A Rose for Emily
by William
Faulkner (1930)
I
WHEN Miss Emily
Grierson died, our whole town went to her funeral: the men through a sort of
respectful affection for a fallen monument, the women mostly out of curiosity
to see the inside of her house, which no one save an old man-servant--a
combined gardener and cook--had seenin at least ten years. It was a big,
squarish frame house that had once been white, decorated with cupolas and
spires and scrolled balconies in the heavily lightsome style of the seventies,
set on what had once been our most select street. But garages and cotton gins
had encroached and obliterated even the august names of that neighborhood; only
Miss Emily's house was left, lifting its stubborn and coquettish decay above
the cotton wagons and the gasoline pumps-an eyesore among eyesores. And now
Miss Emily had gone to join the representatives of those august names where
they lay in the cedar-bemused cemetery among the ranked and anonymous graves of
Union and Confederate soldiers who fell at the battle of Jefferson. Alive, Miss
Emily had been a tradition, a duty, and a care; a sort of hereditary obligation
upon the town, dating from that day in 1894 when Colonel Sartoris, the
mayor--he who fathered the edict that no Negro woman should appear on the
streets without an apron-remitted her taxes, the dispensation dating from the
death of her father on into perpetuity. Not that Miss Emily would have accepted
charity. Colonel Sartoris invented an involved tale to the effect that Miss
Emily's father had loaned money to the town, which the town, as a matter of
business, preferred this way of repaying. Only a man of Colonel Sartoris'
generation and thought could have invented it, and only a woman could have believed
it.
When the next
generation, with its more modern ideas, became mayors and aldermen, this
arrangement created some little dissatisfaction. On the first of the year they
mailed her a tax notice. February came, and there was no reply. They wrote her
a formal letter, asking her to call at the sheriff's office at her convenience.
A week later the mayor wrote her himself, offering to call or to send his car
for her, and received in reply a note on paper of an archaic shape, in a thin,
flowing calligraphy in faded ink, to the effect that she no longer went out at
all. The tax notice was also enclosed, without comment. They called a special
meeting of the Board of Aldermen. A deputation waited upon her, knocked at the
door through which no visitor had passed since she ceased giving china-painting
lessons eight or ten years earlier. They were admitted by the old Negro into a
dim hall from which a stairway mounted into still more shadow. It smelled of
dust and disuse-- a close, dank smell. The Negro led them into the parlor. It
was furnished in heavy, leather-covered furniture. When the Negro opened the
blinds of one window, they could see that the leather was cracked; and when
they sat down, a faint dust rose sluggishly about their thighs, spinning with slow
motes in the single sun-ray. On a tarnished gilt easel before the fireplace
stood a crayon portrait of Miss Emily's father. They rose when she entered--a
small, fat woman in black, with a thin gold chain descending to her waist and
vanishing into her belt, leaning on an ebony cane with a tarnished gold head.
Her skeleton was small and spare; perhaps that was why what would have been
merely plumpness in another was obesity in her. She looked bloated, like a body
long submerged in motionless water, and of that pallid hue. Her eyes, lost in the
fatty ridges of her face, looked like two small pieces of coal pressed into a
lump of dough as they moved from one face to another while the visitors stated
their errand. She did not ask them to sit. She just stood in the door and
listened quietly until the spokesman came to a stumbling halt. Then they could hear
the invisible watch ticking at the end of the gold chain. Her voice was dry and
cold. I have no taxes in Jefferson.
Colonel Sartoris explained it to me. Perhaps one of you can gain access to the
city records and satisfy yourselves."
"But we
have. We are the city authorities, Miss Emily. Didn't you get a notice from the
sheriff, signed by him?"
"I received
a paper, yes," Miss Emily said. "Perhaps he considers himself the
sheriff . . . I have no taxes in Jefferson."
"But there
is nothing on the books to show that, you see We must go by the--"
"See Colonel
Sartoris. I have no taxes in Jefferson."
"But, Miss
Emily--"
"See Colonel
Sartoris." (Colonel Sartoris had been dead almost ten years.)
"I have no
taxes in Jefferson. Tobe!" The Negro appeared. "Show these gentlemen
out."
II
So SHE vanquished
them, horse and foot, just as she had vanquished their fathers thirty years
before about the smell. That was two years after her father's death and a short
time after her sweetheart--the one we believed would marry her --had deserted
her. After her father's death she went out very little; after her sweetheart
went away, people hardly saw her at all. A few of the ladies had the temerity
to call, but were not received, and the only sign of life about the place was the
Negro man--a young man then--going in and out with a market
basket. "Just
as if a man--any man--could keep a kitchen properly, "the ladies said; so
they were not surprised when the smell developed. It was another link between
the gross, teeming world and the high and mighty Griersons. A neighbor, a
woman, complained to the mayor, Judge Stevens, eighty years old.
"But what
will you have me do about it, madam?" he said.
"Why, send
her word to stop it," the woman said. "Isn't there a law? "
"I'm sure
that won't be necessary," Judge Stevens said. "It's probably just a
snake or a rat
that nigger of hers killed in the yard. I'll speak to him about it."
The next day he
received two more complaints, one from a man who came in diffident deprecation.
"We really must do something about it, Judge. I'd be the last one in the
world to bother Miss Emily, but we've got to do something." That night the
Board of Aldermen met—three graybeards and one younger man, a member of the
rising generation. "It's simple enough," he said. "Send her word
to have her place cleaned up. Give her a certain time to do it in, and if she
don't. .."
"Dammit,
sir," Judge Stevens said, "will you accuse a lady to her face of smelling
bad?" So the next night, after midnight, four men crossed Miss Emily's
lawn and slunk about the house like burglars, sniffing along the base of the brickwork
and at the cellar openings while one of them performed a regular sowing motion
with his hand out of a sack slung from his shoulder. They broke open the cellar
door and sprinkled lime there, and in all the outbuildings. As they recrossed
the lawn, a window that had been dark was lighted and Miss Emily sat in it, the
light behind her, and her upright torso motionless as that of an idol. They
crept quietly across the lawn and into the shadow of the locusts that lined the
street. After a week or two the smell went away. That was when people had begun
to feel really sorry for her. People in our town, remembering how old lady
Wyatt, her great-aunt, had gone completely crazy at last, believed that the
Griersons held themselves a little too high for what they really were. None of
the young men were quite good enough for Miss Emily and such. We had long
thought of them as a tableau, Miss Emily a slender figure in white in the
background, her father a spraddled silhouette in the foreground, his back to
her and clutching a horsewhip, the two of them framed by the back-flung front door.
So when she got to be thirty and was still single, we were not pleased exactly,
but vindicated; even with insanity in the family she wouldn't have turned down
all of her chances if they had really materialized. When her father died, it
got about that the house was all that was left to
her; and in a
way, people were glad. At last they could pity Miss Emily. Being left alone,
and a pauper, she had become humanized. Now she too would know the old thrill
and the old despair of a penny more or less. The day after his death all the
ladies prepared to call at the house and offer condolence and aid, as is our
custom Miss Emily met them at the door, dressed as usual and with no trace of
grief on her face. She told
them that her
father was not dead. She did that for three days, with the ministers calling on
her, and the doctors, trying to persuade her to let them dispose of the body.
Just as they were about to resort to law and force, she broke down, and they
buried her father quickly. We did not say she was crazy then. We believed she
had to do that. We remembered all the young men her father had driven away, and
we knew that with nothing left, she would have to cling to that which had
robbed her, as people will.
III
SHE WAS SICK for
a long time. When we saw her again, her hair was cut short, making her look
like a girl, with a vague resemblance to those angels in colored church
windows--sort of tragic and serene. The town had just let the contracts for
paving the sidewalks, and in the summer after her father's death they began the
work. The construction company came with riggers and mules and machinery, and a
foreman named Homer Barron, a Yankee--a big, dark, ready man, with a big voice and
eyes lighter than his face. The little boys would follow in groups to hear him
cuss the riggers, and the riggers singing in time to the rise and fall of
picks. Pretty soon he knew everybody in town. Whenever you heard a lot of laughing
anywhere about the square, Homer Barron would be in the center of the group.
Presently we began to see him and Miss Emily on Sunday afternoons driving in the
yellow-wheeled buggy and the matched team of bays from the livery stable. At
first we were glad that Miss Emily would have an interest, because the ladies
all said, "Of course a Grierson would not think seriously of a Northerner,
a day laborer." But there were still others, older people, who said that
even grief could not cause a real lady to forget noblesse oblige-
- without calling
it noblesse oblige. They just said, "Poor Emily. Her kinsfolk should come
to her." She had some kin in Alabama; but years ago her father had fallen
out with them over the estate of old lady Wyatt, the crazy woman, and there was
no communication between the two families. They had not even been represented
at the funeral. And as soon as the old people said, "Poor Emily," the
whispering began.
"Do you
suppose it's really so?" they said to one another. "Of course it is. What
else could . . ." This behind their hands; rustling of craned silk and satin
behind jalousies closed upon the sun of Sunday afternoon as the thin, swift
clop-clop-clop of the matched team passed: "Poor Emily." She carried
her head high enough--even when we believed that she was fallen. It was as if
she demanded more than ever the recognition of her dignity as the last
Grierson; as if it had wanted that touch of earthiness to reaffirm her
imperviousness. Like when she bought the rat poison, the arsenic. That was over
a year after they had begun to say "Poor Emily," and while the two
female cousins were visiting her.
"I want some
poison," she said to the druggist. She was over thirty then, still a
slight woman, though thinner than usual, with cold, haughty black eyes in a
face the flesh of which was strained across the temples and about the
eyesockets as you imagine a lighthouse-keeper's face ought to look. "I
want some poison," she said.
"Yes, Miss
Emily. What kind? For rats and such? I'd recom--"
"I want the
best you have. I don't care what kind."
The druggist
named several. "They'll kill anything up to an elephant. But what you want
is--"
"Arsenic,"
Miss Emily said. "Is that a good one?"
"Is . . .
arsenic? Yes, ma'am. But what you want--"
"I want
arsenic."
The druggist
looked down at her. She looked back at him, erect, her face like a strained
flag. "Why, of course," the druggist said. "If that's what you
want. But the law
requires you to tell what you are going to use it for." Miss Emily just
stared at him, her head tilted back in order to look him eye for eye, until he
looked away and went and got the arsenic and wrapped it up. The Negro delivery
boy brought her the package; the druggist didn't come back. When she opened the
package at home there was written on the box, under the skull and bones:
"For rats."
IV
So THE NEXT day
we all said, "She will kill herself"; and we said it would be the
best thing. When she had first begun to be seen with Homer Barron, we had said,
"She will marry him." Then we said, "She will persuade him
yet," because Homer himself had remarked--he liked men, and it was known
that he drank with the younger men in the Elks' Club-- that he was not a
marrying man. Later we said, "Poor Emily" behind the jalousies as
they passed on Sunday afternoon in the glittering buggy, Miss Emily with her
head high and Homer Barron with his hat cocked and a cigar in his teeth, reins and
whip in a yellow glove. Then some of the ladies began to say that it was a
disgrace to the town and a bad example to the young people. The men did not
want to interfere, but at last the ladies forced the Baptist minister--Miss
Emily's people were Episcopal-- to call upon her. He would never divulge what happened
during that interview, but he refused to go back again. The next Sunday they
again drove about the streets, and the following day the minister's wife wrote
to Miss Emily's relations in Alabama. So she had blood-kin under her roof again
and we sat back to watch developments. At first nothing happened. Then we were
sure that they were to be married. We learned that Miss Emily had been to the
jeweler's and ordered a man's toilet set in silver, with the letters H. B. on
each piece. Two days later we learned that she had bought a complete outfit of men's
clothing, including a nightshirt, and we said, "They are married." We
were really glad. We were glad because the two female cousins were even more
Grierson than Miss Emily had ever been. So we were not surprised when Homer
Barron--the streets had been finished some time since--was gone. We were a
little disappointed that there was not a public blowing-off, but we believed
that he had gone on to prepare for Miss Emily's coming, or to give her a chance
to get rid of the cousins. (By that time it was a cabal, and we were all Miss
Emily's allies to help circumvent the cousins.) Sure enough, after another week
they departed. And, as we had expected all along, within three days Homer
Barron was back in town. A neighbor saw the Negro man admit him at the kitchen
door at dusk one evening. And that was the last we saw of Homer Barron. And of
Miss Emily for some time. The Negro man went in and out with the market basket,
but the front door remained closed. Now and then we would see her at a window
for a moment, as the men did that night when they sprinkled the lime, but for
almost six months she did not appear on the streets. Then we knew that this was
to be expected too; as if that quality of her father which had thwarted her
woman's life so many times had been too virulent and too furious to die.
When we next saw
Miss Emily, she had grown fat and her hair was turning gray. During the next
few years it grew grayer and grayer until it attained
an even
pepper-and-salt iron-gray, when it ceased turning. Up to the day of her death
at seventy-four it was still that vigorous iron-gray, like the hair of an
active man. From that time on her front door remained closed, save for a period
of six or seven years, when she was about forty, during which she gave lessons
in china-painting. She fitted up a studio in one of the downstairs rooms, where
the daughters and granddaughters of Colonel Sartoris' contemporaries were sent
to her with the same regularity and in the same spirit that they were sent to
church on Sundays with a twenty-five-cent piece for the collection plate.
Meanwhile her taxes had been remitted. Then the newer generation became the
backbone and the spirit of the town, and the painting pupils grew up and fell
away and did not send their children to her with boxes of color and tedious
brushes and pictures cut from the ladies' magazines. The front door closed upon
the last one and remained closed for good. When the town got free postal
delivery, Miss Emily alone refused to let them fasten the metal numbers above
her door and attach a mailbox to it. She would not listen to them. Daily,
monthly, yearly we watched the Negro grow grayer and more stooped, going in and
out with the market basket. Each December we sent her a tax notice, which would
be returned by the post office a week later, unclaimed. Now and then we would
see her in one of the downstairs windows--she had evidently shut up the top
floor of the house--like the carven torso of an idol in a niche, looking or not
looking
at us, we could
never tell which. Thus she passed from generation to generation--dear,
inescapable, impervious, tranquil, and perverse. And so she died. Fell ill in
the house filled with dust and shadows, with only a doddering Negro man to wait
on her. We did not even know she was sick; we had long since given up trying to
get any information from the Negro He talked to no one, probably not even to
her, for his voice had grown harsh and rusty, as if from disuse. She died in
one of the downstairs rooms, in a heavy walnut bed with a curtain, her gray
head propped on a pillow yellow and moldy with age and lack of sunlight.
V
THE NEGRO met the
first of the ladies at the front door and let them in, with their hushed,
sibilant voices and their quick, curious glances, and then he disappeared. He
walked right through the house and out the back and was not seen again. The two
female cousins came at once. They held the funeral on the second day, with the
town coming to look at Miss Emily beneath a mass of bought flowers, with the
crayon face of her father musing profoundly above the bier and the ladies
sibilant and macabre; and the very old men --some in their brushed Confederate
uniforms--on the porch and the lawn, talking of Miss Emily as if she had been a
contemporary of theirs, believing that they had danced with her and courted her
perhaps, confusing time with its mathematical progression, as the old do, to
whom all the past is not a diminishing road but, instead, a huge meadow which
no winter ever quite touches, divided from them now by the narrow bottle-neck
of the most recent decade of years. Already we knew that there was one room in
that region above stairs which no one had seen in forty years, and which would
have to be forced. They waited until Miss Emily was decently in the ground
before they opened it. The violence of breaking down the door seemed to fill
this room with pervading dust. A thin, acrid pall as of the tomb seemed to lie
everywhere upon this room decked and furnished as for a bridal: upon the
valance curtains of faded rose color, upon the rose-shaded lights, upon the dressing
table, upon the delicate array of crystal and the man's toilet things backed
with tarnished silver, silver so tarnished that the monogram was obscured.
Among them lay a collar and tie, as if they had just been removed, which,
lifted, left upon the surface a pale crescent in the dust. Upon a chair hung
the suit, carefully folded; beneath it the two mute shoes and the discarded
socks. The man himself lay in the bed. For a long while we just stood there,
looking down at the profound and fleshless grin. The body had apparently once
lain in the attitude of an embrace, but now the long sleep that outlasts love,
that conquers even the grimace of love, had cuckolded him. What was left of
him, rotted beneath what was left of the nightshirt, had become inextricable
from the bed in which he lay; and upon him and upon the pillow beside him lay that
even coating of the patient and biding dust. Then we noticed that in the second
pillow was the indentation of a head. One of us lifted something from it, and
leaning forward, that faint and invisible dust dry and acrid in the nostrils,
we saw a long strand of irongray hair.
Tidak ada komentar:
Posting Komentar