Fable, A - William Faulkner [143]
'Tell me then,' the old general said.
'-if I must? Is that it? The ribbons and stars and braid that turned forty years of spears and bullets, yet not one of them to stop a woman's tongue?--Or try to tell you, that is, because I dont know; I was only nine then, I only saw and remembered; Marya too, even if she was eleven, because even then she already didn't need to dread or grieve for anything just because her face had looked at it. Not that we needed to look at this because it had been there all our lives, most of the valley's too. It was already ours, our-the valley's-pride (with a little awe in it) as another one might have a peak or glacier or waterfall-that speck, that blank white wall or dome or tower-whatever it was-which was first in all our valley that the sun touched and the last that lost it, still holding light long after the gulch we crouched in had lost what little it had ever snared. Yet it wasn't high either; high wasn't the right word either; you couldn't-we didn't-measure where it was that way. It was just higher than any of our men, even herds-men and hunters, ever went. Not higher than they could but than they did, dared; no shrine or holy place because we knew them too and even the kind of men that lived in, haunted, served them; mountain men too before they were priests because we knew their fathers and our fathers had known their grandfathers, so they would be priests only afterward with what was left. Instead, it was an eyrie like where eagles nested, where people-men-came as if through the air itself (you), leaving no more trace of coming or arriving (yes, you) or departing (oh yes, you) than eagles would (oh yes, you too; if Marya and I ever saw you then, we did not remember it, nor when you saw us if you ever did except for our mother's telling; I almost said If our father himself ever saw you in the flesh because of course he did, you would have seen to that yourself: a gentleman honorable in gentleman fashion and brave too since it would have taken courage, our father having already lost too much for that little else to be dear spending), come there not to tremble on their knees on stone floors, but to think. To think: not that dreamy hoping and wishing and believing (but mainly just waiting) that we would think is thinking, but some fierce and rigid concentration that at any time-tomorrow, today, next moment, this one-will change the shape of the earth.
'Not high, just high enough to stand between us and the sky like a way-station to heaven, so no wonder when we died the rest of us believed the soul hadn't stopped there maybe but at least had paused to surrender half the coupon; no wonder when our Wednesday Night mother was gone for that week in the spring, Marya and I knew where she had gone to; not dead: we had buried nothing, so she wouldn't have to pass it. But certainly there, since where else could she be-that face which had never belonged to, had no place in, our valley from the beginning, not to mention what we, even her children, had felt, sensed, behind that face which had no place in our mountains, among our kind of people anywhere; where else but there? not to think, to be accepted into that awesome and tremendous condition, because even her face and what was behind it could not match that, but at least to breathe, bathe in the lambence of that furious meditation. The wonder was that she came back. Not the valley's wonder but mine and Marya's too. Because we were children, we didn't know: we only watched and saw and knitted, knotted, tried to, what simple threads we had of implication;