Complete Works of William Faulkner

by William Faulkner

  And time was when that first president, Colonel Sartoris, had come the four miles between his ancestral symbol and his bank in a surrey and matched pair drove by a Negro coachman in a linen duster and one of the Colonel’s old plug hats; and time ain’t so was when the second president still come and went in that fire-engine-coloured E.M.F. racer until he bought that black Packard and a Negro too except in a white coat and a showfer’s cap to drive it. This here new third president had a black automobile too even if it wasn’t a Packard, and a Negro that could drive it too even if he never had no white coat and showfer’s cap yet and even if the president didn’t ride back and forth to the bank or at least not yet. Them two previous presidents would ride around the county in the evening after the bank closed and on Sunday, in that surrey and pair or the black Packard, to look at the cotton farms they represented the mortgages on, while this new president hadn’t commenced that neither. Which wasn’t because he jest couldn’t believe yet that he actively represented the mortgages. He never doubted that. He wasn’t skeered to believe it, and he wasn’t too meek to nor doubtful to. It was because he was watching yet and learning yet. It wasn’t that he had learned two lessons while he thought he was jest learning that single one about how he would need respectability, because he had done already brought that second lesson in from Frenchman’s Bend with him. That was humility, the only kind of humility that’s worth a hoot: the humility to know they’s a heap of things you don’t know yet but if you jest got the patience to be humble and watchful long enough, especially keeping one eye on your back trail, you will. So now on the evenings and Sundays there was jest that house where you wasn’t invited in to see him setting in that swivel chair in that one room he used, with his hat on and chewing steady on nothing and his feet propped on that little wooden additional ledge nailed in unpainted paradox to that hand-carved and painted mantel like one of them framed mottoes you keep hanging on the wall where you work or think, saying Remember Death or Keep Smiling or -Working or God is Love to remind not jest you but the strangers that see it too, that you got at least a speaking acquaintance with the fact that it might be barely possible it taken a little something more than jest you to get you where you’re at.

  But all that, footrest and all, would come later. Right now, Lawyer was free. And then — it wasn’t no three days after Linda reached New York, but it wasn’t no three hundred neither — he become, as the feller says, indeed free. He was leaning against the counter in the post office lobby with the letter already open in his hand when I come in; it wasn’t his fault neither that the lobby happened to be empty at the moment.

  “His name is Barton Kohl,” he says.

  “Sho now,” I says. “Whose name is?”

  “That dream’s name,” he says.

  “Cole,” I says.

  “No,” he says. “You’re pronouncing it Cole. It’s spelled K-o-h-l.”

  “Oh,” I says. “Kohl. That don’t sound very American to me.”

  “Does Vladimir Kyrilytch sound very American to you?”

  But the lobby was empty. Which, as I said, wasn’t his fault. “Confound it,” I says, “with one Ratliff in ever generation for them whole hundred and fifty years since your durn Yankee Congress banished us into the Virginia mountains, has had to spend half his life trying to live down his front name before somebody spoke it out loud where folks could hear it. It was Eula told you.”

  “All right,” he says. “I’ll help you bury your family shame. — Yes,” he says. “He’s a Jew. A sculptor, probably a damned good one.”

  “Because of that?” I says.

  “Probably, but not exclusively. Because of her.”

  “Linda’ll make him into a good sculptor, no matter what he was before, because she married him?”

  “No. He would have to be the best of whatever he was for her to pick him out.”

  “So she’s married now,” I says.

  “What?” he says. “No. She just met him, I tell you.”

  “So you ain’t—” I almost said safe yet before I changed it: “ — sure yet. I mean, she ain’t decided yet.”

  “What the hell else am I talking about? Don’t you remember what I told you last fall? that she would love once and it would be for keeps.”

  “Except that you said ‘doomed to’.”

  “All right,” he says.

  “Doomed to fidelity and grief, you said. To love once quick and lose him quick and for the rest of her life to be faithful and to grieve. But leastways she ain’t lost him yet. In fact, she ain’t even got him yet. That’s correct, aint it?”

  “Didn’t I say all right?” he says.

  That was the first six months, about. Another year after that, that-ere little footrest ledge was up on that hand-painted Mount Vernon mantel — that-ere little raw wood step like out of a scrap pile, nailed by a country carpenter on to that what you might call respectability’s virgin Matterhorn for the Al-pine climber to cling to panting, gathering his-self for that last do-or-die upsurge to deface the ultimate crowning pinnacle and peak with his own victorious initials. But not this one; and here was that humility again: not in public where it would be a insult to any and all that held Merchants and Farmers Bank Al-pine climbing in veneration, but in private like a secret chapel or a shrine: not to cling panting to it, desperate and indomitable, but to prop his feet on it while setting at his ease.

  This time I was passing the office stairs when Lawyer come rushing around the corner as usual, with most of the law papers flying along loose in his outside pockets but a few of them still in his hand too as usual. I mean, he had jest two gaits: one standing more or less still and the other like his coat-tail was on fire. “Run back home and get your grip,” he says. “We’re leaving Memphis tonight for New York.”

  So we went up the stairs and as soon as we was inside the office he changed to the other gait as usual. He throwed the loose papers on to the desk and taken one of the cob pipes outen the dish and set down, only when he fumbled in his coat for the matches or tobacco or whatever it was he discovered the rest of the papers and throwed them on to the desk and set back in the chair like he had done already had all the time in the world and couldn’t possibly anticipate nothing else happening in the next hundred years neither. “For the housewarming,” he says.

  “You mean the reception, don’t you? Ain’t that what they call it after the preacher has done collected his two dollars?” He didn’t say anything, jest setting there working at lighting that pipe like a jeweller melting one exact drop of platinum maybe into a watch. “So they ain’t going to marry,” I says. “They’re jest going to confederate. I’ve heard that: that that’s why they call them Grinnich Village samples dreams: you can wake up without having to jump outen the bed in a dead run for the nearest lawyer.”

  He didn’t move. He jest bristled, that lively and quick he never had time to change his position. He sat there and bristled like a hedgehog, not moving of course: jest saying cold and calm, since even a hedgehog, once it has got itself arranged and prickled out, can afford a cold and calm collected voice too: “All right. I’ll arrogate the term ‘marriage’ to it then. Do you protest or question it? Maybe you would even suggest a better one? — Because there’s not enough time left,” he says. “Enough left? There’s none left. Young people today don’t have any left because only fools under twenty-five can believe, let alone hope, that there’s any left at all — for any of us, anybody alive today—”

  “It don’t take much time to say We both do in front of a preacher and then pay whatever the three of you figger it’s worth.”

  “Didn’t I just say there’s not even that much left if all you’ve had is just twenty-five or thirty years—”

  “So that’s how old he is,” I says. “You stopped at jest twenty-five before.”

  He didn’t stop at nowhere now: “Barely a decade since their fathers and uncles and brothers just finished the one which was to rid the phenomenon of government forever of the parasites —
the hereditary properties, the farmers-general of the human dilemma who had just killed eight million human beings and ruined a forty-mile-wide strip down the middle of western Europe. Yet less than a dozen years later and the same old cynical manipulators not even bothering to change their names and faces but merely assuming a set of new titles out of the shibboleth of the democratic lexicon and its mythology, not even breaking stride to coalesce again to wreck the one doomed desperate hope—” Now he will resume the folks that broke President Wilson’s heart and killed the League of Nations I thought, but he was the one that didn’t even break stride: “That one already in Italy and one a damned sight more dangerous in Germany because all Mussolini has to work with are Italians while this other man has Germans. And the one in Spain that all he needs is to be let alone a little longer by the rest of us who still believe that if we just keep our eyes closed long enough it will all go away. Not to mention—”

  “Not to mention the one in Russia,” I said.

  “ — the ones right here at home: the organisations with the fine names confederated in unison in the name of God against the impure in morals and politics and with the wrong skin colour and ethnology and religion: K.K.K. and Silver Shirts; not to mention the indigenous local champions like Long in Louisiana and our own Bilbo in Mississippi, not to mention our very own Senator Clarence Egglestone Snopes right here in Yoknapatawpha County—”

  “Not to mention the one in Russia,” I says.

  “What?” he says.

  “So that’s why,” I says. “He ain’t jest a sculptor. He’s a communist too.”

  “What?” Lawyer says.

  “Barton Kohl. The reason they didn’t marry first is that Barton Kohl is a communist. He can’t believe in churches and marriage. They won’t let him.”

  “He wanted them to marry,” Lawyer says. “It’s Linda that won’t.” So now it was me that said What? and him setting there fierce and untouchable as a hedgehog. “You don’t believe that?” he says.

  “Yes,” I says. “I believe it.”

  “Why should she want to marry? What could she have ever seen in the one she had to look at for nineteen years, to make her want any part of it?”

  “All right,” I says. “All right. Except that’s the one I don’t believe. I believe the first one, about there ain’t enough time left. That when you are young enough, you can believe. When you are young enough and brave enough at the same time, you can hate intolerance and believe in hope and, if you are sho enough brave, act on it.” He still looked at me. “I wish it was me,” I says.

  “Not just to marry somebody, but to marry anybody just so it’s marriage. Just so it’s not adultery. Even you.”

  “Not that,” I says. “I wish I was either one of them. To believe in intolerance and hope and act on it. At any price. Even at having to be under twenty-five again like she is, to do it. Even to being a thirty-year-old Grinnich Village sculptor like he is.”

  “So you do refuse to believe that all she wants is to cuddle up together and be what she calls happy.”

  “Yes,” I says. “So do I.” So I didn’t go that time, not even when he said:

  “Nonsense. Come on. Afterward we will run up to Saratoga and look at that ditch or hill or whatever it was where your first immigrant Vladimir Kyrilytch Ratliff ancestor entered your native land.”

  “He wasn’t no Ratliff then yet,” I says. “We don’t know what his last name was. Likely Nelly Ratliff couldn’t even spell that one, let alone pronounce it. Maybe in fact neither could he. Besides, it wasn’t even Ratliff then. It was Ratcliffe. — No,” I says, “jest you will be enough. You can get cheaper corroboration than one that will not only need a round-trip ticket but three meals a day too.”

  “Corroboration for what?” he says.

  “At this serious moment in her life when she is fixing to officially or leastways formally confederate or shack up with a gentleman friend of the opposite sex as the feller says, ain’t the reason for this trip to tell her and him at last who she is? or leastways who she ain’t?” Then I says, “Of course. She already knows,” and he says,

  “How could she help it? How could she have lived in the same house with Flem for nineteen years and still believe he could possibly be her father, even if she had incontrovertible proof of it?”

  “And you ain’t never told her,” I says. Then I says, “It’s even worse than that. Whenever it occurs to her enough to maybe fret over it a little and she comes to you and says maybe, ‘Tell me the truth now. He ain’t my father,’ she can always depend on you saying, ‘You’re wrong, he is.’ Is that the dependence and need you was speaking of?” Now he wasn’t looking at me. “What would you do if she got it turned around backwards and said to you, ‘Who is my father?’ ” No, he wasn’t looking at me. “That’s right,” I says. “She won’t never ask that. I reckon she has done watched Gavin Stevens too, enough to know there’s some lies even he ought not to need to cope with.” He wasn’t looking at me a-tall. “So that there dependence is on a round-trip ticket too,” I says.

  He was back after ten days. And I thought how maybe if that sculptor could jest ketch her unawares, still half asleep maybe, and seduce her outen the bed and up to a altar or even jest a J.P. before she noticed where she was at, maybe he — Lawyer — would be free. Then I knowed that wasn’t even wishful thinking because there wasn’t nothing in that idea that could been called thinking a-tall. Because once I got rid of them hopeful cobwebs I realised I must a knowed for years what likely Eula knowed the moment she laid eyes on him: that he wouldn’t never be free because he wouldn’t never want to be free because this was his life and if he ever lost it he wouldn’t have nothing left. I mean, the right and privilege and opportunity to dedicate forever his capacity for responsibility to something that wouldn’t have no end to its appetite and that wouldn’t never threaten to give him even a bone back in recompense. And I remembered what he said back there about how she was doomed to fidelity and monogamy — to love once and lose him and then to grieve, and I said I reckoned so, that being Helen of Troy’s daughter was kind of like being say the ex-Pope of Rome or the ex-Emperor of Japan: there wasn’t much future to it. And I knowed now he was almost right, he jest had that word “doomed” in the wrong place: that it wasn’t her that was doomed, she would likely do fine; it was the one that was recipient of the fidelity and the monogamy and the love, and the one that was the proprietor of the responsibility that never even wanted, let alone expected, a bone back, that was the doomed one; and how even between them two the lucky one might be the one that had the roof fall on him while he was climbing into or out of the bed.

  So naturally I would a got a fur piece quick trying to tell him that, so naturally my good judgment told me not to try it. And so partly by jest staying away from him but mainly by fighting like a demon, like Jacob with his angel, I finally resisted actively saying it — a temptation about as strong as a human man ever has to face, which is to deliberately throw away the chance to say afterward, “I told you so.” So time passed. That little additional mantelpiece footrest was up now that hadn’t nobody ever seen except that Negro yardman — a Jefferson legend after he mentioned it to me and him (likely) and me both happened to mention it in turn to some of our close intimates: a part of the Snopes legend and another Flem Snopes monument in that series mounting on and up from that water tank that we never knowed yet if they had got out of it all that missing Flem Snopes regime powerhouse brass them two mad skeered Negro firemen put into it.

  Then it was 1936 and there was less and less of that time left: Mussolini in Italy and Hitler in Germany and sho enough, like Lawyer said, that one in Spain too; Lawyer said, “Pack your grip. We will take the airplane from Memphis tomorrow morning. — No no,” he says, “you don’t need to fear contamination from association this time. They’re going to be married. They’re going to Spain to join the Loyalist army and apparently he nagged and worried at her until at last she probably said, ‘Oh hell, have it your way t
hen.’ ”

  “So he wasn’t a liberal emancipated advanced-thinking artist after all,” I says. “He was jest another ordinary man that believed if a gal was worth sleeping with she was worth deserving to have a roof over her head and something to eat and a little money in her pocket for the balance of her life.”

  “All right,” he says. “All right.”

  “Except we’ll go on the train,” I says. “It ain’t that I’m jest simply skeered to go in a airplane: it’s because when we go across Virginia I can see the rest of the place where that-ere first immigrant Vladimir Kyrilytch worked his way into the United States.” So I was already on the corner with my grip when he drove up and stopped and opened the door and looked at me and then done what the moving pictures call a double-take and says,

  “Oh hell.”

  “It’s mine,” I says. “I bought it.”

  “You,” he says, “in a necktie. That never even had one on before, let alone owned one, in your life.”

  “You told me why. It’s a wedding.”

  “Take it off,” he says.

  “No,” I says.

  “I won’t travel with you. I won’t be seen with you.”

  “No,” I says. “Maybe it ain’t jest the wedding. I’m going back to let all them V. K. Ratliff beginnings look at me for the first time. Maybe it’s them I’m trying to suit. Or leastways not to shame.” So we taken the train to Memphis that night and the next day we was in Virginia — Bristol then Roanoke and Lynchburg and turned north-east alongside the blue mountains and somewhere ahead, we didn’t know jest where, was where that first Vladimir Kyrilytch finally found a place where he could stop, that we didn’t know his last name or maybe he didn’t even have none until Nelly Ratliff, spelled Ratcliffe then, found him, any more than we knowed what he was doing in one of them hired German regiments in General Burgoyne’s army that got licked at Saratoga except that Congress refused to honour the terms of surrender and banished the whole kit-and-biling of them to struggle for six years in Virginia without no grub nor money and the ones like that first V.K. without no speech neither. But he never needed none of the three of them to escape not only to the right neighbourhood but into the exact right hayloft where Nelly Ratcliffe, maybe hunting eggs or such, would find him. And never needed no language to eat the grub she toted him; and maybe he never knowed nothing about farming before the day when she finally brought him out where her folks could see him; nor never needed no speech to speak of for the next development, which was when somebody — her maw or paw or brothers or whoever it was, maybe jest a neighbour — noticed the size of her belly; and so they married and so that V.K. actively did have a active legal name of Ratcliffe, and the one after him come to Tennessee and the one after him moved to Missippi, except that by that time it was spelled Ratliff, where the oldest son is still named Vladimir Kyrilytch and still spends half his life trying to keep anybody from finding it out.