Complete Works of William Faulkner

by William Faulkner

  Or so I thought. Because you simply cannot go against a community. You can stand singly against any temporary unanimity of even a city-full of human behavior, even a mob. But you cannot stand against the cold inflexible abstraction of a long-suffering community’s moral point of view. Mr Garraway had been one of the first — no: the first — to move his account from Colonel Sartoris’s bank to the Bank of Jefferson, even before Flem Snopes ever thought or had reason to think of his tenant-farmer panic. He had moved it in fact as soon as we — the town and county — knew that Manfred de Spain was definitely to be president of it. Because he — Mr Garraway — had been one of that original small inflexible unreconstructible puritan group, both Baptist and Methodist, in the county who would have moved their fiscal allegiance also from Jefferson while De Spain was mayor of it, to escape the moral contamination and express their opinion of that liaison which he represented, if there had been another fiscal town in the county to have moved it to. Though later, a year or two afterward, he moved the account back, perhaps because he was just old or maybe he could stay in his small dingy store out at Seminary Hill and not have to come to town, have to see with his own eyes and so be reminded of his county’s shame and disgrace and sin if he didn’t want to be. Or maybe once you accept something, it doesn’t really matter anymore whether you like it or not. Or so I thought.

  The note said ten oclock. That was all: Please meet me at your office at ten tonight. Not if convenient, let alone when could you see me at your office? but simply at ten tonight please. You see. Because in the first place, Why me? Me? To say that to all of them, all three of them — no, all four, taking De Spain with me: Why cant you let me alone? What more can you want of me than I have already failed to do? But there would be plenty of time for that; I would have plenty of time to eat the sardines and crackers and say What a shame to the account of whatever the recent outrage the President and his party had contrived against Mr Garraway, when he — Mr Garraway — said suddenly (an old man with an old man’s dim cloudy eyes magnified and enormous behind the thick lenses of his iron-framed spectacles): “Is it so that Will Varner came in to town this morning?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “So he caught them.” Now he was trembling, shaking, standing there behind the worn counter which he had inherited from his father, racked with tins of meat and spools of thread and combs and needles and bottles of cooking extract and malaria tonic and female compound some of which he had probably inherited too, saying in a shaking voice: “Not the husband! The father himself had to come in and catch them after eighteen years!”

  “But you put your money back,” I said. “You took it out at first, when you just heard at second hand about the sin and shame and outrage. Then you put it back. Was it because you saw her too at last? She came out here one day, into your store, and you saw her yourself, got to know her, to believe that she at least was innocent? Was that it?”

  “I knew the husband,” he said, cried almost, holding his voice down so the Negroes couldn’t hear what we — he was talking about. “I knew the husband! He deserved it!”

  Then I remembered. “Yes,” I said, “I thought I saw you in town this afternoon.” Then I knew. “You moved it again today, didn’t you? You drew it out again and put it back into the Bank of Jefferson today, didn’t you?” and he standing there, shaking even while he tried to hold himself from it. “Why?” I said. “Why again today?”

  “She must go,” he said. “They must both go — she and De Spain too.”

  “But why?” I said, muttered too, not to be overheard: two white men discussing in a store full of Negroes a white woman’s adultery. More: adultery in the very top stratum of a white man’s town and bank. “Why only now? It was one thing as long as the husband accepted it; it became another when somebody — how did you put it? — catches them, blows the gaff? They become merely sinners then, criminals then, lepers then? nothing for constancy, nothing for fidelity, nothing for devotion, unpoliced devotion, eighteen years of devotion?”

  “Is that all you want?” he said. “I’m tired. I want to go home.” Then we were on the gallery where a few of the Negroes still lingered, the arms and faces already fading back into the darkness behind the lighter shades of shirts and hats and pants as if they were slowly vacating them, while his shaking hands fumbled the heavy padlock through the hasp and fumbled it shut; until suddenly I said, quite loud:

  “Though if anything the next one will be worse because the next president will probably be Governor Smith and you know who Governor Smith is of course: a Catholic,” and would have stopped that in time in very shame but could not, or maybe should have stopped it in time in very shame but would not. Since who was I, what anguish’s missionary I that I must compound it blindly right and left like some blind unrational minor force of nature? who had already spoiled supper and ruined sleep both for the old man standing there fumbling with his clumsy lock as if I had actually struck him, — the old man who in his fashion, in a lot of people’s fashion, really was a kindly old man who never in his life wittingly or unwittingly harmed anyone black or white, not serious harm: not more than adding a few extra cents to what it would have been for cash, when the article went on credit; or selling to a Negro for half-price or often less (oh yes, at times even giving it to him) the tainted meat or rancid lard or weevilled flour or meal he would not have permitted a white man — a Protestant gentile white man of course — to eat at all out of his store; standing there with his back turned fumbling at the giant padlock as though I had actually struck him, saying,

  “They must go. They must go, both of them.”

  There is a ridge; you drive on beyond Seminary Hill and in time you come upon it: a mild unhurried farm road presently mounting to cross the ridge and on to join the main highway leading from Jefferson to the world. And now, looking back and down, you see all Yoknapatawpha in the dying last of day beneath you. There are stars now, just pricking out as you watch them among the others already coldly and softly burning; the end of day is one vast green soundless murmur up the northwest toward the zenith. Yet it is as though light were not being subtracted from earth, drained from earth backward and upward into that cooling green, but rather had gathered, pooling for an unmoving moment yet, among the low places of the ground so that ground, earth itself is luminous and only the dense clumps of trees are dark, standing darkly and immobile out of it.

  Then, as though at signal, the fireflies — lightning-bugs of the Mississippi child’s vernacular — myriad and frenetic, random and frantic, pulsing; not questing, not quiring, but choiring as if they were tiny incessant appeaseless voices, cries, words. And you stand suzerain and solitary above the whole sum of your life beneath that incessant ephemeral spangling. First is Jefferson, the center, radiating weakly its puny glow into space; beyond it, enclosing it, spreads the County, tied by the diverging roads to that center as is the rim to the hub by its spokes, yourself detached as God himself for this moment above the cradle of your nativity and of the men and women who made you, the record and annal of your native land proffered for your perusal in ring by concentric ring like the ripples on living water above the dreamless slumber of your past; you to preside unanguished and immune above this miniature of man’s passions and hopes and disasters — ambition and fear and lust and courage and abnegation and pity and honor and sin and pride — all bound, precarious and ramshackle held together, by the web, the iron-thin warp and woof of his rapacity but withal yet dedicated to his dreams.

  They are all here, supine beneath you, stratified and superposed, osseous and durable with the frail dust and the phantoms: — the rich alluvial river-bottom land of old Issetibbeha, the wild Chickasaw king, with his Negro slaves and his sister’s son called Doom who murdered his way to the throne and, legend said (record itself said since there were old men in the county in my own childhood who had actually seen it), stole an entire steamboat and had it dragged intact eleven miles overland to convert into a palace proper to aggrandise his s
tate; the same fat black rich plantation earth still synonymous of the proud fading white plantation names whether we — I mean of course they — ever actually owned a plantation or not: Sutpen and Sartoris and Compson and Edmonds and McCaslin and Beauchamp and Grenier and Habersham and Holston and Stevens and De Spain, generals and governors and judges, soldiers (even if only Cuban lieutenants) and statesmen failed or not, and simple politicians and over-reachers and just simple failures, who snatched and grabbed and passed and vanished, name and face and all. Then the roadless, almost pathless perpendicular hill-country of McCallum and Gowrie and Frazier and Muir translated intact with their pot stills and speaking only the old Gaelic and not much of that, from Culloden to Carolina, then from Carolina to Yoknapatawpha still intact and not speaking much of anything except that they now called the pots ‘kettles’ though the drink (even I can remember this) was still usquebaugh; then and last on to where Frenchman’s Bend lay beyond the south-eastern horizon, cradle of Varners and ant-heap for the north-east crawl of Snopes.

  And you stand there — you, the old man, already white-headed (because it doesn’t matter if they call your gray hairs premature because life itself is always premature which is why it aches and anguishes) and pushing forty, only a few years from forty — while there rises up to you, proffered up to you, the spring darkness, the unsleeping darkness which, although it is of the dark itself declines the dark since dark is of the little death called sleeping. Because look how, even though the last of west is no longer green and all of firmament is now one unlidded studded slow-wheeling arc and the last of earth-pooled visibility has drained away, there still remains one faint diffusion since everywhere you look about the dark panorama you still see them, faint as whispers: the faint and shapeless lambence of blooming dogwood returning loaned light to light as the phantoms of candles would.

  And you, the old man, standing there while there rises to you, about you, suffocating you, the spring dark peopled and myriad two and two seeking never at all solitude but simply privacy, the privacy decreed and created for them by the spring darkness, the spring weather, the spring which an American poet, a fine one, a woman and so she knows, called girls’ weather and boys’ luck. Which was not the first day at all, not Eden morning at all because girls’ weather and boys’ luck is the sum of all the days: the cup, the bowl proffered once to the lips in youth and then no more; proffered to quench or sip or drain that lone one time and even that sometimes premature, too soon. Because the tragedy of life is, it must be premature, inconclusive and inconcludable, in order to be life; it must be before itself, in advance of itself, to have been at all.

  And now for truth was the one last chance to choose, decide: whether or not to say Why me? Why bother me? Why cant you let me alone? Why must it be my problem whether I was right and your husband just wants your lover’s scalp, or Ratliff is right and your husband doesn’t care a damn about you or his honor either and just wants De Spain’s bank? — the Square empty beneath the four identical faces of the courthouse clock saying ten minutes to ten to the north and east and south and west, vacant now beneath the arclight-stippled shadows of fledged leaves like small bites taken out of the concrete paving, the drugstores closed and all still moving now were the late last homeward stragglers from the second running of the picture show. Or better still, what she herself should have thought without my needing to say it: Take Manfred de Spain in whatever your new crisis is, since you didn’t hesitate to quench with him your other conflagration eighteen years ago. Or do you already know in advance he will be no good this time, since a bank is not a female but neuter?

  And of course Otis Harker. “Evening, Mr Stevens,” he said. “When you drove up I almost hoped maybe it was a gang come to rob the postoffice or the bank or something to bring us a little excitement for a change.”

  “But it was just another lawyer,” I said, “and lawyers dont bring excitement: only misery?”

  “I dont believe I quite said that, did I?” he said. “But leastways lawyers stays awake so if you’re going to be around a while, maybe I’ll jest mosey back to the station and maybe take a nap while you watch them racing clock-hands a spell for me.” Except that he was looking at me. No: he wasn’t looking at me at all: he was watching me, deferent to my white hairs as a well-’raised’ Mississippian should be, but not my representative position as his employer; not quite servile, not quite impudent, waiting maybe or calculating maybe.

  “Say it,” I said. “Except that—”

  “Except that Mr Flem Snopes and Mr Manfred de Spain might cross the Square any time now with old Will Varner chasing them both out of town with that pistol.”

  “Good night,” I said. “If I dont see you again.”

  “Good night,” he said. “I’ll likely be somewhere around. I mean around awake. I wouldn’t want Mr Buck himself to have to get up out of bed and come all the way to town to catch me asleep.”

  You see? You cant beat it. Otis Harker too, who, assuming he does keep awake all night as he is paid to do, should have been at home all day in bed asleep. But of course, he was there; he actually saw old Varner cross the Square at four this morning on his way to Flem’s house. Yes. You cant beat it: the town itself officially on record now in the voice of its night marshal; the county itself had spoken through one of its minor clowns; eighteen years ago when Manfred de Spain thought he was just bedding another loose-girdled bucolic Lilith, he was actually creating a piece of buffoon’s folklore.

  Though there were still ten minutes, and it would take Otis Harker at least twenty-five to “round up” the gin and compress and their purlieus and get back to the Square. And I know now that I already smelled tobacco smoke even before I put my hand on what I thought was an unlocked door for the reason that I myself had made a special trip back to leave it unlocked, still smelling the tobacco while I still tried to turn the knob, until the latch clicked back from inside and the door opened, she standing there against the dark interior in what little there was of light. Though it was enough to see her hair, that she had been to the beauty parlor: who according to Maggie had never been to one, the hair not bobbed of course, not waved, but something, I dont know what it was except that she had been to the beauty parlor that afternoon.

  “Good for you for locking it,” I said. “We wont need to risk a light either. Only I think that Otis Harker already—”

  “That’s all right,” she said. So I closed the door and locked it again and turned on the desk lamp. “Turn them all on if you want to,” she said. “I wasn’t trying to hide. I just didn’t want to have to talk to somebody.”

  “Yes,” I said, and sat behind the desk. She had been in the client’s chair, sitting in the dark smoking; the cigarette was still burning in the little tray with two other stubs. Now she was sitting again in the client’s chair at the end of the desk where the light fell upon her from the shoulder down but mostly on her hands lying quite still on the bag on her lap. Though I could still see her hair — no makeup, lips or nails either: just her hair that had been to the beauty shop. “You’ve been to the beauty shop,” I said.

  “Yes,” she said. “That’s where I met Chick.”

  “But not inside,” I said, already trying to stop. “Not where water and soap are coeval, conjunctive,” still trying to stop. “Not for a few years yet,” and did. “All right,” I said. “Tell me. What was it he took out there to your mother yesterday that had old Will on the road to town at two oclock this morning?”

  “There’s your cob pipe,” she said. They were in the brass bowl beside the tobacco jar. “You’ve got three of them. I’ve never seen you smoke one. When do you smoke them?”

  “All right,” I said. “Yes. What was it he took out there?”

  “The will,” she said.

  “No no,” I said. “I know about the will; Ratliff told me. I mean, what was it Flem took out there to your mother yesterday morning—”

  “I told you. The will.”

  “Will?” I said.


  “Linda’s will. Giving her share of whatever she would inherit from me, to her — him.” And I sat there and she too, opposite one another across the desk, the lamp between us low on the desk so that all we could really see of either probably was just the hands: mine on the desk and hers quite still, almost like two things asleep, on the bag in her lap, her voice almost like it was asleep too so that there was no anguish, no alarm, no outrage anywhere in the little quiet dingy mausoleum of human passions, high and secure, secure even from any random exigency of what had been impressed on Otis Harker as his duty for which he was paid his salary, since he already knew it would be me in it: “The will. It was her idea. She did it herself. I mean, she believes she thought of it, wanted to do it, did it, herself. Nobody can tell her otherwise. Nobody will. Nobody. That’s why I wrote the note.”

  “You’ll have to tell me,” I said. “You’ll have to.”

  “It was the … school business. When you told her she wanted to go, get away from here; all the different schools to choose among that she hadn’t even known about before, that it was perfectly natural for a young girl — young people to want to go to them and to go to one of them, that until then she hadn’t even thought about, let alone known that she wanted to go to one of them. Like all she needed to do to go to one of them was just to pick out the one she liked the best and go to it, especially after I said Yes. Then her — he said No.

  “As if that was the first time she ever thought of No, ever heard of No. There was a … scene. I dont like scenes. You dont have to have scenes. Nobody needs to have a scene to get what you want. You just get it. But she didn’t know that, you see. She hadn’t had time to learn it maybe, since she was just seventeen then. But then you know that yourself. Or maybe it was more than not knowing better. Maybe she knew too much. Maybe she already knew, felt even then that he had already beat her. She said: ‘I will go! I will! You cant stop me! Damn your money; if Mamma wont give it to me, Grandpa will — Mr Stevens (oh yes, she said that too) will—’ While he just sat there — we were sitting then, still at the table; only Linda was standing up — just sat there saying, ‘That’s right. I cant stop you.’ Then she said, ‘Please.’ Oh yes, she knew she was beaten as well as he did. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I want you to stay at home and go to the Academy.’