Uncollected Stories of William Faulkner (36 page)

He put Lucas and George out at George’s gate. They watched the car go on down the road, already going fast. George was batting his eyes rapidly. “Now whut we gonter do?” he said. Lucas roused.

“Eat your breakfast quick as you can and come on to my house. You got to go to town and get back here by noon.”

“I needs to go to bed too,” George said. “I’m bad off to sleep too.”

“Ne’mine about that,” Lucas said. “You eat your breakfast and get up to my house quick.” When George reached his gate a half hour later, Lucas met him, the check already written out in his laborious, cramped, but quite legible hand. It was for fifty dollars. “Get it in silver dollars,” Lucas said. “And be back here by noon.”

It was just dusk when the salesman’s car stopped again at Lucas’s gate, where Lucas and George, carrying a long-handled shovel, waited. The salesman was freshly shaved and his face looked rested; the snap-brim hat had been brushed and his shirt was clean. But he now wore a pair of cotton khaki pants still bearing the manufacturer’s stitched label and still showing the creases where they had been folded on the store’s shelf. He gave Lucas a hard, jeering stare as Lucas and George approached. “I ain’t going to ask if my mule’s all right,” he said. “Because I don’t need to. Hah?”

“Hit’s all right,” Lucas said. He and George got into the rear seat beside the divining machine. The salesman put the car into gear, though he did not move it yet.

“Well?” he said. “Where do you want to take your walk tonight? Same place?”

“Not there,” Lucas said. “I’ll show you whar. We was looking in the wrong place. I misread the paper.”

“You bet,” the salesman said. “It’s worth that extra twenty-five bucks to have found that out—” The car had begun to move. He stopped it so suddenly that Lucas and George, squatting gingerly on the front edge of the seat, lurched forward before they caught themselves. “You did what?” the salesman said.

“I misread the paper,” Lucas said.

“What paper? Have you got a letter or something that tells where some money is buried?”

“That’s right,” Lucas said.

“Where is it?”

“Hit’s put away in the house,” Lucas said.

“Go and get it.”

“Ne’mine,” Lucas said. “I read hit right this time.” For a moment longer the salesman sat, his head turned over his shoulder. Then he looked forward. He put the car in gear again.

“All right,” he said. “Where’s the place?”

“Drive on,” Lucas said. “I’ll show you.”

It was not in the bottom, but on a hill overlooking the creek—a clump of ragged cedars, the ruins of old chimneys, a depression which was once a well or a cistern, the old worn-out fields stretching away and a few snaggled trees of what had been an orchard, shadowy and dim beneath the moonless sky where the fierce stars of late summer swam. “Hit’s in the orchard,” Lucas said. “Hit’s divided, buried in two separate places. One of them’s in the orchard.”

“Provided the fellow that wrote you the letter ain’t come back and joined it all up again,” the salesman said. “What are we waiting on? Here, Jack,” he said to George, “grab that thing out of there.” George lifted the divining machine from the car. The salesman had a flashlight himself now, quite new, thrust into his hip pocket. He didn’t put it on at once. “By God, you better find it first pop this time. We’re on a hill now. There probably ain’t a man in ten miles that can walk at all that won’t be up here inside an hour, watching us.”

“Don’t tell me that,” Lucas said. “Tell hit to this-here three hundred and twenty-five dollar buzz-box I done bought.”

“You ain’t bought this box yet, big boy,” the salesman said. “You say one of the places is in the orchard. All right. Where?”

Lucas, carrying the shovel, went on into the old orchard, the others following. The salesman watched him pause, squinting at trees and sky to orient himself, then move on again, pause again. “We kin start here,” he said. The salesman snapped on the light, handcupping the beam on to the metal box which George carried.

“All right, Jack,” he said. “Get going.”

“I better tote it,” Lucas said.

“No,” the salesman said. “You’re too old. I don’t know yet that you can even keep up with us. Get on, Jack!” So Lucas walked on
George’s other side, carrying the shovel and watching the small bright dials in the flashlight’s contracted beam as they went back and forth across the orchard. He was watching also, grave and completely attentive, when the needles began to spin and jerk and then quiver. Then he held the box and watched George digging into the light’s concentrated pool and saw the rusted can come up at last and the bright cascade of silver dollars about the salesman’s hands and heard the salesman’s voice: “Well, by God! By God!” Lucas squatted also; they faced each other across the pit.

“I done found this much of hit, anyhow,” he said. The salesman, one hand upon the scattered coins, made a slashing, almost instinctive blow with the other as if Lucas had reached for the coins. Squatting, he laughed harshly at Lucas across the pit.

“
You
found? This machine don’t belong to you, old man.”

“I bought hit,” Lucas said.

“With what?”

“A mule,” Lucas said. The other laughed at him, harsh and steady across the pit. “I give you a billy sale for hit.”

“Which never was worth a damn. It’s in my car yonder. Go and get it whenever you want to.” He scrabbled the coins together, back into the can. He rose quickly out of the light, until only his legs showed in the new, still-creased cotton pants. He still wore the same low black shoes. He had not had them shined again—only washed. Lucas rose also, more slowly. “All right,” the salesman said. “This ain’t hardly any of it. Where’s the other place?”

“Ask your finding machine,” Lucas said. “Ain’t it supposed to know?”

“You damn right it does,” the salesman said.

“Then I reckon we can go home,” Lucas said. “George Wilkins.”

“Sir,” George said.

“Wait,” the salesman said. He and Lucas faced each other in the darkness, two shadows, faceless. “There wasn’t over a hundred here. Most of it is in the other place. I’ll give you ten per cent.”

“Hit was my letter,” Lucas said. “Hit ain’t enough.”

“Twenty. And that’s all.”

“I wants half,” Lucas said. “And that mule paper, and another paper to say the finding machine belongs to me.”

“Tomorrow,” the salesman said.

“I wants hit now,” Lucas said. The invisible face stared at his own invisible one. Both he and George seemed to feel the windless summer air moving to the trembling of the white man’s body.

“How much did you say them other fellows found?”

“Twenty-two thousand dollars,” Lucas said.

“Hit mought a been more,” George said. “Hit wuz a big—”

“All right,” the salesman said suddenly. “I’ll give you a bill of sale for the machine as soon as we finish.”

“I wants it now,” Lucas said. They went back to the car. While Lucas held the flashlight, they watched the salesman rip open his patent brief case and jerk out of it and fling toward Lucas the bill of sale for the mule. Then they watched his jerking hand fill in the long printed form with its carbon duplicates and sign it and rip out one of the duplicates.

“You get possession tomorrow morning,” he said. “It belongs to me until then. O.K.?”

“All right,” Lucas said. “What about them fifty dollars we done already found? Does I get half of them?” This time the salesman just laughed, harsh and steady and without mirth. Then he was out of the car. He didn’t even wait to close his brief case. They could see him half running back toward the orchard, carrying the divining machine and the flashlight both.

“Come on,” he said. “Bring the spade.” Lucas gathered up the two papers, the bill of sale which he had signed for the mule, and the one which the salesman had signed for the divining machine.

“George Wilkins,” he said.

“Sir,” George said.

“Take that mule back whar you got hit. Then go tell Roth Edmonds he can quit worrying folks about her.”

Lucas mounted the gnawed steps beside which the bright mare stood beneath the heavy saddle, and entered the commissary, with its ranked shelves of tinned food, the hooks from which hung collars and trace chains and hames and ploughlines, its smell of molasses and cheese and leather and kerosene. Edmonds swiveled around from the roll-top desk. “Where’ve you been?” he said. “I sent word two days ago I wanted to see you.”

“I was in bed, I reckon,” Lucas said. “I been had to stay up all night for the last three nights. I can’t stand hit no more like when I was a young man.”

“So you’ve found that out at last, have you? What I wanted to see you about is that damn St. Louis fellow. Dan says he’s still hanging around here. What’s he doing?”

“Hunting buried money,” Lucas said.

“What?” Edmonds said. “Doing what, did you say?”

“Hunting buried money,” Lucas said. “Using my finding box. He rents it from me. That’s why I been had to stay up all night. To go with him and make sho’ I’d get the box back. But last night he never turnt up, so I reckon he’s done gone back wharever it was he come from.”

Edmonds sat in the swivel chair and stared at him. “Rents it from you? The same machine he sold you?”

“For twenty-five dollars a night,” Lucas said. “That’s what he chawged me to use hit one night. So I reckon that’s the regular rent on um. Leastways, that’s what I chawges.” Edmonds stared at him as he leaned against the counter with only the slight shrinkage of the jaws to show that he was an old man, in his clean, faded overalls and shirt and the open vest looped across by a heavy gold watch chain, and the thirty-dollar handmade beaver hat which Edmonds’s father had given him forty years ago above the face which was not sober and not grave but wore no expression whatever. It was absolutely impenetrable. “Because he was looking in the wrong place,” Lucas said. “He was looking up there on that hill. That money is buried down there by the creek. Them two white men that slipped in here that night three years ago and got clean away with twenty-two thousand dollars—” At last Edmonds got himself out of the chair and on to his feet. He was trembling. He drew a deep breath, walking steadily toward the old Negro leaning against the counter, his lower lip full of snuff. “And now that we done got shut of him,” Lucas said, “me and George Wilkins—” Walking steadily toward him, Edmonds expelled his breath. He had believed it would be a shout, but it was not much more than a whisper.

“Get out of here,” he said. “Go home. And don’t come back. Don’t ever come back. When you need supplies, send your wife after them.”

He stood in the worn, faded, clean overalls which Mannie herself had washed only a week ago, and heard the first clod strike the pine box. Soon he had one of the shovels himself, which in his hands (he was better than six feet and weighed better than two hundred pounds) resembled the toy shovel a child plays with at the shore, its half cubic foot of flung dirt no more than the light gout of sand the child’s shovel would have flung.

Another member of his sawmill gang touched his arm and said, “Lemme have hit, Rider.”

He didn’t even falter. He released one hand in midstroke and flung it backward, striking the other across the chest, jolting him back a step, and restored the hand to the moving shovel, flinging the dirt with that effortless fury so that the mound seemed to be rising of its own volition, not built up from above but thrusting visibly upward out of the earth itself, until at last the grave, save for its rawness, resembled any other, marked off without order about the barren plot by shards of pottery and broken bottles and old brick and other objects insignificant to sight but actually of a profound meaning and fatal to touch, which no white man could have read. Then he straightened up and with one hand flung the shovel quivering upright in the mound like a javelin and turned and began to walk away, walking on even when an old woman came out of the meager clump of his kin and friends and a few old people who had known him and his dead wife both since they were born, and grasped his forearm. She was his aunt. She had raised him. He could not remember his parents at all.

“Whar you gwine?” she said.

“Ah’m goan home,” he said.

“You don’t wants ter go back dar by yoself. You needs to eat. You come on home and eat.”

“Ah’m goan home,” he repeated, walking out from under her hand, his forearm like iron, as if the weight on it were no more than that of a fly, the other members of the mill gang whose head he was giving way quietly to let him pass. But before he reached the fence one of them overtook him; he did not need to be told it was his aunt’s messenger.

“Wait, Rider,” the other said. “We gots a jug in de bushes—” Then the other said what he had not intended to say, what he had never conceived of saying in circumstances like these, even though everybody knew it—the dead who either will not or cannot quit the earth yet, although the flesh they once lived in has been returned to it—let the preachers tell and reiterate and affirm how they left it not only without regret but with joy, mounting toward glory: “You don’t wants ter go back dar. She be wawkin yit.”

He didn’t pause, glancing down at the other, his eyes red at the inner corners in his high, slightly back-tilted head. “Lemme lone, Acey,” he said. “Doan mess wid me now,” and went on, stepping over the three-strand wire fence without even breaking his stride, and crossed the road and entered the woods. It was middle dusk when he emerged from them and crossed the last field, stepping over that fence too in one stride, into the lane. It was empty at this hour of Sunday evening—no family in wagon, no rider, no walkers churchward to speak to him and carefully refrain from looking after him when he had passed—the pale, powder-light, powder-dry dust of August from which the long week’s marks of hoof and wheel had been blotted by the strolling and unhurried Sunday shoes, with somewhere beneath them, vanished but not gone, fixed and held in the annealing dust, the narrow, splay-toed prints of his wife’s bare feet where on Saturday afternoons she would walk to the commissary to buy their next week’s supplies while he took his bath; himself, his own prints, setting the period now as he strode on, moving almost as fast as a smaller man could have trotted, his body breasting the air her body had vacated, his eyes touching the objects—post and tree and field and house and hill—her eyes had lost.