A Rose for Emily
A
Rose for Emily
by
William Faulkner
I
WHEN Miss Emily Grierson died, our
whole town went to her funeral: the men through a sort of respectful affection
for a fallen monument, the women mostly out of curiosity to see the inside of
her house, which no one save an old man-servant--a combined gardener and
cook--had seen in at least ten years.
It was a big, squarish frame house that
had once been white, decorated with cupolas and spires and scrolled balconies
in the heavily lightsome style of the seventies, set on what had once been our
most select street. But garages and cotton gins had encroached and obliterated
even the august names of that neighborhood; only Miss Emily's house was left,
lifting its stubborn and coquettish decay above the cotton wagons and the
gasoline pumps-an eyesore among eyesores. And now Miss Emily had gone to join
the representatives of those august names where they lay in the cedar-bemused
cemetery among the ranked and anonymous graves of Union and Confederate
soldiers who fell at the battle of Jefferson.
Alive, Miss Emily had been a tradition,
a duty, and a care; a sort of hereditary obligation upon the town, dating from
that day in 1894 when Colonel Sartoris, the mayor--he who fathered the edict
that no Negro woman should appear on the streets without an apron-remitted her
taxes, the dispensation dating from the death of her father on into perpetuity.
Not that Miss Emily would have accepted charity. Colonel Sartoris invented an
involved tale to the effect that Miss Emily's father had loaned money to the
town, which the town, as a matter of business, preferred this way of repaying.
Only a man of Colonel Sartoris' generation and thought could have invented it,
and only a woman could have believed it.
When the next generation, with its more
modern ideas, became mayors and aldermen, this arrangement created some little
dissatisfaction. On the first of the year they mailed her a tax notice.
February came, and there was no reply. They wrote her a formal letter, asking
her to call at the sheriff's office at her convenience. A week later the mayor
wrote her himself, offering to call or to send his car for her, and received in
reply a note on paper of an archaic shape, in a thin, flowing calligraphy in
faded ink, to the effect that she no longer went out at all. The tax notice was
also enclosed, without comment.
They called a special meeting of the
Board of Aldermen. A deputation waited upon her, knocked at the door through
which no visitor had passed since she ceased giving china-painting lessons
eight or ten years earlier. They were admitted by the old Negro into a dim hall
from which a stairway mounted into still more shadow. It smelled of dust and
disuse--a close, dank smell. The Negro led them into the parlor. It was
furnished in heavy, leather-covered furniture. When the Negro opened the blinds
of one window, they could see that the leather was cracked; and when they sat
down, a faint dust rose sluggishly about their thighs, spinning with slow motes
in the single sun-ray. On a tarnished gilt easel before the fireplace stood a
crayon portrait of Miss Emily's father.
They rose when she entered--a small,
fat woman in black, with a thin gold chain descending to her waist and
vanishing into her belt, leaning on an ebony cane with a tarnished gold head.
Her skeleton was small and spare; perhaps that was why what would have been
merely plumpness in another was obesity in her. She looked bloated, like a body
long submerged in motionless water, and of that pallid hue. Her eyes, lost in
the fatty ridges of her face, looked like two small pieces of coal pressed into
a lump of dough as they moved from one face to another while the visitors
stated their errand.
She did not ask them to sit. She just
stood in the door and listened quietly until the spokesman came to a stumbling
halt. Then they could hear the invisible watch ticking at the end of the gold
chain.
Her voice was dry and cold. "I
have no taxes in Jefferson. Colonel Sartoris explained it to me. Perhaps one of
you can gain access to the city records and satisfy yourselves."
"But we have. We are the city
authorities, Miss Emily. Didn't you get a notice from the sheriff, signed by
him?"
"I received a paper, yes,"
Miss Emily said. "Perhaps he considers himself the sheriff . . . I have no
taxes in Jefferson."
"But there is nothing on the books
to show that, you see We must go by the--"
"See Colonel Sartoris. I have no
taxes in Jefferson."
"But, Miss Emily--"
"See Colonel Sartoris."
(Colonel Sartoris had been dead almost ten years.) "I have no taxes in
Jefferson. Tobe!" The Negro appeared. "Show these gentlemen
out."
II
So SHE vanquished them, horse and foot,
just as she had vanquished their fathers thirty years before about the smell.
That was two years after her father's
death and a short time after her sweetheart--the one we believed would marry
her --had deserted her. After her father's death she went out very little;
after her sweetheart went away, people hardly saw her at all. A few of the
ladies had the temerity to call, but were not received, and the only sign of
life about the place was the Negro man--a young man then--going in and out with
a market basket.
"Just as if a man--any man--could
keep a kitchen properly, "the ladies said; so they were not surprised when
the smell developed. It was another link between the gross, teeming world and
the high and mighty Griersons.
A neighbor, a woman, complained to the
mayor, Judge Stevens, eighty years old.
"But what will you have me do
about it, madam?" he said.
"Why, send her word to stop
it," the woman said. "Isn't there a law? "
"I'm sure that won't be
necessary," Judge Stevens said. "It's probably just a snake or a rat
that nigger of hers killed in the yard. I'll speak to him about it."
The next day he received two more
complaints, one from a man who came in diffident deprecation. "We really
must do something about it, Judge. I'd be the last one in the world to bother
Miss Emily, but we've got to do something." That night the Board of
Aldermen met--three graybeards and one younger man, a member of the rising
generation.
"It's simple enough," he
said. "Send her word to have her place cleaned up. Give her a certain time
to do it in, and if she don't. .."
"Dammit, sir," Judge Stevens
said, "will you accuse a lady to her face of smelling bad?"
So the next night, after midnight, four
men crossed Miss Emily's lawn and slunk about the house like burglars, sniffing
along the base of the brickwork and at the cellar openings while one of them
performed a regular sowing motion with his hand out of a sack slung from his
shoulder. They broke open the cellar door and sprinkled lime there, and in all
the outbuildings. As they recrossed the lawn, a window that had been dark was
lighted and Miss Emily sat in it, the light behind her, and her upright torso
motionless as that of an idol. They crept quietly across the lawn and into the
shadow of the locusts that lined the street. After a week or two the smell went
away.
That was when people had begun to feel
really sorry for her. People in our town, remembering how old lady Wyatt, her
great-aunt, had gone completely crazy at last, believed that the Griersons held
themselves a little too high for what they really were. None of the young men
were quite good enough for Miss Emily and such. We had long thought of them as
a tableau, Miss Emily a slender figure in white in the background, her father a
spraddled silhouette in the foreground, his back to her and clutching a
horsewhip, the two of them framed by the back-flung front door. So when she got
to be thirty and was still single, we were not pleased exactly, but vindicated;
even with insanity in the family she wouldn't have turned down all of her
chances if they had really materialized.
When her father died, it got about that
the house was all that was left to her; and in a way, people were glad. At last
they could pity Miss Emily. Being left alone, and a pauper, she had become
humanized. Now she too would know the old thrill and the old despair of a penny
more or less.
The day after his death all the ladies
prepared to call at the house and offer condolence and aid, as is our custom
Miss Emily met them at the door, dressed as usual and with no trace of grief on
her face. She told them that her father was not dead. She did that for three
days, with the ministers calling on her, and the doctors, trying to persuade
her to let them dispose of the body. Just as they were about to resort to law
and force, she broke down, and they buried her father quickly.
We did not say she was crazy then. We
believed she had to do that. We remembered all the young men her father had
driven away, and we knew that with nothing left, she would have to cling to
that which had robbed her, as people will.
III
SHE WAS SICK for a long time. When we
saw her again, her hair was cut short, making her look like a girl, with a
vague resemblance to those angels in colored church windows--sort of tragic and
serene.
The town had just let the contracts for
paving the sidewalks, and in the summer after her father's death they began the
work. The construction company came with niggers and mules and machinery, and a
foreman named Homer Barron, a Yankee--a big, dark, ready man, with a big voice
and eyes lighter than his face. The little boys would follow in groups to hear
him cuss the niggers, and the niggers singing in time to the rise and fall of
picks. Pretty soon he knew everybody in town. Whenever you heard a lot of
laughing anywhere about the square, Homer Barron would be in the center of the
group. Presently we began to see him and Miss Emily on Sunday afternoons
driving in the yellow-wheeled buggy and the matched team of bays from the livery
stable.
At first we were glad that Miss Emily
would have an interest, because the ladies all said, "Of course a Grierson
would not think seriously of a Northerner, a day laborer." But there were
still others, older people, who said that even grief could not cause a real
lady to forget noblesse oblige- -
without
calling it noblesse oblige. They just said, "Poor Emily. Her
kinsfolk should come to her." She had some kin in Alabama; but years ago
her father had fallen out with them over the estate of old lady Wyatt, the
crazy woman, and there was no communication between the two families. They had
not even been represented at the funeral.
And as soon as the old people said,
"Poor Emily," the whispering began. "Do you suppose it's really
so?" they said to one another. "Of course it is. What else could . .
." This behind their hands; rustling of craned silk and satin behind
jalousies closed upon the sun of Sunday afternoon as the thin, swift
clop-clop-clop of the matched team passed: "Poor Emily."
She carried her head high enough--even
when we believed that she was fallen. It was as if she demanded more than ever
the recognition of her dignity as the last Grierson; as if it had wanted that
touch of earthiness to reaffirm her imperviousness. Like when she bought the
rat poison, the arsenic. That was over a year after they had begun to say
"Poor Emily," and while the two female cousins were visiting her.
"I want some poison," she
said to the druggist. She was over thirty then, still a slight woman, though
thinner than usual, with cold, haughty black eyes in a face the flesh of which
was strained across the temples and about the eyesockets as you imagine a
lighthouse-keeper's face ought to look. "I want some poison," she
said.
"Yes, Miss Emily. What kind? For
rats and such? I'd recom--"
"I want the best you have. I don't
care what kind."
The druggist named several.
"They'll kill anything up to an elephant. But what you want is--"
"Arsenic," Miss Emily said.
"Is that a good one?"
"Is . . . arsenic? Yes, ma'am. But
what you want--"
"I want arsenic."
The druggist looked down at her. She
looked back at him, erect, her face like a strained flag. "Why, of
course," the druggist said. "If that's what you want. But the law
requires you to tell what you are going to use it for."
Miss Emily just stared at him, her head
tilted back in order to look him eye for eye, until he looked away and went and
got the arsenic and wrapped it up. The Negro delivery boy brought her the
package; the druggist didn't come back. When she opened the package at home
there was written on the box, under the skull and bones: "For rats."
IV
So THE NEXT day we all said, "She
will kill herself"; and we said it would be the best thing. When she had
first begun to be seen with Homer Barron, we had said, "She will marry
him." Then we said, "She will persuade him yet," because Homer
himself had remarked--he liked men, and it was known that he drank with the
younger men in the Elks' Club--that he was not a marrying man. Later we said, "Poor
Emily" behind the jalousies as they passed on Sunday afternoon in the
glittering buggy, Miss Emily with her head high and Homer Barron with his hat
cocked and a cigar in his teeth, reins and whip in a yellow glove.
Then some of the ladies began to say
that it was a disgrace to the town and a bad example to the young people. The
men did not want to interfere, but at last the ladies forced the Baptist
minister--Miss Emily's people were Episcopal-- to call upon her. He would never
divulge what happened during that interview, but he refused to go back again.
The next Sunday they again drove about the streets, and the following day the
minister's wife wrote to Miss Emily's relations in Alabama.
So she had blood-kin under her roof
again and we sat back to watch developments. At first nothing happened. Then we
were sure that they were to be married. We learned that Miss Emily had been to
the jeweler's and ordered a man's toilet set in silver, with the letters H. B.
on each piece. Two days later we learned that she had bought a complete outfit
of men's clothing, including a nightshirt, and we said, "They are
married." We were really glad. We were glad because the two female cousins
were even more Grierson than Miss Emily had ever been.
So we were not surprised when Homer
Barron--the streets had been finished some time since--was gone. We were a
little disappointed that there was not a public blowing-off, but we believed
that he had gone on to prepare for Miss Emily's coming, or to give her a chance
to get rid of the cousins. (By that time it was a cabal, and we were all Miss
Emily's allies to help circumvent the cousins.) Sure enough, after another week
they departed. And, as we had expected all along, within three days Homer
Barron was back in town. A neighbor saw the Negro man admit him at the kitchen
door at dusk one evening.
And that was the last we saw of Homer
Barron. And of Miss Emily for some time. The Negro man went in and out with the
market basket, but the front door remained closed. Now and then we would see
her at a window for a moment, as the men did that night when they sprinkled the
lime, but for almost six months she did not appear on the streets. Then we knew
that this was to be expected too; as if that quality of her father which had
thwarted her woman's life so many times had been too virulent and too furious
to die.
When we next saw Miss Emily, she had
grown fat and her hair was turning gray. During the next few years it grew
grayer and grayer until it attained an even pepper-and-salt iron-gray, when it
ceased turning. Up to the day of her death at seventy-four it was still that
vigorous iron-gray, like the hair of an active man.
From that time on her front door
remained closed, save for a period of six or seven years, when she was about
forty, during which she gave lessons in china-painting. She fitted up a studio
in one of the downstairs rooms, where the daughters and granddaughters of
Colonel Sartoris' contemporaries were sent to her with the same regularity and
in the same spirit that they were sent to church on Sundays with a
twenty-five-cent piece for the collection plate. Meanwhile her taxes had been
remitted.
Then the newer generation became the
backbone and the spirit of the town, and the painting pupils grew up and fell
away and did not send their children to her with boxes of color and tedious
brushes and pictures cut from the ladies' magazines. The front door closed upon
the last one and remained closed for good. When the town got free postal
delivery, Miss Emily alone refused to let them fasten the metal numbers above
her door and attach a mailbox to it. She would not listen to them.
Daily, monthly, yearly we watched the
Negro grow grayer and more stooped, going in and out with the market basket.
Each December we sent her a tax notice, which would be returned by the post
office a week later, unclaimed. Now and then we would see her in one of the
downstairs windows--she had evidently shut up the top floor of the house--like
the carven torso of an idol in a niche, looking or not looking at us, we could
never tell which. Thus she passed from generation to generation--dear,
inescapable, impervious, tranquil, and perverse.
And so she died. Fell ill in the house
filled with dust and shadows, with only a doddering Negro man to wait on her.
We did not even know she was sick; we had long since given up trying to get any
information from the Negro
He talked to no one, probably not even
to her, for his voice had grown harsh and rusty, as if from disuse.
She died in one of the downstairs
rooms, in a heavy walnut bed with a curtain, her gray head propped on a pillow
yellow and moldy with age and lack of sunlight.
V
THE NEGRO met the first of the ladies
at the front door and let them in, with their hushed, sibilant voices and their
quick, curious glances, and then he disappeared. He walked right through the
house and out the back and was not seen again.
The two female cousins came at once.
They held the funeral on the second day, with the town coming to look at Miss
Emily beneath a mass of bought flowers, with the crayon face of her father
musing profoundly above the bier and the ladies sibilant and macabre; and the
very old men --some in their brushed Confederate uniforms--on the porch and the
lawn, talking of Miss Emily as if she had been a contemporary of theirs,
believing that they had danced with her and courted her perhaps, confusing time
with its mathematical progression, as the old do, to whom all the past is not a
diminishing road but, instead, a huge meadow which no winter ever quite
touches, divided from them now by the narrow bottle-neck of the most recent
decade of years.
Already we knew that there was one room
in that region above stairs which no one had seen in forty years, and which
would have to be forced. They waited until Miss Emily was decently in the
ground before they opened it.
The violence of breaking down the door
seemed to fill this room with pervading dust. A thin, acrid pall as of the tomb
seemed to lie everywhere upon this room decked and furnished as for a bridal:
upon the valance curtains of faded rose color, upon the rose-shaded lights,
upon the dressing table, upon the delicate array of crystal and the man's
toilet things backed with tarnished silver, silver so tarnished that the
monogram was obscured. Among them lay a collar and tie, as if they had just
been removed, which, lifted, left upon the surface a pale crescent in the dust.
Upon a chair hung the suit, carefully folded; beneath it the two mute shoes and
the discarded socks.
The man himself lay in the bed.
For a long while we just stood there, looking
down at the profound and fleshless grin. The body had apparently once lain in
the attitude of an embrace, but now the long sleep that outlasts love, that
conquers even the grimace of love, had cuckolded him. What was left of him,
rotted beneath what was left of the nightshirt, had become inextricable from
the bed in which he lay; and upon him and upon the pillow beside him lay that
even coating of the patient and biding dust.
Then we noticed that in the second
pillow was the indentation of a head. One of us lifted something from it, and
leaning forward, that faint and invisible dust dry and acrid in the nostrils,
we saw a long strand of iron-gray hair.
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