The Wild Palms: [If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem] by William Faulkner
“Come on,” he said. “Let’s get out of here.” Later (he had returned to the ore train, where Hogben, its entire crew, sat over the red hot stove in the caboose not much larger than a broom closet. “You’ll be back in thirty days then,” Wilbourne said. “I have to make a trip every thirty days for us to hold the franchise,” Hogben said. “You better bring your wife on out now.”—“We’ll wait,” Wilbourne said. Then he returned to the cabin and he and Charlotte stood in the door and watched the crowd emerge from the commissary with its pitiful loot and later cross the canyon and board the ore train, filling the three open cars. The temperature was not forty-one now, neither was it back up to fourteen. The train moved; they could see the tiny faces looking back at the mine entrance, the refuse dump, with incredulous bewilderment, a kind of shocked and unbelieving sorrow; as the train moved a burst of voices reached across the canyon to them, faint with distance, forlorn, grieving, and wild) he said to Charlotte, “Thank God we got our grub out first.”
“Maybe it wasn’t ours,” she said soberly.
“Buckner’s then. They hadn’t paid him either.”
“But he ran away. They didn’t.”
It was still nearer spring then; by the time the ore train made its next ritualistic and empty visitation perhaps they would see the beginning of the mountain spring which neither of them had seen and did not know would not appear until that time which in their experience was the beginning of summer. They talked of this at night now, with the thermometer again sometimes at forty-one. But they could at least talk in bed now, in the dark where beneath the blankets Charlotte would, after an amount of savage heaving and twisting (this too ritualistic) emerge from the woollen undergarment to sleep in the old fashion. She would not fling it out from beneath the blankets but would keep it inside, a massy wad upon and beneath and around which they slept, so it would be warm for the morning. One night she said, “You haven’t heard from Buckner yet. But of course you haven’t; how could you have.”
“No,” he said, suddenly sober. “And I wish I would. I told him to take her to a doctor soon as they got out. But he probably— He promised to write me.”
“I wish you would too.”
“We may have a letter when the ore train comes back for us.”
“If it comes back.” But he suspected nothing, though later it seemed incredible to him that he had not, even though at the time he could not have said why he should have suspected, on what evidence. But he did not. Then one day about a week before the ore train was due there was a knock and he opened the door upon a man with a mountain face and a pack and a pair of slung snow shoes on his back.
“You Wilbourne?” he said. “Got a letter for you.” He produced it—a pencilled envelope smudged with handling and three weeks old.
“Thanks,” Wilbourne said. “Come in and eat.”
But the other declined. “One of them big airplanes fell somewhere back in yonder just before Christmas. You hear or see anything about that time?”
“I wasn’t here then,” Wilbourne said. “You better eat first.”
“There’s a reward for it. I guess I wont stop.”
The letter was from Buckner. It said Everything O K Buck. Charlotte took it from him and stood looking at it. “That’s what you said. You said it was simple, didn’t you. Now you feel all right about it.”
“Yes,” Wilbourne said. “I am relieved.”
Charlotte looked at the letter, the four words, counting O and K as two. “Just one in ten thousand. All you have to do is be reasonably careful, isn’t it. Boil the tools and so forth. Does it matter who you do it on?”
“They have to be fe—” Then he stopped. He looked at her, he thought swiftly Something is about to happen to me. Wait. Wait. “Do it on?”
She looked at the letter. “That was foolish, wasn’t it. Maybe I was mixed up with incest.” Now it did happen to him. He began to tremble, he was trembling even before he grasped her shoulder and jerked her about to face him.
“Do it on?”
She looked at him, still holding the cheap ruled sheet with its heavy pencilling—the sober intent gaze with that greenish cast which the snow gave her eyes. She spoke in short brutal sentences like out of a primer. “That night. That first night alone. When we couldn’t wait to cook supper. When the stove went out my douche bag was hanging behind it. It froze and when we lit the stove again I forgot it and it burst.”
“And every time since then you didn’t—”
“I should have known better. I always did take easy. Too easy. I remember somebody telling me once, I was young then, that when people loved, hard, really loved each other, they didn’t have children, the seed got burned up in the love, the passion. Maybe I believed it. Wanted to believe it because I didn’t have a douche bag anymore. Or maybe I just hoped. Anyway it’s done.”
“When?” he said, shaking her, trembling. “How long since you missed? Are you sure?”
“Sure that I missed? Yes. Sixteen days.”
“But you’re not sure,” he said, rapidly, knowing he was talking only to himself: “You cant be sure yet. Sometimes they miss, any woman. You can never be sure until two—”
“Do you believe that?” she said quietly. “That’s just when you want a child. And I dont and you dont because we cant. I can starve and you can starve but not it. So we must, Harry.”
“No!” he cried. “No!”
“You said it was simple. We have proof it is, that it’s nothing, no more than clipping an ingrowing toenail. I’m strong and healthy as she is. Dont you believe that?”
“Ah,” he cried. “So you tried it on her first. That was it. You wanted to see if she would die or not. That’s why you were so bent on selling me the idea when I had already said no—”
“The stove went out the night after they left, Harry. But yes, I did wait to hear from her first. She would have done the same if it had been me first. I would have wanted her to. I would have wanted her to live whether I did or not just as she would want me to live whether she did or not, just as I want to live.”
“Yes,” he said. “I know. I didn’t mean that. But you—you—”
“So it’s all right. It’s simple. You know that now by your own hand.”
“No! No!”
“All right,” she said quietly. “Maybe we can find a doctor to do it when we go out next week.”
“No!” he cried, shouted, gripping her shoulder, shaking her. “Do you hear me?”
“You mean no one else shall do it, and you wont?”
“Yes! That’s what I mean! That’s exactly what I mean!”
“Are you that afraid?”
“Yes!” he said. “Yes!”
The next week passed. He took to walking, slogging and plunging in the waist-deep drifts, not to not see her; it’s because I cant breathe in there he told himself; once he went up to the mine even, the deserted gallery dark now of the extravagant and unneeded bulbs though it still seemed to him that he could hear the voices, the blind birds, the echoes of that frenzied and incomprehensible human speech which still remained, hanging batlike and perhaps head-down about the dead corridors until his presence startled them into flight. But sooner or later the cold—something—would drive him back to the cabin and they did not quarrel simply because she refused to be drawn into one and again he would think She is not only a better man and a better gentleman than I am, she is a better everything than I will ever be They ate together, went through the day’s routine, they slept together to keep from freezing; now and then he took her (and she accepted him) in a kind of frenzy of immolation, saying, crying, “At least it doesn’t matter now; at least you wont have to get up in the cold.” Then it would be day again; he would refill the tank when the stove burned out; he would carry out and throw into the snow the cans which they had opened for the last meal, and there would be nothing else for him to do, nothing else under the sun for him to do. So he would walk (there was a pair of snow shoes in the cabin but he never tried to use
Then the ore train came. He had packed the remaining provisions out of Buckner’s theoretical hundred dollars into a box. They loaded this and the two bags with which they had left New Orleans almost exactly a year ago and themselves into the toy caboose. At the mainline junction he sold the cans of beans and salmon and lard, the sacks of sugar and coffee and flour, to a small store-keeper for twenty-one dollars. They rode two nights and a day in day coaches and left the snow behind and found buses now, cheaper now, her head tilted back against the machine-made doily, her face in profile against the dark fleeing snow-free countryside and the little lost towns, the neon, the lunch rooms with broad strong Western girls got up out of Hollywood magazines (Hollywood which is no longer in Hollywood but is stippled by a billion feet of burning colored gas across the face of the American earth) to resemble Joan Crawford, asleep or not he could not tell.
They reached San Antonio, Texas, with a hundred and fifty-two dollars and a few cents. It was warm here, it was almost like New Orleans; the pepper trees had been green all winter and the oleander and mimosa and lantana were already in bloom and cabbage palms exploded shabbily in the mild air as in Louisiana. They had a single room with a decrepit gas plate, reached by an outside gallery in a shabby wooden house. And now they did quarrel. “Cant you see?” she said. “My period would come now, tomorrow. Now is the time, the simple time to do it. Like you did with her—what’s her name? the whore’s name? Bill. Billie, i,e. You shouldn’t have let me learn so much about it. I wouldn’t know how to pick my time to worry you then.”
“Apparently you learned about it without any help from me,” he said, trying to restrain himself, cursing himself: You bastard, she’s the one that’s in trouble; it’s not you. “I had settled it. I had said no. You were the one who—” Now he did stop himself, rein himself in. “Listen. There’s a pill of some sort. You take it when your time is due. I’ll try to get some of them.”
“Try where?”
“Where would I try? Who would ever need such? At a brothel. Oh God, Charlotte! Charlotte!”
“I know,” she said. “We cant help it. It’s not us now. That’s why: dont you see? I want it to be us again, quick, quick. We have so little time. In twenty years I cant anymore and in fifty years we’ll both be dead. So hurry. Hurry.”
He had never been in a brothel in his life and had never even sought one before. So now he discovered what a lot of people have: how difficult it is to find one; how you lived in the duplex for ten years before you discovered that the late-sleeping ladies next door were not night-shift telephone girls. At last that occurred to him which the veriest yokel seems to inherit with breath: he asked a taxi-driver and was presently set down before a house a good deal like the one he lived in and pressed a button which made no audible response though presently a curtain over the narrow window beside the door fell a second before he could have sworn someone had looked out at him. Then the door opened, a negro maid conducted him down a dim hallway and into a room containing a bare veneered dining-table bearing an imitation cut-glass punch bowl and scarred by the white rings from damp glass-bottoms, a pianola slotted for coins, and twelve chairs ranged along the four walls in orderly sequence like tombstones in a military graveyard, where the maid left him to sit and look at a lithograph of the Saint Bernard dog saving the child from the snow and another of President Roosevelt, until there entered a double-chinned woman of no especial age more than forty, with blondined hair and a lilac satin gown not quite clean. “Good evening,” she said. “Stranger in town?”
“Yes,” he told her. “I asked a taxi-driver. He—”
“Dont apologise,” she said. “The drivers is all my friends here.”
He remembered the driver’s parting advice: “The first white person you see, buy them some beer. You’ll be jake then.”—“Wont you have some beer?” he said.
“Why, I dont mind if I do,” the woman said. “It might refresh us.” Immediately (she had rung no bell that Wilbourne could see) the maid entered. “Two beers, Louisa,” the woman said. The maid went out. The woman sat down too. “So you’re a stranger in San Tone. Well, some of the sweetest friendships I ever seen was made in one night or even after one session between two folks that never even seen one another an hour ago. I got American girls here or Spanish (strangers like Spanish girls, once, anyway. It’s the influence of the moving pictures, I always say) and one little Eyetalian that just—” The maid entered with two tankards of beer. It could not have been much further away than wherever it was she had been standing when the woman in purple had rung no bell that Wilbourne could see. The maid went out.
“No,” he said. “I dont want—I came here—I—” The woman was watching him; she had started to raise her mug. Instead she set it back on the table, watching him. “I’m in trouble,” he said quietly. “I hoped you could help me.”
Now the woman even withdrew her hand from the tankard and he saw now that her eyes, even if they were no less muddy, were also no less cold than the big diamond at her breast. “And just what made you think I could or would help you out of whatever your trouble is? the driver tell you that too? What’d he look like? You take his number?”
“No,” Wilbourne said. “I—”
“Never mind that now. What kind of trouble are you in?” He told her, simply and quietly, while she watched him. “H’m,” she said. “And so you, a stranger here, found right off a taxi-driver that brought you straight to me to find a doctor to do your business. Well, well.” Now she did ring the bell, not violently, just hard.
“No, no, I dont—” She even keeps a doctor in the house he thought. “I dont—”
“Undoubtless,” the woman said. “It’s all a mistake. You’ll get back to the hotel or wherever it is and find you just drempt your wife was knocked up or even that you had a wife.”
“I wish I would,” Wilbourne said. “But I—” The door opened and a man entered, a biggish man, fairly young, bulging his clothes a little, who gave Wilbourne a hot, embracing, almost loverlike glare out of hot brown flesh-bedded eyes beneath the straight innocently parted hair of a little boy and continued to look at him from then on. His neck was shaved.
“Thatim?” he said over his shoulder to the woman in purple, in a voice husky with prolonged whiskey begun at too early an age yet withal the voice of a disposition cheerful, happy, even j
“Yah,” the woman in purple said. “Then I want to find that taxi-driver.” Wilbourne began to struggle. At once the young man turned upon him with loverlike joy, beaming. “Not in here,” the woman said sharply. “Out, like I told you, you ape.”
“I’ll go,” Wilbourne said. “You can turn me loose.”
“Yah; sure, you sonafabitch,” the young man said. “I’ll just help you. You got helped in, see. This way.” They were in the hall again, now there was a small slight black-haired dark-faced man also, in dingy trousers and a tieless blue shirt: a Mexican servant of some sort. They went on to the door, the back of Wilbourne’s coat bunched in the young man’s huge hand. The young man opened it. The brute will have to hit me once Wilbourne thought. Or he will burst, suffocate. But all right. All right.