“I’m going with you,” he said, not loud; we stood there under the still circumpsect eyes and spoke quietly to one another like two conspirators. Then I saw the pistol, the outline of it inside his shirt, probably the one we had taken from Grumby that day we killed him.
“No you ain’t,” I said.
“Yes I am.”
“No you ain’t.” So I walked on, along the street in the hot sun. It was almost noon now and I could smell nothing except the verbena in my coat, as if it had gathered all the sun, all the suspended fierce heat in which the equinox could not seem to occur and were distilling it, so that I moved in a cloud of verbena as I might have moved in a cloud of smoke from a cigar. Then George Wyatt was beside me (I don’t know where he came from) and five or six others of Father’s old troop a few yards behind, George’s hand on my arm, drawing me into a doorway out of the avid eyes like caught breaths.
“Have you got that derringer?” George said.
“No,” I said.
“Good,” George said. “They are tricky things to fool with. Couldn’t nobody but Colonel ever handle one right; I never could. So you take this. I tried it this morning and I know it’s right. Here.” He was already fumbling the pistol into my pocket, then the same thing seemed to happen to him that happened to Drusilla last night when she kissed my hand—something communicated by touch straight to the simple code by which he lived, without going through the brain at all: so that he too stood suddenly back, the pistol in his hand, staring at me with his pale outraged eyes and speaking in a whisper thin with fury: “Who are you? Is your name Sartoris? By God, if you don’t kill him, I’m going to.” Now it was not panting, it was a terrible desire to laugh, to laugh as Drusilla had, and say, “That’s what Drusilla said.” But I didn’t. I said,
“I’m tending to this. You stay out of it. I don’t need any help.” Then his fierce eyes faded gradually, exactly as you turn a lamp down.
“Well,” he said, putting the pistol back into his pocket. “You’ll have to excuse me, son. I should have knowed you wouldn’t do anything that would keep John from laying quiet. We’ll follow you and wait at the foot of the steps. And remember: he’s a brave man, but he’s been sitting in that office by himself since yesterday morning waiting for you and his nerves are on edge.”
“I’ll remember,” I said. “I don’t need any help.” I had started on when suddenly I said it without having any warning that I was going to: “No bloody moon.”
“What?” he said. I didn’t answer. I went on across the square itself now, in the hot sun, they following though not close so that I never saw them again until afterward, surrounded by the remote still eyes not following me yet either, just stopped where they were before the stores and about the door to the courthouse, waiting. I walked steadily on enclosed in the now fierce odor of the verbena sprig. Then shadow fell upon me; I did not pause, I looked once at the small faded sign nailed to the brick B. J. Redmond. Atty at Law and began to mount the stairs, the wooden steps scuffed by the heavy bewildered boots of countrymen approaching litigation and stained by tobacco spit, on down the dim corridor to the door which bore the name again, B. J. Redmond and knocked once and opened it. He sat behind the desk, not much taller than Father but thicker as a man gets who spends most of his time sitting and listening to people, freshly shaven and with fresh linen; a lawyer yet it was not a lawyer’s face—a face much thinner than the body would indicate, strained (and yes, tragic; I know that now) and exhausted beneath the neat recent steady strokes of the razor, holding a pistol flat on the desk before him, loose beneath his hand and aimed at nothing. There was no smell of drink, not even of tobacco in the neat clean dingy room although I knew he smoked. I didn’t pause. I walked steadily toward him. It was not twenty feet from door to desk yet I seemed to walk in a dreamlike state in which there was neither time nor distance, as though the mere act of walking was no more intended to encompass space than was his sitting. We didn’t speak. It was as if we both knew what the passage of words would be and the futility of it; how he might have said, “Go out, Bayard. Go away, boy” and then, “Draw then. I will allow you to draw” and it would have been the same as if he had never said it. So we did not speak; I just walked steadily toward him as the pistol rose from the desk. I watched it, I could see the foreshortened slant of the barrel and I knew it would miss me though his hand did not tremble. I walked toward him, toward the pistol in the rocklike hand, I heard no bullet. Maybe I didn’t even hear the explosion though I remember the sudden orange bloom and smoke as they appeared against his white shirt as they had appeared against Grumby’s greasy Confederate coat; I still watched that foreshortened slant of barrel which I knew was not aimed at me and saw the second orange flash and smoke and heard no bullet that time either. Then I stopped; it was done then. I watched the pistol descend to the desk in short jerks; I saw him release it and sit back, both hands on the desk, I looked at his face and I knew too what it was to want air when there was nothing in the circumambience for the lungs. He rose, shoved the chair back with a convulsive motion and rose, with a queer ducking motion of his head; with his head still ducked aside and one arm extended as though he couldn’t see and the other hand resting on the desk as if he couldn’t stand alone, he turned and crossed to the wall and took his hat from the rack and with his head still ducked aside and one hand extended he blundered along the wall and passed me and reached the door and went through it. He was brave; no one denied that. He walked down those stairs and out onto the street where George Wyatt and the other six of Father’s old troop waited and where the other men had begun to run now; he walked through the middle of them with his hat on and his head up (they told me how someone shouted at him: “Have you killed that boy too?”), saying no word, staring straight ahead and with his back to them, on to the station where the south-bound train was just in and got on it with no baggage, nothing, and went away from Jefferson and from Mississippi and never came back.
I heard their feet on the stairs then in the corridor then in the room, but for a while yet (it wasn’t that long, of course) I still sat behind the desk as he had sat, the flat of the pistol still warm under my hand, my hand growing slowly numb between the pistol and my forehead. Then I raised my head; the little room was full of men. “My God!” George Wyatt cried. “You took the pistol away from him and then missed him, missed him twice?” Then he answered himself—that same rapport for violence which Drusilla had and which in George’s case was actual character judgment: “No; wait. You walked in here without even a pocket knife and let him miss you twice. My God in heaven.” He turned, shouting: “Get to hell out of here! You, White, ride out to Sartoris and tell his folks it’s all over and he’s all right. Ride!” So they departed, went away; presently only George was left, watching me with that pale bleak stare which was speculative yet not at all ratiocinative. “Well by God,” he said. “—Do you want a drink?”
“No,” I said. “I’m hungry. I didn’t eat any breakfast.”
“I reckon not, if you got up this morning aiming to do what you did. Come on. We’ll go to the Holston House.”
“No,” I said. “No. Not there.”
“Why not? You ain’t done anything to be ashamed of. I wouldn’t have done it that way, myself. I’d a shot at him once, anyway. But that’s your way or you wouldn’t have done it.”
“Yes,” I said. “I would do it again.”
“Be damned if I would.—You want to come home with me? We’ll have time to eat and then ride out there in time for the—–” But I couldn’t do that either.
“No,” I said. “I’m not hungry after all. I think I’ll go home.”
“Don’t you want to wait and ride out with me?”
“No. I’ll go on.”
“You don’t want to stay here, anyway.” He looked around the room again, where the smell of powder smoke still lingered a little, still lay somewhere on the hot dead air though invisible now, blinking a little with his fierce pale unintroverted eyes. ??
?Well by God,” he said again. “Maybe you’re right, maybe there has been enough killing in your family without— Come on.” We left the office. I waited at the foot of the stairs and soon Ringo came up with the horses. We crossed the square again. There were no feet on the Holston House railing now (it was twelve o’clock) but a group of men stood before the door who raised their hats and I raised mine and Ringo and I rode on.
We did not go fast. Soon it was one, maybe after; the carriages and buggies would begin to leave the square soon, so I turned from the road at the end of the pasture and I sat the mare, trying to open the gate without dismounting, until Ringo dismounted and opened it. We crossed the pasture in the hard fierce sun; I could have seen the house now but I didn’t look. Then we were in the shade, the close thick airless shade of the creek bottom; the old rails still lay in the undergrowth where we had built the pen to hide the Yankee mules. Presently I heard the water, then I could see the sunny glints. We dismounted. I lay on my back, I thought Now it can begin again if it wants to. But it did not. I went to sleep. I went to sleep almost before I had stopped thinking. I slept for almost five hours and I didn’t dream anything at all yet I waked myself up crying, crying too hard to stop it. Ringo was squatting beside me and the sun was gone though there was a bird of some sort still singing somewhere and the whistle of the north-bound evening train sounded and the short broken puffs of starting where it had evidently stopped at our flag station. After a while I began to stop and Ringo brought his hat full of water from the creek but instead I went down to the water myself and bathed my face.
There was still a good deal of light in the pasture, though the whippoorwills had begun, and when we reached the house there was a mockingbird singing in the magnolia, the night song now, the drowsy moony one, and again the moon like the rim print of a heel in wet sand. There was just one light in the hall now and so it was all over though I could still smell the flowers even above the verbena in my coat. I had not looked at him again. I had started to before I left the house but I did not, I did not see him again and all the pictures we had of him were bad ones because a picture could no more have held him dead than the house could have kept his body. But I didn’t need to see him again because he was there, he would always be there; maybe what Drusilla meant by his dream was not something which he possessed but something which he had bequeathed us which we could never forget, which would even assume the corporeal shape of him whenever any of us, black or white, closed our eyes. I went into the house. There was no light in the drawing room except the last of the afterglow which came through the western window where Aunt Jenny’s colored glass was; I was about to go on upstairs when I saw her sitting there beside the window. She didn’t call me and I didn’t speak Drusilla’s name, I just went to the door and stood there. “She’s gone,” Aunt Jenny said. “She took the evening train. She has gone to Montgomery, to Dennison.” Denny had been married about a year now; he was living in Montgomery, reading law.
“I see,” I said. “Then she didn’t—–” But there wasn’t any use in that either; Jed White must have got there before one o’clock and told them. And besides, Aunt Jenny didn’t answer. She could have lied to me but she didn’t, she said,
“Come here.” I went to her chair. “Kneel down. I can’t see you.”
“Don’t you want the lamp?”
“No. Kneel down.” So I knelt beside the chair. “So you had a perfectly splendid Saturday afternoon, didn’t you? Tell me about it.” Then she put her hands on my shoulders. I watched them come up as though she were trying to stop them; I felt them on my shoulders as if they had a separate life of their own and were trying to do something which for my sake she was trying to restrain, prevent. Then she gave up or she was not strong enough because they came up and took my face between them, hard, and suddenly the tears sprang and streamed down her face like Drusilla’s laughing had. “Oh, damn you Sartorises!” she said. “Damn you! Damn you!”
As I passed down the hall the light came up in the dining-room and I could hear Louvinia laying the table for supper. So the stairs were lighted quite well. But the upper hall was dark. I saw her open door (that unmistakable way in which an open door stands open when nobody lives in the room any more) and I realized I had not believed that she was really gone. So I didn’t look into the room. I went on to mine and entered. And then for a long moment I thought it was the verbena in my lapel which I still smelled. I thought that until I had crossed the room and looked down at the pillow on which it lay—the single sprig of it (without looking she would pinch off a half dozen of them and they would be all of a size, almost all of a shape, as if a machine had stamped them out) filling the room, the dusk, the evening with that odor which she said you could smell alone above the smell of horses.
3
THE LAST WILDERHESS
Editor’s Note
The county built a marble monument to Colonel Sartoris; it stands on the highest site in the Jefferson cemetery, overlooking the railroad he built. Drusilla disappeared from the family records. Young Bayard Sartoris lost control of his father’s railroad, but he founded a bank in Jefferson and was its president during the rest of his long life. Years afterward, with the death of Major Cassius de Spain, he became the county’s leading citizen.
Major de Spain, as a result of tax sales and mortgage foreclosures, had acquired most of the hundred square miles that Colonel Sutpen once owned. He remodeled the shack where Wash Jones had died into a hunting lodge; and there, late every fall, he used to entertain a group of his friends, including General Compson and McCaslin Edmonds and young Isaac McCaslin, the son of Uncle Buck and Miss Sophonsiba. Sam Fathers was their guide through the wild lands in the Tallahatchie River bottom. It was on the north bank of the river that Boon Hogganbeck, who also had Chickasaw ancestors, finally killed Old Ben, the enormous bear with the mutilated paw.
“The Bear” appeared as a chapter of Go Down, Moses after being reworked in a masterly fashion from two magazine stories. The chapter, here reprinted, is divided into five sections. Those who would like to read what is first of all a hunting story—or better, a story of the chase, with overtones that make it one of the greatest in the language—should confine themselves to the first three sections and the last, which are written in the author’s simplest manner. It is the long fourth section that creates difficulties for the reader, partly because of its complicated style, but chiefly because it deals with the general theme of Go Down, Moses—which is the relation between the white and the black descendants of old Carothers McCaslin—rather than with the yearly pursuit of Old Ben. Faulkner himself omitted the section when he reprinted “The Bear” as part of his book about the wilderness—Big Woods (1955)—and the result was a more unified story. Strangely, however, it had lost some of the haunting power that it possesses in the longer version.
It is in the fourth section that Faulkner carries to an extreme his effort toward putting the whole world into one sentence, holding it suspended between one capital letter and one period. There is a sentence that occupies six pages of the present volume (259-265), with a two-page parenthesis in the middle. Containing several paragraphs, each of which begins with a small letter, and a quantity of quoted matter, it runs to more than eighteen hundred words, and it was quite probably—until Faulkner himself exceeded that length in a sentence of “The Jail” (1951)—the longest in American fiction. In all this section of “The Bear,” the reader may have difficulty in fitting the subjects to the predicates and in disentangling the subordinate clauses—let alone in tracing the genealogy of the McCaslin family—and yet, if he perseveres, he will discover one of Faulkner’s most impressive themes: the belief in Isaac McCaslin’s heart that the land itself has been cursed by slavery, and that the only way for him to escape the curse is to relinquish the land.
1883
The Bear
I
There was a man and a dog too this time. Two beasts, counting Old Ben, the bear, and two men, counting Boon Hogganbeck, in whom s
ome of the same blood ran which ran in Sam Fathers, even though Boon’s was a plebeian strain of it and only Sam and Old Ben and the mongrel Lion were taintless and incorruptible.
Isaac McCaslin was sixteen. For six years now he had been a man’s hunter. For six years now he had heard the best of all talking. It was of the wilderness, the big woods, bigger and older than any recorded document—of white man fatuous enough to believe he had bought any fragment of it, of Indian ruthless enough to pretend that any fragment of it had been his to convey; bigger than Major de Spain and the scrap he pretended to, knowing better; older than old Thomas Sutpen of whom Major de Spain had had it and who knew better; older even than old Ikkemotubbe, the Chickasaw chief, of whom old Sutpen had had it and who knew better in his turn. It was of the men, not white nor black nor red, but men, hunters, with the will and hardihood to endure and the humility and skill to survive, and the dogs and the bear and deer juxtaposed and reliefed against it, ordered and compelled by and within the wilderness in the ancient and unremitting contest according to the ancient and immitigable rules which voided all regrets and brooked no quarter;—the best game of all, the best of all breathing and forever the best of all listening, the voices quiet and weighty and deliberate for retrospection and recollection and exactitude among the concrete trophies—the racked guns and the heads and skins—in the libraries of town houses or the offices of plantation houses or (and best of all) in the camps themselves where the intact and still-warm meat yet hung, the men who had slain it sitting before the burning logs on hearths, when there were houses and hearths, or about the smoky blazing of piled wood in front of stretched tarpaulins when there were not. There was always a bottle present, so that it would seem to him that those fine fierce instants of heart and brain and courage and wiliness and speed were concentrated and distilled into that brown liquor which not women, not boys and children, but only hunters drank, drinking not of the blood they spilled but some condensation of the wild immortal spirit, drinking it moderately, humbly even, not with the pagan’s base and baseless hope of acquiring thereby the virtues of cunning and strength and speed but in salute to them. Thus it seemed to him on this December morning not only natural but actually fitting that this should have begun with whiskey.