Uncollected Stories of William Faulkner (85 page)

“Yes sir,” the negro said. “Even if you are asleep?”

“Yes,” Gordon said. “Whether I’m asleep or not. As soon as it comes.”

It did not arrive until morning however. That is, he did not get it until it appeared on the tray with his early cup of coffee, though when he saw that it was a package and not just an envelope he did not even listen for an answer to his question as to why he had not been wakened last night to receive it but instead he merely extracted the note and returned the newspaper-wrapped object to the negro. “Put this back in the desk,” he said.

So it was relief he felt, an emotion such as any woman might feel, not the vindication of a man’s, a banker’s, judgment (
I’m getting old
he thought) as a penance, for the strengthening of his soul, he did not even read the note until he had drunk his coffee. It was written in pencil on the back of a soiled handbill announcement of a chain store grocery:
You seem to have been right again, if being told you are right can be any satisfaction to you anymore. I said once that she and her kind can take it and we can’t and so that’s what’s wrong with us and you said Maybe and I was wrong, which both you and I expected. But you were wrong too because I can take it because why shouldn’t I? because Gavin Blount beat him at last. It might have been Charles Gordon she gave the rose to but by God it was Gavin Blount she threw the soup plate at
.

Women know things that we dont know, haven’t yet learned, may never learn, I suppose. Perhaps it is that a man has everything, what he believes is right and what he believes is wrong and what he believes ought to happen and must happen and what he believes ought not to happen and cant happen, all neatly ticketed and catalogued and fitted into a pattern.

We called Mr Bowman a dangerous man, because he reacted in a proper and thoroughly masculine way, co-ordinating to a certain simple masculine creed with a kind of violent promptitude, without misgiving or remorse. One morning Zack Stowers came into the express office, a naked pistol in his hand. A drummer had insulted his wife; he had overtaken the man just as he sprang into the station bus and drove away from the hotel.

“Hey?” Mr Bowman said—he is a little deaf—leaning into the grille, cupping his ear. Stowers repeated, waving the pistol. The drummer had a friend with him; he himself might need support.

“Sure,” Mr Bowman said immediately. He took from the cash drawer the pistol that belonged to the company and dropped it into his hip pocket and paused at the rear door to call back to his wife: “Going down to the depot a minute.” He came around the partition without stopping for his coat and followed Stowers to the street. Stowers’ buggy was there. They got in and drove to the station at a slashing gallop while people along the street turned to look after them.

There were two of them. “There they are,” Stowers said. “See
that tall one in the green hat, and the short one carrying two grips?”

“You mean that narrow-sterned man with his coat on his arm?” Mr Bowman said, leaning a little forward as they galloped across the broad plaza before the station. They spoke in tense, calm, impersonal voices, like two men raising a long pole or a ladder.

“No, no,” Stowers said, reins, whip and pistol indiscriminate in his hands; “that tall fellow in the green hat just turning to look this way.”

“Oh, yes,” Mr Bowman said, “I got him. Now he’s looked at us, you want to shoot him now?”

“No, no. You just keep them covered. I want to talk to him first.”

“Better shoot him now,” Mr Bowman said. “He’s done looked around.”

“No, no; you wait like I say.”

“All right,” Mr Bowman said. “But it wont be in the back now, since he’s looking at us.”

They descended, not waiting to hitch the team. The fat drummer had turned too now, and still holding the two bags he watched them approach with a kind of grave horror. His hat was on the back of his head, and with his round eyes and his round mouth he looked like the photograph of a small fat boy in a sailor hat. He cast over his shoulder one glance: he and his companion were now as completely isolated as though they were the last two men.

“Which one you want?” Mr Bowman said, producing his pistol, contemplating the two drummers like a not particularly hungry dog would two quarters of dressed beef.

“Wait, now, durn you,” Stowers said. “Just watch them.”

“Hey?” Mr Bowman said, cupping his ear with the hand that held the pistol. Stowers laid his pistol down and began to take off his coat.

“What’s this, friend?” the tall drummer said.

“You going to fight him fist-and-skull, are you?” Mr Bowman said.

“Here, friend,” the tall drummer said. He looked over his shoulder. “Here, folks, I demand—”

“Let me fight him,” Mr Bowman said. “You hold the pistol on them so they wont run.”

“No,” Stowers said, flinging his coat down. “It’s my business.”

“I’ll fight them both,” Mr Bowman said. “Fight them both at once.”

“No,” Stowers said through his teeth, glaring at the tall drummer.

“Here, folks,” the tall drummer said, glancing quickly about, but not daring to look too long away from Stowers; “I demand—”

Stowers struck him, leaping bodily from the ground to do so, then they were swinging at one another. Mr Bowman moved aside and approached the fat drummer, who still held the two bags.

“It’s a mistake, mister,” the fat drummer said. “I swear to God. I swear to God he aint done nothing to his wife. He dont even know her. And if he did, there aint a man living has more respect for a woman than him.”

“You want to fight too?” Mr Bowman said.

“I swear so help me God, mister.”

“Come on. I’ll lay the gun on the ground between us. Come on.”

The train came in, roared down and past, jarring. The tall drummer looked over his shoulder, swung again at Stowers, then turned and leaped away. Stowers sprang after him, then whirled and ran back and caught up his pistol, and then two bystanders caught and held him, struggling and cursing.

“Now, now;” they said, “now, now.”

When the train pulled out Mr Bowman and Stowers returned to the buggy, Stowers dabbing at his mouth and spitting. “Durn it,” he said, “I kind of got carried away for a minute. I was so mad.… He kept on saying he wasn’t the one I was hunting.”

“No matter,” Mr Bowman said. “He put up a pretty good fight. Mine wouldn’t even do that.”

He is the express agent—a thick-built man who shows no age at all. Ruddy faced, his nose hooks a little and his hot hazel eyes hook a little, and he has a thatch of sparse, fine, vigorous reddish hair, and what would be, with a man more careful or aware of his appearance, a bald spot. He walks on the balls of his feet, with a light, mincing step like a prize-fighter gone a little stiff in the joints, and his clothes are always a little too short or too tight and too gaily colored in an innocent, slovenly way.

He looks like he might be thirty-eight, yet he has a nephew grown, married and a father; a boy whom Mr and Mrs Bowman
said was Mr Bowman’s nephew. Yet my aunt says he is an adopted child, taken by them from an orphanage. He grew up in the tight, small house where they live, and went to school and worked in the express office on Saturday when he got big enough, and got to be a man and went away and married; and now they own two dogs, fox terriers, fat, insolent, illtempered beasts with red choleric eyes, that ride with them in the car on Sundays and follow Mr Bowman around all during the week, at the office and on the street, and snarl and snap viciously at our hands when we offer to pet them. They snarl and snap at Mr Bowman too, but at Mrs Bowman they do not snarl. They do not exactly avoid her, but they regard her with a certain respect, insolent but alert, remaining in the office only when Mr Bowman is there.

Minnie Maude, who lives at Mrs Wiggins’ boarding house across the street, told me that one day they had a terrible fight because Mr Bowman wanted to wash the dogs in the kitchen one cold day. She said that Mrs Bowman’s cook told Mrs Wiggins’ cook that after that Mrs Bowman would not even let him keep the dogs in the kitchen at night and that Mr Bowman would slip back after they went to bed and let the dogs in and that he gave the cook a dollar a week extra to turn them out in the morning when she came, and clean up after them.

Mr Bowman is the agent, but Mrs Bowman is the office itself, the Company, as far as we are concerned. She is there all day long in a clean, full-length apron, with black alpaca gauntlets on her arms—a flat-faced woman with a full eye and a broad smile full of gold teeth and a wealth of virulent copper curls which you know cannot be authentic. Full-breasted, broad of hip, duck-legged; tireless, pleasant in a brusque, ready way, she looks like a handsome and prosperous washerwoman. And never more so than on Sunday, when she dresses in flowered silk and a broad-brimmed red hat and they and the dogs drive into the country and return with the car full of dogwood or red-gum and sumach, with which she decorates their dark and transiently frequented little house.

“You break off too much,” Mr Bowman says. She does not reply, her back turned to him and her arms lifted, her dress drawn across her firm arms and shoulders, her broad thighs. Then they go back to the kitchen, the dogs at Mr Bowman’s heels and with two wary eyes on Mrs Bowman, where he takes from the cupboard a gallon
jug of white whiskey, and they drink it neat from thickish tumblers, drink for drink. “It’ll be withered in two days, anyway,” he says. “If everybody took as much as you do, there wont be any left in fifty years.”

“What of it?” she says. “Do you expect to be here then? I dont.”

The next morning, Mrs Bowman already in the car and honking the horn impatiently for him, he waters the branches clumsily, sploshing water about; that evening when they return from the office he repeats it. “You’re going to drown them dead,” she says.

“They aint nothing but trash, anyhow,” he says.

“Then throw them out. I dont want my house all splashed up with water.”

The next morning they are late and in a hurry and he does not stop to water them; that evening they are late getting home. The next day it is too late, anyway. But he waters them just the same. When they return that evening the cook has thrown them out. She has to go with Mr Bowman into the back yard and show him where she put them, so that he can see they are withered and dead.

“It’s a sight, the way they go on,” the cook told. “Fighting about them dogs, and if it aint the dogs, it’s Mr Joe’s room again. Her wanting to change it so they can both have a bedroom, and him cussing and hollering scandalous whenever she mentions it. And them setting in my kitchen, drinking outen that jug and cussing one another like two men. But she stands right up to him. Makes him take them dogs out to the garage to wash them even on the coldest days.”

The express office was a sinecure. At first he had the office in a small hamlet. One night he was checking up, in the office alone, when at a sound he turned and looked into the muzzle of a pistol.

“Put them up,” the robber said. Even in the act of raising his hands he looked quickly about; as his right hand rose it brought with it the heavy metal cash-box and in the same motion he flung it at the robber’s face and then leaped straight into the exploding pistol. Lying together on the floor, heaving and striking silently at one another, he took the pistol away from the robber and killed him with it: a man with a criminal record and a five thousand dollar reward. He bought a house with the five thousand dollars; the company gave him the easy office he now holds.

When he first came to our town he also operated an eating-place
at the station, which his wife ran until one day there was some trouble with a locomotive engineer, whereupon he sold out and his wife came to help him in the office. Not that he distrusted her: it was merely his few firm and simple convictions of human conduct. He neither trusted or loved her the less nor hated the engineer the more, though for a year after that the engineer would go across to the fireman’s side and crouch behind the boiler-head when he went through the station.

Soon his wife was running the office and he was doing only the outside work, hauling and such, the two dogs beside him on the truck, meeting the early train and the late one, without an overcoat in the bitterest weather. An active, though not talkative, man; full-blooded: so much so as to be impervious to cold; so much so that the very heat of his desire for children perhaps consumed and sterilised the seed in that deep provision of nature’s for frustrating them who would try to force nature beyond her own provisions, since he would doubtless have tried to make his son a more Bowman-ish Bowman than himself, or killed him trying.

So he is hardly ever in the office at all, as the absence of the dogs attested. Yet we never saw him, even with his abundant time, loafing and talking with the idle men about the square, until lately.

Women know things we dont know. Minnie Maude is twenty-two: she chews the gum behind the wicket of the Rex theatre across the street from the express office. “You wait,” she says. “He’s a little late today, but you wait and you’ll see.” So we wait, and after a while the car drives up and he gets out. His name is Wall. He sells insurance or something: a dapper little man with a handsome face in a bleakly effeminate way, like the face of a comely woman sea-captain—that sort of cold eyes. We watch him enter the express office.

“Good Lord,” I say; “the man’s—”

“Do you see them dogs anywhere?” Minnie Maude says. I look at her. “He’s out delivering the express from number twenty-four. Dont you reckon he knows that?”

“Good Lord,” I say again.

Minnie Maude’s finger is slender against the softly squashed strawberry of her painted mouth; the smooth, minute corrugations of her musing gum show between her small teeth. She says in a musing tone; her eyes have a musing, faraway look, older
than time or sin: “Them big women that have to fight the way they look all the time, they always take them little feisty men.” I thought of that too, remembering how Wall had once shown me a thumbed notebook—his stud-book, he called it—containing probably a hundred feminine names and telephone numbers scattered about north Mississippi and into Memphis. And why he should dare that man for that woman who should be old enough to be his mother or at least his aunt. But that’s one of the things that women know and we never will, not even Wall, for all his notebook full of names.