“Goodday, madam,” he said. “Have you stableroom for my horses and shelter for myself and my boy for the night?”
The woman looked at him with a static, musing quality, as though she had seen without alarm an apparition.
“I’ll have to see,” she said.
“I shall pay,” the man said. “I know the times.”
“I’ll have to ask him,” the woman said. She turned, then stopped. The older man entered the hall behind her. He was big, in jean clothes, with a shock of iron-gray hair and pale eyes.
“I am Saucier Weddel,” the man in gray said. “I am on my way home to Mississippi from Virginia. I am in Tennessee now?”
“You are in Tennessee,” the other said. “Come in.”
Weddel turned to the Negro. “Take the horses on to the stable,” he said.
The Negro returned to the gate, shapeless in the oilcloth cape and the big overcoat, with that swaggering arrogance which he had assumed as soon as he saw the woman’s bare feet and the meagre, barren interior of the cabin. He took up the two bridle reins and began to shout at the horses with needless and officious vociferation, to which the two horses paid no heed, as though they were long accustomed to him. It was as if the Negro himself paid no attention to his cries, as though the shouting were merely concomitant to the action of leading the horses out of sight of the door, like an effluvium by both horses and Negro accepted and relegated in the same instant.
II
Through the kitchen wall the girl could hear the voices of the men in the room from which her father had driven her when the stranger approached the house. She was about twenty: a big girl with smooth, simple hair and big, smooth hands, standing barefoot in a single garment made out of flour sacks. She stood close to the wall, motionless, her head bent a little, her eyes wide and still and empty like a sleepwalker’s, listening to her father and the guest enter the room beyond it.
The kitchen was a plank leanto built against the log wall of the cabin proper. From between the logs beside her the clay chinking, dried to chalk by the heat of the stove, had fallen away in places. Stooping, the movement slow and lush and soundless as the whispering of her bare feet on the floor, she leaned her eye to one of these cracks. She could see a bare table on which sat an earthenware jug and a box of musket cartridges stenciled U. S. Army. At the table her two brothers sat in splint chairs, though it was only the younger one, the boy, who looked toward the door, though she knew, could hear now, that the stranger was in the room. The older brother was taking the cartridges one by one from the box and crimping them and setting them upright at his hand like a mimic parade of troops, his back to the door where she knew the stranger was now standing. She breathed quietly. “Vatch would have shot him,” she said, breathed, to herself, stooping. “I reckon he will yet.”
Then she heard feet again and her mother came toward the door to the kitchen, crossing and for a moment blotting the orifice. Yet she did not move, not even when her mother entered the kitchen. She stooped to the crack, her breathing regular and placid, hearing her mother clattering the stovelids behind her. Then she saw the stranger for the first time and then she was holding her breath quietly, not even aware that she had ceased to breathe. She saw him standing beside the table in his shabby cloak, with his hat in his left hand. Vatch did not look up.
“My name is Saucier Weddel,” the stranger said.
“Soshay Weddel,” the girl breathed into the dry chinking, the crumbled and powdery wall. She could see him at full length, in his stained and patched and brushed cloak, with his head lifted a little and his face worn, almost gaunt, stamped with a kind of indomitable weariness and yet arrogant too, like a creature from another world with other air to breathe and another kind of blood to warm the veins. “Soshay Weddel,” she breathed.
“Take some whiskey,” Vatch said without moving.
Then suddenly, as it had been with the suspended breathing, she was not listening to the words at all, as though it were no longer necessary for her to hear, as though curiosity too had no place in the atmosphere in which the stranger dwelled and in which she too dwelled for the moment as she watched the stranger standing beside the table, looking at Vatch, and Vatch now turned in his chair, a cartridge in his hand, looking up at the stranger. She breathed quietly into the crack through which the voices came now without heat or significance out of that dark and smoldering and violent and childlike vanity of men:
“I reckon you know these when you see them, then?”
“Why not? We used them too. We never always had the time nor the powder to stop and make our own. So we had to use yours now and then. Especially during the last.”
“Maybe you would know them better if one exploded in your face.”
“Vatch.” She now looked at her father, because he had spoken. Her younger brother was raised a little in his chair, leaning a little forward, his mouth open a little. He was seventeen. Yet still the stranger stood looking quietly down at Vatch, his hat clutched against his worn cloak, with on his face that expression arrogant and weary and a little quizzical.
“You can show your other hand too,” Vatch said. “Don’t be afraid to leave your pistol go.”
“No,” the stranger said. “I am not afraid to show it.”
“Take some whiskey, then,” Vatch said, pushing the jug forward with a motion slighting and contemptuous.
“I am obliged infinitely,” the stranger said. “It’s my stomach. For three years of war I have had to apologize to my stomach; now, with peace, I must apologize for it. But if I might have a glass for my boy? Even after four years, he cannot stand cold.”
“Soshay Weddel,” the girl breathed into the crumbled dust beyond which the voices came, not yet raised yet forever irreconcilable and already doomed, the one blind victim, the other blind executioner:
“Or maybe behind your back you would know it better.”
“You, Vatch.”
“Stop, sir. If he was in the army for as long as one year, he has run too, once. Perhaps oftener, if he faced the Army of Northern Virginia.”
“Soshay Weddel,” the girl breathed, stooping. Now she saw Weddel, walking apparently straight toward her, a thick tumbler in his left hand and his hat crumpled beneath the same arm.
“Not that way,” Vatch said. The stranger paused and looked back at Vatch. “Where are you aiming to go?”
“To take this out to my boy,” the stranger said. “Out to the stable. I thought perhaps this door—” His face was in profile now, worn, haughty, wasted, the eyebrows lifted with quizzical and arrogant interrogation. Without rising Vatch jerked his head back and aside. “Come away from that door.” But the stranger did not stir. Only his head moved a little, as though he had merely changed the direction of his eyes.
“He’s looking at paw,” the girl breathed. “He’s waiting for paw to tell him. He aint skeered of Vatch. I knowed it.”
“Come away from that door,” Vatch said. “You damn nigra.”
“So it’s my face and not my uniform,” the stranger said. “And you fought four years to free us, I understand.”
Then she heard her father speak again. “Go out the front way and around the house, stranger,” he said.
“Soshay Weddel,” the girl said. Behind her her mother clattered at the stove. “Soshay Weddel,” she said. She did not say it aloud. She breathed again, deep and quiet and without haste. “It’s like a music. It’s like a singing.”
III
The Negro was squatting in the hallway of the barn, the sagging and broken stalls of which were empty save for the two horses. Beside him was a worn rucksack, open. He was engaged in polishing a pair of thin dancing slippers with a cloth and a tin of paste, empty save for a thin rim of polish about the circumference of the tin. Beside him on a piece of plank sat one finished shoe. The upper was cracked; it had a crude sole nailed recently and crudely on by a clumsy hand.
“Thank de Lawd folks cant see de bottoms of yo feets,” the Negro said. “Thank de
Lawd it’s just dese hyer mountain trash. I’d even hate fo Yankees to see yo feets in dese things.” He rubbed the shoe, squinted at it, breathed upon it, rubbed it again upon his squatting flank.
“Here,” Weddel said, extending the tumbler. It contained a liquid as colorless as water.
The Negro stopped, the shoe and the cloth suspended. “Which?” he said. He looked at the glass. “Whut’s dat?”
“Drink it,” Weddel said.
“Dat’s water. Whut you bringing me water fer?”
“Take it,” Weddel said. “It’s not water.”
The Negro took the glass gingerly. He held it as if it contained nitroglycerin. He looked at it, blinking, bringing the glass slowly under his nose. He blinked. “Where’d you git dis hyer?” Weddel didn’t answer. He had taken up the finished slipper, looking at it. The Negro held the glass under his nose. “It smell kind of like it ought to,” he said. “But I be dawg ef it look like anything. Dese folks fixing to pizen you.” He tipped the glass and sipped gingerly, and lowered the glass, blinking.
“I didn’t drink any of it,” Weddel said. He set the slipper down.
“You better hadn’t,” the Negro said. “When here I done been fo years trying to take care of you en git you back home like whut Mistis tole me to do, and here you sleeping in folks’ barns at night like a tramp, like a pater-roller nigger—” He put the glass to his lips, tilting it and his head in a single jerk. He lowered the glass, empty; his eyes were closed; he said, “Whuf!” shaking his head with a violent, shuddering motion. “It smells right, and it act right. But I be dawg ef it look right. I reckon you better let it alone, like you started out. When dey try to make you drink it you send um to me. I done already stood so much I reckon I can stand a little mo fer Mistis’ sake.”
He took up the shoe and the cloth again. Weddel stooped above the rucksack. “I want my pistol,” he said.
Again the Negro ceased, the shoe and the cloth poised. “Whut fer?” He leaned and looked up the muddy slope toward the cabin. “Is dese folks Yankees?” he said in a whisper.
“No,” Weddel said, digging in the rucksack with his left hand. The Negro did not seem to hear him.
“In Tennessee? You tole me we was in Tennessee, where Memphis is, even if you never tole me it was all disyer up-and-down land in de Memphis country. I know I never seed none of um when I went to Memphis wid yo paw dat time. But you says so. And now you telling me dem Memphis folks is Yankees?”
“Where is the pistol?” Weddel said.
“I done tole you,” the Negro said. “Acting like you does. Letting dese folks see you come walking up de road, leading Caesar caze you think he tired; making me ride whilst you walks when I can outwalk you any day you ever lived and you knows it, even if I is fawty en you twenty-eight. I ghy tell yo maw. I ghy tell um.”
Weddel rose, in his hand a heavy cap-and-ball revolver. He chuckled it in his single hand, drawing the hammer back, letting it down again. The Negro watched him, crouched like an ape in the blue Union army overcoat. “You put dat thing back,” he said. “De war done wid now. Dey tole us back dar at Ferginny it was done wid. You dont need no pistol now. You put it back, you hear me?”
“I’m going to bathe,” Weddel said. “Is my shirt—”
“Bathe where? In whut? Dese folks aint never seed a bathtub.”
“Bathe at the well. Is my shirt ready?”
“Whut dey is of it. . . . You put dat pistol back, Marse Soshay. I ghy tell yo maw on you. I ghy tell um. I just wish Marster was here.”
“Go to the kitchen,” Weddel said. “Tell them I wish to bathe in the well house. Ask them to draw the curtain on that window there.” The pistol had vanished beneath the grey cloak. He went to the stall where the thoroughbred was. The horse nuzzled at him, its eyes rolling soft and wild. He patted its nose with his left hand. It whickered, not loud, its breath sweet and warm.
IV
The Negro entered the kitchen from the rear. He had removed the oilcloth tent and he now wore a blue forage cap which, like the overcoat, was much too large for him, resting upon the top of his head in such a way that the unsupported brim oscillated faintly when he moved as though with a life of its own. He was completely invisible save for his face between cap and collar like a dried Dyak trophy and almost as small and dusted lightly over as with a thin pallor of wood ashes by the cold. The older woman was at the stove on which frying food now hissed and sputtered; she did not look up when the Negro entered. The girl was standing in the middle of the room, doing nothing at all. She looked at the Negro, watching him with a slow, grave, secret, unwinking gaze as he crossed the kitchen with that air of swaggering caricatured assurance, and upended a block of wood beside the stove and sat upon it.
“If disyer is de kind of weather yawl has up here all de time,” he said, “I dont care ef de Yankees does has dis country.” He opened the overcoat, revealing his legs and feet as being wrapped, shapeless and huge, in some muddy and anonymous substance resembling fur, giving them the appearance of two muddy beasts the size of halfgrown dogs lying on the floor; moving a little nearer the girl, the girl thought quietly Hit’s fur. He taken and cut up a fur coat to wrap his feet in “Yes, suh,” the Negro said. “Just yawl let me git home again, en de Yankees kin have all de rest of it.”
“Where do you-uns live?” the girl said.
The Negro looked at her. “In Miss’ippi. On de Domain. Aint you never hyeard tell of Countymaison?”
“Countymaison?”
“Dat’s it. His grandpappy named it Countymaison caze it’s bigger den a county to ride over. You cant ride across it on a mule betwixt sunup and sundown. Dat’s how come.” He rubbed his hands slowly on his thighs. His face was now turned toward the stove; he snuffed loudly. Already the ashy overlay on his skin had disappeared, leaving his face dead black, wizened, his mouth a little loose, as though the muscles had become slack with usage, like rubber bands — not the eating muscles, the talking ones. “I reckon we is gittin nigh home, after all. Leastways dat hawg meat smell like it do down whar folks lives.”
“Countymaison,” the girl said in a rapt, bemused tone, looking at the Negro with her grave, unwinking regard. Then she turned her head and looked at the wall, her face perfectly serene, perfectly inscrutable, without haste, with a profound and absorbed deliberation.
“Dat’s it,” the Negro said. “Even Yankees is heard tell of Weddel’s Countymaison en erbout Marster Francis Weddel. Maybe yawl seed um pass in de carriage dat time he went to Washn’ton to tell yawl’s president how he aint like de way yawl’s president wuz treating de people. He rid all de way to Washn’ton in de carriage, wid two niggers to drive en to heat de bricks to kept he foots warm, en de man done gone on ahead wid de wagon en de fresh hawses. He carried yawl’s president two whole dressed bears en eight sides of smoked deer venison. He must a passed right out dar in front yawl’s house. I reckon yo pappy or maybe his pappy seed um pass.” He talked on, voluble, in soporific singsong, his face beginning to glisten, to shine a little with the rich warmth, while the mother bent over the stove and the girl, motionless, static, her bare feet cupped smooth and close to the rough puncheons, her big, smooth, young body cupped soft and richly mammalian to the rough garment, watching the Negro with her ineffable and unwinking gaze, her mouth open a little.
The Negro talked on, his eyes closed, his voice interminable, boastful, his air lazily intolerant, as if he were still at home and there had been no war and no harsh rumors of freedom and of change, and he (a stableman, in the domestic hierarchy a man of horses) were spending the evening in the quarters among field hands, until the older woman dished the food and left the room, closing the door behind her. He opened his eyes at the sound and looked toward the door and then back to the girl. She was looking at the wall, at the closed door through which her mother had vanished. “Dont dey lets you eat at de table wid um?” he said.
The girl looked at the Negro, unwinking. “Countymaison,” she said. “Vatch says he is a nigra
too.”
“Who? Him? A nigger? Marse Soshay Weddel? Which un is Vatch?” The girl looked at him. “It’s caze yawl aint never been nowhere. Ain’t never seed nothing. Living up here on a nekkid hill whar you cant even see smoke. Him a nigger? I wish his maw could hear you say dat.” He looked about the kitchen, wizened, his eyeballs rolling white, ceaseless, this way and that. The girl watched him.
“Do the girls there wear shoes all the time?” she said.
The Negro looked about the kitchen, “Where does yawl keep dat ere Tennessee spring water? Back here somewhere?”
“Spring water?”
The Negro blinked slowly. “Dat ere light-drinking kahysene.”
“Kahysene?”
“Dat ere light colored lamp oil whut yawl drinks. Aint you got a little of it hid back here somewhere?”
“Oh,” the girl said. “You mean corn.” She went to a corner and lifted a loose plank in the floor, the Negro watching her, and drew forth another earthen jug. She filled another thick tumbler and gave it to the Negro and watched him jerk it down his throat, his eyes closed. Again he said, “Whuf!” and drew his back hand across his mouth.
“Whut wuz dat you axed me?” he said.
“Do the girls down there at Countymaison wear shoes?”
“De ladies does. If dey didn’t have none, Marse Soshay could sell a hun’ed niggers en buy um some . . . Which un is it say Marse Soshay a nigger?”
Complete Works of William Faulkner Page 661
