Uncollected Stories of William Faulkner (55 page)

“ ’Taint no time fer prayin now,” the man in the door said. “You reckon God’ll pay any attention to whut you say? Git on outen hyer, you little sawed-off hophead.”

“Hophead?” the wop shrieked. “Son!”

“Son!” the other said. He laid the gun down and swung his legs into the companion.

“Call me a hophead,” the wop screeched, waving the pistol.

“Drop it!” the other said.

“Call me a hophead,” the wop wailed. Pete was looking at him across his shoulder. The wop jerked the pistol down and Pete ducked his head away and the wop jabbed the pistol at him and shot him in the back of the head. It was a heavy Colt’s and it slammed Pete into the wall. The wall slammed him again, like he’d been hit twice, and as he fell again and banged his head on the engine, the other man jumped over him, onto the wop.

The sound of the explosion kept on, slamming back and forth between the walls. It was like the air was full of it, and every time anybody moved, they jarred some more of it down, and I could smell powder and a faint scorching smell.

“Call me a hophead,” the wop was screeching. The other man caught the pistol and wrenched the butt out of the wop’s hand. His finger was still in the trigger guard and he arched his body to ease it, screeching sure enough, until the other tore the pistol free. Then the tall man held him by the front of his shirt and slapped him, rocking his head from side to side. They sounded like pistol shots. Then a voice topside yelled something and the man dragged the wop to the galley door and flung him through it.

“Now,” he said, “git on up there. Show yo face back hyer one mo time and I’ll tear it off.” He came back to the companion and thrust his head out.

Pete was lying with his face against the engine. I could hear water lapping between the two hulls and I smelled scorching hair again, and I stood there waiting to be sick. The man came back.

“Hit’s that-ere cutter,” he said. He lifted Pete away from the engine. I quit smelling scorched hair. “Better come up outen hyer, bud,” the man said. “Come on.” I followed him up the steps, into the breeze. Where it blew on me I could feel myself sweating. Around the corner of the deckhouse the Captain’s feet stuck, his toes flopped over. But what surprised me was that it was still early in the morning. It seemed like it ought to be noon, at least, but the sun hadn’t yet reached the tops of the pines on the island. About two miles inshore I saw the cutter again, rushing along on her rigid white wings like last night, her pennon stiff as a board, and I watched her pass and thought of Conrad’s centaur, the half man, half tugboat charging back and forth in the same high-eared, myopic solitude.

“Gwine to Gulfpo’t,” the man said. “Dance tonight, I reckon.… Hyer, set down and smoke a cigareet. You’ll feel better.” I sat down against the deckhouse, facing the island and he offered me a cigarette, but I turned my face away. “Them durn wops,” he said. “You jest set hyer. We’ll be done soon.”

I leaned back and shut my eyes, waiting to get sick. My hand smarted, but not very much. I could hear them working back and forth between the two boats. Someone came into the engine room and went forward again, with a lot of slow, bumping sounds. Then the noise forward ceased. I could hear them in their boat now. Feet came around the deckhouse, but I didn’t look up.

“Well, Houdini,” the wop said, “want any more of it?”

“Git in that boat,” the other man said. “Better git that pump fixed and clear outen hyer,” he said. “So long.”

The hulls jarred, scraped. The big engine started, the propeller swished. But I didn’t look around. I sat against the deckhouse, looking at the ragged pines like illcast bronze against the cobalt sky and the blanched scar of beach and the bright green water.

The sound of the engine came back for a long time. But at last it died completely away. A sea eagle swooped balancing into one of the pines and tilted there, the sun glinting on the slow, preening motions of its wings, and I watched it, waiting to get sick.

The Captain came aft, holding onto the deckhouse. His head was
bloody. Someone had doused him with a pail, and the blood had streaked down his face like thin paint. He looked at me for a while.

“Got that pump fixed?”

“I dont know. Yes. I’ve got it fixed.”

He went down the companion, slowly. I could hear him below, then he came back with a shirt in his hand and squatted beside me and tore the shirt down the middle.

“Take a turn with this,” he said. I bound up his head. Then we finished connecting the pump and started the engine and went forward. The hatch was open. It reeked horribly. I didn’t look in. We got the anchor up and the Captain squared her away along the island. The breeze freshened with motion, and I leaned against the deckhouse, letting the breeze blow on me where I was sweating.

“Engineer,” the Captain said. I looked back. “See about them fellers in the hold.”

I went to the hatch, but I didn’t look in. I sat down and swung my legs into the hatch, letting the wind blow on me.

“You, Engineer,” the Captain said.

“They’re all right.”

“Carry them back to the galley.”

“Wont they do here?”

“Carry them back to the galley.”

They had smashed a lot of it. I could feel broken glass under my feet, so I shuffled my feet along the floor, pushing the glass aside. It smelled horrible.

There was a scuttle in the bulkhead. Pete went through easily. But the nigger, naked from the waist up, was pretty bloody, where they had dumped him in on the broken bottles and then trampled on him, beside the wound itself, which began to bleed again when I moved him. I wedged him into the scuttle and went around into the galley and hauled at him. I tried to slip my hand down and catch the waist of his pants, but he stuck again and something broke and my hand came free with the broken string on which his charm—a cloth tobacco sack containing three hard pellets—the charm which he had said would protect him from anything that came to him across water—hung, the soiled bag dangling at the end of it. But at last I got him through.

My hand was smarting again, and all at once we passed out of the island’s lee and the boat began to roll a little, and I leaned
against the grease-crusted oil stove, wondering where the soda was. I didn’t see it, but I saw Pete’s bottle, the one he had brought aboard with him in New Orleans. I got it and took a big drink. As soon as I swallowed I knew I was going to be sick, but I kept on swallowing. Then I stopped and thought about trying to make it topside, but I quit thinking about anything and leaned on the stove and got pretty sick. I was sick for a good while, but afterward I took another drink and then I felt a little better.

Jim Gant was a stock trader. He bought horses and mules in three adjoining counties, and with a hulking halfwitted boy to help him, drove them overland seventy-five miles to the Memphis markets.

They carried a camping outfit with them in a wagon, passing only one night under roof during each trip. That was toward the end of the journey, where at nightfall they would reach … the first mark of man’s hand in almost fifteen miles of cypress-and-cane river jungle and worn gullies and second-growth pine … a rambling log house with stout walls and broken roof and no trace whatever of husbandry … plow or plowed land … anywhere near it. There would be usually from one to a dozen wagons standing before it and in a corral of split rails nearby the mules stamped and munched, with usually sections of harness still unremoved: about the whole place lay an air of transient and sinister dilapidation.

Here Gant would meet and mingle with other caravans similar to his, or at times more equivocal still, of rough, unshaven, over-alled men, and they would eat coarse food and drink pale, virulent corn whiskey and sleep in their muddy clothes and boots on the puncheon floor before the log fire. The place was conducted by a youngish woman with cold eyes and a hard infrequent tongue. There was in the background a man, oldish, with cunning reddish pig’s eyes and matted hair and beard which lent a kind of ferocity to the weak face which they concealed. He was usually befuddled with drink to a state of morose idiocy, though now and then they
would hear him and the woman cursing one another in the back or beyond a closed door, the woman’s voice cold and level, the man’s alternating between a rumbling bass and the querulous treble of a child.

After Gant sold his stock he would return home to the settlement where his wife and baby lived. It was less than a village, twenty miles from the railroad in a remote section of a remote county. Mrs. Gant and the two-year-old girl lived alone in the small house while Gant was away, which was most of the time. He would be at home perhaps a week out of each eight. Mrs. Gant would never know just what day or hour he would return. Often it would be between midnight and dawn. One morning about dawn she was awakened by someone standing in front of the house, shouting “Hello, Hello” at measured intervals. She opened the window and looked out. It was the halfwit.

“Yes?” she said. “What is it?”

“Hello,” the halfwit bawled.

“Hush your yelling,” Mrs. Gant said, “where’s Jim?”

“Jim says to tell you he ain’t coming home no more,” the halfwit bawled. “Him and Mrs. Vinson taken and went off in the waggin. Jim says to tell you not to expect him back.” Mrs. Vinson was the woman at the tavern, and the halfwit stood in the making light while Mrs. Gant in a white cotton nightcap leaned in the window and cursed him with the gross violence of a man. Then she banged the window shut.

“Jim owes me a dollar and six bits,” the halfwit bawled. “He said you would give it to me.” But the window was shut, the house silent again; no light had ever shown. Yet still the halfwit stood before it, shouting “Hello, Hello” at the blank front until the door opened and Mrs. Gant came out in her nightdress, with a shotgun and cursed him again. Then he retreated to the road and stopped again in the dawn, shouting “Hello, Hello” at the blank house until he tired himself at last and went away.

Just after sunup the next morning Mrs. Gant, with the sleeping child wrapped in a quilt, went to a neighbor’s house and asked the woman to keep the child for her. She borrowed a pistol from another neighbor and departed. A passing wagon, bound for Jefferson, took her aboard and she passed slowly from sight that way, sitting erect in a shoddy brown coat, on the creaking seat.

All that day the halfwit told about the dollar and seventy-five cents which Gant had taken from him and told him Mrs. Gant would repay. By noon he had told them all singly, and hoarse, voluble and recapitulant, he would offer to stop them and tell them again as they gathered at the store over the pistol incident. An ancient mariner in faded overalls he pursued them, gesticulant, shock-haired, with a wild eye and drooling a little at the mouth, telling about the dollar and seventy-five cents.

“Jim said for me to git it from her. He said she would give hit to me.”

He was still talking about it when Mrs. Gant returned ten days later. She returned the pistol with no more than thanks. She had not even cleaned it nor removed the two exploded cartridges … a hale, not-old woman with a broad, strong face: she had been accosted more than once during her sojourn in those equivocal purlieus of Memphis, where, with a deadly female intuition, an undeviating conviction for sin (who had never been further away from home than the county seat and who had read no magazines and seen no movies) she sought Gant and the woman with the capability of a man, the pertinacity of a Fate, the serene imperviousness of a vestal out of a violated temple, and then returned to her child, her face cold, satiate and chaste.

The night of her return she was called to the door. It was the halfwit.

“Jim says you would give me that dollar and.…”

She struck him, felled him with a single blow. He lay on the floor, his hands lifted a little, his mouth beginning to open in horror and outrage. Before he could shriek she stooped and struck him again, jerking him up and holding him while she beat him in the face, he bellowing hoarsely. She lifted him bodily and flung him from the porch to the ground and entered the house, where his cries had roused the child. She sat and took it onto her lap, rocking it, her heels clapping hard and rythmic at each thrust, hushing it by singing to it in a voice louder, more powerful, than its own.

Three months later she had sold the house for a good price; and she moved away, taking with her a battered trunk tied with cotton rope and the shotgun and the quilt in which the child slept. They learned later that she had bought a dressmaking shop in Jefferson, the county seat.

They told in the town how she and her daughter, Zilphia, lived in a single room twelve feet square for twenty-three years. It was partitioned off from the rear of the shop and it contained a bed, a table, two chairs and an oil stove. The rear window gave upon a vacant lot where farmers tethered their teams on market days and where sparrows whirled in gusty clouds about the horse and mule droppings and the refuse from the grocery store beneath. The window was barred and in it for the seven years before the county Health Officer forced Mrs. Gant to let Zilphia go to school, the farmers, hitching or unhitching, would see a wan small face watching them, or, holding to the bars, coughing: a weak hacking sound soon blown away along the air, leaving the still pale face as before with something about it of that quality of Christmas wreaths in a forgotten window.

“Who is that?” one asked.

“Gant’s gal. Jim Gant. Used to live out to the Bend.”

“Oh. Jim Gant. I heard about that.” They looked at the face. “Well, I reckon Mrs. Gant ain’t got a whole lot of use for men-folks no more.” They looked at the face. “But she ain’t no more than a child yet.”

“I reckon Mrs. Gant ain’t taking no risk.”

“Hit ain’t her risk. Hit’s whoever’s risk that would chance her.”

“Hit’s a fact. Sho.”

That was before Mrs. Gant came upon Zilphia and the boy lying inside a worn horse-blanket in the woods one day. It was during the time when, every morning and again at one o’clock they would see the two of them going toward the school, and every noon and afternoon returning to the barred room above the vacant lot. At midmorning recess time Mrs. Gant would close the shop and when the dismissal bell rang, she would be standing at the corner of the playground, upright, erect in a shapeless dress of dull black and an oil cloth sewing apron and her bosom festooned with threaded needles; still comely in a harsh way. Zilphia would cross the playground straight to her and the two of them would sit on the stone coping above the street level, side by side and not talking while the other children ran with random shouts back and forth behind
them, until the bell rang again and Zilphia returned to her books and Mrs. Gant to the shop and the seam which she had laid aside.