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We didn’t go home tonight though. We were still at Colonel Linscomb’s, in the office again, after supper again. Boon looked battered and patched up and a considerable subdued, but he was calm and peaceful enough. And clean too: he had shaved and had on a fresh shirt. I mean, a new shirt that he must have bought in Hardwick, sitting on the same straight hard chair Ned had sat on last night.

“Naw,” he said. “I wasn’t fighting him about that. I wasn’t even mad about that no more. That was her business. Besides, you cant just cut right off: you got to—got—”

“Taper off?” Grandfather said.

“No sir,” Boon said. “Not taper off. You quit, only you still got to clean up the trash, litter, no matter how good you finished. It wasn’t that. What I aimed to break his neck for was for calling my wife a whore.”

“You mean you’re going to marry her?” Grandfather said. But it was not Grandfather: it was me that Boon pounced, almost jumped at.

“God damn it,” he said, “if you can go bare-handed against a knife defending her, why the hell cant I marry her? Aint I as good as you are, even if I aint eleven years old?”

And that’s about all. About six the next afternoon we came over the last hill, and there was the clock on the courthouse above the trees around the Square. Ned said, “Hee hee hee.” He was in front with Boon. He said: “Seems like I been gone two years.”

“When Delphine gets through with you tonight, maybe you’ll wish you had,” Grandfather said.

“Or maybe not come back a-tall,” Ned said. “But a woman, got to keep sweeping and cooking and washing and dusting on her mind all day long, I reckon she needs a little excitement once in a while.”

Then we were there. The automobile stopped. I didn’t move. Grandfather got out, so I did too. “Mr. Ballott’s got the key,” Boon said.

“No he hasn’t,” Grandfather said. He took the key from his pocket and gave it to Boon. “Come on,” he said. We crossed the street toward home. And do you know what I thought? I thought It hasn’t even changed. Because it should have. It should have been altered, even if only a little. I dont mean it should have changed of itself, but that I, bringing back to it what the last four days must have changed in me, should have altered it. I mean, if those four days—the lying and deceiving and tricking and decisions and undecisions, and the things I had done and seen and heard and learned that Mother and Father wouldn’t have let me do and see and hear and learn—the things I had had to learn that I wasn’t even ready for yet, had nowhere to store them nor even anywhere to lay them down; if all that had changed nothing, was the same as if it had never been—nothing smaller or larger or older or wiser or more pitying—then something had been wasted, thrown away, spent for nothing; either it was wrong and false to begin with and should never have existed, or I was wrong or false or weak or anyway not worthy of it.

“Come on,” Grandfather said—not kind, not unkind, not anything; I thought If Aunt Callie would just come out whether she’s carrying Alexander or not and start hollering at me. But nothing: just a house I had known since before I could have known another, at a little after six oclock on a May evening, when people were already thinking about supper; and Mother should have had a few gray hairs at least, kissing me for a minute, then looking at me; then Father, whom I had always been a little … afraid is not the word but I cant think of another—afraid of because if I hadn’t been, I think I would have been ashamed of us both. Then Grandfather said, “Maury.”

“Not this time, Boss,” Father said. Then to me: “Let’s get it over with.”

“Yes sir,” I said, and followed him, on down the hall to the bathroom and stopped at the door while he took the razor strop from the hook and I stepped back so he could come out and we went on; Mother was at the top of the cellar stairs; I could see the tears, but no more; all she had to do would be to say Stop or Please or Maury or maybe if she had just said Lucius. But nothing, and I followed Father on down and stopped again while he opened the cellar door and we went in, where we kept the kindling in winter and the zinc-lined box for ice in summer, and Mother and Aunt Callie had shelves for preserves and jelly and jam, and even an old rocking chair for Mother and Aunt Callie while they were putting up the jars, and for Aunt Callie to sleep in sometimes after dinner, though she always said she hadn’t been asleep. So here we were at last, where it had taken me four days of dodging and scrabbling and scurrying to get to; and it was wrong, and Father and I both knew it. I mean, if after all the lying and deceiving and disobeying and conniving I had done, all he could do about it was to whip me, then Father was not good enough for me. And if all that I had done was balanced by no more than that shaving strop, then both of us were debased. You see? it was impasse, until Grandfather knocked. The door was not locked, but Grandfather’s father had taught him, and he had taught Father, and Father had taught me that no door required a lock: the closed door itself was sufficient until you were invited to enter it. But Grandfather didn’t wait, not this time.

“No,” Father said. “This is what you would have done to me twenty years ago.”

“Maybe I have more sense now,” Grandfather said. “Persuade Alison to go on back upstairs and stop snivelling.” Then Father was gone, the door closed again. Grandfather sat in the rocking chair: not fat, but with just the right amount of paunch to fill the white waistcoat and make the heavy gold watch chain hang right.

“I lied,” I said.

“Come here,” he said.

“I cant,” I said. “I lied, I tell you.”

“I know it,” he said.

“Then do something about it. Do anything, just so it’s something.”

“I cant,” he said.

“There aint anything to do? Not anything?”

“I didn’t say that,” Grandfather said. “I said I couldn’t. You can.”

“What?” I said. “How can I forget it? Tell me how to.”

“You cant,” he said. “Nothing is ever forgotten. Nothing is ever lost. It’s too valuable.”

“Then what can I do?”

“Live with it,” Grandfather said.

“Live with it? You mean, forever? For the rest of my life? Not ever to get rid of it? Never? I cant. Dont you see I cant?”

“Yes you can,” he said. “You will. A gentleman always does. A gentleman can live through anything. He faces anything. A gentleman accepts the responsibility of his actions and bears the burden of their consequences, even when he did not himself instigate them but only acquiesced to them, didn’t say No though he knew he should. Come here.” Then I was crying hard, bawling, standing (no: kneeling; I was that tall now) between his knees, one of his hands at the small of my back, the other at the back of my head holding my face down against his stiff collar and shirt and I could smell him—the starch and shaving lotion and chewing tobacco and benzine where Grandmother or Delphine had cleaned a spot from his coat, and always a faint smell of whiskey which I always believed was from the first toddy which he took in bed in the morning before he got up. When I slept with him, the first thing in the morning would be Ned (he had no white coat; sometimes he didn’t have on any coat or even a shirt, and even after Grandfather sent the horses to stay at the livery stable, Ned still managed to smell like them) with the tray bearing the decanter and water jug and sugar bowl and spoon and tumbler, and Grandfather would sit up in bed and make the toddy and drink it, then put a little sugar into the heel-tap and stir it and add a little water and give it to me until Grandmother came suddenly in one morning and put a stop to it. “There,” he said at last. “That should have emptied the cistern. Now go wash your face. A gentleman cries too, but he always washes his face.”

And this is all. It was Monday afternoon, after school (Father wouldn’t let Mother write me an excuse, so I had to take the absent marks. But Miss Rhodes was going to let me make up the work) and Ned was sitting on the back steps again, Grandmother’s steps this time, but in the shade this time too. I said:

“If we’d just thought to bet that money Sam gave us on Lightning that last time, we could have settled what to do about it good.”

“I did settle it good,” Ned said. “I got five for three this time. Old Possum Hood’s got twenty dollars for his church now.”

“But we lost,” I said.

“You and Lightning lost,” Ned said. “Me and that money was on Akrum.”

“Oh,” I said. Then I said, “How much was it?” He didn’t move. I mean, he didn’t do anything. I mean, he looked no different at all; it might have been last Friday instead of this one; all the four days of dodging and finagling and having to guess right and guess fast and not having but one guess to do it with, had left no mark on him, even though I had seen him once when he not only had had no sleep, he didn’t even have any clothes to wear. (You see, how I keep on calling it four days? It was Saturday afternoon when Boon and I—we thought—left Jefferson, and it was Friday afternoon when Boon and Ned and I saw Jefferson again. But to me, it was the four days between that Saturday night at Miss Ballenbaugh’s when Boon would have gone back home tomorrow if I had said so, and the moment when I looked down from Lightning Wednesday and saw Grandfather and passed to him, during which Ned had carried the load alone, held back the flood, shored up the crumbling levee with whatever tools he could reach—including me—until they broke in his hand. I mean, granted we had no business being behind that levee: a gentleman always sticks to his lie whether he told it or not.) And I was only eleven; I didn’t know how I knew that too, but I did: that you never ask anyone how much he won or lost gambling. So I said: “I mean, would there be enough to pay back Boss his four hundred and ninety-six dollars?” And he still sat there, unchanged; so why should Mother have a gray hair since I saw her last? since I would have to be unchanged too? Because now I knew what Grandfather meant: that your outside is just what you live in, sleep in, and has little connection with who you are and even less with what you do. Then he said:

“You learned a considerable about folks on that trip; I’m just surprised you aint learnt more about money too. Do you want Boss to insult me, or do you want me to insult Boss, or do you want both?”

“How do you mean?” I said.

“When I offers to pay his gambling debt, aint I telling him to his face he aint got enough sense to bet on horses? And when I tells him where the money come from I’m gonter pay it with, aint I proving it?”

“I still dont see where the insult to you comes in,” I said.

“He might take it,” Ned said.

Then the day came at last. Everbe sent for me and I walked across town to the little back-street almost doll-size house that Boon was buying by paying Grandfather fifty cents every Saturday. She had a nurse and she should have been in bed. But she was sitting up, waiting for me, in a wrapper; she even walked across to the cradle and stood with her hand on my shoulder while we looked at it.

“Well?” she said. “What do you think?”

I didn’t think anything. It was just another baby, already as ugly as Boon even if it would have to wait twenty years to be as big. I said so. “What are you going to call it?”

“Not it,” she said. “Him. Cant you guess?”

“What?” I said.

“His name is Lucius Priest Hogganbeck,” she said.

WILLIAM FAULKNER

(1897–1962)

William Cuthbert Faulkner was born in 1897 in New Albany, Mississippi, the first of four sons of Murry and Maud Butler Falkner (he later added the ‘u’ to the family name himself). In 1904 the family moved to the university town of Oxford, Mississippi, where Faulkner was to spend most of his life. He was named for his great-grandfather ‘The Old Colonel,’ a Civil War veteran who built a railroad, wrote a bestselling romantic novel called The White Rose of Memphis, became a Mississippi state legislator, and was eventually killed in what may or may not have been a duel with a disgruntled business partner. Faulkner identified with this robust and energetic ancestor and often said that he inherited the ‘ink stain’ from him.

Never fond of school, Faulkner left at the end of football season his senior year of high school, and began working at his grandfather’s bank. In 1918, after his plans to marry his sweetheart Estelle Oldham were squashed by their families, he tried to enlist as a pilot in the U.S. Army but was rejected because he did not meet the height and weight requirements. He went to Canada, where he pretended to be an Englishman and joined the RAF training program there. Although he did not complete his training until after the war ended and never saw combat, he returned to his hometown in uniform, boasting of war wounds. He briefly attended the University of Mississippi, where he began to publish his poetry.

After spending a short time living in New York, he again returned to Oxford, where he worked at the university post office. His first book, a collection of poetry, The Marble Faun, was published at Faulkner’s own expense in 1924. The writer Sherwood Anderson, whom he met in New Orleans in 1925, encouraged him to try writing fiction, and his first novel, Soldier’s Pay, was published in 1926. It was followed by Mosquitoes. His next novel, which he titled Flags in the Dust, was rejected by his publisher and twelve others to whom he submitted it. It was eventually published in drastically edited form as Sartoris (the original version was not issued until after his death). Meanwhile, he was writing The Sound and the Fury, which, after being rejected by one publisher, came out in 1929 and received many ecstatic reviews, although it sold poorly. Yet again, a new novel, Sanctuary, was initially rejected by his publisher, this time as ‘too shocking.’ While working on the night shift at a power plant, Faulkner wrote what he was determined would be his masterpiece, As I Lay Dying. He finished it in about seven weeks, and it was published in 1930, again to generally good reviews and mediocre sales.

In 1929 Faulkner had finally married his childhood sweetheart, Estelle, after her divorce from her first husband. They had a premature daughter, Alabama, who died ten days after birth in 1931; a second daughter, Jill, was born in 1933.

With the eventual publication of his most sensational and violent (as well as, up till then, most successful) novel, Sanctuary (1931), Faulkner was invited to write scripts for MGM and Warner Brothers, where he was responsible for much of the dialogue in the film versions of Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not and Chandler’s The Big Sleep, and many other films. He continued to write novels and published many stories in the popular magazines. Light in August (1932) was his first attempt to address the racial issues of the South, an effort continued in Absalom, Absalom! (1936), and Go Down, Moses (1942). By 1946, most of Faulkner’s novels were out of print in the United States (although they remained well-regarded in Europe), and he was seen as a minor, regional writer. But then the influential editor and critic Malcolm Cowley, who had earlier championed Hemingway and Fitzgerald and others of their generation, put together The Portable Faulkner, and once again Faulkner’s genius was recognized, this time for good. He received the 1949 Nobel Prize for Literature as well as many other awards and accolades, including the National Book Award and the Gold Medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and France’s Legion of Honor.