Uncollected Stories of William Faulkner (86 page)

But you have to admire his courage, his conviction of invulnerability, and when Minnie Maude, still seeing unbelief in my eyes, says, “They spent week-end before last in Mottson, registered as man and wife,” I say:

“Hush. Do you want to cause a killing?”

She looks at me. “Who killing?”

“If you volunteer that information to everyone who stops here as you did to me, dont you know Mr Bowman will hear it? If they’ve got away with it this long, and even that I cant see how—”

She is watching me, her eyes no longer faraway; in them is that curious, weary tolerance with which they look at children sometimes. “Dont kid yourself, honey,” she says.

“What do you mean?” I say. But I suppose she doesn’t know. I suppose, knowing so much that is immediate and significant, they dont have to know. And so I went away.

He wears colored shirts; every afternoon he drinks coffee in the café with the men of the town dropping in and out again; outside the door the two dogs crouch, alert, choleric, lunging and snapping at the small boys who pause to chivvy them. When he emerges they fall in at his heels and halt again while he enters the drug store and buys a magazine, then with the magazine rolled under his arm, his hands in his pockets and his coat open upon his gaudy shirt and tie, he goes home.

Once I stopped him on the street, contriving to do it casually. It was raining that day, but his only concession was to button the top button of his coat, from beneath which a corner of the magazine peeped.

“Fine day for reading,” I said.

“Hey?” he said, cupping his ear, his slightly apoplectic eyes glaring pleasantly at me.

“Your magazine,” I said, touching it with my finger. “Do you ever read Balzac?”

“What’s that? Movie magazine? I dont think I ever saw it.”

“He’s a man,” I said. “A writer.”

“What does he write?”

“He wrote a good story about a banker named Nucingen.”

“I dont pay no attention to their names,” he said. He drew out the magazine and made to open it. It was
The Ladies’ Home Journal
.

“I doubt if there’s one in there this month,” I said. “You’ll get it wet, anyway.”

So he buttoned it into his coat again and went on, the dogs at his heels. I followed to the corner and saw him pass the express office on the opposite side of the street, his gait not hurried nor slackened, his head slanted into the rain. After a while I saw him cross the street and enter his tight little yard and hold the gate open for the dogs to precede him.

“He wash them dogs everyday,” the cook told. “Got a pair of these here long-sleeve gloves to catch them with. Then he sets the tub right in the middle of the kitchen floor and takes off the gloves and them dogs cutting his hands up like a razor and him cussing them scandalous. But he wash them right there, biting and all, and she dont say nothing about it. Then he gets out that magazine and sets there in my kitchen, in my way and me trying to git supper, reading about how to raise chillen right and asking me can I cook this or that where it’s got the picture with it to show. Me, that’s been cooking for better white folks than him for forty years. If he dont like the way I cook, he better git another one.”

I had not seen Don in seven years and had not heard from him in six and a half when I got the wire collect: HAVE GHOST FOR YOU CAN YOU COME AND GET IT NOW LEAVING MYSELF THIS WEEK. And I thought at once, ‘What in the world do I want with a ghost?’ and I reread the wire and the name of the place where it was sent—a Mississippi village so small that the name of the town was address sufficient for a person transient enough to leave at the end of the week—and I thought, ‘What in the world is he doing there?’

I found that out the next day. Don is an architect by vocation and an amateur painter by avocation. He was spending his two weeks’ vacation squatting behind an easel about the countryside, sketching colonial porticoes and houses and negro cabins and heads—hill niggers, different from those of the lowlands, the cities.

While we were at supper at the hotel that evening he told me about the ghost. The house was about six miles from the village, vacant these forty years. “It seems that this bird—his name was Sutpen—”

“—Colonel Sutpen,” I said.

“That’s not fair,” Don said.

“I know it,” I said. “Pray continue.”

“—seems that he found the land or swapped the Indians a stereopticon for it or won it at blackjack or something. Anyway—this must have been about ’40 or ’50—he imported him a foreign
architect and built him a house and laid out a park and gardens (you can still see the old paths and beds, bordered with brick) which would be a fitten setting for his lone jewel—”

“—a daughter named—”

“Wait,” Don said. “Here, now; I—”

“—named Azalea,” I said.

“Now we’re even,” Don said.

“I meant Syringa,” I said.

“Now I’m one up,” Don said. “Her name was Judith.”

“That’s what I meant, Judith.”

“All right. You tell, then.”

“Carry on,” I said. “I’ll behave.”

It seems that he had a son and a daughter both, as well as a wife—a florid, portly man, a little swaggering, who liked to ride fast to church of a Sunday. He rode fast there the last time he went, lying in a homemade coffin in his Confederate uniform, with his sabre and his embroidered gauntlets. That was in ’70. He had lived for five years since the war in the decaying house, alone with his daughter who was a widow without having been a wife, as they say. All the livestock was gone then except a team of spavined workhorses and a pair of two year old mules that had never been in double harness until they put them into the light wagon to carry the colonel to town to the Episcopal chapel that day. Anyway, the mules ran away and turned the wagon over and tumbled the colonel, sabre and plumes and all, into the ditch; from which Judith had him fetched back to the house, and read the service for the dead herself and buried him in the cedar grove where her mother and her husband already lay.

Judith’s nature had solidified a right smart by that time, the niggers told Don. “You know how women, girls, must have lived in those days. Sheltered. Not idle, maybe, with all the niggers to look after and such. But not breeding any highpressure real estate agents or lady captains of commerce. But she and her mother took care of the place while the men were away at the war, and after her mother died in ’63 Judith stayed on alone. Maybe waiting for her husband to come back kept her bucked up. She knew he was
coming back, you see. The niggers told me that never worried her at all. That she kept his room ready for him, same as she kept her father’s and brother’s rooms ready, changing the sheets every week until all the sheets save one set for each bed were gone to make lint and she couldn’t change them anymore.

“And then the war was over and she had a letter from him—his name was Charles Bon, from New Orleans—written after the surrender. She wasn’t surprised, elated, anything. ‘I knew it would be all right,’ she told the old nigger, the old one, the greatgrandmother, the one whose name was Sutpen too. ‘They will be home soon now.’ ‘They?’ the nigger said. ‘You mean, him and Marse Henry too? That they’ll both come back to the same roof after what has happened?’ And Judith said, ‘Oh. That. They were just children then. And Charles Bon is my husband now. Have you forgotten that?’ And the nigger said, ‘I aint forgot it. And Henry Sutpen aint forgot it neither.’ And (they were cleaning up the room then) Judith says, ‘They have got over that now. Dont you think the war could do that much?’ And the nigger said, ‘It all depends on what it is the war got to get over with.’

“What what was for the war to get over with?”

“That’s it,” Don said. “They didn’t seem to know. Or to care, maybe it was. Maybe it was just so long ago. Or maybe it’s because niggers are wiser than white folks and dont bother about
why
you do, but only about
what
you do, and not so much about that. This was what they told me. Not her, the old one, the one whose name was Sutpen too; I never did talk to her. I would just see her, sitting in a chair beside the cabin door, looking like she might have been nine years old when God was born. She’s pretty near whiter than she is black; a regular empress, maybe because she is white. The others, the rest of them, of her descendants, get darker each generation, like stairsteps kind of. They live in a cabin about a half mile from the house—two rooms and an open hall full of children and grandchildren and greatgrandchildren, all women. Not a man over eleven years old in the house. She sits there all day long where she can see the big house, smoking a pipe, her bare feet wrapped around a chair rung like an ape does, while the others work. And just let one stop, let up for a minute. You can hear her a mile, and her looking no bigger than one of these half lifesize dolls-of-all-nations in the church bazaar. Not moving except to take the pipe
out of her mouth: ‘You, Sibey!’ or ‘You, Abum!’ or ‘You, Rose!’ That’s all she has to say.

“But the others talked; the grandmother, the old one’s daughter, of what she had seen as a child or heard her mother tell. She told me how the old woman used to talk a lot, telling the stories over and over, until about forty years ago. Then she quit talking, telling the stories, and the daughter said that sometimes the old woman would get mad and say such and such a thing never happened at all and tell them to hush their mouths and get out of the house. But she said that before that she had heard the stories so much that now she never could remember whether she had seen something or just heard it told. I went there several times, and they told me about the old days before the war, about the fiddles and the lighted hall and the fine horses and carriages in the drive, the young men coming thirty and forty and fifty miles, courting Judith. And one coming further than that: Charles Bon. He and Judith’s brother were the same age. They had met one another at school—”

“University of Virginia,” I said. “Bayard attenuated 1000 miles. Out of the wilderness proud honor periodical regurgitant.”

“Wrong,” Don said. “It was the University of Mississippi. They were of the tenth graduating class since its founding—almost charter members, you might say.”

“I didn’t know there were ten in Mississippi that went to school then.”

“—you might say. It was not far from Henry’s home, and (he kept a pair of saddle horses and a groom and a dog, descendant of a pair of shepherds which Colonel Sutpen had brought back from Germany: the first police dogs Mississippi, America, maybe, had ever seen) once a month perhaps he would make the overnight ride and spend Sunday at home. One weekend he brought Charles Bon home with him. Charles had probably heard of Judith. Maybe Henry had a picture of her, or maybe Henry had bragged a little. And maybe Charles got himself invited to go home with Henry without Henry being aware that this had happened. As Charles’ character divulged (or became less obscure as circumstances circumstanced, you might say) it began to appear as if Charles might be that sort of a guy. And Henry that sort of a guy too, you might say.

“Now, get it. The two young men riding up to the colonial
portico, and Judith leaning against the column in a white dress—”

“—with a red rose in her dark hair—”

“All right. Have a rose. But she was blonde. And them looking at one another, her and Charles. She had been around some, of course. But to other houses like the one she lived in, lives no different from the one she knew: patriarchial and generous enough, but provincial after all. And here was Charles, young—” We said, “and handsome” in the same breath. (“Dead heat,” Don said) “and from New Orleans, prototype of what today would be a Balkan archduke at the outside. Especially after that visit. The niggers told how after that, every Tuesday
A.M
. Charles’ nigger would arrive after his allnight ride, with a bouquet of flowers and a letter, and sleep for a while in the barn and then ride back again.”

“Did Judith use the same column all the time, or would she change, say, twice a week?”

“Column?”

“To lean against. Looking up the road.”

“Oh,” Don said. “Not while they were away at the war, her father and brother and Charles. I asked the nigger what they—those two women—did while they were living there alone. ‘Never done nothin. Jes hid de silver in de back gyarden, and et whut dey could git.’ Isn’t that fine? So simple. War is so much simpler than people think. Just bury the silver, and eat what you can git.”

“Oh, the war,” I said. “I think this should count as just one: Did Charles save Henry’s life or did Henry save Charles’ life?”

“Now I am two up,” Don said. “They never saw each other during the war, until at the end of it. Here’s the dope. Here are Henry and Charles, close as a married couple almost, rooming together at the university, spending their holidays and vacations under Henry’s roof, where Charles was treated like a son by the old folks, and was the acknowledged railhorse of Judith’s swains; even acknowledged so by Judith after a while. Overcame her maiden modesty, maybe. Or put down her maiden dissimulation, more like—”

“Ay. More like.”

“Ay. Anyway, the attendance of saddle horses and fast buggies fell off, and in the second summer (Charles was an orphan, with a guardian in New Orleans—I never did find out just how Charles came to be in school way up in North Mississippi) when Charles
decided that perhaps he had better let his guardian see him in the flesh maybe, and went home, he took with him Judith’s picture in a metal case that closed like a book and locked with a key, and left behind him a ring.

“And Henry went with him, to spend the summer as Charles’ guest in turn. They were to be gone all summer, but Henry was back in three weeks. They—the niggers—didn’t know what had happened. They just knew that Henry was back in three weeks instead of three months, and that he tried to make Judith send Charles back his ring.”

“And so Judith pined and died, and there’s your unrequited ghost.”

“She did no such thing. She refused to send back the ring and she dared Henry to tell what was wrong with Charles, and Henry wouldn’t tell. Then the old folks tried to get Henry to tell what it was, but he wouldn’t do it. So it must have been pretty bad, to Henry at least. But the engagement wasn’t announced yet; maybe the old folks decided to see Charles and see if some explanation was coming forth between him and Henry, since whatever it was, Henry wasn’t going to tell it. It appears that Henry was that sort of a guy, too.