Knight's Gambit by William Faulkner Page B

while he was gone, because if that old man—and he was close to sixty then—had had to spend one full day sitting in a chair in the shade with nothing in his hands to chop or hoe with, he would have died before sundown. So Jackson left. He walked. They didn’t have but one mule. They ain’t never had but one mule. But it ain’t but about thirty miles. He was gone about two and a half years. Then one day—’
    ‘He come home that first Christmas,’ Mrs. Pruitt said.
    ‘That’s right,’ Pruitt said. ‘He walked them thirty miles home and spent Christmas Day, and walked them other thirty miles back to the sawmill.’
    ‘Whose sawmill?’ Uncle Gavin said.
    ‘Quick’s,’ Pruitt said. ‘Old Man Ben Quick’s. It was the second Christmas he never come home. Then, about the beginning of March, about when the river bottom at Frenchman’s Bend would be starting to dry out to where you could skid logs through it and you would have thought he would be settled down good to his third year of sawmilling, he come home to stay. He didn’t walk this time. He come in a hired buggy. Because he had the goat and the baby.’
    ‘Wait,’ Uncle Gavin said.
    ‘We never knew how he got home,’ Mrs. Pruitt said. ‘Because he had been home over a week before we even found out he had the baby.’
    ‘Wait,’ Uncle Gavin said.
    They waited, looking at him, Pruitt sitting on the gallery railing and Mrs. Pruitt’s fingers still shelling the peas out of the long brittle hulls, looking at Uncle Gavin. His eyes were not exultant now any more than they had been baffled or even very speculative before; they had just got brighter, as if whatever it was behind them had flared up, steady and fiercer, yet still quiet, as if it were going faster than the telling was going.
    ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Tell me.’
    ‘And when I finally heard about it and went up there,’ Mrs. Pruitt said, ‘that baby wasn’t two weeks old. And how he had kept it alive, and just on goat’s milk—’
    ‘I don’t know if you know it,’ Pruitt said. ‘A goat ain’t like a cow. You milk a goat every two hours or so. That means all night too.’
    ‘Yes,’ Mrs. Pruitt said. ‘He didn’t even have diaper cloths. He had some split floursacks the midwife had showed him how to put on. So I made some cloths and I would go up there; he had kept the nigger on to help his pa in the field and he was doing the cooking and washing and nursing that baby, milking the goat to feed it; and I would say, “Let me take it. At least until he can be weaned. You come stay at my house, too, if you want,” and him just looking at me—little, thin, already wore-out something that never in his whole life had ever set down to a table and et all he could hold—saying, “I thank you, ma’am. I can make out.” ’
    ‘Which was correct,’ Pruitt said. ‘I don’t know how he was at sawmilling, and he never had no farm to find out what kind of a farmer he was. But he raised that boy.’
    ‘Yes,’ Mrs. Pruitt said. ‘And I kept on after him: “We hadn’t even heard you was married,” I said. “Yessum,” he said. “We was married last year. When the baby come, she died.” “Who was she?” I said. “Was she a Frenchman Bend girl?” “No’m,” he said. “She come from downstate.” “What was her name?” I said. “Miss Smith,” he said.’
    ‘He hadn’t even had enough time off from hard work to learn how to lie either,’ Pruitt said. ‘But he raised that boy. After their crops were in in the fall, he let the nigger go, and next spring him and the old man done the work like they use to. He had made a kind of satchel, like they say Indians does, to carry the boy in. I would go up there now and then while the ground was still cold and see Jackson and his pa plowing and chopping brush, and that satchel hanging on a fence post and that boy asleep bolt upright in it like it was a feather bed. He learned to walk that spring, and I would stand there at the fence