“A writer. A man that writes pieces for the newspapers and such.”
She grunted. “I know um.” She grunted again around the pipe stem, not ceasing to puff at it, speaking in smoke, shaping her words in smoke for the eye to hear. “I know um. You aint the first newspaper writer we done had dealings with.”
“I’m not? When—”
She puffed, not looking at me. “Not much dealings, though. Not after Marse Henry went to town and horsewhupped him outen he own office, out into the street, wropping the whup around him like a dog.” She smoked, the pipe held in a hand not much larger than the hand of a doll. “And so because you writes for the newspapers, you think you got lief to come meddling round Cunnel Sutpen’s house?”
“It’s not Colonel Sutpen’s house now. It belongs to the state. To anybody.”
“How come it does?”
“Because the taxes haven’t been paid on it in forty years. Do you know what taxes are?”
She smoked. She was not looking at me. But it was hard to tell what she was looking at. Then I found what she was looking at. She extended her arm, the pipe stem pointing toward the house, the pasture. “Look yonder,” she said. “Going up across the pahster.” It was the dog. It looked as big as a calf: big, savage, lonely without itself being aware that it was lonely, like the house itself. “That dont belong to no state. You try it and see.”
“Oh, that dog. I can pass that dog.”
“How pass it?”
“I can pass it.”
She smoked again. “You go on about your business, young white gentleman. You let what dont concern you alone.”
“I can pass that dog. But if you’d tell me, I wouldn’t have to.”
“You get by that dog. Then we’ll see about telling.”
“Is that a dare?”
“You pass that dog.”
“All right,” I said. “I’ll do that.” I turned and went back to the road. I could feel her watching me. I didn’t look back. I went on up the road. Then she called me, strongvoiced; as Don said, her voice would carry a good mile, and not full raised either. I turned. She still sat in the chair, small as a big doll, jerking her arm, the smoking pipe, at me. “You git out of here and stay out!” she shouted. “You go on away.”
That’s what I was thinking of while I stood there beside the house, hearing the dog. Passing it was easy: just a matter of finding where the branch ran, and a hunk of raw beef folded about a half can full of pepper. So I stood there, about to commit breaking and entering, thinking of the trivial matter of an old negress’ name. I was a little wrought up; I was not too old for that. Not so old but what the threshold of adventure could pretty well deprive me of natural judgment, since it had not once occurred to me that one who had lived hidden in a house for forty years, going out only at night for fresh air, her presence known only to one other human being and a dog, would not need to call out, on hearing a noise in the house: “Is that you?”
So when I was in the dark hall at last, standing at the foot of the stairs where forty years ago the negro girl, lying screaming on her back, had seen the face upside down in the air above her, still hearing no sound, no voice yet saying, ‘Is that you?’ I was about ready to be tied myself. I was that young. I stood there for some time, until I found that my eyeballs were aching, thinking, ‘What shall I do now? The ghost must be asleep. So I wont disturb her.’
Then I heard the sound. It was at the back of the house somewhere, and on the ground floor. I had a seething feeling, of vindication. I thought of myself talking to Don, telling him “I told you so! I told you all the time.” Perhaps I had mesmerised myself and still had a hangover, because I imagine that judgment had already recognised the sound for that of a stiff key in a stiff lock; that someone was entering the house from the rear, in a logical flesh-and-blood way with a logical key. And I suppose that judgment knew who it was, remembering how the uproar of the creekward dog must have reached the cabin too. Anyway, I stood there in the pitch dark and heard her enter the hall from the back, moving without haste yet surely, as a blind fish might move surely about and among the blind rocks in a blind pool in a cave. Then she spoke, quietly, not loud, yet without lowering her voice: “So you passed the dog.”
“Yes,” I whispered. She came on, invisible.
“I told you,” she said. “I told you not to meddle with what aint none of your concern. What have they done to you and yo’n?”
“Shhhhh,” I whispered. “If she hasn’t heard me yet maybe I can get out. Maybe she wont know—”
“He aint going to hear you. Wouldn’t mind, if he did.”
“He?” I said.
“Git out?” she said. She came on. “You done got this far. I told you not to, but you was bound. Gittin out is too late now.”
“He?” I said. “He?” She passed me, without touching me. I heard her begin to mount the stairs. I turned toward the sound, as though I could see her. “What do you want me to do?”
She didn’t pause. “Do? You done done too much now. I told you. But young head mulehard. You come with me.”
“No; I’ll—”
“You come with me. You done had your chance and you wouldn’t take it. You come on.”
We mounted the stairs. She moved on ahead, surely, invisible. I held to the railing, feeling ahead, my eyeballs aching: suddenly I brushed into her where she stood motionless. “Here’s the top,” she said. “Aint nothing up here to run into.” I followed her again, the soft sound of her bare feet. I touched a wall and heard a door click and felt the door yawn inward upon a rush of stale, fetid air warm as an oven: a smell of old flesh, a closed room. And I smelled something else. But I didn’t know what it was at the time, not until she closed the door again and struck a match to a candle fixed upright in a china plate. And I watched the candle come to life and I wondered quietly in that suspension of judgment how it could burn, live, at all in this dead room, this tomblike air. Then I looked at the room, the bed, and I went and stood above the bed, surrounded by that odor of stale and unwashed flesh and of death which at first I had not recognised. The woman brought the candle to the bed and set it on the table. On the table lay another object—a flat metal case. ‘Why, that’s the picture,’ I thought. ‘The picture of Judith which Charles Bon carried to the war with him and brought back.’ Then I looked at the man in the bed—the gaunt, pallid, skull-like head surrounded by long, unkempt hair of the same ivory color, and a beard reaching almost to his waist, lying in a foul, yellowish nightshirt on foul, yellowish sheets. His mouth was open, and he breathed through it, peaceful, slow, faint, scarce stirring his beard. He lay with closed eyelids so thin that they looked like patches of dampened tissue paper pasted over the balls. I looked at the woman. She had approached. Behind us our shadows loomed crouching high up the scaling, fishcolored wall. “My God,” I said. “Who is it?”
She spoke without stirring, without any visible movement of her mouth, in that voice not loud and not lowered either. “It’s Henry Sutpen,” she said.
IV
We were downstairs again, in the dark kitchen. We stood, facing one another. “And he’s going to die,” I said. “How long has he been like this?”
“About a week. He used to walk at night with the dog. But about a week ago one night I waked up and heard the dog howling and I dressed and come up here and found him laying in the garden with the dog standing over him, howling. And I brought him in and put him in that bed and he aint moved since.”
“You put him to bed? You mean, you brought him into the house and up the stairs by yourself?”
“I put Judith into her coffin by myself. And he dont weigh nothing now. I going to put him in his coffin by myself too.”
“God knows that will be soon,” I said. “Why dont you get a doctor?”
She grunted; her voice sounded no higher than my waist. “He’s the fourth one to die in this house without no doctor. I done for the other three. I reckon I can do for him too.”
Then she told m
e, there in the dark kitchen, with Henry Sutpen upstairs in that foul room, dying quietly unknown to any man, including himself. “I got to get it off my mind. I done toted it a long time now, and now I going to lay it down.” She told again of Henry and Charles Bon like two brothers until that second summer when Henry went home with Charles in turn. And how Henry, who was to be gone three months, was back home in three weeks, because he had found It out.
“Found what out?” I said.
It was dark in the kitchen. The single window was a pale square of summer darkness above the shagmassed garden. Something moved beneath the window outside the kitchen, something big-soft-footed; then the dog barked once. It barked again, fulltongued now; I thought quietly, ‘Now I haven’t got any more meat and pepper. Now I am in the house and I cant get out.’ The old woman moved; her torso came into silhouette in the window. “Hush,” she said. The dog hushed for a moment, then as the woman turned away from the window it bayed again, a wild, deep, savage, reverberant sound. I went to the window.
“Hush,” I said, not loud. “Hush, boy. Still, now.” It ceased; the faint, soft-big sound of its feet faded and died. I turned. Again the woman was invisible. “What happened in New Orleans?” I said.
She didn’t answer at once. She was utterly still; I could not even hear her breathe. Then her voice came out of the unbreathing stillness. “Charles Bon already had a wife.”
“Oh,” I said. “Already had a wife. I see. And so—”
She talked, not more rapidly, exactly. I dont know how to express it. It was like a train running along a track, not fast, but you got off the track, telling me how Henry had given Charles Bon his chance. Chance for what, to do what, never did quite emerge. It couldn’t have been to get a divorce; she told me and Henry’s subsequent actions showed that he could not have known there was an actual marriage between them until much later, perhaps during or maybe at the very end, of the war. It seemed that there was something about the New Orleans business that, to Henry anyway, was more disgraceful than the question of divorce could have been. But what it was, she wouldn’t tell me. “You dont need to know that,” she said. “It dont make no difference now. Judith is dead and Charles Bon is dead and I reckon she’s done dead down yonder in New Orleans too, for all them lace dresses and them curly fans and niggers to wait on her, but I reckon things is different down there. I reckon Henry done told Charles Bon that at the time. And now Henry wont be living fore long, and so it dont matter.”
“Do you think Henry will die tonight?”
Her voice came out of the darkness, hardly waisthigh. “If the Lord wills it. So he gave Charles Bon his chance. And Charles Bon never took it.”
“Why didn’t Henry tell Judith and his father what it was?” I said. “If it was reason enough for Henry, it would be reason enough for them.”
“Would Henry tell his blooden kin something, withouten there wouldn’t anything else do but telling them, that I wont tell you, a stranger? Aint I just telling you how Henry tried other ways first? and how Charles Bon lied to him?”
“Lied to him?”
“Charles Bon lied to Henry Sutpen. Henry told Charles Bon that them wasn’t Sutpen ways, and Charles Bon lied to Henry. You reckon if Charles Bon hadn’t lied to Henry, that Henry would have let Charles Bon marry his sister? Charles Bon lied to Henry before that Christmas morning. And then he lied to Henry again after that Christmas morning; else Henry wouldn’t have never let Charles Bon marry Judith.”
“How lied?”
“Aint I just told you how Henry found out in New Orleans? Likely Charles Bon took Henry to see her, showing Henry how they did in New Orleans, and Henry told Charles Bon, ‘Them ways aint Sutpen ways.’ ”
But still I couldn’t understand it. If Henry didn’t know they were married, it seemed to make him out pretty much of a prude. But maybe nowadays we can no longer understand people of that time. Perhaps that’s why to us their written and told doings have a quality fustian though courageous, gallant, yet a little absurd. But that wasn’t it either. There was something more than just the relationship between Charles and the woman; something she hadn’t told me and had told me she was not going to tell and which I knew she would not tell out of some sense of honor or of pride; and I thought quietly, ‘And now I’ll never know that. And without it, the whole tale will be pointless, and so I am wasting my time.’
But anyway, one thing was coming a little clearer, and so when she told how Henry and Charles had gone away to the war in seeming amity and Judith with her hour old wedding ring had taken care of the place and buried her mother and kept the house ready for her husband’s return, and how they heard that the war was over and that Charles Bon was safe and how two days later Henry brought Charles’ body home in the wagon, dead, killed by the last shot of the war, I said, “The last shot fired by who?”
She didn’t answer at once. She was quite still. It seemed to me that I could see her, motionless, her face lowered a little—that immobile, myriad face, cold, implacable, contained. “I wonder how Henry found out that they were married,” I said.
She didn’t answer that either. Then she talked again, her voice level, cold, about when Henry brought Charles home and they carried him up to the room which Judith had kept ready for him, and how she sent them all away and locked the door upon herself and her dead husband and the picture. And how she—the negress; she spent the night on a chair in the front hall—heard once in the night a pounding noise from the room above and how when Judith came out the next morning her face looked just like it had when she locked the door upon herself. “Then she called me and I went in and we put him in the coffin and I took the picture from the table and I said, ‘Do you want to put this in, Missy?’ and she said, ‘I wont put that in,’ and I saw how she had took the poker and beat that lock shut to where it wouldn’t never open again.
“We buried him that day. And the next day I took the letter to town to put it on the train—”
“Who was the letter to?”
“I didn’t know. I cant read. All I knew, it was to New Orleans because I knowed what New Orleans looked like wrote out because I used to mail the letters she wrote to Charles Bon before the war, before they was married.”
“To New Orleans,” I said. “How did Judith find where the woman lived?” Then I said: “Was there— There was money in that letter.”
“Not then. We never had no money then. We never had no money to send until later, after Cunnel had done come home and died and we buried him too, and Judith bought them chickens and we raised them and sold them and the eggs. Then she could put money in the letters.”
“And the woman took the money? She took it?”
She grunted. “Took it.” She talked again; her voice was cold and steady as oil flowing. “And then one day Judith said, ‘We will fix up Mr Charles’ room.’ ‘Fix it up with what?’ I said. ‘We’ll do the best we can,’ she said. So we fixed up the room, and that day week the wagon went to town to meet the train and it come back with her in it from New Orleans. It was full of trunks, and she had that fan and that mosquito-bar umbrella over her head and a nigger woman, and she never liked it about the wagon. ‘I aint used to riding in wagons,’ she said. And Judith waiting on the porch in a old dress, and her getting down with all them trunks and that nigger woman and that boy—”
“Boy?”
“Hers and Charles Bon’s boy. He was about nine years old. And soon as I saw her I knew, and soon as Judith saw her she knew too.”
“Knew what?” I said. “What was the matter with this woman, anyway?”
“You’ll hear what I going to tell you. What I aint going to tell you aint going to hear.” She talked, invisible, quiet, cold. “She didn’t stay long. She never liked it here. Wasn’t nothing to do and nobody to see. She wouldn’t get up till dinner. Then she would come down and set on the porch in one of them dresses outen the trunks, and fan herself and yawn, and Judith out in the back since daylight, in a old dress no better than mine, working. r />
“She never stayed long. Just until she had wore all the dresses outen the trunks one time, I reckon. She would tell Judith how she ought to have the house fixed up and have more niggers so she wouldn’t have to fool with the chickens herself, and then she would play on the piano. But it never suited her neither because it wasn’t tuned right. The first day she went out to see where Charles Bon was buried, with that fan and that umbrella that wouldn’t stop no rain, and she come back crying into a lace handkerchief and laid down with that nigger woman rubbing her head with medicine. But at suppertime she come down with another dress on and said she never seed how Judith stood it here and played the piano and cried again, telling Judith about Charles Bon like Judith hadn’t never seed him.”
“You mean, she didn’t know that Judith and Charles had been married too?”
She didn’t answer at all. I could feel her looking at me with a kind of cold contempt. She went on: “She cried about Charles Bon a right smart at first. She would dress up in the afternoon and go promenading across to the burying ground, with that umbrella and the fan, and the boy and that nigger woman following with smelling bottles and a pillow for her to set on by the grave, and now and then she would cry about Charles Bon in the house, kind of flinging herself on Judith and Judith setting there in her old dress, straight-backed as Cunnel, with her face looking like it did when she come outen Charles Bon’s room that morning, until she would stop crying and put some powder on her face and play on the piano and tell Judith how they done in New Orleans to enjoy themselves and how Judith ought to sell this old place and go down there to live.
“Then she went away, setting in the wagon in one of them mosquito-bar dresses too, with that umbrella, crying into the hankcher a while and then waving it at Judith standing there on the porch in that old dress, until the wagon went out of sight. Then Judith looked at me and she said, ‘Raby, I’m tired. I’m awful tired.’ ”