Collected Stories

  “Bathe where? In whut? Dese folks aint never seed a bathtub.”

  “Bathe at the well. Is my shirt ready?”

  “Whut dey is of it.… You put dat pistol back, Marse Soshay. I ghy tell yo maw on you. I ghy tell um. I just wish Marster was here.”

  “Go to the kitchen,” Weddel said. “Tell them I wish to bathe in the well house. Ask them to draw the curtain on that window there.” The pistol had vanished beneath the grey cloak. He went to the stall where the Thoroughbred was. The horse nuzzled at him, its eyes rolling soft and wild. He patted its nose with his left hand. It whickered, not loud, its breath sweet and warm.

  IV

  THE NEGRO entered the kitchen from the rear. He had removed the oilcloth tent and he now wore a blue forage cap which, like the overcoat, was much too large for him, resting upon the top of his head in such a way that the unsupported brim oscillated faintly when he moved as though with a life of its own. He was completely invisible save for his face between cap and collar like a dried Dyak trophy and almost as small and dusted lightly over as with a thin pallor of wood ashes by the cold. The older woman was at the stove on which frying food now hissed and sputtered; she did not look up when the Negro entered. The girl was standing in the middle of the room, doing nothing at all. She looked at the Negro, watching him with a slow, grave, secret, unwinking gaze as he crossed the kitchen with that air of swaggering caricatured assurance, and upended a block of wood beside the stove and sat upon it.

  “If disyer is de kind of weather yawl has up here all de time,” he said, “I dont care ef de Yankees does has dis country.” He opened the overcoat, revealing his legs and feet as being wrapped, shapeless and huge, in some muddy and anonymous substance resembling fur, giving them the appearance of two muddy beasts the size of halfgrown dogs lying on the floor; moving a little nearer the girl, the girl thought quietly Hit’s fur. He taken and cut up a fur coat to wrap his feet in “Yes, suh,” the Negro said. “Just yawl let me git home again, en de Yankees kin have all de rest of it.”

  “Where do you-uns live?” the girl said.

  The Negro looked at her. “In Miss’ippi. On de Domain. Aint you never hyeard tell of Countymaison?”

  “Countymaison?”

  “Dat’s it. His grandpappy named it Countymaison caze it’s bigger den a county to ride over. You cant ride across it on a mule betwixt sunup and sundown. Dat’s how come.” He rubbed his hands slowly on his thighs. His face was now turned toward the stove; he snuffed loudly. Already the ashy overlay on his skin had disappeared, leaving his face dead black, wizened, his mouth a little loose, as though the muscles had become slack with usage, like rubber bands—not the eating muscles, the talking ones. “I reckon we is gittin nigh home, after all. Leastways dat hawg meat smell like it do down whar folks lives.”

  “Countymaison,” the girl said in a rapt, bemused tone, looking at the Negro with her grave, unwinking regard. Then she turned her head and looked at the wall, her face perfectly serene, perfectly inscrutable, without haste, with a profound and absorbed deliberation.

  “Dat’s it,” the Negro said. “Even Yankees is heard tell of Weddel’s Countymaison en erbout Marster Francis Weddel. Maybe yawl seed um pass in de carriage dat time he went to Washn’ton to tell yawl’s president how he aint like de way yawl’s president wuz treating de people. He rid all de way to Washn’ton in de carriage, wid two niggers to drive en to heat de bricks to kept he foots warm, en de man done gone on ahead wid de wagon en de fresh hawses. He carried yawl’s president two whole dressed bears en eight sides of smoked deer venison. He must a passed right out dar in front yawl’s house. I reckon yo pappy or maybe his pappy seed um pass.” He talked on, voluble, in soporific singsong, his face beginning to glisten, to shine a little with the rich warmth, while the mother bent over the stove and the girl, motionless, static, her bare feet cupped smooth and close to the rough puncheons, her big, smooth, young body cupped soft and richly mammalian to the rough garment, watching the Negro with her ineffable and unwinking gaze, her mouth open a little.

  The Negro talked on, his eyes closed, his voice interminable, boastful, his air lazily intolerant, as if he were still at home and there had been no war and no harsh rumors of freedom and of change, and he (a stableman, in the domestic hierarchy a man of horses) were spending the evening in the quarters among field hands, until the older woman dished the food and left the room, closing the door behind her. He opened his eyes at the sound and looked toward the door and then back to the girl. She was looking at the wall, at the closed door through which her mother had vanished. “Dont dey lets you eat at de table wid um?” he said.

  The girl looked at the Negro, unwinking. “Countymaison,” she said. “Vatch says he is a nigra too.”

  “Who? Him? A nigger? Marse Soshay Weddel? Which un is Vatch?” The girl looked at him. “It’s caze yawl aint never been nowhere. Ain’t never seed nothing. Living up here on a nekkid hill whar you cant even see smoke. Him a nigger? I wish his maw could hear you say dat.” He looked about the kitchen, wizened, his eyeballs rolling white, ceaseless, this way and that. The girl watched him.

  “Do the girls there wear shoes all the time?” she said.

  The Negro looked about the kitchen, “Where does yawl keep dat ere Tennessee spring water? Back here somewhere?”

  “Spring water?”

  The Negro blinked slowly. “Dat ere light-drinking kahysene.”

  “Kahysene?”

  “Dat ere light colored lamp oil whut yawl drinks. Aint you got a little of it hid back here somewhere?”

  “Oh,” the girl said. “You mean corn.” She went to a corner and lifted a loose plank in the floor, the Negro watching her, and drew forth another earthen jug. She filled another thick tumbler and gave it to the Negro and watched him jerk it down his throat, his eyes closed. Again he said, “Whuf!” and drew his back hand across his mouth.

  “Whut wuz dat you axed me?” he said.

  “Do the girls down there at Countymaison wear shoes?”

  “De ladies does. If dey didn’t have none, Marse Soshay could sell a hun’ed niggers en buy um some … Which un is it say Marse Soshay a nigger?”

  The girl watched him. “Is he married?”

  “Who married? Marse Soshay?” The girl watched him. “How he have time to git married, wid us fighting de Yankees for fo years? Aint been home in fo years now where no ladies to marry is.” He looked at the girl, his eyewhites a little bloodshot, his skin shining in faint and steady highlights. Thawing, he seemed to have increased in size a little too. “Whut’s it ter you, if he married or no?”

  They looked at each other. The Negro could hear her breathing. Then she was not looking at him at all, though she had not yet even blinked nor turned her head. “I dont reckon he’d have any time for a girl that didn’t have any shoes,” she said. She went to the wall and stooped again to the crack. The Negro watched her. The older woman entered and took another dish from the stove and departed without having looked at either of them.

  V

  THE FOUR MEN, the three men and the boy, sat about the supper table. The broken meal lay on thick plates. The knives and forks were iron. On the table the jug still sat. Weddel was now cloakless. He was shaven, his still damp hair combed back. Upon his bosom the ruffles of the shirt frothed in the lamplight, the right sleeve, empty, pinned across his breast with a thin gold pin. Under the table the frail and mended dancing slippers rested among the brogans of the two men and the bare splayed feet of the boy.

  “Vatch says you are a nigra,” the father said.

  Weddel was leaning a little back in his chair. “So that explains it,” he said. “I was thinking that he was just congenitally illtempered. And having to be a victor, too.”

  “Are you a nigra?” the father said.

  “No,” Weddel said. He was looking at the boy, his weathered and wasted face a little quizzical. Across the back of his neck his hair, long, had been cut roughly as though with a knife or perhaps a bayonet. The bo
y watched him in complete and rapt immobility. As if I might be an apparition he thought. A hant. Maybe I am. “No,” he said. “I am not a Negro.”

  “Who are you?” the father said.

  Weddel sat a little sideways in his chair, his hand lying on the table. “Do you ask guests who they are in Tennessee?” he said. Vatch was filling a tumbler from the jug. His face was lowered, his hands big and hard. His face was hard. Weddel looked at him. “I think I know how you feel,” he said. “I expect I felt that way once. But it’s hard to keep on feeling any way for four years. Even feeling at all.”

  Vatch said something, sudden and harsh. He clapped the tumbler on to the table, splashing some of the liquor out. It looked like water, with a violent, dynamic odor. It seemed to possess an inherent volatility which carried a splash of it across the table and on to the foam of frayed yet immaculate linen on Weddel’s breast, striking sudden and chill through the cloth against his flesh.

  “Vatch!” the father said.

  Weddel did not move; his expression arrogant, quizzical, and weary, did not change. “He did not mean to do that,” he said.

  “When I do,” Vatch said, “it will not look like an accident.”

  Weddel was looking at Vatch. “I think I told you once,” he said. “My name is Saucier Weddel. I am a Mississippian. I live at a place named Contalmaison. My father built it and named it. He was a Choctaw chief named Francis Weddel, of whom you have probably not heard. He was the son of a Choctaw woman and a French émigré of New Orleans, a general of Napoleon’s and a knight of the Legion of Honor. His name was François Vidal. My father drove to Washington once in his carriage to remonstrate with President Jackson about the Government’s treatment of his people, sending on ahead a wagon of provender and gifts and also fresh horses for the carriage, in charge of the man, the native overseer, who was a full blood Choctaw and my father’s cousin. In the old days The Man was the hereditary title of the head of our clan; but after we became Europeanised like the white people, we lost the title to the branch which refused to become polluted, though we kept the slaves and the land. The Man now lives in a house a little larger than the cabins of the Negroes—an upper servant. It was in Washington that my father met and married my mother. He was killed in the Mexican War. My mother died two years ago, in ’63, of a complication of pneumonia acquired while superintending the burying of some silver on a wet night when Federal troops entered the county, and of unsuitable food; though my boy refuses to believe that she is dead. He refuses to believe that the country would have permitted the North to deprive her of the imported Martinique coffee and the beaten biscuit which she had each Sunday noon and Wednesday night. He believes that the country would have risen in arms first. But then, he is only a Negro, member of an oppressed race burdened with freedom. He has a daily list of my misdoings which he is going to tell her on me when we reach home. I went to school in France, but not very hard. Until two weeks ago I was a major of Mississippi infantry in the corps of a man named Longstreet, of whom you may have heard.”

  “So you were a major,” Vatch said.

  “That appears to be my indictment; yes.”

  “I have seen a rebel major before,” Vatch said. “Do you want me to tell you where I saw him?”

  “Tell me,” Weddel said.

  “He was lying by a tree. We had to stop there and lie down, and he was lying by the tree, asking for water. ‘Have you any water, friend?’ he said. ‘Yes. I have water,’ I said. ‘I have plenty of water.’ I had to crawl; I couldn’t stand up. I crawled over to him and I lifted him so that his head would be propped against the tree. I fixed his face to the front.”

  “Didn’t you have a bayonet?” Weddel said. “But I forgot; you couldn’t stand up.”

  “Then I crawled back. I had to crawl back a hundred yards, where—”

  “Back?”

  “It was too close. Who can do decent shooting that close? I had to crawl back, and then the damned musket—”

  “Damn musket?” Weddel sat a little sideways in his chair, his hand on the table, his face quizzical and sardonic, contained.

  “I missed, the first shot. I had his face propped up and turned, and his eyes open watching me, and then I missed. I hit him in the throat and I had to shoot again because of the damned musket.”

  “Vatch,” the father said.

  Vatch’s hands were on the table. His head, his face, were like his father’s, though without the father’s deliberation. His face was furious, still, unpredictable. “It was that damn musket. I had to shoot three times. Then he had three eyes, in a row across his face propped against the tree, all three of them open, like he was watching me with three eyes. I gave him another eye, to see better with. But I had to shoot twice because of the damn musket.”

  “You, Vatch,” the father said. He stood now, his hands on the table, propping his gaunt body. “Dont you mind Vatch, stranger. The war is over now.”

  “I dont mind him,” Weddel said. His hands went to his bosom, disappearing into the foam of linen while he watched Vatch steadily with his alert, quizzical, sardonic gaze. “I have seen too many of him for too long a time to mind one of him any more.”

  “Take some whiskey,” Vatch said.

  “Are you just making a point?”

  “Damn the pistol,” Vatch said. “Take some whiskey.”

  Weddel laid his hand again on the table. But instead of pouring, Vatch held the jug poised over the tumbler. He was looking past Weddel’s shoulder. Weddel turned. The girl was in the room, standing in the doorway with her mother just behind her. The mother said as if she were speaking to the floor under her feet: “I tried to keep her back, like you said. I tried to. But she is strong as a man; hardheaded like a man.”

  “You go back,” the father said.

  “Me to go back?” the mother said to the floor.

  The father spoke a name; Weddel did not catch it; he did not even know that he had missed it. “You go back.”

  The girl moved. She was not looking at any of them. She came to the chair on which lay Weddel’s worn and mended cloak and opened it, revealing the four ragged slashes where the sable lining had been cut out as though with a knife. She was looking at the cloak when Vatch grasped her by the shoulder, but it was at Weddel that she looked. “You cut hit out and gave hit to that nigra to wrap his feet in,” she said. Then the father grasped Vatch in turn. Weddel had not stirred, his face turned over his shoulder; beside him the boy was upraised out of his chair by his arms, his young, slacked face leaned forward into the lamp. But save for the breathing of Vatch and the father there was no sound in the room.

  “I am stronger than you are, still,” the father said. “I am a better man still, or as good.”

  “You wont be always,” Vatch said.

  The father looked back over his shoulder at the girl. “Go back,” he said. She turned and went back toward the hall, her feet silent as rubber feet. Again the father called that name which Weddel had not caught; again he did not catch it and was not aware again that he had not. She went out the door. The father looked at Weddel. Weddel’s attitude was unchanged, save that once more his hand was hidden inside his bosom. They looked at one another—the cold, Nordic face and the half Gallic half Mongol face thin and worn like a bronze casting, with eyes like those of the dead, in which only vision has ceased and not sight. “Take your horses, and go,” the father said.

  VI

  IT WAS dark in the hall, and cold, with the black chill of the mountain April coming up through the floor about her bare legs and her body in the single coarse garment. “He cut the lining outen his cloak to wrap that nigra’s feet in,” she said. “He done hit for a nigra.” The door behind her opened. Against the lamplight a man loomed, then the door shut behind him. “Is it Vatch or paw?” she said. Then something struck her across the back—a leather strap. “I was afeared it would be Vatch,” she said. The blow fell again.

  “Go to bed,” the father said.

  “You can w
hip me, but you cant whip him,” she said.

  The blow fell again: a thick, flat, soft sound upon her immediate flesh beneath the coarse sacking.

  VII

  IN THE deserted kitchen the Negro sat for a moment longer on the upturned block beside the stove, looking at the door. Then he rose carefully, one hand on the wall

  “Whuf!” he said. “Wish us had a spring on de Domain whut run dat. Stock would git trompled to death, sho mon.” He blinked at the door, listening, then he moved, letting himself carefully along the wall, stopping now and then to look toward the door and listen, his air cunning, unsteady, and alert. He reached the corner and lifted the loose plank, stooping carefully, bracing himself against the wall. He lifted the jug out, whereupon he lost his balance and sprawled on his face, his face ludicrous and earnest with astonishment. He got up and sat flat on the floor, carefully, the jug between his knees, and lifted the jug and drank. He drank a long time.

  “Whuf!” he said. “On de Domain we’d give disyer stuff to de hawgs. But deseyer ign’unt mountain trash—” He drank again; then with the jug poised there came into his face an expression of concern and then consternation. He set the jug down and tried to get up, sprawling above the jug, gaining his feet at last, stooped, swaying, drooling, with that expression of outraged consternation on his face. Then he fell headlong to the floor, overturning the jug.

  VIII

  THEY STOOPED above the Negro, talking quietly to one another—Weddel in his frothed shirt, the father and the boy.

  “We’ll have to tote him,” the father said.

  They lifted the Negro. With his single hand Weddel jerked the Negro’s head up, shaking him. “Jubal,” he said.

  The Negro struck out, clumsily, with one arm. “Le’m be,” he muttered. “Le’m go.”

  “Jubal!” Weddel said.

  The Negro thrashed, sudden and violent. “You le’m be,” he said. “I ghy tell de Man. I ghy tell um.” He ceased, muttering: “Field hands. Field niggers.”