And after a while it was full dark; Mister Ernest would have to strike a match ever now and then to read the compass, until the stars come out good and we could pick out one to follow, because I said, “How fur do you reckon it is?” and he said, “A little more than one box of matches.” So we used a star when we could, only we couldn’t see it all the time because the woods was too dense and we would git a little off until he would have to spend another match. And now it was good and late, and he stopped and said, “Get on the horse.”
“I ain’t tired,” I said.
“Get on the horse,” he said. “We don’t want to spoil him.”
Because he had been a good feller ever since I had knowed him, which was even before that day two years ago when maw went off with the Vicksburg roadhouse feller and the next day pap didn’t come home neither, and on the third one Mister Ernest rid Dan up to the door of the cabin on the river he let us live in, so pap could work his piece of land and run his fish line, too, and said, “Put that gun down and come on here and climb up behind.”
So I got in the saddle even if I couldn’t reach the stirrups, and Mister Ernest taken the reins and I must ‘a’ went to sleep, because the next thing I knowed a buttonhole of my lumberjack was tied to the saddle horn with that ere whang cord off the compass, and it was good and late now and we wasn’t fur, because Dan was already smelling water, the river. Or maybe it was the feed lot itself he smelled, because we struck the fire road not a quarter below it, and soon I could see the river, too, with the white mist laying on it soft and still as cotton. Then the lot, home; and up yonder in the dark, not no piece akchully, close enough to hear us unsaddling and shucking corn prob’ly, and sholy close enough to hear Mister Ernest blowing his horn at the dark camp for Simon to come in the boat and git us, that old buck in his brake in the bayou; home, too, resting, too, after the hard run, waking hisself now and then, dreaming of dogs behind him or maybe it was the racket we was making would wake him.
Then Mister Ernest stood on the bank blowing until Simon’s lantern went bobbing down into the mist; then we clumb down to the landing and Mister Ernest blowed again now and then to guide Simon, until we seen the lantern in the mist, and then Simon and the boat; only it looked like ever time I set down and got still, I went back to sleep, because Mister Ernest was shaking me again to git out and climb the bank into the dark camp, until I felt a bed against my knees and tumbled into it.
Then it was morning, tomorrow; it was all over now until next November, next year, and we could come back. Uncle Ike and Willy and Walter and Roth and the rest of them had come in yestiddy, soon as Eagle taken the buck out of hearing and they knowed that deer was gone, to pack up and be ready to leave this morning for Yoknapatawpha, where they lived, until it would be November again and they could come back again.
So, as soon as we et breakfast, Simon run them back up the river in the big boat to where they left their cars and pickups, and now it wasn’t nobody but jest me and Mister Ernest setting on the bench against the kitchen wall in the sun; Mister Ernest smoking a cigar — a whole one this time that Dan hadn’t had no chance to jump him through a grapevine and bust. He hadn’t washed his face neither where that vine had throwed him into the mud. But that was all right, too; his face usually did have a smudge of mud or tractor grease or beard stubble on it, because he wasn’t jest a planter; he was a farmer, he worked as hard as ara one of his hands and tenants — which is why I knowed from the very first that we would git along, that I wouldn’t have no trouble with him and he wouldn’t have no trouble with me, from that very first day when I woke up and maw had done gone off with that Vicksburg road-house feller without even waiting to cook breakfast, and the next morning pap was gone, too, and it was almost night the next day when I heard a horse coming up and I taken the gun that I had already throwed a shell into the britch when pap never come home last night, and stood in the door while Mister Ernest rid up and said, “Come on. Your paw ain’t coming back neither.”
“You mean he give me to you?” I said.
“Who cares?” he said. “Come on. I brought a lock for the door. We’ll send the pickup back tomorrow for whatever you want.”
So I come home with him and it was all right, it was jest fine — his wife had died about three years ago — without no women to worry us or take off in the middle of the night with a durn Vicksburg roadhouse jake without even waiting to cook breakfast. And we would go home this afternoon, too, but not jest yet; we always stayed one more day after the others left because Uncle Ike always left what grub they hadn’t et, and the rest of the homemade corn whisky he drunk and that town whisky of Roth Edmondziz he called Scotch that smelled like it come out of a old bucket of roof paint; setting in the sun for one more day before we went back home to git ready to put in next year’s crop of cotton and oats and beans and hay; and across the river yonder, behind the wall of trees where the big woods started, that old buck laying up today in the sun, too — resting today, too, without nobody to bother him until next November.
So at least one of us was glad it would be eleven months and two weeks before he would have to run that fur that fast again. So he was glad of the very same thing we was sorry of, and so all of a sudden I thought about how maybe planting and working and then harvesting oats and cotton and beans and hay wasn’t jest something me and Mister Ernest done three hundred and fifty-one days to fill in the time until we could come back hunting again, but it was something we had to do, and do honest and good during the three hundred and fifty-one days, to have the right to come back into the big woods and hunt for the other fourteen; and the fourteen days that old buck run in front of dogs wasn’t jest something to fill his time until the three hundred and fifty-one when he didn’t have to, but the running and the risking in front of guns and dogs was something he had to do for fourteen days to have the right not to be bothered for the other three hundred and fifty-one. And so the hunting and the farming wasn’t two different things at all — they was jest the other side of each other.
“Yes,” I said. “All we got to do now is put in that next year’s crop. Then November won’t be no time away.”
“You ain’t going to put in the crop next year,” Mister Ernest said. “You’re going to school.”
So at first I didn’t even believe I had heard him. “What?” I said. “Me? Go to school?”
“Yes,” Mister Ernest said. “You must make something out of yourself.”
“I am,” I said. “I’m doing it now. I’m going to be a hunter and a farmer like you.”
“No,” Mister Ernest said. “That ain’t enough any more. Time was when all a man had to do was just farm eleven and a half months, and hunt the other half. But not now. Now just to belong to the farming business and the hunting business ain’t enough. You got to belong to the business of mankind.”
“Mankind?” I said.
“Yes,” Mister Ernest said. “So you’re going to school. Because you got to know why. You can belong to the farming and hunting business and you can learn the difference between what’s right and what’s wrong, and do right. And that used to be enough — just to do right. But not now. You got to know why it’s right and why it’s wrong, and be able to tell the folks that never had no chance to learn it; teach them how to do what’s right, not just because they know it’s right, but because they know now why it’s right because you just showed them, told them, taught them why. So you’re going to school.”
“It’s because you been listening to that durn Will Legate and Walter Ewell!” I said.
“No,” Mister Ernest said.
“Yes!” I said. “No wonder you missed that buck yestiddy, taking ideas from the very fellers that let him git away, after me and you had run Dan and the dogs durn nigh clean to death! Because you never even missed him! You never forgot to load that gun! You had done already unloaded it a purpose! I heard you!”
“All right, all right,” Mister Ernest said. “Which would you rather have? His bloody head and hide
on the kitchen floor yonder and half his meat in a pickup truck on the way to Yoknapatawpha County, or him with his head and hide and meat still together over yonder in that brake, waiting for next November for us to run him again?”
“And git him, too,” I said. “We won’t even fool with no Willy Legate and Walter Ewell next time.”
“Maybe,” Mister Ernest said.
“Yes,” I said.
“Maybe,” Mister Ernest said. “The best word in our language, the best of all. That’s what mankind keeps going on: Maybe. The best days of his life ain’t the ones when he said ‘Yes’ beforehand: they’re the ones when all he knew to say was ‘Maybe.’ He can’t say ‘Yes’ until afterward because he not only don’t know it until then, he don’t want to know ‘Yes’ until then.… Step in the kitchen and make me a toddy. Then we’ll see about dinner.”
“All right,” I said. I got up. “You want some of Uncle Ike’s corn or that town whisky of Roth Edmondziz?”
“Can’t you say Mister Roth or Mister Edmonds?” Mister Ernest said.
“Yes, sir,” I said. “Well, which do you want? Uncle Ike’s corn or that ere stuff of Roth Edmondziz?”
Once Aboard the Lugger
Contempo, February 1932
IN THE MIDDLE of the afternoon we made a landfall. Ever since we left the mouth of the river at dawn and felt the first lift of the sea, Pete’s face had been getting yellower and yellower, until by midday and twenty four hours out of New Orleans, when we spoke to him he’d glare at us with his yellow cat’s eyes, and curse Joe. Joe was his older brother. He was about thirty-five. He had some yellow diamonds big as gravel. Pete was about nineteen, in a silk shirt of gold and lavender stripes, and a stiff straw hat, and all day long he squatted in the bows, holding his hat and saying Jesus Christ to himself.
He wouldn’t even drink any of the whiskey he had hooked from Joe. Joe wouldn’t let us take any with us, and the Captain wouldn’t have let us fetch it aboard, if he had. The Captain was a teetotaller. He had been in the outside trade before Joe hired him, where they took on cargoes of green alcohol in the West Indies and had it all flavored and aged and bottled and labeled and cased before they raised Tortugas. He said he never had been a drinking man, but if he ever had, he’d be cured now. He was a real prohibitionist: he believed that nobody should be allowed to drink. He was a New Englander, with a face like a worn doormat.
So Pete had to hook a couple of bottles from Joe, and we brought them aboard inside our pants leg and the nigger hid them in the galley, and between wheel tricks I’d go forward where Pete was squatting, holding his hat, and have a nip. Now and then the nigger’s disembodied face ducked into the port, without any expression at all, like a mask in carnival, and he passed up a cup of coffee which Pete drank and like as not threw the cup at the nigger’s head just as it ducked away.
“He done busted two of them,” the nigger told me. “We ain’t got but four left, now. I gwine give it to him in a bakingpowder can next time.”
Pete hadn’t eaten any breakfast, and he flung his dinner overside and turned his back while I ate mine, his face getting yellower and yellower, and when we fetched the island — a scar of sand with surf creaming along its windward flank and tufted with gnawed purple pines on a darkling twilit sea — his face and his eyes were the same color.
The Captain held inside. We passed into the island’s lee. The motion ceased and we pounded along in slack water of the clearest green. To starboard the island stretched on, bastioned and sombre, without sign of any life at all. Across the Sound a low smudge of mainland lay like a violet cloud. From beyond the island we could hear the boom and hiss of surf, but inside here the water was like a mill-pond, with sunlight slanting into it in green corridors. And then Pete got really sick, leaning overside and holding his hat on.
Twilight came swiftly. The clear green of the water, losing the sun, darkened. We beat on across a pulseless surface fading slowly to the hue of violet ink. Against the sky the tall pines stood in shabby and gaunt parade. The smudge of mainland had dissolved. Low on the water where it had been, a beacon was like a cigarette coal. Pete was still being sick.
The engine slowed. “Forrard there,” the Captain said at the wheel. I manned the anchor.
“Come on, Pete,” I said, “Give me a hand with it. You’ll feel better.”
“Hell with it,” Pete said. “Leave the bastard sink.”
So the nigger came topside and we cleared the hawser. The engine stopped and our momentum died into a violet silence floored with whispering water.
“Let go,” the Captain said. We tumbled the anchor over, the hawser rattling and hissing about our feet.
Just before dark came completely down a pale wing of rigid water and a green navigating light stood abruptly in the dusk two miles away and as abruptly faded.
“There her,” the nigger said. “Gwine, too.”
“What is it?”
“Rum chaser. Gwine to Mobile.”
“Hope she stays there,” I said. In the twilight my shirt felt warmer than I, drily so, like a garment of sand.
Pete wouldn’t eat his supper, either. He sat humped in the bows, a filthy quilt about his shoulders, looking like a big disgruntled bird. He sat there while the nigger and I warped the dinghy alongside and until the Captain emerged with three spades and a flashlight. Then he refused unconditionally to get into the dinghy, and he and the Captain cursed each other at point-blank range in the darkness, in ferocious whispers.
But move he would not. So we left him there, humped in his quilt, his hat slanted in savage silhouette above the shapeless blob of the vessel lurking neither wholly hidden nor wholly revealed against the perspective of the Sound and the ghostly and sourceless echo of starlight and the new moon.
The dinghy moved in darkness, in silence save for small gurgling clucks of water as the nigger wielded the oars. At each invisible stroke I could feel the steady and fading surge of the thwart under my thighs. Milky serpentines seethed alongside, mooned with bubbled fire, in the nothingness which bore us and which slapped now and then beneath the keel with whispering, caressing shocks, as of soft and secret palms. Soon a lesser darkness smoldered laterally across the bows, the Captain humped in vague relief against it, and the nigger’s rhythmic blobbing. It thickened still more. The dinghy lifted with a faint grating jar, and stopped. The new moon hung in the crests of the pines overhead.
We hauled the dinghy up. The Captain stood squinting at the skyline. The sand was white, faintly luminous in the starlight. Staring at it, it seemed to be within a hand’s breadth of the face. Then as you stared it seemed to shrink dizzily away until equilibrium itself was lost, fading at last without demarcation into the spangled sky that seemed to take of the sand something of its quality of dizzy and faint incandescence and against which the pines reared their tall and ragged crests, forlorn and gallant and a little austere.
The nigger had lifted the shovels out of the dinghy and the Captain, having oriented himself, took up one of them. The nigger and I took up the other two and followed the dark blob of him across the beach and into the trees. The sand was grown over with a harsh undergrowth of some sort, tough and possessing that pointless perversity of random rusty wire. We struggled through it, the sand shifting beneath us, also with a sort of derisive perversity. The surge and hiss of surf came steadily out of the darkness upon our faces, with the cool, strong breath of the sea itself, and immediately before us the treacherous darkness burst into mad shapes and a tense, soundless uproar. For a moment it seemed that I could taste my very heart in my mouth and the nigger prodded heavily into me from behind, and in the yellow tunnel of the Captain’s flashlight wildeyed and anonymous horned beasts glared at us on braced forelegs, then whirled and rushed soundlessly away with mad overreaching of gaunt flanks and tossing tails. It was like a nightmare through which, pursued by demons, you run forever on a shifting surface that gives no purchase for the feet.
My shirt felt colder than I, now, and damp, an
d in the dizzy darkness that followed the flash my heart consented to beat again. The nigger handed me my shovel and I found that the Captain had gone on.
“What in God’s name was that?” I said.
“Wild cattle,” the nigger said. “Island full of them. They’ll run you in the daytime.”
“Oh,” I said. We slogged on and overtook the Captain halted beside a dune grown harshly over with the wirelike undergrowth. He bade us halt here while he prowled slowly about the dune, prodding at it with his shovel. The nigger and I squatted, our shovels beside us. My shirt was wet, cold to my body. The steady breathing of the sea came across the sand, among the pines.
“What are cattle doing on this island?” I whispered. “I thought it was uninhabited.”
“I don’t know,” the nigger said. “I don’t know what anything want here, walking around night and day in this sand, listening to that wind in them trees.” He squatted beside me, naked to the waist, the starlight glinting faintly upon him, reflected by the sand. “Be wild, too.” he said.
I killed a mosquito on the back of my hand. It left a huge, warm splash, like a raindrop. I wiped my hands on my flanks.
“Skeeter bad here,” the nigger said.
I killed another on my forearm, and two bit me on the ankles at the same time, and one on the neck, and I rolled my sleeves down and buttoned my collar.
“They’ll eat you up, without any shirt on,” I said.
“No, sir,” he said. “Skeeter dont bother me. Cant nothing off the land bother me. I got medicine.”
“You have? On you?”
In the darkness somewhere the cattle moved, in dry crackling surges in the undergrowth. The nigger tugged at his middle and drew something from his waist — a cloth tobacco sack in which I could feel three small, hard objects, slung on a cord about his hips.
Complete Works of William Faulkner Page 686
