“No,” I said. “I give up now.”
“My bed is a roll of tarred roofing paper.”
“A roll of what?”
“Tarred roofing paper.” His face was bright, peaceful; his voice quiet, full of gleeful quiet. “At night I just unroll it and go to bed and the next a. m. I just roll it back up and lean it in the corner. And then my room is all cleaned up for the day. Ain’t that fine? No sheets, no laundry, no nothing. Just roll up my whole bed like an umbrella and carry it under my arm when I want to move.”
“Oh,” I said. “You have no family, then.”
“Not with me. No.”
“You have a family back home, then?”
He was quite quiet. He did not feign to be occupied with something on the table. Neither did his eyes go blank, though he mused peacefully for a moment. “Yes. I have a wife back home. Likely this climate wouldn’t suit her. She wouldn’t like it here. But she is all right. I always kept my insurance paid up; I carried a right smart more than you would figure a architect’s draughtsman on a seventy-five-dollar salary would keep up. If I told you the amount, you would be surprised. She helped me to save; she is a good woman. So she’s got that. She earned it. And besides, I don’t need money.”
“So you don’t plan to go back home.”
“No,” he said. He watched me; again his expression was that of a child about to tell on itself. “You see, I done something.”
“Oh. I see.”
He talked quietly: “It ain’t what you think. Not what them others—” he jerked his head, a brief embracing gesture— “think. I never stole any money. Like I always told Martha — she is my wife; Mrs. Midgleston — money is too easy to earn to risk the bother of trying to steal it. All you got to do is work. ‘Have we ever suffered for it?’ I said to her. ‘Of course, we don’t live like some. But some is born for one thing and some is born for another thing. And the fellow that is born a tadpole, when he tries to be a salmon all he is going to be is a sucker.’ That’s what I would tell her. And she done her part and we got along right well; if I told you how much life insurance I carried, you would be surprised. No; she ain’t suffered any. Don’t you think that.”
“No,” I said.
“But then I done something. Yes, sir.”
“Did what? Can you tell?”
“Something. Something that ain’t in the lot and plan for mortal human man to do.”
“What was it you did?”
He looked at me. “I ain’t afraid to tell. I ain’t never been afraid to tell. It was just that these folks—” again he jerked his head slightly— “wouldn’t have understood. Wouldn’t have knowed what I was talking about. But you will. You’ll know.” He watched my face. “At one time in my life I was a farn.”
“A farn?”
“Farn. Don’t you remember in the old books where they would drink the red grape wine, how now and then them rich Roman and Greek senators would up and decide to tear up a old grape vineyard or a wood away off somewheres the gods used, and build a summer house to hold their frolics in where the police wouldn’t hear them, and how the gods wouldn’t hear them, and how the gods wouldn’t like it about them married women running around nekkid, and so the woods god named — named—”
“Pan,” I said.
“That’s it. Pan. And he would send them little fellows that was half a goat to scare them out—”
“Oh,” I said. “A faun.”
“That’s it. A farn. That’s what I was once. I was raised religious; I have never used tobacco or liquor; and I don’t think now that I am going to hell. But the Bible says that them little men were myths. But I know they ain’t, and so I have been something outside the lot and plan for mortal human man to be. Because for one day in my life I was a farn.”
II
In the office where Midgleston was a draughtsman they would discuss the place and Mrs. Van Dyming’s unique designs upon it while they were manufacturing the plans, the blue prints. The tract consisted of a meadow, a southern hillside where grapes grew, and a woodland. “Good land, they said. But wouldn’t anybody live on it.”
“Why not?” I said.
“Because things happened on it. They told how a long time ago a New England fellow settled on it and cleaned up the grape vines to market the grapes. Going to make jelly or something. He made a good crop, but when time came to gather them, he couldn’t gather them.”
“Why couldn’t he gather them?”
“Because his leg was broke. He had some goats, and a old ram that he couldn’t keep out of the grape lot. He tried every way he knew, but he couldn’t keep the ram out. And when the man went in to gather the grapes to make jelly, the ram ran over him and knocked him down and broke his leg. So the next spring the New England fellow moved away.
“And they told about another man, a I-talian lived the other side of the woods. He would gather the grapes and make wine out of them, and he built up a good wine trade. After a while his trade got so good that he had more trade than he did wine. So he began to doctor the wine up with water and alcohol, and he was getting rich. At first he used a horse and wagon to bring the grapes home on his private road through the woods, but he got rich and he bought a truck, and he doctored the wine a little more and he got richer and he bought a bigger truck. And one night a storm come up while he was away from home, gathering the grapes, and he didn’t get home that night. The next a. m. his wife found him. That big truck had skidded off the road and turned over and he was dead under it.”
“I don’t see how that reflected on the place,” I said.
“All right. I’m just telling it. The neighbor folks thought different, anyway. But maybe that was because they were not anything but country folks. Anyway, none of them would live on it, and so Mr. Van Dyming bought it cheap. For Mrs. Van Dyming. To play with. Even before we had the plans finished, she would take a special trainload of them down there to look at it, and not even a cabin on the place then, not nothing but the woods and that meadow growed up in grass tall as a man, and that hillside where them grapes grew tangled. But she would stand there, with them other rich Park Avenue folks, showing them how here would be the community house built to look like the Coliseum and the community garage yonder made to look like it was a Acropolis, and how the grape vine would be grubbed up entire and the hillside terraced to make a outdoors theatre where they could act in one another’s plays; and how the meadow would be a lake with one of them Roman barges towed back and forth on it by a gas engine, with mattresses and things for them to lay down on while they et.”
“What did Mr. Van Dyming say about all this?”
“I don’t reckon he said anything. He was married to her, you know. He just says, one time, ‘Now, Mattie—’ and she turns on him, right there in the office, before us all, and says, ‘Don’t you call me Mattie.’” He was quiet for a time. Then he said: “She wasn’t born on Park Avenue. Nor Westchester neither. She was born in Poughkeepsie. Her name was Lumpkin.
“But you wouldn’t know it, now. When her picture would be in the paper with all them Van Dyming diamonds, it wouldn’t say how Mrs. Carleton Van Dyming used to be Miss Mathilda Lumpkin of Poughkeepsie. No, sir. Even a newspaper wouldn’t dared say that to her. And I reckon Mr. Van Dyming never either, unless he forgot like the day in the office. So she says, ‘Don’t you call me Mattie’ and he hushed and he just stood there — a little man; he looked kind of like me, they said — tapping one of them little highprice cigars on his glove, with his face looking like he had thought about smiling a little and then he decided it wasn’t even any use in that.
“They built the house first. It was right nice; Mr. Van Dyming planned it. I guess maybe he said more than just Mattie that time. And I guess that maybe Mrs. Van Dyming never said, ‘Don’t you call me Mattie’ that time. Maybe he promised her he wouldn’t interfere with the rest of it. Anyway, the house was right nice. It was on the hill, kind of in the edge of the woods. It was logs. But it wasn’t too much logs. It belonged
there, fitted. Logs where logs ought to be, and good city bricks and planks where logs ought not to be. It was there. Belonged there. It was all right. Not to make anybody mad. Can you see what I mean?”
“Yes. I think I can see what you mean.”
“But the rest of it he never interfered with; her and her Acropolises and all.” He looked at me quite intently. “Sometimes I thought. . . .”
“What? Thought what?”
“I told you him and me were the same size, looked kind of alike.” He watched me. “Like we could have talked, for all of him and his Park Avenue clothes and his banks and his railroads, and me a seventy-five a week draughtsman living in Brooklyn, and not young neither. Like I could have said to him what was in my mind at any time, and he could have said to me what was in his mind at any time, and we would have understood one another. That’s why sometimes I thought. . . .” He looked at me, intently, not groping exactly. “Sometimes men have more sense than women. They know what to leave be, and women don’t always know that. He don’t need to be religious in the right sense or religious in the wrong sense. Nor religious at all.” He looked at me, intently. After a while he said, in a decisive tone, a tone of decisive irrevocation: “This will seem silly to you.”
“No. Of course not. Of course it won’t.”
He looked at me. Then he looked away. “No. It will just sound silly. Just take up your time.”
“No. I swear it won’t. I want to hear it. I am not a man who believes that people have learned everything.” He watched me. “It has taken a million years to make what is, they tell us,” I said. “And a man can be made and worn out and buried in threescore and ten. So how can a man be expected to know even enough to doubt?”
“That’s right,” he said. “That’s sure right.”
“What was it you sometimes thought?”
“Sometimes I thought that, if it hadn’t been me, they would have used him. Used Mr. Van Dyming like they used me.”
“They?” We looked at one another, quite sober, quite quiet.
“Yes. The ones that used that ram on that New England fellow, and that storm on that I-talian.”
“Oh. Would have used Mr. Van Dyming in your place, if you had not been there at the time. How did they use you?”
“That’s what I am going to tell. How I was chosen and used. I did not know that I had been chosen. But I was chosen to do something beyond the lot and plan for mortal human man. It was the day that Mr. Carter (he was the boss, the architect) got the hurryup message from Mrs. Van Dyming. I think I told you the house was already built, and there was a big party of them down there where they could watch the workmen building the Coliseums and the Acropolises. So the hurryup call came. She wanted the plans for the theatre, the one that was to be on the hillside where the grapes grew. She was going to build it first, so the company could set and watch them building the Acropolises and Coliseums. She had already begun to grub up the grape vines, and Mr. Carter put the theatre prints in a portfolio and give me the weekend off to take them down there to her.”
“Where was the place?”
“I don’t know. It was in the mountains, the quiet mountains where never many lived. It was a kind of green air, chilly too, and a wind. When it blew through them pines it sounded kind of like a organ, only it didn’t sound tame like a organ. Not tame; that’s how it sounded. But I don’t know where it was. Mr. Carter had the ticket all ready and he said it would be somebody to meet me when the train stopped.
“So I telephoned Martha and I went home to get ready. When I got home, she had my Sunday suit all pressed and my shoes shined. I didn’t see any use in that, since I was just going to take the plans and come back. But Martha said how I had told her it was company there. And you are going to look as nice as any of them,’ she says. ‘For all they are rich and get into the papers. You’re just as good as they are.’ That was the last thing she said when I got on the train, in my Sunday suit, with the portfolio: ‘You’re just as good as they are, even if they do get into the papers.’ And then it started.”
“What started? The train?”
“No. It. The train had been running already a good while; we were out in the country now. I didn’t know then that I had been chosen. I was just setting there in the train, with the portfolio on my knees where I could take care of it. Even when I went back to the ice water I didn’t know that I had been chosen. I carried the portfolio with me and I was standing there, looking out the window and drinking out of the little paper cup. There was a bank running along by the train then, with a white fence on it, and I could see animals inside the fence, but the train was going too fast to tell what kind of animals they were.
“So I had filled the cup again and I was drinking, looking out at the bank and the fence and the animals inside the fence, when all of a sudden it felt like I had been thrown off the earth. I could see the bank and the fence go whirling away. And then I saw it. And just as I saw it, it was like it had kind of exploded inside my head. Do you know what it was I saw?”
“What was it you saw?”
He watched me. “I saw a face. In the air, looking at me across that white fence on top of the bank. It was not a man’s face, because it had horns, and it was not a goat’s face because it had a beard and it was looking at me with eyes like a man and its mouth was open like it was saying something to me when it exploded inside my head.”
“Yes. And then what? What did you do next?”
“You are saying ‘He saw a goat inside that fence.’ I know. But I didn’t ask you to believe. Remember that. Because I am twenty-five years past bothering if folks believe me or not. That’s enough for me. And I guess that’s all anything amounts to.”
“Yes,” I said. “What did you do then?”
“Then I was laying down, with my face all wet and my mouth and throat feeling like it was on fire. The man was just taking the bottle away from my mouth (there were two men there, and the porter and the conductor) and I tried to sit up. ‘That’s whiskey in that bottle,’ I said.
“‘Why, sure not, doc,’ the man said. ‘You know I wouldn’t be giving whiskey to a man like you. Anybody could tell by looking at you that you never took a drink in your life. Did you?’ I told him I hadn’t. ‘Sure you haven’t,’ he said. ‘A man could tell by the way it took that curve to throw you down that you belonged to the ladies’ temperance. You sure took a bust on the head, though. How do you feel now? Here, take another little shot of this tonic.’
“‘I think that’s whiskey,’ I said.
“And was it whiskey?”
“I dont know. I have forgotten. Maybe I knew then. Maybe I knew what it was when I took another dose of it. But that didn’t matter, because it had already started then.”
“The whiskey had already started?”
“No. It. It was stronger than whiskey. Like it was drinking out of the bottle and not me. Because the men held the bottle up and looked at it and said, ‘You sure drink it like it ain’t whiskey, anyway. You’ll sure know soon if it is or not, won’t you?’
“When the train stopped where the ticket said, it was all green, the light was, and the mountains. The wagon was there, and the two men when they helped me down from the train and handed me the portfolio, and I stood there and I said, ‘Let her rip.’ That’s what I said: ‘Let her rip’; and the two men looking at me like you are looking at me.”
“How looking at you?”
“Yes. But you dont have to believe. And I told them to wait while I got the whistle—”
“Whistle?”
“There was a store there, too. The store and the depot, and then the mountains and the green cold without any sun, and the dust kind of pale looking where the wagon was standing. Then we—”
“But the whistle,” I said.
“I bought it in the store. It was a tin one, with holes in it. I couldn’t seem to get the hang of it. So I threw the portfolio into the wagon and I said, ‘Let her rip.’ That was what I said. One of them took the portfo
lio out of the wagon and gave it back to me and said, ‘Say, doc, ain’t this valuable?’ and I took it and threw it back into the wagon and I said, ‘Let her rip.’
“We all rode on the seat together, me in the middle. We sung. It was cold, and we went along the river, singing, and came to the mill and stopped. While one of them went inside the mill I began to take off my clothes—”
“Take off your clothes?”
“Yes. My Sunday suit. Taking them off and throwing them right down in the dust, by gummy.”
“Wasn’t it cold?”
“Yes. It was cold. Yes. When I took off my clothes I could feel the cold on me. Then the one came back from the mill with a jug and we drank out of the jug—”
“What was in the jug?”
“I dont know. I dont remember. It wasn’t whiskey. I could tell by the way it looked. It was clear like water.”
“Couldn’t you tell by the smell?”
“I dont smell, you see. I dont know what they call it. But ever since I was a child, I couldn’t smell some things. They say that’s why I have stayed down here for twenty-five years.
“So we drank and I went to the bridge rail. And just as I jumped I could see myself in the water. And I knew that it had happened then. Because my body was a human man’s body. But my face was the same face that had gone off inside my head back there on the train, the face that had horns and a beard.
“When I got back into the wagon we drank again out of the jug and we sung, only after a while I put on my underclothes and my pants like they wanted me to, and then we went on, singing.
“When we came in sight of the house I got out of the wagon. ‘You dont want to get out here,’ they said. ‘We are in the pasture where they keep that bull chained up.’ But I got out of the wagon, with my Sunday coat and vest and the portfolio, and the tin flute.”
III
He ceased. He looked at me, quite grave, quite quiet.
“Yes,” I said. “Yes. Then what?”
He watched me. “I never asked you to believe nothing, did I? I will have to say that for you.” His hand was inside his bosom. “Well, you had some pretty hard going, so far. But now I will take the strain off of you.”
Complete Works of William Faulkner Page 666