Uncollected Stories of William Faulkner (70 page)

She rose at last and slowly descended the hill toward the creek, and saw a small dark figure approaching her. Lee! she thought, with a constriction of throat muscles, but it was not Lee: it was too small. The figure, seeing her, stopped, then cautiously approached. “Jule?” it said timidly.

“Who’s that?” she replied sharply.

“It’s me—Bud.”

They stood facing each other curiously. “What are you doing here?”

“I’m goin’ away.”

“Goin’ away? Where can you go to?”

“I dunno, somewhere. I cant stay to home no more.”

“Why cant you stay to home?” Emotions she hated were stirring in her.

“Maw, she’s— I hate her, I aint going to stay there no longer. I never stayed noways, ’ceptin’ fer paw; and now—now paw—he’s—he’s—” he dropped to his knees, rocking back and forth in a recurrence of grief. Juliet drew near him in an access of pity, hating herself. He was a soiled little boy in worn overalls; she decided with difficulty that he must be about eleven years old. Beside him was a bundle knotted in a handkerchief, consisting of a chunk of cold indigestible bread and a dog-eared book of pictures which were once colored. He looked so small and lonely, kneeling in the dead leaves, and the common bond of hatred drew them together. He raised his streaked dirty face. “Oh, Jule,” he said, putting his arms around her legs and burrowing his face into her sharp little hip.

She watched the fitful interruptions of moonlight torturing the bare boughs of trees. Above them the wind sucked with a far sound,
and across the moon slid a silent V of geese. The earth was cold and still, waiting in dark quietude for spring and the south wind. The moon stared through a cloud rift and she could see her brother’s tousled hair and the faded collar of his shirt, and her racking infrequent tears rose and slid down the curve of her cheek. At last she, too, was frankly crying because everything seemed so transient and pointless, so futile; that every effort, every impulse she had toward the attainment of happiness was thwarted by blind circumstance, that even trying to break away from the family she hated was frustrated by something from within herself. Even dying couldn’t help her: death being nothing but that state those left behind are cast into.

Finally she jerked the tears from her face and pushed her brother away.

“Get up. You’re a fool, you cant go anywhere like this, little as you are. Come on up to the house and see grammaw.”

“No, no, Jule; I cant, I do’ want ter see grammaw.”

“Why not? You got to do somethin’, aint you? Lessen you want to go back home,” she added.

“Back to her? I wont never go back to her.”

“Well, come on, then; grammaw’ll know what to do.”

He pulled back again. “I’m skeered o’ grammaw, I’m skeered o’ her.”

“Well, what you goin’ to do?”

“I’m goin’ away, yonder way,” pointing toward the county seat. She recognised his stubbornness with a sense of familiarity, knowing he could be forced no easier than she. There was one thing, however, she could do, so she cajoled him as far as the gate onto the road, and left him in the shadow of a tree. Soon she reappeared with a substantial parcel of food and a few dollars in small change—her savings of years. He took it with the awkward apathy of despair and together they moved onto the high road and stopped again, regarding each other like strangers.

“Good bye, Jule,” he said at last, and would have touched her again, but she drew back; so he turned, a small ineffectual figure, up the vaguely indistinct road. She watched him until he was scarcely discernible, soon he was out of sight, and once more she turned and descended the hill.

The trees were still, bodyless and motionless as reflections now
that the wind had dropped; waiting pagan and untroubled by rumors of immortality for winter and death. Far, far away across the October earth a dog howled, and the mellow long sound of a horn wavered about her, filling the air like a disturbance of still waters, then was absorbed into silence again leaving the dark world motionless about her, quiet and slightly sad and beautiful. Possum hunters, she thought, and wondered as it died away if she had heard any sound at all.

She wondered dully and vaguely how she could ever have been wrought up over things, how anything could ever make her any way but like this: quiet, and a little sorrowful. Scarcely moving herself, it seemed as though the trees swam up slowly out of the dark and moved across above her head, drawing their top-most branches through star-filled waters that parted before them and joined together when they had passed, with never a ripple or change.

Here at her feet lay the pool: shadows, then repeated motionless trees, the sky again; and she sat down and stared into the water in a sensuous smooth despair. This was the world, below her and above her head, eternal and empty and limitless. The horn sounded again all around her, in water and trees and sky; then died slowly away, draining from sky and trees and water into her body, leaving a warm salty taste in her mouth. She turned over suddenly and buried her face in her thin arms, feeling the sharp earth strike through her clothing against thighs and stomach and her hard little breasts. The last echo of the horn slid immaculately away from her down some smooth immeasurable hill of autumn quiet, like a rumor of a far despair.

Soon it, too, was gone.

Dear Anderson:—

I was with a boating party across the lake over the week end, and going up the river the pilot pointed out to us the old Jackson place. They are descendants of Old Hickory, and there is only one of them left,—Al Jackson. I wish you could know him: with your interest in people he would be a gold mine to you. The man has had a very eventful life, through no fault of his own. He is himself very retiring. It is told of him no one ever saw him in wading or swimming or undressed. Something about his feet, they say, though no one knows for certain.

The pilot was telling me about his people. His mother at the age of seven held the tatting championship of her Sunday school, and as a reward they gave her the privilege of attending every religious ceremony held at her church, without having to go to the social ones, for a period of ninety-nine years. At the age of nine she could play on a melodeon her father had swapped a boat and a clock and a pet alligator for; she could sew, cook; and she increased attendance at her church three hundred percent with some sort of a secret recipe for communion wine, including among other things, grain alcohol. The pilot’s father used to go to her church. In fact the whole parish finally did. They tore down two churches for wood to make fish-traps of, and one minister finally got a job on a ferry boat. The church gave her a bible with her name and favorite flower embossed in gold on it for this.

Old man Jackson won her hand when she was twelve. They say he was ravished by her prowess on the melodeon. The pilot said
old man Jackson didn’t have a melodeon. Old man Jackson was a character, himself. When he was eight he learned by heart one thousand verses from the new testament, bringing on an attack resembling brain fever. When they finally got a veterinary up, he said it couldn’t be brain fever, though. After that he became kind of—well, call it queer: bought library paste to eat whenever he could get it, and wore a raincoat every time he took a bath. He slept in a folding bed flat on the floor and closed up on him when he retired. He invented some holes bored in for air.

It seems that Jackson finally got the idea of raising sheep in that swamp of his, his belief being that wool grew like anything else, and that if sheep stood in water all the time, like trees, the fleece would be naturally more luxuriant. By the time he had about a dozen of them drowned, he made life belts out of cane for them. And then he found that the alligators were getting them.

One of the older boys (he must have had about a dozen) discovered the alligators wouldn’t bother a goat with long horns, so the old man carved imitation horns about three feet across out of roots and fastened them onto his sheep. He didn’t give them all horns, lest the alligators catch onto the trick. The pilot said he figured on losing so many head a year, but in this way he kept the death rate pretty low.

Soon they found that the sheep were learning to like the water, were swimming all around in it, that in about six months they never came out of the water at all. When shearing time came, he had to borrow a motor boat to run them down with. And when they caught one and raised it out of the water, it had no legs. They had atrophied and completely disappeared.

And that was true of everyone they caught. The legs not only were gone, but that part of the sheep which was under water was covered with scales in place of wool, and the tail had broadened and flattened like a beaver’s. Within another six months they couldn’t even catch one with the motor boat. They had learned to dive from watching fish; and when a year had passed Jackson saw them only when they stuck their noses up for a breath of air now and then. Soon days would pass without the water being broken by one of them. Occasionally they caught one on a hook baited with corn, but it had no wool on it at all.

Old man Jackson, so the pilot says, got kind of discouraged.
Here was all his capital swimming around under water, and he was afraid they would turn Alligators before [he] could catch any of them. Finally his second boy, Claude, the wild one that was always after women, told his father that if he would give him outright half he could catch, he would get a few of them. They agreed, and so Claude would take off his clothes and go in the water. He never got many at first, though he would occasionally hem one up under a log and get him. One of them bit him pretty badly one day, and he thought to himself: “Yes, sir, I got to work fast: them things will be alligators in a year.”

So he lit in, and everyday his swimming got better and he’d get a few more. Soon he could stay under water for a half an hour at a time; but out of the water his breathing wasnt so very good, and his legs were beginning to feel funny at the knee. He then took to staying in the water all day and all night and his folks would bring him food. He lost all use of his arms to the elbow and his legs to the knee; and the last time any of the family saw him his eyes had moved around to the side of his head and there was a fish’s tail sticking out of the corner of his mouth.

About a year later they heard of him again. There was a single shark appeared off the coast that kept on bothering the blonde lady bathers, especially the fat ones.

“That’s Claude,” said old man Jackson, “he always was hell on blondes.”

And so their sole source of income was gone. The family was in quite a bad way for years and years, until the Prohibition law came along and saved them.

I hope you will find this story as interesting as I have.

Sincerely,             

William Faulkner  

Dear Anderson:—

I have your letter regarding the Jacksons. I am amazed. What I had thought to be a casual story seems to be quite well known. It must be a very unusual family, and so I echo your words: How I would like to meet Al Jackson.

I have been making a few inquiries myself. It’s like sluicing for gold—a speck here and a speck there. It seems that Elenor’s story
is scandalous. She slid down a drain pipe and eloped with a tin pedler one night. Imagine the horror felt by a family as clean as fish-herding families must be, upon learning that “Perchie,” as Elenor was called, had eloped with a man who not only couldn’t swim, but who had never had a drop of water upon his body in his whole life. He is so afraid of water that, having been once caught by a rainstorm while on the road, he would not leave his van to feed his horse. The storm lasted nine days, the horse died between the shafts of starvation, and the man himself was found unconscious, having eaten a pair of congress shoes he was taking as a present to old man Jackson, and having consumed the reins as far as he could reach without leaving the van. The irony of it is that he was found and saved by Claude, one of Elenor Jackson’s brothers, who had paused to look into the van in the hope of finding a woman in it. (Claude was kind of bad after women, as I wrote you.)

But Al is the one I wish to meet. He is considered by every one who knows him to be the finest time of American manhood, a pure Nordic. During the war he took correspondence course after course to cure his shyness and develop will power in order to help the boys over there by making four minute Liberty loan speeches, and he is said to be the one who first thought of re-writing Goethe and Wagner and calling them Pershing and Wilson. Al Jackson likes the arts, you know.

I think you are wrong about Jackson’s ancestry. This Spearhead Jackson was captured and hung from the yardarm of a British frigate in 1799. It seems he was beating up the trades with a cargo of negroes when the frigate sighted him and gave chase. As was his custom, he started throwing negroes overboard, holding the Britisher off, but a squall came up suddenly, blowing him out to sea and three days off his course. Still throwing negroes overboard he ran for the Dry Tortugas but he ran out of negroes and the Britisher overtook him and boarded him off Caracas, giving no quarter and scuttling his vessel. So Al Jackson could not have sprung from this line. Besides, Al Jackson could never have come from an ancestor who had so little regard for the human soul.

And further proof. These Jacksons quite obviously descend from Andrew Jackson. The battle of New Orleans was fought in a swamp. How could Andrew Jackson have outfought an army outnumbering him unless he had had webbed feet? The detachment
which saved the day was composed of two battalions of fish-herds from Jackson’s Florida swamps, half horse and half alligator they were. Also, if you will examine the statue to him in Jackson Park (and who but a Jackson could ride a horse weighing two and a half tons and hold him balanced on his hind feet?) you will see that he wears congress shoes.

Yes, I have heard the negro shooting story. But it is believed in this country to be a rank calumny. It was a man called Jack Spearman shooting Swedes for a dollar bounty in Minnesota. My version, of course, may be incorrect.