The Sound and the Fury - William Faulkner [70]
“Yes,” I says. “I feed a whole dam kitchen full of niggers to follow around after him, but if I want an automobile tire changed, I have to do it myself.”
“I aint had nobody to leave him wid,” he says. Then he begun moaning and slobbering.
“Take him on round to the back,” I says. “What the hell makes you want to keep him around here where people can see him?” I made them go on, before he got started bellowing good. It’s bad enough on Sundays, with that dam field full of people that haven’t got a side show and six niggers to feed, knocking a dam oversize mothball around. He’s going to keep on running up and down that fence and bellowing every time they come in sight until first thing I know they’re going to begin charging me golf dues, then Mother and Dilsey’ll have to get a couple of china door knobs and a walking stick and work it out, unless I play at night with a lantern. Then they’d send us all to Jackson, maybe. God knows, they’d hold Old Home week when that happened.
I went on back to the garage. There was the tire, leaning against the wall, but be damned if I was going to put it on. I backed out and turned around. She was standing by the drive. I says,
“I know you haven’t got any books: I just want to ask you what you did with them, if it’s any of my business. Of course I haven’t got any right to ask,” I says. “I’m just the one that paid $11.65 for them last September.”
“Mother buys my books,” she says. “There’s not a cent of your money on me. I’d starve first.”
“Yes?” I says. “You tell your grandmother that and see what she says. You dont look all the way naked,” I says, “even if that stuff on your face does hide more of you than anything else you’ve got on.”
“Do you think your money or hers either paid for a cent of this?” she says.
“Ask your grandmother,” I says. “Ask her what became of those checks. You saw her burn one of them, as I remember.” She wasn’t even listening, with her face all gummed up with paint and her eyes hard as a fice dog’s.
“Do you know what I’d do if I thought your money or hers either bought one cent of this?” she says, putting her hand on her dress.
“What would you do?” I says. “Wear a barrel?”
“I’d tear it right off and throw it into the street,” she says. “Dont you believe me?”
“Sure you would,” I says. “You do it every time.”
“See if I wouldn’t,” she says. She grabbed the neck of her dress in both hands and made like she would tear it.
“You tear that dress,” I says, “and I’ll give you a whipping right here that you’ll remember all your life.”
“See if I dont,” she says. Then I saw that she really was trying to tear it, to tear it right off of her. By the time I got the car stopped and grabbed her hands there was about a dozen people looking. It made me so mad for a minute it kind of blinded me.
“You do a thing like that again and I’ll make you sorry you ever drew breath,” I says.
“I’m sorry now,” she says. She quit, then her eyes turned kind of funny and I says to myself if you cry here in this car, on the street, I’ll whip you. I’ll wear you out. Lucky for her she didn’t, so I turned her wrists loose and drove on. Luckily we were near an alley, where I could turn into the back street and dodge the square. They were already putting the tent up in Beard’s lot. Earl had already given me the two passes for our show windows. She sat there with her face turned away, chewing her lip. “I’m sorry now,” she says. “I dont see why I was ever born.”
“And I know of at least one other person that dont understand all he knows about that,” I says. I stopped in front of the school house. The bell had rung, and the last of them were just going in. “You’re on time for once, anyway,” I says. “Are you going in there and stay there, or am I coming with you and make you?” She got out and banged the door. “Remember what I say,” I says. “I mean it. Let me hear one more time that you are slipping up and down back alleys with one of those dam squirts.”
She turned back at that. “I dont slip around,” she says. “I dare anybody to know everything I do.”
“And they all know it, too,