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

better, thank you. Give him a few weeks’ rest and he will be well again.”

“I am so glad, so glad,” she answered, pitying him, envying him. (My son died, a hero: Mrs. Worthington, Mrs. Saunders, chat with me about nothing at all.) “Poor boy, don’t he remember his friends at all?”

“Yes, yes.” (This was Donald, my son.) “Donald, don’t you remember Mrs. Burney? She is Dewey’s mother, you know.”

(… but not forever. I wish you all the luck and love in the world. Wish me luck, dear Dick.⁠ ⁠…)

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

The way that girl goes on with men! she thought exultantly. Dewey may be dead, but thank God he ain’t engaged to her. “Your boy is home, he’ll be married soon and everything. So nice for you, so nice.⁠ ⁠…”

“There, there,” the rector said, touching her shoulder kindly, “you must come often to see him.”

“Yes, I will come often,” she replied through her black-bordered cotton handkerchief. “It’s so nice he come home safe and well. Some didn’t.” (Dewey, Dewey.)

The sun flamed slowly across the wistaria, seeking interstices. She would see Mrs. Worthington downtown now, probably. Mrs. Worthington would ask her how she was, how her husband was. (My rheumatism, but I am old. Yes, yes. When we get old.⁠ ⁠… You are old, too, she would think with comfortable malice, older than me. Old, old, too old for things like this to happen to us. He was so good to me, so big and strong: brave.⁠ ⁠…) She rose and someone handed her the cotton umbrella.

“Yes, yes. I will come again to see him.” (Poor boy. Poor man, his face: so gray.)

The lawn mower chattered slowly, reluctantly breaking the evening. Mrs. Burney, disturbing bees, crossed grass blindly. Someone passed her at the gate and remarking an arching thrust of poorly laid concrete and a broken drain, she slanted her umbrella backward, shielding her neat, black-clad, airproof back.

Sucking silver sound of pigeons slanting to and from the spire like smears of soft paint on a cloudless sky. The sun lengthened the shadow of the wistaria-covered wall, immersing the grouped chairs in cool shadow. Waiting for sunset.

(Dick, my love, that I did not love, Dick, your ugly body breaking into mine like a burglar, my body flowing away, washing away all trace of yours.⁠ ⁠… Kiss and forget me: remember me only to wish me luck, dear, ugly, dead Dick.⁠ ⁠…)

(This was my son, Donald. He is dead.)

Gilligan, crossing the lawn, said: “Who was that?”

“Mrs. Burney,” the rector told him. “Her son was killed. You’ve probably heard of him downtown.”

“Yeh, I’ve heard of him. He was the one under indictment for stealing fifty pounds of sugar and they let him go to enlist, wasn’t he?”

“There were stories.⁠ ⁠…” The rector’s voice died away.

Donald Mahon, hearing silence: “You stopped, Joe.”

Gilligan stood near him settling the colored glasses over his eyes. “Sure, Loot. More Rome?”

The shadow of the wall took them completely and at last he said:

“Carry on, Joe.”

V

She missed Mrs. Worthington. She saw the old woman drive smoothly away from Price’s in her car, alone in the back seat. The negro driver’s head was round as a cannonball and Mrs. Burney watched it draw away, smelling gasoline. The shadow of the courthouse was like thinned tobacco smoke filling one side of the square, and standing in the door of a store she saw an acquaintance, a friend of her son’s. He had been in Dewey’s company, an officer or something, but he hadn’t got killed, not him! Trust them generals and things.

(No, no! I won’t feel like this! He done the best he could. It ain’t his fault if he wasn’t brave enough to get killed, like Dewey was. They are all jealous of Dewey anyway: won’t talk about him except that he done what was right. Done what was right! Didn’t I know he would? Dewey, Dewey. So young he was, so big and brave. Until that Green man took him off and got him killed.)

She felt sorry for the man, felt kindly toward him, pitying him. She stopped beside him. Yes, ma’am, he was all right. Yes, the other boys were all right.

“But then you wasn’t killed,” she explained. “All soldiers wasn’t like Dewey: so brave⁠—foolhardy, almost.⁠ ⁠… I always told him not to let that Green get him⁠—get him⁠—”

“Yes, yes,” he agreed, looking at her meticulous, bent neatness.

“He was all right? He didn’t want for nothing?”

“No, no, he was all right,” he assured her. Sunset was almost come. Sparrows in a final delirium in the dusty elms, the last wagons going slowly countryward.

“Men don’t know,” she said bitterly. “You probably never done for him what you could. That Mr. Green.⁠ ⁠… I always misdoubted him.”

“He is dead, too, you know,” he reminded her.

(I won’t be unjust to him!) “You was a officer or something: seems like you’d have took better care of a boy you knowed.”

“We did all we could for him,” he told her patiently. The square, empty of wagons, was quiet. Women went slowly in the last of the sun, meeting husbands, going home to supper. She felt her rheumatism more, now that the air was getting cooler, and she became restive in her fretful black.

“Well. You seen his grave, you say.⁠ ⁠… You are sure he was all right?” So big and strong he was, so good to her.

“Yes, yes. He was all right.”

Madden watched her bent, neat rotundity going down the street among shadows, beneath metallic awnings. The shadow of the courthouse had taken half the town like a silent victorious army, not firing a shot. The sparrows completed a final dusty delirium and went away, went away across evening into morning, retracing months: a year.

Someone on a fire-step had shouted Gas and the officer leaped among them striking, imploring. Then he saw the officer’s face in red and bitter relief as the man on the fire-step, sharp against the sorrowful dawn, turned screaming, You have got us killed, and shot him in the face at point-blank range.

VI

San Francisco, Cal.
April 14,