The Essential Faulkner

by William Faulkner

  “But you got this one, didn’t you?” the plump convict said.

  “Yah,” the tall one said. The plump one blinked at him.

  “Was it good?”

  “It’s all good,” one of the others said. “Well? Go on. How many more did you have on the way back? Sometimes when a fellow starts getting it it looks like he just can’t miss even if—” That was all, the convict told them. They left the sawmill fast, he had no time to buy food until they reached the next landing. There he spent the whole sixteen dollars he had earned and they went on. The River was lower now, there was no doubt of it, and sixteen dollars’ worth looked like a lot of food and he thought maybe it would do, would be enough. But maybe there was more current in the River still than it looked like. But this time it was Mississippi, it was cotton; the plow handles felt right to his palms again, the strain and squat of the slick buttocks against the middle-buster’s blade was what he knew, even though they paid but a dollar a day here. But that did it. He told it: they told him it was Saturday again and paid him and he told about it—night, a smoked lantern in a disc of worn and barren earth as smooth as silver, a circle of crouching figures, the importunate murmurs and ejaculations, the meagre piles of worn bills beneath the crouching knees, the dotted cubes clicking and scuttering in the dust; that did it. “How much did you win?” the second convict said.

  “Enough,” the tall one said.

  “But how much?”

  “Enough,” the tall one said. It was enough exactly; he gave it all to the man who owned the second motor boat (he would not need food now), he and the woman in the launch now and the skiff towing behind, the woman with the baby, and the paper-wrapped parcel beneath his peaceful hand, on his lap; almost at once he recognized, not Vicksburg because he had never seen Vicksburg, but the trestle beneath which on his roaring wave of trees and houses and dead animals he had shot, accompanied by thunder and lightning, a month and three weeks ago; he looked at it once without heat, even without interest as the launch went on. But now he began to watch the bank, the levee. He didn’t know how he would know but he knew he would, and then it was early afternoon and sure enough the moment came and he said to the launch owner: “I reckon this will do.”

  “Here?” the launch owner said. “This don’t look like anywhere to me.”

  “I reckon this is it,” the convict said. So the launch put inshore, the engine ceased, it drifted up and lay against the levee and the owner cast the skiff loose.

  “You better let me take you on until we come to something,” he said. “That was what I promised.”

  “I reckon this will do,” the convict said. So they got out and he stood with the grapevine painter in his hand while the launch purred again and drew away, already curving; he did not watch it. He laid the bundle down and made the painter fast to a willow root and picked up the bundle and turned. He said no word, he mounted the levee, passing the mark, the tide-line of the old raging, dry now and lined, traversed by shallow and empty cracks like foolish and deprecatory senile grins, and entered a willow clump and removed the overalls and shirt they had given him in New Orleans and dropped them without even looking to see where they fell and opened the parcel and took out the other, the known, the desired, faded a little, stained and worn, but clean, recognizable, and put them on and returned to the skiff and took up the paddle. The woman was already in it.

  The plump convict stood blinking at him. “So you come back,” he said. “Well well.” Now they all watched the tall convict as he bit the end from the cigar neatly and with complete deliberation and spat it out and licked the bite smooth and damp and took a match from his pocket and examined the match for a moment as though to be sure it was a good one, worthy of the cigar perhaps, and raked it up his thigh with the same deliberation—a motion almost too slow to set fire to it, it would seem—and held it until the flame burned clear and free of sulphur, then put it to the cigar. The plump one watched him, blinking rapidly and steadily. “And they give you ten years more for running. That’s bad. A fellow can get used to what they give him at first, to start off with, I don’t care how much it is, even a hundred and ninety-nine years. But ten more years. Ten years more, on top of that. When you never expected it. Ten more years to have to do without no society, no female companionship—” He blinked steadily at the tall convict. But he (the tall convict) had thought of that too. He had had a sweetheart. That is, he had gone to church singings and picnics with her—a girl a year or so younger than he, short-legged, with ripe breasts and a heavy mouth and dull eyes like ripe muscadines, who owned a baking-powder can almost full of ear-rings and brooches and rings bought (or presented at suggestion) from ten-cent stores. Presently he had divulged his plan to her, and there were times later when, musing, the thought occurred to him that possibly if it had not been for her he would not actually have attempted it—this a mere feeling, unworded, since he could not have phrased this either: that who to know what Capone’s uncandled bridehood she might not have dreamed to be her destiny and fate, what fast car filled with authentic colored glass and machine guns, running traffic lights. But that was all past and done when the notion first occurred to him, and in the third month of his incarceration she came to see him. She wore ear-rings and a bracelet or so which he had never seen before and it never became quite clear how she had got that far from home, and she cried violently for the first three minutes, though presently (and without his ever knowing either exactly how they had got separated or how she had made the acquaintance) he saw her in animated conversation with one of the guards. But she kissed him before she left that evening and said she would return the first chance she got, clinging to him, sweating a little, smelling of scent and soft young female flesh, slightly pneumatic. But she didn’t come back though he continued to write to her, and seven months later he got an answer. It was a postcard, a colored lithograph of a Birmingham hotel, a childish X inked heavily across one window, the heavy writing on the reverse slanted and primer-like too: This is where were honny-monning at. Your friend (Mrs) Vernon Waldrip

  The plump convict stood blinking at the tall one, rapidly and steadily. “Yes, sir,” he said. “It’s them ten more years that hurt. Ten more years to do without a woman, no woman a tall a fellow wants—” He blinked steadily and rapidly, watching the tall one. The other did not move, jackknifed backward between the two bunks, grave and clean, the cigar burning smoothly and richly in his clean steady hand, the smoke wreathing upward across his face, saturnine, humorless, and calm. “Ten more years—”

  “Women——!” the tall convict said.

  7

  MODERN TIMES

  Editor’s Note

  By the end of the 1920s, the old slaveholding families had almost disappeared from Yoknapatawpha County. The name of Sartoris was borne only by a middle-aged woman and her half-grown son; the name of Compson only by an irascible bachelor; the name of McCaslin only by a childless hunter then in his late sixties; while other names like Sutpen, Grenier, and Beauchamp had survived, some of them in the Negro quarters, but most of them only in courthouse records. With the old families had vanished the code they tried to observe in their human relations; the only code followed by most of their successors was that of grab-and-git. Popeye (in Sanctuary, 1931), the impotent killer with his tight black clothes and his eyes like rubber pushbuttons, was the symbol of the time.

  Of the four stories in this section, “Death Drag” appeared in Doctor Martino (1934) and later in the Collected Stories. It grew out of the same interest in the mechanized lives of barnstorming aviators that produced Faulkner’s novel Pylon (1935). “Uncle Bud and the Three Madams” is the hilarious Chapter XXV of Sanctuary. “Percy Grimm” is from Chapter XIX of Light in August; it is not the best passage in that powerful novel, but it is almost the only one that tells a complete story in itself. Faulkner said in a letter, “I invented Grimm in 1931. I didn’t realize until after Hitler got into the newspapers that I had created a Nazi before he did.” Incidentally the title of
the novel refers primarily to Lena Grove and her baby. In the Mississippi backwoods it is sometimes said of a pregnant woman, but more often of a mare or a cow, that she will be light in August or September.

  “Delta Autumn” is a sequel to “The Bear” and comes from the same book, Go Down, Moses (1942). Uncle Ike McCaslin, the hero of that novel (or cycle of stories), is the most saintlike of Faulkner’s characters in his life as a whole and in his relation to the Negroes. Through Sam Fathers, his master in woodlore, he had also become a spiritual heir of the Chickasaws, and therefore it is right that he should give a final judgment on the Yoknapataw-pha story from the beginning. “No wonder,” he thinks on his last trip into the wilderness, “the ruined woods I used to know don’t cry for retribution! The people who have destroyed it will accomplish its revenge.”

  1928

  Death Drag

  I

  The airplane appeared over town with almost the abruptness of an apparition. It was travelling fast; almost before we knew it there it was already at the top of a loop; still over the square, in violation of both city and government ordinance. It was not a good loop either, performed viciously and slovenly and at top speed, as though the pilot were either a very nervous man or in a hurry, or (and this queerly: there is in our town an ex-army aviator. He was coming out of the post office when the airplane appeared going south; he watched the hurried and ungraceful loop and he made the comment) as though the pilot were trying to make the minimum of some specified maneuver in order to save gasoline. The airplane came over the loop with one wing down, as though about to make an Immelmann turn. Then it did a half roll, the loop three-quarters complete, and without any break in the whine of the full-throttled engine and still at top speed and with that apparition-like suddenness, it disappeared eastward toward our airport. When the first small boys reached the field, the airplane was on the ground, drawn up into a fence corner at the end of the field. It was motionless and empty. There was no one in sight at all. Resting there, empty and dead, patched and shabby and painted awkwardly with a single thin coat of dead black, it gave again that illusion of ghostliness, as though it might have flown there and made that loop and landed by itself.

  Our field is still in an embryonic state. Our town is built upon hills, and the field, once a cotton field, is composed of forty acres of ridge and gully, upon which, by means of grading and filling, we managed to build an X-shaped runway into the prevailing winds. The runways are long enough in themselves, but the field, like our town, is controlled by men who were of middle age when younger men first began to fly, and so the clearance is not always good. On one side is a grove of trees which the owner will not permit to be felled; on another is the barnyard of a farm: sheds and houses, a long barn with a roof of rotting shingles, a big haycock. The airplane had come to rest in the fence corner near the barn. The small boys and a Negro or two and a white man, descended from a halted wagon in the road, were standing quietly about it when two men in helmets and lifted goggles emerged suddenly around the corner of the barn. One was tall, in a dirty coverall. The other was quite short, in breeches and puttees and a soiled, brightly patterned overcoat which looked as if he had got wet in it and it had shrunk on him. He walked with a decided limp.

  They had stopped at the corner of the barn. Without appearing to actually turn their heads, they seemed to take in at one glance the entire scene, quickly. The tall man spoke. “What town is this?”

  One of the small boys told him the name of the town.

  “Who lives here?” the tall man said.

  “Who lives here?” the boy repeated.

  “Who runs this field? Is it a private field?”

  “Oh. It belongs to the town. They run it.”

  “Do they all live here? The ones that run it?”

  The white man, the Negroes, the small boys, all watched the tall man.

  “What I mean, is there anybody in this town that flies, that owns a ship? Any strangers here that fly?”

  “Yes,” the boy said. “There’s a man lives here that flew in the war, the English army.”

  “Captain Warren was in the Royal Flying Corps,” a second boy said.

  “That’s what I said,” the first boy said.

  “You said the English army,” the second boy said.

  The second man, the short one with the limp, spoke. He spoke to the tall man, quietly, in a dead voice, in the diction of Weber and Fields in vaudeville, making his wh’s into v’s and his ih’s into d’s. “What does that mean?” he said.

  “It’s all right,” the tall man said. He moved forward. “I think I know him.” The short man followed, limping, terrific, crablike. The tall man had a gaunt face beneath a two days’ stubble. His eyeballs looked dirty, too, with a strained, glaring expression. He wore a dirty helmet of cheap, thin cloth, though it was January. His goggles were worn, but even we could tell that they were good ones. But then everybody quit looking at him to look at the short man; later, when we older people saw him, we said among ourselves that he had the most tragic face we had ever seen; an expression of outraged and convinced and indomitable despair, like that of a man carrying through choice a bomb which, at a certain hour each day, may or may not explode. He had a nose which would have been out of proportion to a man six feet tall. As shaped by his close helmet, the entire upper half of his head down to the end of his nose would have fitted a six-foot body. But below that, below a lateral line bisecting his head from the end of his nose to the back of his skull, his jaw, the rest of his face, was not two inches deep. His jaw was a long, flat line clapping- to beneath his nose like the jaw of a shark, so that the tip of his nose and the tip of his jaw almost touched. His goggles were merely flat pieces of window-glass held in felt frames. His helmet was leather. Down the back of it, from the top to the hem, was a long savage tear, held together top and bottom by strips of adhesive tape almost black with dirt and grease.

  From around the corner of the barn there now appeared a third man, again with that abrupt immobility, as though he had materialized there out of thin air; though when they saw him he was already moving toward the group. He wore an overcoat above a neat civilian suit; he wore a cap. He was a little taller than the limping man, and broad, heavily built. He was handsome in a dull, quiet way; from his face, a man of infrequent speech. When he came up the spectators saw that he, like the limping man, was also a Jew. That is, they knew at once that two of the strangers were of a different race from themselves, without being able to say what the difference was. The boy who had first spoken probably revealed by his next speech what they thought the difference was. He, as well as the other boys, was watching the man who limped.

  “Were you in the war?” the boy said. “In the air war?”

  The limping man did not answer. Both he and the tall man were watching the gate. The spectators looked also and saw a car enter the gate and come down the edge of the field toward them. Three men got out of the car and approached. Again the limping man spoke quietly to the tall man: “Is that one?”

  “No,” the tall man said, without looking at the other. He watched the newcomers, looking from face to face. He spoke to the oldest of the three. “Morning,” he said. “You run this field?”

  “No,” the newcomer said. “You want the secretary of the Fair Association. He’s in town.”

  “Any charge to use it?”

  “I don’t know. I reckon they’ll be glad to have you use it.”

  “Go on and pay them,” the limping man said.

  The three newcomers looked at the airplane with that blank, knowing, respectful air of groundlings. It reared on its muddy wheels, the propeller motionless, rigid, with a quality immobile and poised and dynamic. The nose was big with engine, the wings taut, the fuselage streaked with oil behind the rusting exhaust pipes. “Going to do some business here?” the oldest one said.

  “Put you on a show,” the tall man said.

  “What kind of show?”

  “Anything you want. Wing-walking;
death-drag.”

  “What’s that? Death-drag?”

  “Drop a man onto the top of a car and drag him off again. Bigger the crowd, the more you’ll get.”

  “You will get your money’s worth,” the limping man said.

  The boys still watched him. “Were you in the war?” the first boy said.

  The third stranger had not spoken up to this time. He now said: “Let’s get on to town.”

  “Right,” the tall man said. He said generally, in his flat, dead voice, the same voice which the three strangers all seemed to use, as though it were their common language: “Where can we get a taxi? Got one in town?”

  “We’ll take you to town,” the men who had come up in the car said.

  “We’ll pay,” the limping man said.

  “Glad to do it,” the driver of the car said. “I won’t charge you anything. You want to go now?”

  “Sure,” the tall man said. The three strangers got into the back seat, the other three in front. Three of the boys followed them to the car.

  “Lemme hang on to town, Mr. Black?” one of the boys said.

  “Hang on,” the driver said. The boys got onto the running boards. The car returned to town. The three in front could hear the three strangers talking in the back. They talked quietly, in low, dead voices, somehow quiet and urgent, discussing something among themselves, the tall man and the handsome one doing most of the talking. The three in front heard only one speech from the limping man: “I won’t take less …”

  “Sure,” the tall man said. He leaned forward and raised his voice a little: “Where’ll I find this Jones, this secretary?”

  The driver told him.

  “Is the newspaper or the printing shop near there? I want some handbills.”