system covering the whole South and East like the veins in an oak leaf and
itself mutually adjunctive to the other intricate
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systems covering the rest of the United States, so that you could get on
a train in Jefferson now and, by changing and waiting a few times, go
anywhere in North America;
No more into the United States, but into the rest of the United States,
because the long pull was over now; only the aging unvanquished women were
unreconciled, irreconcilable, reversed and irrevocably reverted against
the whole moving unanimity of panorama until, old unordered vacant pilings
above a tide's flood, they themselves had an illusion of motion, facing
irreconcilably backward toward the old lost battles, the old aborted
cause, the old four ruined years whose very physical scars ten and twenty
and twenty-five changes of season had annealed back into the earth;
twenty-five and then thirty-five years; not only a century and an age, but
a way of thinking died; the town itself wrote the epilogue and epitaph:
1900, on Confederate Decoration Day, Mrs Virginia Depre, Colonel
Sartoris's sister, twitched a lanyard and the spring-restive bunting
collapsed and flowed, leaving the marble effigy-the stone infantryman on
his stone pedestal on the exact spot where forty years ago the Richmond
officer and the local Baptist minister had mustered in the Colonel's regi-
ment, and the old men in the gray and braided coats (all officers now,
none less in rank than captain) tottered into the sunlight and fired
shotguns at the bland sky and raised their cracked quavering voices in the
shrill hackle-lifting yelling which Lee and Jackson and Longstreet and the
two Johnstons (and Grant and Sherman and Hooker and Pope and McClellan and
Burnside too for the matter of that) had listened to amid the smoke and
the din; epilogue and epitaph, because apparently neither the U.D.C.
ladies who instigated and bought the monument, nor the architect who
designed it nor the masons who erected it, had noticed that the marble
eyes under the shading marble palm stared not toward the north and the
enemy, but toward the south, toward (if anything) his own rear-looking
perhaps, the wits said (could say now, with the old war thirty-five years
past and you could even joke about it-except the women, the ladies, the
unsurrendered, the irreconcilable, who even after another thirty-flve
years would still get up and stalk out of picture houses showing Gone With
the Wind), for reinforcements; or per. haps not a combat soldier at all,
but a provost marshal's man looking for deserters, or perhaps himself for
a safe place to run to: because that old war was dead; the sons of those
tottering old men in gray had already died in blue coats in Cuba, the
macabre mementos and testimonials and shrines of the new war already
usurping the earth before the blasts of
312 WILLIAM FAULKNER
blank shotgun shells and the weightless collapsing of bunting had unveiled
the final ones to the old;
Not only a new century and a new way of thinking, but of acting and
behaving too: now you could go to bed in a train in Jefferson and wake up
tomorrow morning in New Orleans or Chicago; there were electric lights and
running water in almost every house in town except the cabins of Negroes;
and now the town had bought and brought from a great distance a kind of
gray crushed ballast-stone called macadam, and paved the entire street
between the depot and the hotel, so that no more would the train-meeting
hacks filled with drummers and lawyers and court-witnesses need to lurch
and heave and strain through the winter mud-holes; every morning a wagon
came to your very door with artificial ice and put it in your icebox on
the back gallery for you, the children in rotationai neighborhood gangs
following it (the wagon), eating the fragments of ice which the Negro
driver chipped off for them; and that summer a specially-built
sprinkling-cart began to make the round of the streets each day; a new
time, a new age: there were screens in windows now; people (white people)
who could actually sleep in summer night air, finding it harmless,
uninimicaclass="underline" as though there had waked suddenly in man (or anyway in his
womenfolks) a belief in his inalienable civil right to be free of dust and
bugs;
Moving faster and faster: from the speed of two horses on either side of
a polished tongue, to that of thirty then fifty then a hundred under a tin
bonnet no bigger than a wash-tub: which from almost the first explosion,
would have to be controlled by police; already in a back yard on the edge
of town, an ex-blacksmith's-apprentice, a grease-covered man with the eyes
of a visionary monk, was building a gasoline buggy, casting and boring his
own cylinders and rods and cams, inventing his own coils and plugs and
valves as he found he needed them, which would run, and did: crept popping
and stinking out of the alley at the exact moment when the banker Bayard
Sartoris, the Colonel's son, passed in his carriage: as a result of which,
there is on the books of Jefferson today a law prohibiting the operation
of any mechanicallypropelled vehicle on the streets of the corporate town:
who (the same banker Sartoris) died in one (such was progress, that fast,
that rapid) lost from control on an icy road by his (the banker's)
grandson, who had just returned from (such was progress) two years of
service as a combat airman on the Western Front and now the camouflage
paint is weathering slowly from a French point-seventy-five field piece
squatting
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on one flank of the base of the Confederate monument, but even before it
faded there was neon in the town and A.A.A. and C.C.C. in the county, and
W.P.A. ("and XYZ and etc.," as "Uncle Pete" Gombault, a lean clean
tobacco-chewing old man, incumbent of a political sinecure under the
designation of United States marshal-an office held back in reconstruction
times, when the State of Mississippi was a United States military
district, by a Negro man who was still living in 1925 -firemaker, sweeper,
janitor and furnace-attendant to five or six lawyers and doctors and one
of the banks-and still known as "Mulberry" from the avocation which he had
followed before and during and after his incumbency as marshaclass="underline" peddling
illlicit whiskey in pint and half-pint bottles from a cache beneath the
roots of a big mulberry tree behind the drugstore of his pre-1865
owner-put it) in both; W.P.A. and XYZ marking the town and the county as
war itself had not: gone now were the last of the forest trees which had
followed the shape of the Square, shading the unbroken second-storey
balcony onto which the lawyers' and doctors' offices had opened, which
shaded in its turn the fronts of the stores and the walkway beneath; and
now was gone even the balcony itself with its wrought-iron balustrade on
which in the long summer afternoons the lawyers would prop their feet to
talk; and the continuous iron chain looping from wooden post to post along
the circumference of the courthouse yard, for the farmers to hitch their
teams to; and the public watering trough where they could water them,
because gone was the last wagon to stand on the Square during the spring
and summer and fall Saturdays and trading-days, and not only the Square