The sound and the fury
smart. I put the watch down and went into Shreve’s room and got the
iodine and painted the cut. I cleaned the rest of the glass out of the
rim with the towel.
I laid out two suits of underwear, with socks, shirts, collars and ties,
and packed my trunk. I put in everything except my new suit and an old
one and two pairs of shoes and two hats, and my books. I carried the
books into the sitting-room and stacked them on the table, the ones I
had brought from home and the ones _Father said it used to be a
gentleman was known by his books; nowadays he is known by the ones he
has not returned_ and locked the trunk and addressed it. The quarter
hour sounded. I stopped and listened to it until the chimes ceased.
I bathed and shaved. The water made my finger smart a little, so I
painted it again. I put on my new suit and put my watch on and packed
the other suit and the accessories and my razor and brushes in my hand
bag, and wrapped the trunk key into a sheet of paper and put it in an
envelope and addressed it to Father, and wrote the two notes and sealed
them.
The shadow hadn’t quite cleared the stoop. I stopped inside the door,
watching the shadow move. It moved almost perceptibly, creeping back
inside the door, driving the shadow back into the door. _Only she was
running already when I heard it. In the mirror she was running before I
knew what it was. That quick, her train caught up over her arm she ran
out of the mirror like a cloud, her veil swirling in long glints her
heels brittle and fast clutching her dress onto her shoulder with the
other hand, running out of the mirror the smells roses roses the voice
that breathed o’er Eden. Then she was across the porch I couldn’t hear
her heels then in the moonlight like a cloud, the floating shadow of the
veil running across the grass, into the bellowing. She ran out of her
dress, clutching her bridal, running into the bellowing where T. P. in
the dew Whooey Sassprilluh Benjy under the box bellowing. Father had a
V-shaped silver cuirass on his running chest_
Shreve said, “Well, you didn’t. . . . Is it a wedding or a wake?”
“I couldn’t make it,” I said.
“Not with all that primping. What’s the matter? You think this was
Sunday?”
“I reckon the police wont get me for wearing my new suit one time,” I
said.
“I was thinking about the Square students. Have you got too proud to
attend classes too?”
“I’m going to eat first.” The shadow on the stoop was gone. I stepped
into sunlight, finding my shadow again. I walked down the steps just
ahead of it. The half hour went. Then the chimes ceased and died away.
Deacon wasn’t at the postoffice either. I stamped the two envelopes and
mailed the one to Father and put Shreve’s in my inside pocket, and then
I remembered where I had last seen the Deacon. It was on Decoration Day,
in a G. A. R. uniform, in the middle of the parade. If you waited long
enough on any corner you would see him in whatever parade came along.
The one before was on Columbus’ or Garibaldi’s or somebody’s birthday.
He was in the Street Sweeper’s section, in a stovepipe hat, carrying a
two inch Italian flag, smoking a cigar among the brooms and scoops. But
the last time was the G. A. R. one, because Shreve said:
“There now. Just look at what your grandpa did to that poor old nigger.”
“Yes,” I said, “Now he can spend day after day marching in parades. If
it hadn’t been for my grandfather, he’d have to work like whitefolks.”
I didn’t see him anywhere. But I never knew even a working nigger that
you could find when you wanted him, let alone one that lived off the fat
of the land. A car came along. I went over to town and went to Parker’s
and had a good breakfast. While I was eating I heard a clock strike the
hour. But then I suppose it takes at least one hour to lose time in, who
has been longer than history getting into the mechanical progression of
it.
When I finished breakfast I bought a cigar. The girl said a fifty cent
one was the best, so I took one and lit it and went out to the street. I
stood there and took a couple of puffs, then I held it in my hand and
went on toward the corner. I passed a jeweller’s window, but I looked
away in time. At the corner two bootblacks caught me, one on either
side, shrill and raucous, like blackbirds. I gave the cigar to one of
them, and the other one a nickel. Then they let me alone. The one with
the cigar was trying to sell it to the other for the nickel.
There was a clock, high up in the sun, and I thought about how, when you
dont want to do a thing, your body will try to trick you into doing it,
sort of unawares. I could feel the muscles in the back of my neck, and
then I could hear my watch ticking away in my pocket and after a while I
had all the other sounds shut away, leaving only the watch in my pocket.
I turned back up the street, to the window. He was working at the table
behind the window. He was going bald. There was a glass in his eye—a
metal tube screwed into his face. I went in.
The place was full of ticking, like crickets in September grass, and I
could hear a big clock on the wall above his head. He looked up, his eye
big and blurred and rushing beyond the glass. I took mine out and handed
it to him.
“I broke my watch.”
He flipped it over in his hand. “I should say you have. You must have
stepped on it.”
“Yes, sir. I knocked it off the dresser and stepped on it in the dark.
It’s still running though.”
He pried the back open and squinted into it. “Seems to be all right. I
cant tell until I go over it, though. I’ll go into it this afternoon.”
“I’ll bring it back later,” I said. “Would you mind telling me if any of
those watches in the window are right?”
He held my watch on his palm and looked up at me with his blurred
rushing eye.
“I made a bet with a fellow,” I said, “And I forgot my glasses this
morning.”
“Why, all right,” he said. He laid the watch down and half rose on his
stool and looked over the barrier. Then he glanced up at the wall. “It’s
twen—”
“Dont tell me,” I said, “please sir. Just tell me if any of them are
right.”
He looked at me again. He sat back on the stool and pushed the glass up
onto his forehead. It left a red circle around his eye and when it was
gone his whole face looked naked. “What’re you celebrating today?” he
said. “That boat race aint until next week, is it?”
“No, sir. This is just a private celebration. Birthday. Are any of them
right?”
“No. But they haven’t been regulated and set yet. If you’re thinking of
buying one of them—”
“No, sir. I dont need a watch. We have a clock in our sitting room. I’ll
have this one fixed when I do.” I reached my hand.
“Better leave it now.”
“I’ll bring it back later.” He gave me the watch. I put it in my pocket.
I couldn’t hear it now, above all the others. “I’m much obliged to you.
I hope I haven’t taken up your time.”
“That’s all right. Bring it in when you are ready. And you better put
off this celebration until after we win that boat race.”
“Yes, sir. I reckon I had.”
I went out, shutting the door upon the ticking. I looked back into the
window. He was watching me across the barrier. There were about a dozen
watches in the window, a dozen different hours and each with the same
assertive and contradictory assurance that mine had, without any hands
at all. Contradicting one another. I could hear mine, ticking away
inside my pocket, even though nobody could see it, even though it could
tell nothing if anyone could.
And so I told myself to take that one. Because Father said clocks slay
time. He said time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little
wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life. The hands were
extended, slightly off the horizontal at a faint angle, like a gull
tilting into the wind. Holding all I used to be sorry about like the new
moon holding water, niggers say. The jeweler was working again, bent
over his bench, the tube tunnelled into his face. His hair was parted in
the center. The part ran up into the bald spot, like a drained marsh in
December.
I saw the hardware store from across the street. I didn’t know you
bought flat-irons by the pound.
The clerk said, “These weigh ten pounds.” Only they were bigger than I
thought. So I got two six-pound little ones, because they would look
like a pair of shoes wrapped up. They felt heavy enough together, but I
thought again how Father had said about the reducto absurdum of human
experience, thinking how the only opportunity I seemed to have for the
application of Harvard. Maybe by next year; thinking maybe it takes two
years in school to learn to do that properly.
But they felt heavy enough in the air. A street car came. I got on. I
didn’t see the placard on the front. It was full, mostly prosperous
looking people reading newspapers. The only vacant seat was beside a
nigger. He wore a derby and shined shoes and he was holding a dead cigar
stub. I used to think that a Southerner had to be always conscious of
niggers. I thought that Northerners would expect him to. When I first
came East I kept thinking You’ve got to remember to think of them as
coloured people not niggers, and if it hadn’t happened that I wasn’t
thrown with many of them, I’d have wasted a lot of time and trouble
before I learned that the best way to take all people, black or white,
is to take them for what they think they are, then leave them alone.
That was when I realised that a nigger is not a person so much as a form
of behaviour; a sort of obverse reflection of the white people he lives
among. But I thought at first that I ought to miss having a lot of them
around me because I thought that Northerners thought I did, but I didn’t
know that I really had missed Roskus and Dilsey and them until that
morning in Virginia. The train was stopped when I waked and I raised the
shade and looked out. The car was blocking a road crossing, where two
white fences came down a hill and then sprayed outward and downward like
part of the skeleton of a horn, and there was a nigger on a mule in the
middle of the stiff ruts, waiting for the train to move. How long he had
been there I didn’t know, but he sat straddle of the mule, his head
wrapped in a piece of blanket, as if they had been built there with the
fence and the road, or with the hill, carved out of the hill itself,
like a sign put there saying You are home again. He didn’t have a saddle
and his feet dangled almost to the ground. The mule looked like a
rabbit. I raised the window.
“Hey, Uncle,” I said, “Is this the way?”
“Suh?” He looked at me, then he loosened the blanket and lifted it away
from his ear.
“Christmas gift!” I said.
“Sho comin, boss. You done caught me, aint you?”
“I’ll let you off this time.” I dragged my pants out of the little
hammock and got a quarter out. “But look out next time. I’ll be coming
back through here two days after New Year, and look out then.” I threw
the quarter out the window. “Buy yourself some Santy Claus.”
“Yes, suh,” he said. He got down and picked up the quarter and rubbed it
on his leg. “Thanky, young marster. Thanky.” Then the train began to
move. I leaned out the window, into the cold air, looking back. He stood
there beside the gaunt rabbit of a mule, the two of them shabby and
motionless and unimpatient. The train swung around the curve, the engine
puffing with short, heavy blasts, and they passed smoothly from sight
that way, with that quality about them of shabby and timeless patience,
of static serenity: that blending of childlike and ready incompetence
and paradoxical reliability that tends and protects them it loves out of
all reason and robs them steadily and evades responsibility and
obligations by means too barefaced to be called subterfuge even and is