Old man Jackson won her hand when she was twelve. They say he was ravished by her prowess on the melodeon. The pilot said old man Jackson didn’t have a melodeon. Old man Jackson was a character, himself. When he was eight he learned by heart one thousand verses from the new testament, bringing on an attack resembling brain fever. When they finally got a veterinary up, he said it couldn’t be brain fever, though. After that he became kind of—well, call it queer: bought library paste to eat whenever he could get it, and wore a raincoat every time he took a bath. He slept in a folding bed flat on the floor and closed up on him when he retired. He invented some holes bored in for air.
It seems that Jackson finally got the idea of raising sheep in that swamp of his, his belief being that wool grew like anything else, and that if sheep stood in water all the time, like trees, the fleece would be naturally more luxuriant. By the time he had about a dozen of them drowned, he made life belts out of cane for them. And then he found that the alligators were getting them.
One of the older boys (he must have had about a dozen) discovered the alligators wouldn’t bother a goat with long horns, so the old man carved imitation horns about three feet across out of roots and fastened them onto his sheep. He didn’t give them all horns, lest the alligators catch onto the trick. The pilot said he figured on losing so many head a year, but in this way he kept the death rate pretty low.
Soon they found that the sheep were learning to like the water, were swimming all around in it, that in about six months they never came out of the water at all. When shearing time came, he had to borrow a motor boat to run them down with. And when they caught one and raised it out of the water, it had no legs. They had atrophied and completely disappeared.
And that was true of everyone they caught. The legs not only were gone, but that part of the sheep which was under water was covered with scales in place of wool, and the tail had broadened and flattened like a beaver’s. Within another six months they couldn’t even catch one with the motor boat. They had learned to dive from watching fish; and when a year had passed Jackson saw them only when they stuck their noses up for a breath of air now and then. Soon days would pass without the water being broken by one of them. Occasionally they caught one on a hook baited with corn, but it had no wool on it at all.
Old man Jackson, so the pilot says, got kind of discouraged. Here was all his capital swimming around under water, and he was afraid they would turn Alligators before [he] could catch any of them. Finally his second boy, Claude, the wild one that was always after women, told his father that if he would give him outright half he could catch, he would get a few of them. They agreed, and so Claude would take off his clothes and go in the water. He never got many at first, though he would occasionally hem one up under a log and get him. One of them bit him pretty badly one day, and he thought to himself: “Yes, sir, I got to work fast: them things will be alligators in a year.”
So he lit in, and everyday his swimming got better and he’d get a few more. Soon he could stay under water for a half an hour at a time; but out of the water his breathing wasnt so very good, and his legs were beginning to feel funny at the knee. He then took to staying in the water all day and all night and his folks would bring him food. He lost all use of his arms to the elbow and his legs to the knee; and the last time any of the family saw him his eyes had moved around to the side of his head and there was a fish’s tail sticking out of the corner of his mouth.
About a year later they heard of him again. There was a single shark appeared off the coast that kept on bothering the blonde lady bathers, especially the fat ones.
“That’s Claude,” said old man Jackson, “he always was hell on blondes.”
And so their sole source of income was gone. The family was in quite a bad way for years and years, until the Prohibition law came along and saved them.
I hope you will find this story as interesting as I have.
Sincerely,
William Faulkner
Dear Anderson:—
I have your letter regarding the Jacksons. I am amazed. What I had thought to be a casual story seems to be quite well known. It must be a very unusual family, and so I echo your words: How I would like to meet Al Jackson.
I have been making a few inquiries myself. It’s like sluicing for gold—a speck here and a speck there. It seems that Elenor’s story is scandalous. She slid down a drain pipe and eloped with a tin pedler one night. Imagine the horror felt by a family as clean as fish-herding families must be, upon learning that “Perchie,” as Elenor was called, had eloped with a man who not only couldn’t swim, but who had never had a drop of water upon his body in his whole life. He is so afraid of water that, having been once caught by a rainstorm while on the road, he would not leave his van to feed his horse. The storm lasted nine days, the horse died between the shafts of starvation, and the man himself was found unconscious, having eaten a pair of congress shoes he was taking as a present to old man Jackson, and having consumed the reins as far as he could reach without leaving the van. The irony of it is that he was found and saved by Claude, one of Elenor Jackson’s brothers, who had paused to look into the van in the hope of finding a woman in it. (Claude was kind of bad after women, as I wrote you.)
But Al is the one I wish to meet. He is considered by every one who knows him to be the finest time of American manhood, a pure Nordic. During the war he took correspondence course after course to cure his shyness and develop will power in order to help the boys over there by making four minute Liberty loan speeches, and he is said to be the one who first thought of re-writing Goethe and Wagner and calling them Pershing and Wilson. Al Jackson likes the arts, you know.
I think you are wrong about Jackson’s ancestry. This Spearhead Jackson was captured and hung from the yardarm of a British frigate in 1799. It seems he was beating up the trades with a cargo of negroes when the frigate sighted him and gave chase. As was his custom, he started throwing negroes overboard, holding the Britisher off, but a squall came up suddenly, blowing him out to sea and three days off his course. Still throwing negroes overboard he ran for the Dry Tortugas but he ran out of negroes and the Britisher overtook him and boarded him off Caracas, giving no quarter and scuttling his vessel. So Al Jackson could not have sprung from this line. Besides, Al Jackson could never have come from an ancestor who had so little regard for the human soul.
And further proof. These Jacksons quite obviously descend from Andrew Jackson. The battle of New Orleans was fought in a swamp. How could Andrew Jackson have outfought an army outnumbering him unless he had had webbed feet? The detachment which saved the day was composed of two battalions of fish-herds from Jackson’s Florida swamps, half horse and half alligator they were. Also, if you will examine the statue to him in Jackson Park (and who but a Jackson could ride a horse weighing two and a half tons and hold him balanced on his hind feet?) you will see that he wears congress shoes.
Yes, I have heard the negro shooting story. But it is believed in this country to be a rank calumny. It was a man called Jack Spearman shooting Swedes for a dollar bounty in Minnesota. My version, of course, may be incorrect.
But who is this Sam Jackson? I had heard a reference to him, but upon mentioning his name to an old moonshiner who seemed to know and revere the family, he hushed up like a clam, and when I insisted, became quite angry with me. All I could get from him was the remark that it was a “dam lie.”
I received most of this information from people at Herman Jackson’s funeral the other day. Herman, you know, was a queer boy with a passion for education. Old man Jackson didn’t believe in education. But the boy Herman was crazy to learn to read, and Al, who seems to be a cultured man, helped the boy invent a way of making pearl buttons from fish scales. Herman saved his money, and was at last admitted into the university. Of course he had to earn his way doing odd jobs. He was for a while a fish grader at the fish market, but he depended mostly on his pearl buttons. People in his boarding house objected to the smell, but on seein
g the boy laboring long into the night glueing fish scales together with fish glue, they felt kind of sorry for him.
At last, at the age of eighteen he learned to read and he established a record. He read Sir Walter Scott’s complete works in twelve and one half days. For two days afterward he seemed to be dazed—could not remember who he was. So a schoolmate wrote his name on a card which Herman carried in his hand, showing it to anyone who asked his name.
Then on the third day he went into convulsions, passing from convulsion to convulsion and dying after days of terrible agony. Al, they say, was quite sad over this, feeling that he was somehow to blame.
The Benevolent Order of Carp, assisted by his college fraternity, R.O.E., buried him with honors; and his funeral is said to have been one of the largest ever held in the fish-herding circles. Al Jackson was not present: he could not bear it. But he is reported to have said: “I only hope that the country which I love, the business to which I have devoted my best years, will show a like appreciation of my passing away.”
If you can ever arrange for me to meet this splendid man, please do so, and I will be obligated to you.
Wm Faulkner
Don Giovanni
He had been married while quite young by a rather plain-faced girl whom he was trying to seduce, and now, at thirty-two, he was a widower. His marriage had driven him into work as drouth drives the fish down the streams into the large waters, and things had gone hard with them during the time in which he shifted from position to position and business to business be[fore] finally and inevitably gravitating into the women’s clothing section of a large department store.
Here he felt that he had at last come into his own (he always got along much better with women than with men) and his restored faith in himself enabled him to rise with comfortable ease to the coveted position of wholesale buyer. He knew women’s clothes and, interested in women, it was his belief that his knowledge of the things they liked gave him a grasp which no other man had on the psychology of women. But he merely speculated upon this. He remained faithful to his wife, although she was bed-ridden: an invalid.
And then when success was in his grasp and life became smooth at last for them, his wife died. He had become habituated to marriage, attached to her, and re-adjustment came but slowly. Yet in time he became accustomed to the novelty of mature liberty. He had been married so young that freedom was an unexplored field to him. He took pleasure in his snug bachelor’s rooms, in his solitary routine of days: of walking home in the dusk, examining the soft bodies of girls on the streets, knowing that if he cared to take one, there was none to say No to him. His only worry was his thinning hair.
But at last, celibacy began to oppress him.
His friend and prospective host sitting with a cigar on the balcony, saw him as he turned the corner under the light and with an exclamation he sprang to his feet, kicking his chair over. Ducking quickly into the room he snapped the table lamp off and leaped upon a couch, feigning sleep.
Walking dapperly, swinging his light stick:
“How they like for a man to be bold with them. Let’s see, she would have one suit of black underwear.… first I’ll act indifferent, like I dont specially want to be with her, or as if I dont particularly care to dance tonight. Drop a remark about coming only because I had promised—that there is another woman I had rather have seen. They like a man that has other women. She’ll say ‘Please take me to dance’ and I’ll say ‘Oh, I dont know if I want to dance tonight’ And she’ll say ‘Wont you take me?’ kind of leaning against me—let’s see—yes, she’ll take my hand, soft-talking me, well, I wont respond, wont seem to hear her. She’ll keep on teasing and then I’ll put my arm around her and raise her face in the dark cab and kiss her, coldly and dignified, as if I didn’t care whether I did or not, and I’ll say ‘Do you really want to dance tonight?’ and she’ll say ‘Oh, I dont know. I’d rather just ride around—with you’ And I’ll say ‘No, let’s dance a while’
“Well, we’ll dance and I’ll caress her back with my hand. She’ll be watching me but I wont look at her—” he broke suddenly from his revery, finding that he had passed his friend’s house. He retraced his steps, craning his neck toward the darkened windows.
“Morrison!” he sang.
No reply.
“Oh, Mor—rison!”
The dark windows were inscrutable as two fates. He knocked on the door, then stepped back to finish his aria. Beside the door was another entrance. Light streamed across a half-length lattice, like a saloon door, and beyond it a typewriter was being thumped viciously. He knocked upon the blind, tentatively.
“Hello” a voice boomed above the clacking machine. He pondered briefly then knocked again, louder.
“Come in, damn you. Do you think this is a bathroom?” the voice said, drowning the typewriter.
He opened the blind. The huge collarless man at the typewriter raised a leonine head, regarding him fretfully.
“Well?” The typewriter ceased.
“Pardon me: I’m looking for Morrison.”
“Next floor,” the other snapped, poising his hands. “Good night.”
“But he doesn’t answer. Do you know if he is in tonight?”
“I do not.”
He pondered again, diffidently. “I wonder how I could find out? I’m pressed for time—”
“How in hell do I know? Go up and see, or stand out there and call him.”
“Thanks, I’ll go up.”
“Well, go up then.” The typewriter clashed pianissimo.
“May I go through this way?” he ventured mildly, politely.
“Yes, yes. Go anywhere. But for God’s sake dont bother me.”
He murmured thanks, sidling past the large frenzied one. The whole room trembled to the big man’s heavy hands and the typewriter leaped and clattered like a mad thing. He mounted dark stairs, his friend heard him stumble, and groaned. I’ll have your blood for this! he swore and the thundering oblivious typewriter beneath him. The door opened and the caller hissed Morrison! into the dark room. He swore again under his breath. The couch complained to his movement and he said:
“Wait there until I turn on the light. You’ll break everything I’ve got, blundering around in the dark.”
The guest sighed with relief. “Well, well, I had just about given you up and gone away when that man below you kindly let me come through his place.”
The light came on under the other’s hand.
“Oh, you were asleep, weren’t you? So sorry to have disturbed you. But I want your advice.”
He put his hat and stick on a table, knocking from it a vase of flowers. With amazing agility he caught the vase before it crashed, but not before the contents had liberally splashed him. He replaced the vase and quickly fell to mopping at his sleeves and coat front with a handkerchief. “Ah, the devil,” he ejaculated with exasperation, “and this suit fresh from the presser, too!”
His host looked on with suppressed vindictive glee, offering him a chair. “Too bad,” he commiserated insincerely. “But she wont notice it: she’ll probably be interested in you.”
He looked up, flattered but a little dubious of the other’s tone. He smoothed his palms over his thinning hair.
“Do you think so? But, listen,” he continued with swift optimism—, “I have decided where I failed before. Boldness and indifference: that is what I have always overlooked. Listen,—” with enthusiasm, “tonight I will turn the trick. But I want your advice.”
The other groaned again and reclined upon the couch.
He continued: “Now, I’ll act as though there was another woman had phoned me, and that I met this one only because I had promised: make her jealous to begin with, see? Now, I’ll act like I dont care to dance and when she begs me to, I’ll kiss her, quite indifferent, see?”
“Yes?” his friend murmured, yawning.
“So we’ll go and dance, and I’ll pet her a little but I wont look at her—like I was thinking of someone else. S
he’ll be intrigued, and she’ll say ‘What are you thinking about so hard?’ And I’ll say ‘Why do you want to know?’ and she’ll beg me to tell her, all the time dancing close to me, and I’ll say ‘I’d rather tell you what you are thinking of’ and she’ll say ‘What?’ right quick. And I’ll say ‘You are thinking about me.’ Now what do you think of that? What do you reckon she’ll say then?”
“Probably tell you you’ve got a swelled head.”
The caller’s face fell. “Do you think she will?”
“Dont know. You’ll find out, though.”
“No, I dont believe she will. I kind of thought she’d think I knew a lot about women.” He mused deeply for a space. Then he burst out again: “If she does I’ll say ‘Perhaps so. But I am tired of this place. Let’s go.’ She wont want to but I’ll be firm. Then I’ll be bold: I’ll take her right out to my place, and when she sees how bold I am she’ll give in. They like bold men. What do you think of that?”
“Fine—provided she acts like she ought to. It might be a good idea to outline the plot to her, though, so she wont slip up.”
“You are kidding me now. But dont you really think this scheme is sound?”
“Air tight. You have thought of everything, haven’t you?”
“Certainly. That’s the only way to win battles, you know. Napoleon taught us that.”