Uncollected Stories of William Faulkner (50 page)

“Yes,” I said. “It was pretty smart.”

“It was worse,” Uncle Gavin said. “It was bad. Nobody would ever have thought anyone except a Pacific veteran would have invented a booby-trap, no matter how much he denied it.”

“It was still smart,” I said. “Even Smith will agree.”

“Yes,” Uncle Gavin said. “That’s why I telephoned you. You were a soldier too. I may need an interpreter to talk to him.”

“I was just a major,” I said. “I never had enough rank to tell anything to any sergeant, let alone a Marine one.” But we didn’t go [to find] Smith first; he would be in his cotton-patch now anyway. And if Snopes had been me, there wouldn’t have been anybody in his house either. But there was. He opened the door himself; he wore an apron and carried a frying pan. There was even a fried egg in it. But then, thinking of that before hand wouldn’t be much for who thought of that reciprocating booby-trap. And there wasn’t anything in his face either.

“Gentle-men,” he said. “Come in.”

“No thanks,” Uncle Gavin said. “It wont take that long. This is yours, I think.” There was a table; Uncle Gavin laid the feed sack on it and flipped it suddenly, the mutilated rifle sliding across the table until it stopped. And still there was nothing whatever in Snopes’s face or voice.

“That ere is what you lawyers call debatable, aint it?”

“Oh yes,” Uncle Gavin said. “Everybody knows about finger prints now too, just like they do about space flight and booby-traps.”

“Yes,” Snopes said. “Are you giving it to me, or selling it to me?”

“I’m selling it to you,” Uncle Gavin said. “For a deed to Essie Meadowfill for that strip of your lot the oil company wants to buy, and a release for that strip of Meadowfill’s lot that your deed covers. She’ll pay you what you paid for the strip, plus ten percent, of what the oil company pays her for it.” And now indeed Snopes didn’t move, immobile with the cold egg in the frying pan. “That’s right,” Uncle Gavin said. “In that case, I’d have to see if McKinley Smith wants to buy it.”

He was smart, you’d have to give him that; smart enough to
know exactly how far to try. “Just ten percent.?” he said.

“You invented that figure,” Uncle Gavin said. And smart enough to know when to quit trying too. He set the frying pan carefully on the floor and folded the mutilated rifle back into the feed sack.

“I reckon you’ll have time to be in your office today, wont you?” he said.

And this time it was Uncle Gavin who stopped dead for a second. But he only said: “I’m going there now.” And we could have met Smith at his house when he came in at sundown too. It was Uncle Gavin who wouldn’t wait; it was not yet noon when we stood at the roadside fence and watched Smith and the mule come up the long black shear of turning earth like the immobilised wake of the plow’s mold-board. Then he was standing across the fence from us, naked from the waist up except for his overalls and combat boots; and I remembered what Uncle Gavin had said that morning about what was withheld to be no longer withheld. He handed Smith the deed. “Here,” he said.

Smith read it. “This is Essie’s,” he said.

“Then marry her,” Uncle Gavin said. “Then you can sell that lot and buy a farm. Isn’t that what you both want? Haven’t you got a shirt or a jumper here with you? Get it and you can ride to town with me; Chick here will bring the mule.”

“No,” Smith said; he was already shoving, actually ramming the deed into his pocket as he turned back to the mule. “I’ll bring him in. I’m going home first. I aint going to marry anybody without a necktie and a shave.”

   And one more, while we were waiting for the Baptist minister to wash his hands and put his coat on too; Mrs Meadowfill was wearing the first hat any of us had ever seen on her; it looked a good deal like the first hat anybody ever made. “But papa,” Essie Smith-soon-to-be said.

“Oh,” Uncle Gavin said. “You mean that wheel-chair. It belongs to me now. It was a legal fee. I’m going to give it to you for a wedding present.”

Soon the sharp line of the hill-crest had cut off his shadow’s head; and pushing it like a snake before him, he saw it gradually become nothing. And at last he had no shadow at all. His heavy shapeless shoes were gray in the dusty road, his overalls were gray with dust: dust was like a benediction upon him and upon the day of labor behind him. He did not recall the falling of slain wheat and his muscles had forgotten the heave and thrust of fork and grain, his hands had forgotten the feel of a wooden handle worn smooth and sweet as silk to the touch; he had forgotten a yawning loft and spinning chaff in the sunlight like an immortal dance.

Behind him a day of labor, before him cloddish eating, and dull sleep in a casual rooming house. And tomorrow labor again and his sinister circling shadow marking another day away. The hill broke briefly and sharply, soon, on its crest it was no more sharp. Here was the valley in shadow, and the opposite hill in two dimensions and gold with sun. Within the valley the town lay among lilac shadows. Among lilac shadows was the food he would eat and the sleep that waited him; perhaps a girl like defunctive music, moist with heat, in blue gingham, would cross his path fatefully; and he too would be as other young men sweating the wheat to gold, along the moony land.

Here was town anyway. Above gray walls were branches of apple once sweet with bloom and yet green, barn and house were hives from which the bees of sunlight had flown away. From here the court-house was a dream dreamed by Thucydides: you could not see that pale Ionic columns were stained with casual tobacco.
And from the blacksmith’s there came the measured ring of hammer and anvil like a call to vespers.

Reft of motion, his body felt his cooling blood, felt the evening drawing away like water; his eyes saw the shadow of the church spire like a portent across the land. He watched the trickling dust from his inverted shoes. His feet were grained and grimy with dust; and cooled, took the pleasantly warm moistness of his shoes gratefully.

The sun was a red descending furnace mouth, his shadow he had thought lost crouched like a skulking dog at his feet. The sun was in the trees, dripping from leaf to leaf, the sun was like a little silver flame moving among the trees. Why, its something alive, he thought, watching a golden light among dark pines, a little flame that had somehow lost its candle and was seeking for it.

How he knew it was a woman or a girl at that distance he could not have told, but know he did; and for a time he watched the aimless movements of the figure with vacuous curiosity. The figure, pausing, took the last of the red sun in a slim golden plane that, breaking again into movement, disappeared.

For a clear moment there was an old sharp beauty behind his eyes. Then his once-clean instincts become swinish got him lurching into motion. He climbed a fence under the contemplative stare of cattle and ran awkwardly across a harvested corn field toward the woods. Old soft furrows shifted beneath his stride, causing his pounding knees to knock together and brittle corn stalks hindered his speed with wanton and static unconcern.

He gained the woods by climbing another fence and stopped for a moment while the west alchemized the leaden dust upon him, gilding the tips of his unshaven beard. Hardwood,—maple and beech trunks, were twin strips of red gold and lavender upright in earth, and stretched branches sloped the sunset to unwordable colors;—they were like the hands of misers reluctantly dripping golden coins of sunset. Pines were half iron and half bronze, sculptured into a symbol of eternal quiet, dripping gold also which the sparse grass took from tree to tree like a running fire, quenching it at last in the shadow of pines. A bird on a swinging branch regarded him briefly, sung, and flew away.

Before this green cathedral of trees he stood for a while, empty as a sheep, feeling the dying day draining from the world as a
bath-tub drains, or a cracked bowl; and he could hear the day repeating slow orisons in a green nave. Then he moved forward again, slowly, as though he expected a priest to stop forth, halting him and reading his soul.

Nothing happened though. The day slowly died without a sound about him, and gravity directed him down hill along peaceful avenues of trees. Soon the violet shadow of the hill itself took him. There was no sun here, though the tips of trees were still as gold-dipped brushes and the trunks of trees upon the summit were like a barred grate beyond which the evening burned slowly away. He stopped again, knowing fear.

He recalled fragments of the day—of sucking cool water from a jug with another waiting his turn, of the wheat breaking to the reaper’s blade as the thrusting horses surged to the collar, of horses dreaming of oats in a barn sweet with ammonia and the smell of sweaty harness, of blackbirds like scraps of burned paper slanting above the wheat. He thought of the run of muscles beneath a blue shirt wet with sweat, and of someone to listen or talk to. Always someone, some other member of his race, of his kind. Man can counterfeit everything except silence. And in this silence he knew fear.

For here was something that even the desire for a woman’s body took no account of. Or, using that instinct for the purpose of seducing him from the avenues of safety, of security where others of his kind ate and slept, it had betrayed him. If I find her, I am safe he thought, not knowing whether it was copulation or companionship that he wanted. There was nothing here for him: hills, sloping down on either side, approaching yet forever severed by a small stream. The water ran brown under alders and willow, and without light, seemed dark and forbidding. Like the hand of the world, like a line on the palm of the world’s hand—a wrinkle of no account. Yet he could drown here! he thought with terror, watching the spinning gnats above it and the trees calm and uncaring as gods, and the remote sky like a silken pall to hide his unsightly dissolution.

He had thought of trees as being so much timber but these silent ones were more than that. Timber had made houses to shelter him, timber had fed his fire for warmth, had given him heat to cook his food; timber had made him boats to go upon the waters of the
earth. But not these trees. These trees gazed on him impersonally, taking a slow revenge. The sunset was a fire no fuel had ever fed, the water murmured in a dark and sinister dream. No boat would swim on this water. And above all brooded some god to whose compulsions he must answer long after the more comfortable beliefs had become out-worn as a garment used everyday.

And this god neither recognized him nor ignored him: this god seemed to be unconscious of his entity, save as a trespasser where he had no business being. Crouching, he felt the sharp warm earth against his knees and his palms; and kneeling, he awaited abrupt and dreadful annihilation.

Nothing happened, and he opened his eyes. Above the hill-crest, among tree trunks, he saw a single star. It was as though he had seen a man there. Here was a familiar thing, something too remote to care what he did. So he rose and with the star at his back, he began walking swiftly in the direction of town. Here was the stream to cross. The delay of looking for a crossing place engendered again his fear. But he suppressed it by his will, thinking of food and of a woman he hoped to find.

That sensation of an imminent displeasure and anger, of a Being whom he had offended, he held away from himself. But it still hung like poised wings about and above him. His first fear was gone, but soon he found himself running. He would have slowed to a walk if only to prove to himself the soundness of his integral integrity, but his legs would not stop running. Here, in the noncommittal dusk, was a log bridging the stream. Walk it! walk it! his good sense told him; but his thrusting legs took it at a run.

The rotten bark slipped under his feet, scaling off and falling upon the dark whispering stream. It was as though he stood upon the bank and cursed his blundering body as it slipped and fought for balance. You are going to die, he told his body, feeling that imminent Presence again about him, now that his mental concentration had been vanquished by gravity. For an arrested fragment of time he felt, through vision without intellect, the waiting dark water, the treacherous log, the tree trunks pulsing and breathing and the branches like an invocation to a dark and unseen god; then trees and the star-flown sky slowly arced across his eyes. In his fall was death, and a bleak derisive laughter. He died time and again, but his body refused to die. Then the water took him.

Then the water took him. But here was something more than water. The water ran darkly between his body and his overalls and shirt, he felt his hair lap backward wetly. But here beneath his hand a startled thigh slid like a snake, among dark bubbles he felt a swift leg; and, sinking, the point of a breast scraped his back. Amid a slow commotion of disturbed water he saw death like a woman shining and drowned and waiting, saw a flashing body tortured by water; and his lungs spewing water gulped wet air.

Churned water lapped at his mouth, trying to enter, and the light of day prisoned beneath the stream broke again upon the surface, shaped to ripples. Gleaming planes of light angled and broke the surface, moving away from him; and treading water, feeling his sodden shoes and his heavy overalls, feeling his wet hair plastered upon his face, he saw her swing herself, dripping, up the bank.

He churned the water in pursuit. It seemed that he would never reach the other side. His heavy water-soaked clothes clung to him like importunate sirens, like women; he saw the broken water of his endeavor crested with stars. Finally he was in the shadow of willows and felt wet and slippery earth under his hand. Here was a root, and here a branch. He drew himself up, hearing the trickling water from his clothing, feeling his clothing become light and then heavy.

His shoes squashed limply and his clinging nondescript garments hampered his running, heavily. He could see her body, ghostly in the moonless dusk, mounting the hill. And he ran, cursing, with water dripping from his hair, with his coarse clothing and shoes wetly complaining, cursing his fate and his luck. He believed he could do better without the shoes, so, still watching the muted flame of her running, he removed them, then he took up the pursuit again. His wet clothes were like lead, he was panting when he crested the hill. There she was, in a wheat field under the rising harvest moon, like a ship on a silver sea.