Soldiers’ Pay by William Faulkner (digital e reader txt) 📕

While in hospital he saw Captain Green’s name in a published casualty list. He also discovered in hospital that he had lost his photograph. He asked hospital orderlies and nurses about it, but no one recalled having seen it among his effects. It was just as well, though. She had in the meantime married a lieutenant on the staff of a college R.O.T.C. unit.

Mrs. Burney’s black was neat and completely airproof: she did not believe in air save as a necessary adjunct to breathing. Mr. Burney, a morose, silent man, whose occupation was that of languidly sawing boards and then mildly nailing them together again, took all his ideas from his wife, so he believed this, too.

She toiled, neat as a pin, along the street, both fretted with and grateful to the heat because of her rheumatism, making a call. When she thought of her destination, of her changed status in the town, above her dull and quenchless sorrow she knew a faint pride: the stroke of Fate which robbed her likewise made of her an aristocrat. The Mrs. Worthingtons, the Mrs. Saunderses, all spoke to her now as one of them, as if she, too, rode in a car and bought a half dozen new dresses a year. Her boy had done this for her, his absence accomplishing that which his presence had never done, could never do.

Her black gown drank heat and held it in solution about her, her cotton umbrella became only a delusion. How hot for April, she thought, seeing cars containing pliant women’s bodies in cool, thin cloth passing her. Other women walking in delicate, gay shades nodded to her bent small rotundity, greeting her pleasantly. Her flat “commonsense” shoes carried her steadily and proudly on.

She turned a corner and the sun through maples was directly in her face. She lowered her umbrella to it, and remarking after a while a broken drain, and feeling an arching thrust of poorly laid concrete, she slanted her umbrella back. Pigeons in the spire were coolly remote from the heat, unemphatic as sleep, and she passed through an iron gate, following a graveled path. The rambling façade of the rectory dreamed in the afternoon above a lawn broken by geranium beds and a group of chairs beneath a tree. She crossed grass and the rector rose, huge as a rock, black and shapeless, greeting her.

(Oh, the poor man, how bad he looks. And so old, so old we are for this to happen to us. He was not any good, but he was my son. And now Mrs. Worthington and Mrs. Saunders and Mrs. Wardle speak to me, stop in to chat about this and that while there is my Dewey dead. They hadn’t no sons and now his son come back and mine didn’t, and how gray his face, poor man.)

She panted with heat, like a dog, feeling pain in her bones, and she hobbled horribly across to the grouped figures. It was because the sun was in her eyes that she couldn’t see, sun going down beyond a lattice wall covered with wistaria. Pigeons crooned liquid gutturals from the spire, slanting like smears of paint, and the rector was saying:

“This is Mrs. Powers, Mrs. Burney, a friend of Donald’s. Donald, here is Mrs. Burney. You remember Mrs. Burney: she is Dewey’s mother, you remember.”

Mrs. Burney took a proffered chair blindly. Her dress held heat, her umbrella tripped her bonelessly, then bonelessly avoided her. The rector closed it and Mrs. Powers settled her in the chair. She rubbed at her eyes with a black-bordered cotton handkerchief.

Donald Mahon waked to voices. Mrs. Powers was saying: “How good of you to come. All Donald’s old friends have been so nice to him. Especially the ones who had sons in the war. They know, don’t they?”

(Oh, the poor man, the poor man. And your scarred face! Madden didn’t tell me your face was scarred, Donald.)

Pigeons like slow sleep, afternoon passing away, dying. Mrs. Burney, in her tight, hot black, the rector, huge and black and shapeless, Mrs. Burney with an unhealed sorrow, Mrs. Powers⁠—(Dick, Dick. How young, how terribly young: tomorrow must never come. Kiss me, kiss me through my hair. Dick, Dick. My body flowing away from me, dividing. How ugly men are, naked. Don’t leave me, don’t leave me! No, no! we don’t love each other! we don’t! we don’t! Hold me close, close: my body’s intimacy is broken, unseeing: thank God my body cannot see. Your body is so ugly, Dick! Dear Dick. Your bones, your mouth hard and shaped as bone: rigid. My body flows away: you cannot hold it. Why do you sleep, Dick? My body flows on and on. You cannot hold it, for yours is so ugly, dear Dick.⁠ ⁠… “You may not hear from me for some time. I will write when I can.⁠ ⁠…”)

Donald Mahon, hearing voices, moved in his chair. He felt substance he could not see, heard what did not move him at all. “Carry on, Joe.”

The afternoon dreamed on, unbroken. A negro, informal in an undershirt, restrained his lawn mower, and stood beneath a tree, talking to a woman across the fence. Mrs. Burney in her rigid unbearable black: Mrs. Worthington speaks to me, but Dewey is dead. Oh, the poor man, his gray face. My boy is dead, but his boy has come home, come home⁠ ⁠… with a woman. What is she doing here? Mrs. Mitchell says⁠ ⁠… Mrs. Mitchell says⁠ ⁠… that Saunders girl is engaged to him. She is downtown yesterday almost nekkid. With the sun on her.⁠ ⁠… She wiped her eyes again under inevitable spring.

Donald Mahon, hearing voices: “Carry on, Joe.”

“I come to see how your boy is getting along, what with everything.” (Dewey, my boy.)

(I miss you like the devil, Dick. Someone to sleep with? I don’t know. Oh, Dick, Dick. You left no mark on me, nothing. Kiss me through my hair, Dick, with all your ugly body, and let’s don’t ever see each other again, ever.⁠ ⁠… No, we won’t, dear, ugly Dick.)

(Yes, that was Donald. He is dead.) “He is much