Uncollected Stories of William Faulkner (34 page)

“I thought you were fixing to say something,” Lucas said. “So a man’s kinfolks can’t tell on him in court?”

“Never you mind about that,” Edmonds said. “George ain’t any kin to you and he can tell plenty. And if he should start to forget, Nat ain’t any kin to George and she can tell plenty. You’ve waited too late. If George Wilkins and Nat tried to buy a wedding license now, they would probably hang you and George both. Besides, even if Judge Gowan don’t, I’m going to take both of you to the penitentiary myself as soon as you have laid by. Now you get on down to your south creek field. Don’t you come out until you have finished planting it. If dark catches you, I’ll send somebody down with a lantern.”

He was done in the south creek piece before dark. He was back at the stable, his mule watered and rubbed down and stalled and fed and the gear hanging on its peg beside the stall door, while George was still unharnessing. Then he was walking up the hill in
the beginning of twilight, toward his house, not fast; he didn’t even look back when he spoke:

“George Wilkins.”

“Sir,” George said, behind him. Lucas neither slowed nor looked back. They went on, mounting the hill, until they reached the battered gate in the weathered fence enclosing his small dusty yard. Then Lucas stopped and looked back at George behind him, lean, foppish even in overalls, wasp-waisted, with no teeth visible now either in the face sober, not to say grave, beneath the rake of the ruined Panama hat.

“Just what was your idea?” Lucas said.

“I don’t rightly know, sir,” George said. “It uz mostly Nat’s. We never aimed to get you in no trouble. She say maybe ifn we took and fotch dat kettle from whar you and Mister Roth told de shurf hit was and you would find hit settin’ on yo’ back porch, maybe when we offered to help you git shet of hit ’fo’ de shurf got here, yo’ mind might change about loanin’ us de money to—I mean to leffin’ us be married.…” Lucas looked at George. He didn’t blink.

“Hah,” he said. “There’s more folks than just me in that trouble.”

“Yes, sir,” George said. “Hit look like it. I hope it’s gonter be a lesson to me.”

“I hope so too,” Lucas said. “When they get done sending you to Parchman, you’ll have plenty of time to study it.”

“Yes, sir,” George said. “Especially wid you to help me.”

“Hah,” Lucas said again. He continued to stare at George; he raised his voice though only a little: a single word, peremptory and cold, still staring at George: “Nat.”

   The girl came down the path, barefoot, in a clean, faded calico dress and a bright headrag. She had been crying.

“It wasn’t me that told Mister Roth to telefoam for dem shurfs!” she said.

“My mind done changed,” Lucas said. “I’m gonter let you and George Wilkins be married.” She stared at him; he watched her gaze flick to George and return.

“It changed quick,” she said. She watched him now. Then he knew she was not looking at him; her hand came up and touched for an instant the bright cotton handkerchief which bound her
head. “Me, marry wid George and go to live in dat house whar de back porch is done already fell off of and whar I got to wawk a half er mile and back from de spring to fotch water? He ain’t even got no stove!”

“My chimbley cooks good, and I can prop up de porch,” George said.

“And I can get used to wawkin’ a mile fer two lard buckets er water,” she said.

She ceased, with no dying fall of her high, clear soprano voice, watching her father’s face.

“A cookstove. And the back porch propped up. A well.”

“A new back porch,” she said. She might not have even spoken.

“The back porch fixed,” he said. Then she was certainly not looking at him; again her hand rose, the lighter palm pale, the fingers limber and delicate, and touched the back of her headkerchief. Lucas moved. “George Wilkins,” he said.

“Sir,” George said.

“Come into the house,” Lucas said.

   The day came at last. In their Sunday clothes he and Nat and George waited at the gate until the car came down the drive. “Morning, Nat,” Edmonds said. “When did you get home?”

“I got back yistiddy, Mister Roth.”

“You stayed in Jackson a good while.”

“Yassuh. I lef de next day after you and pappy and Gawge went to town wid de shurfs.”

“You and George go on a minute,” Edmonds said. They went on. Lucas stood beside the car. This was the first time Edmonds had spoken to him since that day three weeks ago, as if it had taken that long for his rage to consume itself. Or die down rather, because it still smoldered.

“I suppose you know what’s going to happen to you,” Edmonds said. “When that lawyer gets through with Nat, and Nat gets through with George, and George gets through with you and Judge Gowan gets through with you both. You were on this place with my father for twenty-five years, until he died. You have been on it twenty years with me. Was that still and that whisky they found in your back yard yours?”

“You knows it wasn’t,” Lucas said.

“All right,” Edmonds said. “Was that other still they found hidden in the bottom yours?”

They looked at each other. “I ain’t being tried for that one,” Lucas said.

“Was that still yours, Luke?” Edmonds said. They looked at each other. The face which Edmonds saw was absolutely blank, impenetrable.

“Does you want me to answer that?” Lucas said.

“No!” Edmonds said violently. “Get in the car!”

The square and the streets leading into it were crowded with cars and wagons. Following Edmonds, they crossed the crowded sidewalk before the entrance, in a lane of faces they knew—other tenants from their own farm and from the other farms along the creek, come the seventeen miles also in battered and limping trucks and sedans, without hope of getting into the courtroom itself but only to wait on the street and see them pass—and faces they knew only by hearsay: the rich white lawyers talking to one another around cigars, the proud and powerful of the earth.

Then they were in the marble foyer, where George began to walk gingerly on the hard heels of his Sunday shoes and where Edmonds, at a touch on his arm, looked back and saw in Lucas’ extended hand the thick, folded, soiled document which, opening stiffly at the old hand-smudged folds, revealed among the blunt and forthright lettering above the signature and seal, the two names in the impersonal and legible script of whatever nameless clerk:
George Wilkins
and
Nathalie Beauchamp
, and dated in October of last year.

“Do you mean,” Edmonds said, “that you have had this all the time?
You have had this all the time?
” But still the face he glared at was impenetrable, almost sleepy-looking.

“You hand it to Judge Gowan,” Lucas said.

It didn’t take very long. They sat in a small office, on the edge of a hard bench, decorous and in silence, their backs not touching the bench’s back, while the deputy marshal chewed a toothpick and read a paper. They did not stop in the courtroom. They went on through it, between the empty benches and through another door, into another office, but larger and finer and quieter, where an angry-looking man waited whom Lucas knew only from hearsay
—the United States Attorney, who had moved to Jefferson only after the administration changed eight years ago. But Edmonds was there, and behind the table sat a man whom Lucas did know, who used to come out in Old Zach Edmonds’ time thirty and forty years ago and stay for weeks during the quail season, with Lucas to hold his horse for him to get down and shoot when the dogs pointed.

“Lucas Beauchamp?” the judge said. “With thirty gallons of whisky and a still sitting on his back porch in open daylight? Nonsense.”

“Then there you are,” the angry man said, flinging out his hands. “I didn’t know anything about this either until Edmonds—” But the judge was not listening to the angry man. He was looking at Nat.

“Come here, girl,” he said. Nat moved forward a step or two and stopped. Lucas could see her trembling. She looked small, thin as a lath, young; she was his youngest and last child—seventeen, born in his wife’s old age and, it sometimes seemed to him, in his too. She was too young to be married and face all the troubles that married people had to get through in order to become old and find out for themselves the taste and savor of peace. Just a stove and a new back porch and a well were not enough. “You’re Luke’s girl?” the judge said.

“Yassuh,” Nat said. “I’m name Nat. Nat Wilkins, Gawge Wilkins’ wife. Dar de paper fer hit in yo’ hand.”

“I see it is,” the judge said. “It’s dated last October.”

“Yes, sir, Judge,” George said. “We been had it since I sold my cotton last year. We uz married den, only she won’t come to live in my house unto Mister Luke—I mean to I gots a stove and de porch fixed and a well dug.”

“Have you got that now?”

“Yes, sir, Judge,” George said. “I’m just ’fo’ gettin’ hit. Soon as I gits around to de hammerin’ and de diggin’.”

“I see,” the judge said. “Henry,” he said to the marshal, “have you got that whisky where you can pour it out?”

“Yes, Judge.”

“And both those stills where you can chop them up, destroy them good?”

“Yes, Judge.”

“Then clear my office. Get them out of here. Get that jimber-jawed clown out of here at least.”

“George Wilkins,” Lucas murmured, “he’s talking about you.”

“Yes, sir,” George said. “Hit sound like he is.”

   But before the next three weeks were up, he had begun to get impatient, probably because he now had so little to do. His land was all planted now, after a good season, the seeds of cotton and corn sprouting almost in the planter’s wheel-print between the brief, gusty rains and the rich flood of the northing sun. One day’s work a week would keep them grassed, so all he had to do now, after slopping his hogs and chopping a little cooking wood, was to lean on the fence in the morning’s cool and watch them grow.

But at last in the third week he stood just inside his kitchen door and saw George Wilkins enter the lot in the dusk and go into the stable and emerge presently leading his, Lucas’, fat middle-aged mare and put her in the spring wagon and drive out of the lot and on. So the next morning he went no farther than his first field and stood in the bright dew looking at his cotton until his wife began to shout at him from the house.

Nat was sitting in a chair beside the hearth where the fire had burned for forty-five years, bent forward, her long hands hanging limp between her knees, her face swollen and puffed again from crying. “Yawl and your Gawge Wilkins!” his wife said when Lucas entered. “Gawn and tell him.”

“He ain’t started on de well,” Nat said. “He ain’t even propped up de back porch. Wid all dat money you give him, he ain’t even started. And I axed him and he just say he ain’t got around to it yet, and I wait and I axed him again and he just say he ain’t got around to it yet. Unto I told him at last that ifn he don’t git started like he promised, my mind gonter change about what all I seed dat night dem shurfs come out here and so last night he say he gwine up de road a piece and do I wants to come home and stay because he mought not git back unto late and I say I can bar de door because I thought he was going to fix about starting on de well.

“And when I seed him catch pappy’s mare and de wagon, I knowed dat uz whar he uz gwine. And it ain’t to almost daylight when he got back and he ain’t only ain’t got nothin’ to fix no porch and dig no well, he had done spent de money. And I told him what
I was gonter do and I was waitin’ soon as Mister Roth got up and I told Mister Roth my mind done change about what I seed dat night and Mister Roth start to cussin’ and say I done waited too long because I’m Gawge’s wife now and de court won’t listen and for me to come and tell you and Gawge both to be offen his place by sundown.”

“Dar now,” his wife said. “Dar’s your Gawge Wilkins!” But Lucas was already moving toward the door. “Whar you gwine?” she said. “Whar we gonter move to now?”

“You wait to start worrying about where we gonter move to when Roth Edmonds starts to worrying about why we ain’t gone,” Lucas said.

   The sun was well up now. It was going to be hot today; it was going to make cotton and corn both before the sun went down. When he reached George’s house, George stood quietly out from beyond the corner of it. Lucas crossed the grassless and sun-glared yard. “Where is it?” he said.

“I hid it in de gully whar mine use to be,” George said. “If dem shurfs ain’t find nothing de first time, dey might think hit ain’t no use to look again.”

“You fool,” Lucas said. “Don’t you know a week ain’t gonter pass from now to the next election without one of them looking in that gully just because Roth Edmonds told them there was a still in it once? When they catch you this time, you ain’t gonter have no witness you done already been married to since last fall.”

“Dey ain’t gonter catch me,” George said. “I’m gonter run dis one de way you tells me. I done had my lesson.”

“You better had,” Lucas said. “You take that wagon soon as dark falls and get that thing outen there. I’ll show you where to put it. Hah,” he said. “And I reckon this one looks about like that other one that was in that gully, too.”

“No, sir,” George said. “This is a good one. The worm in hit is almost new. That’s how come I couldn’t git him down no more on the price he axed. That porch and well money lacked two dollars of being enough, but I just made that up myself. But it ain’t worryin’ about gittin’ caught that bothers me. What I can’t keep from studyin’ about is what we gonter tell Nat about that back porch and that well.”

“What
we
is?” Lucas said.

“What I is then,” George said. Lucas looked at him for a moment.

“George Wilkins,” he said.

“Sir,” George said.

“I don’t give no man advice about his wife,” Lucas said.

When they drew near the commissary, Lucas said: “You wait here.” “No, no,” the salesman said. “I’ll talk to him. If I can’t sell it to him, there ain’t a—” Then the salesman stopped. He did not know why. He was young, not yet thirty, with the slightly soiled snap and dash of his calling, and a white man. Yet he stopped and looked at the Negro in battered overalls, whose face showed only that he was at least sixty, who was looking at him not only with dignity but with command.