“Yes. But what must I do? Tell me.”
“Wait. Like I waited. Five years I waited for the Lord to move and show His will. And He done it. You wait too. When He is ready for it He will show His will to them that have the sayso.”
“Yes. The sayso.” They glared at one another, still, breathing quietly.
“The madam. When He is ready, He will reveal it to her.”
“You mean, if the madam knows, she will send him away? Yes. But I cant wait.”
“No more can you hurry the Lord God. Aint I waited five years?”
She began to beat her hands lightly together. “But dont you see? This may be the Lord’s way. For you to tell me. Because you know. Maybe it’s His way for you to tell me and me to tell the madam.” Her mad eyes were quite calm, her mad voice patient and calm: it was only her light unceasing hands.
“You’ll wait, the same as I waited,” he said. “You have felt the weight of the Lord’s remorseful hand for maybe three days. I have lived under it for five years, watching and waiting for His own good time, because my sin is greater than your sin.” Though he was looking directly at her face he did not seem to see her at all, his eyes did not. They looked like they were blind, wide open, icecold, fanatical. “To what I done and what I suffered to expiate it, what you done and are womansuffering aint no more than a handful of rotten dirt. I done bore mine five years; who are you to hurry Almighty God with your little womanfilth?”
She turned, at once. “Well. You dont have to tell me. I know, anyway. I’ve known it all the time that he’s part nigger.” She returned to the house. She did not walk fast now and she yawned, terrifically. ‘All I have to do is to think of some way to make the madam believe it. He wont tell her, back me up.’ She yawned again, tremendously, her face emptied now of everything save yawning and then emptied even of yawning. She had just thought of something else. She had not thought of it before, but she believed that she had, had known it all the while, because it seemed so right: he would not only be removed; he would be punished for having given her terror and worry. ‘They’ll send him to the nigger orphanage,’ she thought. ‘Of course. They will have to.’
She did not even go to the matron at once. She had started there, but instead of turning toward the office door she saw herself passing it, going on toward the stairs and mounting. It was as though she followed herself to see where she was going. In the corridor, quiet and empty now, she yawned again, with utter relaxation. She entered her room and locked the door and took off her clothes and got into bed. The shades were drawn and she lay still in the more than halfdark, on her back. Her eyes were closed and her face was empty and smooth. After a while she began to open her legs and close them slowly, feeling the sheets flow cool and smooth over them and then flow warm and smooth again. Thinking seemed to hang suspended between the sleep which she had not had now in three nights and the sleep which she was about to receive, her body open to accept sleep as though sleep were a man. ‘All I need do is to make the madam believe,’ she thought. And then she thought He will look just like a pea in a pan full of coffee beans
That was in the afternoon. At nine that evening she was undressing again when she heard the janitor come up the corridor, toward her door. She did not, could not, know who it was, then somehow she did know, hearing the steady feet and then a knock at the door which already began to open before she could spring to it. She didn’t call; she sprang to the door, putting her weight against it, holding it to. “I’m undressing!” she said in a thin, agonised voice, knowing who it was. He didn’t answer, his weight firm and steady against the crawling door, beyond the crawling gap. “You cant come in here!” she cried, hardly louder than a whisper. “Dont you know they . . .” Her voice was panting, fainting, and desperate. He did not answer. She tried to halt and hold the slow inward crawling of the door. “Let me get some clothes on, and I’ll come out there. Will you do that?” She spoke in that fainting whisper, her tone light, inconsequential, like that of one speaking to an unpredictable child or a maniac: soothing, cajoling: “You wait, now. Do you hear? Will you wait, now?” He did not answer. The slow and irresistible crawling of the door did not cease. Leaning against it, wearing nothing save her undergarment, she was like a puppet in some burlesque of rapine and despair. Leaning, downlooking, immobile, she appeared to be in deepest thought, as if the puppet in the midst of the scene had gone astray within itself. Then she turned, releasing the door, and sprang back to the bed, whipping up without looking at it a garment and whirling to face the door, clutching the garment at her breast, huddling. He had already entered; apparently he had been watching her and waiting during the whole blind interval of fumbling and interminable haste.
He still wore the overalls and he now wore his hat. He did not remove it. Again his cold mad gray eyes did not seem to see her, to look at her at all. “If the Lord Himself come into the room of one of you,” he said, “you would believe He come in bitchery.” He said, “Have you told her?”
The woman sat on the bed. She seemed to sink slowly back upon it, clutching the garment, watching him, her face blanched. “Told her?”
“What will she do with him?”
“Do?” She watched him: those bright, still eyes that seemed not to look at her so much as to envelop her. Her mouth hung open like the mouth of an idiot.
“Where will they send him to?” She didn’t answer. “Dont lie to me, to the Lord God. They’ll send him to the one for niggers.” Her mouth closed; it was as if she had discovered at last what he was talking about. “Ay, I’ve thought it out. They’ll send him to the one for nigger children.” She didn’t answer, but she was watching him now, her eyes still a little fearful but secret too, calculating. Now he was looking at her; his eyes seemed to contract upon her shape and being. “Answer me, Jezebel!” he shouted.
“Shhhhhhhhh!” she said. “Yes. They’ll have to. When they find . . .”
“Ah,” he said. His gaze faded; the eyes released her and enveloped her again. Looking at them, she seemed to see herself as less than nothing in them, trivial as a twig floating upon a pool. Then his eyes became almost human. He began to look about the womanroom as if he had never seen one before: the close room, warm, littered, womanpinksmelling. “Womanfilth,” he said. “Before the face of God.” He turned and went out. After a while the woman rose. She stood for a time, clutching the garment, motionless, idiotic, staring at the empty door as if she could not think what to tell herself to do. Then she ran. She sprang to the door, flinging herself upon it, crashing it to and locking it, leaning against it, panting, clutching the turned key in both hands.
At breakfast time the next morning the janitor and the child were missing. No trace of them could be found. The police were notified at once. A side door was found to be unlocked, to which the janitor had a key.
“It’s because he knows,” the dietitian told the matron.
“Knows what?”
“That that child, that Christmas boy, is a nigger.”
“A what?” the matron said. Backthrust in her chair, she glared at the younger woman. “A ne — I dont believe it!” she cried. “I dont believe it!”
“You dont have to believe it,” the other said. “But he knows it. He stole him away because of it.”
The matron was past fifty, flabby faced, with weak, kind, frustrated eyes. “I dont believe it!” she said. But on the third day she sent for the dietitian. She looked as if she had not slept in some time. The dietitian, on the contrary, was quite fresh, quite serene. She was still unshaken when the matron told her the news, that the man and the child had been found. “At Little Rock,” the matron said. “He tried to put the child into an orphanage there. They thought he was crazy and held him until the police came.” She looked at the younger woman. “You told me . . . The other day you said . . . How did you know about this?”
The dietitian did not look away. “I didn’t. I had no idea at all. Of course I knew it didn’t mean anything when the other children called him N
igger—”
“Nigger?” the matron said. “The other children?”
“They have been calling him Nigger for years. Sometimes I think that children have a way of knowing things that grown people of your and my age dont see. Children, and old people like him, like that old man. That’s why he always sat in the door yonder while they were playing in the yard: watching that child. Maybe he found it out from hearing the other children call him Nigger. But he might have known beforehand. If you remember, they came here about the same time. He hadn’t been working here hardly a month before the night — that Christmas, dont you remember — when Ch — they found the baby on the doorstep?” She spoke smoothly, watching the baffled, shrinking eyes of the older woman full upon her own as though she could not remove them. The dietitian’s eyes were bland and innocent. “And so the other day we were talking and he was trying to tell me something about the child. It was something he wanted to tell me, tell somebody, and finally he lost his nerve maybe and wouldn’t tell it, and so I left him. I wasn’t thinking about it at all. It had gone completely out of my mind when—” Her voice ceased. She gazed at the matron while into her face there came an expression of enlightenment, sudden comprehension; none could have said if it were simulated or not. “Why, that’s why it . . . Why, I see it all, now. What happened just the day before they were gone, missing. I was in the corridor, going to my room; it was the same day I happened to be talking to him and he refused to tell me whatever it was he started to tell, when all of a sudden he came up and stopped me; I thought then it was funny because I had never before seen him inside the house. And he said — he sounded crazy, he looked crazy. I was scared, too scared to move, with him blocking the corridor — he said, ‘Have you told her yet?’ and I said, ‘Told who? Told who what?’ and then I realised he meant you; if I had told you that he had tried to tell me something about the child. But I didn’t know what he meant for me to tell you and I wanted to scream and then he said, ‘What will she do if she finds it out?’ and I didn’t know what to say or how to get away from him and then he said, ‘You dont have to tell me. I know what she will do. She will send him to the one for niggers.’ ”
“For negroes?”
“I dont see how we failed to see it as long as we did. You can look at his face now, his eyes and hair. Of course it’s terrible. But that’s where he will have to go, I suppose.”
Behind her glasses the weak, troubled eyes of the matron had a harried, jellied look, as if she were trying to force them to something beyond their physical cohesiveness. “But why did he want to take the child away?”
“Well, if you want to know what I think, I think he is crazy. If you could have seen him in the corridor that ni — day like I did. Of course it’s bad for the child to have to go to the nigger home, after this, growing up with white people. It’s not his fault what he is. But it’s not our fault, either—” She ceased, watching the matron. Behind the glasses the older woman’s eyes were still harried, weak, hopeless; her mouth was trembling as she shaped speech with it. Her words were hopeless too, but they were decisive enough, determined enough.
“We must place him. We must place him at once. What applications have we? If you will hand me the file . . .”
When the child wakened, he was being carried. It was pitch dark and cold; he was being carried downstairs by someone who moved with silent and infinite care. Pressed between him and one of the arms which supported him was a wad which he knew to be his clothes. He made no outcry, no sound. He knew where he was by the smell, the air, of the back stairway which led down to the side door from the room in which his bed had been one among forty others since he could remember. He knew also by smell that the person who carried him was a man. But he made no sound, lying as still and as lax as while he had been asleep, riding high in the invisible arms, moving, descending slowly toward the side door which gave onto the playground.
He didn’t know who was carrying him. He didn’t bother about it because he believed that he knew where he was going. Or why, that is. He didn’t bother about where either, yet. It went back two years, to when he was three years old. One day there was missing from among them a girl of twelve named Alice. He had liked her, enough to let her mother him a little; perhaps because of it. And so to him she was as mature, almost as large in size, as the adult women who ordered his eating and washing and sleeping, with the difference that she was not and never would be his enemy. One night she waked him. She was telling him goodbye but he did not know it. He was sleepy and a little annoyed, never full awake, suffering her because she had always tried to be good to him. He didn’t know that she was crying because he did not know that grown people cried, and by the time he learned that, memory had forgotten her. He went back into sleep while still suffering her, and the next morning she was gone. Vanished, no trace of her left, not even a garment, the very bed in which she had slept already occupied by a new boy. He never did know where she went to. That day he listened while a few of the older girls who had helped her prepare to leave in that same hushed, secret sibilance in which a half dozen young girls help prepare the seventh one for marriage told, still batebreathed, about the new dress, the new shoes, the carriage which had fetched her away. He knew then that she had gone for good, had passed beyond the iron gates in the steel fence. He seemed to see her then, grown heroic at the instant of vanishment beyond the clashedto gates, fading without diminution of size into something nameless and splendid, like a sunset. It was more than a year before he knew that she had not been the first and would not be the last. That there had been more than Alice to vanish beyond the clashedto gates, in a new dress or new overalls, with a small neat bundle less large sometimes than a shoe-box. He believed that that was what was happening to him now. He believed that he knew now how they had all managed to depart without leaving any trace behind them. He believed that they had been carried out, as he was being, in the dead of night.
Now he could feel the door. It was quite near now; he knew to the exact number how many more invisible steps remained to which in turn the man who carried him would lower himself with that infinite and silent care. Against his cheek he could feel the man’s quiet, fast, warm breathing; beneath him he could feel the tense and rigid arms, the wadded lump which he knew was his clothing caught up by feel in the dark. The man stopped. As he stooped the child’s feet swung down and touched the floor, his toes curling away from the ironcold planks. The man spoke, for the first time. “Stand up,” he said. Then the child knew who he was.
He recognised the man at once, without surprise. The surprise would have been the matron’s if she had known how well he did know the man. He did not know the man’s name and in the three years since he had been a sentient creature they had not spoken a hundred words. But the man was a more definite person than anyone else in his life, not excepting the girl Alice. Even at three years of age the child knew that there was something between them that did not need to be spoken. He knew that he was never on the playground for instant that the man was not watching him from the chair in the furnace room door, and that the man was watching him with a profound and unflagging attention. If the child had been older he would perhaps have thought He hates me and fears me. So much so that he cannot let me out of his sight With more vocabulary but no more age he might have thought That is why I am different from the others: because he is watching me all the time He accepted it. So he was not surprised when he found who it was who had taken him, sleeping, from his bed and carried him downstairs; as, standing beside the door in the cold pitch dark while the man helped him put on his clothes, he might have thought He hates me enough even to try to prevent something that is about to happen to me coming to pass
He dressed obediently, shivering, as swiftly as he could, the two of them fumbling at the small garments, getting them on him somehow. “Your shoes,” the man said, in that dying whisper. “Here.” The child sat on the cold floor, putting on the shoes. The man was not touching him now, but the child could hear, feel, tha
t the man was stooped too, engaged in something. ‘He’s putting on his shoes too,’ he thought. The man touched him again, groping, lifting him to his feet. His shoes were not laced. He had not learned to do that by himself yet. He did not tell the man that he had not laced them. He made no sound at all. He just stood there and then a bigger garment enveloped him completely — by its smell he knew that it belonged to the man — and then he was lifted again. The door opened, inyawned. The fresh cold air rushed in, and light from the lamps along the street; he could see the lights and the blank factory walls and the tall unsmoking chimneys against the stars. Against the street light the steel fence was like a parade of starved soldiers. As they crossed the empty playground his dangling feet swung rhythmically to the man’s striding, the unlaced shoes flapping about his ankles. They reached the iron gates and passed through.
They did not have to wait long for the streetcar. If he had been older he would have remarked how well the man had timed himself. But he didn’t wonder or notice. He just stood on the corner beside the man, in the unlaced shoes, enveloped to the heels in the man’s coat, his eyes round and wide, his small face still, awake. The car came up, the row of windows, jarring to a stop and humming while they entered. It was almost empty, since the hour was past two o’clock. Now the man noticed the unlaced shoes and laced them, the child watching, quite still on the seat, his legs thrust straight out before him. The station was a long distance away, and he had ridden on a streetcar before, so when they reached the station he was asleep. When he waked it was daylight and they had been on the train for some time. He had never ridden on a train before, but no one could have told it. He sat quite still, as in the streetcar, completely enveloped in the man’s coat save for his outthrust legs and his head, watching the country — hills and trees and cows and such — that he had never seen before flowing past. When the man saw that he was awake he produced food from a piece of newspaper. It was bread, with ham between. “Here,” the man said. He took the food and ate, looking out the window.
Complete Works of William Faulkner Page 141