Uncollected Stories of William Faulkner (93 page)

It seemed greener than ever when he saw it again from shipdeck as they dropped down with the tide. And with England at last behind, in retrospect it seemed greener still, with an immaculate peace which no war could ever disturb. While they felt through the Zone and into the gray Atlantic again he slept and waked, touching at times his head where endless pillows had worn his hair away, wondering if it would grow out again.

It was March again. For eleven months he had not thought of painting. Before they reached midocean it was April; one day off Newfoundland they learned by wireless that America had entered the war. His back did not hurt so much as it itched.

He spent some of his backpay in New York. He not only visited public and semipublic galleries, but through the kindness of a preserved fat woman he spent afternoons in private galleries and homes. His sponsor, a canteen worker, had once been soft pink and curved, but now she was long since the wife of a dollarayear man in Washington, with an income of fifty thousand. She had met
Elmer in the station canteen and was quite kind to him, commiserating the mothy remnant of his once curling hair. Then he went south. With his limp and his yellow stick he remained in New Orleans in an aimless hiatus. Nowhere he had to go, nowhere he wanted to go, he existed not lived in a voluptuous inertia mocking all briskness and haste: grave vitiating twilights soft and oppressive as smoke upon the city, hanging above the hushed eternal river and the docks where he walked smelling rich earth in overquick fecundity—sugar and fruit, resin and dusk and heat, like the sigh of a dark and passionate woman no longer young.

He was halted one day on Canal Street by a clotting of people. A hoarse man stood on a chair in the center of the throng, a fattish sweating prosperous man making a Liberty Loan speech, pleading on the streets for money like a beggar. And suddenly, across the clotting heads, he saw a slight taut figure as fiercely erect as ever, watching the orator and the audience with a fierce disgust. “Jo!” Elmer cried. “
Jo!
”

money we earn, work and sweat for, so that our children   not have to face what we are now   able to earn this money? By the protection which this country, this American nation showing the old dying civilizations   freedom   she calls on you what will you say

The crowd stirred in a slow hysteria and Elmer lunged his maimed body, trying to thrust through toward where he still saw the fierce poise of her small hat. “For Christ’s sake,” someone said: a youth in the new campaign hat and the still creased khaki of recent enlistment; “whatcher in such a rush about?”

boys over there   finish it before others must die   duty of civilization to stamp forever

“Maybe he wants he should enlist,” another, a plump Jewish man clutching a new thousand dollar bill in his hand, shrieked. “This var— In Lithuania I have seen yet O God,” he shrieked in Elmer’s face.

“Pardon me. Pardon me.” Elmer chanted, trying to thrust through, trying to keep in sight the unmistakable poise of that head.

“Well, he’s going in the wrong direction,” the soldier said, barring the way. “Recruiting office is over yonder, buddy.” Across his shoulder Elmer caught another glimpse of the hat, lost it again.

price we must pay for having become the greatest nation Word of God in the Book itself

The crowd surged again, elbowing the filaments of fire which lived along his spine. “This var!” the Jew shrieked at him again. “Them boys getting killed already O God. It vill make business: In Lithuania I have seen—”

“Look out,” a third voice said quickly; “he’s lame; dont you see his stick?”

“Yes, sure,” the soldier said. “They all get on crutches when assembly blows.”

“Pardon me. Pardon me.” Elmer chanted amid the laughter. The black hat was not in sight now. He was sweating too, striving to get through, his spine alive now with fiery ants. The orator remarked the commotion. He saw the soldier and Elmer’s sick straining face; he paused, mopping his neck.

“What’s that?” he said. “Wants to enlist? Come here, brother. Make room, people; let him come up here.” Elmer tried to hold back as the hands touched began to push and draw him forward as the crowd opened.

“I just want to pass,” he said. But the hands thrust him on. He looked over his shoulder, thinking, I am afraid I am going to puke, thinking, I’ll go. I’ll go. Only for God’s sake dont touch my back again. The black hat was gone. He began to struggle; at last his back had passed the stage where he could feel at all. “Let me go, goddam you!” he said whitely. “I have already been—”

But already the orator, leaning down, caught his hand; other hands lifted and pushed him up onto the platform while once more the sweating man turned to the crowd and spoke. “Folks, look at this young man here. Some of us, most of us, are young and well and strong: we can go. But look at this young man here, a cripple, yet he wants to defy the beast of intolerance and blood. See him: his stick, limping. Shall it be said of us who are sound in body and limb, that we have less of courage and less of love of country than this boy? And those of us who are unfit or old; those of us who cannot go—”

“No, no,” Elmer said, jerking at the hand which the other held. “I just want to pass: I have already been—”

“—men, women, let everyone of us do what this boy, lame in the very splendor of young manhood, would do. If we cannot go
ourselves, let everyone of us say, I have sent one man to the front; that though we ourselves are old and unfit, let everyone of us say, I have sent one soldier to preserve this American heritage which our fathers created for us out of their own suffering and preserved to us with their own blood; That I have done what I could that this heritage may be handed down unblemished to my children, to my children’s children yet unborn—” The hoarse inspired voice went on, sweeping speaker and hearers upward into an immolation of words, a holocaust without heat, a conflagration with neither light nor sound and which would leave no ashes.

Elmer sought for another glimpse of that small hat, that fierce disdainful face, but in vain. It was gone, and the crowd, swept up once more in the speaker’s eloquence, as suddenly forgot him. But she was gone, as utterly as a flame blown out. He wondered in sick despair if she had seen, not recognising him and not understanding. The crowd let him through now.

dont let the German Beast think that we, you and I, refused, failed, dared not, while our boys our sons are fighting the good fight bleeding and suffering and dying to wipe forever from the world

He shifted his stick to the palm which had become callous to it. He saw the Jew again, still trying to give away his thousand dollar bill; heard diminishing behind him the voice hoarse and endless, passionate, fatuous, and sincere. His back began to hurt again.

Musical with motion Montparnasse and Raspail: evening dissolves swooning: a thin odor of heliotrope become visible: with lights spangling yellow green and red. Angelo gains Elmer’s attention at last and with his thumb indicates at a table nearby heavy eyes in sober passive allure, and a golden smile above a new shoddy fur neckpiece. He continues to nudge Elmer, making his rich pursed mouthsound: the grave one stares at Elmer in stoic invitation, the other one crops her goldrimmed teeth at him before he looks quickly away. Yet still Angelo grimaces at him and nods rapidly, but Elmer is obdurate, and Angelo sits back in his chair with an indescribable genuflexion of weary disgust.

“Six weeks ago,” he says in Italian, “they fetched you into the political dungeon of Venice, where I already was, and took from
you your belt and shoelaces. You did not know why. Two days later I removed myself, went to your consul, who in turn removed you. Again you did not know how or why. And now since twenty-three days we are in Paris. In Paris, mind you. And now what do we do? We sit in caffees, we eat, we sit in caffees; we go and sleep. This we have done save for the seven days of one week which we spent in the forest of Meudon while you made a picture of three trees and an inferior piece of an inferior river—this too apparently for what reason you do not know, since you have done nothing with it, since for thirteen days now you have shown it to no one but have carried it in that affair beside your leg, from one caffee to another, sitting over it as though it were an egg and you a hen. Do you perhaps hope to hatch others from it, eh? or perhaps you are waiting until age will make of it an old master? And this in Paris. In Paris, mind. We might as well be in heaven. In America even, where there is nothing save money and work.”

Musical with motion and lights and sound, with taxies flatulent palevaporous in the glittering dusk. Elmer looks again: the two women have risen and they now move away between the close tables with never a backward glance; again Angelo makes his sound of exasperation explosive but resigned. But musical with girlmotion Montparnasse and Raspail and soon Angelo, his friend and patron forgotten in the proffered flesh, expresses his pleasure and approbation between his pursed lips, leaving his patron to gaze lonely and musing through the gray opposite building and upon that Texas hill where he stood beside his mother’s grave and thought of Myrtle Monson and money and of Hodge, the painter.

Someone died and left the elder Hodge two thousand dollars. He bought a house with it, almost in revenge, it might be said. It was in a small town innocent of trees where, Hodge said in humorous paraphrase, there were more cows and less milk and more rivers and less water and you could see further and see less than anywhere under the sun. Mrs Hodge, pausing in her endless bitter activity, gazed at her husband sedentary, effacing, as inevitable and inescapable as disease, in amazement, frankly shocked at last. “I thought you was looking for a house that suited you,” Hodge said.

She looked about at those identical rooms, at the woodwork (doorframes and windows painted a thin new white which only brought into higher relief the prints of hands long moved away to
print other identical houses about the earth), at walls papered with a serviceable tan which showed the minimum of stains and drank light like a sponge. “You did it just for meanness,” she said bitterly, going immediately about the business of unpacking, for the last time.

“Why, aint you always wanted a home of your own to raise your children in?” Hodge said. Mrs Hodge suspended a folded quilt and looked about at the room which the two older boys would probably never see, which Jo would have fled on sight; and now Elmer, the baby, gone to a foreign war.

It could not have been nature nor time nor space, who was impervious to flood and fire and time and distance, indomitable in the face of lease contracts which required them to rent for a whole year to get the house at all. It must have been the fact of possession, rooting, that broke her spirit as a caged bird’s breaks. Whatever it was, she tried to make morningglories grow upon the sawfretted porch, then she gave up. Hodge buried her on the treeless intimation of a hill, where unhampered winds could remind her of distance when she inevitably sickened to move again, though dead, and where time and space could mock at her inability to quicken and rise and stir; and he wrote Elmer, who was lying then on his face in a plaster cast in a British hospital while his spine hurt and the flesh inside the cast became warmly fluid like a film of spittle and he could smell it too, that his mother was dead and that he (Hodge) was as usual. He added that he had bought a house, forgetting to say where. Later, and with a kind of macabre thoughtfulness, he forwarded the returned letter to Elmer three months after Elmer had visited home for that brief afternoon and returned to Houston.

After his wife’s death Hodge, cooking (he was a good cook, better than his wife had ever been) and doing his own sloven housework, would sit after supper on the porch, whittling a plug of tobacco against tomorrow’s pipe, and sigh. Immediately that sigh would smack of something akin to relief, and he would reprimand himself in quick respect for the dead. And then he would not be so sure what that sigh signified. He contemplated the diminishing future, those years in which he would never again have to go anywhere unless he pleased, and he knew a mild discomfort. Had he too got from that tireless optimist an instinct for motion, a
gadfly of physical progression? Had she, dying, robbed him of any gift for ease? As he never went to church he was intensely religious, and he contemplated with troubled static alarm that day when he too should pass beyond the veil and there find his wife waiting for him, all packed up and ready to move.

And then, when that had worn off and he had decided since he could not help that, to let Heaven’s will be done since not only was that best but he couldn’t do anything about it anyway, three men in boots came and, to his alarmed and pained astonishment, dug an oilwell in his chickenyard so near that he could stand in the kitchen door and spit into it. So he had to move again, or be washed bodily out of the county. But this time he merely moved the house itself, turning it around so he could sit on the veranda and watch the moiling activity in his erstwhile henyard with static astonishment and, if truth be told, consternation. He had given Elmer’s Houston address to one of the booted men, asking him if he would mind looking Elmer up next time he was in Houston and telling him about it. So all he had to do then was to sit on his front porch and wait and muse upon the unpredictableness of circumstance. For instance, it had permitted him to run out of matches tonight, so instead of shredding his whole plug for smoking, he reserved enough to chew until someone came tomorrow who had matches; and sitting on the veranda of the first thing larger than a foldingbed which he had ever owned, with his most recent tribulation skeletoned and ladderlatticed high against the defunctive sky, he chewed his tobacco and spat outward into the immaculate dusk. He had not chewed in years and so he was a trifle awkward at first. But soon he was able to arc tobacco juice in a thin brown hissing, across the veranda and onto a parallelogram of troubled earth where someone had once tried to make something grow.

   The New Orleans doctor sent Elmer to New York. There he spent two years while they fixed his spine, and another year recovering from it, lying again on his face with behind his mind’s eye the image of a retreating shortlegged body in a lemoncolored dress, but not retreating fast now, since already, though lying on his face beneath weights, he was moving faster. Before departing however he made a brief visit to Texas. His father had not changed, not aged: Elmer found him resigned and smugly philosophical as ever
beneath this new blow which Fate had dealt him. The only change in the establishment was the presence of a cook, a lean yellow woman no longer young, who regarded Elmer’s presence with a mixture of assurance and alarm; inadvertently he entered his father’s bedroom and saw that the bed, still unmade at noon, had obviously been occupied by two people. But he had no intention of interfering, nor any wish to; already he had turned his face eastward; already thinking and hope and desire had traversed the cold restless gray Atlantic, thinking
Now I have the money. And now fame. And then Myrtle