Uncollected Stories of William Faulkner (84 page)

So he told it again: how the girls fell in line and kissed the members of the battalion one by one, and how the niggers were fiddling again now only his mother said you couldn’t hear it, and how he said to her once (he was fifteen then and it seemed to him that he had listened to it a right considerable of times), “How do
you know you couldn’t hear it?” and his mother estopped for that moment, standing there on the musket barrel and glaring at him, her mouth still open for talking beneath the sunbonnet which she wore indoors and out, which, so he told Blount, he believed she put on each morning even before her shoes and petticoat. “I bet when you came to Charley Gordon they couldn’t even see the niggers’ elbows working,” he told her.

“What you mean is, they didn’t need to listen,” Blount said. “What you mean is you could hear ‘Look away, look away’ without having to listen then. There are folks that can still hear it, even after seventy years,” he added. “That cant hear anything else.”

“But you cant live now and then both,” Gordon said.

“You can die trying.”

“You mean, you will die trying.”

“All right. What if I do? Who will be harmed by it?”

That was the first time Gordon told the other he should marry, saying it again on the afternoon when Blount had burst in with his astonishing request and in a condition even more hysteric than when he had burst in twelve years ago crying You are her son, you are Lewis Randolph’s son—the wild sick intelligent face—the doctor who, as he said, preferred an anecdote to an appendectomy, who spent his days weighing the names of candidates for an annual ball like the head of a new and still precarious revolutionary government choosing his cabinet and ministers. “So I am to drag her, a woman almost ninety years old, in by main force from where she is contented and comfortable, to go to a dance with a lot of prancing jellybeans.”

“But don’t you see? She attended the first one. I mean the real first one, the first one that meant anything, when the Guards were really born, when they sang Dixie under that flag most of them had never seen before and she kissed a hundred and four men and gave Charles Gordon the rose. Can’t you see?”

“But why mother? There must be one woman still alive here in Memphis who was there that night.”

“No,” Blount said. “She’s the last one. And even if there were others alive she would still be the last one. It was not one of the others that left on that troop train that night with a Confederate officer’s cloak over a hooped ball gown and the flower still in her hair, to be married bareheaded in the snow in a square of troops
like a court martial and spend four hours with the husband she was never to see again. And now to have her attend the la—this one, to enter the ball room on my arm like she did seventy years ago on Charles Gordon’s.”

“You started to say the last one. Is this the last one you are going to hold, or is it the last one you expect to attend yourself? I thought only death or marriage could relieve you of your chairmanship.”

“I’m not getting any younger.”

“For marriage or for dying?” Blount did not answer. Apparently he was not listening either, the intelligent tragic face downlooking, sick, and bemused. Suddenly he looked up, full at the other, and Gordon knew that he was sicker than he or anyone else suspected.

“You say for me to marry,” he said. “I can’t marry. She wouldn’t have me.”

“Who wouldn’t have you?”

“Lewis Randolph.”

So he departed, and Gordon sat bemused too. But there was nothing sick about him—this stocky solid man, gray successful and sane, sitting in his sober good broadcloth and his enormous immaculate old-fashioned cuffs, the expensive cigar burning in the clipped hand soft and smooth now but which still had not forgot the shape of a plow handle, rousing, waking suddenly, saying aloud: “Well, by damn. By damn if I don’t do it.”

So two days later his secretary telephoned Blount’s home; within an hour Blount was in the office. “Well, I persuaded her,” Gordon said. “She’s coming in. But not to the ball. I expect that will be too much for her. We’ll just call it dinner at my house, with a few guests. I’ll have Henry Heustace and his wife. She’s only about twenty years older than they are. We’ll see about the ball later.” Only Blount was not listening to this either.

“Persuaded her,” he said. “Lewis Randolph at the Nonconnah Guards ball. Charley Gordon, and now Gavin Blount. How did you do it?”

“How do you think? What’s the one sure way to persuade any woman, maiden wife or widow, to go anywhere? I told her there was an eligible bachelor who wanted to marry her.”

And so, three weeks later still, sitting among his guests above the fine linen and crystals and silver and cut flowers of his heavy diningroom he thought
maybe Gavin Blount never saw her before
at all but by God this is the first time I ever saw her at a table with actual linen on it and more than one dish and knife and fork and drinking vessel
—the thin erect figure with perfectly white hair, in a shawl and an absolutely unrelieved black silk dress which still showed the creases and still smelled of the thin pungent bark in which it had been folded away, reaching Memphis at last who had been on the road for a few months under twenty years, arriving once more in a dissolving December dusk and entering the house which she had never seen before, the cold sharp unfaded eyes glancing once at the bouquet of red roses which the servant and not the donor presented, who (the donor) peered up the hall from within the room which Gordon called office after the old fashion, and cried: “That can’t be her. It can’t be. Yes it is. It can’t be anyone else,” saying, “No. Not in to table. I want to sit across from her. So I can look at her, watch her,” and the son said,

“Watch her what? Get tangled up in a lot of new-fangled knives and spoons?” and the other:

“Tangled up? Lewis Randolph? Do you think the woman that carried that derringer around in her apron pocket for three years until the time came to use it could be outcountenanced or confounded by all the Post-postulations in existence?”

And she was not. The son watched Heustace precede the butler and draw her chair and saw her pause just an instant and look at the array of silver with a quick comprehensive country woman’s glance, and that was all. So he knew then that he need not have worried about her at all, telling himself with the old humor that it was a good thing for him she did not know he had worried. Because, as Blount might have put it and as his, Gordon’s, son actually did, she had already stolen the show, not only on the part of Heustace, the only guest present approximating her own generation, but of the other couple of Gordon’s own time and of the young woman who was his son’s guest and the young man who was his daughter’s, not to mention the face which hung opposite her above a bowl of flowers like a stricken and fading moon about to sink beyond a hedge: so that he stopped watching his mother and began to watch Blount; he saw his mother raise a spoon full of soup and he thought
She ain’t going to like it and she is going to say so out loud
and then he began to watch Blount thinking
He’s the one that needs worrying about
, thinking
Yes. A damn sight sicker than
anybody knows
. So he was taken by surprise too, not, he realized later, that he actually had expected the evening to pass without incident but that it had begun so quickly, before they had even got settled at table; he was watching Blount, aware that Heustace was talking to his mother about the war days in Memphis, the Yankees in the city, which Heustace remembered; he heard Heustace say, “Conditions in the country were different, of course. There was not even a moral check on them there,” when he saw Blount move a little, thrust his chair back, the sick moonlike face leaned forward above his untasted soup as he began to speak with a curious rapid intensity; and then suddenly Gordon knew what was coming as if he had read Blount’s mind, he saw the other faces leaning forward into the abrupt silence as though Blount’s intensity had communicated somehow even to them.

“The trouble is,” Blount said, “We never could keep our Yankees in the right proportion. We were like a cook with too much raw material. If we could just have kept the proportion down to ten or twelve to one of us, we could have made a good war out of it. But when they wouldn’t play fair, when the overflow of them took to prowling about the country where only women and children were left, a single woman and a child maybe, and a hand full of scared niggers—” The mother was staring at Blount. She had just bitten a piece of bread, the bread still lifted and she chewing as people without teeth chew, and now she had ceased chewing and was watching Blount exactly as she used to watch the nigger plowing beyond the fence. “Half of them prowling around the back doors of houses away back in the country while all the men were away fighting the other half million of them, gone in good faith, believing that the women and children would be safe even from Yankees—” Now she chewed again, twice; Gordon saw the two rapid motions of her jaw before she ceased again and glanced both ways along the table, at the other faces leaning forward with an identical expression of intense amazement, the glance rapid and cold, the cold eyes pausing no longer on the son’s face than on any other. Then she put her hands on the table and began to thrust her chair back.

“Now mother,” Gordon said; “now mother.” But she was not rising: it was as though she had merely pushed her chair back to give herself room to talk in, thrusting it sharply back and leaning
forward, her hands, one of which still held the bitten bread, on the edge of the table, staring at the man who sat opposite her in exactly the same attitude, and now her voice, though not rapid, was as cold and efficient as her gaze had been: and the son, waiting for his body to obey him and move also, thought
How hope to stop it, when she has had to wait seventy years for some one to tell it to
.

“It was just five of them that I ever saw,” she said. “Joanna said there were more out in front, still on their horses. But I never saw them. It was just five that came round to the kitchen door, walking. They came to the kitchen door and walked in. Walked right into my kitchen without even knocking. Joanna had just come down the hall yelling that the whole front yard was full of Yankees and I was just turning from the stove where I was heating milk for him—” she did not move, she did not even indicate Gordon with a movement of her head or eyes. “I had just said ‘Hush that yelling and take that child up off the floor’ when those five tramps came right into my kitchen without even taking off their hats—” And still Gordon could not begin to move. He sat too, ringed by the amazed faces from among which the faces of his mother and Blount leaned toward each other above the bowl of flowers, the one cold, articulated beneath the white hair, the other resembling something expensive and fragile and on the point of falling from a mantel or shelf onto a stone floor, the voice coming from it in a passionate and dying whisper:

“Yes. Yes. Go on. And then what?”

“The pan of boiling milk was sitting on the stove like this. I took it up, just like this—” Then she moved; she and Blount both rose at the same instant as though they were two puppets worked by a single wire. They faced each other for a second, an instant, motionless like two dolls in a Christmas window above the bright glitter of the table, against the background of amazed and incredulous faces. Then she took up her bowl of soup and flung it at Blount’s head, then, facing him, her butter knife clutched in her hand and pointed at Blount as though it were a small pistol, she repeated the phrase with which she had ordered the soldiers out of the house—a phrase such as steamboat mates used and which Gordon believed she did not even know she knew until that moment seventy years ago when she needed it.

Later, after the tumult of cheering and yelling had ceased, he was
able to reconstruct it somewhat—the two of them, both small, rigid, back-leaning, facing each other, the one with the gleaming little knife clutched and steady at Blount’s middle, the other, his face and shirtfront splashed with soup, his head erect and the sick face exalted like that of a soldier having a decoration pinned on him, about them both the roar, the tumult of cheering voices. When Gordon finally overtook her she was sitting in a chair in the parlor, trembling though still bolt upright. “Call Lucius,” she said. “I want to go home.”

“Why it was fine,” he said. “Can’t you hear them still? You never heard more noise than that even on that other night when you came up to the ball.”

“I’m going home,” she said. She rose. “Call Lucius. I want to go out the back door.” So he took her back into that room he called his office until the car came.

“Is it those words you forgot and used?” he said. “That’s nothing nowadays. You find them in all the books. Some of them, that is.”

“No,” she said. “I just want to go home.” So he put her into the car then, and returned to the office. Blount was there, sitting quietly in a chair, clutching a damp stained napkin.

“I’ll get you a fresh shirt,” Gordon said.

“No,” Blount said. “Never mind.”

“You’re not going to the ball that way, are you?” The other didn’t answer. A decanter sat on the table. Gordon unstoppered it and poured a neat drink and pushed the glass toward Blount. But the other did not move to take it.

“I know why you stopped feeling the derringer now,” he said. “It wasn’t that the need for it had passed away. Because they might have come back, another lot of them. Maybe they did. You wouldn’t have known it. It was because she found out she wasn’t worthy to be protected by a bullet, a clean bullet that Charles Gordon would have said was all right, when she found out she could be surprised and tricked into using language she didn’t even know she knew, Charles Gordon didn’t know she knew, that Yankees and niggers had heard her use.” Now he looked at Gordon. “I want your pistol.” Gordon looked at him. “Come, Ran. I can go home and get one. You know that.” For an instant longer Gordon looked at him. Then he said, quietly, immediately:

“All right. Here you are.” He took the pistol from the desk and
gave it to Blount. And yet, after the other had gone, Gordon’s mind misgave him a little—this man whose business was judging character, anticipating the progression of human actions, who had done it for so long that at times they appeared to be snap judgments but were not, and in which he had complete faith, not only because they had been almost invariably right. Never-the-less, this time he had misgivings, though presently he admitted to himself that they were not due to his affection for Blount so much as to his pride in his judgment. However, right or wrong, it was done now, so he sat smoking quietly until he heard the car return and presently the negro, Lucius, entered. “I’m expecting a message,” Gordon said. “I don’t think it will come until in the morning, though it may come to-night. But when it does, bring it up to me.”