The Sound and the Fury - William Faulkner.mobi [37]
“I want to see you a minute,” I said, stopping.
“See me? All right. See you again, fellows,” he said, stopping and turning back; “glad to have chatted with you.” That was the Deacon, all over. Talk about your natural psychologists. They said he hadn’t missed a train at the beginning of school in forty years, and that he could pick out a Southerner with one glance. He never missed, and once he had heard you speak, he could name your state. He had a regular uniform he met trains in, a sort of Uncle Tom’s cabin outfit, patches and all.
“Yes, suh. Right dis way, young marster, hyer we is,” taking your bags. “Hyer, boy, come hyer and git dese grips.” Whereupon a moving mountain of luggage would edge up, revealing a white boy of about fifteen, and the Deacon would hang another bag on him somehow and drive him off. “Now, den, dont you drap hit. Yes, suh, young marster, jes give de old nigger yo room number, and hit’ll be done got cold dar when you arrives.”
From then on until he had you completely subjugated he was always in or out of your room, ubiquitous and garrulous, though his manner gradually moved northward as his raiment improved, until at last when he had bled you until you began to learn better he was calling you Quentin or whatever, and when you saw him next he’d be wearing a cast-off Brooks suit and a hat with a Princeton club I forget which band that someone had given him and which he was pleasantly and unshakably convinced was a part of Abe Lincoln’s military sash. Someone spread the story years ago, when he first appeared around college from wherever he came from, that he was a graduate of the divinity school. And when he came to understand what it meant he was so taken with it that he began to retail the story himself, until at last he must have come to believe he really had. Anyway he related long pointless anecdotes of his undergraduate days, speaking familiarly of dead and departed professors by their first names, usually incorrect ones. But he had been guide mentor and friend to unnumbered crops of innocent and lonely freshmen, and I suppose that with all his petty chicanery and hypocrisy he stank no higher in heaven’s nostrils than any other.
“Haven’t seen you in three-four days,” he said, staring at me from his still military aura. “You been sick?”
“No. I’ve been all right. Working, I reckon. I’ve seen you, though.”
“Yes?”
“In the parade the other day.”
“Oh, that. Yes, I was there. I dont care nothing about that sort of thing, you understand, but the boys likes to have me with them, the vet’runs does. Ladies wants all the old vet’runs to turn out, you know. So I has to oblige them.”
“And on that Wop holiday too,” I said. “You were obliging the W. C. T. U. then, I reckon.”
“That? I was doing that for my son-in-law. He aims to get a job on the city forces. Street cleaner. I tells him all he wants is a broom to sleep on. You saw me, did you?”
“Both times. Yes.”
“I mean, in uniform. How’d I look?”
“You looked fine. You looked better than any of them. They ought to make you a general, Deacon.”
He touched my arm, lightly, his hand that worn,