Complete Works of William Faulkner

by William Faulkner

  She was wearing the hat and coat and was carrying the shopping bag when she ran into Mrs Hait’s kitchen, already hollering: “Miss Mannie! Mule in the yard!”

  Mrs Hait was squatting in front of the stove, raking live ashes from it into a scuttle. She was childless, living alone now in the little wooden house painted the same color that the railroad company used on its stations and boxcars — out of respect to and in memory of, we all said, that morning three years ago when what remained of Mr Hait had finally been sorted from what remained of the five mules and several feet of new manila rope scattered along the right-of-way. In time the railroad claims adjuster called on her, and in time she cashed a check for eight thousand five hundred dollars, since (as Uncle Gavin said, these were the halcyon days when even the railroad companies considered their southern branches and divisions the rightful legitimate prey of all who dwelt beside them) although for several years before Mr Hait’s death single mules and pairs (by coincidence belonging often to Mr Snopes too; you could always tell his because every time the railroad killed his mules they always had new strong rope on them) had been in the habit of getting themselves killed on that same blind curve at night, this was the first time a human being had — as Uncle Gavin put it — joined them in mutual apotheosis.

  Mrs Hait took the money in cash; she stood in a calico wrapper and her late husband’s coat sweater and the actual felt hat he had been wearing (it had been found intact) on that fatal morning and listened in cold and grim silence while the bank teller then the cashier then the president (Mr de Spain himself) tried to explain to her about bonds, then about savings accounts, then about a simple checking account, and put the money into a salt sack under her apron and departed; that summer she painted her house that serviceable and time-defying color which matched the depot and the boxcars, as though out of sentiment or (as Ratliff said) gratitude, and now she still lived in it, alone, in the calico wrapper and the sweater coat and the same felt hat which her husband had owned and wore until he no longer needed them; though her shoes by this time were her own: men’s shoes which buttoned, with toes like small tulip bulbs, of an archaic and obsolete pattern which Mr Wildermark himself ordered especially for her once a year.

  She jerked up and around, still clutching the scuttle, and glared at old Het and said — her voice was a good strong one too, immediate too —

  “That son of a bitch,” and, still carrying the scuttle and with old Het still carrying the shopping bag and following, ran out of the kitchen into the fog. That’s why it wasn’t cold: the fog: as if all the sleeping and breathing of Jefferson during that whole long January night was still lying there imprisoned between the ground and the mist, keeping it from quite freezing, lying like a scum of grease on the wooden steps at the back door and on the brick coping and the wooden lid of the cellar stairs beside the kitchen door and on the wooden planks which led from the steps to the wooden shed in the corner of the back yard where Mrs Hait’s cow lived; when she stepped down onto the planks, still carrying the scuttle of live ashes, Mrs Hait skated violently before she caught her balance. Old Het in her rubber soles didn’t slip.

  “Watch out!” she shouted happily. “They in the front!” One of them wasn’t. Because Mrs Hait didn’t fall either. She didn’t even pause, whirling and already running toward the corner of the house where, with silent and apparition-like suddenness, the mule appeared. It belonged to Mr. I.O. Snopes too. I mean, until they finally unravelled Mr Hait from the five mules on the railroad track that morning three years ago, nobody had connected him with Mr Snopes’s mule business, even though now and then somebody did wonder how Mr Hait didn’t seem to need to do anything steady to make a living. Ratliff said the reason was that everybody was wondering too hard about what in the world I.O. Snopes was doing in the livestock business. Though Ratliff said that on second thought maybe it was natural: that back in Frenchman’s Bend I.O. had been a blacksmith without having any business at that, hating horses and mules both since he was deathly afraid of them, so maybe it was natural for him to take up the next thing he wouldn’t have any business in or sympathy or aptitude for, not to mention being six or eight or a dozen times as scared since now, instead of just one horse or mule tied to a post and with its owner handy, he would have to deal alone with eight or ten or a dozen of them running loose until he could manage to put a rope on them.

  That’s what he did though — bought his mules at the Memphis market and brought them to Jefferson and sold them to farmers and widows and orphans black and white, for whatever he could get, down to some last irreducible figure, after which (up to the night when the freight train caught Mr Hait too and Jefferson made the first connection between Mr Hait and Mr Snopes’s livestock business) single mules and pairs and gangs (always tied together with that new strong manila rope which Snopes always itemised and listed in his claim) would be killed by night freight trains on that same blind curve of Mr Hait’s exit; somebody (Ratliff swore it wasn’t him but the depot agent) finally sent Snopes through the mail a printed train schedule for the division.

  Though after Mr Hait’s misfortune (miscalculation, Ratliff said; he said it was Mr Hait the agent should have sent the train schedule to, along with a watch) Snopes’s mules stopped dying of sudden death on the railroad track. When the adjuster came to adjust Mrs Hait, Snopes was there too, which Ratliff said was probably the most terrible decision Snopes ever faced in his whole life: between the simple prudence which told him to stay completely clear of the railroad company’s investigation, and his knowledge of Mrs Hait which had already told him that his only chance to get any part of that indemnity would be by having the railroad company for his ally.

  Because he failed. Mrs Hait stated calmly that her husband had been the sole owner of the five mules; she didn’t even have to dare Snopes out loud to dispute it; all he ever saw of that money (oh yes, he was there in the bank, as close as he dared get, watching) was when she crammed it into the salt bag and folded the bag into her apron. For five or six years before that, at regular intervals he had passed across the peaceful and somnolent Jefferson scene in dust and uproar, his approach heralded by forlorn shouts and cries, his passing marked by a yellow cloud of dust filled with the tossing jug-shaped heads and the clattering hooves, then last of all Snopes himself at a panting trot, his face gaped with forlorn shouting and wrung with concern and terror and dismay.

  When he emerged from his conference with the adjuster he still wore the concern and the dismay but the terror was now blended into an incredulous, a despairing, a shocked and passionate disbelief which still showed through the new overlay of hungry hope it wore during the next three years (again, Ratliff said, such a decision and problem as no man should be faced with: who — Snopes — heretofore had only to unload the mules into the receiving pen at the depot and then pay a Negro to ride the old bell mare which would lead them across town to his sales stable-lot, while now and single-handed he had to let them out of the depot pen and then force, herd them into the narrow street blocked at the end by Mrs Hait’s small unfenced yard) when the uproar — the dust-cloud filled with plunging demonic shapes — would seem to be translated in one single burst across the peaceful edge of Jefferson and into Mrs Hait’s yard, where the two of them, Mrs Hait and Snopes — Mrs Hait clutching a broom or a mop or whatever weapon she was able to snatch up as she ran out of the house cursing like a man, and Snopes, vengeance for the moment sated or at least the unbearable top of the unbearable sense of impotence and injustice and wrong taken off (Ratliff said he had probably long since given up any real belief of actually extorting even one cent of that money from Mrs Hait and all that remained now was the raging and baseless hope) who would now have to catch the animals somehow and get them back inside a fence — ducked and dodged among the thundering shapes in a kind of passionate and choreographic pantomime against the backdrop of that house whose very impervious paint Snopes believed he had paid for and within which its very occupant and chatelaine led a life of queenly and s
ybaritic luxury on his money (which according to Ratliff was exactly why Mrs Hait refused to appeal to the law to abate Snopes as a nuisance: this too was just a part of the price she owed for the amazing opportunity to swap her husband for eight thousand dollars); — this, while that whole section of town learned to gather — the ladies in the peignoirs and boudoir caps of morning, the children playing in the yards, and the people Negro and white who happened to be passing at the moment — and watch from behind neighboring shades or the security of adjacent fences.

  When they saw it, the mule was running too, its head high too in a strange place it had never seen before, so that coming suddenly out of the fog and all it probably looked taller than a giraffe rushing down at Mrs Hait and old Het with the halter-rope whipping about its ears.

  “Dar hit!” old Het shouted, waving the shopping bag, “Hoo! Scat!” She told Ratliff how Mrs Hait whirled and skidded again on the greasy planks as she and the mule now ran parallel with one another toward the cowshed from whose open door the static and astonished face of the cow now looked out. To the cow, until a second ago standing peacefully in the door chewing and looking at the fog, the mule must have looked taller and more incredible than any giraffe, let alone looking like it aimed to run right through the shed as if it were straw or maybe even pure and simple mirage. Anyway, old Het said the cow snatched her face back inside the shed like a match going out and made a sound inside the shed, old Het didn’t know what sound, just a sound of pure shock and alarm like when you pluck a single string on a harp or a banjo, Mrs Hait running toward the sound old Het said in a kind of pure reflex, in automatic compact of female with female against the world of mules and men, she and the mule converging on the shed at top speed, Mrs Hait already swinging the scuttle of live ashes to throw at the mule. Of course it didn’t take this long; old Het said she was still hollering “Dar hit! Dar hit!” when the mule swerved and ran at her until she swung the shopping bag and turned it past her and on around the next corner of the house and back into the fog like a match going out too.

  That was when Mrs Hait set the scuttle down on the edge of the brick coping of the cellar entrance and she and old Het turned the corner of the house in time to see the mule coincide with a rooster and eight white leghorn hens coming out from under the house. Old Het said it looked just like something out of the Bible, or maybe out of some kind of hoodoo witches’ bible: the mule that came out of the fog to begin with like a hant or a goblin, now kind of soaring back into the fog again borne on a cloud of little winged ones. She and Mrs Hait were still running; she said Mrs Hait was now carrying the worn-out stub of a broom though old Het didn’t remember when she had picked it up.

  “There’s more in the front!” old Het hollered.

  “That son of a bitch,” Mrs Hait said. There were more of them. Old Het said that little handkerchief-sized yard was full of mules and I.O. Snopes. It was so small that any creature with a stride of three feet could have crossed it in two paces, yet when they came in sight of it it must have looked like watching a drop of water through a microscope. Except that this time it was like being in the middle of the drop of water yourself. That is, old Het said that Mrs Hait and I.O. Snopes were in the middle of it because she said she stopped against the house where she would be more or less out of the way even though nowhere in that little yard was going to be safe, and watched Mrs Hait still clutching the broom and with a kind of sublime faith in something somewhere, maybe in just her own invulnerability though old Het said Mrs Hait was just too mad to notice, rush right into the middle of the drove, after the one with the flying halter-rein that was still vanishing into the fog still in that cloud of whirling loose feathers like confetti or the wake behind a speed boat.

  And Mr Snopes too, the mules running all over him too, he and Mrs Hait glaring at each other while he panted:

  “Where’s my money? Where’s my half of it?”

  “Catch that big son of a bitch with the halter,” Mrs Hait said. “Get that big son of a bitch out of here,” both of them, old Het and Mrs Hait both, running on so that Snopes’s panting voice was behind them now:

  “Pay me my money! Pay me my part of it!”

  “Watch out!” old Het said she hollered. “He heading for the back again!”

  “Get a rope!” Mrs Hait hollered back at Snopes.

  “Fore God, where is ere rope?” Snopes hollered.

  “In the cellar, fore God!” old Het hollered. She didn’t wait either. “Go round the other way and head him!” she said. And she said that when she and Mrs Hait turned that corner, there was the mule with the flying halter once more seeming to float lightly onward on a cloud of chickens with which, since the chickens had been able to go under the house and so along the chord while the mule had to go around on the arc, it had once more coincided. When they turned the next corner, they were in the back yard again.

  “Fore God!” Het hollered, “he fixing to misuse the cow!” She said it was like a tableau. The cow had come out of the shed into the middle of the back yard; it and the mule were now facing each other about a yard apart, motionless, with lowered heads and braced legs like two mismatched bookends, and Snopes was half in and half out of the now-open cellar door on the coping of which the scuttle of ashes still sat, where he had obviously gone seeking the rope; afterward old Het said she thought at the time an open cellar door wasn’t a very good place for a scuttle of live ashes, and maybe she did. I mean, if she hadn’t said she thought that, somebody else would since there’s always somebody handy afterward to prove their foresight by your hindsight. Though if things were going as fast as she said they were, I dont see how anybody there had time to think anything much.

  Because everything was already moving again; when they went around the next corner this time, I.O. was leading, carrying the rope (he had found it), then the cow, her tail raised and rigid and raked slightly like the flagpole on a boat, and then the mule, Mrs Hait and old Het coming last and old Het told again how she noticed the scuttle of live ashes sitting on the curb of the now-open cellar with its accumulation of human refuse and Mrs Hait’s widowhood — empty boxes for kindling, old papers, broken furniture — and thought again that wasn’t a very good place for the scuttle.

  Then the next corner. Snopes and the cow and the mule were all three just vanishing on the cloud of frantic chickens which had once more crossed beneath the house just in time. Though when they reached the front yard there was nobody there but Snopes. He was lying flat on his face, the tail of his coat flung forward over his head by the impetus of his fall, and old Het swore there was the print of the cow’s split foot and the mule’s hoof too in the middle of his white shirt.

  “Where’d they go?” she shouted at him. He didn’t answer. “They tightening on the curves!” she hollered at Mrs Hait. “They already in the back again!” They were. She said maybe the cow had aimed to run back into the shed but decided she had too much speed and instead whirled in a kind of desperation of valor and despair on the mule itself. Though she said that she and Mrs Hait didn’t quite get there in time to see it: only to hear a crash and clash and clatter as the mule swerved and blundered over the cellar entrance. Because when they got there, the mule was gone. The scuttle was gone from the cellar coping too but old Het said she never noticed it then: only the cow in the middle of the yard where she had been standing before, her fore legs braced and her head lowered like somebody had passed and snatched away the other bookend. Because she and Mrs Hait didn’t stop either, Mrs Hait running heavily now old Het said, with her mouth open and her face the color of putty and one hand against her side. In fact she said they were both run out now, going so slow this time that the mule overtook them from behind and she said it jumped clean over them both: a brief demon thunder rank with the ammonia-reek of sweat, and went on (either the chickens had finally realised to stay under the house or maybe they were worn out too and just couldn’t make it this time); when they reached the next corner the mule had finally succeeded in vanishing int
o the fog; they heard its hooves, brief, staccato and derisive on the hard street, dying away.

  Old Het said she stopped. She said, “Well. Gentlemen, hush,” she said. “Aint we had—” Then she smelled it. She said she stood right still, smelling, and it was like she was actually looking at that open cellar as it was when they passed it last time without any coal scuttle setting on the coping. “Fore God,” she hollered at Mrs Hait, “I smell smoke! Child, run in the house and get your money!”

  That was about nine oclock. By noon the house had burned to the ground. Ratliff said that when the fire engine and the crowd got there, Mrs Hait, followed by old Het carrying her shopping bag in one hand and a framed crayon portrait of Mr Hait in the other, was just coming out of the house carrying an umbrella and wearing the army overcoat which Mr Hait had used to wear, in one pocket of which was a quart fruit jar packed with what remained of the eighty-five hundred dollars (which would be most of it, according to how the neighbors said Mrs Hait lived) and in the other a heavy nickel-plated revolver, and crossed the street to a neighbor’s house, where with old Het beside her in a second rocker, she had been sitting ever since on the gallery, the two of them rocking steadily while they watched the volunteer fire-fighters flinging her dishes and furniture up and down the street. By that time Ratliff said there were plenty of them interested enough to go back to the Square and hunt up I.O. and keep him posted.

  “What you telling me for?” I.O. said. “It wasn’t me that set that-ere scuttle of live fire where the first thing that passed would knock it into the cellar.”

  “It was you that opened the cellar door though,” Ratliff said.

  “Sho,” Snopes said. “And why? To get that rope, her own rope, right where she sent me to get it.”

  “To catch your mule, that was trespassing on her yard,” Ratliff said. “You cant get out of it this time. There aint a jury in the county that wont find for her.”