Big Woods

by William Faulkner

  So in my streaming slicker I supervise the unloading of the boats—the tents, the stove, the bedding, the food for ourselves and the dogs and horses until there will be meat in camp. I dispatch two of the Negroes to cut firewood; we have the cook-tent raised and the stove up and a fire and supper cooking while the big tent is still being staked down and trenched. By then the horses have appeared on the other bank; again it is my hand (my voice first shouting across the rain at the other Negro, the boy, who is trying to beat the horses down into the river) on the lead ropes, no more weight than that and my voice drawing them down into the water, then holding them beside the moving boat with only their heads above the surface as though they actually are suspended from this frail and strengthless old man’s grip, until they are once more up the bank.

  Then the meal is ready. I have my one glass of thin whisky and water. Then we uncover, and, standing in the churned mud beneath the stretched tarpaulin, I say grace over the fried slabs of pork, the soft shapeless bread, the canned beans and molasses and coffee in the iron plates and cups—the town food we brought with us—then we cover ourselves and eat. “Eat it all up,” I say. “I don’t want a piece of town meat in camp after breakfast tomorrow. Then you boys will hunt. When I first started hunting in this bottom seventy years ago with old General Compson and Major de Spain and Walter’s father and Roth’s and Will’s grandfathers, (and Boon Hogganbeck, the forty-year-old adolescent boy who killed the big old warp-footed bear with his bare hands and a pocket-knife) Major de Spain wouldn’t allow but two pieces of foreign grub in his camp. That was one side of pork and one ham of beef. And not to eat for the first supper and breakfast either, but to save until along toward the end of the hunt when everybody would be so sick of bear meat and coon and venison we couldn’t even bear to look at them.”

  “I thought Uncle Ike was going to say the pork and beef was for the dogs,” Will Legate says. “But that’s right; I remember. You just shot the dogs a mess of wild turkey when they burnt out on deer guts.”

  “There was game here then,” Walter Ewell says.

  “Not to mention they shot does,” Will says.

  “There’s game here still,” I say. “A good hunter can find it without shooting does either when the law says he shant. Remember that. And remember too why there had to be game laws at last.”

  “Meaning me and Walter and Will Legate,” Roth Edmonds says.

  “Meaning all of us,” I say. “God created man and He created the world for him to live in; I reckon He created the kind of a world He would have wanted to live in if He had been a man—the ground to walk on, the Big Woods, the trees and the water, and the game to live in it. And maybe He didn’t put the desire to hunt and kill game in man, but I reckon He knew it was going to be there, that man was going to teach himself that, since he wasn’t quite God yet. So I reckon He foreknew man would follow and kill the game. I believe He said, So be it. I reckon He even foresaw the end. But He said, I will give him his chance, I will give him warning and foreknowledge too, along with the desire to follow and the power to slay. The woods and fields he ravages and the game he devastates will be the consequence and signature of his crime and guilt, and his punishment.—Bed time,” I say; then to young Ash: “Breakfast at four o’clock, Ash, We want meat on the ground by sunup.”

  There is a good fire in the heater; the tent is already warm and is even beginning to dry out except for the mud we had to set it up in. Young Ash has made my bed too—the strong battered iron cot, the stained mattress which was never quite soft enough, the worn, often-washed blankets which as the years pass are less and less warm enough. But the tent is warm; presently when the kitchen tent is cleaned up and readied for breakfast, Joseph, the young Negro, Ash’s helper, will come and make his bed down before the heater where he can be roused from time to time to put in more wood. So at least I will have comfort to lie awake in, which I have known all the time that I shall do, being unable to sleep this first night. Or maybe I dont want to sleep. Maybe this is what I have come for. So, the spectacles folded away in the worn case beneath the pillow where I can find them, the lean old man’s sapless body folded and fitted easily into the worn old groove in the old mattress, hands crossed on breast as if in rehearsal for that last attitude of relinquishment and peace, I lie with my eyes closed until the sounds of undressing have subsided and the snoring begins. Then I open my eyes and lie looking up at the motionless belly of rain-murmured canvas upon which the glow of the heater fades slowly toward the moment when Joseph will rouse and stoke it again.

  We—the camp—had a house once, seventy and sixty and even just forty years ago when the Big Woods were only thirty miles from Jefferson and Major de Spain who had been my father’s cavalry commander in ’61 and ’2 and ’3 and ’4, and my cousin (cousin? my older brother, my father too) brought me into the woods for the first time. Old Sam Fathers was alive then, born in slavery of a Negro girl and a Chickasaw chief, who had taught me to shoot, not just when to shoot but when not to; such a November dawn as tomorrow will be and old Sam led me straight to the big cypress, knowing the buck would pass there because something ran in Sam Fathers’ blood which ran in the buck’s also, we standing there against the tremendous trunk, Sam Fathers who owned the seventy years then because then I owned only twelve of them; and there was nothing save the dawn until suddenly the buck was there, smoke-colored out of nothing, beautiful, magnificent with speed: and Sam said, “Now. Shoot quick and shoot slow”: and the gun levelled rapidly without haste as though of its own volition and will and crashed and I walked to the buck lying still intact and still in the attitude of that magnificent speed and bled it with Sam’s knife and Sam dipped his hands into the hot blood and marked my face forever while I stood trying not to tremble, humbly and with pride too though a boy of twelve could not actually have phrased it: “I slew you; my bearing must not shame your quitting life. My conduct forever afterward must become your death.” I own a house in Jefferson. That is, it is recorded to me, I pay taxes on it, it is specified as my domicile, since it contains the impedimenta necessary for a human being to get through life with: stove, bed, spare clothing—somewhere to store and keep the relics of human mutation: the crushed now scentless rose or violet or field daisy of first love, the grammar- or high-school medal, the mounted head of the first stag. But it is not my home. It is merely the way station in which I pass the time waiting for November again. Because this is my home: this tent with its muddy floor and the bed neither wide enough nor soft enough nor even warm enough for the old bones; my kin, the men whose ghosts alone still companion me: De Spain and Compson and the old Walter Ewell and Hogganbeck.

  Because this is my land. I can feel it, tremendous, still primeval, looming, musing downward upon the tent, the camp—this whole puny evanescent clutter of human sojourn which after our two weeks will vanish, and in another week will be completely healed, traceless in this unmarked solitude. It is mine, though I have never owned a foot of it, and never will. I have never wanted to, not even after I saw that it is doomed, not even after I began to watch it retreat year by year before the onslaught of axe and saw and log-lines and then dynamite and plow. Because there was never any one for me to acquire and possess it from because it had belonged to no one man. It belonged to all; we had only to use it well, humbly and with pride. Then suddenly I know why I have never wanted to own any of it, never wanted to arrest at least that much of what man calls progress, measure my longevity at least against that much of the wilderness’s ultimate fate. It is because there is just exactly enough of it. It is as if I can see the two of us—myself and the wilderness—as coevals, my own span as a hunter, a woodsman, not contemporary with my own first breath but instead transmitted to me, assumed by me gladly, humbly, with joy and pride, from the old Major de Spain and the old Sam Fathers who had taught me to hunt, the two spans—mine and the wilderness’s—running out together, not toward oblivion, nothingness, but into a dimension free of both time and space where once more the untree
d land warped and wrung to mathematical squares of rank cotton for the frantic old-world people to turn into shells to shoot at one another, would find ample room for both—the names, the faces of the old men I had known and loved and for a little while outlived, moving again among the shades of the tall unaxed trees and sightless brakes where the wild strong immortal game ran forever before the tireless belling immortal hounds, falling and rising phoenixlike to the soundless guns—

  I have been asleep. The lantern is lighted; outside in the darkness the oldest Negro, old Isham, is beating a spoon against a tin pan and crying, “Raise up and get yo foa clock coffy. Raise up and get yo foa clock coffy,” and the tent is filled now with the sound of men dressing, and Will Legate’s voice: “Get out of here now and let Uncle Ike sleep. If we wake him up, he’ll insist on going out with us. And he ain’t got any business in the woods this morning.”

  So I do not move, simulating sleep while they leave the tent. I listen to the breakfast sounds from beneath the stretched tarpaulin, and hear them depart—the horses, the dogs; the last voice dies away and there remain only the Negroes clearing breakfast away; presently I may even hear the first faint clear cry of the first hound, the strike dog, ring through the wet woods from where the buck bedded, and perhaps I will even go back to sleep again. Then the tent flap swings in and falls, something jolts against the foot of the cot and I open my eyes. It is Roth, Roth Edmonds, grandson of the McCaslin Edmonds who had been not just my cousin but my older brother and father too in the time when I had neither, carrying not the rifle which he had used ever since he had finally seen that a man with a steady eye and hand owed more to the bear or the buck than to shoot it with a blind handful of pellets, but a shotgun.

  “Are you going to shoot that today?” I say.

  “You said last night you want meat this morning,” he says.

  “Since when did you start having trouble getting meat with your rifle?” I say.

  But he is already gone; the tent flap falls again and now there is only the murmur of the rain, the waft of light and the cold wet smell of actual rain snatched, jerked out of the tent again; I cry: “Roth! Wait!” But it is too late, too late not just now, this morning, not even yesterday, but already too late much longer ago than any of these; I am trembling now, the blanket huddled to my chin, my hands crossed on my breast as though I hoped to huddle for warmth even within their frail circumscription. It is cold; I lie shaking faintly and steadily in it, rigid save for the shaking, until—I don’t know how much later, since long enough is already too late—the flap lifts again and this time Legate almost scuttles in, almost furtive.

  “What?” I say.

  “A tarpaulin,” Legate says. “We got a deer on the ground.”

  “Why a tarpaulin for a dead deer?” I say. Then I answer it myself: “Who killed it?” I say. “It was Roth,” answering that too. “It was a doe.”

  “I tried not to wake you,” Legate says.

  “All right,” I say. “Bring it in.”

  “All of it?” Legate says.

  “All of it?” I say. “You mean he shot two of them?”

  “That other one is pretty old and tough,” Legate says.

  “Bring her in!” I say. “Feed her to the dogs if you like. But don’t let her lay out there in the woods.”

  “All right, all right,” Legate says. Then he is gone too and now I can lie again in the empty tent, shaking, but only with the cold, since there is nothing left now ponderable enough to cause a man to tremble: only to remember and to grieve of this land which man has deswamped and denuded and derivered in two generations so that white men can own plantations and commute every night to Memphis, and black men own plantations and ride in jim crow cars to Chicago to live in millionaires’ mansions on Lakeshore Drive; this land where white men rent farms and live like niggers and Negroes crop on shares and live like animals; where cotton grows man-tall in the very cracks in the sidewalk, mortgaged before it is even planted and sold and the money spent before it is ever harvested, and usury and mortgage and bankruptcy and measureless wealth all breed and spawn together until no man has time to say which one is which, or cares..…

  This land, said the old hunter. No wonder the ruined woods I used to know don’t cry for retribution. The very people who destroyed them will accomplish their revenge.

  WILLIAM FAULKNER

  (1897–1962)

  William Cuthbert Faulkner was born in 1897 in New Albany, Mississippi, the first of four sons of Murry and Maud Butler Falkner (he later added the “u” to the family name himself). In 1904 the family moved to the university town of Oxford, Mississippi, where Faulkner was to spend most of his life. He was named for his great-grandfather “The Old Colonel,” a Civil War veteran who built a railroad, wrote a bestselling romantic novel called The White Rose of Memphis, became a Mississippi state legislator, and was eventually killed in what may or may not have been a duel with a disgruntled business partner. Faulkner identified with this robust and energetic ancestor and often said that he inherited the “ink stain” from him.

  Never fond of school, Faulkner left at the end of football season his senior year of high school, and began working at his grandfather’s bank. In 1918, after his plans to marry his sweetheart Estelle Oldham were squashed by their families, he tried to enlist as a pilot in the U.S. Army but was rejected because he did not meet the height and weight requirements. He went to Canada, where he pretended to be an Englishman and joined the RAF training program there. Although he did not complete his training until after the war ended and never saw combat, he returned to his hometown in uniform, boasting of war wounds. He briefly attended the University of Mississippi, where he began to publish his poetry.

  After spending a short time living in New York, he again returned to Oxford, where he worked at the university post office. His first book, a collection of poetry, The Marble Faun, was published at Faulkner’s own expense in 1924. The writer Sherwood Anderson, whom he met in New Orleans in 1925, encouraged him to try writing fiction, and his first novel, Soldier’s Pay, was published in 1926. It was followed by Mosquitoes. His next novel, which he titled Flags in the Dust, was rejected by his publisher and twelve others to whom he submitted it. It was eventually published in drastically edited form as Sartoris (the original version was not issued until after his death). Meanwhile, he was writing The Sound and the Fury, which, after being rejected by one publisher, came out in 1929 and received many ecstatic reviews, although it sold poorly. Yet again, a new novel, Sanctuary, was initially rejected by his publisher, this time as ‘too shocking.’ While working on the night shift at a power plant, Faulkner wrote what he was determined would be his masterpiece, As I Lay Dying. He finished it in about seven weeks, and it was published in 1930, again to generally good reviews and mediocre sales.

  In 1929 Faulkner had finally married his childhood sweetheart, Estelle, after her divorce from her first husband. They had a premature daughter, Alabama, who died ten days after birth in 1931; a second daughter, Jill, was born in 1933.

  With the eventual publication of his most sensational and violent (as well as, up till then, most successful) novel, Sanctuary (1931), Faulkner was invited to write scripts for MGM and Warner Brothers, where he was responsible for much of the dialogue in the film versions of Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not and Chandler’s The Big Sleep, and many other films. He continued to write novels and published many stories in the popular magazines. Light in August (1932) was his first attempt to address the racial issues of the South, an effort continued in Absalom, Absalom! (1936), and Go Down, Moses (1942). By 1946, most of Faulkner’s novels were out of print in the United States (although they remained well-regarded in Europe), and he was seen as a minor, regional writer. But then the influential editor and critic Malcolm Cowley, who had earlier championed Hemingway and Fitzgerald and others of their generation, put together The Portable Faulkner, and once again Faulkner’s genius was recognized, this time for good. He received the 1949 Nobel Prize fo
r Literature as well as many other awards and accolades, including the National Book Award and the Gold Medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and France’s Legion of Honor.

  In addition to several collections of short fiction, his other novels include Pylon (1935), The Unvanquished (1938), The Wild Palms (1939), The Hamlet (1940), Intruder in the Dust (1948), A Fable (1954), The Town (1957), The Mansion (1959), and The Reivers (1962).

  William Faulkner died of a heart attack on July 6, 1962, in Oxford, Mississippi, where he is buried.

  “He is the greatest artist the South has produced.… Indeed, through his many novels and short stories, Faulkner fights out the moral problem which was repressed after the nineteenth century [yet] for all his concern with the South, Faulkner was actually seeking out the nature of man. Thus we must turn to him for that continuity of moral purpose which made for the greatness of our classics.”

  —RALPH ELLISON

  “Faulkner, more than most men, was aware of human strength as well of human weakness. He knew that the understanding and the resolution of fear are a large part of the writer’s reason for being.”