Uncollected Stories of William Faulkner (81 page)

“A lot of you have already gone. I’m not talking to them. A lot of you have made your plans to go. I’m not talking to them either. But there are some of you that could go and would go, only you believe it will be over before you could get into a fight, see a Yankee’s coat tail. It’s them I’m talking to.” The listener could see them: the rigid gray line beneath the new flag and the white eyeballs of the negroes in the balcony, the man in the crimson sash and negligent propped sabre who would be dead in seven months, the young girls in spread skirts like a cluster of butterflies, the ranked gilded chairs beneath the high windows where the snow murmured. “You have all heard of Virginia since Bull Run. But you haven’t seen it. Washington, New York. But haven’t seen it.” Then he drew from his coat the stamped and sealed paper and opened it and read it aloud: … 
empowered by the President of the Confederate States of America
.…

They shouted then, the women too. They yelled. Possibly some of them had not seen the gray uniform before, but probably none of them had ever heard that sound before; the first time it fell on their ears it came from their own throats, not invented by any one individual but springing simultaneously from a race, invented (if invented) not by man but by his doom. And it outlived even the doom. The listener, the boy of six, grew to manhood and became trusted, trustworthy, and successful, with a place higher in the social and economic fabric of his chosen milieu than most others. In his forty-fifth year he made a business trip to New York, where
he met the father of the man he had come to see, an old man who had been in Shields’ Corps in the Valley ’62. He knew it, remembered it. “Sometimes I hear it even yet,” he told the southerner. “Even after fifty years. And I wake up sweating.” And there was another whom the boy was to know later, a man named Mullen who had been in Forrest’s cavalry command, who went West and returned on a visit and told about a youth who rode down a Kansas street in ’78 yelling “Yaaaiiihhh! Yaaaiiihhh!” and firing his pistol into the saloon doors until a deputy marshal behind a garbage heap shot him off the horse with a sawed-off shotgun loaded with slugs, and how they gathered about the youth bleeding to death on the ground and Mullen said, “Son, whar was it your pappy fit?” and the youth said, “Wharever there was Yankees, same as me. Yaaaiiihhh!”

Thus the listener heard it: how at another signal from Blount the music struck up again and the girls formed single file behind Blount’s partner and so passed along the battalion front, kissing the men one after another, Lewis Randolph among them, kissing a hundred and four men, a hundred and three men that is because she gave Charles Gordon a red rose from his own bouquet and even thirty years afterward the listener heard from an eye-witness that the kiss which went with it was no fleet passage of laughing lips like the touch of a flying foot on the pebble of a ford. And when the troop train departed she was in it, hoisted through a window in the blind side while on the platform itself the faces of the other girls, centered by the petal-like spread of their skirts, seemed to float like severed flowers on a dark stream, while her mother gossipped placidly and waited for her in the armory a mile away. She travelled to Nashville in a day coach full of soldiers, with Charles Gordon’s cloak over her ball gown and they were married by a private (who happened to be a minister) in a battalion waiting there to entrain, on the snow-bound platform with a whole regiment for witnesses while the ice-caked telegraph wires looping overhead crackled and hummed with the outraged commands of her mother addressed to every station between Memphis and Bristol; she was married in the ball gown and the officer’s cloak in the snow, with not a hair turned though she had not slept in thirty hours, in a hollow square of youthful faces none of which had heard a bullet yet all of whom believed they were going to die. Four hours later the troop train went on and fifteen hours later she was
back in Memphis, with a letter written by Gordon on the back of a fly-specked menu from the station eating-room to the mother who was no longer frantic but just grimly and coldly outraged. “Married?” the mother cried. “Married?”

“Yes! And I’m going to have a baby too!”

“Nonsense! Nonsense!”

“I am! I am! I tried hard enough.”

They returned home to Mississippi. It was a big square house twenty-five miles from any town. It had a park, flower beds, a rose garden. During that winter the two women knitted socks and mufflers and made shirts and first aid packs for the men of the steadily growing company and they embroidered the colors for it, with negro girls from the quarters to pick and iron the bright fragmentary silk. The lot, the stable, was full of strange horses and mules, the lawns and park dotted with tents and littered with refuse; from the high room where they worked the two women heard all day long heavy boots in the hall and the loud voices about the punch bowl in the diningroom while the melting frost and sleet of the departing winter gathered in the prints of heavy heels among the broken and ruined roses. In the evenings there would be a bonfire and oratory, the glare of the fire red and fierce upon the successive speakers, the motionless heads of slaves in silhouette along the fence between the fire and the portico where the women white and black, mistress daughter and slave, huddled in shawls and listened to the voices orotund and sonorous and meaningless above the gestures of flung and senseless pantomime.

At last the company departed. The talking, the boots in the hall were gone and after a while even the rubbish and litter; the scarred lawn healed gradually under the rains of spring, leaving only the ruined flower beds and boxwood hedges, the house quiet again with only the two women and the negroes in the quarters, their voices, the measured sound of axe-strokes and the smell of woodsmoke coming peacefully up through the long spring twilights. Now the old monotonous unoriginal tale began. It was not new. It was just one of the thousand repetitions through the South during that year and the next two, not of actual suffering yet but merely that attenuation of hardship, that unceasing demand upon endurance without hope or even despair—that excruciating repetition which is Tragedy’s tragedy, as if Tragedy had a childlike faith in the efficacy of the plot simply because it had worked once—an economic system
which had outlived its place in time, a land empty of men who rode out of it not to engage a mortal enemy as they believed but to batter themselves to pieces against a force with which they were unequipped by both heredity and inclination to cope and of which those whom they charged and counter-charged were not champions so much as victims too; armed with convictions and beliefs a thousand years out of date they galloped gallantly behind the bright bunting of a day and vanished, not in battle-smoke but beyond the irrevocable curtain-fall of an era, an age, where, fleshless and immolated, they might bang themselves forever against no foe and without pain or hurt in elysian fields beneath a halted sun; behind them proscenium and footlights died. Some of them returned to be sure, but they were shadows, dazed bewildered and impotent, creeping back onto the darkened stage where the old tale had had its way and surfeited: a woman or women who after the trampling and flags and trumpets were gone looked about and found themselves alone in remote houses about a sparsely-settled land populated in overwhelming proportion by a race dark and, even in normal times, unpredictable, half child and half savage, a land, a way of living, to be held together by hands trained only for needlework, the very holding together of which offered but one certainty: that next year there would be even less food and security than this year, and into which reports of far-away battles came like momentary and soundless lightning-glares, unreal and dreamlike, brought by word-of-mouth months after the slain had begun to rot (these dead nameless too, whether father brother husband son or not report would not know)—then the beginning and growing rumor of violence and pillage nearer and nearer and the woman or women sitting in unlighted rooms waiting for the quarters to settle down for the night in order to bury in secret a little silver in garden or orchard (with hands not quite so soft now) and not knowing even then what ears might be listening from what shadow. Then the watching and waiting, the unflagging petty struggle for existence, sustenance—ditch-bank and woods-edge combed for weeds and acorns to support life in bodies denied even the ultimate of starvation, denied not life but merely hope, as if the sole aim of the debacle were clinical: merely to ascertain just how much will and flesh could endure.

They—the two women—served it. When the house was quiet again they began to prepare for the child which would come in the
fall. The older woman did that is, because the daughter was superintending the planting of the year’s crop, the cotton and the feed—the mother in the high room where they had made the flags, with a negro woman to help her with the ironing and the infinitesimal stitching and running of ribbons while the daughter followed the plows to the field, on a horse until the mother forced her to desist, then in a battered buckboard, the plowhands throwing down gaps in the rail fences so she could pass through and sit in the buckboard and watch the gathering of the cotton in the bright hot days of September as her father had done before her—a crop which was ginned and sent to the county seat to be sold and vanished there, disappeared, where to they did not know and had no time to try to discover for in the last week of September the child was born, a boy, they named him Randolph; there was a negro midwife but no doctor and a week later a neighbor from ten miles away rode up, a man too old for fighting: “There was a big battle up beyond Corinth. General Johnston was killed, and They are in Memphis now. You had better come to us. At least there will be a man in the house.”

“Thank you,” the mother said. “Mr. Randolph (he had gone into that battle without coming out of it, along with Gavin Blount, though Blount’s body was later found.) will expect to find us here when he returns.”

The equinoctial rains began that day. By nightfall it had turned cold and that night the daughter waked suddenly, knowing that her mother was not in the house and knowing also where the older woman would be. The child’s negro nurse was asleep on a pallet in the hall but the daughter did not call, she just rose from the bed, covering the child snugly and holding to the bedpost until the waves of weakness and dizziness subsided. Then in the pair of her father’s heavy shoes which she wore to the fields and with a shawl clutched about her head and shoulders and holding to the stair rail for support, she descended and entered the rain itself, the strong steady black wind full of icy rain particles which actually supported her, held her erect as she leaned into it, clutching the streaming shawl but making no sound until she reached the orchard and even then not loud but merely peremptory and urgent: “Mother! Mother!” the older woman’s reply calm too, even a little irritable, from somewhere about her feet:

“Careful now. Dont you fall in too. It’s my leg. I cant move.”
The daughter could see a little now, as if the driving rain particles were faintly incandescent, holding in each drop something of the departed day and disseminating it—the heavy trunk which the older woman had got there single-handed from the house, how, the daughter never knew, the pit which she had dug and into which she had fallen.

“How long have you been there?” the daughter cried, already turning back toward the house, running, the older woman calling after her in that same cold sharp voice, forbidding her to call the negroes, repeating “the silver. The silver”, the daughter calling toward the house, still not loud, just peremptory and urgent. Presently the nurse came with two negro men. They lifted the older woman from the pit.

“Joanna can help me into the house,” she said. “You stay and see that Will and Awce bury the trunk.” But the two men had to carry her, though it was not until the next morning that they found for certain the hip was broken. And though a doctor came that day the mother died three nights later from pneumonia, not telling even then how she had got the heavy trunk out there nor how long she had lain in the pit slowly filling with rain. So they buried her, and they concealed carefully the marks of digging above the buried trunk; and now in the buckboard again, the child wrapped in a blanket beside her, the daughter watched the building of a hidden pen for the hogs deep in the river bottom and the gathering and cribbing of the corn. They would have food but little else, since the cotton, the money crop, had vanished. In a row of heterogeneous and carefully labelled bottles and phials in her father’s desk were the seeds hoarded in the summer from the kitchen garden; in the next spring she watched the planting of them, and in the man’s shoes and now in a pair of her father’s trousers, in the buckboard with the child beside her (he was to be weaned, he was to learn to walk and talk in that buckboard; he ate and slept in it across his mother’s lap, feeling against his side the hard shape of the derringer in her pocket) she saw the corn planted and then gathered again. During that year she received two letters. The first one was in the shaky script of an old man (she did not even recognise it to be her father’s hand at first) on soiled cheap paper in a soiled envelope, addressed to her mother from Rock Island Prison. The second she did know. It was the same bold dashing sprawl she had fetched
back from Nashville on the fly-specked bill-of-fare. He had been wounded, not bad; the paragraph devoted to his stay in the Richmond hospital had an almost Lucullan tone. He had been transferred to the Department of the West, he was now having a single day with his parents, following which he would join Van Dorn’s cavalry corps on an expedition (destination unstated) the conclusion of which would leave him within a day’s ride of that son whom he had never seen and to whom he sent his duty. But he never reached home. One night he rode howling into Holly Springs behind Van Dorn’s long floating hair and the next day his body was identified from one of his wife’s letters by an old man who had shot him from his kitchen door, apparently in the act of breaking into the chicken-roost.