Uncollected Stories of William Faulkner (89 page)

“To New Orleans,” I said. “How did Judith find where the woman lived?” Then I said: “Was there— There was money in that letter.”

“Not then. We never had no money then. We never had no money to send until later, after Cunnel had done come home and died and we buried him too, and Judith bought them chickens and we raised them and sold them and the eggs. Then she could put money in the letters.”

“And the woman took the money? She took it?”

She grunted. “Took it.” She talked again; her voice was cold and steady as oil flowing. “And then one day Judith said, ‘We will fix up Mr Charles’ room.’ ‘Fix it up with what?’ I said. ‘We’ll do the best we can,’ she said. So we fixed up the room, and that day week the wagon went to town to meet the train and it come back with her in it from New Orleans. It was full of trunks, and she had that fan and that mosquito-bar umbrella over her head and a nigger woman, and she never liked it about the wagon. ‘I aint used to riding in wagons,’ she said. And Judith waiting on the porch in a old dress, and her getting down with all them trunks and that nigger woman and that boy—”

“Boy?”

“Hers and Charles Bon’s boy. He was about nine years old. And soon as I saw her I knew, and soon as Judith saw her she knew too.”

“Knew what?” I said. “What was the matter with this woman, anyway?”

“You’ll hear what I going to tell you. What I aint going to tell you aint going to hear.” She talked, invisible, quiet, cold. “She didn’t stay long. She never liked it here. Wasn’t nothing to do and nobody to see. She wouldn’t get up till dinner. Then she would come down and set on the porch in one of them dresses outen the trunks, and fan herself and yawn, and Judith out in the back since daylight, in a old dress no better than mine, working.

“She never stayed long. Just until she had wore all the dresses outen the trunks one time, I reckon. She would tell Judith how she ought to have the house fixed up and have more niggers so she wouldn’t have to fool with the chickens herself, and then she would play on the piano. But it never suited her neither because it wasn’t tuned right. The first day she went out to see where Charles Bon was buried, with that fan and that umbrella that wouldn’t stop no rain, and she come back crying into a lace handkerchief and laid down with that nigger woman rubbing her head with medicine. But at suppertime she come down with another dress on and said she never seed how Judith stood it here and played the piano and cried again, telling Judith about Charles Bon like Judith hadn’t never seed him.”

“You mean, she didn’t know that Judith and Charles had been married too?”

She didn’t answer at all. I could feel her looking at me with a kind of cold contempt. She went on: “She cried about Charles Bon a right smart at first. She would dress up in the afternoon and go promenading across to the burying ground, with that umbrella and the fan, and the boy and that nigger woman following with smelling bottles and a pillow for her to set on by the grave, and now and then she would cry about Charles Bon in the house, kind of flinging herself on Judith and Judith setting there in her old dress, straight-backed as Cunnel, with her face looking like it did when she come outen Charles Bon’s room that morning, until she would stop crying and put some powder on her face and play on the piano and tell Judith how they done in New Orleans to enjoy themselves and how Judith ought to sell this old place and go down there to live.

“Then she went away, setting in the wagon in one of them mosquito-bar dresses too, with that umbrella, crying into the hankcher a while and then waving it at Judith standing there on the porch in that old dress, until the wagon went out of sight. Then Judith looked at me and she said, ‘Raby, I’m tired. I’m awful tired.’ ”

“And I’m tired too. I done toted it a long time now. But we had to look after them chickens so we could put the money in the letter every month—”

“And she still took the money? even after she came and saw, she still took it? And after Judith saw, she still sent it?”

She answered immediately, abrupt, levelvoiced: “Who are you, questioning what a Sutpen does?”

“I’m sorry. When did Henry come home?”

“Right after she left, I carried two letters to the train one day. One of them had Henry Sutpen on it. I knowed how that looked wrote out, too.”

“Oh. Judith knew where Henry was. And she wrote him after she saw the woman. Why did she wait until then?”

“Aint I told you Judith knew soon as she saw that woman, same as I knew soon as I saw?”

“But you never did tell me what. What is there about this woman? Dont you see, if you dont tell me that, the story wont make sense.”

“It done made enough sense to put three folks in their graves. How much more sense you want it to make?”

“Yes,” I said. “And so Henry came home.”

“Not right then. One day, about a year after she was here, Judith gave me another letter with Henry Sutpen on it. It was all fixed up, ready to go on the train. ‘You’ll know when to send it,’ Judith said. And I told her I would know the time when it come. And then the time come and Judith said, ‘I reckon you can send that letter now’ and I said ‘I done already sent it three days ago.’

“And four nights later Henry rode up and we went to Judith in the bed and she said, ‘Henry. Henry, I’m tired. I’m so tired, Henry.’ And we never needed no doctor then and no preacher, and I aint going to need no doctor now and no preacher neither.”

“And Henry has been here forty years, hidden in the house. My God.”

“That’s forty years longer than any of the rest of them stayed. He was a young man then, and when them dogs would begin to get old he would leave at night and be gone two days and come back the next night with another dog just like urn. But he aint young now and last time I went myself to get the new dog. But he aint going to need no more dog. And I aint young neither, and I going soon too. Because I tired as Judith, too.”

It was quiet in the kitchen, still, blackdark. Outside the summer midnight was filled with insects; somewhere a mockingbird sang. “Why did you do all this for Henry Sutpen? Didn’t you have your own life to live, your own family to raise?”

She spoke, her voice not waisthigh, level, quiet. “Henry Sutpen is my brother.”

We stood in the dark kitchen. “And so he wont live until morning. And nobody here but you.”

“I been enough for three of them before him.”

“Maybe I’d better stay too. Just in case.…”

Her voice came level, immediate: “In case what?” I didn’t answer. I could not hear her breathe at all. “I been plenty enough for three of them. I dont need no help. You done found out now. You go on away from here and write your paper piece.”

“I may not write it at all.”

“I bound you wouldn’t, if Henry Sutpen was in his right mind
and strength. If I was to go up there now and say, ‘Henry Sutpen, here a man going to write in the papers about you and your paw and your sister,’ what you reckon he’d do?”

“I dont know. What would he do?”

“Nummine that. You done heard now. You go away from here. You let Henry Sutpen die quiet. That’s all you can do for him.”

“Maybe that’s what he would do: just say, ‘Let me die quiet.’ ”

“That’s what I doing, anyway. You go away from here.”

So that’s what I did. She called the dog to the kitchen window and I could hear her talking to it quietly as I let myself out the front door and went on down the drive. I expected the dog to come charging around the house after me and tree me too, but it didn’t. Perhaps that was what decided me. Or perhaps it was just that human way of justifying meddling with the humanities. Anyway, I stopped where the rusted and now hingeless iron gate gave upon the road and I stood there for a while, in the myriad, peaceful, summer country midnight. The lamp in the cabin was black now, and the house too was invisible beyond the cedartunnelled drive, the massed cedars which hid it shaggy on the sky. And there was no sound save the bugs, the insects silversounding in the grass, and the senseless mockingbird. And so I turned and went back up the drive to the house.

I still expected the dog to come charging around the corner, barking. ‘And then she will know I didn’t play fair,’ I thought. ‘She will know I lied to her like Charles Bon lied to Henry Sutpen.’ But the dog didn’t come. It didn’t appear until I had been sitting on the top step for some time, my back against a column. Then it was there: it appeared without a sound, standing on the earth below the steps, looming, shadowy, watching me. I made no sound, no move. After a while it went away, as silent as it came. The shadow of it made one slow dissolving movement and disappeared.

It was quite still. There was a faint constant sighing high in the cedars, and I could hear the insects and the mockingbird. Soon there were two of them, answering one another, brief, quiring, risinginflectioned. Soon the sighing cedars, the insects and the birds became one peaceful sound bowled inside the skull in monotonous miniature, as if all the earth were contracted and reduced to the dimensions of a baseball, into and out of which shapes, fading, emerged fading and faded emerging:

“And you were killed by the last shot fired in the war?”

“I was so killed. Yes.”

“Who fired the last shot fired in the war?”

“Was it the last shot you fired in the war, Henry?”

“I fired a last shot in the war; yes.”

“You depended on the war, and the war betrayed you too; was that it?”

“Was that it, Henry?”

“What was wrong with that woman, Henry? There was something the matter that was worse to you than the marriage. Was it the child? But Raby said the child was nine after Colonel Sutpen died in ’70. So it must have been born after Charles and Judith married. Was that how Charles Bon lied to you?”

“What was it that Judith knew and Raby knew as soon as they saw her?”

“Yes.”

“Yes what?”

“Yes.”

“Oh. And you have lived hidden here for forty years.”

“I have lived here forty years.”

“Were you at peace?”

“I was tired.”

“That’s the same thing, isn’t it? For you and Raby too.”

“Same thing. Same as me. I tired too.”

“Why did you do all this for Henry Sutpen?”

“He was my brother.”

The whole thing went off like a box of matches. I came out of sleep with the deep and savage thunder of the dog roaring over my head and I stumbled past it and down the steps running before I was good awake, awake at all, perhaps. I remember the thin, mellow, farcarrying negro voices from the cabin beyond the pasture, and then I turned still half asleep and saw the façade of the house limned in fire, and the erstblind sockets of the windows, so that the entire front of the house seemed to loom stooping above me in a wild and furious exultation. The dog, howling, was hurling itself against the locked front door,
then it sprang from the porch and ran around toward the back.

I followed, running; I was shouting too. The kitchen was already gone, and the whole rear of the house was on fire, and the roof too; the light, longdried shingles taking wing and swirling upward like scraps of burning paper, burning out zenithward like inverted shooting stars. I ran back toward the front of the house, still yelling. The dog passed me, fulltongued, frantic; as I watched the running figures of negro women coming up across the redglared pasture I could hear the dog hurling itself again and again against the front door.

The negroes came up, the three generations of them, their eyeballs white, their open mouths pinkly cavernous. “They’re in there, I tell you!” I was yelling. “She set fire to it and they are both in there. She told me Henry Sutpen would not be alive by morning, but I didn’t—” In the roaring I could scarce hear myself, and I could not hear the negroes at all for a time. I could only see their open mouths, their fixed, whitecircled eyeballs. Then the roaring reached that point where the ear loses it and it rushes soundless up and away, and I could hear the negroes. They were making a long, concerted, wild, measured wailing, in harmonic pitch from the treble of the children to the soprano of the oldest woman, the daughter of the woman in the burning house; they might have rehearsed it for years, waiting for this irrevocable moment out of all time. Then we saw the woman in the house.

We were standing beneath the wall, watching the clapboards peel and melt away, obliterating window after window, and we saw the old negress come to the window upstairs. She came through fire and she leaned for a moment in the window, her hands on the burning ledge, looking no bigger than a doll, as impervious as an effigy of bronze, serene, dynamic, musing in the foreground of Holocaust. Then the whole house seemed to collapse, to fold in upon itself, melting; the dog passed us again, not howling now. It came opposite us and then turned and sprang into the roaring dissolution of the house without a sound, without a cry.

I think I said that the sound had now passed beyond the outraged and surfeited ear. We stood there and watched the house dissolve and liquefy and rush upward in silent and furious scarlet, licking and leaping among the wild and blazing branches of the
cedars, so that, blazing, melting too, against the soft, mildstarred sky of summer they too wildly tossed and swirled.

Just before dawn it began to rain. It came up fast, without thunder or lightning, and it rained hard all forenoon, lancing into the ruin so that above the gaunt, unfallen chimneys and the charred wood a thick canopy of steam unwinded floated. But after a while the steam dispersed and we could walk among the beams and plank ends. We moved gingerly, however, the negroes in nondescript outer garments against the rain, quiet too, not chanting now, save the oldest woman, the grandmother, who was singing a hymn monotonously as she moved here and there, pausing now and then to pick up something. It was she who found the picture in the metal case, the picture of Judith which Charles Bon had owned. “I’ll take that,” I said.

She looked at me. She was a shade darker than the mother. But there was still the Indian, faintly; still the Sutpen, in her face. “I dont reckon mammy would like that. She particular about Sutpen property.”