Complete Works of William Faulkner

by William Faulkner

  But like I said we was all busy or anyway occupied or at least interested, so we could wait. And sho enough, even waiting ends if you can jest wait long enough. So finally the medallion came. It was October now, a good time of year, one of the best. Naturally it was Lawyer went to the depot and got it though I’m sho Flem paid the freight on it for no other reason than Lawyer wouldn’t a waited long enough for the agent to add it up, herding the two Negroes toting it all wrapped up in straw and nailed up in a wooden box, across the platform to his car like he was herding two geese. And for the next three days when his office seen him it was on the fly you might say, from a distance when he happened to pass it. Which was a good thing there wasn’t no passel of brigands or highwaymen or contractors or jest simple lawyers making a concerted financial attack on Yoknapatawpha County at that time because Yoknapatawpha would a jest had to rock along the best it could without no help from its attorney. Because he had the masons already hired and waiting with likely even the mortar already mixed, even before the medallion come; one morning I even caught him, put my hand on the car door and says,

  “I’ll ride out to the cemetery with you,” and he jest reached across, the car already in gear and the engine already racing, and lifted my hand off and throwed it away and says,

  “Get out of the way,” and went on and so I went up to the office, the door never was locked nohow even when he was jest normal and jest out of it most of the time, and opened the bottom drawer where he kept the bottle but it never even smelled like he used to keep whiskey in it. So I waited on the street until school let out and finally caught that boy, Chick, and says,

  “Hasn’t your uncle got some whiskey at home somewhere?” and he says,

  “I dont know. I’ll look. You want me to pour up a drink in something and bring it?” and I says,

  “No. He dont need a drink. He needs a whole bottle, providing it’s big enough and full enough. Bring all of it; I’ll stay with him and watch.”

  Then the monument was finished, ready for Flem to pass on it, and he — Lawyer — sent me the word too, brisk and lively as a general jest getting ready to capture a town: “Be at the office at three-thirty so we can pick up Chick. The train leaves Memphis at eight oclock so we wont have any time to waste.”

  So I was there. Except it wasn’t in the office at all because he was already in the car with the engine already running when I got there. “What train at eight oclock to where and whose?” I says.

  “Linda’s,” he says. “She’ll be in New York Saturday morning. She’s all packed and ready to leave. Flem’s sending her to Memphis in his car as soon as we are done.”

  “Flem’s sending her?” I says.

  “Why not?” he says. “She’s his daughter. After all you owe something to your children even if it aint your fault. Get in,” he says. “Here’s Chick.”

  So we went out to the cemetery and there it was — another colyum not a-tall saying what it had cost Flem Snopes because what it was saying was exactly how much it was worth to Flem Snopes, standing in the middle of that new one-grave lot, at the head of that one grave that hadn’t quite healed over yet, looking — the stone, the marble — whiter than white itself in the warm October sun against the bright yellow and red and dark red hickories and sumacs and gums and oaks like splashes of fire itself among the dark green cedars. Then the other car come up with him and Linda in the back seat, and the Negro driver that would drive her to Memphis in the front seat with the baggage (it was all new too) piled on the seat by him; coming up and stopping, and him setting there in that black hat that still looked brand new and like he had borrowed it, and that little bow tie that never had and never would look anything but new, chewing slow and steady at his tobacco; and that gal setting there by him, tight and still and her back not even touching the back of the seat, in a kind of dark suit for travelling and a hat and a little veil and her hands in white gloves still and kind of clenched on her knees and not once, not never once ever looking at that stone monument with that marble medallion face that Lawyer had picked out and selected that never looked like Eula a-tall you thought at first, never looked like nobody nowhere you thought at first, until you were wrong because it never looked like all women because what it looked like was one woman that ever man that was lucky enough to have been a man would say, “Yes, that’s her. I knowed her five years ago or ten years ago or fifty years ago and you would a thought that by now I would a earned the right not to have to remember her anymore,” and under it the carved letters that he his-self, and I dont mean Lawyer this time, had picked out:

  EULA VARNER SNOPES

  1889 1927

  A virtuous Wife is a Crown to her Husband

  Her Children rise and call Her Blessed

  and him setting there chewing, faint and steady, and her still and straight as a post by him, not looking at nothing and them two white balls of her fists on her lap. Then he moved. He leant a little and spit out the window and then set back in the seat. “Now you can go,” he says.

  TWENTY FOUR

  Charles Mallison

  SO THE CAR went on. Then I turned and started walking back to ours when Ratliff said behind me: “Wait. You got a clean handkerchief?” and I turned and saw Uncle Gavin walking on away from us with his back to us, not going anywhere: just walking on, until Ratliff took the handkerchief from me and we caught up with him. But he was all right then, he just said:

  “What’s the matter?” Then he said, “Well, let’s get on back. You boys are free to loaf all day long if you want to but after all I work for the County so I have to stay close enough to the office so that anybody that wants to commit a crime against it can find me.”

  So we got in the car and he started it and we drove back to town. Except that he was talking about football now, saying to me: “Why dont you wake up and get out of that kindergarden and into high school so you can go out for the team? I’ll need somebody I know on it because I think I know what’s wrong with football the way they play it now;” going on from there, talking and even turning loose the wheel with both hands to show us what he meant: how the trouble with football was, only an expert could watch it because nobody else could keep up with what was happening; how in baseball everybody stood still and the ball moved and so you could keep up with what was happening. But in football, the ball and everybody else moved at the same time and not only that but always in a clump, a huddle with the ball hidden in the middle of them so you couldn’t even tell who did have it, let alone who was supposed to have it; not to mention the ball being already the color of dirt and all the players thrashing and rolling around in the mud and dirt until they were all that same color too; going on like that, waving both hands with Ratliff and me both hollering, “Watch the wheel! Watch the wheel!” and Uncle Gavin saying to Ratliff, “Now you dont think so,” or “You claim different of course,” or “No matter what you say,” and Ratliff saying, “Why, I never,” or “No I dont,” or “I aint even mentioned football,” until finally he — Ratliff — said to me:

  “Did you find that bottle?”

  “No sir,” I said. “I reckon Father drank it. Mr Gowrie wont bring the next kag until Sunday night.”

  “Let me out here,” Ratliff said to Uncle Gavin. Uncle Gavin stopped talking long enough to say,

  “What?”

  “I’ll get out here,” Ratliff said. “See you in a minute.”

  So Uncle Gavin stopped long enough for Ratliff to get out (we had just reached the Square) then we went on, Uncle Gavin talking again or still talking since he had only stopped long enough to say What? to Ratliff, and parked the car and went up to the office and he was still talking that same kind of foolishness that you never could decide whether it didn’t make any sense or not, and took one of the pipes from the bowl and begun to look around the desk until I went and shoved the tobacco jar up and he looked at the jar and said, “Oh yes, thanks,” and put the pipe down, still talking. Then Ratliff came in and went to the cooler and got a glass and the spo
on and sugar-bowl from the cabinet and took a pint bottle of white whiskey from inside his shirt, Uncle Gavin still talking, and made the toddy and came and held it out.

  “Here,” he said.

  “Why, much obliged,” Uncle Gavin said. “That looks fine. That sure looks fine.” But he didn’t touch it. He didn’t even take it while Ratliff set it down on the desk where I reckon it was still sitting when Clefus came in the next morning to sweep the office and found it and probably had already started to throw it out when he caught his hand back in time to smell it or recognise it or anyway drink it. And now Uncle Gavin took up the pipe again and filled it and fumbled in his pocket and then Ratliff held out a match and Uncle Gavin stopped talking and looked at it and said, “What?” Then he said, “Thanks,” and took the match and scratched it carefully on the underside of the desk and blew it carefully out and put it into the tray and put the pipe into the tray and folded his hands on the desk and said to Ratliff:

  “So maybe you can tell me because for the life of me, I cant figure it out. Why did she do it? Why? Because as a rule women dont really care about facts just so they fit; it’s just men that dont give a damn whether they fit or not, who is hurt, how many are hurt, just so they are hurt bad enough. So I want to ask your opinion. You know women, travelling around the country all day long right in the middle of them, from one parlor to another all day long all high and mighty, as dashing and smooth and welcome as if you were a damned rush—” and stopped and Ratliff said,

  “What? What rush? Rush where?”

  “Did I say rush?” Uncle Gavin said. “No no, I said Why? a young girl’s grief and anguish when young girls like grief and anguish and besides, they can get over it. Will get over it. And just a week from her birthday too of course but after all Flem is the one to get the zero for that: for missing by a whole week anything as big as a young girl’s nineteenth birthday. Besides, forget all that; didn’t somebody just say that young girls really like grief and anguish? No no, what I said was, Why?” He sat there looking at Ratliff. “Why? Why did she have to? Why did she? The waste. The terrible waste. To waste all that, when it was not hers to waste, not hers to destroy because it is too valuable, belonged to too many, too little of it to waste, destroy, throw away and be no more.” He looked at Ratliff. “Tell me, V.K. Why?”

  “Maybe she was bored,” Ratliff said.

  “Bored,” Uncle Gavin said. Then he said it again, not loud: “Bored.” And that was when he began to cry, sitting there straight in the chair behind the desk with his hands folded together on the desk, not even hiding his face. “Yes,” he said. “She was bored. She loved, had a capacity to love, for love, to give and accept love. Only she tried twice and failed twice to find somebody not just strong enough to deserve, earn it, match it, but even brave enough to accept it. Yes,” he said, sitting there crying, not even trying to hide his face from us, “of course she was bored.”

  And one more thing. One morning — it was summer again now, July — the north-bound train from New Orleans stopped and the first man off was usually the Negro porter — not the pullman porters, they were always back down the track at the end; we hardly ever saw them, but the one from the day coaches at the front end — to get down and strut a little while he talked to the section hands and the other Negroes that were always around to meet the passenger trains. But this time it was the conductor himself, almost jumping down before the train stopped, with the white flagman at his heels, almost stepping on them; the porter himself didn’t get off at all: just his head sticking out a window about half way down the car.

  Then four things got off. I mean, they were children. The tallest was a girl though we never did know whether she was the oldest or just the tallest, then two boys, all three in overalls, and then a little one in a single garment down to its heels like a man’s shirt made out of a flour- or meal-sack or maybe a scrap of an old tent. Wired to the front of each one of them was a shipping tag written in pencil:

  From: Byron Snopes, El Paso, Texas

  To: Mr Flem Snopes, Jefferson, Mississippi

  Though Mr Snopes wasn’t there. He was busy being a banker now and a deacon in the Baptist church, living in solitary widowerhood in the old De Spain house which he had remodeled into an ante-bellum Southern mansion; he wasn’t there to meet them. It was Dink Quistenberry. He had married one of Mr Snopes’s sisters or nieces or something out at Frenchman’s Bend and when Mr Snopes sent I.O. Snopes back to the country the Quistenberrys came in to buy or rent or anyway run the Snopes Hotel, which wasn’t the Snopes Hotel anymore now but the Jefferson Hotel though the people that stayed there were still the stock traders and juries locked up by the Circuit Court. I mean, Dink was old enough to be Mr Snopes’s brother-in-law or whatever it was but he was the kind of man it just didn’t occur to you to say Mister to.

  He was there; I reckon Mr Snopes sent him. And when he saw them I reckon he felt just like we did when we saw them, and like the conductor and the flagman and the porter all looked like they had been feeling ever since the train left New Orleans, which was evidently where they got on it. Because they didn’t look like people. They looked like snakes. Or maybe that’s too strong too. Anyway, they didn’t look like children; if there was one thing in the world they didn’t look like it was children, with kind of dark pasty faces and black hair that looked like somebody had put a bowl on top of their heads and then cut their hair up to the rim of the bowl with a dull knife, and perfectly black perfectly still eyes that nobody in Jefferson (Yoknapatawpha County either) ever afterward claimed they saw blink.

  I dont know how Dink talked to them because the conductor had already told everybody listening (there was a good crowd by that time) that they didn’t talk any language or anything else that he had ever heard of and that to watch them because one of them had a switch knife with a six-inch blade, he didn’t know which one and he himself wasn’t going to try to find out. But anyway Dink got them into his car and the train went on.

  Maybe it was the same thing they used in drugstores or at least with Skeets McGowan in Christian’s because it wasn’t a week before they could go into Christian’s, all four of them (it was always all four of them, as if when the medicine man or whoever it was separated each succeeding one from the mother, he just attached the severed cord to the next senior child. Because by that time we knew who they were: Byron Snopes’s children out of a Jicarilla Apache squaw in Old Mexico), and come out two minutes later all eating ice cream cones.

  They were always together and anywhere in town or near it at any time of day, until we found out it was any time of night too; one night at two oclock in the morning when Otis Harker caught them coming in single file from behind the coca cola bottling plant; Otis said he didn’t know how in the world they got into it because no door was open nor window broken, but he could smell warm coca cola syrup spilled down the front of the little one’s nightshirt or dressing-sacque or whatever it was from five or six feet away. Because that was as close as he got; he said he hollered at them to go on home to the Snopes, I mean the Jefferson Hotel but they just stood there looking at him and he said he never intended anything: just to get them moving since maybe they didn’t understand what he meant yet. So he sort of flung his arms out and was just kind of jumping at them, hollering again, when he stopped himself just in time, the knife already in one of their hands with the blade open at least six inches long; so fast that he never even saw where it came from and in the next minute gone so fast he still didn’t even know which one of the three in overalls — the girl or the two boys — had it; that was when Mr Connors went to Dink Quistenberry the next morning and told him he would have to keep them off the streets at night.

  “Sure,” Dink said. “You try it. You keep them off the streets or off anywhere else. You got my full permission. You’re welcome to it!”

  So when the dog business happened, even Mr Hub Hampton himself didn’t get any closer than that to them. This was the dog business. We were getting paved streets in Jeffe
rson now and so more new families, engineers and contractors and such like the little Riddell boy’s that gave us that holiday two years ago, had moved to Jefferson. One of them didn’t have any children but they had a Cadillac and his wife had a dog that they said cost five hundred dollars, the only dog higher than fifty dollars except a field-trial pointer or setter (and a part Airedale bear dog named Lion that Major de Spain, Mr de Spain’s father, owned once that hunting people in north Mississippi still talked about) that Jefferson ever heard of, let alone saw — a Pekinese with a gold name-plate on its collar that probably didn’t even know it was a dog, that rode in the Cadillac and sneered through the window not just at other dogs but at people too, and even ate special meat that Mr Wall Snopes’s butcher ordered special from Kansas City because it cost too much for just people to buy and eat it.

  One day it disappeared. Nobody knew how, since the only time it wasn’t sneering out through the Cadillac window, it was sneering out through a window in the house where it — they — lived. But it was gone and I dont think anywhere else ever saw a woman take on over anything like Mrs Widrington did, with rewards in all the Memphis and north Mississippi and west Tennessee and east Arkansas papers and Mr Hampton and Mr Connors neither able to sleep at night for Mrs Widrington ringing their telephone, and the man from the insurance company (its life was insured too so maybe there were more people insured in Jefferson than there were dogs but then there was more of them not insured in Jefferson than there was dogs too) and Mrs Widrington herself likely at almost any time day or night to be in your back yard calling what Aleck Sander and I thought was Yow! Yow! Yow! until Uncle Gavin told us it was named Lao T’se for a Chinese poet. Until one day the four Snopes Indians came out of Christian’s drugstore and somebody passing on the street pointed his finger and hollered “Look!”