The Essential Faulkner (28 page)

“Be damned if I would.—You want to come home with me? We’ll have time to eat and then ride out there in time for the—–” But I couldn’t do that either.

“No,” I said. “I’m not hungry after all. I think I’ll go home.”

“Don’t you want to wait and ride out with me?”

“No. I’ll go on.”

“You don’t want to stay here, anyway.” He looked around the room again, where the smell of powder smoke still lingered a little, still lay somewhere on the hot dead air though invisible now, blinking a little with his fierce pale unintroverted eyes. “Well by God,” he said again. “Maybe you’re right, maybe there has been enough killing in your family without— Come on.” We left the office. I waited at the foot of the stairs and soon Ringo came up with the horses. We crossed the square again. There were no feet on the Holston House railing now (it was twelve o’clock) but a group of men stood before the door who raised their hats and I raised mine and Ringo and I rode on.

We did not go fast. Soon it was one, maybe after; the carriages and buggies would begin to leave the square soon, so I turned from the road at the end of the pasture and I sat the mare, trying to open the gate without dismounting, until Ringo dismounted and opened it. We crossed the pasture in the hard fierce sun; I could have seen the house now but I didn’t look. Then we were in the shade, the close thick airless shade of the creek bottom; the old rails still lay in the undergrowth where we
had built the pen to hide the Yankee mules. Presently I heard the water, then I could see the sunny glints. We dismounted. I lay on my back, I thought
Now it can begin again if it wants to
. But it did not. I went to sleep. I went to sleep almost before I had stopped thinking. I slept for almost five hours and I didn’t dream anything at all yet I waked myself up crying, crying too hard to stop it. Ringo was squatting beside me and the sun was gone though there was a bird of some sort still singing somewhere and the whistle of the north-bound evening train sounded and the short broken puffs of starting where it had evidently stopped at our flag station. After a while I began to stop and Ringo brought his hat full of water from the creek but instead I went down to the water myself and bathed my face.

There was still a good deal of light in the pasture, though the whippoorwills had begun, and when we reached the house there was a mockingbird singing in the magnolia, the night song now, the drowsy moony one, and again the moon like the rim print of a heel in wet sand. There was just one light in the hall now and so it was all over though I could still smell the flowers even above the verbena in my coat. I had not looked at him again. I had started to before I left the house but I did not, I did not see him again and all the pictures we had of him were bad ones because a picture could no more have held him dead than the house could have kept his body. But I didn’t need to see him again because he was there, he would always be there; maybe what Drusilla meant by his dream was not something which he possessed but something which he had bequeathed us which we could never forget, which would even assume the corporeal shape of him whenever any of us, black or white, closed our eyes. I went into the house. There was no light in the drawing room except the last of the afterglow which came through the western window where Aunt Jenny’s colored glass was; I was about to go on upstairs when I saw her
sitting there beside the window. She didn’t call me and I didn’t speak Drusilla’s name, I just went to the door and stood there. “She’s gone,” Aunt Jenny said. “She took the evening train. She has gone to Montgomery, to Dennison.” Denny had been married about a year now; he was living in Montgomery, reading law.

“I see,” I said. “Then she didn’t—–” But there wasn’t any use in that either; Jed White must have got there before one o’clock and told them. And besides, Aunt Jenny didn’t answer. She could have lied to me but she didn’t, she said,

“Come here.” I went to her chair. “Kneel down. I can’t see you.”

“Don’t you want the lamp?”

“No. Kneel down.” So I knelt beside the chair. “So you had a perfectly splendid Saturday afternoon, didn’t you? Tell me about it.” Then she put her hands on my shoulders. I watched them come up as though she were trying to stop them; I felt them on my shoulders as if they had a separate life of their own and were trying to do something which for my sake she was trying to restrain, prevent. Then she gave up or she was not strong enough because they came up and took my face between them, hard, and suddenly the tears sprang and streamed down her face like Drusilla’s laughing had. “Oh, damn you Sartorises!” she said. “Damn you! Damn you!”

As I passed down the hall the light came up in the dining-room and I could hear Louvinia laying the table for supper. So the stairs were lighted quite well. But the upper hall was dark. I saw her open door (that unmistakable way in which an open door stands open when nobody lives in the room any more) and I realized I had not believed that she was really gone. So I didn’t look into the room. I went on to mine and entered. And then for a long moment I thought it was the verbena in my lapel which I still smelled. I thought that until I had crossed the room and looked down at the pillow on which it lay—the
single sprig of it (without looking she would pinch off a half dozen of them and they would be all of a size, almost all of a shape, as if a machine had stamped them out) filling the room, the dusk, the evening with that odor which she said you could smell alone above the smell of horses.

The county built a marble monument to Colonel Sartoris; it stands on the highest site in the Jefferson cemetery, overlooking the railroad he built. Drusilla disappeared from the family records. Young Bayard Sartoris lost control of his father’s railroad, but he founded a bank in Jefferson and was its president during the rest of his long life. Years afterward, with the death of Major Cassius de Spain, he became the county’s leading citizen.

Major de Spain, as a result of tax sales and mortgage foreclosures, had acquired most of the hundred square miles that Colonel Sutpen once owned. He remodeled the shack where Wash Jones had died into a hunting lodge; and there, late every fall, he used to entertain a group of his friends, including General Compson and McCaslin Edmonds and young Isaac McCaslin, the son of Uncle Buck and Miss Sophonsiba. Sam Fathers was their guide through the wild lands in the Tallahatchie River bottom. It was on the north bank of the river that Boon Hogganbeck, who also had Chickasaw ancestors, finally killed Old Ben, the enormous bear with the mutilated paw.

“The Bear” appeared as a chapter of
Go Down, Moses
after being reworked in a masterly fashion from two magazine stories. The chapter, here reprinted, is divided into five sections. Those who would like to read what is first of all a hunting story—or better, a story of the chase, with
overtones that make it one of the greatest in the language—should confine themselves to the first three sections and the last, which are written in the author’s simplest manner. It is the long fourth section that creates difficulties for the reader, partly because of its complicated style, but chiefly because it deals with the general theme of
Go Down, Moses
—which is the relation between the white and the black descendants of old Carothers McCaslin—rather than with the yearly pursuit of Old Ben. Faulkner himself omitted the section when he reprinted “The Bear” as part of his book about the wilderness—
Big Woods
(1955)—and the result was a more unified story. Strangely, however, it had lost some of the haunting power that it possesses in the longer version.

It is in the fourth section that Faulkner carries to an extreme his effort toward putting the whole world into one sentence, holding it suspended between one capital letter and one period. There is a sentence that occupies six pages of the present volume (259-265), with a two-page parenthesis in the middle. Containing several paragraphs, each of which begins with a small letter, and a quantity of quoted matter, it runs to more than eighteen hundred words, and it was quite probably—until Faulkner himself exceeded that length in a sentence of “The Jail” (1951)—the longest in American fiction. In all this section of “The Bear,” the reader may have difficulty in fitting the subjects to the predicates and in disentangling the subordinate clauses—let alone in tracing the genealogy of the McCaslin family—and yet, if he perseveres, he will discover one of Faulkner’s most impressive themes: the belief in Isaac McCaslin’s heart that the land itself has been cursed by slavery, and that the only way for him to escape the curse is to relinquish the land.

There was a man and a dog too this time. Two beasts, counting Old Ben, the bear, and two men, counting Boon Hogganbeck, in whom some of the same blood ran which ran in Sam Fathers, even though Boon’s was a plebeian strain of it and only Sam and Old Ben and the mongrel Lion were taintless and incorruptible.

Isaac McCaslin was sixteen. For six years now he had been a man’s hunter. For six years now he had heard the best of all talking. It was of the wilderness, the big woods, bigger and older than any recorded document—of white man fatuous enough to believe he had bought any fragment of it, of Indian ruthless enough to pretend that any fragment of it had been his to convey; bigger than Major de Spain and the scrap he pretended to, knowing better; older than old Thomas Sutpen of whom Major de Spain had had it and who knew better; older even than old Ikkemotubbe, the Chickasaw chief, of whom old Sutpen had had it and who knew better in his turn. It was of the men, not white nor black nor red, but men, hunters, with the will and hardihood to endure and the humility and skill to survive, and the dogs and the bear and deer juxtaposed and reliefed against it, ordered and compelled by and within the wilderness in the ancient and unremitting contest according to the ancient and immitigable rules which voided all regrets and brooked no quarter;—the
best game of all, the best of all breathing and forever the best of all listening, the voices quiet and weighty and deliberate for retrospection and recollection and exactitude among the concrete trophies—the racked guns and the heads and skins—in the libraries of town houses or the offices of plantation houses or (and best of all) in the camps themselves where the intact and still-warm meat yet hung, the men who had slain it sitting before the burning logs on hearths, when there were houses and hearths, or about the smoky blazing of piled wood in front of stretched tarpaulins when there were not. There was always a bottle present, so that it would seem to him that those fine fierce instants of heart and brain and courage and wiliness and speed were concentrated and distilled into that brown liquor which not women, not boys and children, but only hunters drank, drinking not of the blood they spilled but some condensation of the wild immortal spirit, drinking it moderately, humbly even, not with the pagan’s base and baseless hope of acquiring thereby the virtues of cunning and strength and speed but in salute to them. Thus it seemed to him on this December morning not only natural but actually fitting that this should have begun with whiskey.

He realized later that it had begun long before that. It had already begun on that day when he first wrote his age in two ciphers and his cousin McCaslin brought him for the first time to the camp, the big woods, to earn for himself from the wilderness the name and state of hunter provided he in his turn were humble and enduring enough. He had already inherited then, without ever having seen it, the big old bear with one trap-ruined foot that in an area almost a hundred miles square had earned for himself a name, a definite designation like a living man:—the long legend of corncribs broken down and rifled, of shoats and grown pigs and even calves carried bodily into the woods and devoured, and traps and deadfalls overthrown and dogs mangled and slain, and shotgun and even rifle
shots delivered at point-blank range yet with no more effect than so many peas blown through a tube by a child—a corridor of wreckage and destruction beginning back before the boy was born, through which sped, not fast but rather with the ruthless and irresistible deliberation of a locomotive, the shaggy tremendous shape. It ran in his knowledge before he ever saw it. It loomed and towered in his dreams before he even saw the unaxed woods where it left its crooked print, shaggy, tremendous, red-eyed, not malevolent but just big, too big for the dogs which tried to bay it, for the horses which tried to ride it down, for the men and the bullets they fired into it; too big for the very country which was its constricting scope. It was as if the boy had already divined what his senses and intellect had not encompassed yet: that doomed wilderness whose edges were being constantly and punily gnawed at by men with plows and axes who feared it because it was wilderness, men myriad and nameless even to one another in the land where the old bear had earned a name, and through which ran not even a mortal beast but an anachronism indomitable and invincible out of an old, dead time, a phantom, epitome and apotheosis of the old, wild life which the little puny humans swarmed and hacked at in a fury of abhorrence and fear, like pygmies about the ankles of a drowsing elephant;—the old bear, solitary, indomitable, and alone; widowered, childless, and absolved of mortality—old Priam reft of his old wife and outlived all his sons.

Still a child, with three years, then two years, then one year yet before he too could make one of them, each November he would watch the wagon containing the dogs and the bedding and food and guns and his cousin McCaslin and Tennie’s Jim and Sam Fathers too, until Sam moved to the camp to live, depart for the Big Bottom, the big woods. To him, they were going not to hunt bear and deer but to keep yearly rendezvous with the bear which they did not even intend to kill. Two weeks later they
would return, with no trophy, no skin. He had not expected it. He had not even feared that it might be in the wagon this time with the other skins and heads. He did not even tell himself that in three years or two years or one year more he would be present and that it might even be his gun. He believed that only after he had served his apprenticeship in the woods which would prove him worthy to be a hunter, would he even be permitted to distinguish the crooked print, and that even then for two November weeks he would merely make another minor one, along with his cousin and Major de Spain and General Compson and Walter Ewell and Boon and the dogs which feared to bay it, and the shotguns and rifles which failed even to bleed it, in the yearly pageant-rite of the old bear’s furious immortality.