Snopes: The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion

by Faulkner, William

  Which was his condition up to about 1916, when he was about thirty years old, maybe more, when something began to happen to him. Or maybe it had already happened and we—Jefferson—only noticed it then. Up to now he had been what you might call a standard-type provincial county-seat house painter: a bachelor, living with his father in a little house on the edge of town, having his weekly bath in the barbershop on Saturday night and then getting a little drunk afterward—not too much so: only once every two or three years waking up Sunday morning in the jail until they would release him on his own recognizance; this not for being too drunk but for fighting, though the fighting did stem from the whiskey, out of that mutual stage of it when the inevitable one (never the same one: it didn’t need to be) challenged his old fixed father-bequeathed convictions that General Lee had been a coward and a traitor and that the earth was a flat plane with edges like the shed roofs he painted—then shooting a little dice in the big ditch behind the cemetery while he sobered up Sunday afternoon to go back to his turpentine Monday morning; with maybe four trips a year to the Memphis brothels.

  Then it happened to him. He still had the Saturday-night barbershop bath and he still drank a little, though as far as Jefferson knew, never enough any more to need to go to combat over General Lee and Ptolemy and Isaac Newton, so that not only the jail but the harassed night marshal too who at the mildest would bang on the locked barbershop or poolroom door at two o’clock Sunday morning, saying, “If you boys dont quiet down and go home,” knew him no more. Nor did the dice game in the cemetery ditch; on Sunday morning now he would be seen walking with his scrawny fiercely moustached miniature father toward the little back-street Hard-Shell church, and that afternoon sitting on the minute gallery of their doll-sized house poring (whom the first three grades of school rotationally licked and the fourth one completely routed) over the newspapers and magazines which brought us all we knew about the war in Europe.

  He had changed. Even we (Jefferson. I was only three then) didn’t know how much until the next April, 1917, after the Lusitania and the President’s declaration, and Captain (Mister then until he was elected captain of it) McLendon organised the Jefferson company to be known as the Sartoris Rifles in honor of the original Colonel Sartoris (there would be no Sartoris in it since Bayard and his twin brother John were already in England training for the Royal Flying Corps), and then we heard the rest of it: how Tug Nightingale, past thirty now and so even when the draft came would probably escape it, was one of the first to apply, and we—they—found out what his dilemma was: which was simply that he did not dare let his father find out that he planned to join the Yankee army, since if his father ever learned it, he, Tug, would be disinherited and thrown out. So it was more than Captain McLendon who said, “What? What’s that?” and McLendon and another—the one who would be elected his First Sergeant—went home with Tug and the sergeant-to-be told it:

  “It was like being shut up in a closet with a buzz saw that had jumped off the axle at top speed, or say a bundle of dynamite with the fuse lit and snapping around the floor like a snake, that you not only cant get close enough to step on it, you dont want to: all you want is out, and Mack saying, ‘Wait, Mr Nightingale, it aint the Yankee army: it’s the army of the United States: your own country,’ and that durn little maniac shaking and seething until his moustache looked like it was on fire too, hollering, ‘Shoot the sons of bitches! Shoot em! Shoot em!’ and then Tug himself trying it: ‘Papa, papa, Captain McLendon and Crack here both belong to it,’ and old man Nightingale yelling, ‘Shoot them then. Shoot all the blue-bellied sons of bitches,’ and Tug still trying, saying, ‘Papa, papa, if I dont join now, when they pass that draft they will come and get me anyway,’ and still that little maniac hollering, ‘Shoot you all! Shoot all you sons of bitches!’ Yes sir. Likely Tug could join the German army or maybe even the French or British, and had his blessing. But not the one that General Lee betrayed him to that day back in 1865. So he threw Tug out. The three of us got out of that house as fast as we could, but before we even reached the sidewalk he was already in the room that was evidently Tug’s. He never even waited to open the door: just kicked the window out, screen and all, and started throwing Tug’s clothes out into the yard.”

  So Tug had crossed his Rubicon, and should have been safe now. I mean, Captain McLendon took him in. He—McLendon—was one of a big family of brothers in a big house with a tremendous mother weighing close to two hundred pounds, who liked to cook and eat both so one more wouldn’t matter; maybe she never even noticed Tug. So he should have been safe now while the company waited for orders to move. But the others wouldn’t let him alone; his method of joining the colors was a little too unique, not to mention East Lynne; there was always one to say:

  “Tug, is it really so that General Lee didn’t need to give up when he did?” and Tug would say,

  “That’s what papa says. He was there and seen it, even if he wasn’t but seventeen years old.” And the other would say:

  “So you had to go clean against him, clean against your own father, to join the Rifles?” And Tug sitting there quite still now, the hands that never would be able to paint more than the roughest outhouse walls and finesseless fences but which could do things to the intractable and unpredictable mule which few other hands dared, hanging quiet too between his knees, because by now he would know what was coming next. And the other—and all the rest of them within range—watching Tug with just half an eye since the other three halves would be watching Captain McLendon across the room; in fact they usually waited until McLendon had left, was actually out.

  “That’s right,” Tug would say; then the other:

  “Why did you do it, Tug? You’re past thirty now, safe from the draft, and your father’s an old man alone here with nobody to take care of him.”

  “We cant let them Germans keep on treating folks like they’re doing. Somebody’s got to make them quit.”

  “So you had to go clean against your father to join the army to make them quit. And now you’ll have to go clean against him again to go round to the other side of the world where you can get at them.”

  “I‘m going to France,” Tug would say.

  “That’s what I said: halfway round. Which way are you going? east or west? You can pick either one and still get there. Or better still, and I’ll make you a bet. Pick out east, go on east until you find the war, do whatever you aim to do to them Germans and then keep right on going east, and I’ll bet you a hundred dollars to one that when you see Jefferson next time, you’ll be looking at it right square across Miss Joanna Burden’s mailbox one mile west of the courthouse.” But by that time Captain McLendon would be there; probably somebody had gone to fetch him. He may have been such a bad company commander that he was relieved of his command long before it ever saw the lines, and a few years after this he was going to be the leader in something here in Jefferson that I anyway am glad I dont have to lie down with in the dark every time I try to go to sleep. But at least he held his company together (and not by the bars on his shoulders since, if they had been all he had, he wouldn’t have had a man left by the first Saturday night, but by simple instinctive humanity, of which even he, even in the middle of that business he was going to be mixed up in later, seemed to have had a little, like now) until a better captain could get hold of it. He was already in uniform. He was a cotton man, a buyer for one of the Memphis export houses, and he spent most of his commissions gambling on cotton futures in the market, but he never had looked like a farmer until he put on the uniform.

  “What the hell’s going on here?” he said. “What the hell do you think Tug is? a damn ant running around a damn orange or something? He aint going around anything: he’s going straight across it, across the water to France to fight for his country, and when they dont need him in France any longer he’s coming back across the same water, back here to Jefferson the same way he went out of it, like we’ll all be damn glad to get back to it. So dont let me hear any more of
this” (excrement: my word) “any more.”

  Whether or not Tug would continue to need Captain McLendon, he didn’t have him much longer. The company was mustered that week and sent to Texas for training; whereupon, since Tug was competent to paint any flat surface provided it was simple enough, with edges and not theoretical boundaries, and possessed that gift with horses and mules which the expert Pat Stamper had recognised at once to partake of that inexplicable quality called genius, naturally the army made him a cook and detached him the same day, so that he was not only the first Yoknapatawpha County soldier (the Sartoris boys didn’t count since they were officially British troops) to go overseas, he was among the last of all American troops to get back home, which was in late 1919, since obviously the same military which would decree him into a cook, would mislay where it had sent him (not lose him; my own experience between ’42 and ’45 taught me that the military never loses anything: it merely buries it).

  So now he was back home again, living alone now (old Mr Nightingale had died in that same summer of 1917, killed, Uncle Gavin said, by simple inflexibility, having set his intractable and contemptuous face against the juggernaut of history and science both that April day in 1865 and never flinched since), a barn and fence painter once more, with his Saturday-night bath in the barbershop and again drinking and gambling again within his means, only with on his face now a look, as V. K. Ratliff put it, as if he had been taught and believed all his life that the fourth dimension was invisible, then suddenly had seen one. And he didn’t have Captain McLendon now. I mean, McLendon was back home too but they were no longer commander and man. Or maybe it was that even that natural humanity of Captain McLendon’s, of which he should have had a pretty good supply since none of it seemed to be within his reach on his next humanitarian crises after that one when he shielded Tug from the harsh facts of cosmology, would not have sufficed here.

  This happened in the barbershop too (no, I wasn’t there; I still wasn’t old enough to be tolerated in the barbershop at ten o’clock on Saturday night even if I could have got away from Mother; this was hearsay from Ratliff to Uncle Gavin to me). This time the straight man was Skeets McGowan, Uncle Willy Christian’s soda jerker—a young man with a swagger and dash to him, who probably smelled more like toilet water than just water, with a considerable following of fourteen-and fifteen-year-old girls at Uncle Willy’s fountain, who we realised afterward had been just a little older than we always thought and, as Ratliff said, even ten years later would never know as much as he—Skeets—figured he had already forgotten ten years ago; he had just been barbered and scented, and Tug had finished his bath and was sitting quietly enough while the first drink or two began to take hold.

  “So when you left Texas, you went north,” Skeets said.

  “That’s right,” Tug said.

  “Come on,” Skeets said. “Tell us about it. You left Texas going due north, to New York. Then you got on the boat, and it kept right on due north too.”

  “That’s right,” Tug said.

  “But suppose they fooled you a little. Suppose they turned the boat, to the east or west or maybe right back south—”

  “God damn it,” Tug said. “Dont you think I know where north is? You can wake me up in the bed in the middle of the night and I can point my hand due north without even turning on the light.”

  “What’ll you bet? Five dollars? Ten?”

  “I’ll bet you ten dollars to one dollar except that any dollar you ever had you already spent on that shampoo or that silk shirt.”

  “All right, all right,” Skeets said. “So the boat went straight north, to France. And you stayed in France two years and then got on another boat and it went straight north too. Then you got off that boat and got on a train and it—”

  “Shut up,” Tug said.

  “—went straight north too. And when you got off, you were back in Jefferson.”

  “Shut up, you goddam little bastard,” Tug said.

  “So dont you see what that means? Either one of two things: either they moved Jefferson—” Now Tug was on his feet though even now apparently Skeets knew no better: “—which all the folks that stayed around here and didn’t go to that war can tell you they didn’t. Or you left Jefferson going due north by way of Texas and come back to Jefferson still going due north without even passing Texas again—” It took all the barbers and customers and loafers too and finally the night marshal himself to immobilise Tug. Though by that time Skeets was already in the ambulance on his way to the hospital.

  And there was Bayard Sartoris. He got back in the spring of ’19 and bought the fastest car he could find and spent his time ripping around the county or back and forth to Memphis until (so we all believed) his aunt, Mrs Du Pre, looked over Jefferson and picked out Narcissa Benbow and then caught Bayard between trips with the other hand long enough to get them married, hoping that would save Bayard’s neck since he was now the last Sartoris Mohican (John had finally got himself shot down in July of ’18), only it didn’t seem to work. I mean, as soon as he got Narcissa pregnant, which must have been pretty quick, he was back in the car again until this time Colonel Sartoris himself stepped into the breach, who hated cars yet gave up his carriage and pair to let Bayard drive him back and forth to the bank, to at least slow the car down during that much of the elapsed mileage. Except that Colonel Sartoris had a heart condition, so when the wreck came it was him that died: Bayard just walked out of the crash and disappeared, abandoned pregnant wife and all, until the next spring when he was still trying to relieve his boredom by seeing how much faster he could make something travel than he could invent a destination for; this time another aeroplane: a new experimental type at the Dayton testing field: only this one fooled him by shedding all four of its wings in midair.

  “That’s right: boredom, Uncle Gavin said—that war was the only civilised condition which offered any scope for the natural blackguardism inherent in men, that not just condoned and sanctioned it but rewarded it, and that Bayard was simply bored: he would never forgive the Germans not for starting the war but for stopping it, ending it. But Mother said that was wrong. She said that Bayard was frightened and ashamed: not ashamed because he was frightened but terrified when he discovered himself to be capable of, vulnerable to being ashamed. She said that Sartorises were different from other people. That most people, nearly all people, loved themselves first, only they knew it secretly and maybe even admitted it secretly; and so they didn’t have to be ashamed of it—or if they were ashamed, they didn’t need to be afraid of being ashamed. But that Sartorises didn’t even know they loved themselves first, except Bayard. Which was all right with him and he wasn’t ashamed of it until he and his twin brother reached England and got into flight training without parachutes in aeroplanes made out of glue and baling wire; or maybe not even until they were at the front, where even for the ones that had lived that far the odds were near zero against scout pilots surviving the first three weeks of active service. When suddenly Bayard realised that, unique in the squadron and, for all he knew, unique in all the R.F.C, or maybe all military air forces, he was not one individual creature at all but there was two of him since he had a twin engaged in the same risk and chance. And so in effect he alone out of all the people flying in that war had been vouchsafed a double indemnity against those odds (and vice versa of course since his twin would enjoy the identical obverse vouchsafement)—and in the next second, with a kind of terror, discovered that he was ashamed of the idea, knowledge, of being capable of having thought it even.

  That was what Mother said his trouble was—why he apparently came back to Jefferson for the sole purpose of trying, in that sullen and pleasureless manner, to find out just how many different ways he could risk breaking his neck that would keep the most people anguished or upset or at least annoyed: that completely un-Sartoris-like capacity for shame which he could neither live with nor quit; could neither live in toleration with it nor by his own act repudiate it. That was why the risking
, the chancing, the fatalism. Obviously the same idea—twinship’s double indemnity against being shot down—must have occurred to the other twin at the same moment, since they were twins. But it probably hadn’t worried John any more than the things he had done in his war (Uncle Gavin said—and in about five years I was going to have a chance to test it myself—that no man ever went to a war, even in the Y.M.C.A., without bringing back something he wished he hadn’t done or anyway would stop thinking about) worried that old original Colonel Sartoris who had been their great-grandfather; only he, Bayard, of all his line was that weak, that un-Sartoris.