William Faulkner,

Oxford, Miss.

MISS ZILPHIA GANT.

1.

Jim Gant was a stock-trader. He bought horses and mules in three adjoining counties and with a hulking halfwitted boy to help him, drove them across northern Mississippi to the Memphis markets seventy-five miles away. They carried a camp outfit with them, passing only one night under a roof during each trip; that toward the end of the journey, in a log farmhouse about whose dilapidation lay an equivocal and sinister air. Here Gant usually met other caravans similar to his own, of rough, overalled men, and they would eat coarse food and drink pale, virulent corn whiskey and sleep fully dressed on the floor before a log fire. The place was conducted by a youngish woman with cold eyes and a hard infrequent tongue. After Gant sold his stock he and the boy would return to the settlement where Gant's wife and child lived.

Mrs Gant would never know just what day or hour he would return. Sometimes it would be after midnight. One morning about dawn she was awakened by someone standing before the house shouting Hello. Hello at measured intervals. She opened the window and looked out. It was the halfwitted boy. "Yes?" she said, "what is it?"

"Hello," the halfwit shouted.

"Hush your yelling," Mrs Gant said.

"Where's Jim?"

"Jim says to tell you he aint coming home no more,"

the halfwit said. "Him and Mrs Vinson have went off some- wheres. Jim says to tell you not to expect him back." Mrs Vinson was the woman at the tavern, and the halfwit stood in the gray light while Mrs Gant from the window cursed him with the gross violence of a man. Then she banged the window.

"Jim owes me a dollar and six bits," the halfwit said, "He said you'd give it to me." But the window was shut, the house silent again; no light had yet showed even. Yet still the halfwit stood before it, shouting Hello. Hello at the blank front until the door opened and Mrs Gant came out with a shotgun and cursed him again. Then he retreated to the road and stopped again in the graying dawn, shouting Hello. Hello at the blank house until he tired himself at last and went away.

The next day Mrs Gant left her three year old daughter with a neighbor, borrowed a pistol and departed. She was gone ten days, then she came back, returned the pistol, sold the house and moved into Jefferson, the county seat and purchased a dressmaking shop. The shop was upstairs above a grocery store. She and her daughter Zilphia lived in a room ten feet square at the rear of the shop, where one window gave upon a vacant lot where farmers tethered their teams on market days. Immediately beneath the window was the refuse dump of the grocery – rotting vegetables, empty casks and barrels, crates in which fowls had been transported. Mrs Gant never put curtains on this window. She had the blacksmith set iron bars into it, so Zilphia could not fall out. Zilphia was three then. She spent five years in that room. At the end of the fifth year Mrs Gant was forced to have a doctor in to see Zilphia.

The next day the County Health Officer called, and a woman member of the school board. At last Mrs Gant agreed to let Zilphia enter the public school, with the understanding that Zilphia was under no condition to be allowed any relations with boys. Each morning, in a black shawl and hat, Mrs Gant brought Zilphia to school; at noon and at three oclock she would close and lock the shop, and in an oilcloth apron with pockets for spools and another for scissors and with the bosom of her black dress festooned with threaded needles, she called for Zilphia and fetched her back to the barred room above the vacant lot and the grocery refuse.

In school Zilphia made friends. She was not permitted to go home with them, so they would come home with her and play in the rear room. It was two years before Mrs Gant would allow Zilphia to visit her playmates at their homes. She first exacted a promise that they avoid all boys. But previous to this she had already ascertained that there were no boys in that neighborhood. At a certain hour she closed the shop and called for Zilphia and fetched her home.

When Zilphia was twelve she suddenly refused to visit her playmates any more and she asked her mother to let her quit school. At last she said that she was ashamed for people never to see her on the street without her mother. Mrs Gant would not let her quit school, but she could not force Zilphia to leave the barred room in the afternoons, and Zilphia spent another year in the room above the vacant lot and the grocery refuse. There were still no curtains at the window, though the bars were still there. At the end of that year Zilphia had to have the doctor again.

When Zilphia was convalescent Mrs Gant bought her a doll-size cookstove.

"When you are well again you can all cook here," she said. "You wont want to go out then, will you?" Zilphia's eyes were overlarge in her thin face, and she still retained that habit of crying suddenly and for no reason. "I'll make dresses for all the dolls," Mrs Gant said. "You can have a doll teaparty every day."

On the teacher's insistence Mrs Gant allowed Zilphia to go to and from school alone, and every day Zilphia brought her playmates back with her and they cooked on the stove. But the teacher continued to call and to insist that Zilphia needed fresh air and exercise. Mrs Gant ordered her from the shop. She did it in the language a man would have used to another man.

But she permitted Zilphia to go home with her friends twice a week. They would come in with Zilphia after school and Mrs Gant would ask them where they were going and what they were going to do, catechising them with cold and bleak suspicion, and Zilphia, still weak from her illness, would sometimes fall to crying and refuse to go at all.

"Your mamma dont believe anything you tell her, does she?" they said, playing in the barn one afternoon. Beyond the barn the pasture sloped to a ditch filled with scrub cedar and briers, where they sometimes hid, and when they saw the figure concealed there, Zilphia ran toward it. The others followed, but she turned upon them with her wild face and her wild despairing eyes.

"Dont you dare!" she wailed, "Dont you dare!" and they halted and watched her run on to the ditch, wailing out of sight. She stopped facing her mother, gasping and shaking. "You old…" she cried, "you old…" Without a word Mrs Gant took her hand and they gained the lane and followed it to the street and returned home: the woman who for nine years had been growing into the outward semblance of a man until now, at forty, there was a faint shadowing of moustache at the corners of her mouth, hatless, in an oil-cloth apron, her black bosom festooned with threaded needles; the girl thin from illness, her mouth open and pale as the gasping mouth of a fish, walking like a sleep-walker, gasping for breath and making no sound.

In Zilphia's thirteenth year her mother began to examine her body monthly. She would make Zilphia strip naked and stand cringing before her while the light fell untempered through the bars and the gray winter drove across the window and above the vacant lot.

After one of these examinations – it was in the beginning of spring – Mrs Gant told Zilphia what her father had done, and then, as though freed by its vocalization, the nine years of frustration and impotent rage boiled over. Foul with its repression, with the ceaseless brooding of a woman violent by nature and emotionally inarticulate, it was like a bursting sewer. The language was that of a coarse and brutal man, and beneath it Zilphia shrank and shrank with wide, secret, fearful eyes.

After that Mrs Gant seemed to have exhausted herself for a time. She saw Zilphia come and go with a sort of apathy. Zilphia shunned her former playmates. She took to walking alone, rapidly and aimlessly, as if she were fleeing something whose exact whereabouts she did not know. She walked into the country, where now and then her mother would come suddenly upon her, then they would turn and return home together, with no word spoken between them. For days at a time they did not speak to one another, but Zilphia slept better because of the fresh air and exercise.

She was thirteen when she saw the boy. She lay shaking, her mouth filling with hot salt, hidden in the bushes and watched him diving naked into a pool in the creek. She lay shaking slowly and watched him dress, then she followed him. He went on beside the creek, in the sand; she watched him stop and drag something from beneath a bush. It was in the autumn then, a bright day. The object was a blanket. The boy spread it on the sand and rolled himself into it and crooked his arm across his eyes and lay still.

Zilphia emerged. He didn't move. She went to a hummock and sat down. Then she quit looking at him and stared at a scarlet sumac across the creek. It was a bright blue day, the sun was warm, and the sand, impregnated with a summer's heat. Zilphia sat slowly shaking, shaking herself into the warm sand until it ceased to give. Then she sat shaking in the nest her thighs had made, staring at the sumac. She did not move when the boy came and spoke to her. His skin was tanned, his hair a candid yellow, his eyes the pale gray of wood ashes.

Nor did she ceased to tremble when she found herself lying beside him under the blanket. She did not remember getting there, save that it was of her own volition. The boy was asking her what was the matter with her. She couldn't speak and the boy's voice came from a long way off. The sun beat on her face; directly overhead was another scarlet sumac bright against the intense soft blue of the sky.

The boy had stopped asking her why she trembled. He was rigid also beside her, motionless. His voice ceased, yet still it seemed to be somewhere, not yet taken into silence. She lay looking at the scarlet branch. The boy's voice came back.

"Did you ever play grown-up?" it said. "Say, did you?" She could hear her own voice somewhere trying to say something, but she knew it never would and she thought about the boy never hearing it and going away.

"Let's play grown-up," the boy said. Zilphia just lay still, because she couldn't do anything else, then she could feel herself flowing out of her body, surrounding the two of them and the blanket and all and she lay waiting, and then she was looking up at her mother's inverted head and foreshortened body against the scarlet bough and the blue sky.

"Git up," Mrs Gant said.

Zilphia lay quietly, looking up at her mother. Anyway I'm not shaking now, she thought. I can speak now, if I want to.

"Git up, you bitch," Mrs Gant said.

The next day Zilphia withdrew from school. Her mother made her an oilcloth apron, with a pocket for spools and another for scissors, and gave her a chair beside the window which looked out upon the square and the busy oblivious people. She sat beside that window for twelve years.

2.

Outside the window the world shaped and reshaped its constant pattern. After twelve years a young man in stained overalls swung on a scaffolding there, with a paintbrush and pot. His eyes were the color of woodashes, his hair was black. When Mrs Gant discovered that he had been painting that one window for two days she sent Zilphia into the rear room, and when at last the painter came inside to paint, Mrs Gant closed the shop and she and Zilphia went home. They had a house now, a frame bungalow as bleak as a calendar lithograph, and for eight days Zilphia had a holiday, the first in twelve years.

Robbed of her needle, of the slow mechanical manipulation in which she had become submerged, Zilphia could not sleep very well. She had been wearing glasses for five years now, and now with no needlework, her eyes pained her, and she would wake from fitful dreams in which the painter, his pot and brush always in his hands, performed monstrous and obscene actions in a dozen avatars. Always in the dreams his eyes were yellow instead of gray, and he was always chewing, his chin fading away into the chewing as though blurred by the drooling substance which he chewed, and always he had the pot and brush. Now and then they were alive themselves; at others he performed with them pantomime of a monstrous significance while she looked on with horror and loathing and longing and desire, knowing that she was asleep.

Mrs Gant fell ill; idleness brought her to bed. One night they had the doctor in. The next morning, Zilphia protesting all the while, Mrs Gant rose and dressed, locked Zilphia into the house and went down town. Zilphia stood at the window and watched her mother's black-shawled figure toil slowly down the street, pausig from time to time to hold itself erect by the fence, then go on again. An hour later she returned in a hired cab and locked the door again and took the key with her back to bed.

For three days and nights Zilphia sat beside the bed where her mother lay while that gaunt, manlike woman– the moustaches were heavier now and grizzled faintly – lay rigid with the covers drawn up to her chin and her eyes closed. Thus it was that Zilphia could never be certain when her mother was asleep. Sometimes she could tell by the breathing, then she would search carefully among the bedclothing for the keys. On the third day she found them, and as she went along the street toward town she was shaking, so that now and then she too was forced to touch the fence and steady herself.

The shop smelled of paint, of lead and turpentine, but only half of it was done. One half of the walls were immaculate and chill and dead as the interior of a new coffin; the other half bore yet the ancient stains and scars of nineteen years. Zilphia opened the window and took her chair beside it.

When she saw him at last the sun was slanting level across the square and people were already beginning to close the stores and go home to supper, and as she sat in the failing light and heard his feet on the stairs she found that she had been sewing all the while and she looked at the fabric upon her lap without any recollection of what it was nor when she had taken it up. Then she forgot it all together and sat looking up at him, blinking a little behind her glasses until he removed them from her face.

"I knowed, once them glasses was off," he said. "I kept looking for you and looking for you. And then when she come in here I could hear her on the stairs, a step at a time then stop till she stood in the door there, holding to the door and sweating like a nigger. Even after she had done fainted she wouldn't let go and faint. She just lay there sweating and sweating and counting the money out of her purse and telling me to be out of town by night." He stood beside her chair, holding the glasses in his hand. She saw the dark rim of paint beneath his nails and smelled that faint odor of turpentine which was a part of him. "We'll get you out of it," he said. "That old woman, that terrible old woman. She'll kill you yet. I've heard. I've talked to folks. When they told me where you lived at I'd walk past the house. I could feel her every time. Like she was watching me through the window. Not hiding behind it; just standing there looking at me and waiting. Once at night I come into the yard. After midnight it was. The house was dark, but I could still feel her standing there, looking at me and waiting. Watching me like when she fainted that day and wouldn't faint till I was out of town. She just lay there sweating, with her eyes shut, telling me to be out of town with her by night. But I’ll get you out of it. Listen: we'll go now and get the license and catch the night train before she knows. "She's sick," Zilphia said. "I cant leave her now." He begged, explained, insisted, but she answered stubbornly and quietly: "She's sick. I cant leave her now."

As they walked home in the dusk he said again: "Dont you worry any more. I'll get you out of it all right. We'll walk right in and tell her, and tonight I'll come back. And then..." The house was in sight, with its dead bleak front. They reached the gate and entered. "While I was watching you through that window, I kept thinking about you wearing glasses, because I used to say I'd never want a woman that wore glasses. Then one day you looked at me, and all of a sudden I was seeing you without the glasses. It was like the glasses was gone, and I knew then that, soon as I saw you once with them off, it wouldn't matter to me whether you wore glasses or not…" They were halfway to the porch. They stopped. Mrs Gant, dressed, in the black shawl and bonnet, stood in the door with the shotgun.

"Zilphy," she said.

"Dont go," he said, "Zilphy."

"You, Zilphy," Mrs Gant said without raising her voice.

"Zilphy," he said, "if you go now… Zilphy." Zilphia went on and mounted the steps. She seemed to have shrunk into herself, to have lost height, become awkward.

"Go in the house," Mrs Gant said without turning her head. Zilphia went on. "Go on," Mrs Gant said. "Shut the door." Zilphia turned, closing the door. She saw five people arrested along the fence, looking. "Shut it," Mrs Gant said, still without turning her head. Zilphia shut the door, shutting the scene into her life, but the painter out of her life forever. She never saw him again.

Yet for two succeeding days he lay hidden in a vacant house across the street. Mrs Gant had locked the door again, but instead of going back to bed she seated herself, fully dressed save for the apron and the threaded needles, in a chair beside the front window, the shotgun leaning at her hand. For three days she sat there, rigid, erect, her eyes closed, sweating slowly. On the third day the painter quitted the vacant house and left the town. That night Mrs Gant died, erect and fully dressed in the chair beside the window.

3.

Two years later Zilphia learned of the painter's marriage from a newspaper. The shop had done well in the two years. Zilphia now had a partner, but she lived in the house alone. She took in three or four newspapers and after supper she read all the wedding notices in them. Into each one she would substitute her name for that of the bride and the painter's for that of the groom. Then she would go to bed and dream, particularly in the moist spring and summer nights, when a mock-orange bush just outside the window filled the room with the faintest suggestion of turpentine.

At this period the dreams were those of late adolescence, of that maiden and ritualistic ceremonial of young girls, through which she and an automaton with merely a name moved in attitudes against a background of fainting music and significant symbols – flowers, ribbons and such.

One evening she opened the paper and came presently upon an account of a wedding in a neighboring state. She substituted her name for that of the bride as usual and read the article through. She had already finished it and was seeking further when she realised that she was sitting with a faint odor of turpentine in her nostrils, an odor that the mock-orange bush could not have produced. Then she realised that she had not had to make any substitution for the name of the groom.

She began to dream of the painter himself again; again she watched him performing monstrously with the paint-pot and brush that possessed life themselves. But now his back was to her and she could only read the movements by the motion of his shoulders and elbows, and a part of the loathing was now the bafflement and the need to see. Beyond him and obscured by his back, was another figure for whom he performed the action of the pot and brush.

She took the clipping and went to Memphis. She was gone two days. A week after she returned she began to receive monthly letters bearing the return address of a private detective agency. She stopped reading the papers altogether; she let the subscriptions lapse. Nightly she dreamed of the painter, of that backside which she could not compass and which was less of a man's than goat's.

The shop was doing well. Zilphia was becoming plumper, a flabby plumpness in the wrong places; her eyes behind the glasses were a muddy olive, protruding a little, and her partner once said privately that Zilphia was not hygenically overfastidious. People called her Miss Zilphia, not Miss Gant: through her glasses (horn-rimmed now) she saw the final door closed between her and the teeming world. When, on the monthly arrival of the Memphis letters, the postmaster rallied her a little on her city sweetheart, there was even in this less of insincerity than pity. After another year there was less of both than either.

The monthly letters arrived from the detective agency; it was well that the shop was prosperous. Thus she knew where and how they lived. She knew more about each one's private affairs than the other did; she knew when they quarrelled and knew exultation; knew when they made up and knew jealousy and despair; sometimes at night she would be one of the two of them, entering into their bodies in turn; she experienced physical pangs the more racking for being vicarious and equivocal. Then the letter came telling her that the wife was pregnant.

That night she dreamed that she was shackled to the wall in their bedroom and that her eyelids were fastened open and her head rigid in a vise; that merged into a dream in which their bed was inside an iron cage against which she beat her hands, flecking the two white bodies with her sprayed blood. The next morning she roused a neighbor by staggering out of the house in her nightdress, screaming. They got the doctor and when she was well again she said that she had mistaken the rat poison for toothpaste. The postmaster told about the letters and the town looked upon her again with interest and pity, believing that her detective sweetheart had jilted her.

When she recovered she looked better. She was thinner, and her eyes had cleared up, and she now slept peacefully at night for a while. Letters still came from the agency. Zilphia knew when the wife's time would be, knew when the husband made arrangements at a maternity hospital and the day the wife went there. Although she was recovered completely, she did not dream anymore, although the habit she had formed in her twelfth year of waking herself with her own weeping, returned, and almost every night she would lie in the darkness, weeping quietly and hopelessly and without any immediate cause, between slumber.

In the letter announcing the delivery was included a newspaper account of a motor fatality almost directly in front of the hospital. That night Zilphia went away. Her partner said that she might be gone for some time, a year, perhaps longer, to recover completely from her illness. The letters from the detective agency ceased.

Zilphia was gone four years. She returned in mourning, with a plain gold wedding band and a child. The child, a girl, had pale gray eyes and brown hair, and Zilphia told them of her marriage and of her husband's death, and presently the interest died away.

She opened the house again and fixed a day nursery in the room behind the shop and resumed her own place in the shop. It was still doing well, and the ladies never tired of fondling little Zilphia.

They still called Zilphia Miss Zilphia, but no longer out of tolerance or pity. She looked better, black became her. But now and then her eyes would cloud over again with that muddy bafflement, and she was plump again, in the wrong places. But on the street she walked with a sort of capable serenity, a sense of worth and of assurance. At night however she still occasionally waked herself with her own weeping, after that habit she had formed sixteen years ago, and as time passed and little Zilphia was going to the public school, these nights became more frequent. Also about this time she began to dream of negro men and she would wake and lie in the dark while her body jerked and shook to a dying rythm, foul with its virginity. But by day she would be capable and serene, walking along the street, taking little Zilphia to school and calling for her at noon and at three oclock, when her open coat, stirring faintly in what wind, would reveal a satin apron with a pocket for spools and another for scissors, and the straight thin glints of needles in her bosom and the gossamer random festooning of the thread.

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