Uncollected Stories of William Faulkner (61 page)

“I knew that he was running from himself then,” the Mail Rider said.

“And the woman, you said she stayed ten years.”

“Sure. She just left yesterday.”

“You mean that she stayed on eight years after he left?”

“She was waiting for him to come back. He never told her he wasn’t coming back. And besides, she had the bugs herself then. Maybe it was the same ones, up and moved onto a new pasture.”

“And he didn’t know it? Living right there in the same house with her, he didn’t know she was infected?”

“How know it? You reckon a fellow that’s got a dynamite cap inside him has got time to worry about whether his neighbor swallowed one too or not? And besides, she had done left a husband and two children when she got the telegram. So I reckon she felt for him to come back. I used to talk to her, that first winter when we thought he was going to die. She was a durn sight handier with that axe than he was, and sometimes there wouldn’t be a thing for me to do when I got there. So we would talk. She was about ten years older than him, and she told me about her husband, that was about ten years older than her, and their children. Her husband
was one of these architects and she told me about how Dorry came back from this Bow and Art school in Paris and how he went to work in her husband’s office. And I guess he was a pretty stiff lick to a woman of thirty-five and maybe better, that had a husband and a house that all run themselves too well for her to meddle with, and Dorry just twenty-five and fresh from Pareesian bowleyvards and looking like a Hollywood dook to boot. So I guess it couldn’t have been long before they had one another all steamed up to where they believed they couldn’t live until they had told her husband and his boss that love was im-perious or im-peerious or whatever it is, and had went off to live just down the canyon from a stage settin with the extra hands all playing mouth-organs and accordions in the background.

“That would have been all right. They could have bore unreality. It was the reality they never had the courage to deny. He tried, though. She told me that she didn’t know he was sick nor where he had went to until she got our telegram. She says he just sent her a note that he was gone and to not expect him back. Then she got the telegram. ‘And there wasn’t nothing else I could do,’ she says, in a man’s flannel shirt and corduroy coat. She had fell off and she didn’t look thirty-five by five years. But I don’t reckon he noticed that. ‘There was nothing else I could do,’ she says. ‘Because his mother had just died the year before.’ ‘Sho,’ I said. ‘I hadn’t thought of that. And since she couldn’t come, you had to since he never had no grandmother nor wife nor sister nor daughter nor maid servant.’ But she wasn’t listening.

“She never listened to anything except to him in the bed or to the pot on the stove. ‘You’ve learned to cook fine,’ I told her. ‘Cook?’ she said. ‘Why not?’ I don’t guess she knew what she was eating, if she et at all, which I never saw her do. Only now and then I would make her think that she had found herself some way to get the grub done without burning it or having it taste like throwed-away cinch-leathers. I reckon though women just ain’t got time to worry much about what food tastes like. But now and then during that bad winter I’d just up and run her out of the kitchen and cook him something he needed.

“Then that next spring I saw him at the station that day, getting on the train. After that, neither of us ever mentioned him a-tall. I went up to see her next day. But we didn’t mention him; I never
told her I saw him get on the train. I set out the week’s grub and I says, ‘I may come back this way tomorrow,’ not looking at her. ‘I ain’t got anything that goes beyond Ten Sleep. So I may come back past here tomorrow on my way to Blizzard.’ ‘I think I have enough to last me until next Tuesday,’ she says. ‘Alright,’ I says. ‘I’ll see you then.’ ”

“So she stayed,” I said.

“Sure. She had them herself, then. She didn’t tell me for some time. Sometimes it would be two months and I would not see her. Sometimes I would hear her down in the canyon with the axe, and sometimes she would speak to me out of the house, without coming to the door, and I would set the grub on the bench and wait a while. But she would not come out, and I would go on. When I saw her again, she never looked no thirty-five by twenty years. And when she left yesterday, she didn’t look it by thirty-five years.”

“She gave him up and left, did she?”

“I telegraphed to her husband. That was about six months after Dorry left. The husband he got here in five days, same as she did. He was a fine fellow, kind of old. But not after making no trouble. ‘I’m obliged to you,’ he says first thing. ‘What for?’ I says. ‘I’m obliged to you,’ he says. ‘What do you think I had better do first?’

“We talked it over. We figgered he had better wait in town until I got back. I went up there. I didn’t tell her he was there. I never got that far; that was the first time I ever come out and talked like there was any such thing as tomorrow. I never got far enough to tell her he was there. I came back and told him. ‘Maybe next year,’ I told him. ‘You try then.’ She still thought Dorry was coming back. Like he would be on the next train. So the husband he went back home and I fixed the money up in an envelope and I got Manny Hughes in the postoffice to help compound a crime or whatever you do to the government, with the cancelling machine so it would look natural, and I carried it to her. ‘It’s registered,’ I said. ‘Must be a gold mine in it.’ And she took it, fake number and fake postmark and all, and opened it, looking for the letter from Dorry. Dorry, she called him; did I tell you? The only thing she seemed to mistrust about it was the only thing that was authentic. ‘There’s no letter,’ she says. ‘Maybe he was in a hurry,’ I says. ‘He must be pretty busy to have earned all that money in six months.’

“After that, two or three times a year I would take her one of
these faked letters. Once a week I would write her husband how she was getting along, and I would take the money two or three times a year, when she would about be running out, and take the letter to her, and her opening the envelope and kind of throwing the money aside to look for the letter, and then looking at me like she believed that me or Manny had opened the envelope and taken the letter out. Maybe she believed that we did.

“I couldn’t get her to eat right. Finally, about a year ago, she had to go to bed too, in the same cot, the same blankets. I telegraphed her husband and he sent a special train with one of them eastern specialists that won’t look at you without you got pedigree stud papers, and we told her he was the County Health officer on his yearly rounds and that his fee was one dollar and she paid him, letting him give her change for a five dollar bill, and him looking at me. ‘Go on and tell her,’ I said. ‘You can live a year,’ he said. ‘A year?’ she says. ‘Sure,’ I says. ‘That’ll be plenty long. You can get here from anywhere in five days.’ ‘That’s so,’ she says. ‘Do you think I ought to try to write to him? I might put it in the papers,’ she said. ‘I wouldn’t do that,’ I said. ‘He’s busy. If he wasn’t pretty busy, he couldn’t make the money he’s making. Could he?’ ‘That’s so,’ she said.

“So the doctor went back to New York on his special train, and he gave the husband an earfull. I had a wire from him right off; he wanted to send the specialist back, this eastern stud doctor. But he figgered by telegraph that that wouldn’t do any good, so I told my substitute he could make a good job; he could make one and a half of my pay for a year. It never done no harm to let him think he was working for one of these big eastern syndicates too, as well as the government. And I took a bed roll and I camped out in the canyon below the cabin. We got a Injun woman to wait on her. The Injun woman couldn’t talk enough of any language to tell her better than a rich man sent her to wait there. And there she waited, with me camped out in the canyon, telling her I was on my vacation, hunting sheep. That vacation lasted eight months. It took her a right smart while.

“Then I went back to town and telegraphed her husband. He telegraphed back to put her on the Los Angeles train on Wednesday, that he would go on to Los Angeles by airplane and meet the train, so we brought her down Wednesday. She was laying on a stretcher when the train come in and stopped and the engine
uncoupled and went on down to the water tank. She was laying on the stretcher, waiting for them to lift her into the baggage car; me and the Injun woman had told her that the rich man had sent for her, when they come up.”

“They?” I said.

“Dorry and his new wife. I forgot to tell that. News passes Blizzard about four times before it ever lights. News happens in Pittsburg, say. All right. It gets radioed, passing right over us to Los Angeles or Frisco. All right. They put the Los Angeles and Frisco papers into the airplane and they pass right over us, going east now to Phoenix. Then they put the papers onto the fast train and the news passes us again, going west at sixty miles an hour at two A. M. And then the papers come back east on the local, and we get a chance to read them. Matt Lewis showed me the paper, about the wedding, on Tuesday. ‘You reckon this is the same Darrel House?’ he says. ‘Is the gal rich?’ I says. ‘She’s from Pittsburg,’ Matt says. ‘Then that’s the one,’ I says.

“So they were all out of the cars, stretching their legs like they do. You know these pullman trains. Folks that have lived together for four days. All know one another like a family: the millionaire, the movie queen, the bride and groom with rice still in their hair like as not. He still never looked a day more than thirty, with this new wife holding to him with her face lowered, and the heads of them other passengers turning when they passed, the heads of the old folks remembering their honeymoons too, and of the bachelors too, thinking maybe a few of the finest thoughts they ever think about this world and the bride thinking a little too, maybe, shrinking against her husband and holding him and thinking enough to imagine herself walking along there nekkid and probably she wouldn’t take eleven dollars or even fifteen for the privilege. They come on too, with the other passengers that would come up and pass the stretcher and glance at it and then kind of pause like a house-owner that finds a dead dog or maybe a queer-shaped piece of wood at the corner, and go on.”

“Did they go on, too?”

“That’s right. They come up and looked at her, with the gal kind of shrinking off against her husband and holding him, with her eyes wide, and Dorry looking down at her and going on, and she—she couldn’t move anything except her eyes then—turning her eyes to follow them, because she seen the rice in their hair too by then. I
guess she had maybe thought all the time until then that he would get off the train and come to her. She thought he would look like he had when she saw him last, and she thought that she would look like she had when he saw her first. And so when she saw him and saw the gal and smelt the rice, all she could do was move her eyes. Or maybe she didn’t know him at all. I don’t know.”

“But he,” I said. “What did he say?”

“Nothing. I don’t reckon he recognized me. There was a lot of folks there, and I didn’t happen to be up in front. I don’t guess he saw me a-tall.”

“I mean, when he saw her.”

“He didn’t know her. Because he didn’t expect to see her there. You take your own brother and see him somewhere you don’t expect to, where it never occurred to your wildest dream he would be, and you wouldn’t know him. Let alone if he has went and aged forty years on you in ten winters. You got to be suspicious of folks to recognize them at a glance wherever you see them. And he wasn’t suspicious of her. That was her trouble. But it didn’t last long.”

“What didn’t last long?”

“Her trouble. When they took her off the train at Los Angeles she was dead. Then it was her husband’s trouble. Ours, too. She stayed in the morgue two days, because when he went and looked at her, he didn’t believe it was her. We had to telegraph back and forth four times before he would believe it was her. Me and Matt Lewis paid for the telegrams, too. He was busy and forgot to pay for them, I guess.”

“You must still have had some of the money the husband sent you to fool her with,” I said.

The Mail Rider chewed. “She was alive when he was sending that money,” he said. “That was different.” He spat carefully. He wiped his sleeve across his mouth.

“Have you got any Indian blood?” I said.

“Indian blood?”

“You talk so little. So seldom.”

“Oh, sure. I have some Indian blood. My name used to be Sitting Bull.”

“Used to be?”

“Sure. I got killed one day a while back. Didn’t you read it in the paper?”

“Ain’t she never going to be ready!” Maxwell Johns stared at himself in the mirror. He watched himself light a cigarette and snap the match backward over his shoulder. It struck the hearth and bounced, still burning, toward the rug.

“What the hell do I care if it burns the damn dump down!” he snarled, striding up and down the garish parlor of the Houston home. He stared at his reflection again—slim young body in evening clothes, smooth dark hair, smooth white face. He could hear, in the room overhead, Doris Houston and her mother shrieking at each other.

“Listen at ’em squall!” he grunted. “You’d think it was a knock-down-and-drag-out going on instead of a flounce getting into her duds. Oh, hell! Their brains are fuzzy as the cotton we grow!”

A colored maid entered the room and puttered about a moment, her vast backside billowing like a high wave under oil. She glanced at Maxwell and sniffed her way out of the room.

The screams above reached a crescendo. Then he heard rushing feet, eager and swift—a bright eager clatter, young and evanescent.

A final screech from above seemed to shoot Doris Houston into the room like a pip squeezed from an orange. She was thin as a dragonfly, honey-haired, with long coltish legs. Her small face was alternate patches of dead white and savage red.

She carried a fur coat over her arm and held onto one shoulder of her dress with the other hand. The other shoulder, with a dangling strap, had slipped far down.

Doris shrugged the gown back into place and mumbled between
her red lips. A needle glinted between her white teeth, the gossamer thread floating out as she flung the coat down and whirled her back to Maxwell. “Here, Unconscious, sew me up!” he interpreted her mumbled words.