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WILLIAM FAULKNER

Dry September THROUGH THE BLOODY September twilight, aftermath of sixty-two rainless days, it

had gone like a fire in dry grass: the rumor, the story, whatever it was. Something about

Miss Minnie Cooper and a Negro. Attacked, insulted, frightened: none of them, gathered

in the barber shop on that Saturday evening where the ceiling fan stirred, without

freshening it, the vitiated air, sending back upon them, in recurrent surges of stale

pomade and lotion, their own stale breath and odors, knew exactly what had happened.

"Except it wasn't Will Mayes," a barber said. He was a man of middle age; a thin,

sand-colored man with a mild face, who was shaving a client. "I know Will Mayes. He's a

good nigger. And I know Miss Minnie Cooper, too."

"What do you know about her?" a second barber said.

"Who is she?" the client said. "A young girl?"

"No," the barber said. "She's about forty, I reckon. She ain't married. That's why I

don't believe..."

"Believe, hell!" a hulking youth in a sweat-stained silk shirt said. "Wont you take

a white woman's word before a nigger's?"

"I don't believe Will Mayes did it," the barber said. "I know Will Mayes."

"Maybe you know who did it, then. Maybe you already got him out of town, you

damn nigger-lover."

"I don't believe anybody did anything. I don't believe anything happened. I leave

it to you fellows if them ladies that get old without getting married don't have notions that

a man can't "

"Then you are a hell of a white man," the client said. He moved under the cloth.

The youth had sprung to his feet.

"You don't?" he said. "Do you accuse a white woman of lying?"

The barber held the razor poised above the half-risen client. He did not look

around.

"It's this durn weather," another said. "It's enough to make a man do anything.

Even to her."

Nobody laughed. The barber said in his mild, stubborn tone: "I ain't accusing

nobody of nothing. I just know and you fellows know how a woman that never..."

"You damn nigger-lover!" the youth said.

"Shut up, Butch," another said. "We'll get the facts in plenty of time to act."

"Who is? Who's getting them?" the youth said. "Facts, hell!"

"You're a fine white man," the client said. "Ain't you?"

In his frothy beard he looked like a desert rat in the moving pictures. "You tell

them, Jack," he said to the youth. "If there ain't any white men in this town, you can count

on me, even if I ain't only a drummer and a stranger."

"That's right, boys," the barber said. "Find out the truth first. I know Will Mayes."

"Well, by God!" the youth shouted. "To think that a white man in this town..."

"Shut up, Butch," the second speaker said. "We got plenty of time."

The client sat up. He looked at the speaker. "Do you claim that anything excuses a

nigger attacking a white woman? Do you mean to tell me you are a white man and you'll

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stand for it? You better go back North where you came from. The South don't want your

kind here."

"North what?" the second said. "I was born and raised in this town."

"Well, by God!" the youth said. He looked about with a strained, baffled gaze, as

if he was trying to remember what it was he wanted to say or to do. He drew his sleeve

across his sweating face. "Damn if I'm going to let a white woman..."

"You tell them, Jack," the drummer said. "By God, if they..."

The screen door crashed open. A man stood in the floor, his feet apart and his

heavy-set body poised easily. His white shirt was open at the throat; he wore a felt hat.

His hot, bold glance swept the group. His name was McLendon. He had commanded

troops at the front in France and had been decorated for valor.

"Well," he said, "are you going to sit there and let a black son rape a white woman

on the streets of Jefferson?"

Butch sprang up again. The silk of his shirt clung flat to his heavy shoulders. At

each armpit was a dark halfmoon, "That's what I been telling them! That's what I..."

"Did it really happen?" a third said. "This ain't the first man scare she ever had,

like Hawkshaw says. Wasn't there something about a man on the kitchen roof, watching

her undress, about a year ago?"

"What?" the client said. "What's that?" The barber had been slowly forcing him

back into the chair; he arrested himself reclining, his head lifted, the barber still pressing

him down.

McLendon whirled on the third speaker. "Happen? What the hell difference does

it make? Are you going to let the black sons get away with it until one really does it?"

"That's what I'm telling them!" Butch shouted. He cursed, long and steady,

pointless.

"Here, here," a fourth said. "Not so loud. don't talk so loud."

"Sure," McLendon said; "no talking necessary at all. I've done my talking. Who's

with me?" He poised on the balls of his feet, roving his gaze.

The barber held the drummer's face down, the razor poised. "Find out the facts

first, boys. I know Willy Mayes. It wasn't him. Let's get the sheriff and do this thing

right."

McLendon whirled upon him his furious, rigid face. The barber did not look

away. They looked like men of different races. The other barbers had ceased also above

their prone clients. "You mean to tell me," McLendon said, "that you'd take a nigger's

word before a white woman's? Why, you damn nigger-loving..."

The third speaker rose and grasped McLendon's arm; he too had been a soldier.

"Now, now. Let's figure this thing out. Who knows anything about what really

happened?"

"Figure out hell!" McLendon jerked his arm free. "All that're with me get up from

there. The ones that ain't..."

He roved his gaze, dragging his sleeve across his face.

Three men rose. The drummer in the chair sat up. "Here," he said, jerking at the

cloth about his neck; "get this rag off me. I'm with him. I don't live here, but by God, if

our mothers and wives and sisters..." He smeared the cloth over his face and flung it to

the floor. McLendon stood in the door and cursed the others. Another rose and moved

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toward him. The remainder sat uncomfortable, not looking at one another, then one by

one they rose and joined him.

The barber picked the cloth from the floor. He began to fold it neatly. "Boys, don't

do that. Will Mayes never done it. I know."

"Come on," McLendon said. He whirled. From his hip pocket protruded the butt

of a heavy automatic pistol. They went out. The screen door crashed behind them,

reverberant in the dead air.

The barber wiped the razor carefully and swiftly, and put it away, and ran to the

rear, and took his hat from the wall. "I'll be back as soon as I can," he said to the other

barbers. "I can't let..." He went out, running. The two other barbers followed him to the

door and caught it on the rebound, leaning out and looking up the street after him. The air

was flat and dead. It had a metallic taste at the base of the tongue.

"What can he do?" the first said. The second one was saying "Jees Christ, Jees

Christ" under his breath. "I'd just as lief be Will Mayes as Hawk, if he gets McLendon

riled."

"Jees Christ, Jees Christ," the second whispered.

"You reckon he really done it to her?" the first said.

II

SHE WAS thirty-eight or thirty-nine. She lived in a small frame house with her invalid

mother and a thin, sallow, unflagging aunt, where each morning between ten and eleven

she would appear on the porch in a lace-trimmed boudoir cap, to sit swinging in the porch

swing until noon. After dinner she lay down for a while, until the afternoon began to

cool. Then, in one of the three or four new voile dresses which she had each summer, she

would go downtown to spend the afternoon in the stores with the other ladies, where they

would handle the goods and haggle over the prices in cold, immediate voices, without

any intention of buying.

She was of comfortable people not the best in Jefferson, but good people enough

and she was still on the slender side of ordinary looking, with a bright, faintly haggard

manner and dress. When she was young she had had a slender, nervous body and a sort of

hard vivacity which had enabled her for a time to ride upon the crest of the town's social

life as exemplified by the high school party and church social period of her

contemporaries while still children enough to be unclass-conscious.

She was the last to realize that she was losing ground; that those among whom she

had been a little brighter and louder flame than any other were beginning to learn the

pleasure of snobbery male and retaliation female. That was when her face began to wear

that bright, haggard look. She still carried it to parties on shadowy porticoes and summer

lawns, like a mask or a flag, with that bafflement of furious repudiation of truth in her

eyes. One evening at a party she heard a boy and two girls, all schoolmates, talking. She

never accepted another invitation.

She watched the girls with whom she had grown up as they married and got

homes and children, but no man ever called on her steadily until the children of the other

girls had been calling her "aunty" for several years, the while their mothers told them in

bright voices about how popular Aunt Minnie had been as a girl. Then the town began to

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see her driving on Sunday afternoons with the cashier in the bank. He was a widower of

about forty, a high-colored man, smelling always faintly of the barber shop or of whisky.

He owned the first automobile in town, a red runabout; Minnie had the first

motoring bonnet and veil the town ever saw. Then the town began to say: "Poor Minnie."

"But she is old enough to take care of herself," others said. That was when she

began to ask her old schoolmates that their children call her "cousin" instead of "aunty."

It was twelve years now since she had been relegated into adultery by public

opinion, and eight years since the cashier had gone to a Memphis bank, returning for one

day each Christmas, which he spent at an annual bachelors' party at a hunting club on the

river. From behind their curtains the neighbors would see the party pass, and during the

over-the-way Christmas day visiting they would tell her about him, about how well he

looked, and how they heard that he was prospering in the city, watching with bright,

secret eyes her haggard, bright face. Usually by that hour there would be the scent of

whisky on her breath. It was supplied her by a youth, a clerk at the soda fountain: "Sure; I

buy it for the old gal. I reckon she's entitled to a little fun."

Her mother kept to her room altogether now; the gaunt aunt ran the house.

Against that background Minnie's bright dresses, her idle and empty days, had a quality

of furious unreality. She went out in the evenings only with women now, neighbors, to

the moving pictures. Each afternoon she dressed in one of the new dresses and went

downtown alone, where her young "cousins" were already strolling in the late afternoons

with their delicate, silken heads and thin, awkward arms and conscious hips, clinging to

one another or shrieking and giggling with paired boys in the soda fountain when she

passed and went on along the serried store fronts, in the doors of which the sitting and

lounging men did not even follow her with their eyes any more.

Ill

THE BARBER WENT SWIFTLY up the street where the sparse lights, insect-swirled,

glared in rigid and violent suspension in the lifeless air. The day had died in a pall of

dust; above the darkened square, shrouded by the spent dust, the sky was as clear as the

inside of a brass bell. Below the east was a rumor of the twice-waxed moon.

When he overtook them McLendon and three others were getting into a car

parked in an alley. McLendon stooped his thick head, peering out beneath the top,

"Changed your mind, did you?" he said. "Damn good thing; by God, tomorrow when this

town hears about how you talked tonight"

"Now, now," the other ex-soldier said. "Hawkshaw's all right. Come on, Hawk;

jump in."

"Will Mayes never done it, boys," the barber said. "If anybody done it. Why, you

all know well as I do there ain't any town where they got better niggers than us. And you

know how a lady will kind of think things about men when there ain't any reason to, and

Miss Minnie anyway..."

"Sure, sure," the soldier said. "We're just going to talk to him a little; that's all."

"Talk hell!" Butch said. "When we're through with the..."

"Shut up, for God's sake!" the soldier said. "Do you want everybody in town..."

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"Tell them, by God!" McLendon said. "Tell every one of the sons that'll let a

white woman..."

"Let's go; let's go: here's the other car." The second car slid squealing out of a

cloud of dust at the alley mouth.

McLendon started his car and took the lead. Dust lay like fog in the street. The

street lights hung nimbused as in water. They drove on out of town.

A rutted lane turned at right angles. Dust hung above it too, and above all the

land. The dark bulk of the ice plant, where the Negro Mayes was night watchman, rose

against the sky. "Better stop here, hadn't we?" the soldier said.

McLendon did not reply. He hurled the car up and slammed to a stop, the

headlights glaring on the blank wall.

"Listen here, boys," the barber said; "if he's here, don't that prove he never done

it? Don't it? If it was him, he would run. Don't you see he would?" The second car came

up and stopped. McLendon got down; Butch sprang down beside him. "Listen, boys," the

barber said.

"Cut the lights off!" McLendon said. The breathless dark rushed down. There was

no sound in it save their lungs as they sought air in the parched dust in which for two

months they had lived; then the diminishing crunch of McLendon's and Dutch's feet, and

a moment later McLendon's voice: "Will!... Will!"

Below the east the wan hemorrhage of the moon increased.

It heaved above the ridge, silvering the air, the dust, so that they seemed to

breathe, live, in a bowl of molten lead. There was no sound of nightbird nor insect, no

sound save their breathing and a faint ticking of contracting metal about the cars. Where

their bodies touched one another they seemed to sweat dryly, for no more moisture came.

"Christ!" a voice said; "let's get out of here."

But they didn't move until vague noises began to grow out of the darkness ahead;

then they got out and waited tensely in the breathless dark. There was another sound: a

blow, a hissing expulsion of breath and McLendon cursing in undertone. They stood a

moment longer, then they ran forward. They ran in a stumbling clump, as though they

were fleeing something. "Kill him, kill the son," a voice whispered. McLendon flung

them back.

"Not here," he said. "Get him into the car."

"Kill him, kill the black son!" the voice murmured. They dragged the Negro to the

car. The barber had waited beside the car. He could feel himself sweating and he knew he

was going to be sick at the stomach.

"What is it, captains?" the Negro said. "I ain't done nothing. Tore God, Mr John."

Someone produced handcuffs.

They worked busily about the Negro as though he were a post, quiet, intent,

getting in one another's way. He submitted to the handcuffs, looking swiftly and

constantly from dim face to dim face. "Who's here, captains?" he said, leaning to peer

into the faces until they could feel his breath and smell his sweaty reek. He spoke a name

or two. "What you all say I done, Mr John?"

McLendon jerked the car door open. "Get in!" he said.

The Negro did not move. "What you all going to do with me, Mr John? I ain't

done nothing. White folks, captains, I ain't done nothing: I swear 'fore God." He called

another name.

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"Get in!" McLendon said. He struck the Negro. The others expelled their breath in

a dry hissing and struck him with random blows and he whirled and cursed them, and

swept his manacled hands across their faces and slashed the barber upon the mouth, and

the barber struck him also.

"Get him in there," McLendon said. They pushed at him.

He ceased struggling and got in and sat quietly as the others took their places. He

sat between the barber and the soldier, drawing his limbs in so as not to touch them, his

eyes going swiftly and constantly from face to face. Butch clung to the running board.

The car moved on. The barber nursed his mouth with his handkerchief.

"What's the matter, Hawk?" the soldier said.

"Nothing," the barber said. They regained the highroad and turned away from

town. The second car dropped back out of the dust. They went on, gaining speed; the

final fringe of houses dropped behind.

"Goddamn, he stinks!" the soldier said.

"We'll fix that," the drummer in front beside McLendon said. On the running

board Butch cursed into the hot rush of air. The barber leaned suddenly forward and

touched McLendon's arm.

"Let me out, John," he said.

"Jump out, nigger-lover," McLendon said without turning his head. He drove

swiftly. Behind them the sourceless lights of the second car glared in the dust. Presently

McLendon turned into a narrow road. It was rutted with disuse. It led back to an

abandoned brick kiln, a series of reddish mounds and weed and vine-choked vats without

bottom. It had been used for pasture once, until one day the owner missed one of his

mules. Although he prodded carefully in the vats with a long pole, he could not even find

the bottom of them.

"John," the barber said.

"Jump out, then," McLendon said, hurling the car along the ruts. Beside the

barber the Negro spoke: "Mr Henry."

The barber sat forward. The narrow tunnel of the road rushed up and past. Their

motion was like an extinct furnace blast: cooler, but utterly dead. The car bounded from

rut to rut.

"Mr Henry," the Negro said.

The barber began to tug furiously at the door. "Look out, there!" the soldier said,

but the barber had already kicked the door open and swung onto the running board. The

soldier leaned across the Negro and grasped at him, but he had already jumped. The car

went on without checking speed.

The impetus hurled him crashing through dust-sheathed weeds, into the ditch.

Dust puffed about him, and in a thin, vicious crackling of sapless stems he lay choking

and retching until the second car passed and died away. Then he rose and limped on until

he reached the highroad and turned toward town, brushing at his clothes with his hands.

The moon was higher, riding high and clear of the dust at last, and after a while the town

began to glare beneath the dust.

He went on, limping. Presently he heard cars and the glow of them grew in the

dust behind him and he left the road and crouched again in the weeds until they passed.

McLendon's car came last now. There were four people in it and Butch was not on the

running board.

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They went on; the dust swallowed them; the glare and the sound died away. The

dust of them hung for a while, but soon the eternal dust absorbed it again. The barber

climbed back onto the road and limped on toward town.

IV

As SHE DRESSED for supper on that Saturday evening, her own flesh felt like fever.

Her hands trembled among the hooks and eyes, and her eyes had a feverish look, and her

hair swirled crisp and crackling under the comb. While she was still dressing the friends

called for her and sat while she donned her sheerest underthings and stockings and a new

voile dress. "Do you feel strong enough to go out?" they said, their eyes bright too, with a

dark glitter. "When you have had time to get over the shock, you must tell us what

happened. What he said and did; everything."

In the leafed darkness, as they walked toward the square, she began to breathe

deeply, something like a swimmer preparing to dive, until she ceased trembling, the four

of them walking slowly because of the terrible heat and out of solicitude for her. But as

they neared the square she began to tremble again, walking with her head up, her hands

clenched at her sides, their voices about her murmurous, also with that feverish, glittering

quality of their eyes.

They entered the square, she in the center of the group, fragile in her fresh dress.

She was trembling worse. She walked slower and slower, as children eat ice cream, her

head up and her eyes bright in the haggard banner of her face, passing the hotel and the

coatless drummers in chairs along the curb looking around at her: "That's the one: see?

The one in pink in the middle."

"Is that her? What did they do with the nigger? Did they?"

"Sure. He's all right."

"All right, is he?"

"Sure. He went on a little trip." Then the drug store, where even the young men

lounging in the doorway tipped their hats and followed with their eyes the motion of her

hips and legs when she passed.

They went on, passing the lifted hats of the gentlemen, the suddenly ceased

voices, deferent, protective. "Do you see?" the friends said. Their voices sounded like

long, hovering sighs of hissing exultation. "There's not a Negro on the square. Not one."

They reached the picture show. It was like a miniature fairyland with its lighted

lobby and colored lithographs of life caught in its terrible and beautiful mutations. Her

lips began to tingle. In the dark, when the picture began, it would be all right; she could

hold back the laughing so it would not waste away so fast and so soon. So she hurried on

before the turning faces, the undertones of low astonishment, and they took their

accustomed places where she could see the aisle against the silver glare and the young

men and girls coming in two and two against it.

The lights flicked away; the screen glowed silver, and soon life began to unfold,

beautiful and passionate and sad, while still the young men and girls entered, scented and

sibilant in the half dark, their paired backs in silhouette delicate and sleek, their slim,

quick bodies awkward, divinely young, while beyond them the silver dream accumulated,

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inevitably on and on. She began to laugh. In trying to suppress it, it made more noise than

ever; heads began to turn.

Still laughing, her friends raised her and led her out, and she stood at the curb,

laughing on a high, sustained note, until the taxi came up and they helped her in.

They removed the pink voile and the sheer underthings and the stockings, and put

her to bed, and cracked ice for her temples, and sent for the doctor. He was hard to locate,

so they ministered to her with hushed ejaculations, renewing the ice and fanning her.

While the ice was fresh and cold she stopped laughing and lay still for a time, moaning

only a little. But soon the laughing welled again and her voice rose screaming.

"Shhhhhhhhhhh! Shhhhhhhhhhhhhh!" they said, freshening the icepack,

smoothing her hair, examining it for gray; "poor girl!" Then to one another: "Do you

suppose anything really happened?" their eyes darkly aglitter, secret and passionate.

"Shhhhhhhhhh! Poor girl! Poor Minnie!"

V

IT WAS MIDNIGHT when McLendon drove up to his neat new house. It was trim and

fresh as a birdcage and almost as small, with its clean, green-and-white paint. He locked

the car and mounted the porch and entered. His wife rose from a chair beside the reading

lamp. McLendon stopped in the floor and stared at her until she looked down.

"Look at that clock," he said, lifting his arm, pointing.

She stood before him, her face lowered, a magazine in her hands. Her face was

pale, strained, and weary-looking.

"Haven't I told you about sitting up like this, waiting to see when I come in?"

"John," she said. She laid the magazine down. Poised on the balls of his feet, he

glared at her with his hot eyes, his sweating face.

"Didn't I tell you?" He went toward her. She looked up then. He caught her

shoulder. She stood passive, looking at him.

"Don't, John. I couldn't sleep... The heat; something. Please, John. You're hurting

me."

"Didn't I tell you?" He released her and half struck, half flung her across the chair,

and she lay there and watched him quietly as he left the room.

He went on through the house, ripping off his shirt, and on the dark, screened

porch at the rear he stood and mopped his head and shoulders with the shirt and flung it

away. He took the pistol from his hip and laid it on the table beside the bed, and sat on

the bed and removed his shoes, and rose and slipped his trousers off. He was sweating

again already, and he stooped and hunted furiously for the shirt. At last he found it and

wiped his body again, and, with his body pressed against the dusty screen, he stood

panting. There was no movement, no sound, not even an insect. The dark world seemed

to lie stricken beneath the cold moon and the lidless stars.

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