Light in August - William Faulkner [99]
When Christmas reentered the kitchen he did not even look back at the table on which lay the note which he had not yet read. He went on through the door which led into the house and on to the stairs. He began to mount, not fast. He mounted steadily; he could now see the bedroom door, a crack of light, firelight, beneath it. He went steadily on and put his hand upon the door. Then he opened it and he stopped dead still. She was sitting at a table, beneath the lamp. He saw a figure that he knew, in a severe garment that he knew—a garment that looked as if it had been made for and worn by a careless man. Above it he saw a head with hair just beginning to gray drawn gauntly back to a knot as savage and ugly as a wart on a diseased bough. Then she looked up at him and he saw that she wore steelrimmed spectacles which he had never seen before. He stood in the door, his hand still on the knob, quite motionless. It seemed to him that he could actually hear the words inside him: You should have read that note. You should have read that note thinking, ‘I am going to do something. Going to do something.’
He was still hearing that while he stood beside the table on which papers were scattered and from which she had not risen, and listened to the calm enormity which her cold, still voice unfolded, his mouth repeating the words after her while he looked down at the scattered and enigmatic papers and documents and thinking fled smooth and idle, wondering what this paper meant and what that paper meant. “To school,” his mouth said.
“Yes,” she said. “They will take you. Any of them will. On my account. You can choose any one you want among them. We won’t even have to pay.”
“To school,” his mouth said. “A nigger school. Me.”
“Yes. Then you can go to Memphis. You can read law in Peebles’s office. He will teach you law. Then you can take charge of all the legal business. All this, all that he does, Peebles does.”
“And then learn law in the office of a nigger lawyer,” his mouth said.
“Yes. Then I will turn over all the business to you, all the money. All of it. So that when you need money for yourself you could ... you would know how; lawyers know how to do it so that it ... You would be helping them up out of darkness and none could accuse or blame you even if they found out ... even if you did not replace ... but you could replace the money and none would ever know. ...”
“But a nigger college, a nigger lawyer,” his voice said, quiet, not even argumentative; just promptive. They were not looking at one another; she had not looked up since he entered.
“Tell them,” she said.
“Tell niggers that I am a nigger too?” She now looked at him. Her face was quite calm. It was the face of an old woman now.
“Yes. You’ll have to do that. So they won’t charge you anything. On my account.”
Then it was as if he said suddenly to his mouth: ‘Shut up. Shut up that drivel. Let me talk.’ He leaned down. She did not move. Their faces were not a foot apart: the one cold, dead white, fanatical, mad; the other parchmentcolored, the lip lifted into the shape of a soundless and rigid snarl. He said quietly: