Uncollected Stories of William Faulkner (31 page)

   This is how Lion’s death affected the two people who loved him most—if you could have called Boon’s feeling for him, for anything, love. And I suppose you could, since they say you always love that which causes you suffering. Or maybe Boon did not consider being clawed by a bear suffering.

Major de Spain never went back again. But we did; he made us welcome to go; it seemed to please him when we went. Father and the others who had been there that time would talk about it, about how maybe if they could just persuade him to go back once … 
But he would not; he was almost sharp when he refused. I remember the day in the next summer when I went to his office to ask permission to go in and hunt squirrels. “Help yourself,” he said. “Ad will be glad to have some company. Do you want to take anybody with you?”

“No, sir,” I said. “I thought if maybe Boon …”

“Yes,” he said. “I’ll wire him to meet you there.” Boon was the marshal at Hoke’s now; Major de Spain called his secretary and sent Boon the wire right away. We didn’t need to wait for an answer; Boon would be there; he had been doing what Major de Spain told him to for twenty years now at least. So I thanked him and then I stood there and after a minute I got up my nerve and said it:

“Maybe if you would come …”

But he stopped me. I don’t know how he did it because he didn’t say anything at once. He just seemed to turn to his desk and the papers on it without moving; and I stood there looking down at a little plumpish gray-headed man in expensive, unobtrusive clothes and an old-fashioned immaculate boiled shirt, whom I was used to seeing in muddy khaki, unshaven, sitting the mule with the carbine across the saddle, and Lion standing beside him as a thoroughbred horse stands and motionless as a statue, with his strong grave head and his fine chest; the two of them somehow queerly alike, as two people get who have been closely associated for many years in doing something which both of them love and respect. He didn’t look at me again.

“No. I will be too busy. But if you have luck, you might bring me a few squirrels when you come back.”

“Yes, sir,” I said. “I will.” So I reached Hoke’s early and caught the morning log train into the woods and they put me off at our crossing. It was the same, yet different, because they were summer woods now, in full leaf, not like that iron dawn when Boon and I had flagged the train to go in to Memphis. And it was hot too. Ad was there with the wagon to meet me; we shook hands. “Mr. Boon here yet?” I said.

“Yes, suh. He got in last night. He in de woods fo daylight. Gone up to de Gum Tree.”

I knew where that was. It was a single big gum just outside the woods, in an old clearing. If you crept up to it quietly just after
daylight this time of year, sometimes you would catch a dozen squirrels in it, trapped there because they could not jump to another tree and dared not descend. So I told Ad to take my duffel on to the house; I would hunt up through the woods and meet Boon. I didn’t say I was going by the holly knoll, but he must have known that I was, because the point where he put me down was on a direct line with the knoll and the Gum Tree. “Watch out for snakes,” he said. “Dey’s crawling now.”

“I will,” I said. He went on and I entered the woods. They were changed, different. Of course it was just the summer; next fall they would be again as I remembered them. Then I knew that that was wrong; that they would never again be as I remembered them, as any of us remembered them, and I, a boy, who had owned no Lion, knew now why Major de Spain knew that he would never return and was too wise to try to. I went on. Soon the earth began to lift under my feet and then I saw the hollies, the four pale trunks marking the four corners and inside them the wooden cross with Old Ben’s dried mutilated paw nailed to it. There was no trace of grave any more; the spring flood water had seen to that. But that was all right because it was not Lion who was there; not Lion. Maybe it was nice for him now, nice for him and Old Ben both now—the long challenge and the long chase, the one with no heart to be driven and outraged, the other with no flesh to be mauled and bled. It was hot and the mosquitoes were too bad to stand still in, besides it was too late to hunt any more this morning; I would go on and pick up Boon and go back to camp. I knew these woods and presently I knew that I could not be very far from the Gum Tree.

Then I began to hear a curious sound. It sounded like a blacksmith shop—someone hammering fast on metal. It grew louder as I approached. Then I saw the clearing, the sun; the hammering, the furious hammering on metal, was quite loud now, and the trees broke and I saw the Gum Tree and then I saw Boon. It was the same Boon; he had not changed; the same Boon who had almost missed that nigger and had missed that buck; who could not shoot even when his old worn-out gun held together. He was sitting under the tree, hammering at something in his lap, and then I saw that the tree was apparently alive with frightened squirrels. I watched them rush from limb to limb, trying to escape, and rush,
dart, down the trunk and then turn and dart back up again. Then I saw what Boon was hammering at. It was a section of his gun; drawing nearer, I saw the rest of it scattered in a dozen pieces about him on the ground where he sat, hunched over, hammering furiously at the part on his lap, his walnut face wild and urgent and streaming with sweat. He was living, as always, in the moment; nothing on earth—not Lion, not anything in the past—mattered to him except his helpless fury with his broken gun. He didn’t stop; he didn’t even look up to see who I was; he just shouted at me in a hoarse desperate voice.

Get out of here!” he said. “Don’t touch them! They’re mine!”

At first there was nothing but the faint, cold, steady rain, the gray and constant light of the late November dawn, and the voices of the dogs converging somewhere in it. Then Sam Fathers, standing just behind me, as he had been standing when I shot my first running rabbit four years ago, touched me and I began to shake, not with any cold, and then the buck was there. He did not come into sight; he was just there, looking not like a ghost but as if all of light were condensed in him and he were the source of it, not only moving in it but disseminating it, already running, seen first as you always see the deer, in that split second after he has already seen you, already slanting away in that first soaring bound, the antlers even in that dim light looking like a small rocking-chair balanced on his head.

“Now,” Sam said, “shoot quick and slow.”

I don’t remember that shot at all. I don’t even remember what I did with the gun afterward. I was running, then I was standing over him where he lay on the wet ground still in the attitude of running and not looking at all dead. I was shaking and jerking again and Sam was beside me and I had his knife in my hand.

“Don’t walk up to him in front,” Sam said. “If he ain’t dead he will cut you all to pieces with his feet. Walk up to him from behind and take him by the horn.”

And I did that—drew the throat taut by one of the antlers and drew Sam’s knife across it, and Sam stooped and dipped his hands in the hot blood and wiped them back and forth across my face. Then he blew his horn and there was a moiling of dogs about us
with Jimbo and Boon Hogganbeck driving them back after they had all had a taste of the blood. Then father and Major de Spain sitting the horses, and Walter Ewell with his rifle which never missed, from the barrel of which all the bluing had long since been worn away, were looking down at us—at the old man of seventy who had been a Negro for two generations now but whose face and bearing were still those of the Chickasaw chief, and the white boy of twelve with the prints of the bloody hands across his face, who now had nothing to do but stand straight and not let the shaking show.

“Did he do all right, Sam?” father said.

“He done all right,” Sam Fathers said.

We were the white boy, not yet a man, whose grandfather had lived in the same country and in almost the same manner as the boy himself would grow up to live, leaving his descendants in the land in his turn, and the old man past seventy whose grandfathers had owned the land long before the white men ever saw it and who had vanished from it now with all their kind, what of blood they had left behind them running now in another race and for a while even in bondage and now drawing toward the end of its alien course, barren. Because Sam Fathers had no children.

His grandfather was Ikkemotubbe himself, who had named himself Doom. Sam told me about that—how Ikkemotubbe, old Issetibbeha’s sister’s son, had run away to New Orleans in his youth and returned seven years later to the plantation in north Mississippi, with a French companion called the Chevalier Soeur-Blonde de Vitry, who must have been the Ikkemotubbe of his family too and who was already addressing Ikkemotubbe as
Du Homme
, and the slave woman who was to be Sam’s grandmother, and a gold-laced hat and coat and a wicker basket containing a litter of puppies and a gold snuffbox of white powder. And how he was met at the river by two or three companions of his bachelor youth, and with the light of a smoking torch glinting on the gold-laced hat and coat, Doom took one of the puppies from the basket and put a pinch of the white powder from the gold box on its tongue, and at once the puppy ceased to be a puppy. And how the next day the eight-year-old son of Doom’s cousin, Moketubbe, who was now hereditary head of the clan (Issetibbeha was now dead) died suddenly, and that afternoon Doom, in the presence of Moketubbe and
most of the others (the People, Sam always called them), took another puppy from the basket and put a pinch of the powder on its tongue, and so Moketubbe abdicated and Doom became in fact the Man which his French friend already called him. And how Doom married the slave woman, already pregnant, to one of the slaves which he had just inherited—hence Sam Fathers’ name, which in Chickasaw had been Had-Two-Fathers—and later sold them both and the child too (his own son) to my great-grandfather almost a hundred years ago.

Up to three years ago he had lived on our farm four miles from Jefferson, though all he ever did was what blacksmithing and carpentering was needed. And he lived among Negroes, in a cabin among the other cabins, he consorted with them and dressed like them and talked like them and went to a Negro church now and then. But for all that, he was still the grandson of that Indian chief and the Negroes knew it. Boon Hogganbeck’s grandmother had been a Chickasaw woman too, and although the blood had run white since and Boon was a white man, it was not a chief’s blood. You could see the difference at once when you saw them together, and even Boon seemed to know that the difference was there—even Boon, to whom in his tradition it had never occurred that anyone might be better born than himself. A man might be smarter, he admitted that, or richer (luckier, he called it) but not better born. He was a mastiff, absolutely faithful to father and Major de Spain, absolutely dependent upon them for his very bread, hardy, courageous enough, a slave to all the appetites and almost unrational. It was Sam Fathers who bore himself, not only toward father but toward all white men, with gravity and dignity and without servility or recourse to that impenetrable wall of ready and easy mirth which Negroes sustain between themselves and white men, bearing himself toward father not only as one man to another but as an older man to a younger one.

He taught me the woods, to hunt, when to shoot and when not to shoot, when to kill and when not to kill, and better, what to do with it afterward. Then he would talk to me, the two of us sitting under the close fierce stars on a summer hilltop while we waited for the dogs to return within hearing behind the red or gray fox they ran, or beside a fire in the November or December woods while the dogs worked out a coon’s trail along the creek, or fireless
in the pitch dark and the heavy dew of April mornings while we waited for daylight beneath a turkey roost. I would not question him; he did not react to questions. I would just wait and then listen and he would begin, talking about the old days and the People whom he had never known, and so could not remember himself, and in place of whom the other race into which his blood had run had supplied him with no substitute.

And as he talked about those old times and those dead and vanished men of another race from either that I knew, gradually those old times would cease to be old times and would become the present, now, not only as if they had happened yesterday but as if they were still happening and some of them had not even happened yet but would occur to-morrow, so that at last it would seem as if I myself had not come into existence yet, that none of my race nor the other race which we had brought into the land with us had come here yet; that although it had been my grandfather’s and was now my father’s and someday would be my land which we hunted over and now rested upon, our hold upon it actually was as trivial and without reality as that now faded and archaic script in one of the Chancery Clerk’s books in the courthouse in town, and that it was I who was the guest here and Sam Fathers’ voice the mouthpiece of the host.

Until three years ago there had been two of them, the other a full-blood Chickasaw, in a sense even more astonishingly lost than Sam Fathers. He called himself Jobaker, as if it were one word. Nobody knew his history at all. He was a hermit, he lived in a foul little shack at the forks of the creek four or five miles from our farm and about that far from any other habitation. He was a market hunter and fisherman and he consorted with nobody, black or white; no Negro would even cross his path and no man dared approach his hut except Sam, and perhaps once a month I would find the two of them in Sam’s shop—two old men squatting on their heels on the dirt floor, talking in a mixture of negroid English and flat hill dialect and now and then a phrase of that old tongue which as time went on and I squatted there too listening, I began to learn. Then he died. That is, nobody had seen him in some time. Then one morning Sam Fathers was missing, none of the Negroes knew when nor where, until that night when some Negroes possum-hunting saw the sudden burst of flames and approached them.
It was Joe Baker’s hut, but before they got anywhere near it someone shot toward them. It was Sam, but nobody ever found Joe Baker’s grave.