Uncollected Stories of William Faulkner (91 page)

It was in Jonesboro, Arkansas, that Jo left them. The two boys had before this refused the gambit of their father’s bland inactivity and their mother’s fretful energy. The second one, a dull lout with a pimpled face, deserted them in Paris, Tennessee, for a job in a liverystable owned by a man with a cruel heavy face and an alcoholcured nose and a twenty-two ounce watch chain; and in Memphis the eldest, a slight quiet youth with his mother’s face but without her unconquerable frustration, departed for Saint Louis. Jo left them in Jonesboro, and presently Elmer and his mother and father moved again.

But before they moved, there came anonymously through the mail (“It’s from Jo,” his mother said. “I know it,” Elmer said) a box of paints: cheap watercolors and an impossible brush bristling smartly from a celluloid tube in which the wood stem would never remain fixed. The colors themselves were not only impossible too, they were of a durability apparently impervious to any element, except the blue. It compensated for the others, seeming to possess a dynamic energy which the mere presence of water liberated as the presence of spring in the earth liberates the hidden seed. Sultry, prodigious, it was as virulent as smallpox, staining everything it touched with the passionate ubiquity of an unbottled plague.

He learned to curb it in time, however, and with his already ungainly body sprawled on the floor, on wrapping paper when he could get it or on newspapers when not he painted blue people and houses and locomotives. After they had moved twice more however the blue was exhausted; its empty wooden dish stared up at him from among the other glazed discs, all of which had by now assumed a similar dun color, like a dead mackerel’s eye in fixed bluish reproach.

But soon school was out, and Elmer, fourteen and in the fourth grade, had failed again to make the rise. Unlike his brothers and sister, he liked going to school. Not for wisdom, not even for information: just going to school. He was always dull in his books and he inevitably developed a fine sexless passion for the teacher. But this year he was ravished away from that constancy by a boy, a young beast as beautiful to him as a god, and as cruel. Throughout the whole session he worshipped the boy from a distance: a blind and timeless adoration which the boy himself wrote finis to by coming suddenly upon Elmer on the playground one day and tripping him violently to earth, for no reason that either of them could have named. Whereupon Elmer rose without rancor, bathed his abraded elbow, and emotionally free again, fled that freedom as though it were a curse, transferring his sheeplike devotion once more to the teacher.

The teacher had a thick gray face like heavy dough; she moved in that unmistakable odor of middle-aged virgin female flesh. She lived in a small frame house which smelled as she smelled, with behind it a small garden in which no flowers ever did well, not even hardy Octoberdusty zinnias. Elmer would wait for her after school
on the afternoons when she remained with pupils who had failed in the day’s tasks, to walk home with her. For she saved all her wrapping paper for him to paint on. And soon the two of them, the dowdy irongray spinster and the hulking blond boy with almost the body of a man, were a matter for comment and speculation in the town. Elmer did not know this. Perhaps she did not either, yet one day she suddenly ceased walking home through the main streets, but instead took the nearest way home, with Elmer lumbering along beside her. She did this for two afternoons. Then she told him not to wait for her anymore. He was astonished: that was all. He went home and painted, sprawled on his stomach on the floor. Within the week he ran out of wrapping paper. The next morning he went by the teacher’s house, as he had used to do. The door was closed. He went and knocked, but got no answer. He waited before it until he heard the school bell ringing four or five blocks away; he had to run. He did not see the teacher emerge from the house when he was out of sight and hurry also toward the still ringing bell along a parallel street, with her thick doughlike face and her blurred eyes behind her nose glasses. Then it became spring. That day, as the pupils filed from the room at noon, she stopped him and told him to come to her house after supper and she would give him some more paper. He had long since forgot how at one time his blond slow openwork inner life had been marked and fixed in simple pleasure between walking home with her by afternoon and coming by her house in the mornings to walk with her to school until she stopped him; forgetting, he had forgiven her, doglike: always with that ability to forgive and then forget as easily; looking, he did not see her eyes, he could not see her heart. “Yessum,” he said. “I will.”

It was dark when he reached her door and knocked; high above the reddening bitten maples stars flickered; somewhere in that high darkness was a lonely sound of geese going north. She opened the door almost before his knock had died away. “Come in,” she said, leading the way toward a lighted room, where he stood clutching his cap, his overgrown body shifting from leg to leg; on the wall behind him his shadow, hulking, loomed. She took the cap from him and put it on a table on which was a fringed paper doily and a tray bearing a teapot and some broken food. “I eat my supper here,” she said. “Sit down, Elmer.”

“Yessum,” he said. She still wore the white shirtwaist and the dark skirt in which he always saw her, in which he perhaps thought of her in slumber even. He sat gingerly on the edge of a chair.

“Spring outside tonight,” she said. “Did you smell it?” He watched her push the tray aside and pick up a crust which had lain hidden in the shallow shadow of the tray.

“Yessum,” he said. “I heard some geese going over.” He began to perspire a little; the room was warm, close, odorous.

“Yes, spring will soon be here,” she said. Still he did not see her eyes, since she now seemed to watch the hand which held the crust. Within the savage arena of light from the shaded lamp it contracted and expanded like a disembodied lung; presently Elmer began to watch crumbs appear between the fingers of it. “And another year will be gone. Will you be glad?”

“Ma’am?” he said. He was quite warm, uncomfortable; he thought of the clear high shrill darkness outside the house. She rose suddenly; she almost flung the now shapeless wad of dough onto the tray.

“But you want your paper, dont you?” she said.

“Yessum,” Elmer said.
Now I will be outside soon
he said. He rose too and they looked at one another; he saw her eyes then; the walls seemed to be rushing slowly down upon him, crowding the hot odorous air upon him. He was sweating now. He drew his hand across his forehead. But he could not move yet. She took a step toward him; he saw her eyes now.

“Elmer,” she said. She took another step toward him. She was grinning now, as if her thick face had been wrung and fixed in that painful and tragic grimace, and Elmer, still unable to move, seemed to drag his eyes heavily up the black shapeless skirt, up the white shirtwaist pinned at the throat with a barpin of imitation lapis-lazuli, meeting her eyes at last. He grinned too and they stood facing one another, cropping the room with teeth. Then she put her hand on him. Then he fled. Outside the house he still ran, with the noise in his ears still of the crashing table. He ran, filling his body with air in deep gulps, feeling his sweat evaporating.

   
O and thy little girlwhite all: musical with motion Montparnasse and Raspail: subtle ceaseless fugues of thighs under the waxing moon of death:

Elmer, fifteen, with a handleless teacup, descends steps, traverses sparse lawn, a gate; crosses a street, traverses lawn not sparse, ascends steps between flowering shrubs, knocks at screen door, politely but without diffidence.

Velma her name, at home alone, pinksoftcurved, plump sixteen. Elmer enters with his teacup and traverses dim quietness among gleams on nearmahogany, conscious of tingling remoteness and pinksoftcurves and soft intimation of sheathed hips in progression, and so on to the pantry. Helps to reach down sugar jar from where it sits in a pan of water against ants, but sees only in white cascade of sugar little white teeth over which full soft mouth and red never quite completely closed and her plump body bulging her soiled expensive clothing richly the aromatic cubbyhole in the halfdark. Touched sugar hands in the halfdark hishing cling by eluding, elude but not gone; bulging rabbitlike things under soiled silk taut softly, hishing ceaseless cascade of tilted sugar now on the floor hishing: a game.

It whispers its blanched cascade down the glazed precipice of the overflowed cup, and she flees squealing, Elmer in lumbering pursuit, tasting something warm and thick and salt in his throat. Reaches kitchen door: she has disappeared; but staring in vacuous astonishment toward the barnyard he sees a vanishing flash of skirts and runs after across the lot and into the high odorous cavern of the barn.

She is not in sight. Elmer stands baffled, bloodcooling, in the center of the trodden dungimpregnated earth; stands in baffled incertitude, bloodcooling in helpless and slowmounting despair for irretrievable loss of that which he had never gained, thinking
So she never meant it. I reckon she is laughing at me. I reckon I better try to scrape up that spilled sugar before Mrs Merridew gets home
. He turns toward the door, moving. As he does so a faint sound from overhead stops him. He feels a surge of triumph and fright that stops his heart for the moment. Then he can move toward the vertical ladder which leads to the loft.

Acrid scent of sweated leather, of ammonia and beasts and dry dust richly pungent; of quiet and solitude, of triumph fear change. Mounts the crude ladder, tasting again thick warm salt, hearing his heart heavy and fast, feels his bodyweight swing from shoulder to
shoulder upward, then sees yellow slants of cavernous sunlight latticed and spinning with golden motes. Mounts final rung and finds her, breathless and a little frightened, in the hay.

In the throes of puberty, that dark soft trouble like a heard forgotten music or a scent or thing remembered though never smelt nor seen, that blending of dread and longing, he began consciously to draw people: not any longer lines at full liberty to assume any significance they chose, but men and women; trying to draw them and make them conform to a vague shape now somewhere back in his mind, trying to imbue them with what he believed he meant by splendor and speed. Later still, the shape in his mind became unvague concrete and alive: a girl with impregnable virginity to time or circumstance; darkhaired small and proud, casting him bones fiercely as though he were a dog, coppers as though he were a beggar leprous beside a dusty gate.

He left his mother and father in Houston when he went to the war. But when he returned, someone else had the house, as usual. He went to the agent. A bright busy bald youngish man, the agent stared at Elmer’s yellow hospital stick in a fretful hiatus, visibly revolving the word Hodge in his mind. Presently he rang a bell and a brisk pretty Jewess smelling of toilet water not soap, came and found the letter [they] had left for him. The agent offered Elmer a cigarette, explaining how the war kept him too busy to smoke cigars. Our War, he called it. He talked briefly about Europe, asking Elmer a few questions such as a clothes dealer might ask of a returned African missionary, answering them himself and telling Elmer a few facts in return: that war was bad and that he was partowner of some land near Fort Worth where the British government had established a training field for aviators. But at last Elmer read the letter and went to see his people.

His father had liked Houston. But his mother would want to move though, and sitting in the daycoach among the smells of peanuts and wet babies, nursing his yellow stick from whose crook the varnish was long since handworn, he remembered and thought of that Joblike man with pity tempered by secret and disloyal relief that he himself would no more be haled over the face of the earth
at what undirected compulsion drove his mother. From the vantage point of absence, of what might almost be called weaning, he wondered when she would give up: this too (compensating for the recent secret disloyalty) tempered by an abrupt fierce wave of tenderness for her bitter indomitable optimism. For he would return to Houston to live, now that his parents did not need him and hence there was none to expect him any longer to do anything. He would live in Houston and paint pictures.

He saw his father first, sitting on the small front porch; already he had known exactly what the house would look like. His father was unchanged, static, affable, resigned; age did not show on him at all, as it never had, on his cunning cherubic face, his vigorous untidy thatch. Yet Elmer discerned something else, something his father had acquired during his absence: a kind of smug unemphatic cheeriness. And then (sitting also on the porch where his father had not risen, also in a yellow varnished chair such as may be bought almost anywhere for a dollar or two) without any feeling at all, he listened to his father’s cheery voice telling him that his mother, that passionate indomitable woman, was dead. While his father recited details with almost gustatory eulogism he looked about at the frame house, painted brown, set in a small dusty grassless treeless yard, recalling that long series of houses exactly like it, stretching behind him like an endless street into that time when he would wake in the dark beside Jo, with her hand sharp and fierce in his hair and her voice in the dark fierce too: “Elly, when you want to do anything, you do it, do you hear? Dont let nobody stop you.” and on into the cloudy time when he had existed but could not remember it. He sat in his yellow varnished chair, nursing his yellow varnished stick, while his father talked on and on and dusk came for two hundred unhindered miles and filled the house where his mother’s fretful presence seemed to linger yet like an odor, as though it had not even time for sleep, let alone for death.

He would not stay for supper, and his father told him how to find the cemetery with what Elmer believed was actual relief. “I’ll get along all right,” Elmer said.

“Yes,” his father agreed heartily, “you’ll get along all right. Folks are always glad to help soldiers. This aint no place for a young man, nohow. If I was young now, like you are—” The intimation of a world fecund, waiting to be conquered with a full
rich patience, died away, and Elmer rose, thinking if his mother had been present now, who refused always to believe that any flesh and blood of hers could get along at all beyond the radius of her fretful kindness. Oh, I’ll get along, he repeated, now to that thin spirit of her which yet lingered about the house which had at last conquered her, and he could almost hear her rejoin quickly, with a kind of triumph: That’s what your sister thought, forgetting that they had never heard from Jo and that for all they knew she might be Gloria Swanson or J.P.Morgan’s wife.