William Faulkner: Collected Stories

The slow constellations wheeled on. It would be dawn and then sun-up after a while and he would be hungry. But that would be tomorrow and now he was only cold, and walking would cure that. His breathing was easier now and he decided to get up and go on, and then he found that he had been asleep because he knew it was almost dawn, the night almost over. He could tell that from the whippoorwills. They were everywhere now among the dark trees below him, constant and inflectioned and ceaseless, so that, as the instant for giving over to the day birds drew nearer and nearer, there was no interval at all between them. He got up. He was a little stiff, but walking would cure that too as it would the cold, and soon there would be the sun.

He went on down the hill, toward the dark woods within which the liquid silver voices of the birds called unceasing the rapid and urgent beating of the urgent and quiring heart of the late spring night. He did not look back.

PAP GOT UP a good hour before daylight and caught the mule and rid down to Killegrews’ to borrow the froe and maul. He ought to been back with it in forty minutes. But the sun had rose and I had done milked and fed and was eating my breakfast when he got back, with the mule not only in a lather but right on the edge of the thumps too.

“Fox hunting,” he said. “Fox hunting. A seventy-year-old man, with both feet and one knee, too, already in the grave, squatting all night on a hill and calling himself listening to a fox race that he couldn’t even hear unless they had come right up onto the same log he was setting on and bayed into his ear trumpet. Give me my breakfast,” he told maw.

“Whitfield is standing there right this minute, straddle of that board tree with his watch in his hand.”

And he was. We rid on past the church, and there was not only Solon Quick’s school-bus truck but Reverend Whitfield’s old mare too. We tied the mule to a sapling and hung our dinner bucket on a limb, and with pap toting Killegrew’s froe and maul and the wedges and me toting our ax, we went on to the board tree where Solon and Homer Bookwright, with their froes and mauls and axes and wedges, was setting on two upended cuts, and Whitfield was standing jest like pap said, in his boiled shirt and his black hat and pants and necktie, holding his watch in his hand. It was gold and in the morning sunlight it looked big as a full-growed squash.

“You’re late!” he said.

So pap told again about how Old Man Killegrew had been off fox hunting all night, and nobody at home to lend him the froe but Mrs. Killegrew and the cook. And naturally, the cook wasn’t going to lend none of Killegrew’s tools out, and Mrs. Killegrew was worser deaf than even Killegrew. If you was to run in and tell her the house was afire, she would jest keep on rocking and say she thought so, too, unless she began to holler back to the cook to turn the dogs loose before you could even open your mouth.

“You could have gone yesterday and borrowed the froe,” Whitfield said. “You have known for a month now that you had promised this one day out of a whole summer toward putting a roof on the house of God.”

“We ain’t but two hours late,” pap said. “I reckon the Lord will forgive it. He ain’t interested in time, nohow. He’s interested in salvation.”

Whitfield never even waited for pap to finish. It looked to me like he even got taller, thundering down at pap like a cloudburst. “He ain’t interested in neither! Why should He be, when He owns them both? And why He should turn around for the poor, mizzling souls of men that can’t even borrow tools in time to replace the shingles on His church, I don’t know either. Maybe it’s just because He made them. Maybe He just said to Himself: ‘I made them; I don’t know why. But since I did, I Godfrey, I’ll roll My sleeves up and drag them into glory whether they will or no!’”

But that wasn’t here nor there either now, and I reckon he knowed it, jest like he knowed there wasn’t going to be nothing atall here as long as he stayed. So he put the watch back into his pocket and motioned Solon and Homer up, and we all taken off our hats except him while he stood there with his face raised into the sun and his eyes shut and his eyebrows looking like a big iron-gray caterpillar lying along the edge of a cliff. “Lord,” he said, “make them good straight shingles to lay smooth, and let them split out easy; they’re for You,” and opened his eyes and looked at us again, mostly at pap, and went and untied his mare and dumb up slow and stiff, like old men do, and rid away.

Pap put down the froe and maul and laid the three wedges in a neat row on the ground and taken up the ax.

“Well, men,” he said, “let’s get started. We’re already late.”

“Me and Homer ain’t,” Solon said. “We was here.” This time him and Homer didn’t set on the cuts. They squatted on their heels. Then I seen that Homer was whittling on a stick. I hadn’t noticed it before. “I make it two hours and a little over,” Solon said. “More or less.”

Pap was still about half stooped over, holding the ax. “It’s nigher one,” he said. “But call it two for the sake of the argument. What about it?”

“What argument?” Homer said.

“All right,” pap said. “Two hours then. What about it?”

“Which is three man-hour units a hour, multiplied by two hours,” Solon said. “Or a total of six work units.” When the WPA first come to Yoknapatawpha County and started to giving out jobs and grub and mattresses, Solon went in to Jefferson to get on it. He would drive his school-bus truck the twenty-two miles in to town every morning and come back that night. He done that for almost a week before he found out he would not only have to sign his farm off into somebody else’s name, he couldn’t even own and run the school bus that he had built himself. So he come back that night and never went back no more, and since then hadn’t nobody better mention WPA to him unless they aimed to fight, too, though every now and then he would turn up with something all figured down into work units like he done now. “Six units short.”

“Four of which you and Homer could have already worked out while you was setting here waiting on me,” pap said.

“Except that we didn’t!” Solon said. “We promised Whitfield two units of twelve three-unit hours toward getting some new shingles on the church roof. We been here ever since sunup, waiting for the third unit to show up, so we could start. You don’t seem to kept up with these modern ideas about work that’s been flooding and uplifting the country in the last few years.”

“What modren ideas?” pap said. “I didn’t know there was but one idea about work until it is done, it ain’t done, and when it is done, it is.”

Homer made another long, steady whittle on the stick. His knife was sharp as a razor.

Solon taken out his snuffbox and filled the top and tilted the snuff into his lip and offered the box to Homer, and Homer shaken his head, and Solon put the top back on the box and put the box back into his pocket.

“So,” pap said, “jest because I had to wait two hours for a old seventy-year man to get back from fox hunting that never had no more business setting out in the woods all night than he would a had setting all night in a highway juke joint, we all three have got to come back here tomorrow to finish them two hours that you and Homer…”

“I ain’t,” Solon said. “I don’t know about Homer. I promised Whitfield one day. I was here at sunup to start it. When the sun goes down, I will consider I have done finished it.”

“I see,” pap said. “I see. It’s me that’s got to come back. By myself. I got to break into a full morning to make up them two hours that you and Homer spent resting. I got to spend two hours of the next day making up for the two hours of the day before that you and Homer never even worked.”