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

The empty world, the sky, were yet filled with lazy spring sunlight, but the sun that had been full upon him, had been brushed away as by a hand. In the moment of realizing this, cursing his stupidity, he dived steeply, slipping to the left. Five threads of vapor passed between the upper and lower planes, each one nearer his body, then he felt two distinct shocks at the base of his skull and vision was reft from him as if a button somewhere had been pressed. His trained hand nosed the machine up smartly, and finding the Vickers release in the darkness, he fired into the bland morning marbled and imminent with March.

Sight flickered on again, like a poorly made electrical contact, he watched holes pitting into the fabric near him like a miraculous smallpox and as he hung poised firing into the sky a dial on his instrument board exploded with a small sound. Then he felt his hand, saw his glove burst, saw his bared bones. Then sight flashed off again and he felt himself lurch, falling until his belt caught him sharply across the abdomen, and he heard something gnawing through his frontal bone, like mice. You’ll break your damn teeth, there, he told them, opening his eyes.

His father’s heavy face hung over him in the dusk like a murdered Caesar’s.

He knew sight again and an imminent nothingness more profound than any yet, while evening, like a ship with twilight-colored sails, drew down the world, putting calmly out to an immeasurable sea. “That’s how it happened,” he said, staring at him.

IX I

Sex and death: the front door and the back door of the world. How indissolubly are they associated in us! In youth they lift us out of the flesh, in old age they reduce us again to the flesh; one to fatten us, the other to flay us, for the worm. When are sexual compulsions more readily answered than in war or famine or flood or fire?

Jones, lurking across the street, saw the coast clear at last.

(First, marched a uniformed self-constituted guard, led by a subaltern with three silver V’s on his sleeve and a Boy Scout bugler furnished by the young Baptist minister, a fiery-eyed dervish, who had served in the Y.M.C.A.)

And then fatly arrogant as a cat, Jones let himself through the iron gate.

(The last motorcar trailed slowly up the street and the casuals gathered through curiosity⁠—the town should raise a monument to Donald Mahon, with effigies of Margaret Mahon-Powers and Joe Gilligan for caryatides⁠—and the little blackguard boys, both black and white, and including young Robert Saunders, come to envy the boy bugler, drifted away.)

And still cat-like, Jones mounted the steps and entered the deserted house. His yellow goat’s eyes became empty as he paused, listening. Then he moved quietly toward the kitchen.

(The procession moved slowly across the square. Country people, in town to trade, turned to stare vacuously, merchant and doctor and lawyer came to door and window to look; the city fathers, drowsing in the courthouse yard, having successfully circumvented sex, having reached the point where death would look after them instead of they after death, waked and looked and slept again. Into a street, among and between horses and mules tethered to wagons, it passed, into a street bordered by shabby negro stores and shops, and here was Loosh standing stiffly at salute as it passed. “Who dat, Loosh?” “Mist’ Donald Mahon.” “Well, Jesus! we all gwine dat way, some day. All roads leads to de graveyard.”)

Emmy sat at the kitchen table, her head between her hard elbows, her hands clasping behind her in her hair. How long she had sat there she did not know but she had heard them clumsily carrying him from the house and she put her hands over her ears, not to hear. But it seemed as if she could hear in spite of her closed ears those horrible, blundering, utterly unnecessary sounds: the hushed scraping of timid footsteps, the muted thumping of wood against wood, that passing, left behind an unbearable unchastity of stale flowers⁠—as though flowers themselves getting a rumor of death became corrupt⁠—all the excruciating ceremony for disposing of human carrion. So she had not heard Mrs. Mahon until the other touched her shoulder. (I would have cured him! If they had just let me marry him instead of her!) At the touch Emmy raised her swollen, blurred face, swollen because she couldn’t seem to cry. (If I could just cry. You are prettier than me, with your black hair and your painted mouth. That’s the reason.)

“Come, Emmy,” Mrs. Mahon said.

“Let me alone! Go away!” she said, fiercely. “You got him killed: now bury him yourself.”

“He would have wanted you to come, Emmy,” the other woman said, gently.

“Go away, let me alone, I tell you!” She dropped her head to the table again, bumping her forehead.⁠ ⁠…

There was no sound in the kitchen save a clock. Life. Death. Life. Death. Life. Death. Forever and ever. (If I could only cry!) She could hear the dusty sound of sparrows and she imagined she could see the shadows growing longer across the grass. Soon it will be night, she thought, remembering that night long, long ago, the last time she had seen Donald, her Donald⁠—not that one! and he had said, “Come here, Emmy,” and she had gone to him. Her Donald was dead long, long ago.⁠ ⁠… The clock went Life. Death. Life. Death. There was something frozen in her chest, like a dishcloth in winter.

(The procession moved beneath arching iron letters. Rest in Peace in cast repetition: Our motto is one for every cemetery, a cemetery for everyone throughout the land. Away, following where fingers of sunlight pointed among cedars, doves were cool, throatily unemphatic among the dead.)

“Go away,” Emmy repeated to another touch on her shoulder, thinking she had dreamed. It was a dream! she thought and the frozen dishrag in her chest melted