the shoe and reset it. The blacksmith offered him a steady job right there but he never even answered, just back on the gallery squatting again, then Sunday in the back pew in the church again where he could get out first, before anybody could try to talk to him. Because they couldn’t see his heart.’