Collected Stories

  Now he seemed to sense, feel, the men who would be gathering with horses and guns and dogs—the curious, and the vengeful: men of Sutpen’s own kind, who had made the company about Sutpen’s table in the time when Wash himself had yet to approach nearer to the house than the scuppernong arbor—men who had also shown the lesser ones how to fight in battle, who maybe also had signed papers from the generals saying that they were among the first of the brave; who had also galloped in the old days arrogant and proud on the fine horses across the fine plantations—symbols also of admiration and hope; instruments too of despair and grief.

  That was whom they would expect him to run from. It seemed to him that he had no more to run from than he had to run to. If he ran, he would merely be fleeing one set of bragging and evil shadows for another just like them, since they were all of a kind throughout all the earth which he knew, and he was old, too old to flee far even if he were to flee. He could never escape them, no matter how much or how far he ran: a man going on sixty could not run that far. Not far enough to escape beyond the boundaries of earth where such men lived, set the order and the rule of living. It seemed to him that he now saw for the first time, after five years, how it was that Yankees or any other living armies had managed to whip them: the gallant, the proud, the brave; the acknowledged and chosen best among them all to carry courage and honor and pride. Maybe if he had gone to the war with them he would have discovered them sooner. But if he had discovered them sooner, what would he have done with his life since? How could he have borne to remember for five years what his life had been before?

  Now it was getting toward sunset. The child had been crying; when he went to the pallet he saw his granddaughter nursing it, her face still bemused, sullen, inscrutable. “Air you hungry yit?” he said.

  “I don’t want nothing.”

  “You ought to eat.”

  This time she did not answer at all, looking down at the child. He returned to his chair and found that the sun had set. “Hit kain’t be much longer,” he thought. He could feel them quite near now, the curious and the vengeful. He could even seem to hear what they were saying about him, the undercurrent of believing beyond the immediate fury: Old Wash Jones he come a tumble at last. He thought he had Sutpen, but Sutpen fooled him. He thought he had Kernel where he would have to marry the gal or pay up. And Kernel refused. “But I never expected that, Kernel!” he cried aloud, catching himself at the sound of his own voice, glancing quickly back to find his granddaughter watching him.

  “Who you talking to now?” she said.

  “Hit ain’t nothing. I was just thinking and talked out before I knowed hit.”

  Her face was becoming indistinct again, again a sullen blur in the twilight. “I reckon so. I reckon you’ll have to holler louder than that before he’ll hear you, up yonder at that house. And I reckon you’ll need to do more than holler before you get him down here too.”

  “Sho now,” he said. “Don’t you worry none.” But already thinking was going smoothly on: “You know I never. You know how I ain’t never expected or asked nothing from ara living man but what I expected from you. And I never asked that. I didn’t think hit would need. I said, I don’t need to. What need has a fellow like Wash Jones to question or doubt the man that General Lee himself says in a handwrote ticket that he was brave? Brave,” he thought. “Better if nara one of them had never rid back home in ’65”; thinking Better if his kind and mine too had never drawn the breath of life on this earth. Better that all who remain of us be blasted from the face of earth than that another Wash Jones should see his whole life shredded from him and shrivel away like a dried shuck thrown onto the fire.

  He ceased, became still. He heard the horses, suddenly and plainly; presently he saw the lantern and the movement of men, the glint of gun barrels, in its moving light. Yet he did not stir. It was quite dark now, and he listened to the voices and the sounds of underbrush as they surrounded the house. The lantern itself came on; its light fell upon the quiet body in the weeds and stopped, the horses tall and shadowy. A man descended and stooped in the lantern light, above the body. He held a pistol; he rose and faced the house. “Jones,” he said.

  “I’m here,” Wash said quietly from the window. “That you, Major?”

  “Come out.”

  “Sho,” he said quietly. “I just want to see to my granddaughter.”

  “We’ll see to her. Come on out.”

  “Sho, Major. Just a minute.”

  “Show a light. Light your lamp.”

  “Sho. In just a minute.” They could hear his voice retreat into the house, though they could not see him as he went swiftly to the crack in the chimney where he kept the butcher knife: the one thing in his slovenly life and house in which he took pride, since it was razor sharp. He approached the pallet, his granddaughter’s voice:

  “Who is it? Light the lamp, grandpaw.”

  “Hit won’t need no light, honey. Hit won’t take but a minute,” he said, kneeling, fumbling toward her voice, whispering now. “Where air you?”

  “Right here,” she said fretfully. “Where would I be? What is …” His hand touched her face. “What is … Grandpaw! Grand.…”

  “Jones!” the sheriff said. “Come out of there!”

  “In just a minute, Major,” he said. Now he rose and moved swiftly. He knew where in the dark the can of kerosene was, just as he knew that it was full, since it was not two days ago that he had filled it at the store and held it there until he got a ride home with it, since the five gallons were heavy. There were still coals on the hearth; besides, the crazy building itself was like tinder: the coals, the hearth, the walls exploding in a single blue glare. Against it the waiting men saw him in a wild instant springing toward them with the lifted scythe before the horses reared and whirled. They checked the horses and turned them back toward the glare, yet still in wild relief against it the gaunt figure ran toward them with the lifted scythe.

  “Jones!” the sheriff shouted; “stop! Stop, or I’ll shoot. Jones! Jones!” Yet still the gaunt, furious figure came on against the glare and roar of the flames. With the scythe lifted, it bore down upon them, upon the wild glaring eyes of the horses and the swinging glints of gun barrels, without any cry, any sound.

  Honor

  I WALKED right through the anteroom without stopping. Miss West says, “He’s in conference now,” but I didn’t stop. I didn’t knock, either. They were talking and he quit and looked up across the desk at me.

  “How much notice do you want to write me off?” I said.

  “Write you off?” he said.

  “I’m quitting,” I said. “Will one day be notice enough?”

  He looked at me, frog-eyed. “Isn’t our car good enough for you to demonstrate?” he said. His hand lay on the desk, holding the cigar. He’s got a ruby ring the size of a tail-light. “You’ve been with us three weeks,” he says. “Not long enough to learn what that word on the door means.”

  He don’t know it, but three weeks is pretty good; it’s within two days of the record. And if three weeks is a record with him, he could have shaken hands with the new champion without moving.

  The trouble is, I had never learned to do anything. You know how it was in those days, with even the college campuses full of British and French uniforms, and us all scared to death it would be over before we could get in and swank a pair of pilot’s wings ourselves. And then to get in and find something that suited you right down to the ground, you see.

  So after the Armistice I stayed in for a couple of years as a test pilot. That was when I took up wing-walking, to relieve the monotony. A fellow named Waldrip and I used to hide out at about three thousand on a Nine while I muscled around on top of it. Because Army life is pretty dull in peacetime: nothing to do but lay around and lie your head off all day and play poker all night. And isolation is bad for poker. You lose on tick, and on tick you always plunge.

  There was a fellow named White lost a thousand one night. He kept on losing a
nd I wanted to quit but I was winner and he wanted to play on, plunging and losing every pot. He gave me a check and I told him it wasn’t any rush, to forget it, because he had a wife out in California. Then the next night he wanted to play again. I tried to talk him out of it, but he got mad. Called me yellow. So he lost fifteen hundred more that night.

  Then I said I’d cut him, double or quit, one time. He cut a queen. So I said, “Well, that beats me. I won’t even cut.” And I flipped his cut over and riffled them and we saw a gob of face cards and three of the aces. But he insisted, and I said, “What’s the use? The percentage would be against me, even with a full deck.” But he insisted. I cut the case ace. I would have paid to lose. I offered again to tear up the checks, but he sat there and cursed me. I left him sitting at the table, in his shirt sleeves and his collar open, looking at the ace.

  The next day we had the job, the speed ship. I had done everything I could. I couldn’t offer him the checks again. I will let a man who is worked up curse me once. But I won’t let him twice. So we had the job, the speed ship. I wouldn’t touch it. He took it up five thousand feet and dived the wings off at two thousand with a full gun.

  So I was out again after four years, a civ again. And while I was still drifting around—that was when I first tried selling automobiles—I met Jack, and he told me about a bird that wanted a wing-walker for his barn-storming circus. And that was how I met her.

  II

  JACK—he gave me a note to Rogers—told me about what a good pilot Rogers was, and about her, how they said she was unhappy with him.

  “So is your old man,” I said.

  “That’s what they say,” Jack said. So when I saw Rogers and handed him the note—he was one of these lean, quiet-looking birds—I said to myself he was just the kind that would marry one of these flighty, passionate, good-looking women they used to catch during the war with a set of wings, and have her run out on him the first chance. So I felt safe. I knew she’d not have had to wait any three years for one like me.

  So I expected to find one of these long, dark, snake-like women surrounded by ostrich plumes and Woolworth incense, smoking cigarettes on the divan while Rogers ran out to the corner delicatessen for sliced ham and potato salad on paper plates. But I was wrong. She came in with an apron on over one of these little pale squashy dresses, with flour or something on her arms, without apologizing or flurrying around or anything. She said Howard—that was Rogers—had told her about me and I said, “What did he tell you?” But she just said:

  “I expect you’ll find this pretty dull for spending the evening, having to help cook your own dinner. I imagine you’d rather go out to dance with a couple of bottles of gin.”

  “Why do you think that?” I said. “Don’t I look like I could do anything else?”

  “Oh, don’t you?” she said.

  We had washed the dishes then and we were sitting in the firelight, with the lights off, with her on a cushion on the floor, her back against Rogers’ knees, smoking and talking, and she said, “I know you had a dull time. Howard suggested that we go out for dinner and to dance somewhere. But I told him you’d just have to take us as we are, first as well as later. Are you sorry?”

  She could look about sixteen, especially in the apron. By that time she had bought one for me to wear, and the three of us would all go back to the kitchen and cook dinner. “We don’t expect you to enjoy doing this any more than we do,” she said. “It’s because we are so poor. We’re just an aviator.”

  “Well, Howard can fly well enough for two people,” I said. “So that’s all right, too.”

  “When he told me you were just a flyer too, I said, ‘My Lord, a wing-walker? When you were choosing a family friend,’ I said, ‘why didn’t you choose a man we could invite to dinner a week ahead and not only count on his being there, but on his taking us out and spending his money on us?’ But he had to choose one that is as poor as we are.” And once she said to Rogers: “We’ll have to find Buck a girl, too. He’s going to get tired of just us some day.” You know how they say things like that: things that sound like they meant something until you look at them and find their eyes perfectly blank, until you wonder if they were even thinking about you, let alone talking about you.

  Or maybe I’d have them out to dinner and a show. “Only I didn’t mean that like it sounded,” she said. “That wasn’t a hint to take us out.”

  “Did you mean that about getting me a girl too?” I said.

  Then she looked at me with that wide, blank, innocent look. That was when I would take them by my place for a cocktail—Rogers didn’t drink, himself—and when I would come in that night I’d find traces of powder on my dresser or maybe her handkerchief or something, and I’d go to bed with the room smelling like she was still there. She said: “Do you want us to find you one?” But nothing more was ever said about it, and after a while, when there was a high step or any of those little things which men do for women that means touching them, she’d turn to me like it was me was her husband and not him; and one night a storm caught us downtown and we went to my place and she and Rogers slept in my bed and I slept in a chair in the sitting-room.

  One evening I was dressing to go out there when the ’phone rang. It was Rogers. “I am—” he said, then something cut him off. It was like somebody had put a hand on his mouth, and I could hear them talking, murmuring: her, rather. “Well, what—” Rogers says. Then I could hear her breathing into the mouth-piece, and she said my name.

  “Don’t forget you’re to come out to-night,” she said.

  “I hadn’t,” I said. “Or did I get the date wrong? If this is not the night—”

  “You come on out,” she said. “Goodbye.”

  When I got there he met me. His face looked like it always did, but I didn’t go in. “Come on in,” he said.

  “Maybe I got the date wrong,” I said. “So if you’ll just—”

  He swung the door back. “Come on in,” he said.

  She was lying on the divan, crying. I don’t know what; something about money. “I just can’t stick it,” she said. “I’ve tried and I’ve tried, but I just can’t stand it.”

  “You know what my insurance rates are,” he said. “If something happened, where would you be?”

  “Where am I, anyway? What tenement woman hasn’t got more than I have?” She hadn’t looked up, lying there on her face, with the apron twisted under her. “Why don’t you quit and do something that you can get a decent insurance rate, like other men?”

  “I must be getting along,” I said. I didn’t belong there. I just got out. He came down to the door with me, and then we were both looking back up the stairs toward the door where she was lying on her face on the couch.

  “I’ve got a little stake,” I said. “I guess because I’ve eaten so much of your grub I haven’t had time to spend it. So if it’s anything urgent.…” We stood there, he holding the door open. “Of course, I wouldn’t try to muscle in where I don’t …”

  “I wouldn’t, if I were you,” he said. He opened the door. “See you at the field tomorrow.”

  “Sure,” I said. “See you at the field.”

  I didn’t see her for almost a week, didn’t hear from her. I saw him every day, and at last I said, “How’s Mildred these days?”

  “She’s on a visit,” he said. “At her mother’s.”

  For the next two weeks I was with him every day. When I was out on top I’d look back at his face behind the goggles. But we never mentioned her name, until one day he told me she was home again and that I was invited out to dinner that night.

  It was in the afternoon. He was busy all that day hopping passengers, so I was doing nothing, just killing time waiting for evening and thinking about her, wondering some, but mostly just thinking about her being home again, breathing the same smoke and soot I was breathing, when all of a sudden I decided to go out there. It was plain as a voice saying, “Go out there. Now, at once.” So I went. I didn’t even wait to cha
nge. She was alone, reading before the fire. It was like gasoline from a broken line blazing up around you.

  III

  IT WAS FUNNY. When I’d be out on top I’d look back at his face behind the windscreen, wondering what he knew. He must have known almost at once. Why, say, she didn’t have any discretion at all. She’d say and do things, you know: insist on sitting close to me; touching me in that different way from when you hold an umbrella or a raincoat over them, and such that any man can tell at one look, when she thought he might not see: not when she knew he couldn’t, but when she thought maybe he wouldn’t. And when I’d unfasten my belt and crawl out I’d look back at his face and wonder what he was thinking, how much he knew or suspected.

  I’d go out there in the afternoon when he was busy. I’d stall around until I saw that he would be lined up for the rest of the day, then I’d give some excuse and beat it. One afternoon I was all ready to go, waiting for him to take off, when he cut the gun and leaned out and beckoned me. “Don’t go off,” he said. “I want to see you.”

  So I knew he knew then, and I waited until he made the last hop and was taking off his monkey suit in the office. He looked at me and I looked at him. “Come out to dinner,” he said.

  When I came in they were waiting. She had on one of those little squashy dresses and she came and put her arms around me and kissed me with him watching.

  “I’m going with you,” she said. “We’ve talked it over and have both agreed that we couldn’t love one another any more after this and that this is the only sensible thing to do. Then he can find a woman he can love, a woman that’s not bad like I am.”