University of Virginia Library

WASH

Sutpen stood above the pallet bed on which the mother and child lay. Between the shrunken planking of the wall the early sunlight fell in long pencil strokes, breaking upon his straddled legs and upon the riding whip in his hand, and lay across the still shape of the mother who lay looking up at him from still, inscrutable, sullen eyes, the child at her side wrapped in a piece of dingy though clean cloth.

Behind them an old negro woman squatted beside the rough hearth where a meagre fire smoldered. "Well, Milly," Sutpen said, "too bad you're not a mare. Then I could give you a decent stall in the stable."

Still the girl on the pallet did not move. She merely continued to look up at him without expression, with a young, sullen, inscrutable face still pale from recent travail. Sutpen moved, bringing into the splintered pencils of sunlight the face of a man of sixty. He said quietly to the squatting negress: "Griselda foaled this morning."

"Horse or mare?" the negress said.

"A horse. A damned fine colt-----What's this?" He indicated the pallet with the hand which held the whip.

"That un's a mare, I reckon."

"Hah," Sutpen said. "A damned fine colt. Going to be the spit and image of old Rob Roy when I rode him North in '61. Do you remember?"

"Yes, Marster."

"Hah." He glanced back toward[1] the pallet. None could have said if the girl still watched him or not. Again his whiphand indicated the pallet. "Do whatever they need with whatever we've got to do it with." He went out, passing out the crazy doorway and stepping down into the rank weeds (there yet leaned rusting against the corner of the porch the scythe which Wash had borrowed from him three months ago to cut them with) where the horse [was tethered. <waited. del.> Wash <still del.> was standing there, holding the reins in his hand. del.] waited, where Wash stood holding the reins.

When Colonel Sutpen rode away to fight the Yankees, Wash didn't[2] go. "I'm looking after the Kernel's place and niggers," he would tell all who asked him and some who had not asked---a gaunt, malariaridden man with pale, questioning eyes, who looked about thirty-five though it was known that he had not only a daughter but an eight-year-old granddaughter as well.

Which[3] was a lie, as most of them---the few remaining men between eighteen and fifty---to whom he told it, knew, though there were some who believed that he himself really believed it, though even these believed that he had better sense than to put it to the test with Mrs Sutpen or the Sutpen slaves. Knew better or was just too lazy and shiftless to try it, they said, knowing that his sole connection with the Sutpen plantation lay in the fact that for years now Colonel Sutpen had allowed him to squat in a crazy shack on a slough in[4] the river bottom on the Sutpen place, which Sutpen had built for a fishing lodge in his bachelor days and which had since fallen into[5] dilapidation from disuse so that now it looked like an aged or sick wild beast crawled terrifically there to drink in the act of dying.

The Sutpen slaves themselves heard of his statement. They laughed. It was not the first time they had laughed at him, calling him white trash behind his back. They began to ask him themselves, in groups, meeting him in the faint road which led up from the slough and the old fish camp: "Why aint you at de war, white man?"

Pausing, he would look about the ring of black faces and white eyes and teeth behind which derision lurked. "Because I got a daughter and family to keep," he said. "Git out of my road, niggers."

"Niggers?" theτ repeated; "niggers?" laughing now. "Who him, calling us niggers?"

"Yes," he said. "I aint got no niggers to look after my folks if I was gone."

"Nor nothing else but dat shack down yon dat Cunnel wouldn't let none of us live in."

Now he cursed them; sometimes he rushed at them, snatching up a stick from the ground while they scattered before him yet seeming to surround him still with that black laughing derisive, evasive, inescapable, leaving him panting and impotent and raging. Once it happened in the very back yard of the big house itself. This was after bitter news had come down from the Tennessee mountains and from

Vicksburg and Sherman had passed through the plantation and most of the negroes had followed him. Almost everything else had gone with the Federal troops and Mrs Sutpen had sent word to Wash that he could have the scuppernongs ripening in the arbor in the back yard. This time it was a house servant, one of the few negroes who remained; this time the negress had to retreat up the kitchen steps, where she turned. "Stop right dar, white man. Stop right whar you is. You aint never crossed dese steps whilst Cunnel here, and you aint ghy do hit now."

This was true. But there was this of a kind of pride: he had never tried to enter the big house, even though he believed that if he had, Sutpen would have received him, permitted him. 'But I aint going to give no black nigger the chance to tell me I cant go nowhere,' he told[6] himself. 'I aint even going to give Kernel the chance to have to cuss [one del.] a nigger on my account.' This, though he and Sutpen had spent more than one afternoon together on those rare Sundays when there would be no company in the house. Perhaps his mind knew that it was because Sutpen had nothing else to do, being a man who could not bear his own company. Yet the fact remained that the two of them would spend whole afternoons in the scuppernong arbor, Sutpen in the hammock and Wash squatting against a post, a pail of cistern water between them, taking drink for drink from the same demijohn. Meanwhile on week days he would see the fine figure of the man---they were the same age almost to a day, though neither of them (perhaps because Wash had a grandchild while Sutpen's son was a youth in school) ever thought of themselves[7] as being so---on the fine figure of the black stallion, galloping about the plantation. For that moment his heart would be quiet and proud. It would seem to him that that world in which negroes, whom the Bible told him had been created and cursed by God to be brute and vassal to all men of white skin, were better found and housed and even clothed than [him del.] <he> and his---that world in which he sensed always about him mocking echoes of black laughter---was but a dream and an illusion and that the actual world was this one across which his own lonely apotheosis seemed to gallop on the black thoroughbred, thinking how the Book said also that all men were created in the image of God and hence all men made the same image in God's eyes at least; so that he could say, as though speaking of himself: 'A fine proud man. If God Himself was to come down and ride the natural earth, that's what He would aim to look like.'

Sutpen returned in 1865, on the black stallion. He seemed to have aged ten years. His son had been killed in action the same winter in which his wife had died. He returned with his citation for gallantry from the hand of General Lee to a ruined plantation, where for a year now his daughter had subsisted partially on the meagre bounty of the man to whom fifteen years ago he had granted permission to live in that tumbledown fishing camp whose very existence he had at the time forgot.[8] Wash was there to meet him, unchanged: still gaunt, still ageless, with his pale, questioning gaze, his air diffident, a little servile, a little familiar. "Well, Kernel," Wash said, "they kilt us but they aint whupped us yit, air they?"

That was the tenor of their conversation for the next five years. It was inferior whiskey which they drank now together from a stoneware jug, and it was not in the scuppernong arbor. It was in the rear of the little store which Sutpen managed to set up on the highroad: a frame shelved room where with Wash for clerk and porter he dispensed kerosene and staple foodstuffs and stale gaudy candy and cheap beads and ribbons to negroes or poor whites of Wash's own kind, who came afoot or on gaunt mules to haggle tediously for dimes and quarters with the[9] man who at one time could gallop (the black stallion was still alive; the stable in which his [get del.] jealous get lived was in better repair than the house where the master himself lived) for ten miles across his own fertile land and who had led troops gallantly in battle; until Sutpen in fury would empty the store, close and lock the doors from the inside. Then he and Wash would repair to the rear and the jug. But the talk would not be quiet now, as when Sutpen lay in the hammock, delivering an arrogant monologue while Wash squatted guffawing against his post. They both

sat now, though Sutpen had the single chair while Wash used whatever box or keg was handy, and even this for just a little while because soon Sutpen would reach that stage of impotent and furious undefeat in which he would rise, swaying and plunging, and declare again that he would take his pistol and the black stallion and ride singlehanded into Washington and kill Lincoln, dead now, and Sherman, now a private citizen. "Kill them!" he would shout. "Shoot them down like the dogs they are---------"

"Sho, Kernel; sho, Kernel," Wash would say, catching Sutpen as he fell. Then he would commandeer the first passing wagon, or lacking that, he would walk the mile to the nearest neighbor and borrow one and return and carry Sutpen home. He entered the house now. He had been doing so for a long time, taking Sutpen home in whatever borrowed wagon,[10] talking him into locomotion with cajoling murmurs as though he were a horse, a stallion himself. The daughter would meet them and hold open the door without a word. He would carry his burden through the once white formal entrance surmounted by a fanlight imported piece by piece from Europe and with a board now nailed over a missing pane, across a velvet carpet from which all nap was now gone, and up a formal stairs where carpet, runner, was[11] now but a fading ghost of bare boards between two strips of fading paint, and into the bedroom. It would be dusk by now and he would let his burden sprawl onto the bed and undress it and then he would sit quietly in a chair beside. After a time the daughter would come to the door. "We're all right now," he would tell her. "Dont you worry none, Miss Judith."

Then it would become dark and after a while he would lie down on the floor beside the bed, though not to sleep, because after a time---sometimes before midnight---the man on the bed would stir and groan and then speak: "Wash?"

"Hyer I am, Kernel/.τ You go back to sleep. We aint whupped yit, air we? Me and you kin do hit."

Even then he had already seen the ribbon about his granddaughter's waits.τ She was now fifteen, already mature, after the early way of her kind. He knew where the ribbon came from; he had been seeing it and its kind daily for three years, even if she had lied about where she got it, which she did not, at once bold, sullen, and fearful. "Sho now," he said. "Ef Kernel wants to give hit to you, I hope [d del.] you minded to thank him."

His heart was quiet, even when he saw the dress, watching her secret, defiant, frightened face when she told him that [she del.] Miss Judith, the daughter, had helped her to make it. But he was quite grave when he approached Sutpen after they closed the store that afternoon, following the other to the rear.

"Get the jug," Sutpen directed.

"Wait," Wash said. "Not yit for a minute."

Neither did Sutpen deny the dress. "What about it?" he said.

But Wash met his arrogant stare; he spoke quietly. "I've knowed you for going on twenty years. I aint never yit denied to do what you told me to do. And I'm a man, nigh sixty. And she aint nothing but a fifteen-year-old gal."

"Meaning that I'd harm a girl? I, a man as old as you are?"

"If you was ara other man, I'd say you was as old as me. And old or no old, I wouldn't let her keep that dress nor nothing else that come from your hand. But you are different."

"How different?" But Wash merely looked at him with his pale, questioning, sober eyes. "So that's why you are afraid of me?"

Now Wash's gaze no longer questioned. It was tranquil, serene. "I aint afraid. Becaueτ you air brave. It aint that you were a brave man at one minute or day of your life and got a paper to show hit from General Lee. But you air brave, the same as you air alive and breathing. That's where hit's different. Hit dont need no ticket from nobody to tell me that. And I know that whatever you handle or tech, whether hits a regiment of men or a ignorant gal or just a hound dog, that you will make hit right."

Now it was Sutpen who looked away, turning suddenly, brusquely. "Get the jug," he said sharply.

"Sho, Kernel," Wash said.

So[12] on that Sunday dawn two years later, having watched the negro midwife which he had walked three miles to fetch enter the crazy door beyond which his granddaughter lay wailing, his heart was still quiet though concerned. He knew what they had been saying---the negroes in cabins about the land, the white men who loafed all day long about the store, watching quietly the three of them: Sutpen, himself, his granddaughter with her air of brazen and shrinking defiance as her condition became daily more and more obvious, like three actors that came and went upon a stage. 'I know what they say to one another,' he thought. 'I can almost hyear them: Wash Jones has fixed old Sutpen at last. Hit taken him twenty years, but he has done hit at last'

It would be dawn after a while, though not yet. From the house, where the lamp shown dim beyond the warped doorframe, his granddaughter's voice came steadily as though run by a clock, while thinking went slowly and terrifically, fumbling, involved somehow with a sound of galloping hooves, until there broke suddenly free in midgallop the fine proud figure of the man on the fine proud stallion, galloping; and then that at which thinking fumbled broke free too and quite clear, not in justification nor even explanation, but as the apotheosis, lonely, explicable, beyond all fouling by human touch: 'He is bigger than all them Yankees that kilt his son and his wife and taken his niggers and ruined his land, bigger than this hyer durn country that he fit for and that has denied him into keeping a little country store; bigger than the denial which hit helt to his lips like the bitter cup in the Book. And how could I have lived this nigh to him for twenty years without being teched and changed by him? Maybe I aint as big as him and maybe I aint done none of the galloping. But at least I done been drug along. Me and him kin do hit, if so be he will show me what he aims for me to do.'

Then it was dawn. Suddenly he could see the house, and the old negress in the door looking at him. Then he realised that his granddaughter's voice had ceased. "It's a girl," the negress said. "You can go tell him if you want to." She reentered the house.

"A girl," he repeated; "a girl"; in astonishment, hearing the galloping hooves, seeing the proud galloping figure emerge again. He seemed to watch it pass galloping through avatars which marked the accumulation of years, time, to the climax where it galloped beneath a brandished sabre and a shottorn flag rushing down a sky in color like thunderous sulphur, thinking for the first time in his life that perhaps Sutpen was an old man like himself. 'Gittin a gal,' he thought in that astonishment; then he thought with the pleased surprise of a child: 'Yes sir. Be dawg if I aint lived to be a great-grandpaw, after all.'

He entered the house. He moved clumsily, on tiptoe, as if he no longer lived there, as if the infant which had just drawn breath and cried in light had dispossessed him, be it of his own blood too though it might. But even above the pallet he could see little save the blur of his granddaughter's [face del.] exhausted face. Then the negress squatting at the hearth spoke. "You better gawn tell him if you going to. Hit's daylight now."

But this was not necessary. He had no more than turned the corner of the porch where the scythe leaned which he had borrowed three months ago to clear away the weeds through which he walked, when Sutpen himself rode up on the old stallion. He did not wonder how Sutpen had got the word. He took it for granted that this was what had brought the other out at this hour on Sunday morning, and he stood while the other dismounted and he took the reins from Sutpen's hand with on his gaunt face an expression almost[13] imbecile with a kind of weary triumph, saying, "Hit's a gal, Kernel. I be dawg if you aint as old as I am------" until Sutpen passed him and entered the house. He stood there with the reins in his hand and heard Sutpen cross the floor to the pallet. He heard

what Sutpen said, and something seemed to stop dead in him before going on.

The sun was now up, the swift sun of Mississippi latitudes, and it seemed to him that he stood beneath a strange sky, in a strange scene, familiar only as things are familiar in dream, like the dreams of falling to one who has never climbed. 'I kaint have heard what I thought I heard,' he thought quietly. 'I know I kaint.' Yet the voice, the familiar voice which had said the words was still speaking, talking now to the old negress about a colt foaled that morning. 'That's why he was up so early,' he thought. 'That was hit. Hit aint me and mine. Hit aint even hisn that got him outen bed.'

Sutpen emerged. He descended into the weeds, moving with that heavy deliberation which would have been haste when he was younger. He had not yet looked full at Wash. He said, "Dicey will stay and tend to her. You better-------" Then he seemed to see Wash facing him; he[14] paused. "What?" he said.

You said-------" To his own ears Wash's voice sounded flat and ducklike, like a deaf man's. "You said if she was a mare, you could give her a good stall in the stable."

"Well?" Sutpen said. His eyes widened and narrowed, almost like a man's fists flexing and shutting, as Wash began to advance toward[1] him, stopping a little. Very astonishment kept Sutpen still for the moment, watching that man whom in twenty years he had [never del.] <no more> known to make any motion save at command than he had the horse which he rode. Again his eyes narrowed and widened; without moving he seemed to rear suddenly upright. "Stand back," he said [. del.] suddenly and sharply. "Dont you touch me."

"I'm going to tech you, Kernel," Wash said in that flat, quiet, almost soft voice, advancing.

Sutpen raised the hand which held the riding whip; [At that moment del.] the old negress peered around the crazy door with her black gargoyle face of a worn gnome. "Stand back, Wash," Sutpen said. Then he struck. The old negress leaped down into the weeds with the agility of a goat, and fled. Sutpen slashed Wash again across the face with the whip, striking him to his knees. When he rose and advanced once more he held in his hands the scythe which he had borrowed from Sutpen three months ago and which Sutpen would never need again.

When he reentered the house his granddaughter stirred on the pallet bed and called his name fretfully. "What was that?" she said.

"What was what, honey?"

"That ere racket out there."

"'Twarn't nothing," he said gently. He knelt and touched her hot forehead clumsily. "Do you want ara thing?"

"I want a sup of water," she said querulously. "I been laying here wanting a sup of water a long time, but dont nobody care enough to pay me no mind."

"Sho now," he said soothingly. He rose stiffly and fetched the dipper of water and raised her head to drink and laid her back and watched her turn to the child with an absolutely[15] stonelike face. But a moment later he saw that she was crying quietly. "Now, now," he said; "I wouldn't do that. Old Dicey says hit's a right fine gal. Hit's all right now. Hit's all over now. Hit aint no need to cry now." But she continued to cry quietly, almost sullenly, and he rose again and stood uncomfortably above the pallet for a time, thinking as he had thought when his own wife lay so and then his daughter in turn: 'Women. Hit's a mystery[16] to me. they† seem to want em, and yit when they git em they cry about hit. Hit's a mystery[16] to me. To ara man.' Then he moved away and drew a chair up to the window and sat down.

Through all that long, bright, sunny forenoon he sat at the window, waiting. Now and then he rose and tiptoed to the pallet. But his granddaughter slept now, her face sullen and calm and weary, the child in the crook of her arm. Then he returned to the chair and sat again, waiting, wondering for a time[17] why it took

them so long until he remembered that it was Sunday. He was sitting there at midafternoon when a halfgrown white boy came around the corner of the house upon the body and gave a choked cry and looked up and glared for a mesmerised instant at Wash in the window before he turned and fled. Then Was† rose and tiptoed again to the pallet. The granddaughter was awake now, wakened perhaps by the boy's cry without hearing it. "Milly," he said, "air you hungry?" She didn't answer, turning her face away. He built up the fire on the hearth and cooked the food which he had brought home the day before: fatback it was, and cold corn pone; he poured water into the stale coffe† pot and heated it. But she would not eat when he carried the plate to her, so he ate himself, quietly, alone, and left the dishes as they were and returned to the window.

Now he seemed to sense, feel, the men who would be gathering with horses and guns and dogs---the curious, and the vengeful: men of Sutpen's own kind, who had made the company about his[18] table in the time when he[19] had yet to approach nearer to the house than the scuppernong arbor---men who had also shown the lesser ones how to fight in battle, who maybe also had signed papers from the generals saying that they were among the first of the brave; who had also galloped in the old days arrogant and proud on the fine horses across the fine plantations---symbols also of admiration and hope; instruments too of despair and grief.

That was who they would expect him to run from. It seemed to him that he had no more to run from than he had to run to. If he ran, he would merely be fleeing one set of bragging and evil shadows for another just like them, since they were all of a kind throughout all the earth which he knew and he was old, too old to flee far even if he were to flee. He could never escape them [. del.], no matter how much or how far he ran: a man going on sixty could not run that far. Not far enough to escape beyond the boundaries of earth where such men lived, set the order and the rule of living. It seemed to him that he now saw for the first time, after five years, how it was that Yankees or any other living armies had managed to whip them: the gallant, the proud, the brave; the acknowledged and chosen best among them all to carry courage and honor and pride. Maybe if he had gone to the war with them, he would have discovered them sooner. But if he had discovered them sooner, what would he have done with his life since? how† could he have borne to remember for five years what his life had been before?

Now it was getting toward sunset. The child had been crying; when he went to the pallet he saw his granddaughter nursing it, her face still bemused, sullen, inscrutable. "Air you hungy† yit?" he said.

"I dont want nothing."

"You ought to eat."

This time she did not answer at all, looking down at the child. He returned to his chair and found that the sun had set. 'Hit kaint be much longer,' he thought. He could feel them quite near now, the curious and the vengeful. He could even seem to hear what they were saying about him, the undercurrent of believing beyond the immediate fury: Old Wash Jones he come a tumble at last. He thought he had Sutpen but Sutpen fooled him. He thought he had Kernel where he would have to marry the gal or pay up. And Kernel refused † "But I never expected that, Kernel!" he cried aloud, catching himself at the sound of his own voice, glancing quickly back to find his granddaughter watching him.

"Who are[20] you talking to now?" she said.

"Hit aint nothing. I was just thinking and talked out before I knowed hit."

Her face was becoming indistinct again, again a sullen blur in the twilight. "I reckon so. I reckon you'll have to holler louder than that before he'll hear you [. del.], up yonder at that house. And I reckon you'll need to do more than holler before you get him down here, too."

"Sho now," he said. "Dont you worry none." But already thinking was going smoothly on: 'You know I never. You know how I aint never expected [nothing

del.] or asked nothing from ara living man but what I expected from you. And I never asked that. I didn't think hit would need. I said, I dont need to. What need has a fellow like Wash Jones to question or doubt the man that General Lee himself says in a handwrote [note del.] ticket that he was brave? Brave,' τ'he thought. 'Better if nara one of them had ever[21] rid back home in '65'; thinking Better if his kind and mine too had never drawn the breath of life on this earth. Better that all who remain of us be blasted from the face of earth than that another Wash Jones should see his whole life shredded from him and shrivel away like a dried shuck thrown onto the fire †

He ceased, became still. He heard the horses, suddenly and plainly; presently he saw the lantern and the movement of men, the glint of gun barrels, in its moving light. Yet he did not [move del.] <stir>. It was quiet dark now and he listened to the voices and the sounds of underbrush as they surrounded the house. The lantern itself came on; its light fell upon the quiet body in the weeds and stopped, the horses tall and shadowy. A man descended and stooped in the lantern,[22] above the body. He held a pistol; he rose and faced the house. "Jones," he said.

"I'm here," Wash said quietly from the window. "That you, Major?"

"Come out."

"Sho," he said quietly. "I just want to see to my granddaughter."

"We'll see to her. Come on out."

"Sho, Major. Just a minute."

"Show a light. Light your lamp."

"Sho. In just a minute." They could hear his voice retreat into the house, though they could not tell what he was doing. They could not[23] see him as he went swiftly and unerringly[24] to the crack in the chimney where he kept the butcher knife: the one thing in his sloven life and house in which he took pride, since it was razor sharp. He approached the pallet, his granddaughter's voice:

"Who is it? Light the lamp, grandpaw."

"Hit wont need no light, honey. Hit wont take but a minute," he said, kneeling, fumbling toward her voice, whispering now. "Where air you?"

"Right here," she said fretfully. "Where would I be? What is------" His hand touched her face. "What is-----Grandpaw! Grand--------"

"Jones!" the sheriff said. "Come out of there!"

"In just a minute, Major," he said. Now he rose and moved swiftly. He knew where in the dark the can of kerosene was, just as he knew that it was full, since it was not two days ago that he had filled it at the store and held it there until[25] he got a ride home with it, since the five gallons were heavy. There were still coals on the hearth; besides the crazy building itself was like tinder: the coals, the hearth, the walls exploded[26] in a single blue glare. Against it the waiting men saw him in a wild instant springing toward them with the lifted scythe before the horses reared and whirled. They checked the horses and turned them back toward the glare, yet still in [savage del.] wild relief against it the gaunt figure ran toward them with the lifted scythe.

"Jones!" the sheriff shouted; "stop! Stop, or I'll shoot. Jones! Jones!† Yet still the gaunt, furious figure came on against the glare and roar of the flames. With the scythe lifted it bore down upon them, upon the wild glaring eyes of the horses and the swinging glints of gun barrels, without any cry, any sound.

The following collation between the typescript and Harper's lists only the substantive variants, some of which are undoubtedly Faulkner's own revisions in the hypothesized lost typescript that he made to serve as printer's copy but some of which may also represent editorial interposition. The accidentals variants have been omitted since they would normally represent the markings of the Harper's copyreader, with the odds against very many going back to variants in the lost typescript. Specialists interested in these variants can readily recover them from the Harper's print. However, the substantive variants are

provided here for their inherent interest to readers as affecting the final form of the story in the magazine. For convenience, the substantive variants have been keyed to numbered references in the text. As a space-saver, and an attempt to avoid the recording of the obvious, a superior dagger in the text indicates a typescript error that was automatically corrected in the magazine version and is not listed in the collation. The reading to the left of the bracket is that of the typescript: to the right the reading is that of Harper's.