“No,” she said. “No. No. No. No.”
“Yes. They are gone. It will be just—” He said, struggling with her, dragging her toward the door. Then she began to cry—a loud wail of shocked amazement like a struck child.
“Hush!” he cried. “Jesus, hush!” She stood backed into the wall beside the open window, wailing with the loud obliviousness of five or six. “Please, Susan!” he said. “Stop bawling! They will hear us! Stop!” He grasped her, trying to close her mouth with his hand.
“Take your nasty hands off of me!” [she] cried, struggling.
“All right, all right.” He held her. He began to lead her away. He led her to the swing and drew her into it, holding her. “Hush, hush! Jesus, hush!”
“You let me alone!” she wailed. “You stop!” But she was not shrieking now, though she still wept with that terrific abandon, not struggling, fighting him now as he held her, trying to hold her quiet.
“I didn’t mean anything,” he said. “It was just what your note said. I thought that—”
“I didn’t!” she cried. “I didn’t!”
“All right, all right,” he said. He held her. He held her clumsily; he realised that she was clinging to him now. He felt like wood—the carcass from which sense, sensibility, sentience, had fled along with the sweet wild fires of hope; he thought in quiet amazement: I wouldn’t have hurt her. All I wanted was just to seduce somebody.
“You sc-scared me so bad,” she said, clinging to him.
“Yes, all right. I’m sorry. I never meant to. Shhhhh, now.”
“Maybe I will tomorrow night. But you scared me so.”
“All right, all right.” He held her. He felt nothing at all now, no despair, no regret, not even surprise. He was thinking of himself and Skeet in the country, lying on a hill somewhere under the moon with the bottle between them, not even talking.
The Big Shot
When Don Reeves was on the Sentinel he used to spend six nights a week playing checkers at the Police Station. The seventh night they played poker. He told me this story:
Martin is sitting in the chair. Govelli sits on the desk, his thigh hung over the edge, his hat on and his thumbs in his vest, the cigarette on his lower lip bobbing up and down while he tells Martin about Popeye running over the red light with a car full of whiskey, barely missing a pedestrian. They—the onlookers, the other pedestrians—ran the car into the curb by a sheer outraged weight of over-tried civic virtue as personified by long-suffering and vulnerable bone and flesh, and held Popeye there, the women shrieking and screaming and the pedestrian on the running board waving his puny fist in Popeye’s face; and then Popeye drew a pistol—a slight man with a dead face and dead black hair and eyes and a delicate hooked little nose and no chin, crouching snarling behind the neat blue automatic. He was a little, dead-looking bird in a tight black suit like a vaudeville actor of twenty years ago, with a savage falsetto voice like a choir-boy, and he was considered quite a personage in his own social and professional circles. I understand he left more than one palpitant heart among the night-blooming sisterhood of DeSoto street when he cleared these parts. There was nothing he could do with his money save give it away, you see. That’s our American tragedy: we have to give away so much of our money, and there’s nobody to give it to save the poets and painters. And if we gave it to them, they would probably stop being poets and painters. And that little flat ubiquitous pistol had caused more than one masculine gland to function overtime, and at least one to stop altogether; in this case the heart also. But his principal bid for interest and admiration among them was the fact that he went each summer to Pensacola to visit his aged mother, telling her that he was a hotel clerk. Have you noticed how people whose lives are equivocal, not to say chaotic, are always moved by the homely virtues. Go to the brothel or the convict camp if you would hear the songs about sonny boy and about mother.
So the cop took them all in—the car full of liquor, the hysterical and outraged pedestrian, and Popeye and the pistol—followed by an augmenting cloud of public opinion noisy as blackbirds, and including two casual reporters.
It may have been the two reporters that tipped the scales with Martin. It couldn’t have been the mere presence of liquor in the car nor the fact that Popeye was on his way to Martin’s house with it when he ran past the light; the cops themselves would have seen to that, Popeye being better known to them by sight than Martin, even. It had not been ten days since Martin extricated Popeye from a similar predicament, and doubtless the cops had already got the car out of the picture as soon as they reached the station. It must have been the presence of the two reporters, those symbols of the vox pop which even this Volstead Napoleon, this little corporal of polling-booths, dared not flout and outrage beyond a certain point.
So he sits in the single chair behind the desk. I am a good mind,” he says. “I am a good mind. How many times have I told you not to let that durn little rat tote a pistol? Have you and him both forgot about that business last year?”
That was when they had Popeye in jail without bond for that killing. They had him dead to rights; a cold-blooded job if there ever was one, even though Popeye had done a public service (as Martin himself said when he heard it; “If he’d just go on now and commit suicide, I’ll put them both up a monument”) when he did it. But anyway they had him, lying in jail there with that strange—but maybe all hop-heads are crazy—strange conviction of his invulnerability. He had a certain code like he had a certain code in his clothing, his tight black suits, limited but positive. He used to get hopped up and deliver long diatribes on the liquor traffic, using the pistol for emphasis. He wouldn’t—or couldn’t—drink himself, and he hated liquor worse than a Baptist deacon.
As near as anybody could discover, he never even took a child’s precautions to conceal or mitigate the deed or his part in it. He wouldn’t say one way or the other, wouldn’t even talk about it or read the papers about himself. He just lay there on his back in the cell all day long, telling anybody—the lawyers Govelli got to save his neck, the reporters and all—that came along how, as soon as he was out, he was going to put the bee on one of the turnkeys for calling him a hop-head; telling it in the same tone he’d tell about a base ball game—if he ever went to one. All I ever heard of him doing was getting pinched by traffic cops with a car full of Govelli’s liquor, and going to Pensacola to see his mother; the lawyer came down heavy on that fact at his trial. He was smart, that lawyer. The trial began as to whether or not Popeye had killed a man; it ended as to whether or not Popeye really went to Pensacola, and if he had an actual mother there. But the witness they produced may have been his mother, after all. He must have had one once—a little, cold, still, quiet man that looked like he might have had ink in his veins—something cold and defunctive, anyway. “I am a good mind,” Martin says. “I am, for a fact.”
Govelli sits motionless above his hooked thumbs, the cigarette wreathing slow across his face, across the neat cicatrice of his scar. It slanted down across the corner of his mouth like a white thread. “They never hung it on him,” he says sullenly.
“Because why not? Because I kept them from it. Not you, not him. I did it.”
“Sure,” Govelli says, “you do it for nothing. Just because you are big-hearted. I’m paying for it. Paying high. And when I dont get what I pay for, I know what I can do.”
They look at one another, the cigarette wreathing slow across Govelli’s face. He had not moved it since he lit it there. “Are you threatening me?” Martin says.
“I dont threaten,” Govelli says. “I’m telling you.”
Martin drums on the desk. He is not looking at Govelli; he is not looking at anything: a thick man, not tall, sitting behind the desk with that dynamic immobility of a motionless locomotive, his fingers musing in slow taps on the desk. “Durn little rat,” he says. “If he even got drunk. You can count on what a man that drinks will do. But a durn hop-head.”
“Sure,” Govelli says. “It’s his fa
ult you can buy snow in this town. It was him lets them sell it here.”
Still Martin does not look at him, his fingers musing on the desk top. “A durn rat. And why you dont get shut of them wops and hop-heads and get some decent American boys that a man can count on.… Here it’s not ten days since I sprung him and now he’s got to wave a pistol right in the face of a crowd on the street. I’m a good mind; be durn if I aint.” He drummed on the desk, looking across the room and out the window, above the tall buildings; his town. For he had built some of it, letting the contracts for a price, taking his natural cut, yet insisting on a good contract, good work—our virtues are usually by-products of our vices, you know. That’s why any sort of an egoist is good to have in the civic blood system—and he ran all of it from that barren office, that cheap yellow desk and patent chair. It was his town, and those who were not glad were not anything. They were just those eternal optimists, suzerains of rented rooms and little lost jobs on stools or behind counters, waiting for that mythical flood tide of outraged humanities that never makes.
After a minute, Govelli watching him, he moved. He drew the telephone across the desk and gave a number. The telephone answered. “They’ve got Popeye down at the station,” he said into the mouthpiece. “See to it.… Popeye; yes. And let me know at once.” He pushed the telephone away and looked at Govelli. “I told you before it was the last time. And I mean it now. If he gets in trouble once more, you will have to get shut of him. And if they find a pistol on him, I’m going to send him to the penitentiary myself. You understand?”
“Oh, I’ll tell him,” Govelli said. “I’ve told him before he aint got any need for that rod. But this is a free country. If he wants to carry a gun, that’s his business.”
“You tell him I’ll make it mine. You go down there and get that car and send that stuff on out to my house and then you tell him. I mean it.”
“You tell them broken-down flatties to lay off of him,” Govelli said. “He’d be all right if they’ll just leave him be.”
After Govelli departs he still sits in the chair, motionless, with that immobility of country people, before which patience is no more than a sound without any meaning. He was born and raised on a Mississippi farm. Tenant-farmers—you know: barefoot, the whole family, nine months in the year. He told me about one day his father sent him up to the big house, the house of the owner, the boss, with a message. He went to the front door in his patched overalls, his bare feet: he had never been there before; perhaps he knew no better anyway, to whom a house was just where you kept the quilt pallets and the corn meal out of the rain (he said ‘outen the rain’). And perhaps the boss didn’t know him by sight; he probably looked exactly like a dozen others on his land and a hundred others in the neighborhood.
Anyway the boss came to the door himself. Suddenly he—the boy—looked up and there within touching distance for the first time was the being who had come to symbolise for him the ease and pleasant ways of the earth: idleness, a horse to ride all day long, shoes all the year round. And you can imagine him when the boss spoke: “Dont you ever come to my front door again. When you come here, you go around to the kitchen door and tell one of the niggers what you want.” That was it, you see. There was a negro servant come to the door behind the boss, his eyeballs white in the gloom, and Martin’s people and kind, although they looked upon Republicans and Catholics, having never seen either one, probably, with something of that mystical horror which European peasants of the fifteenth century were taught to regard Democrats and Protestants, the antipathy between them and negroes was an immediate and definite affair, being at once biblical, political, and economic: the three compulsions—the harsh unflagging land broken into sparse intervals by spells of demagoguery and religio-neurotic hysteria—which shaped and coerced their gaunt lives. A mystical justification of the need to feel superior to someone somewhere, you see.
He didn’t deliver the message at all. He turned and walked back down the drive, feeling the nigger’s teeth too in the gloom of the hall beyond the boss’ shoulder, holding his back straight until he was out of sight of the house. Then he ran. He ran down the road and into the woods and hid there all day, lying on his face in a ditch. He told me that now and then he crawled to the edge of the field and he could see his father and his two older sisters and his brother working in the field, chopping cotton, and he told me it was as though he were seeing them for the first time.
But he didn’t go home until that night. I dont know what he told them, what happened; perhaps nothing did. Perhaps the message was of no importance—I cant imagine those people having anything of importance capable of being communicated by words—or it may have been sent again. And people like that react to disobedience and unreliability only when it means loss of labor or money. Unless they had needed him in the field that day, they probably had not even missed him.
He never approached the boss again. He would see him from a distance, on the horse, and then he began to watch him, the way he sat the horse, his gestures and mannerisms, the way he spoke; he told me that sometimes he would hide and talk to himself, using the boss’ gestures and tone to his own shadow on the wall of the barn or the bank of a ditch: “Dont you never come to my front door no more. You go around to the back door and tell hit to the nigger. Dont you never come to my front door no more” in his meagre idiom that said ‘ye’ and ‘hit’ and ‘effen’ for ‘you’ and ‘it’ and ‘if’, set off by the aped gestures of that lazy and arrogant man who had given an unwitting death-blow to that which he signified and summed and which alone permitted him breath. He didn’t tell me, but I believe that he would slip away from the field, the furrow and the deserted hoe, to lurk near the gate to the big house and wait for the boss to pass. He just told me that he didn’t hate the man at all, not even that day at the door with the nigger servant grinning beyond the other’s shoulder. And that the reason he hid to watch and admire him was that his folks would think he ought to hate him and he knew he couldn’t.
Then he was married, a father, and proprietor of a store at the cross-roads. The process must have been to him something like the bald statement: suddenly he was grown and married and owner of a store within long sight of the big house. I dont think he remembered himself the process of getting grown and getting the store anymore than he could remember the road, the path he would traverse to reach the gate and crouch in the brush there in time. He had done it the same way. The actual passing of time, the attenuation, had condensed into a forgotten instant; his strange body—that vehicle in which we ride from one unknown station to another as in a train, unwitting when the engine changes or drops a car here and takes on one there with only a strange new whistle-blast coming back to us—had metamorphosed, inventing for him new minor desires and compulsions to be obeyed and cajoled, conquered or surrendered to or bribed with the small change left over from his unflagging dream while he lay in the weeds at the gate, waiting to see pass the man who knew neither his name nor his face nor that implacable purpose which he—the man—had got upon that female part of every child where ambition lies fecund and waiting.
So he was a merchant, one step above his father, his brothers mesmerised still to the stubborn and inescapable land. He could neither read nor write; he did a credit business in spools of thread and tins of snuff and lap-links and plow-shares, carrying them in his head through the day and reciting them without a penny’s error while his wife transcribed them into the cash book on the kitchen table after supper was done.
Now the next part he was a little ashamed of and a little proud of too: his man’s nature, the I, and the dream in conflict. It emerged from his telling as a picture, a tableau. The boss was an old man now, gone quietly back to his impotent vices. He still rode about the place a little, but most of the day he spent in his sock feet lying in a hammock between two trees in the yard—the man who had always been able to wear shoes all day long, all year long. Martin told me about that. “That’s what I had made up my mind,” he said. “Once I
had believed that if I could just wear shoes all the time, you see. And then I found that I wanted more. I wanted to work right through the wanting and being able to wear shoes all the time and come out on the other side where I could own fifty pairs at once if I wanted and then not even want to wear one of them.” And when he told me that he was sitting in the swivel chair behind the desk, his stocking feet propped in an open drawer.
But to get back to the picture. It is night, an oil lamp burns on an up-ended box in a narrow cuddy; it is the store-room behind the store proper, filled with unopened boxes and barrels, with coils of new rope and pieces of new harness on nails in the wall; the two of them—the old man with his white stained moustache and his eyes that dont see so good anymore and his blue-veined uncertain hands, and the young man, the peasant at his first maturity, with his cold face and the old habit of deference and emulation and perhaps affection (we must love or hate anything to ape it) and surely a little awe, facing one another across the box, the cards lying between them—they used wrought nails for counters—and a tumbler and spoon at the old man’s hand and the whiskey jug on the floor in the shadow of the box. “I’ve got three queens,” the boss says, spreading his cards in a palsied and triumphant row. “Beat that, by Henry!”
“Well, sir,” the other says, “you had me fooled again.”
Uncollected Stories of William Faulkner Page 59