Complete Works of William Faulkner

by William Faulkner

  “Why did he marry her, anyways?” the chauffeur said.

  “You want to know why he married her? It wasn’t the jack, even if they did have a pot full of it, of this Oklahoma Indian oil. . . .”

  “Indian oil?”

  “Sure. The government give this Oklahoma to the Indians because nobody else would have it, and when the first Indian got there and seen it and dropped dead and they tried to bury him, when they stuck the shovel into the ground the oil blowed the shovel out of the fellow’s hand, and so the white folks come. They would come up with a new Ford with a man from the garage driving it and they would go to an Indian and say, ‘Well, John, how much rotten-water you catchum your front yard?’ and the Indian would say three wells or thirteen wells or whatever it is and the white man would say, ‘That’s too bad. The way the White Father put the bee on you boys, it’s too bad. Well, never mind. You see this fine new car here? Well, I’m going to give it to you so you can load up your folks and go on to where the water don’t come out of the ground rotten and where the White Father can’t put the bee on you no more.’ So the Indian would load his family into the car, and the garage man would head the car west, I guess, and show the Indian where the gasoline lever was and hop off and snag the first car back to town. See?”

  “Oh,” the chauffeur said.

  “Sure. So here we was in England one time, minding our own business, when here this old dame and her red-headed gal come piling over from Europe or somewheres where the gal was going to the high school, and here it ain’t a week before Blair says, ‘Well, Ernie, we’re going to get married. What the hell do you think of that?’ And him a fellow that hadn’t done nothing all his life but dodge skirts so he could drink all night and try to ride a horse to death all day, getting married in less than a week. But soon as I see this old dame, I know which one of her and her husband it was that had took them oil wells off the Indians.”

  “She must have been good, to put it on Blair at all, let alone that quick,” the chauffeur said. “Tough on her, though. I’d hate for my daughter to belong to him. Not saying nothing against him, of course.”

  “I’d hate for my dog to belong to him. I see him kill a dog once because it wouldn’t mind him. Killed it with a walking stick, with one lick. He says, ‘Here. Send Andrews here to haul this away.’”

  “I don’t see how you put up with him,” the chauffeur said. “Driving his cars, that’s one thing. But you, in the house with him day and night. . . .”

  “We settled that. He used to ride me when he was drinking. One day he put his hand on me and I told him I would kill him. ‘When?’ he says. ‘When you get back from the hospital?’ ‘Maybe before I go there,’ I says. I had my hand in my pocket. ‘I believe you would,’ he says. So we get along now. I put the rod away and he don’t ride me any more and we get along.”

  “Why didn’t you quit?”

  “I don’t know. It’s a good job, even if we do stay all over the place all the time. Jees! half the time I don’t know if the next train goes to Ty Juana or Italy; I don’t know half the time where I’m at or if I can read the newspaper next morning even. And I like him and he likes me.”

  “Maybe he quit riding you because he had something else to ride,” the chauffeur said.

  “Maybe so. Anyways, when they married, she hadn’t never been on a horse before in all her life until he bought this chestnut horse for her to match her hair. We went all the way to Kentucky for it, and he come back in the same car with it. I wouldn’t do it; I says I would do anything in reason for him but I wasn’t going to ride in no horse Pullman with it empty, let alone with a horse already in it. So I come back in a lower.

  “He didn’t tell her about the horse until it was in the stable. ‘But I don’t want to ride,’ she says.

  “‘My wife will be expected to ride,’ he says. ‘You are not in Oklahoma now.’

  “‘But I can’t ride,’ she says.

  “‘You can at least sit on top of the horse so they will think you can ride on it,’ he says.

  “So she goes to Callaghan, riding them practice plugs of his with the children and the chorines that have took up horse riding to get ready to get drafted from the bushes out in Brooklyn or New Jersey to the Drive or Central Park. And her hating a horse like it was a snake ever since one day when she was a kid and gets sick on a merry-go-round.”

  “How did you know all this?” the chauffeur said.

  “I was there. We used to stop there now and then in the afternoon to see how she was coming on the horse. Sometimes she wouldn’t even know we was there, or maybe she did. Anyways, here she would go, round and round among the children and one or two head of Zigfield’s prize stock, passing us and not looking at us, and Blair standing there with that black face of his like a subway tunnel, like he knew all the time she couldn’t ride no horse even on a merry-go-round and like he didn’t care if she learned or not, just so he could watch her trying and not doing it. So at last even Callaghan come to him and told him it wasn’t no use. ‘Very well,’ Blair says. ‘Callaghan says you may be able to sit on the top of a painted horse, so I will buy you a horse out of a dump cart and nail him to the front porch, and you can at least be sitting on top of it when we come up.’

  “‘I’ll go back to momma’s,’ she says.

  “‘I wish you would,’ Blair says. ‘My old man tried all his life to make a banker out of me, but your old woman done it in two months.’”

  “I thought you said they had jack of their own,” the chauffeur said. “Why didn’t she spend some of that?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe there wasn’t no exchange for Indian money in New York. Anyways, you would have thought she was a conductor on a Broadway surface car. Sometimes she wouldn’t even wait until I could get Blair under a shower and a jolt into him before breakfast, to make the touch. So the gal goes to the old dame (she lives on Park Avenue) and the gal . . .”

  “Was you there too?” the chauffeur said.

  “Cried . . . What? Oh. This was a maid, a little Irish kid named Burke; me and her used to go out now and then. She was the one told me about this fellow, this Yale college boy, this Indian sweetheart.”

  “Indian sweetheart?”

  “They went to the same ward school out at Oklahoma or something. Swapped Masonic rings or something before the gal’s old man found three oil wells in the henhouse and dropped dead and the old dame took the gal off to Europe to go to the school there. So this boy goes to Yale College and last year what does he do but marry a gal out of a tank show that happened to be in town. Well, when she finds that Callaghan has give her up, she goes to her old woman in Park Avenue. She cries. ‘I begin to think that maybe I won’t look funny to his friends, and then he comes there and watches me. He don’t say nothing,’ she says, ‘he just stands there and watches me.’

  “‘After all I’ve done for you,’ the old dame says. ‘Got you a husband that any gal in New York would have snapped up. When all he asks is that you learn to sit on top of a horse and not shame him before his swell friends. After all I done for you,’ the old dame says.

  “‘I didn’t,’ she says. ‘I didn’t want to marry him.’

  “‘Who did you want to marry?’ the old dame says.

  “‘I didn’t want to marry nobody,’ the gal says.

  “So now the old dame digs up about this boy, this Allen boy that the gal . . .”

  “I thought you said his name was Yale,” the chauffeur said.

  “No. Allen. Yale is where he went to this college.”

  “You mean Columbia.”

  “No. Yale. It’s another college.”

  “I thought the other one was named Cornell or something,” the chauffeur said.

  “No. It’s another one. Where these college boys all come from when these hotchachacha deadfalls get raided and they give them all a ride downtown in the wagon. Don’t you read no papers?”

  “Not often,” the chauffeur said. “I don’t care nothing about politics.”
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br />   “All right. So this Yale boy’s poppa had found a oil well too and he was lousy with it too, and besides the old dame was mad because Blair wouldn’t leave her live in the house with them and wouldn’t take her nowheres when we went. So the old dame give them all three — her and Blair and this college boy — the devil until the gal jumps up and says she will ride on a horse or bust, and Blair told her to go on and bust if she aimed to ride on this chestnut horse we brought all the way back from Kentucky. ‘I don’t aim for you to ruin this good horse,’ Blair says. ‘You’ll ride on the horse I tell you to ride on.’

  “So then she would slip out the back way and go off and try to ride this horse, this good one, this Kentucky plug, to learn how first and then surprise him. The first time didn’t hurt her, but the second time it broke her collar bone, and she was scared how Blair would find it out until she found out how he had knew it all the time that she was riding on it. So when we come down here for the first time that year and Blair started chasing this lyron or whatever it—”

  “Fox,” the chauffeur said.

  “All right. That’s what I said. So when—”

  “You said lyron,” the chauffeur said.

  “All right. Leave it be a lyron. Anyways, she would ride on this chestnut horse, trying to keep up, and Blair already outrun the dogs and all, like this time two years ago when he run off from the dogs and got close enough to this lyron to hit it with his riding whip—”

  “You mean fox,” the chauffeur said. “A fox, not a lyron. Say . . .” The other man, the valet, secretary, whatever he might have been, was lighting another cigarette, crouched into his upturned collar, the derby slanted down upon his face.

  “Say what?” he said.

  “I was wondering,” the chauffeur said.

  “Wondering what?”

  “If it’s as hard for him to ride off and leave her as he thinks it is. To not see her ruining this good Kentucky horse. If he has to ride as fast to do it as he thinks he does.”

  “What about that?”

  “Maybe he don’t have to ride as fast this year as he did last year, to run off from her. What do you think about it?”

  “Think about what?”

  “I was wondering.”

  “What wondering?”

  “If he knowed he don’t have to ride as fast this year or not.”

  “Oh. You mean Gawtrey.”

  “That his name? Gawtrey?”

  “That’s it. Steve Gawtrey.”

  “What about him?”

  “He’s all right. He’ll eat your grub and drink your liquor and fool your women and let you say when.”

  “Well, what about that?”

  “Nothing. I said he was all right. He’s fine by me.”

  “How by you?”

  “Just fine, see? I done him a little favor once, and he done me a little favor, see?”

  “Oh,” the chauffeur said. He did not look at the other. “How long has she known him?”

  “Six months and maybe a week. We was up in Connecticut and he was there. He hates a horse about as much as she does, but me and Callaghan are all right too; I done Callaghan a little favor once too, so about a week after we come back from Connecticut, I have Callaghan come in and tell Blair about this other swell dog, without telling Blair who owned it. So that night I says to Blair, ‘I hear Mr. Van Dyming wants to buy this horse from Mr. Gawtrey too.’ ‘Buy what horse?’ Blair says. ‘I don’t know,’ I says. ‘One horse looks just like another to me as long as it stays out doors where it belongs,’ I says. ‘So do they to Gawtrey,’ Blair says. ‘What horse are you talking about?’ ‘This horse Callaghan was telling you about,’ I says. Then he begun to curse Callaghan. ‘He told me he would get that horse for me,’ he says. ‘It don’t belong to Callaghan,’ I says, ‘it’s Mr. Gawtrey’s horse.’ So here it’s two nights later when he brings Gawtrey home to dinner with him. That night I says, ‘I guess you bought that horse.’ He had been drinking and he cursed Gawtrey and Callaghan too. ‘He won’t sell it,’ he says. ‘You want to keep after him,’ I says. ‘A man will sell anything.’ ‘How keep after him, when he won’t listen to a price?’ he says. ‘Leave your wife do the talking,’ I says. ‘He’ll listen to her.’ That was when he hit me. . . .”

  “I thought you said he just put his hand on you,” the chauffeur said.

  “I mean he just kind of flung out his hand when he was talking, and I happened to kind of turn my face toward him at the same time. He never aimed to hit me because he knowed I would have took him. I told him so. I had the rod in my hand, inside my coat, all the while.

  “So after that Gawtrey would come back maybe once a week because I told him I had a good job and I didn’t aim to have to shoot myself out of it for no man except myself maybe. He come once a week. The first time she wouldn’t leave him in. Then one day I am reading the paper (you ought to read a paper now and then. You ought to keep up with the day of the week, at least) and I read where this Yale Allen boy has run off with a show gal and they had fired him off the college for losing his amateur’s standing, I guess. I guess that made him mad, after he had done jumped the college anyways. So I cut it out, and this Burke kid (me and her was all right, too) she puts it on the breakfast tray that A.M. And that afternoon, when Gawtrey happens to come back, she leaves him in, and this Burke kid happens to walk into the room sudden with something — I don’t know what it was — and here is Gawtrey and her like a fade-out in the pitchers.”

  “So Blair got his horse,” the chauffeur said.

  “What horse?”

  “The horse Gawtrey wouldn’t sell him.”

  “How could he, when Gawtrey never owned no horse no more than I do, unless it’s maybe some dog still finishing last year’s Selling Plate at Pimlico? Besides, Gawtrey don’t owe Blair no horse yet.”

  “Not yet?”

  “She don’t like him, see. The first time he come to the house alone she wouldn’t leave him into the front door. And the next time, too, if this Burke kid hadn’t happened to left that piece out of the papers about this college boy on the breakfast tray. And the time after that when he come, she wouldn’t leave him in again; it was like he might have been a horse maybe, or even a dog, because she hated a dog worse than she did a horse even, even if she didn’t have to try to ride on no dog. If it had have been a dog, Blair wouldn’t have never got her to even try to ride on it. So I’d have to go out and steam Callaghan up again until it got to where I wasn’t no more than one of these Russian droshkies or something.”

  “A Russian what?”

  “One of these fellows that can’t call their own soul. Every time I would leave the house I would have to meet Gawtrey in a dump somewheres and then go to see Callaghan and soap him down, because he is one of these boys with ideas, see?”

  “What kind of ideas?”

  “Just ideas. Out of the Sunday school paper. About how this wasn’t right because he liked her and felt sorry for her and so he wanted to tell Blair he had been lying and that Gawtrey hadn’t never owned no horse. Because a fellow that won’t take a nickel when it’s throwed right in his face, he ain’t never as big a fool to nobody as he is to the man that can have some sense about religion and keep all these golden rules in the Sunday school paper where they come from. If the Lord didn’t want a man to cut his own grass, why did He put Sunday on Sunday like he did? Tell me that.”

  “I guess you’re right,” the chauffeur said.

  “Sure I’m right. Jees! I told Callaghan Blair would cut his throat and mine both for a Rockefeller quarter, same as any sensible man, and I ast him if he thought gals had done all give out with Blair’s wife; if she was going to be the last one they made.”

  “So he don’t . . .” the chauffeur said. He ceased; then he said, “Look there.”

  The other man looked. Through the gap in the trees, in the center of the segment of visible rice field, they could see a tiny pink-and-black dot. It was almost a mile away; it did not appear to be moving fast.
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  “What’s that?” the other said. “The fox?”

  “It’s Blair,” the chauffeur said. “He’s going fast. I wonder where the others are.” They watched the pink-and-black dot go on and disappear.

  “They’ve went back home if they had any sense,” the other said. “So we might as well go back too.”

  “I guess so,” the chauffeur said. “So Gawtrey don’t owe Blair no horse yet.”

  “Not yet. She don’t like him. She wouldn’t leave him in the house again after that day, and this Burke kid says she come back from a party one night because Gawtrey was there. And if it hadn’t been for me, Gawtrey wouldn’t a got invited down here, because she told Blair that if he come, she wouldn’t come. So I’d have to work on Callaghan again so he would come in once a day and steam Blair up again about the horse to get Gawtrey invited, because Blair was going to make her come.” The chauffeur got out of the car and went around to the crank. The other man lighted a cigarette. “But Blair ain’t got his horse yet. You take a woman with long hair like she’s got, long as she keeps her hair up, it’s all right. But once you catch her with her hair down, it’s just been too bad.”

  The chauffeur engaged the crank. Then he paused, stooped, his head turned. “Listen,” he said.

  “What?”

  “That horn.” The silver sound came again, faint, distant, prolonged.

  “What’s that?” the other said. “Do they have to keep soldiers here?”

  “It’s the horn they blow,” the chauffeur said. “It means they have caught that fox.”

  “Jees!” the other said. “Maybe we will go back to town to-morrow.”

  The two men on the mules recrossed the rice field and mounted the ridge into the pines.

  “Well,” the youth said, “I reckon he’s satisfied now.”

  “You reckon he is?” the other said. He rode a little in front of the youth. He did not turn his head when he spoke.

  “He’s run that fox three years,” the youth said. “And now he’s killed it. How come he ain’t satisfied?”