Uncollected Stories of William Faulkner (35 page)

“You wait here,” Lucas said. So the salesman leaned against the lot fence in the bright August morning while Lucas went on up the hill and mounted the gnawed steps beside which a bright-coated young mare with a blaze and three stockings stood under a heavy comfortable saddle, and entered the commissary, with its ranked shelves of tinned food and tobacco and patent medicines, its hooks from which hung trace chains and collars and hames, and where, at a roll-top desk beside the front window, his landlord was writing in a ledger. Lucas stood quietly looking at the back of the white man’s neck until the other looked around. “He’s done come,” Lucas said.

Edmonds swiveled his chair about, back-tilted. He was already glaring at Lucas before the chair stopped moving; he said with astonishing violence: “No!”

“Yes,” Lucas said.

“No!”

“He done fotch the machine with him,” Lucas said. “I seed hit work. I buried a dollar in my back yard this morning and it went right straight to whar it wuz and found it. He just wants three hundred dollars for it. We gonter find that money tonight and I can pay it back tomorrow morning.”

“No!” Edmonds said. “I tell you and tell you and tell you there ain’t any money buried around here. You’ve been here sixty years. Did you ever hear of anybody in this country with enough money to bury? Can you imagine anybody in this country burying anything worth as much as two bits that some of his kinfolks or friends or neighbors or acquaintances ain’t dug up long ago?”

“You’re wrong,” Lucas said. “Folks finds it all the time. Ain’t I told you about them two strange white men that come in here after dark one night three years ago and dug up twenty-two thousand dollars and got out again before anybody even seed um? I seed the hole whar they had done filled it up again. And the churn hit was buried in.”

“Hah,” Edmonds said. “Then how do you know it was twenty-two thousand dollars?” But Lucas only looked at him. It was not stubbornness. It was an infinite, an almost Jehovah-like patience, as if he, Lucas, were engaged in a contest, partially for the idiot’s own benefit, with an idiot. “Your paw would a lent me three hundred dollars if he was here,” he said.

“Well, I ain’t,” Edmonds said. “You’ve got damn near three thousand dollars in the bank. If I could keep you from wasting any of that on a damn machine to find buried money, I would. But then, you ain’t going to use any of your money, are you? You’ve got more sense yourself than to risk that.”

“It looks like I’m gonter have to,” Lucas said. “I’m gonter ask you one more time—”

“No!” Edmonds said, again with that astonishing and explosive violence. Lucas looked at him for a time, almost contemplative. He did not sigh.

“All right,” he said.

When he returned to the salesman, his son-in-law was there too—a lean-hipped, very black young man with a ready face full of white teeth and a ruined Panama hat raked above his right ear.

The salesman looked once at Lucas’s face and hunched himself away from the fence. “I’ll go talk to him,” he said.

“No,” Lucas said. “You stay away from there.”

“Then what you going to do about it?” the salesman said. “Here I’ve come all the way from St. Louis—and how you ever persuaded them to send this machine out without any down payment in the first place, I still don’t see. And I’ll tell you right now, if I got to take it back and turn in an expense account for this trip and no sale, something is—”

“We ain’t doing no good standing here, nohow,” Lucas said. The other two followed him, back to the gate and the highroad, where the salesman’s car stood. The divining machine rested on the rear seat and Lucas stood in the open door, looking at it—an oblong metal box with a handle for carrying at each end, compact and solid, efficient and businesslike and complex with its knobs and dials, and Lucas standing over it, sober and bemused. “And I seed hit work,” he said. “I seed hit with my own eyes.”

“Well?” the salesman said. “What you going to do? I’ve got to know, so I can know what to do, myself. Ain’t you got three hundred dollars?” Lucas mused upon the machine. He did not look up yet.

“We gonter find that money tonight,” he said. “You put in the machine and I’ll show you whar to look, and we’ll go halves on hit.”

“Ha, ha, ha,” the salesman said harshly. “Now I’ll tell one.”

“We bound to find hit, cap-tin,” the son-in-law said. “Two white men slipped in here three years ago and dug up twenty-two thousand dollars one night and got clean away wid hit fo’ daylight.”

“You bet,” the salesman said. “And you knew it was exactly twenty-two thousand because you found where they had throwed away the odd cents.”

“Naw, sir,” the son-in-law said. “Hit mought a been even more than twenty-two thousand dollars. Hit wuz a big churn.”

“George Wilkins,” Lucas said, still half inside the car and still without turning his head.

“Sir,” the son-in-law said.

“Shut up.” Now Lucas turned and looked at the salesman; again the salesman saw a face quite sober, even a little cold, quite impenetrable. “I’ll swap you a mule for it.”

“A mule?” the salesman said.

“When we find that money tonight, I’ll buy the mule back for your three hundred dollars.” The son-in-law had begun to bat his
eyes rapidly. But nobody was looking at him. Lucas and the salesman looked at one another—the shrewd, suddenly attentive face of the young white man, the absolutely impenetrable face of the Negro.

“Do you own the mule?”

“How could I swap hit to you ef ’n I didn’t?”

“Let’s go see it,” the salesman said.

“George Wilkins,” Lucas said.

“Sir,” the son-in-law said. He was still batting his eyes constantly and rapidly.

“Go up to my barn and get my halter,” Lucas said.

Edmonds found the mule was missing as soon as the stablemen brought the drove up from pasture that evening. She was a three-year-old, eleven-hundred-pound mare mule named Alice Ben Bolt, and he had refused three hundred dollars for her in the spring. But he didn’t even curse. He merely dismounted and stood beside the lot fence while the rapid beat of his mare’s feet died away in the darkling night and then returned, and the head stableman sprang down and handed him his flashlight and pistol. Then, himself on the mare and the two Negroes on saddleless mules, they went back across the pasture, fording the creek, to the gap in the fence through which the mule had been led. From there they followed the tracks of the mule and of the man who led her in the soft earth along the edge of a cotton field, to the road. And here too they could follow them, the head stableman walking and carrying the flashlight, where the man had led the unshod mule in the softer dirt which bordered the gravel. “That’s Alice’s foot,” the head stableman said. “I’d know hit anywhar.”

Later Edmonds would realize that both the Negroes had recognized the man’s footprints too. But at the time his very fury and concern had short-circuited his normal sensitivity to Negro behavior. They would not have told him who had made the tracks even if he had demanded to know, but the realization that they knew would have enabled him to leap to the correct divination and so save himself the four or five hours of mental turmoil and physical effort which he was about to enter.

They lost the tracks. He expected to find the marks where the
mule had been loaded into a waiting truck, whereupon he would return home and telephone to the sheriff in Jefferson and to the Memphis police to watch the horse-and-mule markets tomorrow. There were no such marks. It took them almost an hour to find where the tracks had vanished on to the gravel, crossing it, descending through the opposite roadside weeds, to reappear in another field a hundred yards away. Supperless, raging, the mare which had been under saddle all day unfed too, he followed the two shadowy mules at the backstretched arm of the second walking Negro, cursing the darkness and the puny light which the head stableman carried, on which they were forced to depend.

Two hours later they were in the creek bottom four miles away. He was walking too now, lest he knock his brains out against a limb, stumbling and thrashing among brier and undergrowth and rotting logs and branches where the tracks led, leading the mare with one hand and fending his face with the other arm and trying to watch his feet, so that he walked into one of the mules, instinctively leaping in the right direction as it lashed out at him with one hoof, before he discovered that the Negroes had stopped. Then, cursing out loud now and moving quickly again to avoid the invisible second mule which would be somewhere to his left, he discovered that the flashlight was now off and he too saw the faint, smoky glare of the lightwood torch among the trees ahead. It was moving. “That’s right,” he said rapidly. “Keep the light off.” He called the second Negro’s name. “Give the mules to Dan and come back here and take the mare.” He waited, watching the light, until the Negro’s hand fumbled at his. Then he released the reins and moved around the mules, drawing his pistol and still watching the moving flame. “Hand me the flashlight,” he said. He took the light from that fumbling hand too. “You and Oscar wait here.”

“I better come wid you,” the Negro said.

“All right,” Edmonds said. “Give Oscar the mules.” He didn’t wait, though from time to time he could hear the Negro behind him, both of them moving as quietly and rapidly as possible. The rage was not cold now. It was hot, and there was an eagerness upon him, a kind of vindictive exultation as he plunged on, heedless of brush or log, the flashlight in his left hand and the pistol in his right, gaining rapidly on the moving torch, bursting at last out of the undergrowth and into a sort of glade, in the centre of which
two men stood looking toward him, one of them carrying before him what Edmonds believed at first to be some kind of receptacle of feed, the other holding high over his head the smoking pine-knot. Then Edmonds recognized George Wilkins’s ruined Panama hat, and he realized not only that the two Negroes with him had known all the time who had made the footprints, but that the object which Lucas was carrying was not any feedbox and that he himself should have known all the time what had become of his mule.

“You, Lucas!” he shouted. George flung the torch, arching, but the flashlight already held them spitted; Edmonds saw the white man now, snap-brim hat, necktie, and all, risen from beside a tree, his trousers rolled to the knees and his feet invisible in caked mud. “That’s right,” Edmonds said. “Go on, George. Run. I believe I can hit that hat without even touching you.” He approached, the flashlight’s beam contracting on to the metal box which Lucas held before him, gleaming and glinting among the knobs and dials. “So that’s it,” he said. “Three hundred dollars. I wish somebody would come into this country with a seed that had to be worked every day, from New Year’s right on through to Christmas. As soon as you niggers are laid by, trouble starts. I ain’t going to worry with Alice tonight, and if you and George want to spend the rest of it walking back and forth with that damn thing, that’s your business. But I want that mule to be in her stall by sunup. Do you hear?” Edmonds had forgotten about the white man until he appeared beside Lucas.

“What mule is that?” he said. Edmonds turned the light on him for a moment.

“My mule, sir,” he said.

“I’ve got a bill of sale for that mule,” the other said. “Signed by Lucas here.”

“Have you now,” Edmonds said. “You can make lamplighters out of it next winter.”

“Is that so?” the other said. “Look here, Mister What’s-your-name—” But Edmonds had already turned the light back to Lucas, who still held the divining machine before him.

“On second thought, I ain’t going to worry about that mule at all,” he said. “I told you this morning what I thought about this business. But you’re a grown man; if you want to fool with it, I can’t stop you. But if that mule ain’t in her stall by sunup tomorrow, I’m going to telephone the sheriff. Do you hear me?”

“I hears you,” Lucas said.

“All right, big boy,” the salesman said. “If that mule is moved from where she’s at until I’m ready to move her, I’m going to telephone the sheriff. Do you hear that too?” This time Edmonds jumped, flung the light beam at the salesman, furious and restrained.

“Were you talking to me, sir?” he said.

“No,” the salesman said. “I’m talking to him. And he heard me.” For a while longer Edmonds held the light beam on the other. Then he dropped it, so that only their legs and feet showed, planted in the pool and its refraction as if they stood in a pool of dying water. He put the pistol back into his pocket.

“Well, you and Lucas have got till daylight to settle that. Because that mule is to be back in my barn at sunup.” He turned and went back to where Dan waited, the light swinging and flickering before him; presently it had vanished.

“George Wilkins,” Lucas said.

“Sir,” George said.

“Find that pine-knot and light it again.” George did so; once more the red glare streamed away in thick smoke, upward against the August stars of more than midnight. “Now grab a holt of this thing,” Lucas said. “I got to find that money now.”

But when day broke they had not found it, the torch paling away in the wan, dew-heavy light, the white man asleep on the wet earth now, drawn into a ball against the dawn’s wet chill, unshaven, with his dashing city hat, his necktie, his soiled shirt and muddy trousers rolled to his knees, and his mud-caked feet whose shoes gleamed with polish yesterday. They waked him. He sat up, cursing. But he knew at once where he was, because he said: “All right now. If that mule moves one foot out of that cotton house, I’m going to get the sheriff.”

“I just wants one more night,” Lucas said. “That money’s here.”

“What about that fellow that says the mule is his?”

“I’ll tend to him in the morning. You don’t need to worry about that. Besides, ef ’n you try to move that mule yourself, the sheriff gonter take her away from you. You leave her whar she’s at and lemme have one more night with this-here machine. Then I kin fix everything.”

“All right,” the other said. “But do you know what it’s going
to cost you? It’s going to cost you just exactly twenty-five dollars more. Now I’m going to town and go to bed.”