Faulkner Reader

by William Faulkner

  Solon looked at pap. “I don’t know as I want to trade now,” he said.

  “I see,” pap said. The ax was still stuck in the cut. He began to pump it up and down to back it out.

  “Wait,” Solon said. “Put that durn ax down.” But pap held the ax raised for the lick, looking at Solon and waiting. “You’re swapping me half a dog for a half a day’s work,” Solon said.

  “Your half of the dog for that half a day’s work you still owe on these shingles.”

  “And the two dollars,” pap said. “That you and Tull agreed on. I sell you half the dog for two dollars, and you come back here tomorrow and finish the shingles. You give me the two dollars now, and I’ll meet you here in the morning with the dog, and you can show me the receipt from Tull for his half then.”

  “Me and Tull have already agreed,” Solon said.

  “All right,” pap said. “Then you can pay Tull his two dollars and bring his receipt with you without no trouble.”

  “Tull will be at the church tomorrow morning, pulling off them old shingles,” Solon said.

  “All right,” pap said. “Then it won’t be no trouble at all for you to get a receipt from him. You can stop at the church when you pass. Tull ain’t named Grier. He won’t need to be off somewhere borrowing a crowbar.”

  So Solon taken out his purse and paid pap the two dollars and they went back to work. And now it looked like they really was trying to finish that afternoon, not jest Solon, but even Homer, that didn’t seem to be concerned in it nohow, and pap, that had already swapped a half a dog to get rid of whatever work Solon claimed would be left over. I quit trying to stay up with them; I jest stacked shingles.

  Then Solon laid his froe and maul down. “Well, men,” he said, “I don’t know what you fellers think, but I consider this a day.”

  “All right,” pap said. “You are the one to decide when to quit, since whatever elbow units you consider are going to be shy tomorrow will be yourn.”

  “That’s a fact,” Solon said. “And since I am giving a day and a half to the church instead of jest a day, like I started out doing, I reckon I better get on home and tend to a little of my own work.” He picked up his froe and maul and ax, and went to his truck and stood waiting for Homer to come and get in.

  “I’ll be here in the morning with the dog,” pap said.

  “Sholy,” Solon said. It sounded like he had forgot about the dog, or that it wasn’t no longer any importance. But he stood there again and looked hard and quiet at pap for about a second. “And a bill of sale from Tull for his half of it. As you say, it won’t be no trouble a-tall to get that from him.” Him and Homer got into the truck and he started the engine. You couldn’t say jest what it was. It was almost like Solon was hurrying himself, so pap wouldn’t have to make any excuse or pretense toward doing or not doing anything. “I have always understood the fact that lightning don’t have to hit twice is one of the reasons why they named it lightning. So getting lightning-struck is a mistake that might happen to any man. The mistake I seem to made is, I never realized in time that what I was looking at was a cloud. I’ll see you in the morning.”

  “With the dog,” pap said.

  “Certainly,” Solon said, again like it had slipped his mind completely. “With the dog.”

  Then him and Homer drove off. Then pap got up.

  “What?” I said. “What? You swapped him your half of Tull’s dog for that half a day’s work tomorrow. Now what?”

  “Yes,” pap said. “Only before that I had already swapped Tull a half a day’s work pulling off them old shingles tomorrow, for Tull’s half of that dog. Only we ain’t going to wait until tomorrow. We’re going to pull them shingles off tonight, and without no more racket about it than is necessary. I don’t aim to have nothing on my mind tomorrow but watching Mr. Solon Work-Unit Quick trying to get a bill of sale for two dollars or ten dollars either on the other half of that dog. And we’ll do it tonight. I don’t want him jest to find out at sunup tomorrow that he is too late. I want him to find out then that even when he laid down to sleep he was already too late.”

  So we went back home and I fed and milked while pap went down to Killegrews’ to carry the froe and maul back and to borrow a crowbar. But of all places in the world and doing what under the sun with it, Old Man Killegrew had went and lost his crowbar out of a boat into forty feet of water. And pap said how he come within a inch of going to Solon’s and borrowing his crowbar out of pure poetic justice, only Solon might have smelled the rat jest from the idea of the crowbar. So pap went to Armstid’s and borrowed hisn and come back and we et supper and cleaned and filled the lantern while maw still tried to find out what we was up to that couldn’t wait till morning.

  We left her still talking, even as far as the front gate, and come on back to the church, walking this time, with the rope and crowbar and a hammer for me, and the lantern still dark. Whitfield and Snopes was unloading a ladder from Snopes’ wagon when we passed the church on the way home before dark, so all we had to do was to set the ladder up against the church. Then pap clumb up onto the roof with the lantern and pulled off shingles until he could hang the lantern inside behind the decking, where it could shine out through the cracks in the planks, but you couldn’t see it unless you was passing in the road, and by that time anybody would ‘a’ already heard us. Then I clumb up with the rope, and pap reached it through the decking and around a rafter and back and tied the ends around our waists, and we started. And we went at it. We had them old shingles jest raining down, me using the claw hammer and pap using the crowbar, working the bar under a whole patch of shingles at one time and then laying back on the bar like in one more lick or if the crowbar ever happened for one second to get a solid holt, he would tilt up that whole roof at one time like a hinged box lid.

  That’s exactly what he finally done. He laid back on the bar and this time it got a holt. It wasn’t jest a patch of shingles, it was a whole section of decking, so that when he lunged back he snatched that whole section of roof from around the lantern like you would shuck a corn nubbin. The lantern was hanging on a nail. He never even moved the nail, he jest pulled the board off of it, so that it looked like for a whole minute I watched the lantern, and the crowbar, too, setting there in the empty air in a little mess of floating shingles, with the empty nail still sticking through the bail of the lantern, before the whole thing started down into the church. It hit the floor and bounced once. Then it hit the floor again, and this time the whole church jest blowed up into a pit of yellow jumping fire, with me and pap hanging over the edge of it on two ropes.

  I don’t know what become of the rope nor how we got out of it. I don’t remember climbing down. Jest pap yelling behind me and pushing me about halfway down the ladder and then throwing me the rest of the way by a handful of my overhalls, and then we was both on the ground, running for the water barrel. It set under the gutter spout at the side, and Armstid was there then; he had happened to go out to his lot about a hour back and seen the lantern on the church roof, and it stayed on his mind until finally he come up to see what was going on, and got there jest in time to stand yelling back and forth with pap across the water barrel. And I believe we still would have put it out. Pap turned and squatted against the barrel and got a holt of it over his shoulder and stood up with that barrel that was almost full and run around the corner and up the steps of the church and hooked his toe on the top step and come down with the barrel busting on top of him and knocking him cold out as a wedge.

  So we had to drag him back first, and maw was there then, and Mrs. Armstid about the same time, and me and Armstid run with the two fire buckets to the spring, and when we got back there was a plenty there, Whitfield, too, with more buckets, and we done what we could, but the spring was two hundred yards away and ten buckets emptied it and it taken five minutes to fill again, and so finally we all jest stood around where pap had come to again with a big cut on his head and watched it go. It was a old church, long dried out, and
full of old colored-picture charts that Whitfield had accumulated for more than fifty years, that the lantern had lit right in the middle of when it finally exploded. There was a special nail where he would keep a old long nightshirt he would wear to baptize in. I would use to watch it all the time during church and Sunday school, and me and the other boys would go past the church sometimes jest to peep in at it, because to a boy of ten it wasn’t jest a cloth garment or even a iron armor; it was the old strong Archangel Michael his self, that had fit and strove and conquered sin for so long that it finally had the same contempt for the human beings that returned always to sin as hogs and dogs done that the old strong archangel his self must have had.

  For a long time it never burned, even after everything else inside had. We could watch it, hanging there among the fire, not like it had knowed in its time too much water to burn easy, but like it had strove and fit with the devil and all the hosts of hell too long to burn in jest a fire that Res Grier started, trying to beat Solon Quick out of half a dog. But at last it went, too, not in a hurry still, but jest all at once, kind of roaring right on up and out against the stars and the far dark spaces. And then there wasn’t nothing but jest pap, drenched and groggy-looking, on the ground, with the rest of us around him, and Whitfield like always in his boiled shirt and his black hat and pants, standing there with his hat on, too, like he had strove too long to save what hadn’t ought to been created in the first place, from the damnation it didn’t even want to escape, to bother to need to take his hat off in any presence. He looked around at us from under it; we was all there now, all that belonged to that church and used it to be born and marry and die from—us and the Armstids and Tulls, and Bookwright and Quick and Snopes.

  “I was wrong,” Whitfield said. “I told you we would meet here tomorrow to roof a church. We’ll meet here in the morning to raise one.”

  “Of course we got to have a church,” pap said. “We’re going to have one. And we’re going to have it soon. But there’s some of us done already give a day or so this week, at the cost of our own work. Which is right and just, and we’re going to give more, and glad to. But I don’t believe that the Lord—–”

  Whitfield let him finish. He never moved. He jest stood there until pap finally run down of his own accord and hushed and set there on the ground mostly not looking at maw, before Whitfield opened his mouth.

  “Not you,” Whitfield said. “Arsonist.”

  “Arsonist?” pap said.

  “Yes,” Whitfield said. “If there is any pursuit in which you can engage without carrying flood and fire and destruction and death behind you, do it. But not one hand shall you lay to this new house until you have proved to us that you are to be trusted again with the powers and capacities of a man.” He looked about at us again. “Tull and Snopes and Armstid have already promised for tomorrow. I understand that Quick had another half day he intended—–”

  “I can give another day,” Solon said.

  “I can give the rest of the week,” Homer said.

  “I ain’t rushed neither,” Snopes said.

  “That will be enough to start with, then,” Whitfield said. “It’s late now. Let us all go home.”

  He went first. He didn’t look back once, at the church or at us. He went to the old mare and clumb up slow and stiff and powerful, and was gone, and we went too, scattering. But I looked back at it. It was jest a shell now, with a red and fading core, and I had hated it at times and feared it at others, and I should have been glad. But there was something that even that fire hadn’t even touched. Maybe that’s all it was—jest indestructibility, endurability—that old man that could plan to build it back while its walls was still fire-fierce and then calmly turn his back and go away because he knowed that the men that never had nothing to give toward the new one but their work would be there at sunup tomorrow, and the day after that, and the day after that, too, as long as it was needed, to give that work to build it back again. So it hadn’t gone a-tall; it didn’t no more care for that little fire and flood than Whitfield’s old baptizing gown had done. Then we was home. Maw had left so fast the lamp was still lit, and we could see pap now, still leaving a puddle where he stood, with a cut across the back of his head where the barrel had busted and the blood-streaked water soaking him to the waist.

  “Get them wet clothes off,” maw said.

  “I don’t know as I will or not,” pap said. “I been publicly notified that I ain’t fitten to associate with white folks, so I publicly notify them same white folks and Methodists, too, not to try to associate with me, or the devil can have the hindmost.”

  But maw hadn’t even listened. When she come back with a pan of water and a towel and the liniment bottle, pap was already in his nightshirt.

  “I don’t want none of that neither,” he said. “If my head wasn’t worth busting, it ain’t worth patching.” But she never paid no mind to that neither. She washed his head off and dried it and put the bandage on and went out again, and pap went and got into bed.

  “Hand me my snuff; then you get out of here and stay out too,” he said.

  But before I could do that maw come back. She had a glass of hot toddy, and she went to the bed and stood there with it, and pap turned his head and looked at it.

  “What’s that?” he said.

  But maw never answered, and then he set up in bed and drawed a long, shuddering breath—we could hear it—and after a minute he put out his hand for the toddy and set there holding it and drawing his breath, and then he taken a sip of it.

  “I Godfrey, if him and all of them put together think they can keep me from working on my own church like ary other man, he better be a good man to try it.” He taken another sip of the toddy. Then he taken a long one. “Arsonist,” he said. “Work units. Dog units. And now arsonist. I Godfrey, what a day!”

  A Justice

  - 1 -

  UNTIL GRANDFATHER DIED, WE WOULD GO OUT TO THE FARM EVERY Saturday afternoon. We would leave home right after dinner in the surrey, I in front with Roskus, and Grandfather and Caddy and Jason in the back. Grandfather and Roskus would talk, with the horses going fast, because it was the best team in the county. They would carry the surrey fast along the levels and up some of the hills even. But this was in north Mississippi, and on some of the hills Roskus and I could smell Grandfather’s cigar.

  The farm was four miles away. There was a long, low house in the grove, not painted but kept whole and sound by a clever carpenter from the quarters named Sam Fathers, and behind it the barns and smokehouses, and further still, the quarters themselves, also kept whole and sound by Sam Fathers. He did nothing else, and they said he was almost a hundred years old. He lived with the Negroes and they—the white people; the Negroes called him a blue-gum—called him a Negro. But he wasn’t a Negro. That’s what I’m going to tell about.

  When we got there, Mr. Stokes, the manager, would send a Negro boy with Caddy and Jason to the creek to fish, because Caddy was a girl and Jason was too little, but I wouldn’t go with them. I would go to Sam Fathers’ shop, where he would be making breastyokes or wagon wheels, and I would always bring him some tobacco. Then he would stop working and he would fill his pipe—he made them himself, out of creek clay with a reed stem—and he would tell me about the old days. He talked like a nigger—that is, he said his words like niggers do, but he didn’t say the same words—and his hair was nigger hair. But his skin wasn’t quite the color of a light nigger and his nose and his mouth and chin were not nigger nose and mouth and chin. And his shape was not like the shape of a nigger when he gets old. He was straight in the back, not tall, a little broad, and his face was still all the time, like he might be somewhere else all the while he was working or when people, even white people, talked to him, or while he talked to me. It was just the same all the time, like he might be away up on a roof by himself, driving nails. Sometimes he would quit work with something half-finished on the bench, and sit down and smoke. And he wouldn’t jump up and go back to work
when Mr. Stokes or even Grandfather came along.

  So I would give him the tobacco and he would stop work and sit down and fill his pipe and talk to me.

  “These niggers,” he said. “They call me Uncle Blue-Gum. And the white folks, they call me Sam Fathers.”

  “Isn’t that your name?” I said

  “No. Not in the old days. I remember. I remember how I never saw but one white man until I was a boy big as you are; a whisky trader that came every summer to the Plantation. It was the Man himself that named me. He didn’t name me Sam Fathers, though.”

  “The Man?” I said.

  “He owned the Plantation, the Negroes, my mammy too. He owned all the land that I knew of until I was grown. He was a Choctaw chief. He sold my mammy to your great-grandpappy. He said I didn’t have to go unless I wanted to, because I was a warrior too then. He was the one who named me Had-Two-Fathers.”

  “Had-Two-Fathers?” I said. “That’s not a name. That’s not anything.”

  “It was my name once. Listen.”

  - 2 -

  This is how Herman Basket told it when I was big enough to hear talk. He said that when Doom came back from New Orleans, he brought this woman with him. He brought six black people, though Herman Basket said they already had more black people in the Plantation than they could find use for. Sometimes they would run the black men with dogs, like you would a fox or a cat or a coon. And then Doom brought six more when he came home from New Orleans. He said he won them on the steamboat, and so he had to take them. He got off the steamboat with the six black people, Herman Basket said, and a big box in which something was alive, and the gold box of New Orleans salt about the size of a gold watch. And Herman Basket told how Doom took a puppy out of the box in which something was alive, and how he made a bullet of bread and a pinch of the salt in the gold box, and put the bullet into the puppy and the puppy died.