Uncollected Stories of William Faulkner Page 32

  He looked her straight in the face. He told the lie without batting an eye, quickly, easily: “Ten or twelve dollars will cover it. They will furnish a box, and there will be only the transportation.”

  “A box?” Again she looked at him with that expression curious and detached, as though he were a child. “He is her grandson, Mr. Stevens. When she took him to raise, she gave him my father’s name. Not just a box, Mr. Stevens. I understand that can be done by paying so much a month.”

  “Not just a box,” Stevens said. “Mr. Edmonds will want to help, I know. And I understand old Luke Beauchamp has some money in the bank. And if you will permit me—”

  “That will not be necessary,” she said. He watched her open the reticule; he watched her count onto the desk twenty-five dollars in frayed bills and coins ranging down to nickels and dimes and pennies. “That will take care of the immediate expenses. I will tell her—you are sure there is no hope?”

  “I am sure. He will die tonight.”

  “I will tell her this afternoon that he is dead then.”

  “Would you like for me to tell her?”

  “I will tell her,” she said.

  “Would you like for me to come out and see her then, talk to her?”

  “If you will be so kind.” Then she was gone, erect, her feet crisp and light, almost brisk, on the stairs, ceasing. He telephoned again, to the warden in Illinois, then to an undertaker in Joliet. Then once more he crossed the hot, empty square. He had to wait only a short while for the editor to return from dinner.

  “We’re bringing him home,” Stevens said. “Miss Worsham and you and me and some others. It will cost—”

  “Wait,” the editor said. “What others?”

  “I don’t know yet. It will cost about two hundred. I’m not counting the telephones; I’ll take care of that myself. I’ll get something out of Carothers Edmonds the first time I catch him, I don’t know how much, but something. And maybe fifty around the square. But the rest of it is you and me, because she insisted on leaving twenty-five with me, which is just twice what I tried to persuade her it would cost, and just exactly four times what she can afford to pay—”

  “Wait,” the editor said. “Wait.”

  “And he will come in on Number Nine the day after tomorrow and we will meet it, Miss Worsham and his grandmother, the old nigger, in my car and you and me in yours.”

  [“Oh hell, now, Gavin! Folks will claim I have turned Republican and I’ll lose what few advertisers I have got.”

  Stevens glared at the editor almost, with a sort of furious patience. “Are you going to let that lady meet that nigger murderer’s body by herself, with nobody else there but that old nigger woman, for a lot of blackguard white men to stare at? If somebody thought to send it to your damn little sheet, dont you know it’ll be in the Memphis papers tomorrow morning?” After a moment the editor looked away.

  “All right,” he said. “Then what?”]

  “Miss Worsham and the old woman will take him back home, back where he was born. Or where the old woman raised him. Or where she tried to. And the hearse out there will be fifteen more, not counting flowers—”

  “Flowers?”

  “Flowers,” Stevens said. “Call the whole thing two hundred and twenty-five. And it will probably be mostly you and me. All right?”

  “All right,” the editor said. “By Jupiter,” he added, “even if I could help myself, the novelty will be almost worth it. It will be the first time in my life I ever paid money for copy I had already promised beforehand I will not print.”

  “Have already promised beforehand you will not print,” Stevens said. And during the rest of that hot and now windless afternoon, while officials from the city hall and justices of the peace and bailiffs came fifteen and twenty miles from the ends of the county, mounted the stairs and stood in his empty office and called his name and then sat and waited and went away and returned and sat again, fuming, Stevens passed from store to store and office to office about the square—merchant and clerk, proprietor and employee, doctor and dentist and lawyer—with his set and rapid speech: “It’s to bring a dead nigger home. It’s for Miss Worsham. Never mind about a paper to sign: just give me a dollar. Or a half a dollar then.”

  And that night after supper he walked through the breathless and star-filled darkness to Miss Worsham’s house on the edge of town and knocked on the paintless door. Hamp Worsham admitted him—an old man, belly-bloated from the vegetables on which he and his wife and Miss Worsham all three mostly lived, with a fringe of white hair and the face of a Roman senator and the blurred pupilless eyes of the old.

  “She expecting you,” he said. “She say to kindly step up to the chamber.”

  “Is that where Aunt Mollie is?” Stevens said.

  “We all dar,” Worsham said.

  So Stevens crossed the lamplit hall (the entire house was still lighted by oil lamps and there was no running water in it) and preceded the Negro up the clean, paintless stairs beside the faded wallpaper, and followed the old Negro up the hall and into the clean, spare bedroom with its unmistakable faint odor of old maidens. They were all there, as Worsham had said—his wife, a tremendous woman in a bright turban leaning in the door, Miss Worsham erect again on a hard chair, the old Negress sitting in the one rocking chair beside the hearth on which even tonight a few ashes smoldered faintly.

  She had a reed-stemmed clay pipe in her hand, but she was not smoking it, the ash dead and white in the stained bowl; and actually looking at her for the first time, Stevens thought: “Good Lord, she’s not as big as a ten-year-old child.” Then he sat too, so that the four of them—himself, Miss Worsham, the old Negress and her brother—made a circle about the brick hearth on which the ancient symbol of physical coherence smoldered.

  “He’ll be home the day after tomorrow, Aunt Molly,” he said. The old Negress didn’t even look at him; she never had looked at him.

  “He dead,” she said. “Pharaoh got him.”

  “Oh, yes, Lord,” Worsham said. “Pharaoh got him.”

  “Done sold my Benjamin,” the old Negress said. “Sold him in Egypt.” She began to sway faintly back and forth in the chair.

  “Oh, yes, Lord,” Worsham said.

  “Hush,” Miss Worsham said. “Hush, Hamp.”

  “I telephoned to Mr. Edmonds,” Stevens said. “He will have everything ready when you get there.”

  “Roth Edmonds sold him,” the old Negress said. She swayed back and forth in the chair. “Sold my Benjamin.”

  “Hush,” Miss Worsham said. “Hush, Mollie. Hush now.”

  “No,” Stevens said. “No he didn’t, Aunt Mollie. It wasn’t Mr. Edmonds. Mr. Edmonds didn’t—” (“But she certainly won’t hear me,” he thought. She was not even looking at him, never had looked at him.)

  “Sold my Benjamin,” she said. “Sold him in Egypt.”

  “Sold him in Egypt,” Worsham said.

  “Roth Edmonds sold my Benjamin.”

  “Sold him to Pharaoh.”

  “Sold him to Pharaoh and now he dead.”

  “I’d better go,” Stevens said. He rose quickly. Miss Worsham rose too, but [the others did not even look at them—the brother and sister facing one another across the hearth and both swaying back and forth, Worsham’s wife leaning against the wall, and now when Stevens looked at her he saw that her eyes were rolled upward in her skull until the pupils had vanished and only the whites showed.] He did not wait for her to precede him—he went down the hall, fast. “Soon I will be outside, then there will be air, space, breath,” he thought. He could hear her behind him—the crisp, almost brisk yet unhurried feet, and beyond the feet, the voices:

  “Sold my Benjamin. Sold him in Egypt.”

  “Sold him in Egypt. Oh, yes, Lord.”

  He descended the stairs, almost running. It was not far now; now he could smell it, feel it—the breathless and simple dark, and now he could manner himself to pause and wait, turning at the door, watching Miss Worsham
as she approached—the high, white, erect, old-time head approaching through the old-time lamplight beyond which he could now hear the third voice, which would be that of Worsham’s wife—a true, constant soprano that ran without words beneath the strophe and antistrophe of the brother and sister:

  “Sold him in Egypt and now he dead.”

  “O, yes, Lord. Sold him in Egypt.”

  “Sold him in Egypt.”

  “And now he dead.”

  “Sold him to Pharaoh.”

  “And now he dead.”

  “I’m sorry,” Stevens said. “I ask you to forgive me. I should have known. I shouldn’t have come.”

  “It’s all right,” Miss Worsham said. “It’s our grief.”

  And on the next bright, hot day but one the hearse and the two cars were waiting when the southbound train came in. There were more than a dozen cars waiting, but it was not until the train came that Stevens and the editor began to notice the number of Negroes and whites both. Then, with the idle white men and youths and small boys and probably half a hundred Negroes, men and women too, watching quietly, the Negro undertaker’s men lifted the gray-and-silver casket from the train and carried it to the hearse and snatched the wreaths and floral symbols of mortality briskly and efficiently out and slid the casket in and replaced the flowers and clapped to the door.

  Then, with Miss Worsham and the old Negress in Stevens’ car with the driver he had hired and himself and the editor in the editor’s car, they followed the hearse as it swung into the long hill up from the station, going fast in a whining lower gear until it reached the crest, going pretty fast still though quiet now, purring, until it slowed into the square, crossing the square, circling the Confederate monument and the courthouse while the merchants and clerks and professional men who had given Stevens the dollars and half dollars two days ago, and the ones who had not, watched quietly from doors and upstairs windows, swinging then into the street which at the edge of town would become the country road leading to the destination seventeen miles away, already picking up speed again and followed by the two cars containing the four people—the highheaded, erect lady, the old Negress, the designated paladin of justice and truth, the Ph.D. from Heidelberg—in formal component complement to the Negro murderer’s catafalque, the slain wolf.

  When they reached the edge of town, the hearse was going quite fast. Now they flashed past the metal sign which said in reverse, Jefferson, Corporate Limit, and the street vanished, slanting away into another long hill, becoming gravel. Stevens leaned forward and cut the switch, so that the editor’s car coasted, slowing as he began to brake it, the hearse and the other car drawing rapidly away now as if in flight, the light and unrained summer dust spurting from beneath the fleeing wheels; soon they were gone. The editor turned his car clumsily, grinding the gears, sawing and filling until he was back in the road facing town again. Then he sat for a moment, his foot on the clutch.

  “Do you know what she asked me this morning, back there at the station?” he said. “She said, ‘Is you gonter put hit in de paper?’ ”

  “What?” Stevens said.

  “That’s what I said,” the editor said. “And she said it again: ‘Is you gonter put hit in de paper? I wants hit all in de paper. All of hit.’ And I wanted to say, ‘If I should happen to know how he really died, do you want that in too?’ And, by Jupiter, if I had said that and if she had known what we know even, I believe she would have said yes. But I didn’t say it. I just said, ‘Why, you couldn’t read it, Aunty.’ And she said, ‘Miss Belle will show me whar to look and I kin look at hit. You put hit in de paper. All of hit.’ ”

  “Oh,” Stevens said. (“Yes,” he thought. “It doesn’t matter to her now. Since it had to be and she couldn’t stop it, and now that it’s all over and done and finished, she doesn’t care how he died. She wanted him home, but she wanted him to come home right. She wanted that casket for him and those flowers and the hearse and she wanted to ride through town behind it in a car.”) “Come on,” he said. “Let’s get back to town. I haven’t seen my desk in two days.”

  Delta Autumn

  Soon now they would enter the Delta. The sensation was familiar to him, renewed like this each last week in November for more than fifty years—the last hill at the foot of which the rich unbroken alluvial flatness began as the sea began at the base of its cliffs, dissolving away beneath the unhurried November rain as the sea itself would dissolve away. At first they had come in wagons—the guns, the bedding, the dogs, the food, the whiskey, the anticipation of hunting—the young men who could drive all night and all the following day in the cold rain and pitch camp in the rain and sleep in the wet blankets and rise at daylight the next morning to hunt. There had been bear then, and a man shot a doe or a fawn as quickly as he did a buck, and in the afternoons they shot wild turkey with pistols to test their stalking skill and marksmanship, feeding all but the breast to the dogs. But that time was gone now and now they went in cars, driving faster and faster each year because the roads were better and they had farther to drive, the territory in which game still existed drawing yearly inward as his life was drawing in, until now he was the last of those who had once made the journey in wagons without feeling it and now those who accompanied him were the sons and even the grandsons of the men who had ridden for twenty-four hours in rain and sleet behind the steaming mules, calling him Uncle Ike now, and he no longer told anyone how near seventy he actually was because he knew as well as they did that he no longer had any business making such expeditions, even by car. In fact, each time now, on that first night in camp, lying aching and sleepless in the harsh blankets, his blood only faintly warmed by the single thin whiskey-and-water which he allowed himself, he would tell himself that this would be his last. But he would stand that trip (he still shot almost as well as he had ever shot, he still killed almost as much of the game he saw as he had ever killed; he no longer knew how many deer had fallen before his gun) and the fierce long heat of the next summer would somehow renew him. Then November would come again and again in the car with two of the sons of his old companions, whom he had taught not only how to distinguish between the prints left by a buck and a doe but between the sound they made in moving, he would look ahead past the jerking arc of the windshield wiper and see the land flatten suddenly, dissolving away beneath the rain as the sea itself would dissolve, and he would say, “Well boys, there it is again.”

  This time though he didn’t have time to speak. The driver of the car stopped it, slamming it to a skidding halt on the greasy pavement without warning, so that old McCaslin, first looking ahead at the empty road, glanced sharply past the man in the middle until he could see the face of the driver, the youngest face of them all, darkly aquiline, handsome and ruthless and saturnine and staring sombrely ahead through the steaming windshield across which the twin arms of the wiper flicked and flicked. “I didn’t intend to come in here this time,” he said. His name was Boyd. He was just past forty. He owned the car as well as two of the three Walker hounds in the rumble behind them, just as he owned, or at least did the driving of, anything—animal, machine or human—which he happened to be using.

  “You said that back in Jefferson last week,” McCaslin said. “Then you changed your mind. Have you changed it again?”

  “Oh, Don’s coming,” the third man said. His name was Legate. He seemed to be speaking to no one. “If it was just a buck he was coming all this distance for now. But he’s got a doe in here. On two legs—when she’s standing up. Pretty light-colored too. The one he was after them nights last fall when he said he was coon-hunting. The one I figured maybe he was still chasing when he was gone all that month last January.” He chortled, still in that voice addressed to no one, not quite completely jeering.

  “What?” McCaslin said. “What’s that?”

  “Now, Uncle Ike,” Legate said, “that’s something a man your age ain’t supposed to had no interest in in twenty years.” But McCaslin had not even glanced at Legate. He was sti
ll watching Boyd’s face, the eyes behind the spectacles, the blurred eyes of an old man but quite sharp too; eyes which could still see a gun barrel and what ran beyond it as well as any of them could. He was remembering himself now: how last year, during the final stage by motor boat to where they would camp, one of the boxes of food had been lost overboard and how on the second day Boyd had gone back to the nearest town for supplies and had been gone overnight and when he did return, something had happened to him: he would go into the woods each dawn with his gun when the others went, but McCaslin, watching him, knew that he was not hunting.

  “All right,” he said. “Take Will and me on to shelter where we can wait for the truck, and you can go back.”

  “I’m going in,” Boyd said harshly. “I’m going to get mine too. Because this will be the last of it.”

  “The last of deer hunting, or of doe hunting?” Legate said. This time McCaslin paid no attention to him even in speech. He still watched Boyd’s savage and immobile face.

  “Why?” he said.

  “After Hitler gets through with it? Or Yokohama or Pelley or Smith or Jones or whatever he will call himself in this country.”

  “We’ll stop him in this country,” Legate said. “Even if he calls himself George Washington.”

  “How?” Boyd said. “By singing God Bless America in bars at midnight and wearing dime-store flags in our lapels?”

  “So that’s what’s worrying you,” McCaslin said. “I ain’t noticed this country being short of defenders yet when it needed them. You did some of it yourself twenty years ago and did it well, if those medals you brought back home mean anything. This country is a little mite stronger and bigger than any one man or even group of men outside or inside of it either. I reckon it can cope with one Austrian paper hanger, no matter what he calls himself. My pappy and some other better men than any of them you named tried once to tear it in two with a war, and they failed.”