Uncollected Stories of William Faulkner (51 page)

He plunged after her. His furrow broke silver in the wheat beneath the impervious moon, rippling away from him, dying again into the dull and unravished gold of standing grain. She was far ahead, the disturbance of her passage through the wheat had died away ere he reached it. He saw, beyond the spreading ripple of her passage arcing away on either side, her body break briefly against a belt of wood, like a match flame; then he saw her no more.

Still running, he crossed the wheat slumbrous along the moony land, and into the trees he went, wearily. But she was gone, and in a recurrent surge of despair he threw himself flat upon the earth. But I touched her! he thought in a fine agony of disappointment, feeling the earth through his damp clothing, feeling twigs beneath his face and arm.

The moon swam up, the moon sailed up like a fat laden ship before an azure trade wind, staring at him in rotund complacency. He writhed, thinking of her body beneath his, of the dark wood, of the sunset and the dusty road, wishing he had never left it. But I touched her! he repeated to himself, trying to build from this an incontrovertible consummation. Yes, her swift frightened thigh and the tip of her breast; but to remember that she had fled him on impulse was worse than ever. I wouldnt have hurt you, he moaned, I wouldnt have hurt you at all.

His lax muscles, emptied, felt a rumor of past labor and of labor tomorrow, compulsions of fork and grain. The moon soothed him, prying in his wet hair, experimenting with shadows; and thinking of tomorrow he rose. That troubling Presence was gone and dark and shadows only mocked him. The moonlight ran along a wire fence and he knew that here was the road.

He felt the dust stirring to his passage and he saw silver corn in fields, and dark trees like poured ink. He thought of how like running quicksilver she had looked, how like a flipped coin she had sped from him; but soon the lights of town came into view—the courthouse clock, and a luminous suggestion of streets, like a fairy land, small though it was. Soon she was forgotten and he thought only a relaxed body in a sorry bed, and waking and hunger and work.

The long monotonous road stretched under the moon before him. Now his shadow was behind him, like a following dog, and beyond it was a day of labor and sweat. Before him was sleep and casual food and more labor; and perhaps a girl like defunctive music, in this calico against the heat. Tomorrow his sinister shadow would circle him again, but tomorrow was a long way off.

The moon swam higher and higher: soon she would slide down the hill of heaven, recalling with interest the silver she had lent to tree and wheat and hill and rolling monotonous fecund land. Below him a barn took the moon for a silver edge and a silo became a
dream dreamed in Greece, apple trees broke into silver like gesturing fountains. Flat planes of moonlight the town, and the lights on the courthouse were futile in the moon.

Behind him labor, before him labor; about all the old despairs of time and breath. The stars were like shattered flowers floating on dark water, sucking down the west; and with dust clinging to his yet damp feet, he slowly descended the hill.

“We’ll name him Frank,” said her father the prize fighter, who never won a battle nor was ever licked, confidently. “No more hustling for you, old girl. We’ll get married, huh?” But, on a day, he bent his round sunny head above his mewling red child in consternation. “A girl?” he whispered in hushed amazement, “cripes, a girl! What do you know about that?” But he was a gentleman and a good sport, so he kissed the mother’s hot cheek. “Buck up, old lady, dont you fret. Better luck next time, huh?”

She did not tell him there would be no next time though, but smiled wanly at him from her tumbled hair; and in the short time he knew his daughter (he was gallantly drowned trying to save a fat lady bather at Ocean Grove Park) he even became reconciled to a girl. When asked the sex of his child he was no longer sheepish about admitting it: he even took an inordinate pride in the swift sunny-headed creature. “She’s me, over and over again,” he told his casual acquaintances proudly; and his last connected thought as he fought the undertow with his mountainous struggling burden, was of her.

“Christ, the old bitch,” he gasped, watching the spinning sky between gaping rollers; and he cursed for her size the fat soft weight killing his hard youth. But he didn’t let go and swim for it, not he! Thinking of Frankie was sharper than the burning in his throat and lungs. “Poor kid, she’ll have it tough now,” he thought among green bubbles.

Frankie, therefore, was a girl of spirit. At least so thought Johnny, her fellow. You would have thought so too, watching the sensuous thrust of her walk and the angular sawing of her thin young arms as she’d take Johnny’s arm and swing the rough synchronism of her young body along the streets of a Saturday night. Johnny’s compeers thought so anyway, for when he’d take her to a dance at his Athletic club she’d put their eyes out; they followed her so thick during the music she hadn’t room to dance. She knocked them cold from that first night when, lounging on the corner laughing and kidding the girls that passed, they saw her approaching. “Cheest,” they said, and dared Johnny to brace her. Johnny, brave in his new suit, was nothing loath.

“Hello, kid,” he said, tipping his hat gracefully and falling in beside her. Frankie gave him a level grey look. “On your way, boy,” she replied, not stopping. “Aw, say—” began Johnny easily, while his pals guffawed behind them.

“Beat it, bum; or I’ll slam you for a row,” commanded Frankie. She didn’t need to call a cop, not Frankie.

Johnny retained his sang-froid admirably. “Hit me, baby, I like it,” he told her, taking her arm. Frankie did no ineffectual lady-like jerking: she took a full arm swing and her narrow palm smacked on Johnny’s face. This was in front of an ex-saloon: swinging doors erupted upon tobacco-fogged lights.

“Hit me again,” said Johnny, straight and red, and Frankie hit him again. A man staggered from the saloon. “Why, the—” spoke the newcomer, “knock hell out of her, you—”

Johnny’s red stinging face and Frankie’s white one hung like two young planets in the dingy street and he saw Frankie’s nose wrinkle up. She’s going to cry, thought Johnny in panic, and the man’s words penetrated his singing head. He whirled upon the newcomer.

“Say, who’re you talking to, fellow? What do you mean, talking that way before a lady?” He thrust his face into the man’s beery one. The other, with alcoholic valor, began: “Why, you—” Johnny struck, and he went cursing into the gutter.

Johnny turned, but Frankie had fled down the street, wailing. He overtook her. “Why, baby,” said Johnny. Frankie heeded him not. Cheest, what luck, and perspiring gently he led her into the mouth of a dark alleyway. He put his awkward arm about her. “Why, say, kid, it’s all right, dont cry.” Frankie turned to him suddenly and
clung passionately to his coat. Cripes, what luck, he thought, patting her back as though she were a dog. “Say, dont cry, wont you? I never meant to scare you, sister. What you want I should do?” He looked about him, trapped. Cheest, what a fix! Suppose the gang should catch him now! Cheest, wouldn’t they razz him? When in trouble, you called a cop; but Johnny, for sound reasons, evaded all intimate dealing with cops—even old Ryan who had known his father, man and boy. Cripes, what’ll he do? Poor gentlemanly dull Johnny.

Then he had an inspiration. “Here, kid, brace up. You wanna go home, dont you? Tell me where you live and I’ll take you, see?” Frankie raised her blurred face. How grey her eyes were, and her bright hair beneath her cheap little hat. Johnny felt how straight and firm her body was. “What’s eating you, baby? Tell old Johnny your troubles: he’ll fix it. Say, I never meant to scare you.”

“It—it wasn’t you: it was that bum back there.”

“Oh, him?” He almost shouted in relief. “Say, j’ou see me slam that bimbo? Say, I knocked him off like—like—Say, I’ll go back and break his neck, huh?”

“No, no,” replied Frankie quickly, “it’s all right. I was a fool to crybaby: I dont, mostly.” She sighed. “Gee, I better be going, I guess.”

“Say, I’m sorry I—I—”

“You never done nothing. You are not the first tried to pick me up. But I usually give ’em the air, right now. Gee, what do you know about us doing a fade-out right on the street, like this?”

“Why, if you aint mad at what I done and at what a fix I got you into, why, say, it means you’re my girl. Say—lemme be your fellow, wont you? I’ll be good to you, kid.” They looked at each other and a soft wind blew over flowers and through trees and the street was no longer blind and mean and filthy. Their lips touched, and a blond morning came on hills brave in a clean dawn.

They walked in a park backed by dark factories; before them was the water front with water lapping at piles, and two ferry boats like a pair of golden swans caught forever in a barren cycle of courtship, to no escape.

“Listen, baby,” said Johnny, “before I seen you it was like I was one of them ferry boats yonder, crossing and crossing a dark river or something by myself, a-crossing and a-crossing and never getting nowheres and not knowing it and thinking I was all the time. You know—being full of a lot of names of people and things busy with their own business, and thinking I was the berries all the time. And say, listen:

“When I seen you coming down the street it was like them two ferry boats would stop when they met instead of crossing each other, and they would turn and go off side by side together where they wasn’t nobody except them. Listen, baby: before I seen you I was a young tough like what old Ryan, the cop, says I was, not doing nothing and not worth nothing and not caring for nothing except old Johnny; but when I slammed that bum back there I done it for you and not for me, and it was like a wind had blew a lot of trash and stuff out of the street.

“And when I put my arm around you and you was holding to me and crying I knowed you was meant for me and that I wasn’t no longer the young tough like what old Ryan says I was; and when you kissed me it was like one morning a gang of us was beating our way back to town on a rattler and the bulls jumped us and trun us off and we walked in and I seen the day breaking acrost the water when it was kind of blue and dark at the same time, and the boats was still on the water and there was black trees acrost, and the sky was kind of yellow and gold and blue. And a wind come over the water, making funny little sucking noises. It was like when you are in a dark room or something, and all on a sudden somebody turns up the lights, and that’s all. When I seen your yellow hair and your grey eyes it was like that; it was like a wind had blew clean through me and there was birds singing somewheres. And then I knowed it was all up with me.”

“Oh, Johnny!” cried Frankie. They swung together, their mouths struck sharply and clung in the sweet friendly dark.

“Baby!”

“Say,” said Frankie’s mother, “who is this fellow you’ve took up with?” Frankie, staring across her mother’s shoulder into the mirror,
cruelly examined the other’s face. Will I look like that when I am old? she asked herself, and something inside her replied no passionately. The older woman’s white flaccid hands fumbled in her dyed hair, then, in rising anger pulled it savagely down. “Well, cant you answer, or dont you think it’s none of my business? What does he do?”

“He—he—he’s got a job in a garage. He’s going to work up to a racing driver.” Why should she feel she must vindicate Johnny to her mother, Johnny, who stood on his own legs and be damned to them all?

“A job in a garage? and you, who’ve saw how hard life is on a woman, and haven’t no more sense than that! You, young and with a figure men like, throwing yourself away on a damn car jumper in dirty overalls!”

“Money aint everything.”

The other stared at Frankie, speechless. At last she said: “Money aint everything? Will you stand there and look at me and say that? You, that have saw how I have to live? Where would you be today, if it wasn’t for what I can make? Where would the clothes to your back be? Can your garage sweetheart buy you clothes? can he do for you what I’ve done? God knows I dont want you to go the way I’ve had to go, but if it’s in your blood and you got to do it, I’d rather see you on the street taking them as they come, than to see you tied down to some damn penny pinching clerk. God, how hard life is on us women.” She turned to the mirror and began anew on her hair, her sense of injury finding ease in voluble self pity. Frankie watched her reflection stonily.

“When your father died without leaving a red cent behind him, who stopped to help me? Some of them high brow dames rotten with money, that are always fretting over social conditions? One of them damn froze face parsons always talking about the wages of sin and raising the poor sinner? Not so’s you’d notice it! You’ll learn, like me, that men dont never help women like me for nothing; and whenever you have any dealings with ’em you got to look out for yourself, and you got to put up a good front to get ’em and to keep ’em. No man aint never yet helped a woman through pity. And another thing: getting a man aint the half of it. Any woman with sense at all can get one, its keeping him that makes the difference between me and them poor girls you see on the streets.
And good or bad, there’s one thing any woman will do: she’ll try to take him away from you, whether she wants him herself or not.

“You can bet on it, there wont nobody help you any more than they did me. God knows, I wouldn’t have chose this life, promising your father like I did. But he has to go and drown himself trying to pull some strange woman out of the ocean. Women always could do what ever they like with your father: he never had sense enough to either let ’em alone or to get something for his trouble. But it aint that I couldn’t trust him: never a better man than him wore hair. But to have died that way, and so soon!” She faced her daughter again.

“Come here, honey.”

Frankie drew near reluctantly and the other put her arms about her. Frankie’s body, in spite of herself, grew taut with reluctance and the other went easily into tears. “My own daughter turns against me! After all I done and suffered for her, she turns against me! Oh God!”