Uncollected Stories of William Faulkner (75 page)

After Govelli departs he still sits in the chair, motionless, with that immobility of country people, before which patience is no more than a sound without any meaning. He was born and raised
on a Mississippi farm. Tenant-farmers—you know: barefoot, the whole family, nine months in the year. He told me about one day his father sent him up to the big house, the house of the owner, the boss, with a message. He went to the front door in his patched overalls, his bare feet: he had never been there before; perhaps he knew no better anyway, to whom a house was just where you kept the quilt pallets and the corn meal out of the rain (he said ‘outen the rain’). And perhaps the boss didn’t know him by sight; he probably looked exactly like a dozen others on his land and a hundred others in the neighborhood.

Anyway the boss came to the door himself. Suddenly he—the boy—looked up and there within touching distance for the first time was the being who had come to symbolise for him the ease and pleasant ways of the earth: idleness, a horse to ride all day long, shoes all the year round. And you can imagine him when the boss spoke: “Dont you ever come to my front door again. When you come here, you go around to the kitchen door and tell one of the niggers what you want.” That was it, you see. There was a negro servant come to the door behind the boss, his eyeballs white in the gloom, and Martin’s people and kind, although they looked upon Republicans and Catholics, having never seen either one, probably, with something of that mystical horror which European peasants of the fifteenth century were taught to regard Democrats and Protestants, the antipathy between them and negroes was an immediate and definite affair, being at once biblical, political, and economic: the three compulsions—the harsh unflagging land broken into sparse intervals by spells of demagoguery and religio-neurotic hysteria—which shaped and coerced their gaunt lives. A mystical justification of the need to feel superior to someone somewhere, you see.

He didn’t deliver the message at all. He turned and walked back down the drive, feeling the nigger’s teeth too in the gloom of the hall beyond the boss’ shoulder, holding his back straight until he was out of sight of the house. Then he ran. He ran down the road and into the woods and hid there all day, lying on his face in a ditch. He told me that now and then he crawled to the edge of the field and he could see his father and his two older sisters and his brother working in the field, chopping cotton, and he told me it was as though he were seeing them for the first time.

But he didn’t go home until that night. I dont know what he told them, what happened; perhaps nothing did. Perhaps the message was of no importance—I cant imagine those people having anything of importance capable of being communicated by words—or it may have been sent again. And people like that react to disobedience and unreliability only when it means loss of labor or money. Unless they had needed him in the field that day, they probably had not even missed him.

He never approached the boss again. He would see him from a distance, on the horse, and then he began to watch him, the way he sat the horse, his gestures and mannerisms, the way he spoke; he told me that sometimes he would hide and talk to himself, using the boss’ gestures and tone to his own shadow on the wall of the barn or the bank of a ditch: “Dont you never come to my front door no more. You go around to the back door and tell hit to the nigger. Dont you never come to my front door no more” in his meagre idiom that said ‘ye’ and ‘hit’ and ‘effen’ for ‘you’ and ‘it’ and ‘if’, set off by the aped gestures of that lazy and arrogant man who had given an unwitting death-blow to that which he signified and summed and which alone permitted him breath. He didn’t tell me, but I believe that he would slip away from the field, the furrow and the deserted hoe, to lurk near the gate to the big house and wait for the boss to pass. He just told me that he didn’t hate the man at all, not even that day at the door with the nigger servant grinning beyond the other’s shoulder. And that the reason he hid to watch and admire him was that his folks would think he ought to hate him and he knew he couldn’t.

Then he was married, a father, and proprietor of a store at the cross-roads. The process must have been to him something like the bald statement: suddenly he was grown and married and owner of a store within long sight of the big house. I dont think he remembered himself the process of getting grown and getting the store anymore than he could remember the road, the path he would traverse to reach the gate and crouch in the brush there in time. He had done it the same way. The actual passing of time, the attenuation, had condensed into a forgotten instant; his strange body—that vehicle in which we ride from one unknown station to another as in a train, unwitting when the engine changes or drops a car here and takes on one there with only a strange new whistle-blast
coming back to us—had metamorphosed, inventing for him new minor desires and compulsions to be obeyed and cajoled, conquered or surrendered to or bribed with the small change left over from his unflagging dream while he lay in the weeds at the gate, waiting to see pass the man who knew neither his name nor his face nor that implacable purpose which he—the man—had got upon that female part of every child where ambition lies fecund and waiting.

So he was a merchant, one step above his father, his brothers mesmerised still to the stubborn and inescapable land. He could neither read nor write; he did a credit business in spools of thread and tins of snuff and lap-links and plow-shares, carrying them in his head through the day and reciting them without a penny’s error while his wife transcribed them into the cash book on the kitchen table after supper was done.

Now the next part he was a little ashamed of and a little proud of too: his man’s nature, the I, and the dream in conflict. It emerged from his telling as a picture, a tableau. The boss was an old man now, gone quietly back to his impotent vices. He still rode about the place a little, but most of the day he spent in his sock feet lying in a hammock between two trees in the yard—the man who had always been able to wear shoes all day long, all year long. Martin told me about that. “That’s what I had made up my mind,” he said. “Once I had believed that if I could just wear shoes all the time, you see. And then I found that I wanted more. I wanted to work right through the wanting and being able to wear shoes all the time and come out on the other side where I could own fifty pairs at once if I wanted and then not even want to wear one of them.” And when he told me that he was sitting in the swivel chair behind the desk, his stocking feet propped in an open drawer.

But to get back to the picture. It is night, an oil lamp burns on an up-ended box in a narrow cuddy; it is the store-room behind the store proper, filled with unopened boxes and barrels, with coils of new rope and pieces of new harness on nails in the wall; the two of them—the old man with his white stained moustache and his eyes that dont see so good anymore and his blue-veined uncertain hands, and the young man, the peasant at his first maturity, with his cold face and the old habit of deference and emulation and perhaps affection (we must love or hate anything to ape it) and
surely a little awe, facing one another across the box, the cards lying between them—they used wrought nails for counters—and a tumbler and spoon at the old man’s hand and the whiskey jug on the floor in the shadow of the box. “I’ve got three queens,” the boss says, spreading his cards in a palsied and triumphant row. “Beat that, by Henry!”

“Well, sir,” the other says, “you had me fooled again.”

“I thought so. By Henry, you young fellows that count on the luck all the time.…”

The other lays his cards down. His hands are gnarled, plow-warped; he handles the cards with a certain deliberation which at first glance appears stiff and clumsy, so that a man would not glance at them again: certainly not a man whose eyes are dim in the first place and a little fuddled with drink in the second. But I doubt if the liquor was for that purpose, if he depended on it alone. I suspect he was as confident of himself, had taken his slow and patient precautions just as he would have got out and practised with an axe before undertaking to clear up a cypress bottom for profit by the stick. “I reckon I still got it,” he says.

The boss has reached for the nails. Now he leans forward. He does it slowly, his trembling hand arrested above the nails. He leans across the table, peering, his movement slowing all the while. It is as though he knows what he will see. It is as though the whole movement were without conviction, as you reach for money in a dream, knowing you are not awake. “Move them closer,” he says. “Damn it, do you expect me to read them from here?” The other does so—the 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. The boss looks at them. He is breathing hard. Then he sits back and takes in his trembling hand a cold chewed cigar from the table-edge and sucks at it, making shaking contact between cigar and mouth, while the other watches him, motionless, his face lowered a little, not yet reaching for the nails. The boss curses, sucking at the cigar. “Pour me a toddy,” he says.

That’s how he got his start. He sold the store and with his wife and infant daughter he came to town, to the city. And he arrived here at just exactly the right time—the year three A. V. Otherwise the best he could have hoped for would have been another store, where at sixty perhaps he could have retired. But now, at only forty-eight (there is a certain irony that oversees the doings of the great. It’s as though behind their chairs at whatever table they sit
there loom leaning and partisan shadows making each the homely and immemorial gesture for fortune and good luck and whose triumphant shout at each coup roars beneath his own exultation, tossing it high—until one day he turns suddenly himself aghast at the sardonic roar), now at forty-eight he was a millionaire, living with the daughter—she was eighteen; his wife had lain ten years now beneath a marble cenotaph that cost twenty thousand dollars among the significant names in the oldest section of the oldest cemetery: he bought the lot at a bankrupt sale—in four or five acres of Spanish bungalow in our newest subdivision, being fetched each morning by his daughter in a lemon-colored roadster doing forty and fifty miles an hour along the avenue to the touched caps of the traffic policemen, in to the barren office where he would sit in his sock feet and read in the
Sentinel
with cold and biding delusion the yearly list of debutantes at the Chickasaw Guards ball each December.

The Spanish bungalow was recent. The first year they had lived in rented rooms, the second year they moved into—the compulsion of his country rearing—the biggest house he could find nearest the downtown, the street cars and traffic, the electric signs. His wife still insisted on doing her own housework. She still wanted to go back to the country, or, lacking that, to buy one of those tiny, neat, tight bungalows surrounded by infinitesimal lawns and garden plots and aseptic chicken-runs on the highways just beyond the city limits.

But he was already beginning to affirm himself in that picture of a brick house with columns on a broad, faintly dingy lawn of magnolias; he could already tell at a glance the right names—Sandeman, Blount, Heustace—in the newspapers and the city directory. He got the house, paid three prices for it, and it killed his wife. Not the overpurchase of the house, but the watching of that man who heretofore had been superior to all occasions, putting himself with that patient casualness with which he used to hide in the brush near the gate to the big house, in the way of his neighbors, establishing a certain hedge-top armistice with the men while their wives remained cold, turning in and out of the drives in their heavy, slightly outmoded limousines without a glance across the dividing box and privet.

So she died, and he got a couple—Italians—to come in and keep
house for him and the girl. Not negroes yet, mind you. He was not ready for them. He had the house, the outward shape and form, but he was not yet certain of himself, not yet ready to affirm in actual practise that conviction of superiority; he would not yet jeopardise that which had once saved him. He had not yet learned that man is circumstance.

The bungalow came five years ago, when he practically gave the house away—he had begun to learn then—and built the new one, the stucco splendor of terraces and patios and wrought iron like the ultimate sublimation of a gasoline station. Perhaps he felt that in this both himself and them—the peasant without past and the black man without future—would have at least a scratch start from very paradox.

This house was staffed by negroes, too many of them; more than he had any use for. He could not bring himself to like them, to be at ease with them: the continuous sad soft murmur of their voices from the kitchen always on the verge of laughter harked him back despite himself, who was saying “Hit aint” for “it is not” and dipping his cheap snuff in the presence of urban politicians and judges and contractors with no subjective qualms whatever, to that day when, feeling the nigger’s teeth and eyeballs in the dusky hall, he tramped with stiff back down the drive from the big house and so out of his childhood forever, paced by the two voices, the one saying “You cannot run” and the other “You cannot cry.”

“So I kept Tony and his wife to look after the niggers,” he told me, “to give them something to do.” Perhaps he believed that. Perhaps he had not even ventured to himself the monstrous shape of his ambition, his delusion. Certainly he had not to the daughter as they drove down town each morning—that was until she was sixteen; within another year one of the negroes was driving him down, since the girl was not up before ten and eleven oclock, what with dancing and riding in cars the better part of the night.

“Who were you with last night?” he would ask her, and she would tell him, with that blank, secret look, who had learned in her seventeen years more about the world, that world divorced from all reality and necessity which women rule and which had killed her mother, than he had in his forty-eight, naming off the names he wanted to hear—Sandeman and Heustace and Blount. And sometimes it was the truth, even that she had met him at a
dance. She just neglected to say what dance, what place—the out-of-doors pavilion at West End Gardens, where the scions of Blount and Sandeman and Heustace would go on Saturday nights with bottles of Govelli’s liquor, to pick up stenographers and shop girls. I have seen her there—a thin creature, a little overdressed despite the two months at the Washington convent. Martin took her there himself, with his list of careful addresses culled from the
Sentinel
—‘Miss So-and-so, daughter of So-and-so, Sandeman Place, home for the holidays’. I like to think of the two of them on that thirty-six hour journey (it was probably, for all his power and all her little urban sophistication derived from the sycophance of clerks in shops, their first Pullman experience) while the world unrolled beyond the drawing-room window with that unforgettable thrill of first journeys, that attenuation of self, that isolation and division when we first assimilate the incontrovertible actuality of the earth’s roundness while gradually but surely our spirit goes down onto four legs again to cling the closer, outfaced by its broken armistice with the horror of space.