The sound and the fury
she could be with him. She couldn’t bear for any of you to do anything
she couldn’t. It was vanity in her, vanity and false pride. And then
when her troubles began I knew that Quentin would feel that he had to do
something just as bad. But I didn’t believe that he would have been so
selfish as to—I didn’t dream that he—”
“Maybe he knew it was going to be a girl,” I says, “And that one more of
them would be more than he could stand.”
“He could have controlled her,” she says. “He seemed to be the only
person she had any consideration for. But that is a part of the judgment
too, I suppose.”
“Yes,” I says, “Too bad it wasn’t me instead of him. You’d be a lot
better off.”
“You say things like that to hurt me,” she says. “I deserve it though.
When they began to sell the land to send Quentin to Harvard I told your
father that he must make an equal provision for you. Then when Herbert
offered to take you into the bank I said, Jason is provided for now, and
when all the expense began to pile up and I was forced to sell our
furniture and the rest of the pasture, I wrote her at once because I
said she will realise that she and Quentin have had their share and part
of Jason’s too and that it depends on her now to compensate him. I said
she will do that out of respect for her father. I believed that, then.
But I’m just a poor old woman; I was raised to believe that people would
deny themselves for their own flesh and blood. It’s my fault. You were
right to reproach me.”
“Do you think I need any man’s help to stand on my feet?” I says, “Let
alone a woman that cant name the father of her own child.”
“Jason,” she says.
“All right,” I says. “I didn’t mean that. Of course not.”
“If I believed that were possible, after all my suffering.”
“Of course it’s not,” I says. “I didn’t mean it.”
“I hope that at least is spared me,” she says.
“Sure it is,” I says, “She’s too much like both of them to doubt that.”
“I couldn’t bear that,” she says.
“Then quit thinking about it,” I says. “Has she been worrying you any
more about getting out at night?”
“No. I made her realise that it was for her own good and that she’d
thank me for it some day. She takes her books with her and studies after
I lock the door. I see the light on as late as eleven oclock some
nights.”
“How do you know she’s studying?” I says.
“I don’t know what else she’d do in there alone,” she says. “She never
did read any.”
“No,” I says, “You wouldn’t know. And you can thank your stars for
that,” I says. Only what would be the use in saying it aloud. It would
just have her crying on me again.
I heard her go up stairs. Then she called Quentin and Quentin says What?
through the door. “Goodnight,” Mother says. Then I heard the key in the
lock, and Mother went back to her room.
When I finished my cigar and went up, the light was still on. I could
see the empty keyhole, but I couldn’t hear a sound. She studied quiet.
Maybe she learned that in school. I told Mother goodnight and went on to
my room and got the box out and counted it again. I could hear the Great
American Gelding snoring away like a planing mill. I read somewhere
they’d fix men that way to give them women’s voices. But maybe he didn’t
know what they’d done to him. I dont reckon he even knew what he had
been trying to do, or why Mr Burgess knocked him out with the fence
picket. And if they’d just sent him on to Jackson while he was under the
ether, he’d never have known the difference. But that would have been
too simple for a Compson to think of. Not half complex enough. Having to
wait to do it at all until he broke out and tried to run a little girl
down on the street with her own father looking at him. Well, like I say
they never started soon enough with their cutting, and they quit too
quick. I know at least two more that needed something like that, and one
of them not over a mile away, either. But then I dont reckon even that
would do any good. Like I say once a bitch always a bitch. And just let
me have twenty-four hours without any damn New York jew to advise me
what it’s going to do. I dont want to make a killing; save that to suck
in the smart gamblers with. I just want an even chance to get my money
back. And once I’ve done that they can bring all Beale Street and all
bedlam in here and two of them can sleep in my bed and another one can
have my place at the table too.
APRIL EIGHTH, 1928
The day dawned bleak and chill, a moving wall of grey light out of the
northeast which, instead of dissolving into moisture, seemed to
disintegrate into minute and venomous particles, like dust that, when
Dilsey opened the door of the cabin and emerged, needled laterally into
her flesh, precipitating not so much a moisture as a substance partaking
of the quality of thin, not quite congealed oil. She wore a stiff black
straw hat perched upon her turban, and a maroon velvet cape with a
border of mangy and anonymous fur above a dress of purple silk, and she
stood in the door for awhile with her myriad and sunken face lifted to
the weather, and one gaunt hand flac-soled as the belly of a fish, then
she moved the cape aside and examined the bosom of her gown.
The gown fell gauntly from her shoulders, across her fallen breasts,
then tightened upon her paunch and fell again, ballooning a little above
the nether garments which she would remove layer by layer as the spring
accomplished and the warm days, in colour regal and moribund. She had
been a big woman once but now her skeleton rose, draped loosely in
unpadded skin that tightened again upon a paunch almost dropsical, as
though muscle and tissue had been courage or fortitude which the days or
the years had consumed until only the indomitable skeleton was left
rising like a ruin or a landmark above the somnolent and impervious
guts, and above that the collapsed face that gave the impression of the
bones themselves being outside the flesh, lifted into the driving day
with an expression at once fatalistic and of a child’s astonished
disappointment, until she turned and entered the house again and closed
the door.
The earth immediately about the door was bare. It had a patina, as
though from the soles of bare feet in generations, like old silver or
the walls of Mexican houses which have been plastered by hand. Beside
the house, shading it in summer, stood three mulberry trees, the fledged
leaves that would later be broad and placid as the palms of hands
streaming flatly undulant upon the driving air. A pair of jaybirds came
up from nowhere, whirled up on the blast like gaudy scraps of cloth or
paper and lodged in the mulberries, where they swung in raucous tilt and
recover, screaming into the wind that ripped their harsh cries onward
and away like scraps of paper or of cloth in turn. Then three more
joined them and they swung and tilted in the wrung branches for a time,
screaming. The door of the cabin opened and Dilsey emerged once more,
this time in a man’s felt hat and an army overcoat, beneath the frayed
skirts of which her blue gingham dress fell in uneven balloonings,
streaming too about her as she crossed the yard and mounted the steps to
the kitchen door.
A moment later she emerged, carrying an open umbrella now, which she
slanted ahead into the wind, and crossed to the woodpile and laid the
umbrella down, still open. Immediately she caught at it and arrested it
and held to it for a while, looking about her. Then she closed it and
laid it down and stacked stovewood into her crooked arm, against her
breast, and picked up the umbrella and got it open at last and returned
to the steps and held the wood precariously balanced while she contrived
to close the umbrella, which she propped in the corner just within the
door. She dumped the wood into the box behind the stove. Then she
removed the overcoat and hat and took a soiled apron down from the wall
and put it on and built a fire in the stove. While she was doing so,
rattling the grate bars and clattering the lids, Mrs Compson began to
call her from the head of the stairs.
She wore a dressing gown of quilted black satin, holding it close under
her chin. In the other hand she held a red rubber hot water bottle and
she stood at the head of the back stairway, calling “Dilsey” at steady
and inflectionless intervals into the quiet stairwell that descended
into complete darkness, then opened again where a grey window fell
across it. “Dilsey,” she called, without inflection or emphasis or
haste, as though she were not listening for a reply at all. “Dilsey.”
Dilsey answered and ceased clattering the stove, but before she could
cross the kitchen Mrs Compson called her again, and before she crossed
the diningroom and brought her head into relief against the grey splash
of the window, still again.
“All right,” Dilsey said, “All right, here I is. I’ll fill hit soon ez I
git some hot water.” She gathered up her skirts and mounted the stairs,
wholly blotting the grey light. “Put hit down dar en g’awn back to bed.”
“I couldn’t understand what was the matter,” Mrs Compson said. “I’ve
been lying awake for an hour at least, without hearing a sound from the
kitchen.”
“You put hit down and g’awn back to bed,” Dilsey said. She toiled
painfully up the steps, shapeless, breathing heavily. “I’ll have de fire
gwine in a minute, en de water hot in two mo.”
“I’ve been lying there for an hour, at least,” Mrs Compson said. “I
thought maybe you were waiting for me to come down and start the fire.”
Dilsey reached the top of the stairs and took the water bottle. “I’ll
fix hit in a minute,” she said. “Luster overslep dis mawnin, up half de
night at dat show. I gwine build de fire myself. Go on now, so you wont
wake de others twell I ready.”
“If you permit Luster to do things that interfere with his work, you’ll
have to suffer for it yourself,” Mrs Compson said. “Jason wont like this
if he hears about it. You know he wont.”
“Twusn’t none of Jason’s money he went on,” Dilsey said. “Dat’s one
thing sho.” She went on down the stairs. Mrs Compson returned to her
room. As she got into bed again she could hear Dilsey yet descending the
stairs with a sort of painful and terrific slowness that would have
become maddening had it not presently ceased beyond the flapping
diminishment of the pantry door.
She entered the kitchen and built up the fire and began to prepare
breakfast. In the midst of this she ceased and went to the window and
looked out toward her cabin, then she went to the door and opened it and
shouted into the driving weather.
“Luster!” she shouted, standing to listen, tilting her face from the
wind, “You, Luster?” She listened, then as she prepared to shout again
Luster appeared around the corner of the kitchen.
“Ma’am?” he said innocently, so innocently that Dilsey looked down at
him, for a moment motionless, with something more than mere surprise.
“Whar you at?” she said.
“Nowhere,” he said. “Jes in de cellar.”
“Whut you doin in de cellar?” she said. “Dont stand dar in de rain,
fool,” she said.
“Aint doin nothin,” he said. He came up the steps.
“Dont you dare come in dis do widout a armful of wood,” she said. “Here
I done had to tote yo wood en build yo fire bofe. Didn’t I tole you not
to leave dis place last night befo dat woodbox wus full to de top?”
“I did,” Luster said, “I filled hit.”
“Whar hit gone to, den?”
“I dont know’m. I aint teched hit.”
“Well, you git hit full up now,” she said. “And git on up den en see
bout Benjy.”
She shut the door. Luster went to the woodpile. The five jaybirds
whirled over the house, screaming, and into the mulberries again. He
watched them. He picked up a rock and threw it. “Whoo,” he said, “Git on
back to hell, whar you belong at. ’Taint Monday yit.”