Complete works of willia.., p.232
Complete Works of William Faulkner, page 232
— I have seen Charles Bon, Henry.
Henry says nothing. It is coming now. He says nothing, he merely stares at his father — the two of them in leaf-faded gray, a single candle, a crude tent walling them away from a darkness where alert pickets face one another and where weary men sleep without shelter, waiting for dawn and the firing, the weary backward walking to commence again: yet in a second tent candle gray and all are gone and it is the holly-decked Christmas library at Sutpen’s Hundred four years ago and the table not a camp table suitable for the spreading of maps but the heavy carved rosewood one at home with the group photograph of his mother and sister and himself sitting upon it, his father behind the table and behind his father the window above the garden where Judith and Bon strolled in that slow rhythm where the heart matches the footsteps and the eyes need only look at one another.
— You are going to let him marry Judith, Henry.
Still Henry does not answer. It has all been said before, and now he has had four years of bitter struggle following which, whether it be victory or defeat which he has gained, at least he has gained it and has peace now, even if the peace be mostly despair.
— He cannot marry her, Henry.
Now Henry speaks.
— You said that before. I told you then. And now, and now it wont be much longer now and then we wont have anything left: honor nor pride nor God since God quit us four years ago only He never thought it necessary to tell us; no shoes nor clothes and no need for them; not only no land to make food out of but no need for the food and when you dont have God and honor and pride, nothing matters except that there is the old mindless meat that dont even care if it was defeat or victory, that wont even die, that will be out in the woods and fields, grubbing up roots and weeds. — Yes. I have decided, Brother or not, I have decided. I will. I will.
— He must not marry her, Henry.
— Yes. I said Yes at first, but I was not decided then. I didn’t let him. But now I have had four years to decide in. I will. I am going to.
— He must not marry her, Henry. His mother’s father told me that her mother had been a Spanish woman. I believed him; it was not until after he was born that I found out that his mother was part negro.
Nor did Henry ever say that he did not remember leaving the tent. He remembers all of it. He remembers stooping through the entrance again and passing the sentry again; he remembers walking back down the cut and rutted road, stumbling in the dark among the ruts on either side of which the fires have now died to embers, so that he can barely distinguish the men sleeping on the earth about them. It must be better than eleven oclock, he thinks. And another eight miles tomorrow. If it were only not for those damned guns. Why doesn’t Old Joe give the guns to Sherman. Then we could make twenty miles a day. We could join Lee then. At least Lee stops and fights some of the time. He remembers it. He remembers how he did not return to his fire but stopped presently in a lonely place and leaned against a pine, leaning quietly and easily, with his head back so he could look up at the shabby shaggy branches like something in wrought iron spreading motionless against the chill vivid stars of early spring, thinking I hope he remembers to thank Colonel Willow for letting us use his tent, thinking not what he would do but what he would have to do. Because he knew what he would do; it now depended on what Bon would do, would force him to do, since he knew that he would do it. So I must go to him, he thought, thinking, Now it is better than two oclock and it will be dawn soon.
Then it was dawn, or almost, and it was cold: a chill which struck through the worn patched thin clothing, through the something of weariness and undernourishment; the passive ability, not the volitional will, to endure; there was light somewhere, enough of it for him to distinguish Bon’s sleeping face from among the others where he lay wrapped in his blankets, beneath his spread cloak; enough light for him to wake Bon by and for Bon to distinguish his face (or perhaps something communicated by Henry’s hand) because Bon does not speak, demand to know who it is: he merely rises and puts the cloak about his shoulders and approaches the smoldering fire and is kicking it into a blaze when Henry speaks:
— Wait.
Bon pauses and looks at Henry; now he can see Henry’s face. He says,
— You will be cold. You are cold now. You haven’t been asleep, have you? Here.
He swings the cloak from his shoulders and holds it out.
— No, Henry says.
— Yes. Take it. I’ll get my blanket.
Bon puts the cloak about Henry and goes and takes up his tumbled blanket and swings it about his shoulders, and they move aside and sit on a log. Now it is dawn. The east is gray; it will be primrose soon and then red with firing and once more the weary backward marching will begin, retreating from annihilation, falling back upon defeat, though not quite yet. There will be a little time yet for them to sit side by side upon the log in the making light of dawn, the one in the cloak, the other in the blanket; their voices are not much louder than the silent dawn itself:
— So it’s the miscegenation, not the incest, which you cant bear.
Henry doesn’t answer.
— And he sent me no word? He did not ask you to send me to him? No word to me, no word at all? That was all he had to do, now, today; four years ago or at any time during the four years. That was all. He would not have needed to ask it, require it, of me. I would have offered it. I would have said, I will never see her again before he could have asked it of me. He did not have to do this, Henry. He didn’t need to tell you I am a nigger to stop me. He could have stopped me without that, Henry.
— No! Henry cries. — No! No! I will — I’ll ——
He springs up; his face is working; Bon can see his teeth within the soft beard which covers his sunken cheeks, and the whites of Henry’s eyes as though the eyeballs struggled in their sockets as the panting breath struggled in his lungs — the panting which ceased, the breath held, the eyes too looking down at him where he sat on the log, the voice now not much louder than an expelled breath:
— You said, could have stopped you. What do you mean by that?
Now it is Bon who does not answer, who sits on the log looking at the face stooped above him. Henry says, still in that voice no louder than breathing:
— But now? You mean you ——
— Yes. What else can I do now? I gave him the choice. I have been giving him the choice for four years.
— Think of her. Not of me: of her.
— I have. For four years. Of you and her. Now I am thinking of myself.
— No, Henry says. — No. No.
— I cannot?
— You shall not.
— Who will stop me, Henry?
— No, Henry says. — No. No. No.
Now it is Bon who watches Henry; he can see the whites of Henry’s eyes again as he sits looking at Henry with that expression which might be called smiling. His hand vanishes beneath the blanket and reappears, holding his pistol by the barrel, the butt extended toward Henry.
— Then do it now, he says.
Henry looks at the pistol; now he is not only panting, he is trembling; when he speaks now his voice is not even the exhalation, it is the suffused and suffocating inbreath itself:
— You are my brother.
— No I’m not. I’m the nigger that’s going to sleep with your sister. Unless you stop me, Henry.
Suddenly Henry grasps the pistol, jerks it free of Bon’s hand stands so, the pistol in his hand, panting and panting; again Bon can see the whites of his inrolled eyes while he sits on the log and watches Henry with that faint expression about the eyes and mouth which might he smiling.
— Do it now, Henry, he says.
Henry whirls; in the same motion he hurls the pistol from him and stoops again, gripping Bon by both shoulders, panting.
— You shall not! he says. — You shall not! Do you hear me?
Bon does not move beneath the gripping hands; he sits motionless, with his faint fixed grimace; his voice is gentler than that first breath in which the pine branches begin to move a little:
— You will have to stop me, Henry. “And he never slipped away,” Shreve said. “He could have, but he never even tried. Jesus, maybe he even went to Henry and said, ‘I’m going, Henry’ and maybe they left together and rode side by side dodging Yankee patrols all the way back to Mississippi and right up to that gate; side by side and it only then that one of them ever rode ahead or dropped behind and that only then Henry spurred ahead and turned his horse to face Bon and took out the pistol; and Judith and Clytie heard the shot, and maybe Wash Jones was hanging around somewhere in the back yard and so he was there to help Clytie and Judith carry him into the house and lay him on the bed, and Wash went to town to tell the Aunt Rosa and the Aunt Rosa comes boiling out that afternoon and finds Judith standing without a tear before the closed door, holding the metal case she had given him with her picture in it but that didn’t have her picture in it now but that of the octoroon and the kid. And your old man wouldn’t know about that too: why the black son a of bitch should have taken her picture out and put the octoroon’s picture in, so he invented a reason for it. But I know. And you know too. Dont you? Dont you, huh?” He glared at Quentin, leaning forward over the table now, looking huge and shapeless as a bear in his swaddling of garments. “Dont you know? It was because he said to himself, ‘If Henry dont mean what he said, it will be all right; I can take it out and destroy it. But if he does mean what he said, it will be the only way I will have to say to her, I was no good; do not grieve for me.’ Aint that right? Aint it? By God, aint it?”
“Yes,” Quentin said.
“Come on,” Shreve said. “Let’s get out of this refrigerator and go to bed.”
IX
AT FIRST, IN bed in the dark, it seemed colder than ever, as if there had been some puny quality of faint heat in the single light bulb before Shreve turned it off and that now the iron and impregnable dark had become one with the iron and icelike bedclothing lying upon the flesh slacked and thin-clad for sleeping. Then the darkness seemed to breathe, to flow back; the window which Shreve had opened became visible against the faintly unearthly glow of the outer snow as, forced by the weight of the darkness, the blood surged and ran warmer, warmer. “University of Mississippi,” Shreve’s voice said in the darkness to Quentin’s right. “Bayard attenuated forty miles (it was forty miles, wasn’t it?); out of the wilderness proud honor semesterial regurgitant.”
“Yes,” Quentin said. “They were in the tenth graduating class since it was founded.”
“I didn’t know there were ten in Mississippi that went to school at one time,” Shreve said. Quentin didn’t answer. He lay watching the rectangle of window, feeling the warming blood driving through his veins, his arms and legs. And now, although he was warm and though while he had sat in the cold room he merely shook faintly and steadily, now he began to jerk all over, violently and uncontrollably until he could even hear the bed, until even Shreve felt it and turned, raising himself (by the sound) onto his elbow to look at Quentin, though Quentin himself felt perfectly all right. He felt fine even, lying there and waiting in peaceful curiosity for the next violent unharbingered jerk to come. “Jesus, are you that cold?” Shreve said. “Do you want me to spread the overcoats on you?”
“No,” Quentin said. “I’m not cold. I’m all right. I feel fine.”
“Then what are you doing that for?”
“I dont know. I cant help it. I feel fine.”
“All right. But let me know if you want the coats. Jesus, if I was going to have to spend nine months in this climate, I would sure hate to have come from the South. Maybe I wouldn’t come from the South anyway, even if I could stay there. Wait. Listen. I’m not trying to be funny, smart. I just want to understand it if I can and I dont know how to say it better. Because it’s something my people haven’t got. Or if we have got it, it all happened long ago across the water and so now there aint anything to look at every day to remind us of it. We dont live among defeated grandfathers and freed slaves (or have I got it backward and was it your folks that are free and the niggers that lost?) and bullets in the dining room table and such, to be always reminding us to never forget. What is it? something you live and breathe in like air? a kind of vacuum filled with wraithlike and indomitable anger and pride and glory at and in happenings that occurred and ceased fifty years ago? a kind of entailed birthright father and son and father and son of never forgiving General Sherman, so that forevermore as long as your children’s children produce children you wont be anything but a descendant of a long line of colonels killed in Pickett’s charge at Manassas?”
“Gettysburg,” Quentin said. “You cant understand it. You would have to be born there.”
“Would I then?” Quentin did not answer. “Do you understand it?”
“I dont know,” Quentin said. “Yes, of course I understand it.” They breathed in the darkness. After a moment Quentin said: “I dont know.”
“Yes. You dont know. You dont even know about the old dame, the Aunt Rosa.”
“Miss Rosa,” Quentin said.
“All right. You dont even know about her. Except that she refused at the last to be a ghost. That after almost fifty years she couldn’t reconcile herself to letting him lie dead in peace. That even after fifty years she not only could get up and go out there to finish up what she found she hadn’t quite completed, but she could find someone to go with her and bust into that locked house because instinct or something told her it was not finished yet. Do you?”
“No,” Quentin said peacefully. He could taste the dust. Even now, with the chill pure weight of the snow-breathed New England air on his face, he could taste and feel the dust of that breathless (rather, furnace-breathed) Mississippi September night. He could even smell the old woman in the buggy beside him, smell the fusty camphor-reeking shawl and even the airless black cotton umbrella in which (he would not discover until they had reached the house) she had concealed a hatchet and a flashlight. He could smell the horse; he could hear the dry plaint of the light wheels in the weightless permeant dust and he seemed to feel the dust itself move sluggish and dry across his sweating flesh just as he seemed to hear the single profound suspiration of the parched earth’s agony rising toward the imponderable and aloof stars. Now she spoke, for the first time since they had left Jefferson, since she had climbed into the buggy with a kind of clumsy and fumbling and trembling eagerness (which he thought derived from terror, alarm, until he found that he was quite wrong) before he could help her, to sit on the extreme edge of the seat, small, in the fusty shawl and clutching the umbrella, leaning forward as if by leaning forward she would arrive the sooner, arrive immediately after the horse and before he, Quentin, would, before the prescience of her desire and need could warn its consummation. “Now,” she said. “We are on the Domain. On his land, his and Ellen’s and Ellen’s descendants. They have taken it away from them since, I understand. But it still belongs to him, to Ellen and her descendants.” But Quentin was already aware of that. Before she spoke he had said to himself, ‘Now. Now’ and (as during the long hot afternoon in the dim hot little house) it seemed to him that if he stopped the buggy and listened, he might even hear the galloping hoofs; might even see at any moment now the black stallion and the rider rush across the road before them and gallop on — the rider who at one time owned, lock stock and barrel, everything he could see from a given point, with every stick and blade and hoof and heel on it to remind him (if he ever forgot it) that he was the biggest thing in their sight and in his own too; who went to war to protect it and lost the war and returned home to find that he had lost more than the war even, though not absolutely all; who said At least I have life left but did not have life but only old age and breathing and horror and scorn and fear and indignation: and all remaining to look at him with unchanged regard was the girl who had been a child when he saw her last, who doubtless used to watch him from window or door as he passed unaware of her as she would have looked at God probably, since everything else within her view belonged to him too. Maybe he would even stop at the cabin and ask for water and she would take the bucket and walk the mile and back to the spring to fetch it fresh and cool for him, no more thinking of saying “The bucket is empty” to him than she would have said it to God — this the not-all, since at least there was breathing left.
Now Quentin began to breathe hard again, who had been peaceful for a time in the warm bed, breathing hard the heady pure snowborn darkness. She (Miss Coldfield) did not let him enter the gate. She said “Stop” suddenly; he felt her hand flutter on his arm and he thought, ‘Why, she is afraid.’ He could hear her panting now, her voice almost a wail of diffident yet iron determination: “I dont know what to do. I dont know what to do.” (‘I do,’ he thought. ‘Go back to town and go to bed.’) But he did not say it. He looked at the two huge rotting gate posts in the starlight, between which no gates swung now, wondering from what direction Bon and Henry had ridden up that day, wondering what had cast the shadow which Bon was not to pass alive; if some living tree which still lived and bore leaves and shed or if some tree gone, vanished, burned for warmth and food years ago now or perhaps just gone; or if it had been one of the two posts themselves, thinking, wishing that Henry were there now to stop Miss Coldfield and turn them back, telling himself that if Henry were there now, there would be no shot to be heard by anyone. “She’s going to try to stop me,” Miss Coldfield whimpered. “I know she is. Maybe this far from town, out here alone at midnight, she will even let that negro man —— And you didn’t even bring a pistol. Did you?”
