Uncollected Stories of William Faulkner (79 page)

The room was a bedroom, a big, square room cluttered with heavy furniture. An old woman reclined in a deep chair before the fire, wrapped in rugs. Blount sat on a straight chair beside her, leaning forward, talking. “That was the first time I ever saw him, when he was sitting there in my office, offering me money to let his daughter come to the Ball. He had the money with him. In cash. But I had never seen him before. I had heard of him, of course; especially on election years when you alls’ women clubs get out reform tickets to drive the high priest of corruption out of town. But I didn’t know about him. I didn’t even know that he was an outlander. Maybe if I had, my civic pride— You know; if robbed
we must be, let it be by our own thieves.”

“Is he an outlander?” the woman said.

“He came from down in Mississippi. He owned a grocery store, maybe a filling station too, out on the edge of town at first. He lived over the store, with his wife and child; that wasn’t as long ago as you’d think, considering where he lives now. His house is fine. It’s bigger than the Morro Castle at the Saint Louis Fair was. It must have eight or ten acres of red tiles on the roof alone.”

“How do you know all this?”

“Anybody can see his house. You cant help but see it. You can see it almost as far as you can see Sears and Roebuck’s.”

“I mean, about him.” She was watching Blount.

“I found out. I asked. Do you think I’d let a man try to bribe me, without finding out all I could about him?”

“So you will know whether the bribe will be good or not?”

Blount stopped in midspeech. He looked at the woman. “Do you — Good Lord. I.… You’re kidding me, as the children say nowadays. I suppose I could be bribed to betray myself; I expect that all men, modern men, can. Have their price. But not to betray people who have put trust in me.”

“By electing you head of a dancing-club,” the woman said.

His mouth was already shaped for talk, for rebuttal. Then he closed it. “Fiddlesticks,” he said. “Why do I argue with you? You cant understand. You’re just a woman. You cant understand how a man feels about valueless things, things that dont have a dollar mark on them. If this had a current price, a value in coins, I would believe you at once. Of course they wouldn’t mind, the other girls, the guests. The girls wouldn’t know her and the men wouldn’t dance with her. She’d just have a rotten time. We know that. We aren’t concerned with her.”

“Who are you concerned with?”

“I dont know. That’s it. I just dont know what I have to do.”

“You didn’t have to go and see the man again.”

“How did you know—” He looked at her, his jaw slacked. His face was thin, sick, intense. He closed his jaw. “Yes. I sent for him. Wrote him a note. He came back, in the same suit. He offered to build a new armory for the Guards. We talked. He told me about himself—”

“And you accepted the armory?”

“No. You know I didn’t. I would not sell the Guards to him because, once he had bought them, they would have no value; they would not be the Guards. If I could sell Forrest Park to him for instance, or sell him what Van Dorn Avenue stands for. So we talked. He was born and raised on a Mississippi plantation. Tenant-farmers; you know: barefoot, the whole family, nine months in the year. There were six children, in a one-room-and-leanto cabin, he the youngest. Sometimes nearby, but usually from a distance, he would see the owner of the land on a saddle-horse, riding over the fields among the tenants, calling them by their first names and they saying Sir to him; and from the road that passed before the big house, he (he would slip away from home, when the rest of his family were in the field) would see the owner lying in a hammock under the trees, at two and three and four oclock in the afternoon, when his own father and mother and sisters and brothers were among the shimmering cotton-rows in sweaty gingham and straw hats like things salvaged out of trash bins.

“One day his father sent him up to the big house with a message. He went to the front door. A nigger opened it, one of the few niggers in that country, neighborhood; one of a race whom his kind hated from birth, through suspicion and economic jealousy and, in this case, envy; performing, as his people did, work which niggers would not do, eating food which the niggers at the big house would have scorned. The negro barred the door with his body; while they stood so, the boss himself came up the hall and looked out at the boy in worn overalls. ‘Dont you ever come to my front door again,’ the boss said. ‘When you come here, go to the back door. Dont you ever come to my front door again.’ And there was the nigger behind the boss, in the house, grinning behind the boss’ back. He—Martin—told me he could feel the nigger’s white eyeballs on his back as he returned down the drive, without delivering the message, and the nigger’s white teeth cracked with laughing.

“He didn’t go back home. He hid in the bushes. He was hungry and thirsty, but he stayed hidden all that day, lying on his face in a ditch. When it turned afternoon he crawled to the edge of the woods, where he could see his father and his brother and his two older sisters working in the field. It was after dark when he went home. He never spoke to the boss again. He never saw him closer than on the saddle-mare, going about the fields, until he was a
grown man. But he watched the boss, the way he sat the horse and wore his hat and talked; sometimes he would hide and talk to himself, using the boss’ gestures, watching his shadow on the wall of the barn or the bank of the ditch: ‘Dont you never come to my front door again. You go around to the back. Dont you never come to my front door again.’ He swore then that some day he too would be rich, with a horse, saddled and unsaddled by niggers, to ride, and a hammock to lie in during the hot hours, with his shoes off. He had never owned shoes at all, so the comparative was to wear shoes all the time, winter and summer; the superlative, to own shoes and not even wear them.

“Then he was grown. He had a wife and a child; he owned a country store in the neighborhood. His wife could read, but he had had no chance to learn. So he memorised his credit transactions as he made them—the spools of thread, the nickles’ worth of lard or axle-grease or kerosene—and recited them to her over the supper table while she wrote them down in a book. He never made a mistake, because he couldn’t afford to.

“He and the boss would play poker in the store at night. They would play on an improvised table, by lamplight, using wrought nails for counters; he would have corn whiskey in a jug, a glass, spoon, a cracked mug of sugar. He never drank himself; he does not know the taste of it to this day, he told me. The boss was an old man then, with a white, tobacco-stained moustache and shaky hands and eyes that didn’t see so good even by daylight. So it couldn’t have been very difficult to fool him. Anyway, they would bet back and forth with the nails, the two of them. ‘I’ve got three queens,’ the boss would say, reaching for the nails. ‘Beat that, by Henry.’ Then the other would lay his cards down on the table; the boss would lean forward, peering, his hands arrested above the nails. ‘Hit’s a straight,’ the other says. ‘I was lucky again that time.’ The boss curses; he takes up a cold cigar in his shaking hand and sucks at it. ‘Pour me another toddy,’ he says. ‘Deal the cards.’

“He came to Memphis. He owned a grocery store at first, selling to niggers and wops on the edge of town. His wife and child lived in two rooms above the store, with a vegetable garden at the back. His wife liked it there. But when he got richer and moved into town and got still richer, she didn’t like it. They lived close up, where
they could see the electric signs from the upstairs window, and he was making money fast then every time there was an election, but they didn’t have a vegetable garden. That was what killed her: not the money; the fact that they didn’t have a garden, and that there was a negro servant in the house, which bothered her. So she died and he buried her in a private lot; the cenotaph cost twelve thousand dollars, he told me. But he could afford it, he said. He could have spent fifty thousand on it then, he said. ‘Ah,’ I said; ‘you had some paving contracts.’ ‘Folks needs to walk,’ he said. ‘Vote, too,’ I said. ‘That’s right,’ he said. He told me he has eight hundred and ten votes that he can drop into any ballot box like so many peanut-hulls.

“Then I found out about the girl, the daughter. He told me that she knew a lot of the folks that went to the Guards’ Ball; she had met them at the balls at West End and at roadhouses. She told him about it herself; almost every night she would go out to another ball, with Harrison Coates or the Sandeman boys or that Heustace one; I forget his name. She had her own car, so she would leave the house alone and meet them at the ball, she told him. And he believed it; he even called them ‘balls’. ‘But she’s as good as they are,’ he said. ‘Even if they dont come to the house for her, like young fellows used to do in my day. They may not know it. But there aint nothing for them to be ashamed of. She’s as good as any of them.’

“I met Harrison Coates on the street; I mean young Harrison, the one that got fired out of Sewanee last year. ‘I’ve been hearing about these balls out at the Grotto,’ I said. He looked at me. ‘That’s what she calls them,’ I said. ‘What she told her father they were. She said you and the Sandeman boys were there.’

“ ‘Who did?’ he said.

“ ‘So you were there,’ I said. I told him her name.

“ ‘Oh,’ he said.

“ ‘So you do know her.’

“ ‘You know; we’d kind of take a night off and go out there. Maybe pick up a girl or two on the way out.’

“ ‘Without asking their names,’ I said. ‘Was that how you met her?’

“ ‘Met who?’ he said. I told him again. ‘Not that Martin?’

“ ‘The same one,’ I said. ‘I wont tell, though.’

“ ‘I was wondering where you knew her,’ he said. ‘Jeez; I thought—’ Then he stopped.

“ ‘Thought what?’ He just looked at me. ‘What is she like?’ I said.

“ ‘A lot of stocking and paint. Like most of them. Hack Sandeman was the one that knew her before. I dont know where. I never asked. You mean the one with that lemon-colored Duplex, dont you?’

“ ‘That’s the one. The only car like that in town.’

“ ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘Jeez; I thought—’ he stopped again.

“ ‘What? Thought what?’

“ ‘Well, she was all dressed up, in some kind of a dress with diamonds and truck. When I went up to her to meet her, there was something about her; kind of.…’ He looked at me.

“ ‘Belligerent?’ I said.

“ ‘I dont know anything about her. I never saw her before. She might be all right, for all I know. Sure; she—’

“ ‘I didn’t mean anything by belligerent,’ I said. ‘I mean, like she was watching you, careful; like she was waiting to find out what you were.’

“ ‘Oh,’ he said; ‘sure. So I thought—’

“ ‘What?’

“ ‘With that car and all. We thought maybe she was somebody’s sweetie. Some bird’s car, maybe, and her on the loose that night and him coming in all of a sudden, looking for her and the car. From Manuel Street or Toccopola; somewhere down there.’

“ ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘You thought that?’

“ ‘We didn’t know it was that Martin. I never paid much attention to the name, because I thought it would be faked. She would just say to meet her somewhere and we would be there, and she would come along in that yellow car and we would get in, maybe looking behind all the time; you know, watching for him.’

“ ‘Yes,’ I said. But already Martin had told me what a good girl she was, and I know she is. I know she is just a country girl, a lot further lost than he is himself, because he at least believes he knows where he wants to go. She had no mother, you see. All she wants is silk stockings, and to drive that yellow car fast past the red lights, with the cops touching their caps to it. But that didn’t suit him. He took her to Washington and put her in school. It was the first
time either of them had ever been in a pullman even. She stayed three weeks, when he (he was back home again) got a letter from the Mother Superior. She had cried ever since he drove off that afternoon in a taxi-cab and left her there; when he met the train at the station she got off, still crying, newly powdered and painted above the streaked tears. She had lost fifteen pounds, he said.

“And now the Guards’ Ball. Maybe he was grooming her for it all the time. And she would go, not wanting to; she would have more sense than he; and be ignored, and then it would be all over. The Ball, I mean, and his wanting her to be there willy-nilly, for her own sake, as he believes. But he cant see that. He would never see it, not even on the next day, with her and Memphis and all standing against him. He would just believe that his own flesh had betrayed him; that she was simply not the man her father was. What do you think of that?”

“Nothing,” the woman said. Her eyes were closed; her head lay back on the pillow. “I’ve heard it before. The same story about the same fly and the same molasses.”

“You think that I would? That I will?”

The woman said nothing. She might have been asleep.

That was in the early spring. Two months later, on a bright morning in May, when Dr Blount emerged from the elevator at his floor he saw, shapeless, patient and shabby, in silhouette against the bright windows at the end of the corridor, a man waiting at the door to his office. They entered the office; again they faced one another across the neat, bare desk.

“You have a street named for your grandpaw,” Martin said. “You wont want that. Some of them have got parks named for them; ones that aint no more worthy of it, but that happen to have more money. I could do that.” He wore the same tie, the same cheap and shabby suit, the same stained felt hat in his hand, speaking in the same level, flat voice of a countryman. “I’d do more than that. I’d do for you what them that deserve you and your grandpappy haven’t done. The one that was killed with Forrest, I mean. My grandpappy was killed too. We never knowed what army he was in nor where he went. He just went off one day and
never come back; maybe he was just tired of staying at home. But my sort dont count. There was plenty of us; always was, always will be. It’s your sort, the ones that’s got the names the streets and the parks would want.” All the time he talked, he was looking at Blount, at the thin, sick, unpredictable face behind rimless nose glasses opposite him across the desk. “There aint no right art gallery in Memphis, and aint like to be withouten I build it. Put her name on that list, and I’ll build a art gallery in Sandeman Park and name it after your grandpappy that was killed with Forrest.”