Reading of "Old Man"
DATE: 20 May 1957
OCCASION: Freshman English Class
TAPE: T-132
LENGTH: 6:07
Play the full recording:
William Faulkner:
That was all, the convict told them. They left the
sawmill fast, he had no time to buy food until they reached the next—next
landing. There he spent the whole sixteen dollars he had earned and they
went on. The River was lower now, there was no doubt of it, and sixteen
dollars' worth looked like a lot of food and he thought maybe it would do,
would be enough. But maybe there was more current in the River still than it
looked like. But this time it was Mississippi, it was cotton; the plow
handles felt right to his palms again, the strain and squat of the [thick]
buttocks against the middle buster's blade was what he knew, even though
they paid but a dollar a day here. But that did it. He told it: they told
him it was Saturday again and paid him and he told about it—night, a smoked
lantern in a disc of worn and barren earth as smooth as silver, a circle of
crouching figures, the importunate murmurs and ejaculations, the meagre
piles of worn bills beneath the crouching knees, the dotted cubes clicking
and scuttering in the dust; that did it. "How much did you win?" the second
convict said.
"Enough," the tall one said.
"How much?"
"Enough," the tall one said. It was
enough exactly; he gave it all to the man who owned the second motor boat
(he would not need food now), he and the woman in the launch now and the
skiff towing behind it, the woman with the baby and the paper-wrapped parcel
beneath his peaceful hand, on his lap; almost at once he recognised, not
Vicksburg because he had never seen Vicksburg, but the trestle beneath which
on his roaring wave of trees and houses and dead animals he had shot,
accompanied by thunder and lightning, a month and three weeks ago; he looked
at it once without heat, even without interest as the launch went on. But
now he began to watch the bank, the levee. He didn't know how he would know
but he knew he would, and then it was early afternoon and sure enough the
moment came and he said to the launch owner: "I reckon this will do."
"Here?" the launch owner said. "This dont look like
anywhere to me."
"I reckon this is it," the convict said. So the launch put
inshore, the engine ceased, it drifted up and lay against the levee and the
owner cast the skiff loose.
"You better let me take you on until we come to
something," he said. "That was what I promised."
"I reckon this will do,"
the convict said. So they got out and he stood with the grapevine painter in
his hand while the launch purred again and drew away, already curving; he
did not watch it. He laid the bundle down and made the painter fast to a
willow root and picked up the bundle and turned. He said no word, he mounted
the levee, passing the mark, the tide-line of the old raging, dry now and
lined, traversed by shallow and empty cracks like foolish and deprecatory
senile grins, and entered a willow clump and removed the overalls and shirt
they had given him in New Orleans and dropped them without even looking to
see where they fell and opened the parcel and took out the other, the known,
the desired, faded a little, stained and worn, but clean, recognisable, and
put them on and returned to the skiff and took up the paddle. The woman was
already in it.
The plump convict stood blinking at him. "So you come
back," he said. "Well well." Now they all watched the tall convict as he bit
the end from the cigar neatly and with complete deliberation and spat it out
and licked the bite smooth and damp and took a match from his pocket and
examined the match for a moment as though to be sure it was a good one,
worthy of the cigar perhaps, and raked it up his thigh with the same
deliberation—a motion almost too slow to set fire to it, it would seem—and
held it until the flame burned clear and free of sulphur, then he put it to the
cigar. The plump one watched him, blinking rapidly and steadily. "And they
give you ten years more for running. That's bad. A fellow can get used to
what they give him at first, to start off with, I dont care how much it is,
even a hundred and ninety-nine years. But ten more years. Ten years more, on
top of that. When you never expected it. Ten more years to have to do
without no society, no female companionship—" He blinked steadily at the
tall convict. But he (the tall convict) had thought of that too. He had had
a sweetheart. That is, he had gone to church singings and picnics with her—a
girl a year or so younger than he, short-legged, with ripe breasts and a
heavy mouth and dull eyes like ripe muscadines, who owned a baking-powder
can almost full of ear-rings and brooches and rings bought (or presented at
suggestion) from ten-cent stores. Presently he had divulged his plan to her,
and there were times later when, musing, the thought occurred to him that
perhaps if it had not been for her he would not actually have attempted
it—this a mere feeling, unworded, since he could not have phrased this either:
that who to know what Capone's uncandled bridehood she might not have
dreamed to be her destined fate, what fast car filled with authentic
colored glass and machine guns, running traffic lights. But that was all
past and done when the notion first occurred to him, and in the third month
of his incarceration she came to see him. She wore ear-rings and a bracelet
or so which he had never seen before and it never became quite clear how she
had got that far from home, and she cried violently for the first three
minutes though presently (and without his ever knowing either exactly how
they had got separated or how she had made the acquaintance) he saw her in
animated conversation with one of the guards. But she kissed him before she
left that evening and said she would return the first chance she got,
clinging to him, sweating a little, smelling of scent and soft young female
flesh, slightly pneumatic. But she didn't come back though he continued to
write to her, and seven months later he got an answer. It was a postcard, a
colored lithograph of a Birmingham hotel, with a childish X inked heavily across
one window, the heavy writing on the reverse slanted and primer-like too:
This is where were honnymonning at. Your friend (Mrs)
Vernon Waldrip
The plump convict stood blinking at the tall one,
rapidly and steadily. "Yes, sir," he said. "It's them ten more years that
hurt. Ten more years to do without a woman, no woman a tall a fellow wants—"
He blinked steadily and rapidly, watching the tall one. The other did not
move, jackknifed backward between the two bunks, grave and clean, the cigar
burning smoothly and richly in his clean steady hand, the smoke wreathing
upward across his face saturnine, humorless, and calm. "Ten more years—"
"Women 'blank'!" the tall convict said.
[end of recording]
