Excerpt from LIGHT IN AUGUST by William Faulkner
AND memory knows this; twenty years later memory is still to believe, On this day I became a man.
The clean, Spartan room was redolent of Sunday. In the windows the clean, darned curtains stirred faintly in a breeze smelling of turned earth and crabapple. Upon the yellow imitation oak melodeon with its pedals padded with pieces of frayed and outworn carpet sat a fruitjar filled with larkspur. The boy sat in a straight chair beside the table on which was a nickel lamp and an enormous Bible with brass clasps and hinges and a brass lock. He wore a clean white shirt without a collar. His trousers were dark, harsh, and new. His shoes had been polished recently and clumsily, as a boy of eight would polish them, with small dull patches here and there, particularly about the heels, where the polish had failed to overlap. Upon the table, facing him and open, lay a Presbyterian catechism.
McEachern stood beside the table. He wore a clean, glazed shirt, and the same black trousers in which the boy had first seen him. His hair, damp, still unsilvered, was combed clean and stiff upon his round skull. His beard was also combed, also still damp. “You have not tried to learn it,” he said.
The boy did not look up. He did not move. But the face of the man was not more rocklike. “I did try.”
“Then try again. I’ll give you another hour.” From his pocket McEachern took a thick silver watch and laid it face up on the table and drew up a second straight, hard chair to the table and sat down, his clean, scrubbed hands on his knees, his heavy polished shoes set squarely. On them were no patches where the polish had failed to overlap. There had been last night at suppertime, though. And later the boy, undressed for bed and in his shirt, had received a whipping and then polished them again. The boy sat at the table. His face was bent, still, expressionless. Into the bleak, clean room the springfilled air blew in fainting gusts.
That was at nine o’clock. They had been there since eight. There were churches nearby, but the Presbyterian church was five miles away; it would take an hour to drive it. At half past nine Mrs. McEachern came in. She was dressed, in black, with a bonnet—a small woman, entering timidly, a little hunched, with a beaten face. She looked fifteen years older than the rugged and vigorous husband. She did not quite enter the room. She just came within the door and stood there for a moment, in her bonnet and her dress of rusty yet often brushed black, carrying an umbrella and a palm leaf fan, with something queer about her eyes, as if whatever she saw or heard, she saw or heard through a more immediate manshape or manvoice, as if she were the medium and the vigorous and ruthless husband the control. He may have heard her. But he neither looked up nor spoke. She turned and went away.
Exactly on the dot of the hour McEachern raised his head. “Do you know it now?” he said.
The boy did not move. “No,” he said.
McEachern rose, deliberately, without haste. He took up the watch and closed it and returned it to his pocket, looping the chain again through his suspender. “Come,” he said. He did not look back. The boy followed, down the hall, toward the rear; he too walked erect and in silence, his head up. There was a very kinship of stubbornness like a transmitted resemblance in their backs. Mrs. McEachern was in the kitchen. She still wore the hat, still carried the umbrella and the fan. She was watching the door when they passed it. “Pa,” she said. Neither of them so much as looked at her. They might not have heard, she might not have spoken, at all. They went on, in steady single file, the two backs in their rigid abnegation of all compromise more alike than actual blood could have made them. They crossed the back yard and went on toward the stable and entered. McEachern opened the crib door and stood aside. The boy entered the crib. McEachern took from the wall a harness strap. It was neither new nor old, like his shoes. It was clean, like the shoes, and it smelled like the man smelled: an odor of clean hard virile living leather. He looked down at the boy. “Where is the book?” he said.
The boy stood before him, still, his face calm and a little pale beneath the smooth parchment skin. “You did not bring it,” McEachern said. “Go back and get it.” His voice was not unkind. It was not human, personal, at all. It was just cold, implacable, like written or printed words. The boy turned and went out.
When he reached the house Mrs. McEachern was in the hall. “Joe,” she said. He did not answer. He didn’t even look at her, at her face, at the stiff movement of one half lifted hand in stiff caricature of the softest movement which human hand can make. He walked stiffly past her, rigidfaced, his face rigid with pride perhaps and despair. Or maybe it was vanity, the stupid vanity of a man. He got the catechism from the table and returned to the stable.
McEachern was waiting, holding the strap. “Put it down,” he said. The boy laid the book on the floor. “Not there,” McEachern said, without heat. “You would believe that a stable floor, the stamping place of beasts, is the proper place for the word of God. But I’ll learn you that, too.” He took up the book himself and laid it on a ledge. “Take down your pants,” he said. “We’ll not soil them.”
Then the boy stood, his trousers collapsed about his feet, his legs revealed beneath his brief shirt. He stood, slight and erect. When the strap fell he did not flinch, no quiver passed over his face. He was looking straight ahead, with a rapt, calm expression like a monk in a picture. McEachern began to strike methodically, with slow and deliberate force, still without heat or anger. It would have been hard to say which face was the more rapt, more calm, more convinced.
He struck ten times, then he stopped. “Take the book,” he said. “Leave your pants be.” He handed the boy the catechism. The boy took it. He stood so, erect, his face and the pamphlet lifted, his attitude one of exaltation. Save for surplice he might have been a Catholic choir boy, with for nave the looming and shadowy crib, the rough planked wall beyond which in the ammoniac and dryscented obscurity beasts stirred now and then with snorts and indolent thuds. McEachern lowered himself stiffly to the top of a feed box, spreadkneed, one hand on his knee and the silver watch in the other palm, his clean, bearded face as firm as carved stone, his eyes ruthless, cold, but not unkind.
They remained so for another hour. Before it was up Mrs. McEachern came to the back door of the house. But she did not speak. She just stood there, looking at the stable, in the hat, with the umbrella and the fan. Then she went back into the house.
Again on the exact second of the hour McEachern returned the watch to his pocket. “Do you know it now?” he said. The boy didn’t answer, rigid, erect, holding the open pamphlet before his face. McEachern took the book from between his hands. Otherwise, the boy did not move at all. “Repeat your catechism,” McEachern said. The boy stared straight at the wall before him. His face was now quite white despite the smooth rich pallor of his skin. Carefully and deliberately McEachern laid the book upon the ledge and took up the strap. He struck ten times. When he finished, the boy stood for a moment longer motionless. He had had no breakfast yet; neither of them had eaten breakfast yet. Then the boy staggered and would have fallen if the man had not caught his arm, holding him up. “Come,” McEachern said, trying to lead him to the feed box. “Sit down here.”
“No,” the boy said. His arm began to jerk in the man’s grasp. McEachern released him.
“Are you all right? Are you sick?” “
No,” the boy said. His voice was faint, his face was quite white.
“Take the book,” McEachern said, putting it into the boy’s hand. Through the crib window Mrs. McEachern came into view, emerging from the house. She now wore a faded Mother Hubbard and a sunbonnet, and she carried a cedar bucket. She crossed the window without looking toward the crib, and vanished. After a time the slow creak of a well pulley reached them, coming with a peaceful, startling quality upon the Sabbath air. Then she appeared again in the window, her body balanced now to the bucket’s weight in her hand, and reentered the house without looking toward the stable.
Again on the dot of the hour McEachern looked up from the watch. “Have you learned it?” he said. The boy did not answer, did not move. When McEachern approached he saw that the boy was not looking at the page at all, that his eyes were quite fixed and quite blank. When he put his hand on the book he found that the boy was clinging to it as if it were a rope or a post. When McEachern took the book forcibly from his hands, the boy fell at full length to the floor and did not move again.
When he came to it was late afternoon. He was in his own bed in the attic room with its lowpitched roof. The room was quiet, already filling with twilight. He felt quite well, and he lay for some time, looking peacefully up at the slanted ceiling overhead, before he became aware that there was someone sitting beside the bed. It was McEachern. He now wore his everyday clothes also—not the overalls in which he went to the field, but a faded dean shirt without a collar, and faded, clean khaki trousers. “You are awake,” he said. His hand came forth and turned back the cover. “Come,” he said.
The boy did not move. “Are you going to whip me again?”
“Come,” McEachern said. “Get up.” The boy rose from the bed and stood, thin, in clumsy cotton underclothes. McEachern was moving also, thickly, with clumsy, musclebound movements, as if at the expenditure of tremendous effort; the boy, watching with the amazeless interest of a child, saw the man kneel slowly and heavily beside the bed. “Kneel down,” McEachern said. The boy knelt; the two of them knelt in the close, twilit room: the small figure in cutdown underwear, the ruthless man who had never known either pity or doubt. McEachern began to pray. He prayed for a long time, his voice droning, soporific, monotonous. He asked that he be forgiven for trespass against the Sabbath and for lifting his hand against a child, an orphan, who was dear to God. He asked that the child’s stubborn heart be softened and that the sin of disobedience be forgiven him also, through the advocacy of the man whom he had flouted and disobeyed, requesting that Almighty be as magnanimous as himself, and by and through and because of conscious grace.
He finished and rose, heaving to his feet. The boy still knelt. He did not move at all. But his eyes were open (his face had never been hidden or even lowered) and his face was quite calm; calm, peaceful, quite inscrutable. He heard the man fumble at the table on which the lamp sat. A match scraped, spurted; the flame steadied upon the wick, beneath the globe upon which the man’s hand appeared now as if it had been dipped in blood. The shadows whirled and steadied. McEachern lifted something from the table beside the lamp: the catechism. He looked down at the boy: a nose, a cheek jutting, granitelike, bearded to the caverned and spectacled eyesocket. “Take the book,” he said.
It had begun that Sunday morning before breakfast. He had had no breakfast; likely neither he nor the man had once thought of that. The man himself had eaten no breakfast, though he had gone to the table and demanded absolution for the food and for the necessity of eating it. At the noon meal he had been asleep, from nervous exhaustion. And at supper time neither of them had thought of food. The boy did not even know what was wrong with him, why he felt weak and peaceful.
That was how he felt as he lay in bed. The lamp was still burning; it was now full dark outside. Some time had elapsed, but it seemed to him that if he turned his head he would still see the two of them, himself and the man, kneeling beside the bed, or anyway, in the rug the indentations of the twin pairs of knees without tangible substance. Even the air seemed still to excrete that monotonous voice as of someone talking in a dream, talking, adjuring, arguing with a Presence who could not even make a phantom indentation in an actual rug.
He was lying so, on his back, his hands crossed on his breast like a tomb effigy, when he heard again feet on the cramped stairs. They were not the man’s; he had heard McEachern drive away in the buggy, departing in the twilight to drive three miles and to a church which was not Presbyterian, to serve the expiation which he had set himself for the morning.
Without turning his head the boy heard Mrs. McEachern toil slowly up the stairs. He heard her approach across the floor. He did not look, though after a time her shadow came and fell upon the wall where he could see it, and he saw that she was carrying something. It was a tray of food. She set the tray on the bed. He had not once looked at her. He had not moved. “Joe,” she said. He didn’t move. “Joe,” she said. She could see that his eyes were open. She did not touch him.
“I ain’t hungry,” he said.
She didn’t move. She stood, her hands folded into her apron. She didn’t seem to be looking at him, either. She seemed to be speaking to the wall beyond the bed. “I know what you think. It ain’t that. He never told me to bring it to you. It was me that thought to do it. He don’t know. It ain’t any food he sent you,” He didn’t move. His face was calm as a graven face, looking up at the steep pitch of the plank ceiling. “You haven’t eaten today. Sit up and eat. It wasn’t him that told me to bring it to you. He don’t know it. I waited until he was gone and then I fixed it myself.”
He sat up then. While she watched him he rose from the bed and took the tray and carried it to the corner and turned it upside down, dumping the dishes and food and all onto the floor. Then he returned to the bed, carrying the empty tray as though it were a monstrance and he the bearer, his surplice the cutdown undergarment which had been bought for a man to wear. She was not watching him now, though she had not moved. Her hands were still rolled into her apron. He got back into bed and lay again on his back, his eyes wide and still upon the ceiling. He could see her motionless shadow, shapeless, a little hunched. Then it went away. He did not look, but he could hear her kneel in the corner, gathering the broken dishes back into the tray. Then she left the room. It was quite still then. The lamp burned steadily above the steady wick; on the wall the flitting shadows of whirling moths were as large as birds. From beyond the window he could smell, feel, darkness, spring, the earth.
ASSIGNMENT GUIDELINES:
Use no more than 5 lines of dialogue.
Figure out what are the most dramatic and visual parts of the story you want to use.
Ask yourself how much you can leave out, and still have something that can arrest viewers.
Start planing the plot by deciding how you’re going to start, and how you’re going to end—what are the images you need?
Try to simplify. Cut everything down to the bare and important essentials.
Imagine being in the scene. If you were the main character, what would you see? How could what he sees reflect what he feels? What might he hear?