Snopes: The Hamlet, the Town, the Mansion

by William Faulkner

  “What’s that?” the proprietor said. He scattered the coins on the counter. “Lunch meat, eleven; bread—” He stopped and as suddenly huddled the coins into a pile again. “Where did you say you come from?”

  “I never said,” Mink said. “Down the road.”

  “Been away a long time, have you?”

  “That’s right,” he said.

  “Much obliged,” the proprietor said. “I sure forgot about them two Cokes. Damn labor unions have even run Coca-Cola up out of sight like everything else. You had two of them, didn’t you?” taking the half-dollar from the change and shoving the rest of it across to him. “I dont know what folks are going to do unless somebody stops them somewhere. Looks like we’re going to have to get shut of these damn Democrats to keep out of the poorhouse. Where’d you say you were headed? Memphis?”

  “I aint said,” he started to say. But the other was already, or still, speaking to the Negro now, already extending toward the Negro another opened soda.

  “This is on the house. Jump in your car and run him up to the crossroads; he’ll have double chance to catch a ride there, maybe someone from the other highway.”

  “I wasn’t fixing to leave yet,” the Negro said.

  “Yes you are,” the proprietor said. “Just a half a mile? You got plenty of time. Dont let me see you around here until you get back. All right,” he said to Mink. “You’ll sure catch a ride there.”

  So he rode again, in the battered mud-stained car; just for a moment the Negro slid his eyes toward him, then away. “Where down the road did you come from?” the Negro said. He didn’t answer. “It was Parchman, wasn’t it?” Then the car stopped. “Here’s the crossroads,” the Negro said. “Maybe you can catch a ride.”

  He got out. “Much obliged,” he said.

  “You done already paid him,” the Negro said. So now he walked again. But mainly it was to be out of the store; he must not stop at one again. If the bottles had been a dollar apiece, there was a definite limit beyond which temptation, or at least his lack of will power, could no longer harm him. But at only a quarter apiece, until he could reach Memphis and actually have the pistol in his hand, there was no foreseeable point within the twelve remaining dollars where he would have peace; already, before he was even outside the store, he was saying Be a man, Be a man. You got to be a man, you got too much to do, too much to resk and, walking again, he was still sweating a little, not panting so much as simply breathing deeply like one who has just blundered unwarned into then out of the lair, the arms, of Semiramis or Messalina, still incredulous, still aghast at his own temerity and still amazed that he has escaped with his life.

  And now he was discovering something else. For most of the twenty-odd years before he went to Parchman, and during all the thirty-eight since, he had walked only on soft dirt. Now he walked on concrete; not only were his feet troubling him but his bones and muscles ached all the way up to his skull, until presently he found a foul puddle of water among rank shadeless weeds at the end of a culvert and removed the new stiff brogans they had given him with the new overalls and sat with his feet in the water, eating the tinned meat and the bread, thinking I got to watch myself. Maybe I dussent to even go inside where they sell hit thinking, not with despair really: still indomitable Likely hit will cost the whole ten-dollar bill, maybe more. That jest leaves three dollars and eighty-five cents and I done already spent eighty-two of that and stopped and took the handful of coins from his pocket and spread them carefully on the ground beside him; he had had three one-dollar bills and the eighty-five cents and he counted slowly the eighty-five cents, a half-dollar, a quarter, and two nickels, and set them aside. He had given the man at the store one of the dollar bills and the man had given him back change for bread, eleven cents, lunch meat eleven cents, which was twenty-two cents, then the man had taken up the half-dollar for the sodas, which was seventy-two cents, which should have left twenty-eight cents; counting what remained slowly over coin by coin again, then counting the coins he had already set aside to be sure they were right. And still it was only eighteen cents instead of twenty-eight. A dime was gone somewhere. And the lunch meat was just eleven cents, he remembered that because there had been a kind of argument about it. So it was the bread, it would have to be the bread. It went up another dime right while I was standing there he thought. And if bread could jump up ten cents right while I was looking at it, maybe I cant buy a pistol even for the whole thirteen dollars. So I got to stop somewhere and find a job.

  The highway was dense with traffic, but going fast now, the automobiles big ones, brand new, and the trucks were big as railroad cars; no more the dusty pickups which would have offered him a lift, but vehicles now of the rich and hurried who would not even have seen a man walking by himself in overalls. Or probably worse: they probably would have hedged away with their own size and speed and shining paint any other one of them which might have stopped for him, since they would not have wanted him under their feet in Memphis either. Not that it mattered now. He couldn’t even see Memphis yet. And now he couldn’t even say when he was going to see it, thinking So I may need as much as ten dollars more before I even get to where I can buy one. But at least he would have to reach Memphis before that became an actual problem, obstacle; at least when he did reach Memphis the thirteen dollars and three cents he still had must be intact, no matter how much more he might have to add to it to get there. So he would have to get more money some way, who knew he could not be trusted in another roadside store where they sold soda pop. So I will have to stop somewhere and ask for work and I aint never asked no man for work in my life so maybe I dont even know how thinking And that will add at least one more day, maybe even more than one thinking quietly but still without despair Ym too old for this. A feller sixty-three years old ought not to have to handle such as this thinking, but without despair: quite indomitable still But a man that’s done already had to wait thirty-eight years, one more day or two or even three aint going to hurt.

  The woman was thick but not fat and not old, a little hard-looking, in a shapeless not very clean dress, standing in a small untidy yard pulling dead clematis vines from a frame beside a small house. “Are you a man of God?” she said.

  “Ma’am?” he said.

  “You look like a preacher.”

  “Nome,” he said. “I been away.”

  “What kind of work can you do?”

  “I kin do that. I kin rake the yard.”

  “What else?”

  “I been a farmer. I reckon I can do most anything.”

  “I reckon first you want something to eat,” she said. “All right. We’re all God’s creatures. Finish pulling down these vines. Then you’ll find a rake by the kitchen door. And remember. I’ll be watching you.”

  Perhaps she was, from behind the curtains. He couldn’t tell. He didn’t try to. Though evidently she was, already standing on the minuscule front gallery when he put the last rake-full on the pile, and told him where the wheelbarrow was and gave him three kitchen matches and stood watching while he wheeled the trash into the adjoining vacant lot and set fire to it. “Put the wheelbarrow and rake back where you got them and come in the kitchen,” she said. He did so—a stove, sink, refrigerator, a table and chair set and on the table a platter of badly cooked greens with livid pork lumps in it and two slices of machine-made bread on a saucer and a glass of water; he standing for a time quite still, his hands hanging quietly at his sides, looking at it. “Are you too proud to eat it?” she said.

  “It aint that,” he said. “I aint hungry. I needed the money to get on. I got to get to Memphis and then back to Missippi.”

  “Do you want that dinner, or dont you?” she said.

  “Yessum,” he said. “Much obliged,” and sat down, she watching him a moment, then she opened the refrigerator and took out an opened tin and set it on the table before him. It contained one half of a canned peach.

  “Here,” she said.

  “Yessum,” he said. “
Much obliged.” Perhaps she was still watching him. He ate what he could (it was cold) and had carried the plate and knife and fork to the sink to wash them when she came suddenly in again.

  “I’ll do that,” she said. “You go on up the road four miles. You’ll come to a mailbox with Brother Goodyhay on it. You can read, cant you?”

  “I’ll find it,” he said.

  “Tell him Beth Holcomb sent you.”

  He found it. He had to. He thought I got to find it thinking how maybe he would be able to read the name on the mailbox simply because he would have to read it, would have to penetrate through the inscrutable hieroglyph; thinking while he stood looking at the metal hutch with the words Bro J C Goodyhay not stencilled but painted on it, not sloven nor careless but impatiently, with a sort of savage impatience: thinking, either before or at least simultaneous with his realisation that someone nearby was shouting at him Maybe I could read all the time and jest never knowed it until I had to. Anyway, hearing the voice and looking up the tiny savagely untended yard, to another small frame house on that minuscule gallery of which a man stood waving one arm and shouting at him: “This is it. Come on.”—a lean quick-moving man in the middle thirties with coldly seething eyes and the long upper lip of a lawyer or an orator and the long chin of the old-time comic-strip Puritan, who said,

  “Hell, you’re aacher.”

  “No,” he said. “I been away. I’m trying to get to—”

  “All right, all right,” the other said. “I’ll meet you round back,” and went rapidly back into the house. He, Mink, went around it into the back yard, which if anything was of an even more violent desolation than the front, since the back yard contained another house not dismantled so much as collapsed—a jumble of beams, joists, window- and door-frames and even still-intact sections of siding, among which moved or stood rather a man apparently as old as he, Mink, was, although he wore a battle jacket of the type which hadn’t been copied from the British model until after Pearl Harbor, with the shoulder patch of a division which hadn’t existed before then either, who when Mink came in sight began to chop rapidly with the axe in his hand among the jumble of lumber about him; barely in time as the back door of the house crashed open and the first man came out, carrying a buck saw; now Mink saw the sawbuck and a small heap of sawn lengths. “All right, all right,” the first man said, handing Mink the saw. “Save all the sound pieces. Dont split the nails out, pull them out. Saw up all the scraps, same length. Dad is in charge. I’ll be in the house,” and went back into it; even doors which he barely released seemed to clap to behind him violently, as though his passage had sucked them shut.

  “So they caught you too did they, mac?” the man in the battle jacket (he would be Dad) said.

  Mink didn’t answer that. He said: “Is that the reverend?”

  “That’s Goodyhay,” the other said. “I aint heard him preach yet but even if he hadn’t opened his mouth he would be a better preacher than he is a cook. But then, somebody’s got to scorch the biscuits. They claim his wife ran off with a sonabitching Four-F potato-chip salesman before he even got back from fighting in the Pacific. They were all doing it back then and what I notice, they aint quit, even without any war to blame it on. But what the hell, I always say there’s still a frog in the puddle for every one that jumps out. So they caught you too, huh?”

  This time he answered. “I got to get to Memphis and then back down to Missippi. I’m already behind. I got to get on tonight. How much does he pay here?”

  “That’s what you think,” the other said. “That’s what I thought three days ago: pick up a dollar or so and move on. Because you’re building a church this time, bully boy. So maybe we both better hope the bastard can preach since we aint going to get our money until they take up the collection Sunday.”

  “Sunday?” he said.

  “That’s right,” the other said. “This is Thursday; count it.”

  “Sunday,” he said. “That’s three days.”

  “That’s right,” the other said. “Sunday’s always three days after Thursday around here. It’s a law they got.”

  “How much wher get on Sunday?”

  “It may be as much as a dollar cash; you’re working for the Lord now, not mammon, jack. But anyway you’ll be fed and slept—”

  “I cant work that long for jest a dollar,” he said. “I aint got the time.”

  “It may be more than a dollar. What I hear around here, he seems to have something. Anyway, he gets them. It seems he was a Marine sergeant on one of them landing barges out in the Pacific one day when a Jap dive bomber dove right at them and everybody tried to jump off into the water before the bomb hit, except one mama’s boy that got scared or tangled up in something so he couldn’t jump and the reverend (except he hadn’t turned reverend then, not for the next few minutes yet) went back to try and untangle him, when the whole barge blew up and took the reverend and the mama’s boy both right on down to the bottom with it before the reverend could get them both loose and up to the top again. Which is just the official version when they gave him the medal, since according to the reverend or leastways his congregation—What I hear, the rest of them are mostly ex-soldiers too or their wives or the other broads they just knocked up without marrying, mostly young, except for a few old ones that seem to got dragged in by the passing suction you might say; maybe the moms and pops of soldiers that got killed, or the ones like that Sister Holcomb one that caught you down the road, that probably never thawed enough to have a child of any kind and God help the husband either if she ever had one, that wasn’t even sucked in but flagged the bus herself because the ride looked like it was free—” He stopped. Then he said: “No, I know exactly why she come: to listen to some of the words he uses doing what he calls preaching. Where was I? Oh yes: that landing barge. According to the reverend, he was already safe and dead and peacefully out of it at last on the bottom of the Pacific Ocean when all of a sudden Jesus Himself was standing over him saying Fall in and he did it and Jesus said Ten-SHUN, about-FACE and assigned him to this new permanent hitch right down here on the edge of Memphis, Tennessee. He’s got something, enough of whatever it took to recruit this new-faith boot camp to need a church to hold it. And I be damned if I dont believe he’s even going to get a carpenter to nail it together. What did he say when he first saw you?”

  “What?” Mink said.

  “What were his first words when he looked at you?”

  “He said, ‘Hell, you’re a preacher.’ ”

  “You see what I mean? He’s mesmerised enough folks to scour the country for any edifice that somebody aint actually sitting on the front porch of, and knocking it down and hauling it over here to be broke up like we’re doing. But he aint got a master carpenter yet to nail it together into a church. Because master carpenters belong to unions, and deal in cash money per diem on the barrel-head, where his assignment come direct from Jesus Christ Who aint interested in money or at least from the putting-out angle. So him and his outpost foxholes up and down the road like that Sister Holcomb that snagged you are sifting for one.”

  “Sifting?” he said.

  “Siwing. Like flour. Straining folks through this back yard until somebody comes up that knows how to nail that church together when we get enough boards and planks and window frames ripped aloose and stacked up. Which maybe we better get at it. I aint actually caught him spying behind a window shade yet but likely an ex-Marine sergeant even reformed into the ministry is no man to monkey with too far.” “You mean I cant leave?”

  “Sure you can. All the outdoors is yours around here. You aint going to get any money until they take up that collection Sunday though. Not to mention a place to sleep tonight and what he calls cooking if you aint particular.”

  In fact, this house had no shades nor curtains whatever to be spied from behind. Indeed, as he really looked about it for the first time, the whole place had an air of violent transience similar to the indiscriminate jumble of walls and windows and doo
rs among which he and the other man worked: merely still nailed together and so standing upright; from time to time, as the stack of reclaimed planks and the pile of fire-lengths to which his saw was reducing the spoiled fragments slowly rose, Mink could hear the preacher moving about inside the intact one, so that he thought If he jest went back inside to compose up his sermon, it sounds like getting ready to preach takes as much activity and quickness as harnessing up a mide. Now it was almost sunset; he thought This will have to be at least a half a dollar. I got to have it. I got to get on. I cant wait till Sunday when the back door jerked, burst open and the preacher said, “All right. Supper’s ready. Come on.”

  He followed Dad inside. Nothing was said by anyone about washing. “I figgered—” he began. But it was already too late. This was a kitchen too but not Spartan so much as desolate, like a public camp site in a roadside park, with what he called another artermatic stove since he had never seen a gas or electric stove until he saw Mrs Hol-comb’s, Goodyhay standing facing it in violent immobility enclosed in a fierce sound of frying; Mink said again. “I figgered—” as Goodyhay turned from the stove with three platters bearing each a charred splat of something which on the enamel surfaces looked as alien and solitary and not for eating as the droppings of cows. “I done already et,” Mink said. “I figgered I would jest get on.”

  “What?” Goodyhay said.

  “Even after I get to Memphis, I still aint hardly begun,” he said. “I got to get on tonight.”

  “So you want your money now,” Goodyhay said, setting the platters on the table where there already sat a tremendous bottle of tomato ketchup and a plate of machine-sliced bread and a sugar bowl and a can of condensed milk with holes punched in the top. “Sit down,” Goodyhay said, turning back to the stove, where Mink could smell the coffee overboiled too with that same violent impatience of the fried hamburger and the woodpiles in the yard and the lettering on the mailbox; until Goodyhay turned again with the three cups of coffee and said again, “Sit down.” Dad was already seated. “I said, sit down,” Goodyhay said. “You’ll get your money Sunday after the collection.”