Complete Works of William Faulkner

by William Faulkner

  Which she would do — until the next day. But at last the fence was finished. Or at least Snopes was no longer where Meadowfill could curse at him: only the hogs rooting and rubbing along the new fence which did hold them, or anyway so far. But only so far, only up to the moment it got too dark to see the orchard last night. So now he had something to stay alive for, to get up in the morning for, hurry out of bed and across to the window as soon as darkness thinned, to see if perhaps darkness itself hadn’t betrayed him in which he couldn’t have seen a hog in his orchard even if he had been able to stay awake twenty-four hours a day watching for it; to get into his chair and wheel himself across to the window and see his orchard for one more night anyway unravished; for one more night at least he had been spared. Then to begrudge the very time he would have to spend at table eating, since this would leave the orchard unguarded, unwatched of course he meant. Because, as Charles’s uncle said, Meadowfill wasn’t worrying at all about what he would do next when he did look out the window and actually see a hog on his property — an old bastard who, as Charles himself remembered, had already alienated all his neighbours before he committed himself to invalidism and the wheel chair, so that not one of them would have raised a hand to eject the hog for him or do anything else for him except maybe hide the body if and when his grey drab of a wife did what she should have done years ago: murdered him some night. Meadowfill hadn’t thought about what to do with the hog at all. He didn’t need to. He was happy, for the first time in his life probably, Charles’s Uncle Gavin said: that you are happy when your life is filled, and any life is filled when it is so busy living from moment to moment that it has no time over to remember yesterday or dread tomorrow. Which of course couldn’t last, his uncle said. That in time Meadowfill would reach the point where if he didn’t look out that window some morning and see a hog in his orchard, he would die of simply hope unbearably deferred; and if he did some morning look out and see one, he would surely die because he would have nothing else left.

  The atom bomb saved him. Charles meant that at last the Japs quit too and now the troops could come home from all directions, back to the women they had begun to marry before the echo of the first Pearl Harbour bomb had died away, and had been marrying ever since whenever they could get two days’ leave, coming back home now either to already going families or to marry the rest of the women they hadn’t got around to yet, the blood money already in the hands of the government housing loan (as his Uncle Gavin put it: “The hero who a year ago was rushing hand grenades and Garand clips up to front-line foxholes, is now rushing baskets of soiled didies out of side- and back-street Veterans Administration tenements.”) and now Jason Compson was undergoing an anguish which he probably believed not only no human should suffer, but no human could really bear. Because when Charles reached home in September of ‘45, Jason’s old lost patrimony was already being chopped up into a subdivision of standardised Veterans’ Housing matchboxes; within the week Ratliff came to the office and told him and his uncle the official name of the subdivision: Eula Acres. Not Jason’s old triumphant jeering gibe of Snopes Field, Snopes’s Demolitional Jump-off, but Eula Acres, Eula’s Uxorious Nestplace. And Charles didn’t know whether old Flem Snopes had named it that himself or not but he would remember his uncle’s face while Ratliff was telling them. But even without that he, Charles, would still prefer to believe it was not really Flem but his builder and (the town assumed) partner Wat Snopes who thought of it, maybe because Charles still wanted to believe that there are some things, at least one thing, that even Flem Snopes wouldn’t do, even if the real reason was that Flem himself never thought of naming it anything because to him it couldn’t matter whether it had a name or not. By Christmas it was already dotted over with small brightly painted pristinely new hutches as identical (and about as permanent) as squares of gingerbread or teacakes, the ex-soldier or -sailor or -marine with his ruptured duck pushing the perambulator with one hand and carrying the second (or third) infant in the other arm, waiting to get inside almost before the last painter could gather up his dropcloth. And by New Year’s a new arterial highway had been decreed and surveyed which would run the whole length of Mr Snopes’s subdivision, including the corner which old Meadowfill owned; whereupon there opened before Meadowfill a prospect of excitement and entertainment beside which the mere depredations of a hog would have been as trivial as the trespass of a frog or a passing bird. Because now one of the big oil companies wanted to buy the corner where Meadowfill’s lot and the old Compson (now Snopes) place joined — that is, a strip of Meadowfill’s orchard, with a contiguous strip of Res Snopes’s hog lot — to build a filling station on.

  Because old Meadowfill didn’t even own thirteen feet of the strip of his land which the oil company wanted. In fact, as the town knew, the title to none of his land vested in him. During the early second Roosevelt days he had naturally been among the first to apply for relief, learning to his outraged and incredulous amazement that a finicking and bureaucratic federal government declined absolutely and categorically to let him be a pauper and a property owner at the same time. So he came to Gavin, choosing him from among the other Jefferson lawyers for the simple reason that he, Meadowfill, knew that in five minutes he would have Stevens so mad that very likely Stevens would refuse to accept any fee at all for drawing the deed transferring all his property to his nine-year-old (this was 1934) daughter. He was wrong only in his estimate of the time, since it required only two minutes for Stevens to reach the boil which carried him into the chancery clerk’s vault, where he discovered that the deed which Jason Compson’s father had executed to Meadowfill read “South to the road known as the Freedom Springs Road, thence East along said Road . . .” The Freedom Springs road being, by the time Meadowfill bought his corner, an eroded thicket-grown ditch ten feet deep with only a footpath in it: as ponderable and inescapable a geographical condition as the Grand Canyon, since this was before the era when the bulldozer and the dragline would not only alter but efface geography. Which was thirteen feet short of the actual survey-line boundary which Mohataha, the Chickasaw matriarch, had granted to Quentin Compson in 1821, and Charles’s uncle said his first impulse was the ethical one to tell old Meadowfill how he actually owned thirteen feet more of the surface of the earth than he thought he did, provided he did something about it before somebody else did. But if he, Stevens, did that, he would be ethically bound to accept Meadowfill’s ten dollars for the title search, so he decided to let one ethic cancel the other and allow simple justice to prevail.

  That was the situation when the survey line for the new highway was run to follow the old Chickasaw line, and Meadowfill discovered that his property only extended to the ditch which was thirteen feet short of it. But rage was a mild term for his condition when the oil company approached him to buy his part of the corner and he found that his mortal enemy, the hog-raising Snopes, owned the thirteen feet without a clear title to which the oil company would buy none of his, Meadowfill’s, ground. There was rage in it too of course, since rage had been Meadowfill’s normal condition for a year now. But now it was triumph too. More: it was vindication, revenge. Revenge on the Compsons who had uttered a false deed to him, allowing him to buy in good faith. Revenge on the community which had badgered him for years with small boys and stray dogs, by holding up a new taxpaying industry (if he could, by stopping the new highway itself). Revenge on the man who for a year now had ruined his sleep and his digestion too by the constant threat of that hog lot. Because he simply declined to sell any part of his property, under any conditions, to anyone: which, since his was in front of Snopes’s, except for the thirteen-foot strip, would cut the oil company off from its proposed corner station as effectively as a toll gate, as a result of which the oil company declined to buy any part of Snopes’s.

  Of course, as the town knew, Snopes (Charles meant of course Res Snopes) had already approached Essie Meadowfill, in whose name the deed lay, who answered, as the town knew too: “You’ll have t
o see papa.” Because Snopes was under a really impossible handicap: his hog lot had forever interdicted him from approaching old Meadowfill in person, of having any sort of even momentary civilised contact with him. In fact, Snopes was under two insurmountable handicaps: the second one being the idea, illusion, dream that mere money could move a man who for years now had become so accustomed to not having or wanting one extra dollar, that the notion of a thousand could not even tempt him. So Snopes misread his man. But he didn’t quit trying. (That’s right. A stranger might have wondered what Flem Snopes was doing all this time, who owned the land in the first place. But they in the town were not strangers.) He went to the oil company’s purchasing agent and said, “Tell him if he’ll sign his deed, I’ll give him ten percent of what you pay me for them thirteen feet.” Then he said, “All right. Fifty percent then. Half of it.” Then he said, “All right. How much will he take?” Then he said — and according to the oil company man, bland and affable and accommodating was no description for his voice: “All right. A good citizen can’t stand in the way of progress, even if it does cost him money. Tell him if he will sign he can have them thirteen feet.”

  This time apparently Meadowfill didn’t even bother to say No, sitting in his wheel chair at the window where he could look out upon the land which he wouldn’t sell and the adjoining land which its owner couldn’t sell because of him. So in a way, Snopes had a certain amount of local sympathy in his next move, which he made shortly before something happened to Essie Meadowfill which revealed her to be, underneath anyway, anything but mousy; and although demure might still be one word for her, the other wasn’t quietness but determination.

  One morning when Meadowfill wheeled his chair from the breakfast table to the window and looked out, he saw what he had been waiting to see for over a year now: a loose hog rooting among the worthless peaches beneath his worthless and untended trees; and even as he sat bellowing for Mrs Meadowfill, Snopes himself crossed the yard with an ear of corn and a loop of rope and snared the hog by one foot and half-drove half-led it back across the yard and out of sight, old Meadowfill leaning from the chair into the open window, bellowing curses at both of them even after they had disappeared.

  The next morning he was already seated at the window when he actually saw the hog come at a steady trot up the lane and into his orchard; he was still leaning in the open window bellowing and cursing when the drab wife emerged from the house, clutching a shawl about her head, and hurried up the lane to knock at Snopes’s locked front door until Meadowfill’s bellowing, which had never stopped, drew her back home. By that time most of the neighbours were there watching what followed: the old man still bellowing curses from the wheel chair in the window while his wife tried single-handed to drive the hog out of the unfenced yard, when Snopes himself appeared (from where everybody knew now he had been concealed watching), innocent, apologetic and amazed, with his ear of corn and his looped plowline, and caught the hog and removed it.

  Next, Meadowfill had the rifle — an aged, battered single-shot ·22. That is, it looked second-hand simply by being in his possession, though nobody knew when he had left the wheel chair and the window (not to mention the hog) long enough to have hunted down the small boy owner and haggled or browbeat him out of it; the town simply could not imagine him ever having been a boy passionate and proud to own a single-shot ·22 and to have kept it all these long years as a memento of that pure and innocent time. But he had it, cartridges too — not solid bullets but loaded with tiny shot such as naturalists use: incapable of killing the hog at all and even of hurting it much at this distance. In fact, Charles’s uncle said Meadowfill didn’t even really want to drive the hog away: he simply wanted to shoot it every day as other people play croquet or bingo.

  He would rush straight from the breakfast table, to crouch in his wheeled ambush at the window until the hog appeared. Then (he would have to rise from the chair to do this) he would stand up and slowly and quietly raise the window sash and the screen (he kept the grooves of both greased for speed and silence, and had equipped both of them with handles at the bottom so that he could raise either one with a single jerk) and deliver the shot, the hog giving its convulsive start and leap, until, forgetting, it would settle down again and receive the next shot, until at last its dim processes would connect the sting with the report and after the next shot it would go home, to return no more until tomorrow morning. Until finally it even connected the scattered peaches themselves with the general inimicality and for a whole week it didn’t return at all; then the neighbourhood legend rose that Meadowfill had contracted with the boy who delivered the Memphis and Jackson papers (he didn’t take a paper himself, not being interested in any news which cost a dollar a month) to scavenge the neighbourhood garbage cans and bait his orchard at night.

  Now the town wondered more than ever just exactly what Snopes could be up to. That is, Snopes would naturally be expected to keep the hog at home after the first time old Meadowfill shot it. Or even sell it, which was Snopes’s profession or trade, though probably no one would give the full market price per pound for a hog containing fourteen or fifteen months of Number Ten lead shot. Until finally Charles’s uncle said they divined Snopes’s intention: his hope that someday, by either error or mistake or maybe simple rage, swept beyond all check of morality or fear of consequences by his vice like a drunkard or gambler, Meadowfill would put a solid bullet in the gun; whereupon Snopes would not merely sue him for killing the hog, he would invoke the town ordinance against firing guns inside the city limits, and between the two of them somehow blackmail Meadowfill into making his, Snopes’s, lot available to the oil company. Then the thing happened to Essie Meadowfill.

  It was a Marine corporal. The town never did know how or where Essie managed to meet him. She had never been anywhere except occasionally for the day in Memphis, like everybody in north Mississippi went at least once a year. She had never missed a day from the bank except her summer vacations, which as far as anybody knew, she spent carrying her share of the burden of the wheel chair’s occupation. Yet she met him, maybe through a lovelorn correspondence agency. Anyway, still carrying the parcels of the day’s marketing, she was waiting at the station when the Memphis bus came in and he got out of it, whom Jefferson had never seen before, he carrying the grocery bag now along the street where Essie was now an hour late (people used to set their watches by her passing). And the town realised that “mousy” had been the wrong word for her for years evidently since obviously no girl deserving the word “mousy” could have bloomed that much, got that round and tender and girl-looking just in the brief time since the bus came up. And “quiet” was going to be the wrong word too; she was going to need the determination whether her Marine knew it yet or not, the two of them walking into the house and up to the wheel chair, into the point-blank range of that rage compared to which the cursing of small boys and throwing rocks at dogs and even shooting live ammunition at Snopes’s hog was mere reflex hysteria, since this trespasser threatened the very system of peonage by which Meadowfill lived, and saying, “Papa, this is McKinley Smith. We’re going to be married.” Then walking back out to the street with him five minutes later and there, in full view of whoever wanted to look, kissing him — maybe not the first time she ever kissed him but probably the first time she ever kissed anyone without bothering (more, caring) whether or not it was a sin. And evidently McKinley had some determination too: son of an east Texas tenant farmer, who probably had barely heard of Mississippi until he met Essie wherever and however that was; who, once he realised that, because of the wheel chair and the grey mother, Essie was not going to cut away from her family and marry him regardless, should have given up and gone back to Texas by the next bus.

  Or maybe what they had was a single determination held in collaboration, like they seemed to own everything else in common. They were indeed doomed and fated, whether they were star-crossed too or not. Because they even acted alike. It was obvious at once that he had cast
his lot for keeps in Jefferson. Since for some time now (this was January 1946, Charles was home now and saw the rest of it himself) the United States had been full of ex-G.I.s going to school whether they were fitted for it or not or even really wanted to go, the obvious thing would be for him to enter the vocational school which had just been added to the Jefferson Academy, where at government expense he could hold her hand at least once every day while they waited for simple meanness finally to kill off old Meadowfill. But Essie’s Marine dismissed higher education as immediately and firmly as Essie had, and for the same reason. He explained it: “I was a soldier for two years. The only thing I learned in that time was, the only place you can be safe in is a private hole, preferably with a iron lid you can pull down on top of you. I aim to own me a hole. Only I ain’t a soldier now and so I can pick where I want it, and even make it comfortable. I’m going to build a house.”

  He bought a small lot. In Eula Acres of course. And Essie selected it of course. It was not even very far from where she had lived most of her life; in fact, after the house began to go up, Meadowfill (he had to unless he gave the hog up and went back to bed) could sit right there in his window and watch every plank of its daily advancement: a constant reminder and warning that he dared not make the mistake of dying. Which at least was a valid reason for sitting in the wheel chair at the window, since he no longer had the hog. It anyway had given up — or anyway for the time being. Or Snopes had given up — for the time being. The hog had made its last sortie about the same day that Essie brought her Marine to the house for that first interview, and had not appeared in the orchard since. Snopes still owned it, or plenty of others (by the wind from that direction), or — since that was his business — he could have replaced it whenever he decided the time was right again. But for now at least he had desisted, patched his fence or (as the neighbours believed) simply stopped leaving the gate unfastened on what he considered strategic days. So now all old Meadowfill had to watch was the house.