Fable, A - William Faulkner [190]
'Son of a bitch,' Buchwald said to the Negro. 'Why didn't you hold him?'
'He slipped!' the Negro panted.
'Slipped my crap,' Buchwald said. 'You didn't hold him,'
'Son of a bitch yourself!' the Negro panted. 'Me stand there holding him for that bullet to come on through hunting me next?'
'All right, all right,' Buchwald said. 'Now we got to plug that one up and shoot him again,'
'Plug it up?' the Negro said.
'Yes,' Buchwald said. 'What the hell sort of undertaker will you make if you dont know how to plug up a hole in a bastard that got shot in the wrong place? Wax will do it. Get a candle,'
'Where'm I going to get a candle?' the Negro said.
'Go out in the hall and yell,' Buchwald said, swapping the pistol Thursday Night to the other hand and taking the door key from his pocket and handing it to the Negro. 'Keep on yelling until you find a Frog. They must have candles. They must have at least one thing in this.... ing country we never had to bring two thousand miles over here and give to them,'
FRIDAY
SATURDAY
SUNDAY
It bade fair to be another bright and lark-filled vernal morning; the gaudy uniforms and arms and jangling accoutrements and even the ebon faces too of the Senegalese regiment seemed to gleam in it as, to the cryptic tribal equatorial cries of its noncoms, it filed onto the parade ground and formed three sides of a hollow square facing the three freshly planted posts set in a symmetric row on the edge of a long pit or ditch, almost filled and obliterated now by four years of war's refuse Friday-tin cans, bottles, old mess kits, worn-out cooking utensils, boots, inextricable coils of rusting and useless wire-from which the dirt had been excavated to form the railroad embankment running across the end of the parade, which would serve as a backstop for what bullets neither flesh nor wood absorbed. They came into position, then at rest and grounded arms and stood at ease and then easy, whereupon there rose a steady unemphatic gabble, not festive: just gregarious, like people waiting for the opening of a marketplace; the pallid constant almost invisible lighters winked and flared from cigarette to cigarette among the babble of voices, the ebon and gleaming faces not even watching the working party of white soldiers while they tamped the last earth about the posts and took up their tools and departed in a disorderly straggle like a company of reapers leaving a field of hay.
Then a distant bugle cried once or twice, the Senegalese N. C. O,'s shouted, the gaudy ranks doused the cigarettes without haste and with a sort of negligent, almost inattentive deliberation came to alert and at ease as the sergeant-major of the city garrison, a bolstered pistol strapped outside his long buttoned-back coat, came into the vacant side of the square before the three posts and stopped and stood as, to the harsh abrupt ejaculations of the new N. C. O. 's, the mutinied regiment filed into the empty rectangle and huddled, pariahs still, hatless and unarmed, still unshaven, alien, stained still with Aisne and Oise and Marne mud so that against the gaudy arras of the Senegalese they looked like harassed and harried and homeless refugees from another planet, moiling a little though quiet and even orderly or at least decorous until suddenly a handful of them, eleven it was, broke abruptly out and ran in a ragged clump toward the three posts and had already knelt facing the posts in the same ragged clump by the time