William Faulkner - Barn Burning

Barn Burning, read by Deborah Winger. The store in which the justice of the peace's court was sitting smelled of cheese. The boy, crouched on his nail keg at the back of the crowded room, knew he smelled cheese and more. From where he sat, he could see the ranked shelves, clothes packed with the solid, squat, dynamic shapes of tin cans, whose labels his stomach read, not from the lettering which meant nothing to his mind, but from the scarlet devils and the silver curve of fish. This, the cheese which he knew he smelled, and the hermetic meat which his intestines believed he smelled, coming in intermittent gusts momentary and brief, between the other constant one, the smell and sense just a little of fear because mostly of despair and grief, the old fierce pull of blood. He could not see the table where the justice sat, and before which his father and his father's enemy, our enemy, he thought in that despair, aren't, mine and his and both, he's my father, stood. But he could hear them, the two of them that is, because his father had said no word yet. But what proof have you, Mr. Harris? I told you, the hog got into my corn. I caught it up and sent it back to him. He had no fence that would hold it. I told him so, warned him. The next time I put the hog in my pen. When he came to get it, I gave him enough wire to patch up his pen. The next time I put the hog up and kept it. I rode down to his house and saw the wire I gave him still rolled onto the spool in his yard. I told him he could have the hog when he paid me a dollar-pound fee. That evening, a nigger came with the dollar and got the hog. He was a strange nigger. He said, he say to tell you wood and hay can burn. I said, what? That what he say to tell you, the nigger said, wood and hay can burn. That night, my barn burned. I got the stock out, but I lost the barn. Where's the nigger? Have you got him? He was a strange nigger, I tell you. I don't know what became of him. But that's not proof. Don't you see that's not proof? Get that boy up here, he knows. For a moment, the boy thought too that the man meant his older brother until Harris said, not him, the little one, the boy. And crouching, small for his age, small and wiry like his father, in patched and faded jeans even too small for him, with straight, uncombed brown hair and eyes gray and wild as storm scud, he saw the men between himself and the table part and become a lane of grim faces, at the end of which he saw the justice, a shabby, collarless, graying man in spectacles beckoning him. He felt no floor under his bare feet. He seemed to walk beneath the palpable weight of the grim, turning faces. His father, stiff in his black Sunday coat, donned not for the trial but for the moving, did not even look at him. He aims for me to lie, he thought, again with that frantic grief and despair, and I will have to do it. What's your name, boy? The justice said. Colonel Satoris Snopes, the boy whispered. Hey? The justice said. Talk louder. Colonel Satoris? I reckon anybody named for Colonel Satoris in this country can't help but tell the truth, can they? The boy said nothing. Enemy. He thought. For a moment he could not even see, could not see that the justice's face was kindly, nor discern that his voice was troubled when he spoke to the man named Harris. Do you want me to question this boy? But he could hear, and during those subsequent long seconds, while there was absolutely no sound in the crowded little room, save that of quiet and intent breathing, it was as if he had swung outward at the end of a grapevine, over a ravine, and at the top of the swing had been caught in a prolonged instant of mesmerized gravity, weightless in time. No, Harris said violently, explosively, damnation, send him out of here. Now time, the fluid world, rushed beneath him again, the voices coming to him again through the smell of cheese and sealed meat, the fear and despair and the old grief of blood. This case is closed. I can't find against you Snopes, but I can give you advice. Leave this country and don't come back to it. His father spoke for the first time, his voice cold and harsh, level, without emphasis. I aim to. I don't figure to stay in a country among people who... He said something unprintable and vile, addressed to no one. That'll do, the justice said. Take your wagon and get out of this country before dark. Case dismissed. His father turned and he followed the stiff black coat, the wiry figure walking a little stiffly from where a confederate provost's man's musket ball had taken him in the heel on a stolen horse 30 years ago. Followed the two backs now, since his older brother had appeared from somewhere in the crowd. No taller than the father, but thicker, chewing tobacco steadily between the two lines of grim-faced men and out of the store and across the worn gallery and down the sagging steps and among the dogs and half-grown boys in the mild May dust, whereas he passed, a voice hissed. Again, he could not see, whirling. There was a face in a red haze, moon-like, bigger than the full moon, the owner of it half again his size, he leaping in the red haze toward the face, feeling no blow, feeling no shock when his head struck the earth, scrabbling up and leaping again, feeling no blow this time either and tasting no blood, scrabbling up to see the other boy in full flight and himself already leaping into pursuit. As his father's hand jerked him back, the harsh cold voice speaking above him, go get in the wagon. It stood in a grove of locusts and mulberries across the road. His two hulking sisters in their Sunday dresses and his mother and her sister in calico and sun bonnets were already in it, sitting on and among the sorry residue of the dozen and more movings which even the boy could remember, the battered stove, the broken beds and chairs, the clock inlaid with Mother of Pearl which would not run, stopped at some fourteen minutes past two o'clock of a dead and forgotten day in time, which had been his mother's dowry. She was crying, but when she saw him she drew her sleeve across her face and began to descend from the wagon. Get back, the father said. He's hurt. I've got to get some water and washes. Get back in the wagon, his father said. He got in too, over the tailgate. His father mounted to the seat where the older brother already sat and struck the gaunt mule's two savage blows with the peeled willow, but without heat. It was not even sadistic. It was exactly that same quality which in later years would cause his descendants to overrun the engine before putting a motor car into motion, striking and reigning back in the same movement. The wagon went on. The store with its quiet crowd of grimly watching men dropped behind. A curve in the road hid it. Forever, he thought. Maybe he's done satisfied now, now that he has, stopping himself, not to say it aloud even to himself. His mother's hand touched his shoulder. Does it hurt, she said. Nah, he said. It don't hurt. Let me be. Can't you wipe some of the blood off before it dries? I'll wash tonight, he said. Let me be, I tell you. The wagon went on. He did not know where they were going. None of them ever did or ever asked, because it was always somewhere, always a house of sorts waiting for them a day or two days or even three days away. Likely, his father had already arranged to make a crop on another farm before he, again, he had to stop himself. He, the father, always did. There was something about his wolf-like independence and even courage when the advantage was at least neutral, which impressed strangers, as if they got from his latent ravening ferocity not so much a sense of dependability as a feeling that his ferocious conviction in the rightness of his own actions would be of advantage to all whose interest lay with his. That night they camped, in a grove of oaks and beaches where a spring ran. The nights were still cool and they had a fire against it, of a rail lifted from a nearby fence and cut into lengths. A small fire, neat, niggered almost, a shrewd fire. Such fires were his father's habit and custom always, even in freezing weather. Older, the boy might have remarked this and wondered why not a big one? Why should not a man who had not only seen the waste and extravagance of war, but who had in his blood an inherent voracious prodigality with material not his own, have burned everything in sight? Then he might have gone a step farther and thought that that was the reason. That niggered blaze was the living fruit of nights past during those four years, in the woods hiding from all men, blue or gray, with his strings of horses, captured horses he called them. And older still, he might have divined the true reason, that the element of fire spoke to some deep mainspring of his father's being, as the element of steel or of powder spoke to other men, as the one weapon for the preservation of integrity, else breath were not worth the breathing, and hence to be regarded with respect and used with discretion. But he did not think this now, and he had seen those same niggered blazes all his life. He merely ate his supper beside it, and was already half asleep over his iron plate, when his father called him, and once more he followed the stiff back, the stiff and ruthless limp, up the slope and on to the starlit road, where, turning, he could see his father against the stars but without face or depth, a shape black, flat, and bloodless as though cut from tin in the iron folds of the frock coat which had not been made for him, the voice harsh like tin, and without heat, like tin. You were fixin' to tell them. You woulda told him. He didn't answer. His father struck him with the flat of his hand on the side of the head, hard but without heat, exactly as he had struck the two mules at the store, exactly as he would strike either of them with any stick in order to kill a horsefly, his voice still without heat or anger. You're gettin' to be a man. You got to learn. You got to learn to stick to your own blood, or you ain't gonna have any blood to stick to you. Do you think either of them, any man there this mornin' would? Don't you know all they wanted was a chance to get at me because they knew I had them beat? Eh? Later, 20 years later, he was to tell himself, if I had said they wanted only truth, justice, he woulda hit me again. But now he said nothing. He was not crying. He just stood there. Answer me, his father said. Yes, he whispered. His father turned. Get on to bed. We'll be there tomorrow. They were there. In the early afternoon, the wagon stopped before a paintless two-room house, identical almost with the dozen others it had stopped before, even in the boy's ten years. And again, as on the other dozen occasions, his mother and aunt got down and began to unload the wagon, although his two sisters and his father and brother had not moved. Likely, he'd ain't fittin' for hogs, one of the sisters said. Nevertheless, fit at will, and you'll hog it and lack it, his father said. Get out of them chairs and help your ma unload. The two sisters got down, big, bovine, in a flutter of cheap ribbons. One of them drew from the jumbled wagon bed a battered lantern, the other a worn broom. His father handed the reins to the older son and began to climb stiffly over the wheel. When they get unloaded, take the team to the barn and feed them, then he said, and at first the boy thought he was still speaking to his brother, come with me. Me? He said. Yes, his father said. You. Abner, his mother said. His father paused and looked back, the harsh level stare beneath the shaggy, graying, irascible brows. I reckon I'll have a word with a man that aims to begin tomorrow ownin' me body and soul for the next eight months. They went back up the road. A week ago, or before last night, that is, he would have asked where they were going, but not now. His father had struck him before last night, but never before had he paused afterward to explain why. It was as if the blow and the following calm, outrageous voice still rang, repercussed, divulging nothing to him save the terrible handicap of being young, the light weight of his few years, just heavy enough to prevent his soaring free of the world as it seemed to be ordered, but not heavy enough to keep him footed solid in it, to resist it and try to change the course of its events. Presently, he could see the grove of oaks and cedars and the other flowering trees and shrubs where the house would be, though not the house yet. They walked beside a fence masked with honeysuckle and Cherokee roses and came to a gate swinging open between two brick pillars and now, beyond a sweep of drive, he saw the house for the first time, and at that instant he forgot his father and the terror and despair both, and even when he remembered his father again, who had not stopped, the terror and despair did not return, because for all the twelve movings they had sojourned until now in a poor country, a land of small farms and fields and houses, and he had never seen a house like this before. It's big as a courthouse, he thought quietly, with a surge of peace and joy whose reason he could not have thought into words, being too young for that. They are safe from him. People whose lives are a part of this peace and dignity are beyond his touch. He knew more to them than a buzzing wasp, capable of stinging for a little moment, but that's all. The spell of this peace and dignity rendering even the barns and stable and cribs which belong to it impervious to the puny flames he might contrive. This, the peace and joy, ebbing for an instant as he looked again at the stiff black back, the stiff and implacable limp of the figure which was not dwarfed by the house, for the reason that it had never looked big anywhere, and which now, against the serene, columned backdrop, had more than ever that impervious quality of something cut ruthlessly from tin, breathless, as though, sidewise to the sun, it would cast no shadow. Watching him, the boy remarked the absolutely undeviating course which his father held, and saw the stiff foot come squarely down in a pile of fresh droppings, where a horse had stood in the drive in which his father could have avoided by a simple change of stride. But it ebbed only for a moment, though he could not have thought this into words either, walking on in the spell of the house, which he could ever want but without envy, without sorrow, certainly never with that ravening and jealous rage which, unknown to him, walked in the iron-like black coat before him. Maybe he will feel it too. Maybe it will even change him now from what maybe he couldn't help but be. They crossed the portico. Now he could hear his father's stiff foot as it came down on the boards with clock-like finality, a sound out of all proportion to the displacement of the body it bore, and which was not dwarfed either by the white door before it, as though it had attained to a sort of vicious and ravening minimum, not to be dwarfed by anything. The flat, wide, black hat, the formal coat of broadcloth, which had once been black, but which had now that friction-glazed, greenish cast of the bodies of old houseflies. The lifted sleeve, which was too large, the lifted hand like a curled claw. The door opened so promptly that the boy knew the negro must have been watching them all the time, an old man with neat, grizzled hair and a linen jacket, who stood barring the door with his body, saying, wipe your foots, white man, before you come in here. Major ain't home, know how. Get out of my way, nigger, his father said, without heat, too, flinging the door back and the negro also, and entering, his hat still on his head. And now the boy saw the prints of the stiff foot on the door jamb, and saw them appear on the pale rug behind the machine-like deliberation of the foot, which seemed to bear, or transmit, twice the weight which the body compassed. The negro was shouted, Miss Lula, Miss Lula, somewhere behind them. Then the boy, deluged as though by a warm wave, by a suave turn of carpeted stare, and a pendant glitter of chandeliers and a mute gleam of gold frames, heard the swift feet and saw her, too, a lady. Perhaps he had never seen her like before, either, in a gray, smooth gown with lace at the throat and an apron tied at the waist, and the sleeves turned back, wiping cake or biscuit dough from her hands with a towel, as she came up the hall, looking not at his father at all, but at the tracks on the blonde rug, with an expression of incredulous amazement. I tried, the negro cried. I told him to- Will you please go away, she said in a shaking voice. Major Despain is not at home. Will you please go away? His father had not spoken again. He did not speak again. He did not even look at her. He just stood stiff in the center of the rug, in his hat, the shaggy iron-gray brows twitching slightly above the pebble-colored eyes, as he appeared to examine the house with brief deliberation. Then with the same deliberation, he turned. The boy watched him pivot on the good leg and saw the stiff foot drag round the arc of the turning, leaving a final long and fading smear. His father never looked at it. He never once looked down at the rug. The negro held the door. It closed behind them upon the hysteric and indistinguishable woman wail. His father stopped at the top of the steps and scraped his boot clean on the edge of it. At the gate, he stopped again. He stood for a moment, planted stiffly on the stiff foot, looking back at the house. Pretty and wide, ain't it? He said. That's sweat. Nigger sweat. Maybe it ain't wide enough yet to suit him. Maybe he wants to mix some white sweat with it. Two hours later, the boy was chopping wood behind the house, within which his mother and aunt and the two sisters—the mother and aunt, not the two girls, he knew that—even at this distance, and muffled by walls, the flat, loud voices of the two girls emanated in incorrigible, idle inertia, were setting up the stove to prepare a meal. And he heard the hooves and saw the linen-clad man on a fine sorrel mare, whom he recognized even before he saw the rolled rug in front of the negro youth following on a fat bay carriage horse, a suffused, angry face vanishing, still at full gallop, beyond the corner of the house where his father and brother were sitting in the two tilted chairs. And a moment later, almost before he could have put the axe down, he heard the hooves again and watched the sorrel mare go back out of the yard, already galloping again. Then his father began to shout one of the sisters' names, who presently emerged backward from the kitchen door, dragging the rolled rug along the ground by one end while the other sister walked behind it. If you ain't gonna tote, go on and set up the washpot, the first said. You, sardy, the second shouted. Set up the washpot. His father appeared at the door, framed against that shabbiness as he had been against that other bland perfection, impervious to either, the mother's anxious face at his shoulder. Go on, the father said, pick it up. The two sisters stooped, broad, lethargic, stooping. They presented an incredible expanse of pale cloth and a flutter of tawdry ribbons. If I thought enough of a rug to have to get hit all the way from France, I wouldn't keep it where folks coming in would have to tromp on it, the first said. They raised the rug. Abner, the mother said, let me do it. You go back and get dinner, the father said, I'll tend to this. From the woodpile through the rest of the afternoon, the boy watched them. The rug spread flat in the dust beside the bubbling washpot, the two sisters stooping over it with that profound and lethargic reluctance, while the father stood over them and turned, implacable and grim, driving them, though never raising his voice again. He could smell the harsh, homemade lye they were using. He saw his mother come to the door once and look toward them with an expression not anxious now but very like despair. He saw his father turn, and he fell too with the axe and saw from the corner of his eye his father raise from the ground a flattish fragment of fieldstone and examine it and return to the pot, and this time his mother actually spoke. Abner, Abner, please don't, please, Abner. Then he was done too. It was dusk. The whippoorwills had already begun. He could smell coffee from the room where they would presently eat the cold food remaining from the mid-afternoon meal, though when he entered the house, he realized they were having coffee again, probably because there was a fire on the hearth before which the rug now lay, spread over the backs of the two chairs. The tracks of his father's foot were gone. Where they had been were now long, water-cloudy scoriations, resembling the sporadic course of a Lilliputian mowing machine. It still hung there while they ate the cold food and then went to bed, scattered without order or claim up and down the two rooms, his mother in one bed where his father would later lie, the older brother in the other, himself, the aunt, and the two sisters on pallets on the floor. But his father was not in bed yet. The last thing the boy remembered was the depthless, harsh silhouette of the hat and coat bending over the rug, and it seemed to him that he had not even closed his eyes when the silhouette was standing over him, the fire almost dead behind it, the stiff foot prodding him awake. Catch up the mule, his father said. When he returned with the mule, his father was standing in the black door, the rolled rug over his shoulder. Ain't you gonna ride, he said. No. Give me your foot. He bent his knee into his father's hand. The wiry, surprising power flowed smoothly, rising, he rising with it, onto the mule's bare back. They had owned a saddle once. The boy could remember it, though not when or where, and with the same effortlessness his father swung the rug up in front of him. Now in the starlight, they retraced the afternoon's path, up the dusty road rife with honeysuckle, through the gate and up the black tunnel of the drive to the lightless house, where he sat on the mule and felt the rough warp of the rug drag across his thighs and vanish. Don't you want me to help, he whispered. His father did not answer, and now he heard again that stiff foot striking the hollow portico with that wooden and clock-like deliberation, that outrageous overstatement of the weight it carried. The rug, hunched, not flung, the boy could tell that even in the darkness, from his father's shoulder struck the angle of the wall and floor with a sound unbelievably loud, thunderous. Then the foot again, unhurried and enormous. A light came on in the house and the boy sat, tense, breathing steadily and quietly and just a little fast, though the foot itself did not increase its speed at all, descending the steps now. Now the boy could see him. Don't you want to ride now, he whispered. We can both ride now. The light within the house altering now, flaring up and sinking. He's coming down the stairs now, he thought. He had already ridden the mule up beside the horse block. Presently his father was up behind him, and he doubled the reins over and slashed the mule across the neck, but before the animal could begin to trot the hard, thin arm came around him, the hard, knotted hand jerking the mule back to a walk. In the first red rays of the sun they were in the lot, putting plow gear on the mules. This time the sorrel mare was in the lot before he heard it at all, the rider collarless and even bareheaded, trembling, speaking in a shaking voice as the woman in the house had done. His father merely looking up once before stooping again to the hame, he was buckling, so that the man on the mare spoke to his stooping back. You must realize you have ruined that road. Wasn't there anybody here, any of your women? He ceased, shaking, the boy watching him, the older brother leaning now in the stable door, chewing, blinking slowly and steadily at nothing, apparently. It cost a hundred dollars. But you never had a hundred dollars, you never will, so I'm going to charge you twenty bushels of corn against your crop. I'll add it in your contract, and when you come to the commissary you can sign it. That won't keep Mrs. Despain quiet, but maybe it will teach you to wipe your feet off before you enter her house again. Then he was gone. The boy looked at his father, who still had not spoken or even looked up again, who was now adjusting the loggerhead in the hame. Pap, he said. His father looked at him, the inscrutable face, the shaggy brows beneath which the gray eyes glinted coldly. Suddenly the boy went toward him, fast, stopping as suddenly. You done the best you could, he cried. If he wanted it done different, why didn't he wait and tell you how? He won't get no twenty bushels, he won't get none. We'll gather it and hide it. I can watch. Did you put the cutter back in the straight stock like I told you? No, sir, he said. Then go do it. That was Wednesday. During the rest of that week he worked steadily at what was within his scope and some which was beyond it, with an industry that did not need to be driven nor even commanded twice. He had this from his mother, with the difference that some at least of what he did, he liked to do, such as splitting wood with the half-size axe which his mother and aunt had earned, or saved money somehow to present him with at Christmas. In company with the two older women, and on one afternoon even one of the sisters, he built pens for the shoat and the cow which were a part of his father's contract with the landlord. And one afternoon, his father being absent, gone somewhere on one of the mules, he went to the field. They were running a middle buster now, his brother holding the plow straight while he handled the reins. And walking beside the straining mule, the rich black soil shearing cool and damp against his bare ankles, he thought, maybe this is the end of it. Maybe even that twenty bushels that seems hard to have to pay for just a rug will be a cheap price for him to stop forever and always from being what he used to be. Thinking, dreaming now, so that his brother had to speak sharply to him to mind the mule. Maybe he even won't collect the twenty bushels. Maybe it will all add up and balance and vanish. Corn, rug, fire, the terror and grief, the being pulled two ways like between two teams of horses, gone, done with forever and ever. Then it was Saturday. He looked up from beneath the mule he was harnessing and saw his father in the black coat and hat. Not that, his father said, the wagon gear. And then, two hours later, sitting in the wagon bed behind his father and brother on the seat, the wagon accomplished a final curve and he saw the weathered, painless store with its tattered tobacco and patent medicine posters and the tethered wagons and saddle animals below the gallery. He mounted the gnawed steps behind his father and brother, and there again was the lane of quiet, watching faces for the three of them to walk through. He saw the man in spectacles sitting at the plank table, and he did not need to be told this was a justice of the peace. He sent one glare of fierce, exultant, partisan defiance at the man in collar and cravat now, whom he had seen but twice before in his life, and that on a galloping horse, who now wore on his face an expression not of rage, but of amazed unbelief, which the boy could not have known was at the incredible circumstance of being sued by one of his own tenants, and came and stood against his father and cried at the justice, He ain't done it. He ain't burnt. Go back to the wagon, his father said. Burnt, the justice said. Do I understand this rug was burned, too? Does anybody here claim it was, his father said. Go back to the wagon, but he did not. He merely retreated to the rear of the room, crowded as that other had been, but not to sit down this time, instead to stand, pressing among the motionless bodies, listening to the voices. And you claim twenty bushes of corn is too high for the damage you did to the rug? He brought the rug to me and said he wanted the tracks washed out of it. I washed the tracks out and took the rug back to him. But you didn't carry the rug back to him in the same condition it was in before you made the tracks on it, his father did not answer, and now, for perhaps half a minute, there was no sound at all save that of breathing, the faint, steady suspiration of complete and intent listening. You declined to answer that, Mr. Snopes? Again his father did not answer. I'm going to find against you, Mr. Snopes, I'm going to find that you were responsible for the injury to Major Despain's rug and hold you liable for it, but twenty bushels of corn seems a little high for a man in your circumstances to have to pay. Major Despain claims it cost a hundred dollars. October corn will be worth about fifty cents. I figure that if Major Despain can stand a ninety-five dollar loss on something he paid cash for, you can stand a five dollar loss you haven't earned yet. I hold you in damages to Major Despain to the amount of ten bushels of corn over and above your contract with him to be paid to him out of your crop at gathering time. Court adjourned. It had taken no time, hardly, the morning was but half begun. He thought they would return home and perhaps back to the field, since they were late, far behind all other farmers. But instead, his father passed on behind the wagon, merely indicating with his hand for the older brother to follow with it, and crossed the road toward the blacksmith's shop opposite, pressing on after his father, overtaking him, speaking, whispering up at the harsh, calm face beneath the weathered hat. He won't get no ten bushels, neither. He won't get one. Wilt, until his father glanced for an instant down at him, the face absolutely calm, the grizzled eyebrows tangled above the cold eyes, the voice almost pleasant, almost gentle. You think so? Well, we'll wait till October, anyway. The matter of the wagon, the setting of a spoke or two and the tightening of the tires, did not take long, either. The business of the tires accomplished by driving the wagon into the spring branch behind the shop and letting it stand there, the mules nuzzling into the water from time to time and the boy on the seat with the idle reins, looking up the slope and through the sooty tunnel of the shed where the slow hammer rang and where his father sat on an upended cypress bolt, easily, either talking or listening, still sitting there when the boy brought the dripping wagon up out of the branch and halted it before the door. Take them on to the shade and hitch, his father said. He did so and returned. His father and the smith and a third man squatting on his heels inside the door were talking about crops and animals. The boy, squatting, too, in the ammoniac dust and hoof pairings and scales of rust, heard his father tell a long and unhurried story, out of the time before the birth of the older brother even, when he had been a professional horse trader. And then his father came up beside him, where he stood before a tattered last year's circus poster on the other side of the store, gazing rapt and quiet at the scarlet horses, the incredible poisons and convolutions of tulle and tights, and the painted leers of comedians, and said, it's time to eat, but not at home. Squatting beside his brother against the front wall, he watched his father emerge from the store and produce from a paper sack a segment of cheese and divide it carefully and deliberately into three with his pocket knife and produce crackers from the same sack. They all three squatted on the gallery and ate, slowly, without talking. Then in the store again, they drank from a tin dipper, tepid water, smelling of the cedar bucket and of living beech trees. And still they did not go home. It was a horse lot this time, a tall rail fence upon and along which men stood and sat, and out of which, one by one, horses were led, to be walked and trotted and then cantered back and forth along the road, while the slow squapping and buying went on and the sun began to slant westward, they, the three of them, watching and listening, the older brother with his muddy eyes and his steady, inevitable tobacco, the father commenting now and then on certain of the animals to no one in particular. It was after sundown when they reached home. They ate supper by lamplight, then, sitting on the doorstep, the boy watched the night fully accomplish, listening to the whippoorwills and the frogs, when he heard his mother's voice, Abner, no, no, oh God, oh God, Abner. And he rose, whirled, and saw the altered light through the door, where a candle stub now burned in a bottleneck on the table, and his father, still in the hat and coat, at once formal and burlesque, as though dressed carefully for some shabby and ceremonial violence, emptying the reservoir of the lamp back into the five-gallon kerosene can from which it had been filled, while the mother tugged at his arm until he shifted the lamp to the other hand and flung her back, not savagely or viciously, just hard, into the wall, her hands flung out against the wall for balance, her mouth open, and in her face the same quality of hopeless despair as had been in her voice. Then his father saw him standing in the door. Go to the barn and get that can of oil we were oiling the wagon with, he said. The boy did not move. Then he could speak. What? cried. What are you? Go get that oil, his father said, go. Then he was moving, running, outside the house, toward the stable. This the old habit, the old blood, which he had not been permitted to choose for himself, which had been bequeathed him willy-nilly and which had run for so long, and who knew where, battening on what of outrage and savagery and lust, before it came to him. I could keep on, he thought. I could run on and on and never look back, never need to see his face again, only I can't, I can't. The rusted can in his hand now, the liquid splashing in it, as he ran back to the house and into it, into the sound of his mother's weeping in the next room, and handed the can to his father. Ain't you going to even send a nigger, he cried? At least you sent a nigger before. This time his father didn't strike him. The hand came even faster than the blow had, the same hand which had set the can on the table with almost excruciating care, flashing from the can toward him too quick for him to follow it, gripping him by the back of his shirt and on to tiptoe before he had seen it quit the can, the face stooping at him in breathless and frozen ferocity, the cold dead voice speaking over him to the older brother who leaned against the table, chewing with that steady, curious, sidewise motion of cows. Empty the can in the big one and go on. I'll catch up with you. Better tie him up to the bedpost, brother said. Do like I told you, the father said. Then the boy was moving, his bunched shirt and the hard, bony hand between his shoulder blades, his toes just touching the floor, across the room and into the other one, past the sisters sitting with spread, heavy thighs in the two chairs over the cold hearth and to where his mother and aunt sat side by side on the bed, the aunt's arms about his mother's shoulders. Hold him, the father said. The aunt made a startled movement. Not you, the father said. Lenny, take hold of him. I want to see you do it. His mother took him by the wrist. You hold him better than that. If he gets loose, don't you know what he's going to do? He will go up yonder. He jerked his head toward the road. Maybe I'd better tie him. I'll hold him, his mother whispered. See you do, then. Then his father was gone, the stiff foot heavy and measured upon the board, ceasing at last. Then he began to struggle. His mother caught him in both arms, he jerking and wrenching at them. He would be stronger in the end, he knew that, but he had no time to wait for it. Let me go, he cried. I don't want to have to hit you. Let him go, the aunt said. If you don't go before God, I am going up there myself. Don't you see I can't? His mother cried. Sardi, Sardi, no, no, help me, Lizzie. Then he was free. His aunt grasped at him, but it was too late. He whirled, running. His mother stumbled forward onto her knees behind him, crying to the nearer sister. Catch him, Ned, catch him. But that was too late, too. The sister, the sisters were twins, born at the same time, yet either of them now gave the impression of being, encompassing as much living meat and volume and weight as any other two of the family. Not yet having begun to rise from the chair, her head, face, alone merely turned, presenting to him in the flying instant an astonishing expanse of young female features, untroubled by any surprise even, wearing only an expression of bovine interest. Then he was out of the room, out of the house, in the mild dust of the starlit road and the heavy rifeness of honeysuckle, the pale ribbon unspooling with terrific slowness under his running feet, reaching the gate at last and turning in, running, his heart and lungs drumming on up the drive toward the lighted house, the lighted door. He did not knock. He burst in, sobbing for breath, incapable for the moment of speech. He saw the astonished face of the Negro in the linen jacket without knowing when the Negro had appeared. To Spain, he cried, panted, where's? Then he saw the white man, too, emerging from a white door down the hall. Barn, he cried, barn. What? The white man said. Barn? Yes, the boy cried, barn. Catch him, the white man shouted, but it was too late this time, too. The Negro grasped his shirt, but the entire sleeve, rotten with washing, carried away, and he was out that door, too, and in the drive again, and had actually never ceased to run, even while he was screaming into the white man's face. Behind him, the white man was shouting, my horse, fetch my horse, and he thought for an instant of cutting across the park and climbing the fence into the road, but he did not know the park nor how high the vine-masked fence might be, and he dared not risk it. So he ran on down the drive, blood and breath roaring. Presently, he was in the road again, though he could not see it. He could not hear, either. The galloping mare was almost upon him before he heard her, and even then he held his course, as if the very urgency of his wild grief and need must in a moment more find him wings, waiting until the ultimate instant to hurl himself aside and into the weed-choked roadside ditch as the horse thundered past and on. For an instant, in furious silhouette against the stars, the tranquil early summer night sky which, even before the shape of the horse and rider vanished, stained abruptly and violently upward. A long, swirling roar, incredible and soundless, blotting the stars, and he, springing up and into the road again, running again, knowing it was too late, yet still running, even after he heard the shot, and an instant later, two shots, pausing now, without knowing he had ceased to run, crying, Pat, Pat, running again, before he knew he had begun to run, stumbling, tripping over something and scrabbling up again, without ceasing to run, looking back over his shoulder at the glare as he got up, running on among the invisible trees, panting, sobbing, Father, Father. At midnight, he was sitting on the crest of a hill. He did not know it was midnight, and he did not know how far he had come. But there was no glare behind him now, and he sat now, his back toward what he had called home for four days anyhow, his face toward the dark woods which he would enter when breath was strong again, small, shaking steadily in the chill darkness, hugging himself into the remainder of his thin, rotten shirt, the grief and despair, now no longer terror and fear, but just grief and despair, Father, my Father, he thought. He was brave, he cried suddenly, aloud, but not loud, no more than a whisper, he was, he was in the war, he was in Colonel Sator's cavalry. Not knowing that his father had gone to that war, a private, in the fine old European sense, wearing no uniform, admitting the authority of and giving fidelity to no man or army or flag, going to war as Malbrook himself did, for booty, it meant nothing and less than nothing to him if it were enemy booty or his own. 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 daybirds 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 inquiring heart of the late spring night. He did not look back.