A Rose for Emily and Other Stories

by William Faulkner

  “If you ain’t going to tote, go on and set up the wash-pot,” the first said.

  “You, Sarty!” the second shouted. “Set up the wash-pot!” His father appeared at the door, framed against that shabbiness as he had been against that other bland perfection, impervious to either, the mother’s anxious face at his shoulder.

  “Go on,” the father said. “Pick it up.” The two sisters stooped, broad, lethargic; stooping, they presented an incredible expanse of pale cloth and a flutter of tawdry ribbons.

  “If I thought enough of a rug to have to git hit all the way from France, I wouldn’t keep hit where folks coming in would have to tromp on hit,” the first said. They raised the rug.

  “Abner,” the mother said. “Let me do it.”

  “You go back and get dinner,” his father said. “I’ll tend to this.”

  From the woodpile, through the rest of the afternoon, the boy watched them—the rug spread flat in the dust beside the bubbling washpot, the two sisters stooping over it with that profound and lethargic reluctance while the father stood over them in turn, implacable and grim, driving them though never raising his voice again. He could smell the harsh home-made lye they were using; he saw his mother come to the door once and look toward them with an expression not anxious now but very like despair; he saw his father turn and he fell to with the axe and saw from the corner of his eye his father raise from the ground a flattish fragment of field stone and examine it and return to the pot, and this time his mother actually spoke: “Abner. Abner. Please don’t. Please, Abner.”

  Then he was done too. It was dusk; the whippoorwills had already begun. He could smell coffee from where they would presently eat the cold food remaining from the mid-afternoon meal, though when he entered the house he realised they were having coffee again probably because there was a fire on the hearth, before which the rug now lay spread over the backs of the two chairs. The tracks of his father’s foot were gone. Where they had been were now long water-cloudy scoriations resembling the sporadic course of a lilliputian mowing machine.

  It still hung there while they ate the cold food and then went to bed, scattered without order or claim up and down the two rooms—his mother in one bed, where his father would later lie, the older brother in the other, himself, the aunt and the two sisters on pallets on the floor. But his father was not in bed yet. The last thing the boy remembered was the depthless harsh silhouette of the hat and coat bending over the rug and it seemed to him that he had not even closed his eyes when the silhouette was standing over him, the fire almost dead behind it, the stiff foot prodding him awake. “Catch up the mule,” his father said.

  When he returned with the mule his father was standing in the black door, the rolled rug over his shoulder. “Ain’t you going to ride?” he said.

  “No. Give me your foot.”

  He bent his knee into his father’s hand, the wiry surprising power flowed smoothly, rising, he rising with it, onto the mule’s bare back (they had owned a saddle once; the boy could remember it though not when nor where) and with the same effortlessness his father swung the rug up in front of him; and now in the starlight they retraced the afternoon’s path, up the dusty road rife with honeysuckle, through the gate and up the black tunnel of the drive to the lightless house, where he sat the mule and felt the rough warp of the rug drag across his thighs and vanish. “Don’t you want me to help?” he whispered. His father did not answer and now he heard again that stiff foot striking the hollow portico with that wooden and clocklike deliberation, that outrageous overstatement of the weight it carried; the rug, hunched, not flung (the boy could tell that even in the darkness) from his father’s shoulder struck the angle of wall and floor with a sound unbelievably loud, thunderous, then the foot again, unhurried and enormous; a light came on in the house and the boy sat the mule, tense, breathing steadily and quietly and just a little fast though the foot itself did not increase its beat at all, descending the steps now; now the boy could see him. “Don’t you want to ride now?” he whispered. “We kin both ride now,” the light within the house altering now, flaring up and sinking. He’s coming down the stairs now he thought. He had already ridden the mule up beside the horse block; presently his father was up behind him and he doubled the reins over and slashed the mule across the neck but before the animal could begin to trot the hard thin arm came around him, the hard knotted hand jerking the mule back to a walk.

  In the first red rays of the sun they were in the lot, putting plow gear on the mules. This time the sorrel mare was in the lot before he heard it at all, the rider collarless and even bareheaded, trembling, speaking in a shaking voice as the woman in the house had done, his father merely looking up once before stooping again to the hame he was buckling, so that the man on the mare spoke to his stooping back: “You must realise you have ruined that rug. Wasn’t there anybody here, any of your women—” he ceased, shaking, the boy watching him, the older brother leaning now in the stable door, chewing, blinking slowly and steadily at nothing apparently. “It cost a hundred dollars. But you never had a hundred dollars. You never will. So I’m going to charge you twenty bushels of corn against your crop. I’ll add it in your contract and when you come to the commissary you can sign it. That won’t keep Mrs. de Spain quiet but maybe it will teach you to wipe your feet off before you enter her house again.” Then he was gone. The boy looked at his father, who still had not spoken nor even looked up again, who was now adjusting the logger-head in the hame.

  “Pap,” he said. His father looked at him—the inscrutable face, the shaggy brows beneath which the gray eyes glinted coldly. Suddenly the boy went toward him, fast, stopping as suddenly. “You done the best you could!” he cried. “If he wanted hit done different, why didn’t he wait and tell you how? He won’t git no twenty bushels! He won’t git none! We’ll gether hit and hide hit! I kin watch—”

  “Did you put the cutter back in that straight stock like I told you?”

  “No sir,” he said.

  “Then go do it.”

  That was Wednesday. During the rest of that week he worked steadily, at what was within his scope and some which was beyond it, with an industry that did not need to be driven nor even commanded twice; he had this from his mother, with the difference that some at least of what he did he liked to do, such as splitting wood with the half-size axe which his mother and aunt had earned or saved money somehow to present him with at Christmas. In company with the two older women (and on one afternoon, even one of the sisters) he built pens for the shoat and the cow which were a part of his father’s contract with the landlord, and one afternoon, his father being absent, gone somewhere on one of the mules, he went to the field. They were running a middle buster now, his brother holding the plow straight while he handled the reins, and walking beside the straining mule, the rich black soil shearing cool and damp against his bare ankles, he thought Maybe this is the end of it. Maybe even that twenty bushels that seems hard to have to pay for just a rug will be a cheap price for him to stop forever and always from being what he used to be; thinking, dreaming now, so that his brother had to speak sharply to him to mind the mule: Maybe he won’t collect the twenty bushels. Maybe it will all add up and balance and vanish—corn, rug, fire; the terror and grief, the being pulled two ways like between two teams of horses—gone, done with for ever and ever.

  Then it was Saturday; he looked up from beneath the mule he was harnessing and saw his father in the black coat and hat. “Not that,” his father said. “The wagon gear.” And then, two hours later, sitting in the wagon bed behind his father and brother on the seat, the wagon accomplished a final curve and he saw the weathered paintless store with its tattered tobacco and patent medicine posters and the tethered wagons and saddle animals below the gallery, he mounted the gnawed steps behind his father and brother and there again was the lane of quiet watching faces for the three of them to walk through. He saw the man in spectacles sitting at the plank table and he did not need to be told this was a J
ustice of the Peace; he sent one glare of fierce exultant partisan defiance at the man in collar and cravat now, whom he had seen but twice before in his life and that on a galloping horse, who now wore on his face an expression not of rage but of amazed unbelief which the boy could not have known was at the incredible circumstance of being sued by one of his own tenants, and came and stood against his father and cried at the Justice: “He ain’t done it! He ain’t burnt—”

  “Go back to the wagon,” his father said.

  “Burnt?” the Justice said. “Do I understand this rug was burned too?”

  “Does anybody here claim it was?” his father said. “Go back to the wagon.” But he did not, he merely retreated to the rear of the room crowded as that other had been, but not to sit down this time, instead to stand pressing among the motionless bodies, listening to the voices:

  “And you claim twenty bushels of corn is too high for the damage you did to the rug?”

  “He brought the rug to me and said he wanted the tracks washed out of it. I washed the tracks out and took the rug back to him.”

  “But you didn’t carry the rug back to him in the same condition it was in before you made the tracks on it.” His father did not answer, and now for perhaps half a minute there was no sound at all save that of breathing, the faint steady suspiration of complete and intent listening. “You decline to answer that, Mr. Snopes?” Again his father did not answer. “I’m going to find against you, Mr. Snopes. I’m going to find that you were responsible for the injury to Major de Spain’s rug and hold you liable for it. But twenty bushels of corn seems a little high for a man in your circumstances to have to pay. Major de Spain claims it cost a hundred dollars. October corn will be worth about fifty cents. I figure that if Major de Spain can stand a ninety-five dollar loss on something he paid cash for, you can stand a five dollar loss you haven’t earned yet. I hold you in damages to Major de Spain to the amount of ten bushels of corn over and above your contract with him, to be paid to him out of your crop at gathering time. Court adjourned.”

  It had taken no time hardly, the morning was but half begun. He thought they would return home and perhaps back to the field, since they were late, far behind all other farmers (They always were. Every moving which he could remember had taken place about this time of year, when everybody else had corn and cotton showing above ground—this, the boy did not realise, not because it took his father this long to find a landlord who pleased him but because anyone who took his father would be in such straits by this time that he would have taken anyone.) but instead his father passed on behind the wagon, merely indicating with his hand for the older brother to follow with it, and crossed the road toward the blacksmith shop opposite, and he who by ordinary would have swung onto the springlike end of the coupling-pole even if it were only going ten feet, pressing on after his father, overtaking him, speaking, whispering up at the harsh calm face beneath the weathered hat: “He won’t git no ten bushels neither. He won’t git one. We’ll—” until his father glanced for an instant down at him, the face absolutely calm, the grizzled eyebrows writhen and tangled above the cold eyes, the voice almost pleasant, almost gentle:

  “You think so? Well, we’ll wait till October, anyway.”

  The matter of the wagon—the setting of a spoke or two and the tightening of the tires—did not take long either, the business of the tires accomplished by driving the wagon into the spring branch behind the shop and letting it stand there, the mules nuzzling into the water from time to time and the boy on the seat with the idle reins, looking up the slope and through the sooty tunnel of the shed where the slow hammer rang and where his father sat on an upended cypress bolt, easily, either talking or listening, still sitting there when the boy brought the dripping wagon up out of the branch and halted it before the door.

  “Take them on to the shade and hitch,” his father said. He did so and returned. His father and the smith and a third man squatting on his heels inside the door were talking, about crops and animals; the boy squatting too in the ammoniac dust and hoof-parings and scales of rust heard his father tell a long and unhurried story out of the time before the birth of the older brother even when he had been a professional horse-trader. And then his father came up beside him where he stood before a tattered last year’s circus poster on the other side of the store, gazing rapt and quiet at the scarlet horses, the incredible poisings and convolutions of tulle and tights and the painted leers of comedians, and said, “It’s time to eat.”

  But not at home. Squatting beside his brother against the front wall he watched his father emerge from the store and produce from a paper sack a segment of cheese and divide it carefully and deliberately into three with his pocket knife and produce crackers from the same sack. They all three squatted on the gallery and ate, slowly, without talking, then in the store again they drank from a tin dipper tepid water smelling of the cedar bucket and of living beech trees too. And still they did not go home. It was a horse lot this time, a tall rail fence upon and along which men stood and sat and out of which one by one horses were led, to be walked and trotted and then cantered back and forth along the road while the slow swapping and buying went on and the sun began to slant westward, they—the three of them—watching and listening, the older brother with his muddy eyes and his steady inevitable tobacco, the father commenting now and then on certain of the animals, to no one in particular—observations which even the boy realised were sound ones because, unasked to be sure, yet they brought no responses from anyone.

  It was after sundown when they reached home. They unhitched in the green dusk rife with the smell of locust and honeysuckle; there was a new moon and the whippoorwills were already calling back and forth, musical, questioning, rapid and urgent as heartbeats above the fairy shrilling of tree frogs. They ate supper by lamplight, then, sitting on the doorstep the boy watched the night fully accomplish, listening to the whippoorwills and the frogs, when he heard his mother’s voice: “Abner! No! No! Oh God. Oh God. Abner!” and he rose, whirled, and saw the altered light through the door where a candle stub now burned in a bottle neck on the table and his father, still in the hat and coat at once formal and burlesque as though dressed carefully for some shabby and ceremonial violence, emptying the reservoir of the lamp back into the five gallon kerosene can from which it had been filled while the mother tugged at his arm until he shifted the lamp to the other hand and flung her back, not savagely or viciously, just hard, into the wall, her hands flung out against the wall for balance, her mouth open and in her face the same quality of hopeless despair as had been in her voice. Then his father saw him standing in the door.

  “Go to the barn and get that can of oil we were oiling the wagon with,” he said. The boy did not move. Then he could speak.

  “What—” he cried. “What are you—”

  “Go get that oil,” his father said. “Go.”

  Then he was moving, running, outside the house, toward the stable: this the old habit, the old blood which he had not been permitted to choose for himself, which had been bequeathed him willy nilly and which had run for so long (and who knew where, battening on what of outrage and savagery and lust) before it came to him. I could keep on he thought. I could run on and on and never look back, never need to see his face again. Only I can’t. I can’t, the rusted can in his hand now, the liquid sploshing in it as he ran back to the house and into it, into the sound of his mother’s weeping in the next room, and handed the can to his father. “Ain’t you going to even send a nigger?” he cried. “At least you sent a nigger before!” This time his father didn’t strike him. The hand came even faster than the blow had, the same hand which had set the can on the table with almost excrutiating care flashing from the can toward him too quick for him to follow it, gripping him by the back of his shirt and onto tiptoe before he had seen it quit the can, the face stooping at him in breathless and frozen ferocity, the cold dead voice speaking over him to the older brother who leaned against the table, chewing with that
steady curious sidewise motion of cows:

  “Empty the can into the big one and go on. I’ll catch up with you.”

  “Better tie him up to the bed post,” the brother said.

  “Do like I told you,” the father said. Then he was moving, his bunched shirt and the hard bony hand between his shoulder blades, his toes just touching the floor, across the room and into the other one, past the two sisters, sitting with spread heavy thighs in the two chairs over the cold hearth, and on to where his mother and aunt sat side by side on the bed, the aunt’s arms about his mother’s shoulders. “Hold him,” the father said. The aunt made a startled movement. “Not you,” the father said. “Lennie. Take hold of him. I want to see you do it.” His mother took him by the wrist. “You’ll hold him better than that. If he gets loose, don’t you know what he is going to do? He will go up yonder.” He jerked his head toward the road. “Maybe I’d better tie him.”

  “I’ll hold him,” his mother whispered.

  “See you do then.” Then his father was gone, the stiff foot heavy and measured upon the boards, unhurried still, ceasing at last.

  Then he began to struggle. His mother caught him in both arms, he jerking and wrenching at them. He would be stronger in the end, he knew that. But he had no time to wait for it. “Lemme go!” he cried. “I don’t want to have to hit you!”

  “Let him go!” the aunt said. “If he don’t go, before God I am going up there myself!”