“I cant help it. She has nothing, no one. In a made-over dress all neatly about five years out of mode, and that child that never has been more than half alive, wrapped in a piece of blanket scrubbed almost cotton-white. Asking nothing of anyone except to be let alone, trying to make something out of her life when all you sheltered chaste women—”
“Do you mean to say a moonshiner hasn’t got the money to hire the best lawyer in the country?” Miss Jenny said.
“It’s not that,” Horace said. “I’m sure he could get a better lawyer. It’s that—”
“Horace,” his sister said. She had been watching him. “Where is that woman?” Miss Jenny was watching him too, sitting a little forward in the wheel chair. “Did you take that woman into my house?”
“It’s my house too, honey.” She did not know that for ten years he had been lying to his wife in order to pay interest on a mortgage on the stucco house he had built for her in Kinston, so that his sister might not rent to strangers that other house in Jefferson which his wife did not know he still owned any share in. “As long as it’s vacant, and with that child—”
“The house where my father and mother and your father and I wont have it. I wont have it.” mother, the house where I —
“Just for one night, then. I’ll take her to the hotel in the morning. Think of her, alone, with that baby. . . . Suppose it were you and Bory, and your husband accused of a murder you knew he didn’t—”
“I dont want to think about her. I wish I had never heard of the Dont you see that you are whole thing. To think that my brother — always having to clean up after yourself? It’s not that there’s a litter But to bring a street-walker, a murderess, left; it’s that you — that — into the house where I was born.”
“Fiddlesticks,” Miss Jenny said. “But, Horace, aint that what the lawyers call collusion? connivance?” Horace looked at her. “It seems to me you’ve already had a little more to do with these folks than the lawyer in the case should have. You were out there where it happened yourself not long ago. Folks might begin to think you know more than you’ve told.”
“That’s so,” Horace said, “Mrs Blackstone. And sometimes I have wondered why I haven’t got rich at the law. Maybe I will, when I get old enough to attend the same law school you did.”
“If I were you,” Miss Jenny said, “I’d drive back to town now and take her to the hotel and get her settled. It’s not late.”
“And go on back to Kinston until the whole thing is over,” Narcissa said. “These people are not your people. Why must you do such things?”
“I cannot stand idly by and see injustice—”
“You wont ever catch up with injustice, Horace,” Miss Jenny said.
“Well, that irony which lurks in events, then.”
“Hmmph,” Miss Jenny said. “It must be because she is one woman you know that dont know anything about that shrimp.”
“Anyway, I’ve talked too much, as usual,” Horace said. “So I’ll have to trust you all—”
“Fiddlesticks,” Miss Jenny said. “Do you think Narcissa’d want anybody to know that any of her folks could know people that would do anything as natural as make love or rob or steal?” There was that quality about his sister. During all the four days between Kinston and Jefferson he had counted on that imperviousness. He hadn’t expected her — any woman — to bother very much over a man she had neither married nor borne when she had one she did bear to cherish and fret over. But he had expected that imperviousness, since she had had it thirty-six years.
When he reached the house in town a light burned in one room. He entered, crossing floors which he had scrubbed himself, revealing at the time no more skill with a mop than he had expected, than he had with the lost hammer with which he nailed the windows down and the shutters to ten years ago, who could not even learn to drive a motor car. But that was ten years ago, the hammer replaced by the new one with which he had drawn the clumsy nails, the windows open upon scrubbed floor spaces still as dead pools within the ghostly embrace of hooded furniture.
The woman was still up, dressed save for the hat. It lay on the bed where the child slept. Lying together there, they lent to the room a quality of transience more unmistakable than the makeshift light, the smug paradox of the made bed in a room otherwise redolent of long unoccupation. It was as though femininity were a current running through a wire along which a certain number of identical bulbs were hung.
“I’ve got some things in the kitchen,” she said. “I wont be but a minute.”
The child lay on the bed, beneath the unshaded light, and he wondered why women, in quitting a house, will remove all the lamp shades even though they touch nothing else; looking down at the child, at its bluish eyelids showing a faint crescent of bluish white against its lead-colored cheeks, the moist shadow of hair capping its skull, its hands uplifted, curl-palmed, sweating too, thinking Good God. Good God.
He was thinking of the first time he had seen it, lying in a wooden box behind the stove in that ruined house twenty miles from town; of Popeye’s black presence lying upon the house like the shadow of something no larger than a match falling monstrous and portentous upon something else otherwise familiar and everyday and twenty times its size; of the two of them — himself and the woman — in the kitchen lighted by a cracked and smutty lamp on a table of clean, spartan dishes and Goodwin and Popeye somewhere in the outer darkness peaceful with insects and frogs yet filled too with Popeye’s presence in black and nameless threat. The woman drew the box out from behind the stove and stood above it, her hands still hidden in her shapeless garment. “I have to keep him in this so the rats cant get to him,” she said.
“Oh,” Horace said, “you have a son.” Then she showed him her hands, flung them out in a gesture at once spontaneous and diffident and self-conscious and proud, and told him he might bring her an orange-stick.
She returned, with something wrapped discreetly in a piece of newspaper. He knew that it was a diaper, freshly washed, even before she said: “I made a fire in the stove. I guess I overstepped.”
“Of course not,” he said. “It’s merely a matter of legal precaution, you see,” he said. “Better to put everybody to a little temporary discomfort than to jeopardize our case.” She did not appear to be listening. She spread the blanket on the bed and lifted the child onto it. “You understand how it is,” Horace said. “If the judge I suspected that I knew more about it than the facts would warrant — mean, we must try to give everybody the idea that holding Lee for that killing is just—”
“Do you live in Jefferson?” she said, wrapping the blanket about the child.
“No. I live in Kinston. I used to — I have practised here, though.”
“You have kinfolks here, though. Women. That used to live in this house.” She lifted the child, tucking the blanket about it. Then she looked at him. “It’s all right. I know how it is. You’ve been kind.”
Come on. Let’s go on to the ”Damn it,” he said, “do you think — hotel. You get a good night’s rest, and I’ll be in early in the morning. Let me take it.”
“I’ve got him,” she said. She started to say something else, looking at him quietly for a moment, but she went on. He turned out the light and followed and locked the door. She was already in the car. He got in.
“Hotel, Isom,” he said. “I never did learn to drive one,” he said. “Sometimes, when I think of all the time I have spent not learning to do things . . .”
The street was narrow, quiet. It was paved now, though he could remember when, after a rain, it had been a canal of blackish substance half earth, half water, with murmuring gutters in which he and Narcissa paddled and splashed with tucked-up garments and muddy bottoms, after the crudest of whittled boats, or made loblollies by treading and treading in one spot with the intense oblivion of alchemists. He could remember when, innocent of concrete, the street was bordered on either side by paths of red brick tediously and unevenly laid and worn in rich,
random maroon mosaic into the black earth which the noon sun never reached; at that moment, pressed into the concrete near the entrance of the drive, were the prints of his and his sister’s naked feet in the artificial stone.
The infrequent lamps mounted to crescendo beneath the arcade of a filling-station at the corner. The woman leaned suddenly forward. “Stop here, please, boy,” she said. Isom put on the brakes. “I’ll get out here and walk,” she said.
“You’ll do nothing of the kind,” Horace said. “Go on, Isom.”
“No; wait,” the woman said. “We’ll be passing people that know you. And then the square.”
“Nonsense,” Horace said. “Go on, Isom.”
“You get out and wait, then,” she said. “He can come straight back.”
Drive ”You’ll do no such thing,” Horace said. “By heaven, I — on, Isom!”
“You’d better,” the woman said. She sat back in the seat. Then she leaned forward again. “Listen. You’ve been kind. You mean all right, but—”
“You dont think I am lawyer enough, you mean?”
“I guess I’ve got just what was coming to me. There’s no use fighting it.”
“Certainly not, if you feel that way about it. But you dont. Or you’d have told Isom to drive you to the railroad station. Wouldn’t you?” She was looking down at the child, fretting the blanket about its face. “You get a good night’s rest and I’ll be in early tomorrow.” They passed the jail — a square building slashed harshly by pale slits of light. Only the central window was wide enough to be called a window, criss-crossed by slender bars. In it the Negro murderer leaned; below along the fence a row of heads hatted and bare above work-thickened shoulders, and the blended voices swelled rich and sad into the soft, depthless evening, singing of heaven and being tired. “Dont you worry at all, now. Everybody knows Lee didn’t do it.”
They drew up to the hotel, where the drummers sat in chairs along the curb, listening to the singing. “I must—” the woman said. Horace got down and held the door open. She didn’t move. “Listen. I’ve got to tell—”
“Yes,” Horace said, extending his hand. “I know. I’ll be in early tomorrow.” He helped her down. They entered the hotel, the drummers turning to watch her legs, and went to the desk. The singing followed them, dimmed by the walls, the lights.
The woman stood quietly nearby, holding the child, until Horace had done.
“Listen,” she said. The porter went on with the key, toward the stairs. Horace touched her arm, turning her that way. “I’ve got to tell you,” she said.
“In the morning,” he said. “I’ll be in early,” he said, guiding her toward the stairs. Still she hung back, looking at him; then she freed her arm by turning to face him.
“All right, then,” she said. She said, in a low, level tone, her face bent a little toward the child: “We haven’t got any money. I’ll tell you now. That last batch Popeye didn’t—”
“Yes, yes,” Horace said; “first thing in the morning. I’ll be in by the time you finish breakfast. Good night.” He returned to the car, into the sound of the singing. “Home, Isom,” he said. They turned and passed the jail again and the leaning shape beyond the bars and the heads along the fence. Upon the barred and slitted wall the splotched shadow of the heaven-tree shuddered and pulsed monstrously in scarce any wind; rich and sad, the singing fell behind. The car went on, smooth and swift, passing the narrow street. “Here,” Horace said, “where are you—” Isom clapped on the brakes.
“Miss Narcissa say to bring you back out home,” he said.
“Oh, she did?” Horace said. “That was kind of her. You can tell her I changed her mind.”
Isom backed and turned into the narrow street and then into the cedar drive, the lights lifting and boring ahead into the unpruned tunnel as though into the most profound blackness of the sea, as though among straying rigid shapes to which not even light could give color. The car stopped at the door and Horace got out. “You might tell her it was not to her I ran,” he said. “Can you remember that?”
xvii
THE LAST TRUMPET-SHAPED bloom had fallen from the heaven-tree at the corner of the jail yard. They lay thick, viscid underfoot, sweet and oversweet in the nostrils with a sweetness surfeitive and moribund, and at night now the ragged shadow of full-fledged leaves pulsed upon the barred window in shabby rise and fall. The window was in the general room, the white-washed walls of which were stained with dirty hands, scribbled and scratched over with names and dates and blasphemous and obscene doggerel in pencil or nail or knife-blade. Nightly the Negro murderer leaned there, his face checkered by the shadow of the grating in the restless interstices of leaves, singing in chorus with those along the fence below.
Sometimes during the day he sang also, alone then save for the slowing passersby and ragamuffin boys and the garage men across the way. “One day mo! Aint no place fer you in heavum! Aint no place fer you in hell! Aint no place fer you in whitefolks’ jail! Nigger, whar you gwine to? Whar you gwine to, nigger?”
Each morning Isom fetched in a bottle of milk, which Horace delivered to the woman at the hotel, for the child. On Sunday afternoon he went out to his sister’s. He left the woman sitting on the cot in Goodwin’s cell, the child on her lap. Heretofore it had lain in that drugged apathy, its eyelids closed to thin crescents, but today it moved now and then in frail, galvanic jerks, whimpering.
Horace went up to Miss Jenny’s room. His sister had not appeared. “He wont talk,” Horace said. “He just says they will have to prove he did it. He said they had nothing on him, no more than on the child. He wouldn’t even consider bond, if he could have got it. He says he is better off in the jail. And I suppose he is. His business out there is finished now, even if the sheriff hadn’t found his kettles and destroyed—”
“Kettles?”
“His still. After he surrendered, they hunted around until they found the still. They knew what he was doing, but they waited until he was down. Then they all jumped on him. The good customers, that had been buying whiskey from him and drinking all that he would give them free and maybe trying to make love to his wife behind his back. You should hear them down town. This morning the Baptist minister took him for a text. Not only as a murderer, but as an adulterer; a polluter of the free Democratico-Protestant atmosphere of Yoknapatawpha county. I gathered that his idea was that Goodwin and the woman should both be burned as a sole example to that child; the child to be reared and taught the English language for the sole end of being taught that it was begot in sin by two people who suffered by fire for having begot it. Good God, can a man, a civilised man, seriously . . .”
“They’re just Baptists,” Miss Jenny said. “What about the money?”
“He had a little, almost a hundred and sixty dollars. It was buried in a can in the barn. They let him dig that up. ‘That’ll keep her’ he says ‘until it’s over. Then we’ll clear out. We’ve been intending to for a good while. If I’d listened to her, we’d have been gone already. You’ve been a good girl’ he says. She was sitting on the cot beside him, holding the baby, and he took her chin in his hand and shook her head a little.”
“It’s a good thing Narcissa aint going to be on that jury,” Miss Jenny said.
“Yes. But the fool wont even let me mention that that gorilla was ever on the place. He said ‘They cant prove anything on me. I’ve been in a jam before. Everybody that knows anything about me knows that I wouldn’t hurt a feeb.’ But that wasn’t the reason he doesn’t want it told about that thug. And he knew I knew it wasn’t, because he kept on talking, sitting there in his overalls, rolling his cigarettes with the sack hanging in his teeth. ‘I’ll just stay here until it blows over. I’ll be better off here; cant do anything outside, anyway. And this will keep her, with maybe something for you until you’re better paid.’
“But I knew what he was thinking. ‘I didn’t know you were a coward’ I said.
“ ’You do like I say’ he said. ‘I’ll be all
right here.’ But he doesn’t . . .” He sat forward, rubbing his hands slowly. “He doesn’t realise. . . . Dammit, say what you want to, but there’s a corruption about even looking upon evil, even by accident; you You’ve seen how Narcissa, cannot haggle, traffic, with putrefaction — just hearing about it, how it’s made her restless and suspicious. I thought I had come back here of my own accord, but now I Do you suppose she thought I was bringing that woman see that — into the house at night, or something like that?”
“I did too, at first,” Miss Jenny said. “But I reckon now she’s learned that you’ll work harder for whatever reason you think you have, than for anything anybody could offer you or give you.”
“You mean, she’d let me think they never had any money, when she—”
“Why not? Aint you doing all right without it?”
Narcissa entered.
“We were just talking about murder and crime,” Miss Jenny said.
“I hope you’re through, then,” Narcissa said. She did not sit down.
“Narcissa has her sorrows too,” Miss Jenny said. “Dont you, Narcissa?”
“What now?” Horace said. “She hasn’t caught Bory with alcohol on his breath, has she?”
“She’s been jilted. Her beau’s gone and left her.”
“You’re such a fool,” Narcissa said.
Complete Works of William Faulkner Page 115