“But no marriage,” he said. “He didn’t promise you that. Don’t lie to me. He didn’t have to.”
“He didn’t have to,” she said. “I knew what I was doing. I knew that to begin with, before we agreed. Then we agreed again before he left New Mexico that that would be all of it. I believed him. I must have believed him. I don’t see how I could have helped but believe him. I wrote him last month to make sure and the letter came back unopened and I was sure. So I didn’t even know I was coming back here until last week. I was waiting there by the road yesterday when the car passed and he saw me and I was sure.”
“Then what do you want?” he said. “What do you want?”
“Yes,” she said. He glared at her, his white hair awry from the pillow, his eyes, lacking the spectacles to focus them, blurred, irisless and apparently pupilless.
“He met you on a street one afternoon just because a box of groceries happened to fall out of a boat. And a month later you went off and lived with him until you got a child from it. Then he took his hat and said good-bye and walked out. Haven’t you got any folks at all?”
“Yes. My aunt, in Vicksburg. I came to live with her two years ago when my father died; we lived in Indianapolis until then. But my aunt had a family and she took in washing herself, so I got a job teaching school in Aluschaskuna.…”
“Took in what?” he said. “Took in washing?” He sprang, flinging himself backward onto one arm, awry-haired, glaring. Now he understood what it was she had brought in with her, what old Isham had already told him—the lips and skin pallid and colorless yet not ill, the tragic and foreknowing eyes. Maybe in a thousand or two thousand years it will have blended in America and we will have forgotten it, he thought. But God pity these. He cried, not loud, in a voice of amazement, pity and outrage, “You’re a nigger!”
“Yes,” she said.
“Then what did you expect here?”
“Nothing.”
“Then why did you come here? You said you were waiting in Aluschaskuna yesterday and he saw you.”
“I’m going back North,” she said. “My cousin brought me up from Vicksburg the day before yesterday in his boat. He’s going to take me on to Leland to get the train.”
“Then go,” he said. Then he cried again in that thin, not loud voice, “Get out of here; I can do nothing for you! Can’t nobody do nothing for you!” She moved, turning toward the entrance. “Wait,” he said. She paused, turning. He picked up the sheaf of bank notes and laid it on the blanket at the foot of the cot and drew his hand back beneath the blanket. “Here.”
“I don’t need it,” she said. “He gave me money last winter. Provided. That was all arranged when we agreed that would have to be all.”
“Take it,” he said. His voice began to rise again, but he stopped it. “Take it out of my tent.” She came back and took the money. “That’s right,” he said. “Go back North. Marry, a man in your own race. That’s the only salvation for you. Marry a black man. You are young, handsome, almost white; you could find a black man who would see in you whatever it was you saw in him, who would ask nothing from you and expect less and get even still less if it’s revenge you want. And then in a year’s time you will have forgotten all this; you will forget it even happened, that he ever existed.…” He ceased; for an instant he almost sprang again for it seemed to him that, without moving at all, she had blazed silently at him. But she had not. She had not even moved, looking quietly down at him from beneath the sodden hat.
“Old man,” she said, “have you lived so long that you have forgotten all you ever knew or felt or even heard about love?” Then she was gone too; the waft of light and the hushed constant rain flowed into the tent, then the flap fell again. Lying back again, trembling, panting, the blanket huddled to his chin and his hands crossed on his breast, he heard the pop and snarl, the mounting then the descending whine of the motor until it died away and once again the tent held only silence and the sound of the rain. And the cold too: he lay shaking faintly and steadily in it, rigid save for the shaking. ‘This Delta,’ he thought. ‘This Delta.’ This land, which man has deswamped and denuded and derivered in two generations so that white men can own plantations and commute every night to Memphis and black men can own plantations and even towns and keep their town houses in Chicago, where white men rent farms and live like niggers and niggers crop on shares and live like animals, where cotton is planted and grows man-tall in the very cracks in the sidewalks, where usury and mortgage and bankruptcy and measureless wealth, Chinese and African and Aryan and Jew, all breed and spawn together until no man has time to say which is which, or cares.… ‘No wonder the ruined woods I used to know don’t cry for retribution,’ he thought. ‘The people who have destroyed it will accomplish its revenge.’
The tent flap swung rapidly in and fell. He did not move save to turn his head and open his eyes. Legate was stooping over Boyd’s bed, rummaging hurriedly in it. “What is it?” McCaslin said.
“Looking for Don’s skinning knife,” Legate said. “We got a deer on the ground. I come in to get the horses.” He rose, the knife in his hand and went toward the door.
“Who killed it?” McCaslin said. “It was Don,” he said.
“Yes,” Legate said, lifting the tent flap.
“Wait,” McCaslin said. “What was it?” Legate paused for an instant in the entrance. He did not look back.
“Just a deer, Uncle Ike,” he said impatiently. “Nothing extra.” He was gone; the flap fell behind him, wafting out of the tent again the faint light, the constant and grieving rain. McCaslin lay back on the cot.
“It was a doe,” he said to the empty tent.
The Bear
He was ten. But it had already begun, long before that day when at last he wrote his age in two figures and he saw for the first time the camp where his father and Major de Spain and old General Compson and the others spent two weeks each November and two weeks again each June. He had already inherited then, without ever having seen it, the tremendous bear with one trap-ruined foot which, in an area almost a hundred miles deep, had earned for itself a name, a definite designation like a living man.
He had listened to it for years: the long legend of corncribs rifled, of shotes and grown pigs and even calves carried bodily into the woods and devoured, of traps and deadfalls overthrown and dogs mangled and slain, and shotgun and even rifle charges delivered at point-blank range and with no more effect than so many peas blown through a tube by a boy—a corridor of wreckage and destruction beginning back before he was born, through which sped, not fast but rather with the ruthless and irresistible deliberation of a locomotive, the shaggy tremendous shape.
It ran in his knowledge before he ever saw it. It looked and towered in his dreams before he even saw the unaxed woods where it left its crooked print, shaggy, huge, red-eyed, not malevolent but just big—too big for the dogs which tried to bay it, for the horses which tried to ride it down, for the men and the bullets they fired into it, too big for the very country which was its constricting scope. He seemed to see it entire with a child’s complete divination before he ever laid eyes on either—the doomed wilderness whose edges were being constantly and punily gnawed at by men with axes and plows who feared it because it was wilderness, men myriad and nameless even to one another in the land where the old bear had earned a name, through which ran not even a mortal animal but an anachronism, indomitable and invincible, out of an old dead time, a phantom, epitome and apotheosis of the old wild life at which the puny humans swarmed and hacked in a fury of abhorrence and fear, like pygmies about the ankles of a drowsing elephant; the old bear solitary, indomitable and alone, widowered, childless and absolved of mortality—old Priam reft of his old wife and having outlived all his sons.
Until he was ten, each November he would watch the wagon containing the dogs and the bedding and food and guns and his father and Tennie’s Jim, the Negro, and Sam Fathers, the Indian, son of a slave woman and a Chickasaw chief, depart on the roa
d to town, to Jefferson, where Major de Spain and the others would join them. To the boy, at seven and eight and nine, they were not going into the Big Bottom to hunt bear and deer, but to keep yearly rendezvous with the bear which they did not even intend to kill. Two weeks later they would return, with no trophy, no head and skin. He had not expected it. He had not even been afraid it would be in the wagon. He believed that even after he was ten and his father would let him go too, for those two November weeks, he would merely make another one, along with his father and Major de Spain and General Compson and the others, the dogs which feared to bay it and the rifles and shotguns which failed even to bleed it, in the yearly pageant of the old bear’s furious immortality.
Then he heard the dogs. It was in the second week of his first time in the camp. He stood with Sam Fathers against a big oak beside the faint crossing where they had stood each dawn for nine days now, hearing the dogs. He had heard them once before, one morning last week—a murmur, sourceless, echoing through the wet woods, swelling presently into separate voices which he could recognize and call by name. He had raised and cocked the gun as Sam told him and stood motionless again while the uproar, the invisible course, swept up and past and faded; it seemed to him that he could actually see the deer, the buck, blond, smoke-colored, elongated with speed, fleeing, vanishing, the woods, the gray solitude, still ringing even when the cries of the dogs had died away.
“Now let the hammers down,” Sam said.
“You knew they were not coming here too,” he said.
“Yes,” Sam said. “I want you to learn how to do when you didn’t shoot. It’s after the chance for the bear or the deer has done already come and gone that men and dogs get killed.”
“Anyway,” he said, “it was just a deer.”
Then on the tenth morning he heard the dogs again. And he readied the too-long, too-heavy gun as Sam had taught him, before Sam even spoke. But this time it was no deer, no ringing chorus of dogs running strong on a free scent, but a moiling yapping an octave too high, with something more than indecision and even abjectness in it, not even moving very fast, taking a long time to pass completely out of hearing, leaving even then somewhere in the air that echo, thin, slightly hysterical, abject, almost grieving, with no sense of a fleeing, unseen, smoke-colored, grass-eating shape ahead of it, and Sam, who had taught him first of all to cock the gun and take position where he could see everywhere and then never move again, had himself moved up beside him; he could hear Sam breathing at his shoulder and he could see the arched curve of the old man’s inhaling nostrils.
“Hah,” Sam said. “Not even running. Walking.”
“Old Ben!” the boy said. “But up here!” he cried. “Way up here!”
“He do it every year,” Sam said. “Once. Maybe to see who in camp this time, if he can shoot or not. Whether we got the dog yet that can bay and hold him. He’ll take them to the river, then he’ll send them back home. We may as well go back, too; see how they look when they come back to camp.”
When they reached the camp the hounds were already there, ten of them crouching back under the kitchen, the boy and Sam squatting to peer back into the obscurity where they huddled, quiet, the eyes luminous, glowing at them and vanishing, and no sound, only that effluvium of something more than dog, stronger than dog and not just animal, just beast, because still there had been nothing in front of that abject and almost painful yapping save the solitude, the wilderness, so that when the eleventh hound came in at noon and with all the others watching—even old Uncle Ash, who called himself first a cook—Sam daubed the tattered ear and the raked shoulder with turpentine and axle grease, to the boy it was still no living creature, but the wilderness which, leaning for the moment down, had patted lightly once the hound’s temerity.
“Just like a man,” Sam said. “Just like folks. Put off as long as she could having to be brave, knowing all the time that sooner or later she would have to be brave once to keep on living with herself, and knowing all the time beforehand what was going to happen to her when she done it.”
That afternoon, himself on the one-eyed wagon mule which did not mind the smell of blood nor, as they told him, of bear, and with Sam on the other one, they rode for more than three hours through the rapid, shortening winter day. They followed no path, no trail even that he could see; almost at once they were in a country which he had never seen before. Then he knew why Sam had made him ride the mule which would not spook. The sound one stopped short and tried to whirl and bolt even as Sam got down, blowing its breath, jerking and wrenching at the rein while Sam held it, coaxing it forward with his voice, since he could not risk tying it, drawing it forward while the boy got down from the marred one.
Then, standing beside Sam in the gloom of the dying afternoon, he looked down at the rotted overturned log, gutted and scored with claw marks and, in the wet earth beside it, the print of the enormous warped two-toed foot. He knew now what he had smelled when he peered under the kitchen where the dogs huddled. He realized for the first time that the bear which had run in his listening and loomed in his dreams since before he could remember to the contrary, and which, therefore, must have existed in the listening and dreams of his father and Major de Spain and even old General Compson, too, before they began to remember in their turn, was a mortal animal, and that if they had departed for the camp each November without any actual hope of bringing its trophy back, it was not because it could not be slain, but because so far they had had no actual hope to.
“Tomorrow,” he said.
“We’ll try tomorrow,” Sam said. “We ain’t got the dog yet.”
“We’ve got eleven. They ran him this morning.”
“It won’t need but one,” Sam said. “He ain’t here. Maybe he ain’t nowhere. The only other way will be for him to run by accident over somebody that has a gun.”
“That wouldn’t be me,” the boy said. “It will be Walter or Major or—”
“It might,” Sam said. “You watch close in the morning. Because he’s smart. That’s how come he has lived this long. If he gets hemmed up and has to pick out somebody to run over, he will pick out you.”
“How?” the boy said. “How will he know—” He ceased. “You mean he already knows me, that I ain’t never been here before, ain’t had time to find out yet whether I—” He ceased again, looking at Sam, the old man whose face revealed nothing until it smiled. He said humbly, not even amazed, “It was me he was watching. I don’t reckon he did need to come but once.”
The next morning they left the camp three hours before daylight. They rode this time because it was too far to walk, even the dogs in the wagon; again the first gray light found him in a place which he had never seen before, where Sam had placed him and told him to stay and then departed. With the gun which was too big for him, which did not even belong to him, but to Major de Spain, and which he had fired only once—at a stump on the first day, to learn the recoil and how to reload it—he stood against a gum tree beside a little bayou whose black still water crept without movement out of a cane-brake and crossed a small clearing and into cane again, where, invisible, a bird—the big woodpecker called Lord-to-God by Negroes—clattered at a dead limb.
It was a stand like any other, dissimilar only in incidentals to the one where he had stood each morning for ten days; a territory new to him, yet no less familiar than that other one which, after almost two weeks, he had come to believe he knew a little—the same solitude, the same loneliness through which human beings had merely passed without altering it, leaving no mark, no scar, which looked exactly as it must have looked when the first ancestor of Sam Fathers’ Chickasaw predecessors crept into it and looked about, club or stone ax or bone arrow drawn and poised; different only because, squatting at the edge of the kitchen, he smelled the hounds huddled and cringing beneath it and saw the raked ear and shoulder of the one who, Sam said, had had to be brave once in order to live with herself, and saw yesterday in the earth beside the gutted log the print of the liv
ing foot.
He heard no dogs at all. He never did hear them. He only heard the drumming of the woodpecker stop short off and knew that the bear was looking at him. He never saw it. He did not know whether it was in front of him or behind him. He did not move, holding the useless gun, which he had not even had warning to cock and which even now he did not cock, tasting in his saliva that taint as of brass which he knew now because he had smelled it when he peered under the kitchen at the huddled dogs.
Then it was gone. As abruptly as it had ceased, the woodpecker’s dry, monotonous clatter set up again, and after a while he even believed he could hear the dogs—a murmur, scarce a sound even, which he had probably been hearing for some time before he even remarked it, drifting into hearing and then out again, dying away. They came nowhere near him. If it was a bear they ran, it was another bear. It was Sam himself who came out of the cane and crossed the bayou, followed by the injured bitch of yesterday. She was almost at heel, like a bird dog, making no sound. She came and crouched against his leg, trembling, staring off into the cane.
“I didn’t see him,” he said. “I didn’t, Sam!”
“I know it,” Sam said. “He done the looking. You didn’t hear him neither, did you?”
“No,” the boy said. “I—”
“He’s smart,” Sam said. “Too smart.” He looked down at the hound, trembling faintly and steadily against the boy’s knee. From the raked shoulder a few drops of fresh blood oozed and clung. “Too big. We ain’t got the dog yet. But maybe someday. Maybe not next time. But someday.”
So I must see him, he thought. I must look at him. Otherwise, it seemed to him that it would go on like this forever, as it had gone on with his father and Major de Spain, who was older than his father, and even with old General Compson, who had been old enough to be a brigade commander in 1865. Otherwise, it would go on so forever, next time and next time, after and after and after. It seemed to him that he could see the two of them, himself and the bear, shadowy in the limbo from which time emerged, becoming time; the old bear absolved of mortality and himself partaking, sharing a little of it, enough of it. And he knew now what he had smelled in the huddled dogs and tasted in his saliva. He recognized fear. So I will have to see him, he thought, without dread or even hope. I will have to look at him.