The Essential Faulkner by William Faulkner Page A

putting it into his lax hand or even between his jaws—illimitable, vast, without beginning or end, not even a trade or a craft but a beneficence as are sunlight and rain and air, inalienable and immutable.
    “Put it on the Book,” Ratcliffe said—the Book: not a ledger, but
the
ledger, since it was probably the only thing of its kind between Nashville and Natchez, unless there might happen to be a similar one a few miles south at the first Choctaw agency at Yalo Busha—a ruled, paper-backed copybook such as might have come out of a schoolroom, in which accrued, with the United States as debtor, in Mohataha’s name (the Chickasaw matriarch, Ikkemotubbe’s mother and old Issetibbeha’s sister, who—she could write her name, or anyway make something with a pen or pencil which was agreed to be, or at least accepted to be, a valid signature—signed all the conveyances as her son’s kingdom passed to the white people, regularising it in law anyway) the crawling tedious list of calico and gunpowder, whiskey and salt and snuff and denim pants and osseous candy drawn from Ratcliffe’s shelves by her descendants and subjects and Negro slaves. That was all the settlement had to do: add the lock to the list, the account. It wouldn’t even matter at what price they entered it. They could have priced it on Pettigrew’s scale of fifteen pounds times the distance not just to Carolina but to Washington itself, and nobody would ever notice it probably; they could have charged the United States with seventeen thousand five hundred dollars’ worth of the fossilised and indestructible candy, and none would ever read the entry. So it was solved, done, finished, ended. They didn’t even have to discuss it. They didn’t even think about it any more, unless perhaps hereand there to marvel (a little speculatively probably) at their own moderation, since they wanted nothing—least of all, to escape any just blame—but a fair and decent adjustment of the lock. They went back to where old Alec still sat with his pipe in front of his dim hearth. Only they had overestimated him; he didn’t want any money at all, he wanted his lock. Whereupon what little remained of Compson’s patience went too.
    “Your lock’s gone,” he told old Alec harshly. “You’ll take fifteen dollars for it,” he said, his voice already fading, because even that rage could recognise impasse when it saw it. Nevertheless, the rage, the impotence, the sweating, the
too much
—whatever it was—forced the voice on for one word more: “Or—” before it stopped for good and allowed Peabody to fill the gap:
    “Or else?” Peabody said, and not to old Alec, but to Compson. “Or else what?” Then Ratcliffe saved that too.
    “Wait,” he said. “Uncle Alec’s going to take fifty dollars for his lock. A guarantee of fifty dollars. He’ll give us the name of the blacksmith back in Cal’lina that made it for him, and we’ll send back there and have a new one made. Going and coming and all’ll cost about fifty dollars. We’ll give Uncle Alec the fifty dollars to hold as a guarantee. Then when the new lock comes, he’ll give us back the money. All right, Uncle Alec?” And that could have been all of it. It probably would have been, except for Pettigrew. It was not that they had forgotten him, nor even assimilated him. They had simply sealed—healed him off (so they thought)—him into their civic crisis as the desperate and defenseless oyster immobilises its atom of inevictable grit. Nobody had seen him move yet he now stood in the center of them where Compson and Ratcliffe and Peabody faced old Alec in the chair. You might have said that he had oozed there, except for that adamantine quality which might (in emergency) become invisible but never insubstantial and never in this world fluid; hespoke in a voice bland, reasonable and impersonal, then stood there being looked at, frail and child-sized, impermeable as diamond and manifest with portent,