For a while the boy seemed to muse above him, motionless, breathing slow and quiet now; he spoke now in a musing, almost dreamy tone: “I could kill you easy. You aint got but one arm, even if you are older. . . .” Suddenly he moved, with almost unbelievable quickness; Weddel’s first intimation was when the boy’s hard, overlarge hands took him by the throat. Weddel did not move. “I could kill you easy. And wouldn’t none mind.”
“Shhhhhh,” Weddel said. “Not so loud.”
“Wouldn’t none care.” He held Weddel’s throat with hard, awkward restraint. Weddel could feel the choking and the shaking expend itself somewhere about the boy’s forearms before it reached his hands, as though the connection between brain and hands was incomplete. “Wouldn’t none care. Except Vatch would be mad.”
“I have a pistol,” Weddel said.
“Then shoot me with it. Go on.”
“No.”
“No what?”
“I told you before.”
“You swear you wont do it? Do you swear?”
“Listen a moment,” Weddel said; he spoke now with a sort of soothing patience, as though he spoke one-syllable words to a child: “I just want to go home. That’s all. I have been away from home for four years. All I want is to go home. Dont you see? I want to see what I have left there, after four years.”
“What do you do there?” The boy’s hands were loose and hard about Weddel’s throat, his arms still, rigid. “Do you hunt all day, and all night too if you want, with a horse to ride and nigras to wait on you, to shine your boots and saddle the horse, and you setting on the gallery, eating, until time to go hunting again?”
“I hope so. I haven’t been home in four years, you see. So I dont know any more.”
“Take me with you.”
“I dont know what’s there, you see. There may not be anything there: no horses to ride and nothing to hunt. The Yankees were there, and my mother died right afterward, and I dont know what we would find there, until I can go and see.”
“I’ll work. We’ll both work. You can get married in Mayesfield. It’s not far.”
“Married? Oh. Your . . . I see. How do you know I am not already married?” Now the boy’s hands shut on his throat, shaking him. “Stop it!” he said.
“If you say you have got a wife, I will kill you,” the boy said.
“No,” Weddel said. “I am not married.”
“And you dont aim to climb up that foot ladder?”
“No. I never saw her but once. I might not even know her if I saw her again.”
“She says different. I dont believe you. You are lying.”
“No,” Weddel said.
“Is it because you are afraid to?”
“Yes. That’s it.”
“Of Vatch?”
“Not Vatch. I’m just afraid. I think my luck has given out. I know that it has lasted too long; I am afraid that I shall find that I have forgot how to be afraid. So I cant risk it. I cant risk finding that I have lost touch with truth. Not like Jubal here. He believes that I still belong to him; he will not believe that I have been freed. He wont even let me tell him so. He does not need to bother about truth, you see.”
“We would work. She might not look like the Miss’ippi women that wear shoes all the time. But we would learn. We would not shame you before them.”
“No,” Weddel said. “I cannot.”
“Then you go away. Now.”
“How can I? You see that he cannot ride, cannot stay on a horse.” The boy did not answer at once; an instant later Weddel could almost feel the tenseness, the utter immobility, though he himself had heard no sound; he knew that the boy, crouching, not breathing, was looking toward the ladder. “Which one is it?” Weddel whispered.
“It’s paw.”
“I’ll go down. You stay here. You keep my pistol for me.”
X
The dark air was high, chill, cold. In the vast invisible darkness the valley lay, the opposite cold and invisible range black on the black sky. Clutching the stub of his missing arm across his chest, he shivered slowly and steadily.
“Go,” the father said.
“The war is over,” Weddel said. “Vatch’s victory is not my trouble.”
“Take your horses and nigra, and ride on.”
“If you mean your daughter, I never saw her but once and I never expect to see her again.”
“Ride on,” the father said. “Take what is yours, and ride on.”
“I cannot.” They faced one another in the darkness. “After four years I have bought immunity from running.”
“You have till daylight.”
“I have had less than that in Virginia for four years. And this is just Tennessee.” But the other had turned; he dissolved into the black slope. Weddel entered the stable and mounted the ladder. Motionless above the snoring Negro the boy squatted.
“Leave him here,” the boy said. “He aint nothing but a nigra. Leave him, and go.”
“No,” Weddel said.
The boy squatted above the snoring Negro. He was not looking at Weddel, yet there was between them, quiet and soundless, the copse, the sharp dry report, the abrupt wild thunder of upreared horse, the wisping smoke. “I can show you a short cut down to the valley. You will be out of the mountains in two hours. By daybreak you will be ten miles away.”
“I cant. He wants to go home too. I must get him home too.” He stooped; with his single hand he spread the cloak awkwardly, covering the Negro closer with it. He heard the boy creep away, but he did not look. After a while he shook the Negro. “Jubal,” he said. The Negro groaned; he turned heavily, sleeping again. Weddel squatted above him as the boy had done. “I thought that I had lost it for good,” he said. “ — The peace and the quiet; the power to be afraid again.”
XI
The cabin was gaunt and bleak in the thick cold dawn when the two horses passed out the sagging gate and into the churned road, the Negro on the Thoroughbred, Weddel on the sorrel. The Negro was shivering. He sat hunched and high, with updrawn knees, his face almost invisible in the oilcloth hood.
“I tole you dey wuz fixing to pizen us wid dat stuff,” he said. “I tole you. Hillbilly rednecks. En you not only let um pizen me, you fotch me de pizen wid yo own hand. O Lawd, O Lawd! If we ever does git home.”
Weddel looked back at the cabin, at the weathered, blank house where there was no sign of any life, not even smoke. “She has a young man, I suppose — a beau.” He spoke aloud, musing, quizzical. “And that boy. Hule. He said to come within sight of a laurel copse where the road disappears, and take a path to the left. He said we must not pass that copse.”
“Who says which?” the Negro said. “I aint going nowhere. I going back to dat loft en lay down.”
“All right,” Weddel said. “Get down.”
“Git down?”
“I’ll need both horses. You can walk on when you are through sleeping.”
“I ghy tell yo maw,” the Negro said. “I ghy tell um. Ghy tell how after four years you aint got no more sense than to not know a Yankee when you seed um. To stay de night wid Yankees en let um pizen one of Mistis’ niggers. I ghy tell um.”
“I thought you were going to stay here,” Weddel said. He was shivering too. “Yet I am not cold,” he said. “I am not cold.”
“Stay here? Me? How in de world you ever git home widout me? Whut I tell Mistis when I come in widout you en she ax me whar you is?”
“Come,” Weddel said. He lifted the sorrel into motion. He looked quietly back at the house, then rode on. Behind him on the Thoroughbred the Negro muttered and mumbled to himself in woebegone singsong. The road, the long hill which yesterday they had toiled up, descended now. It was muddy, rockchurned, scarred across the barren and rocky land beneath the dissolving sky, jolting downward to where the pines and laurel began. After a while the cabin had disappeared.
“And so I am running away,” Weddel said. “When I get home I shall not be very proud of this. Yes, I will. It
means that I am still alive. Still alive, since I still know fear and desire. Since life is an affirmation of the past and a promise to the future. So I am still alive — Ah.” It was the laurel copse. About three hundred yards ahead it seemed to have sprung motionless and darkly secret in the air which of itself was mostly water. He drew rein sharply, the Negro, hunched, moaning, his face completely hidden, overriding him unawares until the Thoroughbred stopped of its own accord. “But I dont see any path—” Weddel said; then a figure emerged from the copse, running toward them. Weddel thrust the reins beneath his groin and withdrew his hand inside his cloak. Then he saw that it was the boy. He came up trotting. His face was white, strained, his eyes quite grave.
“It’s right yonder,” he said.
“Thank you,” Weddel said. “It was kind of you to come and show us, though we could have found it, I imagine.”
“Yes,” the boy said as though he had not heard. He had already taken the sorrel’s bridle. “Right tother of the brush. You cant see hit until you are in hit.”
“In whut?” the Negro said. “I ghy tell um. After four years you aint got no more sense. . . .”
“Hush,” Weddel said. He said to the boy, “I am obliged to you. You’ll have to take that in lieu of anything better. And now you get on back home. We can find the path. We will be all right now.”
“They know the path too,” the boy said. He drew the sorrel forward. “Come on.”
“Wait,” Weddel said, drawing the sorrel up. The boy still tugged at the bridle, looking on ahead toward the copse. “So we have one guess and they have one guess. Is that it?”
“Damn you to hell, come on!” the boy said, in a kind of thin frenzy. “I am sick of hit. Sick of hit.”
“Well,” Weddel said. He looked about, quizzical, sardonic, with his gaunt, weary, wasted face. “But I must move. I cant stay here, not even if I had a house, a roof to live under. So I have to choose between three things. That’s what throws a man off — that extra alternative. Just when he has come to realize that living consists in choosing wrongly between two alternatives, to have to choose among three. You go back home.”
The boy turned and looked up at him. “We’d work. We could go back to the house now, since paw and Vatch are . . . We could ride down the mou-tin, two on one horse and two on tother. We could go back to the valley and get married at Mayesfield. We would not shame you.”
“But she has a young man, hasn’t she? Somebody that waits for her at church on Sunday and walks home and takes Sunday dinner, and maybe fights the other young men because of her?”
“You wont take us, then?”
“No. You go back home.”
For a while the boy stood, holding the bridle, his face lowered. Then he turned; he said quietly: “Come on, then. We got to hurry.”
“Wait,” Weddel said; “what are you going to do?”
“I’m going a piece with you. Come on.” He dragged the sorrel forward, toward the roadside.
“Here,” Weddel said, “you go on back home. The war is over now. Vatch knows that.”
The boy did not answer. He led the sorrel into the underbrush. The Thoroughbred hung back. “Whoa, you Caesar!” the Negro said. “Wait, Marse Soshay. I aint gwine ride down no. . . .”
The boy looked over his shoulder without stopping. “You keep back there,” he said. “You keep where you are.”
The path was a faint scar, doubling and twisting among the brush. “I see it now,” Weddel said. “You go back.”
“I’ll go a piece with you,” the boy said; so quietly that Weddel discovered that he had been holding his breath, in a taut, strained alertness. He breathed again, while the sorrel jolted stiffly downward beneath him. “Nonsense,” he thought. “He will have me playing Indian also in five minutes more. I had wanted to recover the power to be afraid, but I seem to have outdone myself.” The path widened; the Thoroughbred came alongside, the boy walking between them; again he looked at the Negro.
“You keep back, I tell you,” he said.
“Why back?” Weddel said. He looked at the boy’s wan, strained face; he thought swiftly, “I dont know whether I am playing Indian or not.” He said aloud: “Why must he keep back?”
The boy looked at Weddel; he stopped, pulling the sorrel up. “We’d work,” he said. “We wouldn’t shame you.”
Weddel’s face was now as sober as the boy’s. They looked at one another. “Do you think we have guessed wrong? We had to guess. We had to guess one out of three.”
Again it was as if the boy had not heard him. “You wont think hit is me? You swear hit?”
“Yes. I swear it.” He spoke quietly, watching the boy; they spoke now as two men or two children. “What do you think we ought to do?”
“Turn back. They will be gone now. We could . . .” He drew back on the bridle; again the Thoroughbred came abreast and forged ahead.
“You mean, it could be along here?” Weddel said. Suddenly he spurred the sorrel, jerking the clinging boy forward. “Let go,” he said. The boy held onto the bridle, swept forward until the two horses were again abreast. On the Thoroughbred the Negro perched, highkneed, his mouth still talking, flobbed down with ready speech, easy and worn with talk like an old shoe with walking.
“I done tole him en tole him,” the Negro said.
“Let go!” Weddel said, spurring the sorrel, forcing its shoulder into the boy. “Let go!”
“You wont turn back?” the boy said. “You wont?”
“Let go!” Weddel said. His teeth showed a little beneath his mustache; he lifted the sorrel bodily with the spurs. The boy let go of the bridle and ducked beneath the Thoroughbred’s neck; Weddel, glancing back as the sorrel leaped, saw the boy surge upward and on to the Thoroughbred’s back, shoving the Negro back along its spine until he vanished.
“They think you will be riding the good horse,” the boy said in a thin, panting voice; “I told them you would be riding . . . Down the mou-tin!” he cried as the Thoroughbred swept past; “the horse can make hit! Git outen the path! Git outen the. . . .” Weddel spurred the sorrel; almost abreast the two horses reached the bend where the path doubled back upon itself and into a matted shoulder of laurel and rhododendron. The boy looked back over his shoulder. “Keep back!” he cried. “Git outen the path!” Weddel rowelled the sorrel. On his face was a thin grimace of exasperation and anger almost like smiling.
It was still on his dead face when he struck the earth, his foot still fast in the stirrup. The sorrel leaped at the sound and dragged Weddel to the path side and halted and whirled and snorted once, and began to graze. The Thoroughbred however rushed on past the curve and whirled and rushed back, the blanket twisted under its belly and its eyes rolling, springing over the boy’s body where it lay in the path, the face wrenched sideways against a stone, the arms back-sprawled, openpalmed, like a woman with lifted skirts springing across a puddle. Then it whirled and stood above Weddel’s body, whinnying, with tossing head, watching the laurel copse and the fading gout of black powder smoke as it faded away.
The Negro was on his hands and knees when the two men emerged from the copse. One of them was running. The Negro watched him run forward, crying monotonously. “The durned fool! The durned fool! The durned fool!” and then stop suddenly and drop the gun; squatting, the Negro saw him become stone still above the fallen gun, looking dawn at the boy’s body with an expression of shock and amazement like he was waking from a dream. Then the Negro saw the other man. In the act of stopping, the second man swung the rifle up and began to reload it. The Negro did not move. On his hands and knees he watched the two white men, his irises rushing and wild in the bloodshot whites. Then he too moved and, still on hands and knees, he turned and scuttled to where Weddel lay beneath the sorrel and crouched over Weddel and looked again and watched the second man backing slowly away up the path, loading the rifle. He watched the man stop; he did not close his eyes nor look away. He watched the rifle elongate and then rise and diminish slowly and become
a round spot against the white shape of Vatch’s face like a period on a page. Crouching, the Negro’s eyes rushed wild and steady and red, like those of a cornered animal.
VI. BEYOND
Beyond
THE HARD ROUND ear of the stethoscope was cold and unpleasant upon his naked chest; the room, big and square, furnished with clumsy walnut — the bed where he had first slept alone, which had been his marriage bed, in which his son had been conceived and been born and lain dressed for the coffin — the room familiar for sixty-five years, by ordinary peaceful and lonely and so peculiarly his own as to have the same odor which he had, seemed to be cluttered with people, though there were but three of them and all of them he knew: Lucius Peabody who should have been down town attending to his medical practice, and the two Negroes, the one who should be in the kitchen and the other with the lawn mower on the lawn, making some pretence toward earning the money which on Saturday night they would expect.
But worst of all was the hard cold little ear of the stethoscope, worse even than the outrage of his bared chest with its fine delicate matting of gray hair. In fact, about the whole business there was just one alleviating circumstance. “At least,” he thought with fretted and sardonic humor, “I am spared that uproar of female connections which might have been my lot, which is the ordinary concomitant of occasions of marriage or divorcement. And if he will just move his damned little toy telephone and let my niggers go back to work—”
And then, before he had finished the thought, Peabody did remove the stethoscope. And then, just as he was settling himself back into the pillow with a sigh of fretted relief, one of the Negroes, the woman, set up such a pandemonium of wailing as to fetch him bolt upright in the bed, his hands to his ears. The Negress stood at the foot of the bed, her long limber black hands motionless on the footboard, her eyes whitely backrolled into her skull and her mouth wide open, while from it rolled slow billows of soprano sound as mellow as high-register organ tones and wall-shattering as a steamer siren.
“Chlory!” he shouted. “Stop that!” She didn’t stop. Apparently she could neither see nor hear. “You, Jake!” he shouted to the Negro man who stood beside her, his hands too on the footboard, his face brooding upon the bed with an expression darkly and profoundly enigmatic; “get her out of here! At once!” But Jake too did not move, and he then turned to Peabody in angry outrage. “Here! Loosh! Get these damn niggers out of here!” But Peabody also did not seem to hear him. The Judge watched him methodically folding the stethoscope into its case; glared at him for a moment longer while the woman’s shattering noise billowed through the room. Then he flung the covers back and rose from the bed and hurried furiously from the room and from the house.
Complete Works of William Faulkner Page 663
