Uncollected Stories of William Faulkner by William Faulkner

Author:William Faulkner [Faulkner, William]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-79164-1
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-05-17T16:00:00+00:00

Miss Zilphia Gant

I

Jim Gant was a stock trader. He bought horses and mules in three adjoining counties, and with a hulking halfwitted boy to help him, drove them overland seventy-five miles to the Memphis markets.

They carried a camping outfit with them in a wagon, passing only one night under roof during each trip. That was toward the end of the journey, where at nightfall they would reach … the first mark of man’s hand in almost fifteen miles of cypress-and-cane river jungle and worn gullies and second-growth pine … a rambling log house with stout walls and broken roof and no trace whatever of husbandry … plow or plowed land … anywhere near it. There would be usually from one to a dozen wagons standing before it and in a corral of split rails nearby the mules stamped and munched, with usually sections of harness still unremoved: about the whole place lay an air of transient and sinister dilapidation.

Here Gant would meet and mingle with other caravans similar to his, or at times more equivocal still, of rough, unshaven, over-alled men, and they would eat coarse food and drink pale, virulent corn whiskey and sleep in their muddy clothes and boots on the puncheon floor before the log fire. The place was conducted by a youngish woman with cold eyes and a hard infrequent tongue. There was in the background a man, oldish, with cunning reddish pig’s eyes and matted hair and beard which lent a kind of ferocity to the weak face which they concealed. He was usually befuddled with drink to a state of morose idiocy, though now and then they would hear him and the woman cursing one another in the back or beyond a closed door, the woman’s voice cold and level, the man’s alternating between a rumbling bass and the querulous treble of a child.

After Gant sold his stock he would return home to the settlement where his wife and baby lived. It was less than a village, twenty miles from the railroad in a remote section of a remote county. Mrs. Gant and the two-year-old girl lived alone in the small house while Gant was away, which was most of the time. He would be at home perhaps a week out of each eight. Mrs. Gant would never know just what day or hour he would return. Often it would be between midnight and dawn. One morning about dawn she was awakened by someone standing in front of the house, shouting “Hello, Hello” at measured intervals. She opened the window and looked out. It was the halfwit.

“Yes?” she said. “What is it?”

“Hello,” the halfwit bawled.

“Hush your yelling,” Mrs. Gant said, “where’s Jim?”

“Jim says to tell you he ain’t coming home no more,” the halfwit bawled. “Him and Mrs. Vinson taken and went off in the waggin. Jim says to tell you not to expect him back.” Mrs. Vinson was the woman at the tavern, and the halfwit stood in the making light while Mrs.

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