The Wild Palms: [If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem] by William Faulkner
He refused. “It’s yours. You earned it.” She looked at him—the unwinking yellow stare in which he seemed to blunder and fumble like a moth, a rabbit caught in the glare of a torch; an envelopment almost like a liquid, a chemical precipitant, in which all the dross of small lying and sentimentality dissolved away. “I dont—”
“You dont like the idea of your woman helping to support you, is that it? Listen. Dont you like what we’ve got?”
“You know I do.”
“Then what does it matter what it cost us, what we pay for it? or how? You stole the money we’ve got now; wouldn’t you do it again? Isn’t it worth it, even if it all busts tomorrow and we have to spend the rest of our lives paying interest?”
“Yes. Only it’s not going to bust tomorrow. Nor next month. Nor next year—”
“No. Not as long as we are worthy of keeping it. Good enough. Strong enough. Worthy to be allowed to keep it. To get what you want as decently as you can, then keep it. Keep it.” She came and put her arms around him, hard, striking her body against him hard, not in caress but exactly as she would grasp him by the hair to wake him up from sleep. “That’s what I’m going to do. Try to do. I like bitching, and making things with my hands. I dont think that’s too much to be permitted to like, to want to have and keep.”
She earned that hundred dollars, working at night now, after he was in bed and sometimes asleep; during the next five weeks she earned twenty-eight dollars more, then she filled an order amounting to fifty. Then the orders stopped; she could get no more. Nevertheless she continued to work, at night altogether now, since she was out with her samples, her completed figures all day, and she worked usually with an audience now, for now their apartment had become a sort of evening club. It began with a newspaper man named McCord who had worked on a New Orleans paper during the brief time when Charlotte’s youngest brother (in a dilettanti and undergraduate heeler manner, Wilbourne gathered) had cubbed there. She met him on the street, he came to dinner one evening and took them out to dinner one evening; three nights later he appeared with three men and two women and four bottles of whiskey at their apartment, and after that Wilbourne never knew just whom he would find when he reached home, except that it would not be Charlotte alone and, regardless of who was there, idle, who even after the dearth season of sales had extended into weeks and then a month and summer was almost upon them, still worked in a cheap coverall already filthy as that of any house painter and a glass of whiskey-and-water among the twists of wire and pots of glue and paint and plaster which transformed steadily and endlessly beneath the deft untiring hands into the effigies elegant, bizarre, fantastic and perverse.
Then she made a final sale, a small one, and it was done, finished. It stopped as abruptly and inexplicably as it had begun. The summer season was on now they told her at the stores, and the tourists and natives too were leaving town to escape the heat. “Except that that’s a lie,” she said. “It’s the saturation point,” she told him, told them all: it was at night, she had returned late with the cardboard box containing the figures which had been refused, so the evening’s collection of callers had already arrived. “But I expected it. Because these are just fun.” She had taken the effigies from the box and set them up on the work bench again. “Like something created to live only in the pitch airless dark, like in a bank vault or maybe a poison swamp, not in the rich normal nourishing air breathed off of guts full of vegetable from Oak Park and Evanston. And so that’s it and that’s all. And now I’m not an artist anymore and I’m tired and I’m hungry and I’m going to curl up with one of our good books and one of our crusts. So let each and all of you step up to the bench and choose himself or herself one souvenir and memento of this occasion, and beat it.”
“We can still beat a crust,” he told her. And besides, she’s not done yet he thought. She hasn’t quit yet. She never will, thinking as he had thought before that there was a part of her which he nor Rittenmeyer either had never touched, which did not even love love. In less than a month he believed that he had proof of this; he returned and found her at the bench again, in a profound excitement which he had never seen before—an excitement without exultation but with a grim and deadly quality of irresistible driving as she told him about it. It was one of the men whom McCord had brought, a photographer. She was to make puppets, marionettes, and he to photograph them for magazine covers and advertisements; perhaps later they would use the actual puppets in charades, tableaux—a hired hall, a rented stable, something, anything. “It’s my money,” she told him. “The hundred and twenty-five dollars I never could get you to take.”
She worked with dense and concentrated fury. She would be at the bench when he went to sleep, he would wake at two and three oclock and find the fierce working light above it still burning. Now he would return (from the hospital at first, then from the park bench where he spent his days after he lost his job, leaving and returning home at the usual hours so she would not suspect) and see the actual figures almost as large as small children—a Quixote with a gaunt mad dreamy uncoordinated face, a Falstaff with the worn face of a syphilitic barber and gross with meat (a single figure, yet when he looked at it he seemed to see two: the man and the gross flesh like a huge bear and its fragile consumptive keeper; it seemed to him that he could actually watch the man struggling with the mountain of entrails as the keeper might wrestle with the bear, not to overcome it but to pass it, escape it, as you do with the atavistic beasts in nightmare), Roxane with spit curls and a wad of gum like the sheet music demonstrator in a ten cent store, Cyrano with the face of a low-comedy Jew in vaudeville, the monstrous flare of whose nostrils ceased exactly on the instant of becoming molluscs, a piece of cheese in one hand and a check book in the other—accumulating about the apartment, filling all available spaces of floor and walls, fragile perverse and disturbing, with incredible rapidity; begun continued and completed in one sustained rush of furious industry—a space of time broken not into successive days and nights but a single interval interrupted only by eating and sleeping.
Then she finished the last one and now she would be gone all day and half the night; he would return in the afternoon and find a scrawled note on a scrap of paper or a margin torn from a newspaper or even the telephone book: Dont wait for me. Go out and eat, which he would do and return and go to bed and sometimes to sleep until she slid naked (she never wore a sleeping garment, she told him she had never owned one) into bed to wake him, rouse him to listen with a hard wrestling movement, holding him in her hard arms while she talked in a grim quiet rapid voice not about money or its lack, not about the details of the day’s progress with the photographing, but of their present life and situation as though it were a complete whole without past or future in which themselves as individuals, the need for money, the figures she had made, were component parts like the parts of a tableau or a puzzle, none more important than another; lying still and relaxed in the darkness while she held him, not even bothering to be aware whether his eyes were open or not, he seemed to see their joint life as a fragile globe, a bubble, which she kept balanced and intact above disaster like a trained seal does its ball. She’s worse off than I am he thought. She doesn’t even know what it is to hope.
Then the puppet business ended, as abruptly and completely as the window dressing had. He returned one evening and she was at home, reading. The filthy overall in which she had lived for weeks (it was August now) was gone and then he saw that the work bench was not only clean of its former litter of wire and paint, it had been drawn into the center of the room and had become a table covered with a strip of chintz and stacked with the magazines and books which formerly had rested upon the floor and in the unused chairs and such, and, most surprising of all, a bowl of flowers. “I’ve got some things here,” she said. “We’ll eat at home for a change.”
She had chops and such, she prepared the meal in a curiously frivolous apron new too like the chintz on the table; he thought how failure, reacting upon her like on a ma
But he did not tell her about the job for another two weeks. His reason was no longer concern that the news might destroy her accord with what she was concentrating on, since that was no longer valid now, if it had ever been, and it was no longer the possibility that he might find something else before she would need to know, for that was not valid either now, since he had tried that and failed, nor was it the Micawber-like faith of the inert in tomorrow; it was partly perhaps the knowledge that late enough would be soon enough, but mostly (he did not try to fool himself) it was a profound faith in her. Not in them, in her. God wont let her starve he thought. She’s too valuable. He did too well with her. Even the one who made everything must fancy some of it enough to want to keep it. So each day he would leave the apartment at the usual hour and sit on his bench in the park until time to go home. And once each day he would take out the wallet and produce the slip of paper on which he kept a record of the dwindling money, as if he expected each time to find that the amount had changed or that he had misread it the day before, finding each time that it had not and he had not—the neat figures, the $182.00 less $5.00 or $10.00, with the date of each subtraction; by the day it would be due there would not be enough to pay the quarter’s rent on the first day of September. And then sometimes he would take out the other paper, the pink cashier’s check with its perforated legend Only Three Hundred Dollars. There would be something almost ceremonial about it, like the formal preparation by the addict of his opium pipe, and then for the time he would as completely renounce reality as the opium smoker himself while he invented a hundred ways to spend it, shifting the various components of the sum and their bought equivalents here and there like a jigsaw puzzle, knowing that this was a form of masturbation (thinking, because I am still, and probably will always be, in the puberty of money), that if it were really possible to cash the check and use the money, he would not even dare to toy with the idea.
Then he returned home one afternoon and found her at the work bench again. It was still the table, still in the center of the room; she had merely turned back the chintz and shoved the books and magazines to one end, and she wore the apron and not the coverall and she was working now with a kind of idle bemusement like someone passing time with a deck of cards. The figure was not three inches tall—a little ancient shapeless man with a foolish disorganised face, the face of a harmless imbecile clown. “It’s a Bad Smell,” she said. Then he understood. “That’s all it is, just a bad smell. Not a wolf at the door. Wolves are Things. Keen and ruthless. Strong, even if they are cowards. But this is just a bad smell because hunger is not here—” again she struck his belly with the back of her hand. “Hunger’s up there. It doesn’t look like this. It looks like a skyrocket or a roman candle or at least one of those sparkler sticks for little children that sparkle away into a live red coal that’s not afraid to die. But this.” She looked up at him. Then he knew it was coming. “How much money have we got?”
“A hundred and forty-eight dollars. But it’s all right. I—”
“Oh, then you have paid next quarter’s rent already.” Then it came, it was too late now. My trouble is, everytime I tell either the truth or a lie I seem to have to sell myself on the idea first. “Look at me. You mean you haven’t been to the hospital in two months?”
“It was the detective. You were busy then, that was the month you forgot to write to New Orleans. He wasn’t trying to hur—get me fired. He just hadn’t heard from you and he was worried. He was trying to find out if you were all right. It wasn’t him, it was the detective who spilled the works. So they let me go. It was funny. I was fired from a job which existed because of moral turpitude, on the grounds of moral turpitude. Only it wasn’t actually that, of course. The job just played out, as I knew in time it would—”
“Well,” she said. “And we haven’t got a drink in the house. You go down to the store and get a bottle while I—No, wait. We’ll go out and eat and drink both. Besides, we’ll have to find a dog.”
“A dog?” From where he stood he could see her in the kitchen take from the ice box the two chops for supper and wrap them again.
“But certainly, friend,” she said. “Get your hat.”
It was evening, the hot August, the neon flashed and glared, alternately corpse- and hell-glowing the faces in the street and their own too as they walked, she still carrying the two chops in the thick slick clammy butcher’s paper. Within the block they met McCord. “We’ve lost our job,” she told him. “So we’re looking for a dog.”
Presently it began to seem to Wilbourne that the invisible dog was actually among them. They were in a bar now, one which they frequented, meeting perhaps twice a week by chance or prearrangement the group which McCord had brought into their lives. There were four of these (“We’ve lost our job,” McCord told them. “And now we’re waiting for a dog.”) present now, the seven of them sitting about a table set for eight, an empty chair, an empty gap, the two chops unwrapped now and on a plate beside a glass of neat whiskey among the highballs. They had not eaten yet; twice Wilbourne leaned to her: “Hadn’t we better eat something? It’s all right; I can—”
“Yes, it’s all right. It’s fine.” She was not speaking to him. “We’ve got forty-eight dollars too much; just think of that. Even the Armours haven’t got forty-eight dollars too much. Drink up, ye armourous sons. Keep up with the dog.”
“Yah,” McCord said. “Set, ye armourous sons, in a sea of hemingwaves.”
The neon flashed and glared, the traffic lights blinked from green to red and back to green again above the squawking cabs and hearse-like limousines. They had not eaten yet though they had lost two members of the party, they were six in the cab, sitting on each others’ knees while Charlotte carried the chops (they had lost the paper now) and McCord held the invisible dog; it was named Moreover now, from the bible, the poor man’s table. “But listen,” McCord said. “Just listen a minute. Doc and Gillespie and I own it. Gillespie’s up there now, but he will have to be back in town by the first and it will be empty. You could take your hundred bucks—”
“You’re impractical,” Charlotte said. “You’re talking about security. Have you no soul?—How much money have we got now, Harry?”
He looked at the meter. “A hundred and twenty-two dollars.”
“But listen,” McCord said.
“All right,” she said. “But now is no time to talk. You’ve made your bed; lie in it. And pull the covers over your head.” They were in Evanston now; they had stopped at a drug store and they had a flashlight now, the cab crawling along a suburban and opulent curb while Charlotte, leaning across McCord, played the flashlight upon the passing midnight lawns. “There’s one,” she said.
“I dont see it,” McCord said.
“Look at that fence. Did you ever hear of an iron fence with a wreath of pansies in each panel that didn’t have an iron dog inside of it? The house has got a mansard roof too.”
“I dont see any house,” McCord said.
“I dont either. But look at that fence.”
The cab stopped, they got out. The torch beam played on the iron fence with scrolled spear-tipped panels set in concrete; there was even a hitching-post in the effigy of a negro boy beside the small scrolled gate. “You’re right,” McCord said. “There’ll be one here.” They did not use the ligh
McCord drove them up to the lake on the Saturday night before Labor Day, the hundred dollars’ worth of food—the tins, the beans and rice and coffee and salt and sugar and flour—in the rumble. Wilbourne contemplated the equivalent of their last dollar with a certain sobriety. “You dont realise how flexible money is until you exchange it for something,” he said. “Maybe this is what the economists mean by a normal diminishing return.”
“You dont mean flexible,” McCord said. “You mean volatile. That’s what Congress means by a fluid currency. If it rains on us before we get this stuff under a roof, you’ll see. Those beans and rice and truck will boil us clean out of the car like three matches in a pail of home brew.” They had a bottle of whiskey and McCord and Wilbourne took turns driving while Charlotte slept. They reached the cottage just after dawn—a hundred odd acres of water surrounded by second growth spruce, four clearings with a cabin in each (from the chimney of one of them smoke stood. “That’s Bradley,” McCord said. “I thought he’d be out by now.”) and a short pier into the water. There was a narrow finger of beach with a buck standing on it, pink in the Sunday dawn, its head up, watching them for an instant before it whirled, its white scut arcing in long bounds while Charlotte, springing from the car, her face swollen with sleep, ran to the water’s edge, squealing. “That’s what I was trying to make!” she cried. “Not the animals, the dogs and deer and horses: the motion, the speed.”