But what for you You never have Told me yet
“Marry,” she said. “I thought you knew. Didn’t you tell me you knew what it was?” And I
Me marry You mean me
“Who did you think I meant? Did you think I was — Gavin.”
“No,” I said.
“I read that. You said No. You’re lying. You thought I meant me.”
“No,” I said.
“Do you remember that time when I told you that any time you believe you had to lie for my sake, I could always count on you sticking to it, no matter how bad you were disproved?”
“Yes,” I said.
“So that’s settled, then,” she said. “No, I mean you. That’s what I want you to do for me. I want you to marry. I want you to have that too. Because then it will be all right. We can always be together no matter how far apart either one of us happens to be or has to be. How did you say it? the two people in all the earth out of all the world that can love each other not only without having to but we don’t even have to not say that word you don’t like to hear? Will you promise?”
“Yes,” I said.
“I know you can’t just step outdoors tomorrow and find her. It may take a year or two. But all you’ve got to do is just stop resisting the idea of being married. Once you do that it’s all right because the rest of it will happen. Will you do that?”
“I swear,” I said.
“Why, you said Swear, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Then kiss me.” I did so, her arms quite hard, quite strong around my neck; a moment, then gone. “And early tomorrow morning, go back home.” And I, writing
I was going to Stay all day
“No. Tomorrow. Early. I’ll put my hand on the wall and when you’re in bed knock on it and if I wake up in the night I can knock and if you’re awake or still there you can knock back and if I don’t feel you knock you can write me from Jefferson tomorrow or the next day. Because I’m all right now. Good-night, Gavin.”
“Good-night, Linda,” I said.
“I read that too. I love you.”
“I love you,” I said.
“I read that too but write it on the tablet anyway and I can have that for a — what do you call it? — eye opener in the morning.”
“Yes,” I said, extending my hand for the tablet.
ELEVEN
Charles Mallison
THIS TIME, I was in uniform. So now all I need is to decide, find out, what this-time I mean or time for what I mean. It wasn’t the next time I saw Linda, because she was still in Pascagoula building ships for Russia too now. And it wasn’t the next time I was in Jefferson, because I passed through home en route to the brown suit. So maybe I mean the next time I ran Ratliff to earth. Though maybe what I really mean is that the next time I saw Uncle Gavin after his marriage, he was a husband.
Because it was 1942 and Gavin was married now, to Melisandre Harriss (Backus that was as Thackeray said); that pitcher had went to that well jest that one time too many, as Ratliff said, provided of course he had said it. One Sunday morning there was Pearl Harbour and I wired Gavin by return mail you might say from Oxford This is it am gone now. I wired Gavin because otherwise I would have had to talk to Mother on the telephone and on long-distance Mother ran into money, so by wiring Gavin for forty-two cents the telephone call from Mother would be on Father’s bill in Jefferson.
So I was at home in time to be actually present at the first innocent crumblings of what he had obviously assumed to be his impregnable bastions; to “stand up” with him, be groomsman to his disaster. It happened like this. I was unable to get into the government flight-training programme course at the University but they told me that anybody with a college degree and any number of hours from one up of flying time, especially solo, would have about as good a chance of going straight into military training for a commission. So there was a professional crop-duster operating from the same field and he took me on as a student, on even bigger aircraft, one of (he claimed) the actual type of army primary training, than the little fifty h.p. popguns the official course used.
So when I sent Uncle Gavin the wire I had around fifteen logged hours, three of which were solo, and when Mother rang my telephone I was already packed up and the car already pointed toward Jefferson. So I was there to see the beginning of it whether Gavin recognised it as banns or not. I mean the Long Island horse farm that Miss Melisandre Harriss Backus that was used to bring the two children (they were grown now; Gavin was marrying not stepchildren but in-laws) back home to now and then from Europe until the Germans began to blow up Americans in actual sight of the Irish coast. So after that it had to be South America, this last time bringing the Argentine steeplechasing cavalry officer that that maniac boy of the two Harriss children (I don’t mean that both Aunt Melisandre’s children were maniacs but that only one of them was a boy) believed was trying to marry the money his mother was still trustee of instead of just his sister who just had an allowance like him. So he (the maniac of course) set out to murder the Argentine steeplechaser with that wild stallion of Rafe McCallum’s that he (the maniac) bought or tricked or anyway got inside that stall where the innocent Argentine would have walked up in the dark and opened the door on what he (the innocent Argentine) thought was going to be not only a gentle horse but a partly blind one too. Except that Gavin read his tea leaves or used his second sight or divining rod or whatever it was he did in cases like this, and got hold of Rafe in time to reach the stall door first and stop him.
So the Argentine was saved, and that night the maniac took his choice between the army recruiting station in Memphis, and Uncle Gavin, and chose the army so he was safe, and that afternoon the Argentine and the maniac’s sister were married and left Jefferson and they were safe. But Uncle Gavin remained, and the next day I had to go on to ground school, preflight, so when I got home next time I was in uniform and Gavin was not only a husband but father too of a stepson who would have been as neat a by-standing murderer as you could hope to see except for a stroke of arrant meddling which to a dog shouldn’t happen, and a stepdaughter married to an Argentine steeplechasing son-in-law. (By which time I was married too, to a bombsight — I hadn’t made pilot but at least I would be riding up front — allotted to me by a government which didn’t trust me with it and so set spies to watch what I did with it, which before entrusting it to me had trained me not to trust my spies nor anybody else respecting it, in a locked black case which stayed locked by a chain to me even while I was asleep — a condition of constant discomfort of course but mainly of unflagging mutual suspicion and mutual distrust and in time mutual hatred which you even come to endure, which is probably the best of all training for successful matrimony.)
So when I saw Jefferson next I was in uniform, long enough to call on the squire and his dame among his new ancestral white fences and electric-lit stables and say Bless you my children and then run Ratliff once more to earth.
“He can’t marry her now,” I said. “He’s already got a wife.”
And you never thought of soberly in connection with Ratliff either. Anyway, not before now, not until this time. “That’s right,” he said. “She ain’t going to marry him. It’s going to be worse than that.”
FLEM
TWELVE
WHEN THE PICKUP truck giving him the ride onward from Clarksdale turned off at a town called Lake Cormorant and he had to get out, he had to walk. And he was apparently still nowhere near Memphis. He was realising now that this was the biggest, in a way terrifying, thing that had happened to him in the thirty-eight years: he had forgotten distance. He had forgot how far one place could be from another. And now he was going to have to eat too. Because all he had was the ten-dollar bill they had given him along with the new overalls and hat and shoes at the Parchman gate, plus the three dollars and eighty-five cents still left out of the forty dollars his cousin Flem — it must have been Flem; after he finally realised that Flem wasn’t going to come or even
send in from Frenchman’s Bend to help him and he quit calling down from the jail window to anybody passing that would send word out to Flem, nobody else but Flem and maybe the judge knew or even bothered to care what became of him, where he was — had sent him back there eighteen years ago just before Flem sent Montgomery Ward to trick him into trying to escape in that woman’s wrapper and sunbonnet and he got caught of course and they gave him the other twenty years.
It was a small tight neatly cluttered store plastered with placards behind a gasoline pump beside the highway; a battered dust- and mud-stained car was parked beside it and inside were only the proprietor and a young Negro man in the remnants of an army uniform. He asked for a loaf of bread and suddenly he remembered sardines, the taste of them from almost forty years ago; he could afford another nickel one time, when to his shock and for the moment unbelief, possibly in his own hearing, he learned that the tin would now cost him twenty-six cents — the small flat solid-feeling tin ubiquitous for five cents through all his previous days until Parchman — and even while he stood in that incredulous shock the proprietor set another small tin before him, saying, “You can have this one for eleven.”
“What is it?” he said.
“Lunch meat,” the proprietor said.
“What is lunch meat?” he said.
“Don’t ask,” the proprietor said. “Just eat it. What else can you buy with eleven cents?”
Then he saw against the opposite wall a waist-high stack of soft-drink cases and something terrible happened inside his mouth and throat — a leap, a spring of a thin liquid like fire or the myriad stinging of ants all the way down to his stomach; with a kind of incredulous terror, even while he was saying No! No! That will cost at least a quarter too, his voice was saying aloud: “I reckon I’ll have one of them.”
“A whole case?” the proprietor said.
“You can’t jest buy one bottle?” he said, counting rapidly, thinking At least twenty bottles. That would take all the ten dollars. Maybe that will save me. Nor, when the proprietor set the uncapped coldly sweating bottle on the counter before him, did he even have time to tell himself I’m going to pick it up and put my mouth on it before I ask the price because otherwise I might not be able to touch it because his hand had already picked up the bottle, already tilting it, almost ramming the neck into his mouth, the first swallow coldly afire and too fast to taste until he could curb, restrain the urgency and passion so he could taste and affirm that he had not forgot the taste at all in the thirty-eight years: only how good it was, draining that bottle in steady controlled swallows now and only then removing it and in horror hearing his voice saying, “I’ll have another one,” even while he was telling himself Stop it! Stop it! then stood perfectly calm and perfectly composed while the proprietor uncapped the second sweating bottle and took that one up and closed his eyes gently and drank it steadily empty and fingered one of the bills loose in the pocket where he carried the three dollar ones (the ten-dollar note was folded carefully beneath a wad of newspaper and safety-pinned inside the fob pocket of the overall bib) and put it on the counter, not looking at it nor at anything while he waited for the proprietor to ask for a second bill or maybe two more; until the proprietor laid sixty-eight cents in coins on the counter and picked up the bill.
Because the two empty bottles were still sitting on the counter in plain sight, he thought rapidly If I could jest pick up the change and git outside before he notices them — if not an impossibility, certainly a gamble he dared not take, had not time to risk: to gamble perhaps two dollars against a shout, a leap over the counter to bar the door until another sheriff came for him. So he said, not touching the change: “You never taken out for the sody.”
“What’s that?” the proprietor said. He scattered the coins on the counter. “Lunch meat, eleven; bread—” He stopped and as suddenly huddled the coins into a pile again. “Where did you say you come from?”
“I never said,” Mink said. “Down the road.”
“Been away a long time, have you?”
“That’s right,” he said,
“Much obliged,” the proprietor said. “I sure forgot about them two Cokes. Damn labour unions have even run Coca-Cola up out of sight like everything else. You had two of them, didn’t you?” taking the half-dollar from the change and shoving the rest of it across to him. “I don’t know what folks are going to do unless somebody stops them somewhere. Looks like we’re going to have to get shut of these damn Democrats to keep out of the poorhouse. Where’d you say you were headed? Memphis?”
“I ain’t said,” he started to say. But the other was already, or still, speaking to the Negro now, already extending toward the Negro another opened soda.
“This is on the house. Jump in your car and run him up to the crossroads; he’ll have double chance to catch a ride there, maybe someone from the other highway.”
“I wasn’t fixing to leave yet,” the Negro said.
“Yes you are,” the proprietor said. “Just a half a mile? You got plenty of time. Don’t let me see you around here until you get back. All right,” he said to Mink. “You’ll sure catch a ride there.”
So he rode again, in the battered mud-stained car; just for a moment the Negro slid his eyes toward him, then away. “Where down the road did you come from?” the Negro said. He didn’t answer. “It was Parchman, wasn’t it?” Then the car stopped. “Here’s the crossroads,” the Negro said. “Maybe you can catch a ride.”
He got out. “Much obliged,” he said.
“You done already paid him,” the Negro said. So now he walked again. But mainly it was to be out of the store; he must not stop at one again. If the bottles had been a dollar apiece, there was a definite limit beyond which temptation, or at least his lack of will power, could no longer harm him. But at only a quarter apiece, until he could reach Memphis and actually have the pistol in his hand, there was no foreseeable point within the twelve remaining dollars where he would have peace; already, before he was even outside the store, he was saying Be a man, Be a man. You got to be a man, you got too much to do, too much to resk and, walking again, he was still sweating a little, not panting so much as simply breathing deeply like one who has just blundered unwarned into then out of the lair, the arms, of Semiramis or Messalina, still incredulous, still aghast at his own temerity and still amazed that he has escaped with his life.
And now he was discovering something else. For most of the twenty-odd years before he went to Parchman, and during the thirty-eight since, he had walked only on soft dirt. Now he walked on concrete; not only were his feet troubling him but his bones and muscles ached all the way up to his skull, until presently he found a foul puddle of water among rank shadeless weeds at the end of a culvert and removed the new stiff brogans they had given him with the new overalls and sat with his feet in the water, eating the tinned meat and the bread, thinking I got to watch myself. Maybe I dassent to even go inside where they sell hit thinkin, not with despair really: still indomitable Likely hit will cost the whole ten-dollar bill, maybe more. That jest leaves three dollars and eighty-five cents and I done already spent eighty-two of that and stopped and took the handful of coins from his pocket and spread them carefully on the ground beside him; he had had three one-dollar bills and the eighty-five cents and he counted slowly the eighty-five cents, a half-dollar, a quarter, and two nickels, and set them aside. He had given the man at the store one of the dollar bills and the man had given him back change for bread, eleven cents, lunch meat eleven cents, which was twenty-two cents, then the man had taken up the half-dollar for the sodas, which was seventy-two cents, which should have left twenty-eight cents; counting what remained slowly over coin by coin again, then counting the coins he had already set aside to be sure they were right. And still it was only eighteen cents instead of twenty-eight. A dime was gone somewhere. And the lunch meat was just eleven cents, he remembered that because there had been a kind of argument about it. So it was the bread, it would have to be the bread. It
went up another dime right while I was standing there he thought. And if bread could jump up ten cents right while I was looking at it, maybe I can’t buy a pistol even for the whole thirteen dollars. So I got to stop somewhere and find a job.
The highway was dense with traffic, but going fast now, the automobiles big ones, brand new, and the trucks were big as railroad cars; no more the dusty pickups which would have offered him a lift, but vehicles now of the rich and hurried who would not even have seen a man walking by himself in overalls. Or probably worse: they probably would have hedged away with their own size and speed and shining paint any other one of them which might have stopped for him, since they would not have wanted him under their feet in Memphis either. Not that it mattered now. He couldn’t even see Memphis yet. And now he couldn’t even say when he was going to see it, thinking So I may need as much as ten dollars more before I even get to where I can buy one. But at least he would have to reach Memphis before that became an actual problem, obstacle; at least when he did reach Memphis the thirteen dollars and three cents he still had must be intact, no matter how much more he might have to add to it to get there. So he would have to get more money some way, who knew he could not be trusted in another roadside store where they sold soda pop. So I will have to stop somewhere and ask for work and I ain’t never asked no man for work in my life so maybe I don’t even know how thinking And that will add at least one more day, maybe even more than one thinking quietly but still without despair I’m too old for this. A feller sixty-three years old ought not to have to handle such as this thinking, but without despair: quite indomitable still But a man that’s done already had to wait thirty-eight years, one more day or two or even three ain’t going to hurt.
The woman was thick but not fat and not old, a little hard-looking, in a shapeless not very clean dress, standing in a small untidy yard pulling dead clematis vines from a frame beside a small house. “Are you a man of God?” she said.
Complete Works of William Faulkner Page 523
