Uncollected Stories of William Faulkner (87 page)

“Then fall came, and Henry went back to the university. Charles was there, too. Judith wrote to him and had letters back, but maybe they were waiting for Henry to fetch him at another weekend, like they used to do. They waited a good while; Henry’s boy told how they didn’t room together now and didn’t speak when they met on the campus. And at home Judith wouldn’t speak to him, either. Henry must have been having a fine time. Getting the full worth out of whatever it was he wouldn’t tell.

“Judith might have cried some then at times, being as that was before her nature changed, as the niggers put it. And so maybe the old folks worked on Henry some, and Henry still not telling. And so at Thanksgiving they told Henry that Charles was coming to spend Christmas. They had it, then, Henry and his father, behind closed doors. But they said you could hear them through the door: ‘Then I wont be here myself,’ Henry says. ‘You will be here, sir,’ the colonel says. ‘And you will give both Charles and your sister a satisfactory explanation of your conduct’: something like that, I imagine.

“Henry and Charles explained it this way. There is a ball on Christmas eve, and Colonel Sutpen announces the engagement, which everybody knew about, anyway. And the next morning about daylight a nigger wakes the colonel and he comes charging down with his nightshirt stuffed into his britches and his galluses dangling and jumps on the mule bareback (the mule being the first animal the nigger came to in the lot) and gets down to the back pasture just as Henry and Charles are aiming at one another with pistols. And the colonel hasn’t any more than got there when here comes Judith, in her nightdress too and a shawl, and bareback on a pony too. And what she didn’t tell Henry. Not crying, even though it wasn’t until after the war that she gave up crying for good, her nature changing and all. ‘Say what he has done,’ she tells Henry. ‘Accuse him to his face.’ But still Henry wont tell. Then Charles says that maybe he had better clear off, but the colonel wont have it. And so thirty minutes later Henry rides off, without any breakfast and without even telling his mother goodbye, and they never saw him again for three years. The police dog howled a right smart at first; it wouldn’t let anybody touch it or feed it. It got into the house and got into Henry’s room and for two days it wouldn’t let anybody enter the room.

“He was gone for three years. In the second year after that Christmas Charles graduated and went home. After Henry cleared out Charles’ visits were put in abeyance, you might say, by mutual consent. A kind of probation. He and Judith saw one another now and then, and she still wore the ring, and when he graduated and went home, the wedding was set for that day one year. But when that day one year came, they were getting ready to fight Bull Run. Henry came home that spring, in uniform. He and Judith greeted one another: ‘Good morning, Henry.’ ‘Good morning, Judith.’ But that was about all. Charles Bon’s name was not mentioned between them; maybe the ring on Judith’s hand was mention enough. And then about three days after his arrival, a nigger rode out from the village, with a letter from Charles Bon, who had stopped tactfully you might say, at the hotel here, this hotel here.

“I dont know what it was. Maybe Henry’s old man convinced him, or maybe it was Judith. Or maybe it was just the two young knights going off to battle; I think I told you Henry was that sort of a guy. Anyway, Henry rides into the village. They didn’t shake
hands, but after a while Henry and Charles come back together. And that afternoon Judith and Charles were married. And that evening Charles and Henry rode away together, to Tennessee and the army facing Sherman. They were gone four years.

“They had expected to be in Washington by July fourth of that first year and home again in time to lay-by the corn and cotton. But they were not in Washington by July fourth, and so in the late summer the colonel threw down his newspaper and went out on his horse and herded up the first three hundred men he met, trash, gentles and all, and told them they were a regiment and wrote himself a colonel’s commission and took them to Tennessee too. Then the two women were left in the house alone, to ‘bury the silver and eat what they could git.’ Not leaning on any columns, looking up the road, and not crying, either. That was when Judith’s nature began to change. But it didn’t change good until one night three years later.

“But it seemed that the old lady couldn’t git enough. Maybe she wasn’t a good forager. Anyway, she died, and the colonel couldn’t get home in time and so Judith buried her and then the colonel got home at last and tried to persuade Judith to go into the village to live but Judith said she would stay at home and the colonel went back to where the war was, not having to go far, either. And Judith stayed in the house, looking after the niggers and what crops they had, keeping the rooms fresh and ready for the three men, changing the bedlinen each week as long as there was linen to change with. Not standing on the porch, looking up the road. Gittin something to eat had got so simple by then that it took all your time. And besides, she wasn’t worried. She had Charles’ monthly letters to sleep on, and besides she knew he would come through all right, anyway. All she had to do was to be ready and wait. And she was used to waiting by then.

“She wasn’t worried. You have to expect, to worry. She didn’t even expect when, almost as soon as she heard of the surrender and got Charles’ letter saying that the war was over and he was safe, one of the niggers come running into the house one morning saying, ‘Missy. Missy.’ And she standing in the hall when Henry came onto the porch and in the door. She stood there, in the white dress (and you can still have the rose, if you like); she stood there; maybe her hand was lifted a little, like when someone
threatens you with a stick, even in fun. ‘Yes?’ she says. ‘Yes?’

“ ‘I have brought Charles home,’ Henry says. She looks at him; the light is on her face but not on his. Maybe it is her eyes talking, because Henry says, not even gesturing with his head: ‘Out there. In the wagon.’

“ ‘Oh,’ she says, quite quiet, looking at him, not moving too. ‘Was—was the journey hard on him?’

“ ‘It was not hard on him.’

“ ‘Oh,’ she says. ‘Yes. Yes. Of course. There must have been a last … last shot, so it could end. Yes. I had forgot.’ Then she moves, quiet, deliberate. ‘I am grateful to you. I thank you.’ She calls then, to the niggers murmuring about the front door, peering into the hall. She calls them by name, composed, quiet: ‘Bring Mr Charles into the house.’

“They carried him up to the room which she had kept ready for four years, and laid him on the fresh bed, in his boots and all, who had been killed by the last shot of the war. Judith walked up the stairs after them, her face quiet, composed, cold. She went into the room and sent the niggers out and she locked the door. The next morning, when she came out again, her face looked exactly as it had when she went into the room. And the next morning Henry was gone. He had ridden away in the night, and no man that knew his face ever saw him again.”

“And which one is the ghost?” I said.

Don looked at me. “You are not keeping count anymore. Are you?”

“No,” I said. “I’m not keeping count anymore.”

“I dont know which one is the ghost. The colonel came home and died in ’70 and Judith buried him beside her mother and her husband, and the nigger woman, the grandmother (not the old one, the one named Sutpen) who was a biggish girl then, she told how, fifteen years after that day, something else happened in that big decaying house. She told of Judith living there alone, busy around the house in an old dress like trash would wear, raising chickens, working with them before day and after dark. She told it as she remembered it, of waking on her pallet in the cabin one dawn to find her mother, dressed, crouched over the fire, blowing it alive. The mother told her to get up and dress, and she told me how they went up to the house in the dawn. She said she already knew it,
before they got to the house and found another negro woman and two negro men of another family living three miles away already in the hall, their eyeballs rolling in the dusk, and how all that day the house seemed to be whispering: ‘Shhhhhh. Miss Judith. Miss Judith. Shhhhhh.’

“She told me how she crouched between errands in the hall, listening to the negroes moving about upstairs, and about the grave. It was already dug, the moist, fresh earth upturned in slowly drying shards as the sun mounted. And she told me about the slow, scuffing feet coming down the stairs (she was hidden then, in a closet beneath the staircase); hearing the slow feet move across overhead, and pass out the door and cease. But she didn’t come out, even then. It was late afternoon when she came out and found herself locked in the empty house. And while she was trying to get out she heard the sound from upstairs and she began to scream and to run. She said she didn’t know what she was trying to do. She said she just ran, back and forth in the dim hall, until she tripped over something near the staircase and fell, screaming, and while she lay on her back beneath the stairwell, screaming, she saw in the air above her a face, a head upside down. Then she said the next thing she remembered was when she waked in the cabin and it was night, and her mother standing over her. ‘You dreamed it,’ the mother said. ‘What is in that house belongs to that house. You dreamed it, you hear, nigger?’ ”

“So the niggers in the neighborhood have got them a live ghost,” I said. “They claim that Judith is not dead, eh?”

“You forget about the grave,” Don said. “It’s there to be seen with the other three.”

“That’s right,” I said. “Besides those niggers that saw Judith dead.”

“Ah,” Don said. “Nobody but the old woman saw Judith dead. She laid out the body herself. Wouldn’t let anybody in until the body was in the coffin and it fastened shut. But there’s more than that. More than niggers.” He looked at me. “White folks too. That is a good house, even yet. Sound inside. It could have been had for the taxes anytime these forty years. But there is something else.” He looked at me. “There’s a dog there.”

“What about that?”

“It’s a police dog. The same kind of dog that Colonel Sutpen
brought back from Europe and that Henry had at the university with him—”

“—and has been waiting at the house forty years for Henry to come home. That puts us even. So if you’ll just buy me a ticket home, I’ll let you off about the wire.”

“I dont mean the same dog. Henry’s dog howled around the house for a while after he rode off that night, and died, and its son was an old dog when they had Judith’s funeral. It nearly broke up the funeral. They had to drive it away from the grave with sticks, where it wanted to dig. It was the last of the breed, and it stayed around the house, howling. It would let no one approach the house. Folks would see it hunting in the woods, gaunt as a wolf, and now and then at night it would take a howling spell. But it was old then; after a while it could not get very far from the house, and I expect there were lots of folks waiting for it to die so they could get up there and give that house a prowl. Then one day a white man found the dog dead in a ditch it had got into hunting food and was too weak to get out again, and he thought, ‘Now is my chance.’ He had almost got to the porch when a police dog came around the house. Perhaps he watched it for a moment in a kind of horrid and outraged astonishment before he decided it wasn’t a ghost and climbed a tree. He stayed there three hours, yelling, until the old nigger woman came and drove it away and told the man to get off the place and stay off.”

“That’s fine,” I said. “I like the touch about the dog’s ghost. I’ll bet that Sutpen ghost has got a horse, too. And did they mention the ghost of a demijohn, maybe?”

“That dog wasn’t a ghost. Ask that man if it was. Because it died too. And then there was another police dog there. They would watch each dog in turn get old and die, and then on the day they would find it dead, another police dog would come charging full-fleshed and in midstride around the corner of the house like somebody with a wand or something had struck the foundation stone. I saw the present one. It isn’t a ghost.”

“A dog,” I said. “A haunted house that bears police dogs like plums on a bush.” We looked at one another. “And the old nigger woman could drive it away. And her name is Sutpen too. Who do you suppose is living in that house?”

“Who do you suppose?”

“Not Judith. They buried her.”

“They buried something.”

“But why should she want to make folks think she is dead if she isn’t dead?”

“That’s what I sent for you for. That’s for you to find out.”

“How find out?”

“Just go and see. Just walk up to the house and go in and holler: ‘Hello. Who’s at home?’ That’s the way they do in the country.”

“Oh, is it?”

“Sure. That’s the way. It’s easy.”

“Oh, is it.”

“Sure,” Don said. “Dogs like you, and you dont believe in haunts. You said so yourself.”

And so I did what Don said. I went there and I entered that house. And I was right and Don was right. That dog was a flesh-and-blood dog and that ghost was a flesh-and-blood ghost. It had lived in that house for forty years, with the old negro woman supplying it with food, and no man the wiser.

While I stood in the darkness in a thick jungle of overgrown crepe myrtle beneath a shuttered window of the house, I thought, ‘I have only to get into the house. Then she will hear me and will call out. She will say “Is that you?” and call the old negress by her name. And so I will find out what the old negress’ name is too.’ That’s what I was thinking, standing there beside the dark house in the darkness, listening to the diminishing rush of the dog fading toward the branch in the pasture.

So I stood there in the junglish overgrowth of the old garden, beside the looming and scaling wall of the house, thinking of the trivial matter of the old woman’s name. Beyond the garden, beyond the pasture, I could see a light in the cabin, where in the afternoon I had found the old woman smoking in a wirebound chair beside the door. “So your name is Sutpen too,” I said.

She removed the pipe. “And what might your name be?”

I told her. She watched me, smoking. She was incredibly old: a small woman with a myriadwrinkled face in color like pale coffee and as still and cold as granite. The features were not negroid, the
face in its cast was too cold, too implacable, and I thought suddenly, ‘It’s Indian blood. Part Indian and part Sutpen, spirit and flesh. No wonder Judith found her sufficient since forty years.’ Still as granite, and as cold. She wore a clean calico dress and an apron. Her hand was bound in a clean white cloth. Her feet were bare. I told her my business, profession, she nursing the pipe and watching me with eyes that had no whites at all; from a short distance away she appeared to have no eyes at all. Her whole face was perfectly blank, like a mask in which the eyesockets had been savagely thumbed and the eyes themselves forgotten. “A which?” she said.