Uncollected Stories of William Faulkner (40 page)

“An old nigger woman named Mollie Beauchamp,” Stevens said. “She and her husband live on the Edmonds’ place. It’s her grandson. You remember him—Butch Beauchamp, about five or six years ago, who spent a year in town, mostly in jail, until they finally caught him breaking into Rouncewell’s store one night? Well, he’s in worse trouble than that now. I don’t doubt her at all. I just hope, for her sake as well as that of the great public whom I represent, that his present trouble is bad and maybe final too—”

“Wait,” the editor said. He didn’t even need to leave his desk. He took the press association flimsy from its spike and handed it to Stevens. “It just came in,” the editor said. It was datelined from Joliet, Illinois, this morning: “Mississippi Negro, on eve of execution for murder of Chicago policeman, exposes alias by completing census questionnaire. Samuel Worsham Beauchamp.…”

   Stevens was crossing the empty square again in the hot suspension in which noon was now several minutes nearer. He had thought he was going home to his boardinghouse for the noon meal, but he found that he was not. “Besides, I didn’t lock my office door,” he thought. “So it seems I didn’t mean what I said I hoped.” So he mounted the outside stairs again, out of the hazy and now windless sun glare, and entered his office. He stopped.
Then he said, “Good morning, Miss Worsham.”

She was quite old too—thin, erect, with a neat, old-time piling of white hair beneath a faded hat of thirty years ago, in rusty black, with a frayed and faded black umbrella. She lived alone in the decaying house her father had left her, where she gave lessons in china painting and, with the help of Hamp Worsham and his wife, raised chickens and vegetables for market.

“I came about Mollie,” she said. “Mollie Beauchamp. She said that you—”

   He told her while she watched him, erect on the hard chair where the old Negress had sat, the rusty umbrella leaning against her knee. On her lap, beneath her folded hands, lay an immense old-fashioned beaded reticule. “He is to be executed tonight.”

“Can nothing be done? Mollie’s and Hamp’s parents belonged to my grandfather. Mollie and I grew up together. Our birthdays are in the very same month.”

“I telephoned,” Stevens said. “I talked to the warden at Joliet, and to the district attorney in Chicago. He had a fair trial, a good lawyer. He had money. He was in a business called numbers, that people like him make money in.” She watched him, erect, not moving. “He is a murderer, Miss Worsham. He shot that policeman in the back. A bad son of a bad father. He confessed it afterward.”

“I know,” she said. Then he realized that she was not looking at him, not seeing him at least. “It’s terrible.”

“So is murder terrible,” Stevens said. “It’s better this way.” Then she was looking at him again.

“I wasn’t thinking of him. I was thinking of Mollie. She mustn’t know.”

“Yes,” Stevens said. “I have already talked to Mr. Wilmoth at the paper. He has agreed not to print anything. I will telephone the Memphis paper, but it’s probably too late for that, even if they would.… If we could just persuade her to go on back home this afternoon, before the Memphis paper.… Out there, where the only white person she ever sees is Mr. Edmonds, and I can see him and warn him not to tell her, and even if the niggers would hear about it, they wouldn’t—. And then maybe in about two or three months I could go out and tell her he is dead and buried somewhere in the
North.…” This time she was watching him with such an expression that he ceased talking; she sat there, erect on the hard chair, watching him until he had ceased.

“She will want to take the body back home with her,” she said.

“The body?” Stevens said. The expression was neither shocked nor disapproving. It merely embodied some old, timeless, female affinity for blood and grief. Looking at her, Stevens thought: “She has walked into town in this heat. Unless Hamp brought her in in the buggy he peddles eggs and vegetables from.”

“He is the only child of her oldest daughter, her own dead first child. He must come home.”

“He must come home,” Stevens said. “I’ll attend to it at once. I’ll telephone at once.”

“You are kind.” For the first time she stirred, moved. He watched her hands draw the reticule toward her, clasping it. “I will defray the expenses. Can you give me some idea—?”

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.