‘Stay on,’ Miss Habersham said. ‘I’ve got the tools and the flashlight.’
‘It’s a half-mile yet,’ he said. ‘Up hill. This aint a sidesaddle but maybe you could sit sideways. Where’s the truck?’ he said to Aleck Sander.
‘Behind them bushes,’ Aleck Sander said. ‘We aint holding a parade. Leastways I aint.’
‘No no,’ Miss Habersham said. ‘I can walk.’
‘We’ll save time,’ he said. ‘It must be after ten now. He’s gentle. That was just when Aleck Sander threw the pick and shovel — —’
‘Of course,’ Miss Habersham said. She handed the tools to Aleck Sander and approached the horse.
‘I’m sorry it aint — —’ he said.
‘Pah,’ she said and took the reins from him and before he could even brace his hand for her foot she put it in the stirrup and went up as light and fast as either he or Aleck Sander could have done, onto the horse astride so that he had just time to avert his face, feeling her looking down in the darkness at his turned head. ‘Pah,’ she said again. ‘I’m seventy years old. Besides, we’ll worry about my skirt after we are done with this:’ — moving Highboy herself before he had hardly time to take hold of the bit, back into the road when Aleck Sander said:
‘Hush.’ They stopped, immobile in the long constant invisible flow of pine. ‘Mule coming down the hill,’ Aleck Sander said.
He began to turn the horse at once. ‘I dont hear anything,’ Miss Habersham said. ‘Are you sure?’
‘Yessum,’ he said, turning Highboy back off the road: ‘Aleck Sander’s sure.’ And standing at Highboy’s head among the trees and undergrowth, his other hand lying on the horse’s nostrils in case he decided to nicker at the other animal, he heard it too — the horse or mule coming steadily down the road from the crest. It was unshod probably; actually the only sound he really heard was the creak of leather and he wondered (without doubting for one second that he had) how Aleck Sander had heard it at all the two minutes and more it had taken the animal to reach them. Then he could see it or that is where it was passing them — a blob, a movement, a darker shadow than shadow against the pale dirt of the road, going on down the hill, the soft steady shuffle and screak of leather dying away, then gone. But they waited a moment more.
‘What was that he was toting on the saddle in front of him?’ Aleck Sander said.
‘I couldn’t even see whether it was a man on it or not,’ he said.
‘I couldn’t see anything,’ Miss Habersham said. He led the horse back into the road. ‘Suppose — —’ she said.
‘Aleck Sander will hear it in time,’ he said. So once more Highboy surged strong and steady at the steepening pitch, he carrying the shovel and clutching the leather under Miss Habersham’s thin hard calf on one side and Aleck Sander with the pick on the other, mounting, really moving quite fast through the strong heady vivid living smell of the pines which did something to the lungs, the breathing as (he imagined: he had never tasted it. He could have — the sip from the communion cup didn’t count because it was not only a sip but sour consecrated and sharp: the deathless blood of our Lord not to be tasted, moving not downward toward the stomach but upward and outward into the Allknowledge between good and evil and the choice and the repudiation and the acceptance forever — at the table at Thanksgiving and Christmas but he had never wanted to.) wine did to the stomach. They were quite high now, the ridged land opening and tumbling away invisible in the dark yet with the sense, the sensation of height and space; by day he could have seen them, ridge on pine-dense ridge rolling away to the east and the north in similitude of the actual mountains in Carolina and before that in Scotland where his ancestors had come from but he hadn’t seen yet, his breath coming a little short now and he could not only hear but feel too the hard short blasts from Highboy’s lungs as he was actually trying to run at this slope too even carrying a rider and dragging two, Miss Habersham steadying him, holding him down until they came out onto the true crest and Aleck Sander said once more ‘Here’ and Miss Habersham turned the horse out of the road because he could still see nothing until they were off the road and only then he distinguished the clearing not because it was a clearing but because in a thin distillation of starlight there stood, canted a little where the earth had sunk, the narrow slab of a marble headstone. And he could hardly see the church (weathered, unpainted, of wood and not much larger than a single room) at all even when he led Highboy around behind it and tied the reins to a sapling and unsnapped the tie-rope from the bit and went back to where Miss Habersham and Aleck Sander were waiting.
‘It’ll be the only fresh one,’ he said. ‘Lucas said there hasn’t been a burying here since last winter.’
‘Yes,’ Miss Habersham said. ‘The flowers too. Aleck Sander’s already found it.’ But to make sure (he thought quietly, he didn’t know to whom: I’m going to make a heap more mistakes but dont let this be one of them.) he hooded the flashlight in his wadded handkerchief so that one thin rapid pencil touched for a second the raw mound with its meagre scattering of wreaths and bouquets and even single blooms and then for another second the headstone adjacent to it, long enough to read the engraved name: Amanda Workitt wife of N. B. Forrest Gowrie 1878 1926 then snapped it off and again the darkness came in and the strong scent of the pines and they stood for a moment beside the raw mound, doing nothing at all. ‘I hate this,’ Miss Habersham said.
‘You aint the one,’ Aleck Sander said. ‘It’s just a half a mile back to the truck. Down hill too.’
She moved; she was first. ‘Move the flowers,’ she said. ‘Carefully. Can you see?’
‘Yessum,’ Aleck Sander said. ‘Aint many. Looks like they throwed them at it too.’
‘But we wont,’ Miss Habersham said. ‘Move them carefully.’ And it must be nearing eleven now; they would not possibly have time; Aleck Sander was right: the thing to do was to go back to the truck and drive away, back to town and through town and on, not to stop, not even to have time to think for having to keep on driving, steering, keeping the truck going in order to keep on moving, never to come back; but then they had never had time, they had known that before they ever left Jefferson and he thought for an instant how if Aleck Sander really had meant it when he said he would not come and if he would have come alone in that case and then (quickly) he wouldn’t think about that at all, Aleck Sander using the shovel for the first shift while he used the pick though the dirt was still so loose they didn’t really need the pick (and if it hadn’t been still loose they couldn’t have done it at all even by daylight); two shovels would have done and faster too but it was too late for that now until suddenly Aleck Sander handed him the shovel and climbed out of the hole and vanished and (not even using the flashlight) with that same sense beyond sight and hearing both which had realised that what Highboy smelled at the branch was quicksand and which had discovered the horse or the mule coming down the hill a good minute before either he or Miss Habersham could begin to hear it, returned with a short light board so that both of them had shovels now and he could hear the chuck! and then the faint swish as Aleck Sander thrust the board into the dirt and then flung the load up and outward, expelling his breath, saying ‘Hah!’ each time — a sound furious raging and restrained, going faster and faster until the ejaculation was almost as rapid as the beat of someone running: ‘Hah! . . . Hah! . . . Hah!’ so that he said over his shoulder:
‘Take it easy. We’re doing all right:’ straightened his own back for a moment to mop his sweating face and seeing as always Miss Habersham in motionless silhouette on the sky above him in the straight cotton dress and the round hat on the exact top of her head such as few people had seen in fifty years and probably no one at any time looking up out of a halfway rifled grave: more than halfway because spading again he heard the sudden thud of wood on wood, then Aleck Sander said sharply:
‘Go on. Get out of here and gimme room:’ and flung the board up and out and took, jerked the shovel from his hands and he climbed out o
f the pit and even as he stooped groping Miss Habersham handed him the coiled tie-rope.
‘The flashlight too,’ he said and she handed him that and he stood too while the strong hard immobile flow of the pines bleached the sweat from his body until his wet shirt felt cold on his flesh and invisible below him in the pit the shovel rasped and scraped on wood, and stooping and hooding the light again he flashed it downward upon the unpainted lid of the pine box and switched it off.
‘All right,’ he said. ‘That’s enough. Get out:’ and Aleck Sander with the last shovel of dirt released the shovel too, flinging the whole thing arcing out of the pit like a javelin and followed it in one motion, and carrying the rope and the light he dropped into the pit and only then remembered he would need a hammer, crowbar — something to open the lid with and the only thing of that nature would be what Miss Habersham might happen to have in the truck a half-mile away and the walk back uphill, stooping to feel, examine the catch or whatever it was to be forced when he discovered that the lid was not fastened at all: so that straddling it, balancing himself on one foot he managed to open the lid up and back and prop it with one elbow while he shook the rope out and found the end and snapped on the flashlight and pointed it down and then said, ‘Wait.’ He said, ‘Wait.’ He was still saying ‘Wait’ when he finally heard Miss Habersham speaking in a hissing whisper:
‘Charles . . . . . Charles.’
‘This aint Vinson Gowrie,’ he said. ‘This man’s name is Montgomery. He’s some kind of a shoestring timber-buyer from over in Crossman County.’
Chapter Five
THEY HAD TO fill the hole back up of course and besides he had the horse. But even then it was a good while until daylight when he left Highboy with Aleck Sander at the pasture gate and tried remembered to tiptoe into the house but at once his mother her hair loose and in her nightdress wailed from right beside the front door: ‘Where have you been?’ then followed him to his uncle’s door and then while his uncle was putting some clothes on: ‘You? Digging up a grave?’ and he with a sort of weary indefatigable patience, just about worn out himself now from riding and digging then turning around and undigging and then riding again, somehow managing to stay that one jump ahead of what he had really never hoped to beat anyway:
‘Aleck Sander and Miss Habersham helped:’ which if anything seemed to be worse though she was still not loud: just amazed and inexpugnable until his uncle came out fully dressed even to his necktie but not shaved and said,
‘Now Maggie, do you want to wake Charley?’ then following them back to the front door and this time she said — and he thought again how you could never really beat them because of their fluidity which was not just a capacity for mobility but a willingness to abandon with the substanceless promptitude of wind or air itself not only position but principle too; you didn’t have to marshal your forces because you already had them: superior artillery, weight, right justice and precedent and usage and everything else and made your attack and cleared the field, swept all before you — or so you thought until you discovered that the enemy had not retreated at all but had already abandoned the field and had not merely abandoned the field but had usurped your very battlecry in the process; you believed you had captured a citadel and instead found you had merely entered an untenable position and then found the unimpaired and even unmarked battle set up again in your unprotected and unsuspecting rear — she said:
‘But he’s got to sleep! He hasn’t even been to bed!’ so that he actually stopped until his uncle said, hissed at him:
‘Come on. What’s the matter with you? Dont you know she’s tougher than you and me both just as old Habersham was tougher than you and Aleck Sander put together; you might have gone out there without her to drag you by the hand but Aleck Sander wouldn’t and I’m still not so sure you would when you came right down to it.’ So he moved on too beside his uncle toward where Miss Habersham sat in the truck behind his uncle’s parked car (it had been in the garage at nine oclock last night; later when he had time he would remember to ask his uncle just where his mother had sent him to look for him). ‘I take that back,’ his uncle said. ‘Forget it. Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings and old ladies — —’ he paraphrased. ‘Quite true, as a lot of truth often is, only a man just dont like to have it flung in his teeth at three oclock in the morning. And dont even forget your mother, which of course you cant; she has already long since seen to that. Just remember that they can stand anything, accept any fact (it’s only men who burk at facts) provided they dont have to face it; can assimilate it with their heads turned away and one hand extended behind them as the politician accepts the bribe. Look at her: who will spend a long contented happy life never abating one jot of her refusal to forgive you for being able to button your own pants.’
And still a good while until daylight when his uncle stopped the car at the sheriff’s gate and led the way up the short walk and onto the rented gallery. (Since he couldn’t succeed himself, although now in his third term the elapsed time covering Sheriff Hampton’s tenure was actually almost twice as long as the twelve years of his service. He was a countryman, a farmer and son of farmers when he was first elected and now owned himself the farm and house where he had been born, living in the rented one in town during his term of office then returning to the farm which was his actual home at each expiration, to live there until he could run for — and be elected — sheriff again.)
‘I hope he’s not a heavy sleeper,’ Miss Habersham said.
‘He aint asleep,’ his uncle said. ‘He’s cooking breakfast.’
‘Cooking breakfast?’ Miss Habersham said: and then he knew that, for all her flat back and the hat which had never shifted from the exact top of her head as though she kept it balanced there not by any pins but simply by the rigid unflagging poise of her neck as Negro women carry a whole family wash, she was about worn out with strain and lack of sleep too.
‘He’s a country man,’ his uncle said. ‘Any food he eats after daylight in the morning is dinner. Mrs Hampton’s in Memphis with their daughter waiting for the baby and the only woman who’ll cook a man’s breakfast at half-past three a. m. is his wife. No hired town cook’s going to do it. She comes at a decent hour about eight oclock and washes the dishes.’ His uncle didn’t knock. He started to open the door then stopped and looked back past both of them to where Aleck Sander stood at the bottom of the front steps. ‘And dont you think you’re going to get out of it just because your mama dont vote,’ he told Aleck Sander. ‘You come on too.’
Then his uncle opened the door and at once they smelled the coffee and the frying hogmeat, walking on linoleum toward a faint light at the rear of the hall then across a linoleum-floored diningroom in rented Grand Rapids mission into the kitchen, into the hard cheerful blast of a woodstove where the sheriff stood over a sputtering skillet in his undershirt and pants and socks, his braces dangling and his hair mussed and tousled with sleep like that of a ten-year-old boy, a battercake turner in one hand and a cuptowel in the other. The sheriff had already turned his vast face toward the door before they entered it and he watched the little hard pale eyes flick from his uncle to Miss Habersham to himself and then to Aleck Sander and even then it was not the eyes which widened so much for that second but rather the little hard black pupils which had tightened in that one flick to pinpoints. But the sheriff said nothing yet, just looking at his uncle now and now even the little hard pupils seemed to expand again as when an expulsion of breath untightens the chest and while the three of them stood quietly and steadily watching the sheriff his uncle told it, rapid and condensed and succinct, from the moment in the jail last night when his uncle had realised that Lucas had started to tell — or rather ask — him something, to the one when he had entered his uncle’s room ten minutes ago and waked him up, and stopped and again they watched the little hard eyes go flick, flick, slick, across their three faces then back to his uncle again, staring at his uncle for almost a quarter of a minute without even blinking. The
n the sheriff said:
‘You wouldn’t come here at four oclock in the morning with a tale like that if it wasn’t so.’
‘You aint listening just to two sixteen-year-old children,’ his uncle said. ‘I remind you that Miss Habersham was there.’
‘You dont have to,’ the sheriff said. ‘I haven’t forgot it. I dont think I ever will.’ Then the sheriff turned. A gigantic man and in the fifties too, you wouldn’t think he could move fast and he didn’t really seem to yet he had taken another skillet from a nail in the wall behind the stove and was already turning toward the table (where for the first time he noticed, saw the side of smoked meat) before he seemed to have moved at all, picking up a butcher knife from beside the meat before his uncle could even begin to speak:
‘Have we got time for that? You’ve got to drive sixty miles to Harrisburg to the District Attorney; you’ll have to take Miss Habersham and these boys with you for witnesses to try and persuade him to originate a petition for the exhumation of Vinson Gowrie’s body — —’
The sheriff wiped the handle of the knife rapidly with the cuptowel. ‘I thought you told me Vinson Gowrie aint in that grave.’
‘Officially he is,’ his uncle said. ‘By the county records he is. And if you, living right here and knowing Miss Habersham and me all your political life, had to ask me twice, what do you think Jim Halladay is going to do? — Then you’ve got to drive sixty miles back here with your witnesses and the petition and get Judge Maycox to issue an order — —’
The sheriff dropped the cuptowel onto the table. ‘Have I?’ he said mildly, almost inattentively: so that his uncle stopped perfectly still watching him as the sheriff turned from the table, the knife in his hand.
Complete Works of William Faulkner Page 361