“I’m Quentin Compson,” he answered.
“Yes. I remember your grandpaw. You go up there and make her come down. Make her go away from here. Whatever he done, me and Judith and him have paid it out. You go and get her. Take her away from here.” So he mounted the stairs, the worn bare treads, the cracked and scaling wall on one side, the balustrade with its intermittent missing spindles on the other. He remembered how he looked back and she was still sitting as he had left her, and that now (and he had not heard him enter) there stood in the hall below a hulking young light-colored negro man in clean faded overalls and shirt, his arms dangling, no surprise, no nothing in the saddle-colored and slack-mouthed idiot face. He remembered how he thought, ‘The scion, the heir, the apparent (though not obvious)’ and how he heard Miss Coldfield’s feet and saw the light of the torch approaching along the upper hall and how she came and passed him, how she stumbled a little and caught herself and looked full at him as if she had never seen him before—the eyes wide and unseeing like a sleepwalker’s, the face which had always been tallow-hued now possessing some still profounder, some almost unbearable, quality of bloodlessness—and he thought, ‘What? What is it now? It’s not shock. And it never has been fear. Can it be triumph?’ and how she passed him and went on. He heard Clytie say to the man, “Take her to the gate, the buggy” and he stood there thinking, ‘I should go with her’ and then, ‘But I must see too now. I will have to. Maybe I shall be sorry tomorrow, but I must see’. So when he came back down the stairs (and he remembered how he thought, ‘Maybe my face looks like hers did, but it’s not triumph’) there was only Clytie in the hall, sitting still on the bottom step, sitting still in the attitude in which he had left her. She did not even look at him when he passed her. Nor did he overtake Miss Coldfield and the negro. It was too dark to go fast, though he could presently hear them ahead of him. She was not using the flashlight now; he remembered how he thought, ‘Surely she cant be afraid to show a light now’. But she was not using it and he wondered if she were holding to the negro’s arm now; he wondered that until he heard the negro’s voice, flat, without emphasis or interest: “Wawkin better over here” and no answer from her, though he was close enough now to hear (or believe he did) her whimpering panting breath. Then he heard the other sound and he knew that she had stumbled and fallen; he could almost see the hulking slack-faced negro stopped in his tracks, looking toward the sound of the fall, waiting, without interest or curiosity, as he (Quentin) hurried forward, hurried toward the voices:
“You, nigger! What’s your name?”
“Calls me Jim Bond.”
“Help me up! You aint any Sutpen! You dont have to leave me lying in the dirt!”
When he stopped the buggy at her gate she did not offer to get out alone this time. She sat there until he got down and came around to her side; she still sat there, clutching the umbrella in one hand and the hatchet in the other, until he spoke her name. Then she stirred; he helped, lifted her down; she was almost as light as Clytie had been; when she moved it was like a mechanical doll, so that he supported and led her through the gate and up the short walk and into the doll-sized house and turned on the light for her and looked at the fixed sleep-walking face, the wide dark eyes as she stood there, still clutching the umbrella and the hatchet, the shawl and the black dress both stained with dirt where she had fallen, the black bonnet jerked forward and awry by the shock of the fall. “Are you all right now?” he said.
“Yes,” she said. “Yes. I’m all right. Goodnight.”—‘Not thank you,’ he thought: ‘Just goodnight’, outside the house now, breathing deep and fast now as he returned to the buggy, finding that he was about to begin to run, thinking quietly, ‘Jesus. Jesus. Jesus’, breathing fast and hard of the dark dead furnace-breath of air, of night where the fierce aloof stars hung. His own home was dark; he was still using the whip when he turned into the lane and then into the stable lot. He sprang out and took the mare from the buggy, stripping the harness from her and tumbling it into the harness room without stopping to hang it up, sweating, breathing fast and hard; when he turned at last toward the house he did begin to run. He could not help it. He was twenty years old; he was not afraid, because what he had seen out there could not harm him, yet he ran; even inside the dark familiar house, his shoes in his hand, he still ran, up the stairs and into his room and began to undress, fast, sweating, breathing fast. ‘I ought to bathe,’ he thought: then he was lying on the bed, naked, swabbing his body steadily with the discarded shirt, sweating still, panting: so that when, his eye-muscles aching and straining into the darkness and the almost dried shirt still clutched in his hand, he said ‘I have been asleep’ it was all the same, there was no difference: waking or sleeping he walked down that upper hall between the scaling walls and beneath the cracked ceiling, toward the faint light which fell outward from the last door and paused there, saying ‘No. No’ and then ‘Only I must. I have to’ and went in, entered the bare stale room whose shutters were closed too, where a second lamp burned dimly on a crude table; waking or sleeping it was the same: the bed, the yellow sheets and pillow, the wasted yellow face with closed, almost transparent eyelids on the pillow, the wasted hands crossed on the breast as if he were already a corpse; waking or sleeping it was the same and would be the same forever as long as he lived:
And you are——?
Henry Sutpen.
And you have been here——?
Four years.
And you came home——?
To die. Yes.
To die?
Yes. To die.
And you have been here——?
Four years.
And you are——?
Henry Sutpen.
It was quite cold in the room now; the chimes would ring for one any time now; the chill had a compounded, a gathered quality, as though preparing for the dead moment before dawn. “And she waited three months before she went back to get him,” Shreve said. “Why did she do that?” Quentin didn’t answer. He lay still and rigid on his back with the cold New England night on his face and the blood running warm in his rigid body and limbs, breathing hard but slow, his eyes wide open upon the window, thinking ‘Nevermore of peace. Nevermore of peace. Nevermore. Nevermore. Nevermore’. “Do you suppose it was because she knew what was going to happen when she told it, took any steps, that it would be over then, finished, and that hating is like drink or drugs and she had used it so long that she did not dare risk cutting off the supply, destroying the source, the very poppy’s root and seed?” Still Quentin didn’t answer. “But at last she did reconcile herself to it, for his sake, to save him, to bring him into town where the doctors could save him, and so she told it then, got the ambulance and the men and went out there. And old Clytie maybe watching for just that out of the upstairs window for three months now: and maybe even your old man was right this time and when she saw the ambulance turn into the gate she believed it was that same black wagon for which she probably had had that nigger boy watching for three months now, coming to carry Henry into town for the white folks to hang him for shooting Charles Bon. And I guess it had been him who had kept that closet under the stairs full of tinder and trash all that time too, like she told him to, maybe he not getting it then either but keeping it full just like she told him, the kerosene and all, for three months now, until the hour when he could begin to howl—” Now the chimes began, ringing for one oclock. Shreve ceased, as if he were waiting for them to cease or perhaps were even listening to them. Quentin lay still too, as if he were listening too, though he was not; he just heard them without listening as he heard Shreve without listening or answering, until they ceased, died away into the icy air delicate and faint and musical as struck glass. And he, Quentin, could see that too, though he had not been there—the ambulance with Miss Coldfield between the driver and the second man, perhaps a deputy sheriff, in the shawl surely and perhaps even with the umbrella too, though probably no hatchet nor flashlight in it now, entering the gate and p
icking its way gingerly up the rutted and frozen (and now partially thawed) drive; and it may have been the howling or it may have been the deputy or the driver or it may have been she who cried first: “It’s on fire!” though she would not have cried that; she would have said, “Faster. Faster.” leaning forward on this seat too—the small furious grim implacable woman not much larger than a child. But the ambulance could not go fast in that drive; doubtless Clytie knew, counted upon, that; it would be a good three minutes before it could reach the house, the monstrous tinder-dry rotten shell seeping smoke through the warped cracks in the weather-boarding as if it were made of gauze wire and filled with roaring and beyond which somewhere something lurked which bellowed, something human since the bellowing was in human speech, even though the reason for it would not have seemed to be. And the deputy and the driver would spring out and Miss Coldfield would stumble out and follow them, running too, onto the gallery too, where the creature which bellowed followed them, wraithlike and insubstantial, looking at them out of the smoke, whereupon the deputy even turned and ran at him, whereupon he retreated, fled, though the howling did not diminish nor even seem to get any further away. They ran onto the gallery too, into the seeping smoke, Miss Coldfield screaming harshly, “The window! The window!” to the second man at the door. But the door was not locked; it swung inward; the blast of heat struck them. The entire staircase was on fire. Yet they had to hold her; Quentin could see it: the light thin furious creature making no sound at all now, struggling with silent and bitter fury, clawing and scratching and biting at the two men who held her, who dragged her back and down the steps as the draft created by the open door seemed to explode like powder among the flames as the whole lower hall vanished. He, Quentin, could see it, could see the deputy holding her while the driver backed the ambulance to safety and returned, the three faces all a little wild now since they must have believed her;—the three of them staring, glaring at the doomed house: and then for a moment maybe Clytie appeared in that window from which she must have been watching the gates constantly day and night for three months—the tragic gnome’s face beneath the clean headrag, against a red background of fire, seen for a moment between two swirls of smoke, looking down at them, perhaps not even now with triumph and no more of despair than it had ever worn, possibly even serene above the melting clapboards before the smoke swirled across it again.—and he, Jim Bond, the scion, the last of his race, seeing it too now and howling with human reason now since now even he could have known what he was howling about. But they couldn’t catch him. They could hear him; he didn’t seem to ever get any further away but they couldn’t get any nearer and maybe in time they could not even locate the direction of the howling anymore. They—the driver and the deputy—held Miss Coldfield as she struggled: he (Quentin) could see her, them; he had not been there but he could see her, struggling and fighting like a doll in a nightmare, making no sound, foaming a little at the mouth, her face even in the sunlight lit by one last wild crimson reflection as the house collapsed and roared away, and there was only the sound of the idiot negro left.
“And so it was the Aunt Rosa that came back to town inside the ambulance,” Shreve said. Quentin did not answer; he did not even say, Miss Rosa. He just lay there staring at the window without even blinking, breathing the chill heady pure snowgleamed darkness. “And she went to bed because it was all finished now, there was nothing left now, nothing out there now but that idiot boy to lurk around those ashes and those four gutted chimneys and howl until someone came and drove him away. They couldn’t catch him and nobody ever seemed to make him go very far away, he just stopped howling for a little while. Then after a while they would begin to hear him again. And so she died.” Quentin did not answer, staring at the window; then he could not tell if it was the actual window or the window’s pale rectangle upon his eyelids, though after a moment it began to emerge. It began to take shape in its same curious, light, gravity-defying attitude—the once-folded sheet out of the wistaria Mississippi summer, the cigar smell, the random blowing of the fireflies. “The South,” Shreve said. “The South. Jesus. No wonder you folks all outlive yourselves by years and years and years.” It was becoming quite distinct; he would be able to decipher the words soon, in a moment; even almost now, now, now.
“I am older at twenty than a lot of people who have died,” Quentin said.
“And more people have died than have been twenty-one,” Shreve said. Now he (Quentin) could read it, could finish it—the sloped whimsical ironic hand out of Mississippi attenuated, into the iron snow:
—or perhaps there is. Surely it can harm no one to believe that perhaps she has escaped not at all the privilege of being outraged and amazed and of not forgiving but on the contrary has herself gained that place or bourne where the objects of the outrage and of the commiseration also are no longer ghosts but are actual people to be actual recipients of the hatred and the pity. It will do no harm to hope—You see I have written hope, not think. So let it be hope.—that the one cannot escape the censure which no doubt he deserves, that the other no longer lack the commiseration which let us hope (while we are hoping) that they have longed for, if only for the reason that they are about to receive it whether they will or no. The weather was beautiful though cold and they had to use picks to break the earth for the grave yet in one of the deeper clods I saw a redworm doubtless alive when the clod was thrown up though by afternoon it was frozen again.
“So it took Charles Bon and his mother to get rid of old Tom, and Charles Bon and the octoroon to get rid of Judith, and Charles Bon and Clytie to get rid of Henry; and Charles Bon’s mother and Charles Bon’s grandmother got rid of Charles Bon. So it takes two niggers to get rid of one Sutpen, dont it?” Quentin did not answer; evidently Shreve did not want an answer now; he continued almost without a pause: “Which is all right, it’s fine; it clears the whole ledger, you can tear all the pages out and burn them, except for one thing. And do you know what that is?” Perhaps he hoped for an answer this time, or perhaps he merely paused for emphasis, since he got no answer. “You’ve got one nigger left. One nigger Sutpen left. Of course you cant catch him and you dont even always see him and you never will be able to use him. But you’ve got him there still. You still hear him at night sometimes. Dont you?”
“Yes,” Quentin said.
“And so do you know what I think?” Now he did expect an answer, and now he got one:
“No,” Quentin said.
“Do you want to know what I think?”
“No,” Quentin said.
“Then I’ll tell you. I think that in time the Jim Bonds are going to conquer the western hemisphere. Of course it wont quite be in our time and of course as they spread toward the poles they will bleach out again like the rabbits and the birds do, so they wont show up so sharp against the snow. But it will still be Jim Bond; and so in a few thousand years, I who regard you will also have sprung from the loins of African kings. Now I want you to tell me just one thing more. Why do you hate the South?”
“I dont hate it,” Quentin said, quickly, at once, immediately; “I dont hate it,” he said. I dont hate it he thought, panting in the cold air, the iron New England dark: I dont. I dont! I dont hate it! I dont hate it!
CHRONOLOGY
1807 Thomas Sutpen born in West Virginia mountains. Poor whites of Scottish-English stock. Large family.
1817 Sutpen family moved down into Tidewater Virginia, Sutpen ten years old. Ellen Coldfield born in Tennessee.
1820 Sutpen ran away from home. Fourteen years old.
1827 Sutpen married first wife in Haiti.
1828 Goodhue Coldfield moved to Yoknapatawpha County (Jefferson) Mississippi: mother, sister, wife and daughter Ellen.
1831 Charles Bon born, Haiti. Sutpen learns his wife has negro blood, repudiates her and child.
1833 Sutpen appears in Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, takes up land, build his house.
1834 Clytemnestra (Clytie) born to slave woman.
&
nbsp; 1838 Sutpen married Ellen Coldfield.
1839 Henry Sutpen born, Sutpen’s Hundred.
1841 Judith Sutpen born.
1845 Rosa Coldfield born.
1850 Wash Jones moves into abandoned fishing camp on Sutpen’s plantation, with his daughter.
1853 Milly Jones born to Wash Jones’ daughter.
1859 Henry Sutpen and Charles Bon meet at University of Mississippi. Judith and Charles meet that Xmas. Charles Etienne St. Valery Bon born, New Orleans.
1860 Xmas, Sutpen forbids marriage between Judith and Bon. Henry repudiates his birthright, departs with Bon.
1861 Sutpen, Henry, and Bon depart for war.
1863 Ellen Coldfield dies.
1864 Goodhue Coldfield dies.
1865 Henry kills Bon at gates. Rosa Coldfield moves out to Sutpen’s Hundred.
Absalom, Absalom! Page 37