Every Day by the Sun

by Dean Faulkner Wells

  William’s drunks were never a subject for family consultations, much less the “interventions” of modern day, any more than my mother discussed Jimmy Meadows’s binges with anyone. They were simply ignored. Perhaps if no one talked about them, they never happened.

  I never saw William Faulkner drunk.

  Dean had his work cut out for him. Of everyone in the family he had the most patience in dealing with his older brother’s addiction, though he himself rarely drank to excess. When Dean drank, it was to have fun. Sometimes he would take William for long drives in the country. More often, they would closet themselves in William’s upstairs bedroom at Rowan Oak. Dean did not confide in anyone, including Louise or Estelle, about what went on between them. Louise never questioned Dean’s time-consuming devotion to his family. Shortly after they were married he told her, “Mother and Bill will always come first.” She accepted the situation. She had little choice.

  Not all of William’s drinking bouts were life threatening. Occasionally, Dean gave up trying to make him quit drinking and simply joined him. One day in the late spring of 1935, William appeared at Vernon Omlie’s apartment with a gallon jug of corn whiskey. After an hour of matching drinks, the two brothers decided they must go downtown. William declared that since he was in Memphis, he ought to do some shopping. They put the jug in the car, drove down Union Avenue, and parked near the Peabody. They were both barefoot, their pants rolled up to their knees. With William carrying the jug, they walked around the corner to the hotel entrance. A policeman was directing traffic at Second and Union. William carefully placed the jug behind the officer in the middle of the intersection. Assured that their liquor supply would be taken care of, they proceeded to go shopping. (Family members have sworn to the truth of this story—and that the jug was waiting untouched in the street when they returned two hours later.)

  DEAN AND LOUISE enjoyed a relaxed schedule of work and play. Dean’s flying skills increased with every hour he logged. Vernon was always there to answer his questions and to teach by example. One night they were flying into Memphis after a trip to St. Louis. At five thousand feet, the Waco swallowed a valve, and the aircraft lost power, forcing Dean to shut down the engine completely. Vernon took the controls and executed a difficult dead-stick landing. Dean watched and learned.

  In July, he performed his first solo night landing. He had been barnstorming in Oxford that day, entertaining a small crowd with stunts and taking passengers for rides. At dusk people were still waiting to go up. Dean would not allow darkness to deprive him of a few dollars more. The pasture south of town was not lighted. So in between hauls, he called two of his young followers over and sent them to town to get lanterns to mark a runway. He promised to take them flying as a reward. They raced to town on their bikes, rounded up a bunch of friends, and raided cars parked at the Lyric Theatre, detaching the carbide headlamps from Model T Fords. These early automobile lights could be removed and turned on and off like flashlights. Back at the pasture they formed an illuminated runway with the stolen lamps. After the last paying customer had left, Dean gave the boys the ride of their lives. When they landed, Dean asked what he owed for the lanterns. The boys admitted that they had “borrowed” them from cars at the Lyric Theatre. In all likelihood, the car owners never saw their headlamps again.

  In August, Dean decided that Louise had to learn how to drive. He gave her brief instructions, then changed places with her behind the steering wheel. This was in Memphis, and in her first lesson she had to drive to the airport in big-city traffic. “You did just fine,” he told her as he got out of the car. “I’ll call you when I’m ready to come home.” She was doing just fine on her way home, too, when the car stalled in the middle of a railroad crossing. Louise heard the bells clanging. A train was coming. She abandoned the car. Two men saw the danger and pushed the car off the tracks just before the train roared by.

  Louise drove home and collapsed. When Dean telephoned her to come pick him up, she said that she could not possibly come. He caught a ride home, and when he heard her story, he was sympathetic, up to a point. He could not understand why she was hysterical and shaking now that the crisis was over. He insisted that she see a doctor. The next day, a physical examination told her the cause of her nerves, though she thought she already knew: She was pregnant. When she broke the news to Dean, he was delighted. “Now you don’t have to drive anymore,” he said. “Before long, I’ll have that boy to come pick me up.” She continued to fly with him, however, for two more months. After November 1, the doctor warned, she would be grounded.

  William came up for a weekend in October. He and Dean decided to fly to Clarksdale and see their brother John. William had had a good amount to drink when he got there, so Dean flew the plane. After they were airborne, he let William take the controls. The flight to Clarksdale was uneventful, but as they approached the airfield, William wanted to land the plane. Dean let him handle the controls. They started to circle the field. They circled and circled and circled for fifteen or twenty minutes. Nobody said anything. William just couldn’t set it down. Finally, Dean suggested that he try. William agreed. Dean shifted the dual controls to his side of the aircraft and within minutes he had landed the Waco.

  It was typical of the understanding between the brothers that William did not resent Dean’s taking over. Nor did Dean judge his brother for losing his nerve. But on Monday when they prepared to take off, Dean was at the controls.

  On one of their regular visits to Oxford that month, Dean and Louise told Maud about the baby. Dean called Auntee, and they celebrated with ice cream and cake. On the weekend of November 2, Dean flew to Oxford for the first time without Louise. It was a cold, foggy Saturday morning. He flew low over the railroad tracks, his map to Mississippi.

  DEAN’S FUNERAL WAS on Armistice Day, November 11, 1935, at two in the afternoon. His casket lay on a bier in Maud’s front parlor in the same spot where Murry’s casket had lain three years before. William went into Dean’s old room to see Louise on the morning of the funeral. “Dean’s body is here now,” he told her. “But I want you to remember him the way he was.” The casket remained closed.

  The ceremony was private, as are all Faulkner funerals. The immediate family—William, Estelle, Louise, Maud, and Jack and John, along with their wives and children—sat in Dean’s room. The door to the parlor remained open. Several of Dean’s closest friends—the pilots Vernon Omlie and Murry Spain among them—stood at the far end of the parlor. There were few flowers and no music. The minister read a short service. Louise slumped in her chair. William gently helped her straighten up. He did not suggest that she leave the room.

  As the family left to go to St. Peter’s Cemetery, they found that the house was surrounded by an enormous, silent crowd, townspeople of all ages, from their father Murry’s contemporaries to small boys brought together by common grief.

  After Dean’s burial, William moved into Maud’s house at 510 South Lamar to care for his mother and his brother’s wife. He slept on a folding cot in the dining room, with his Underwood portable on the table next to the galley proofs of Absalom, Absalom!

  Each night he drew Louise’s bath, and before she went to bed he would bring her a glass of warm milk and a sleeping pill. One morning as William and Louise sat at the table waiting for breakfast to be served, Louise said, “I can’t eat. I dreamed the whole accident last night.” William answered, “I dream it every night.”

  For three weeks William tended solicitously to Maud and Louise. Then grief and guilt erupted inside him and he began to drink. Louise knew it at once; Maud, however, was unaware of his condition. One afternoon, William and Louise were sitting on the sofa in the front room, talking about Dean, when suddenly William began to cry. “I have ruined your life,” he said. “It is my fault.” Louise was sobbing, too, when Maud appeared. She looked at both of them and said, “You understand, Louise, he cannot help it. He could not stand it anymore. He had to have some relief.” She left the room not in anger bu
t in sorrow for both of her favorite sons.

  On December 10, 1935, William departed again for Hollywood. Early in 1936, the small marker he had selected for Dean’s grave was placed in St. Peter’s Cemetery. The biblical inscription was identical to the one William had written in 1929 for John Sartoris: “I bare him on eagles’ wings and brought him unto me.” Upon returning to Oxford, William drove Maud and Louise to the cemetery to see the marker. Maud did not like the inscription, not because she objected to the obvious comparison between John Sartoris and Dean Faulkner but because she saw it as a monument to William’s grief and guilt.

  I’ve always wondered why he did not choose a verse from A Shropshire Lad. “To an Athlete Dying Young” was one of his favorites—and mine.

  Years after Dean’s death, when Sartoris was republished in 1951 and Maud received her copy from William, she told me to read the novel and to remember that whereas young Bayard represented a combination of William, Jack, and John Falkner, John Sartoris was based on my father, who loved people, who was spontaneous, full of laughter, “warm and ready and generous.” She knew well the lines in Sartoris that introduced the epitaph William had chosen:

  Yet withal there was something else, as though the merry wild spirit of him who had laughed away so much of his heritage of humorless and fustian vainglory managed somehow even yet … to soften the arrogant gesture with which they bade him farewell.

  Although he rarely spoke of his youngest brother, on one occasion he told me, or tried to tell me, how he felt. “Your father was a rainbow,” he said.

  *Several biographers have given their wedding date as September 30, 1935. If this had been true, it would have made me a “wood colt.” I loved the idea and was disappointed to find a copy of their license dated September 30, 1934.

  “The Old Colonel,” William Clark Falkner (1825–1889), of Ripley, Mississippi, great-great-grandfather of Dean Faulkner Wells, a colonel in the Confederate Army, planter, lawyer, and railroad builder.

  Sallie Murry Falkner and J. W. T. Falkner, grandparents of William Faulkner, photo taken in 1910, the year that J.W.T. became the founding president of the First National Bank in Oxford.

  Lelia Dean Butler, “Damuddy,” mother of Maud Butler Falkner and the author’s great-grandmother.

  Maud Butler Falkner, twenty-five, in 1896, the year she married Murry Cuthbert Falkner.

  Maud Falkner with William, “Billy,” as an infant; his first studio portrait, taken in 1898.

  The four Faulkner brothers: Dean, three, in front; standing left to right, Jack, William, and John (1910).

  When World War I ended, William, twenty-one, shown here in an RAF lieutenant’s uniform, returned to Oxford in December 1918. For his rakish airs he soon became known about town as “Count No ’Count.”

  Rare photo of “the Doodlebug,” the locomotive on the Old Colonel’s Gulf and Chicago Railroad (later named Gulf & Ship Island Railroad), circa 1920.

  Marionettes, William Faulkner’s first book, was written, illustrated, and hand-bound by the author, then a student at Ole Miss. He and his classmate Ben Wasson sold copies on campus for five dollars each.

  William Faulkner was living in New Orleans in 1925 when his friend William Spratling made this sketch of him.

  Estelle Oldham Franklin, in Shanghai circa 1926, before her divorce from Cornell Franklin and subsequent marriage to William Faulkner.

  Estelle Oldham Franklin and her daughter Victoria (Cho Cho) in Shanghai before Estelle’s 1927 divorce from her first husband, Cornell Franklin. She married William Faulkner in 1929.

  Dean Swift Faulkner at his high school commencement in Oxford in 1926, the same year his brother William’s first novel, Soldiers’ Pay, was published.

  Dean Swift Faulkner played baseball at the University of Mississippi from 1927 to 1931.

  Dean Swift Faulkner, twenty, SAE fraternity picture at Ole Miss, circa 1927.

  Pen-and-ink study of Charlie Chaplin by William Faulkner that may have been sketched in Hollywood where Faulkner worked as an MGM screenwriter in 1932.

  William Faulkner showed off his new Waco C cabin cruiser in 1933, the plane he gave to his brother Dean a year later.

  Dean Swift Faulkner, twenty-seven, shown in a photo taken for his pilot’s license.

  William selected a biblical inscription for his brother Dean’s tombstone: “I bare him on eagles’ wings and brought him unto me.”

  Louise Faulkner took two-year-old Dean to the dedication ceremony of the Dean Faulkner Memorial Airport in 1938. The grass landing strip was located five miles south of Oxford.

  Dean Faulkner’s fellow pilots and barnstormers at Mid-South Airways in Memphis, Captain Vernon Omlie and his wife, Phoebe Omlie. Vernon was killed in a commercial plane crash in 1936. (Courtesy of the Mississippi Valley Collection, University of Memphis Library)

  WHILE THE CENTER OF MY FATHER’S WORLD WAS ALWAYS OXFORD, when I lived with Wese and Jimmy the moving never seemed to stop. The war years, 1941–45, were great levelers. Suddenly I was not the only one moving away on short notice. Anyone’s father could be drafted; thus, everyone was in the same boat, all ready to go wherever we were sent and to pull together in the war effort, all subject to abrupt changes in lifestyle and stuck with the same number of rationing tickets for sugar, coffee, gasoline, chocolate, or eggs.

  After the initial shock of leaving Oxford at age five, I adjusted to life on the go, to being the new child in school, exploring new neighborhoods, looking for new playmates. I was a natural-born common denominator, a social little creature who liked people and expected them to like me back. I’m always surprised when somebody hates me. Most of my schoolmates liked me. I was no threat to anyone. The older I got, the more I came to accept, even look forward to, the next move, to a different house in a different town.

  When I was in second grade, Jimmy, Wese, my dog Little Bit, and I lived in a white two-bedroom clapboard house in Clarksdale within a few blocks of my grammar school. Jimmy had been hired to run the Clarksdale Chamber of Commerce, though he did not last a year. To save gasoline he rode to work on my bicycle, often with me perched behind him.

  Money was short for everyone we knew, and Jimmy didn’t have health insurance. Fortunately, I was an abnormally healthy child. When outbreaks of measles (red and German), chicken pox, mumps, or the flu swept through the schools, I caught none of them. Wese would keep sending me off to school every morning, until the day came when I was the only child left in my class. Home I went with the familiar note, “School closed until further notice due to an epidemic of _____.” I ended up catching all of those diseases from my own children. My natural immunity seemed to have vanished by then, and I was far sicker than they ever were.

  In those days, rather than send each child to a doctor’s office, nurses came to our school for “Shots Day.” We didn’t know what we were getting shots for, but we all lined up in the auditorium staring in misery at the table center stage, where two nurses in white starched uniforms sat. The smell of alcohol was all pervasive and we tried not to look at the needles. If I could, I bribed my way with “recess candy” to the head of the line in order to get it over with, and to be able to watch my classmates suffer as I had and guess which one of my friends might start to cry. Tell me children aren’t pint-size savages. Or maybe it was just me.

  We had a fenced-in backyard with a garage—a natural place, Jimmy said, to raise chickens. The next weekend he came home with two little chicks, still fuzzy yellow, but with the tips of gray and black-and-white feathers beginning to show. They were fun to feed, ate a lot, and grew fast. Jimmy made them nests of straw in the garage. Having gathered eggs with Mama Hale out in the country, I was eager to go into the egg business myself, mentally adding up how much money I’d make when my chickens started laying. I named them Hedy Lamarr and Betty Grable. Betty did fine, actually laying several eggs, but Hedy was a disaster, flying at Little Bit and me whenever we came close. When we had fried chicken for Sunday dinner I didn’t ask any questions
but ate the pully-bone as I always did.

  I spent a great deal of time with my grandmother Maud, Nannie to me, during the war years. She was devoutly, even obsessively patriotic. During WWI, she had placed two stars on a piece of red, white, and blue felt and hung it in her window to show that she had sons serving in the armed forces—one for Jack, a marine who fought in the Argonne Forest in France—and one for William.

  In the Second World War her fervor returned. She read a newspaper daily, subscribed to Time and Life, and listened to H. V. Kaltenborn reporting war news on the CBS Radio Network at six o’clock every evening. A radio console was kept in the parlor. It looked like a wooden cabinet with double doors. Nannie would open it up and turn on the radio and we would gather to listen. As soon as Kaltenborn said “Good night,” Nannie turned off the radio and closed the console until 6 p.m. the next day.

  After John’s son Jimmy Faulkner completed his basic Marine Corps training at Parris Island, South Carolina, he learned to fly Corsairs. Nannie and Aunt Lucille, Jimmy’s mother, drove to Cherry Point, North Carolina, to see him off to the Pacific. The family could not believe it. The two women had not exchanged three civil words in a lifetime, yet off they went on a two-day journey in Aunt Lucille’s station wagon. Their mutual affection for Jimmy, their tall, blue-eyed, flying Faulkner, had effected a temporary truce.

  Early one Sunday morning, when all of us except Nannie were still in bed, we heard a steady knocking at the front door. Nannie didn’t have a door knocker much less a bell. We heard bare knuckles on wood growing louder with each rap. I heard Nannie open the door and invite someone into the parlor. When I peeked through a crack in my bedroom door I saw an ancient creature, even older than Nannie and smaller than she, a tiny, gray shriveled figure in a faded housedress, black high-topped lace-up shoes, and a bedraggled sun bonnet. She sat very straight in Nannie’s best chair next to the fireplace with her heels together. Their communication was intense, though I could not distinguish from their whispers what was being said. Then I heard Nannie say, “Thank you. But I must say no. Thank you.”