The Essential Faulkner

by William Faulkner

  “Hah,” Mrs. Tull said. She said it exactly as Bookwright would have. “Dangerous. Ask Vernon Tull. Ask Henry Armstid if them things was pets.”

  “If you please, ma’am,” the Justice said. He was looking at Eck. “What is the defendant’s position? Denial of ownership?”

  “What?” Eck said.

  “Was that your horse that ran over Mr. Tull?”

  “Yes,” Eck said. “It was mine. How much do I have to p—–”

  “Hah,” Mrs. Tull said again. “Denial of ownership. When there were at least forty men—fools too, or they wouldn’t have been there. But even a fool’s word is good about what he saw and heard—at least forty men heard that Texas murderer give that horse to Eck Snopes. Not sell it to him, mind; give it to him.”

  “What?” the Justice said. “Gave it to him?”

  “Yes,” Eck said. “He give it to me. I’m sorry Tull happened to be using that bridge too at the same time. How much do I—–”

  “Wait,” the Justice said. “What did you give him? a note? a swap of some kind?”

  “No,” Eck said. “He just pointed to it in the lot and told me it belonged to me.”

  “And he didn’t give you a bill of sale or a deed or anything in writing?”

  “I reckon he never had time,” Eck said. “And after Lon Quick forgot and left that gate open, never nobody had time to do no writing even if we had a thought of it.”

  “What’s all this?” Mrs. Tull said. “Eck Snopes has just told you he owned that horse. And if you won’t take his word, there were forty men standing at that gate all day long doing nothing, that heard that murdering card-playing whiskey-drinking anti-christ—” This time the Justice raised one hand, in its enormous pristine cuff, toward her. He did not look at her.

  “Wait,” he said. “Then what did he do?” he said to Eck. “Just lead the horse up and put the rope in your hand?”

  “No,” Eck said. “Him nor nobody else never got no ropes on none of them. He just pointed to the horse in the lot and said it was mine and auctioned off the rest of them and got into the buggy and said good-bye and druv off. And we got our ropes and went into the lot, only Lon Quick forgot to shut the gate. I’m sorry it made Tull’s mules snatch him outen the wagon. How much do I owe him?” Then he stopped, because the Justice was no longer looking at him and, as he realized a moment later, no longer listening either. Instead, he was sitting back in the chair, actually leaning back in it for the first time, his head bent slightly and his hands resting on the table before him, the fingers lightly overlapped. They watched him quietly for almost a half-minute before anyone realized that he was looking quietly and steadily at Mrs. Tull.

  “Well, Mrs. Tull,” he said, “by your own testimony, Eck never owned that horse.”

  “What?” Mrs. Tull said. It was not loud at all. “What did you say?”

  “In the law, ownership can’t be conferred or invested by word-of-mouth. It must be established either by recorded or authentic document, or by possession or occupation. By your testimony and his both, he never gave that Texan anything in exchange for that horse, and by his testimony the Texas man never gave him any paper to prove he owned it, and by his testimony and by what I know myself from these last four weeks, nobody yet has ever laid hand or rope either on any one of them. So that horse never came into Eck’s possession at all. That Texas man could have given that same horse to a dozen other men standing around that gate that day, without even needing to tell Eck he had done it; and Eck himself could have transferred all his title and equity in it to Mr. Tull right there while Mr. Tull was lying unconscious on that bridge just by thinking it to himself, and Mr. Tull’s title would be just as legal as Eck’s.”

  “So I get nothing,” Mrs. Tull said. Her voice was still calm, quiet, though probably no one but Tull realized that it was too calm and quiet. “My team is made to run away by a wild spotted mad dog, my wagon is wrecked; my husband is jerked out of it and knocked unconscious and unable to work for a whole week with less than half of our seed in the ground, and I get nothing.”

  “Wait,” the Justice said. “The law—–”

  “The law,” Mrs. Tull said. She stood suddenly up—a short, broad, strong woman, balanced on the balls of her planted feet.

  “Now, mamma,” Tull said.

  “Yes, ma’am,” the Justice said. “Your damages are fixed by statute. The law says that when a suit for damages is brought against the owner of an animal which has committed damage or injury, if the owner of the animal either can’t or won’t assume liability, the injured or damaged party shall find recompense in the body of the animal. And since Eck Snopes never owned that horse at all, and since you just heard a case here this morning that failed to prove that Flem Snopes had any equity in any of them, that horse still belongs to that Texas man. Or did belong. Because now that horse that made your team run away and snatch your husband out of the wagon, belongs to you and Mr. Tull.”

  “Now, mamma!” Tull said. He rose quickly. But Mrs. Tull was still quiet, only quite rigid and breathing hard, until Tull spoke. Then she turned on him, not screaming: shouting; presently the bailiff was banging the table-top with his hand-polished hickory cane and roaring “Order! Order!” while the neat old man, thrust backward in his chair as though about to dodge and trembling with an old man’s palsy, looked on with amazed unbelief.

  “The horse!” Mrs. Tull shouted. “We see it for five seconds, while it is climbing into the wagon with us and then out again. Then it’s gone, God don’t know where and thank the Lord He don’t! And the mules gone with it and the wagon wrecked and you laying there on the bridge with your face full of kindling-wood and bleeding like a hog and dead for all we knew. And he gives us the horse! Don’t hush me! Get on to that wagon, fool that would sit there behind a pair of young mules with reins tied around his wrist! Get on to that wagon, all of you!”

  “I can’t stand no more!” the old Justice cried. “I won’t! This court’s adjourned! Adjourned!”

  5

  THE END OF AN ORDER

  Editor’s Note

  A recurring theme in Faulkner’s novels is that the old South was defeated from within. After four years of fighting against hopeless odds, the landowners of Yoknapatawpha County had remained “the unvanquished,” and they all had tried, as did Colonel Sutpen, to restore their houses, their plantations, and their social order to the image of what they had been before the war. Moreover, they achieved a partial success. There were years in Jefferson when the prewar standards prevailed; when a Sartoris was mayor, a Benbow was county judge, and Major de Spain was the local magnate. But the heirs of the men who had withstood the Northern armies and defeated the carpetbaggers were driven from their posts of influence by Southern renegades, or rather by a coalition between Northern business and a new class of Southerners descended in part from the bushwhackers of Civil War days. Jefferson itself was overrun, infested by the tribe of Snopes: for a time there were Snopeses in the bank, in the power company, in politics, Snopeses everywhere gnawing like rats at the standards by which the South had lived.

  The Snopeses and their allies are the destructive element in Faulkner’s novels. The Negroes are an element of stability: they endured. Faulkner’s favorite characters are the Negro cooks and matriarchs who hold a white family together: Elnora and Clytie and Dilsey and Aunt Mollie Beauchamp. After the Compson family has gone to pieces, in The Sound and the Fury, it is Dilsey the cook who is left behind to mourn. Looking up at the square unpainted house with its rotting portico, she thinks, “Ise seed de first en de last”; and later in the kitchen she says, looking at the cold stove, “I seed de first en de last.”

  Of the four stories in this section, “That Evening Sun,” with its black heroine, is one of Faulkner’s very best; it belongs to a cycle dealing with the Compson children. “Ad Astra” is part of another cycle recounting the adventures of Bayard Sartoris’ twin grandsons in the Royal Air Force: John was killed, and Bayard, named for his grandfather, c
ame home (in Sartoris, 1929) feeling that he too had died on the night of the Armistice. In “A Rose for Emily,” often anthologized, Faulkner has found one of his most effective symbols for the decay of the old order. These three stories were included in These 13 (1931) and reprinted in Collected Stories of William Faulkner (1950). “Dilsey” comes from the last part of The Sound and the Fury (1929), which describes the going to pieces of the Compson family and which remained Faulkner’s favorite among his novels. For the earlier histroy of the Compsons and the fate of the survivors, see “Appendix: The Compsons,” printed in the last part of this volume.

  1902

  That Evening Sun

  I

  Monday is no different from any other weekday in Jefferson now. The streets are paved now, and the telephone and electric companies are cutting down more and more of the shade trees—the water oaks, the maples and locusts and elms—to make room for iron poles bearing clusters of bloated and ghostly and bloodless grapes, and we have a city laundry which makes the rounds on Monday morning, gathering the bundles of clothes into bright-colored, specially made motorcars: the soiled wearing of a whole week now flees apparitionlike behind alert and irritable electric horns, with a long diminishing noise of rubber and asphalt like tearing silk, and even the Negro women who still take in white people’s washing after the old custom, fetch and deliver it in automobiles.

  But fifteen years ago, on Monday morning the quiet, dusty, shady streets would be full of Negro women with, balanced on their steady, turbaned heads, bundles of clothes tied up in sheets, almost as large as cotton bales, carried so without touch of hand between the kitchen door of the white house and the blackened washpot beside a cabin door in Negro Hollow.

  Nancy would set her bundle on the top of her head, then upon the bundle in turn she would set the black straw sailor hat which she wore winter and summer. She was tall, with a high, sad face sunken a little where her teeth were missing. Sometimes we would go a part of the way down the lane and across the pasture with her, to watch the balanced bundle and the hat that never bobbed nor wavered, even when she walked down in the ditch and up the other side and stooped through the fence. She would go down on her hands and knees and crawl through the gap, her head rigid, uptilted, the bundle steady as a rock or a balloon, and rise to her feet again and go on.

  Sometimes the husbands of the washing women would fetch and deliver the clothes, but Jesus never did that for Nancy, even before Father told him to stay away from our house, even when Dilsey was sick and Nancy would come to cook for us.

  And then about half the time we’d have to go down the lane to Nancy’s cabin and tell her to come on and cook breakfast. We would stop at the ditch, because Father told us to not have anything to do with Jesus—he was a short black man, with a razor scar down his face—and we would throw rocks at Nancy’s house until she came to the door, leaning her head around it without any clothes on.

  “What yawl mean, chunking my house?” Nancy said. “What you little devils mean?”

  “Father says for you to come on and get breakfast,” Caddy said. “Father says it’s over a half an hour now, and you’ve got to come this minute.”

  “I ain’t studying no breakfast,” Nancy said. “I going to get my sleep out.”

  “I bet you’re drunk,” Jason said. “Father says you’re drunk. Are you drunk, Nancy?”

  “Who says I is?” Nancy said. “I got to get my sleep out. I ain’t studying no breakfast.”

  So after a while we quit chunking the cabin and went back home. When she finally came, it was too late for me to go to school. So we thought it was whiskey until that day they arrested her again and they were taking her to jail and they passed Mr. Stovall. He was the cashier in the bank and a deacon in the Baptist church, and Nancy began to say:

  “When you going to pay me, white man? When you going to pay me, white man? It’s been three times now since you paid me a cent—” Mr. Stovall knocked her down, but she kept on saying, “When you going to pay me, white man? It’s been three times now since—” until Mr. Stovall kicked her in the mouth with his heel and the marshal caught Mr. Stovall back, and Nancy lying in the street, laughing. She turned her head and spat out some blood and teeth and said, “It’s been three times now since he paid me a cent.”

  That was how she lost her teeth, and all that day they told about Nancy and Mr. Stovall, and all that night the ones that passed the jail could hear Nancy singing and yelling. They could see her hands holding to the window bars, and a lot of them stopped along the fence, listening to her and to the jailer trying to make her stop. She didn’t shut up until almost daylight, when the jailer began to hear a bumping and scraping upstairs and he went up there and found Nancy hanging from the window bar. He said that it was cocaine and not whiskey, because no nigger would try to commit suicide unless he was full of cocaine, because a nigger full of cocaine wasn’t a nigger any longer.

  The jailer cut her down and revived her; then he beat her, whipped her. She had hung herself with her dress. She had fixed it all right, but when they arrested her she didn’t have on anything except a dress and so she didn’t have anything to tie her hands with and she couldn’t make her hands let go of the window ledge. So the jailer heard the noise and ran up there and found Nancy hanging from the window, stark naked, her belly already swelling out a little, like a little balloon.

  When Dilsey was sick in her cabin and Nancy was cooking for us, we could see her apron swelling out; that was before father told Jesus to stay away from the house. Jesus was in the kitchen, sitting behind the stove, with his razor scar on his black face like a piece of dirty string. He said it was a watermelon that Nancy had under her dress.

  “It never come off of your vine, though,” Nancy said.

  “Off of what vine?” Caddy said.

  “I can cut down the vine it did come off of,” Jesus said.

  “What makes you want to talk like that before these chillen?” Nancy said. “Whyn’t you go on to work? You done et. You want Mr. Jason to catch you hanging around his kitchen, talking that way before these chillen?”

  “Talking what way?” Caddy said. “What vine?”

  “I can’t hang around white man’s kitchen,” Jesus said. “But white man can hang around mine. White man can come in my house, but I can’t stop him. When white man want to come in my house, I ain’t got no house. I can’t stop him, but he can’t kick me outen it. He can’t do that.”

  Dilsey was still sick in her cabin. Father told Jesus to stay off our place. Dilsey was still sick. It was a long time. We were in the library after supper.

  “Isn’t Nancy through in the kitchen yet?” Mother said. “It seems to me that she has had plenty of time to have finished the dishes.”

  “Let Quentin go and see,” Father said. “Go and see if Nancy is through, Quentin. Tell her she can go on home.”

  I went to the kitchen. Nancy was through. The dishes were put away and the fire was out. Nancy was sitting in a chair, close to the cold stove. She looked at me.

  “Mother wants to know if you are through,” I said.

  “Yes,” Nancy said. She looked at me. “I done finished.” She looked at me.

  “What is it?” I said. “What is it?”

  “I ain’t nothing but a nigger,” Nancy said. “It ain’t none of my fault.”

  She looked at me, sitting in the chair before the cold stove, the sailor hat on her head. I went back to the library. It was the cold stove and all, when you think of a kitchen being warm and busy and cheerful. And with a cold stove and the dishes all put away, and nobody wanting to eat at that hour.

  “Is she through?” Mother said.

  “Yessum,” I said.

  “What is she doing?” Mother said.

  “She’s not doing anything. She’s through.”

  “I’ll go and see,” Father said.

  “Maybe she’s waiting for Jesus to come and take her home,” Caddy said.

  “Jesus is gone,” I said. Nancy told u
s how one morning she woke up and Jesus was gone.

  “He quit me,” Nancy said. “Done gone to Memphis, I reckon. Dodging them city po-lice for a while, I reckon.”

  “And a good riddance,” Father said. “I hope he stays there.”

  “Nancy’s scaired of the dark,” Jason said.

  “So are you,” Caddy said.

  “I’m not,” Jason said.

  “Scairy cat,” Caddy said.

  “I’m not,” Jason said.

  “You, Candace!” Mother said. Father came back.

  “I am going to walk down the lane with Nancy,” he said. “She says that Jesus is back.”

  “Has she seen him?” Mother said.

  “No. Some Negro sent her word that he was back in town. I won’t be long.”

  “You’ll leave me alone, to take Nancy home?” Mother said. “Is her safety more precious to you than mine?”

  “I won’t be long,” Father said.

  “You’ll leave these children unprotected, with that Negro about?”

  “I’m going too,” Caddy said. “Let me go, Father.”

  “What would he do with them, if he were unfortunate enough to have them?” Father said.

  “I want to go, too,” Jason said.

  “Jason!” Mother said. She was speaking to Father. You could tell that by the way she said the name. Like she believed that all day Father had been trying to think of doing the thing she wouldn’t like the most, and that she knew all the time that after a while he would think of it. I stayed quiet, because Father and I both knew that Mother would want him to make me stay with her if she just thought of it in time. So Father didn’t look at me. I was the oldest. I was nine and Caddy was seven and Jason was five.