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I lay prone on the bed. Shreve was next door humming a song I didn't recognize. The melody was muffled by the walls and the sound of ice hitting the window until all I could hear was a low murmur. Something like a promise. Something like a lie.
It's almost Christmas, Shreve said, appearing in the doorframe. He is not Southern but somehow he understands perhaps because Southerners feel like foreigners in the North even if we are a Union or who knows the rhetoric the sturdy fat man from Ohio pontificates. I refused to look up, refused to face him and the holiday and everything that is holy. What once was holy is now defiled, what once was created is now destroyed, what once floated now sinks, and the moment Eve bit the apple it spoiled. Spoiled like milk left in the summer heat, spoiled like me, at Harvard for thirty pieces of silver.
Faith and faith alone has brought me here, but I am not interested in faith that has no purpose. But Father I say and he Quentin there are no virgins have never been such a thing so don't you go muddying things up and I but what about and he it's just a story, boy. They are all just stories in the end. Yet I am a virgin I am and will be I think unless Caddy but not and so
Caddy smells like trees, but not the trees they have up here, up in the north where ice hits windows and clocks tick faster, together, echoing. Caddy smells like magnolia and oak Spanish moss hanging heavy from branches. Benjy's crying echoes across the empty yard and his pasture was sold. Sold for me, sold for thirty pieces of silver and a piece of letterhead that said Harvard. Harvard pride of the academics they always said I was smart but I didn't want to go and it didn't matter. Jason is the pride of Mother's eye but he's still South and I'm North even though he doesn't know anything about honor but it's a dying tradition He said and I listened I listen I listen
For your mother he said and I knew there was no other way then Father was right when he said there was nothing new and all the stories had been told. But if we are all just stories in the end, where do we begin? Fingering the gold watch, I could feel it beat against my fingertips, beat against the constraints of the pocket. I felt its heart but that is not right it cannot have a heart because hearts are what make us alive what make us feel except that hearts can break and so can watches.
This time next year you'll be gone the house will be gone the river will be gone. Memory will be gone and I'll forget Damuddy's funeral and the portentous future laid upon the cursed Compsons. I'll forget because it won't exist, never will have existed and therefore cannot be except as we remember it.
Do you remember how we ran through the pastures hands fingers intertwined saying I Love You and Shhh don't want to be too loud Benjy will hear. Don't you think it's a little odd changing his name just like that
Dilsey says it's a bad sign hit bad sign
She's just a superstitious old Negro
She knows lots
So do I
Yes you are going to Harvard, voice tinged with mockery, going to maybe live in the same room as a Yankee
Don't ruin this I say Don't remind me I told them take Jason let Jason go
He's just a boy!
What do you know about growing up? I asked didn't want an answer but she gave it to me anyway lying next to me hearing the creek trickle past
I know what it feels like like your insides are boiling like everything and nothing is happening at once. I know it makes me want to fight, Quentin, fight against everything that is hanging there
looking up There is nothing there
Stop being so literal she rolled onto her belly You know what I mean
and then
Can I feel it?
Feel what?
You know I can tell Quentin I am not so innocent and I wish you would stop thinking Just look at your trousers it's clear just stop for a minute and let it
Her fingers are there before any more can be said she traces the outline with a light touch I can tell she has done this before and my breath catches her hands slipping below gently softly and I want to stop the world stop time stop it right there
It feels good doesn't it?
I try to count to sixty. Grandfather's watch beats heavily against my thigh, heavier than her pulse against my skin.
Roses were wrong, it should not have been roses, but dogwoods would not do either. She walked down the aisle and Father gave her away and I wanted to run because there was nothing to give away. It was already gone. Roses were wrong and so were dogwoods. It should have been tulips, red, full of all they are, telling everyone what they already knew. But Mother could not take that and so we all put on a brave front except for Benjy Benjy was always the one who was honest
everything else was a lie everything she told me everything I wanted to believe so she walked into the arms of another man who didn't love her couldn't love her like I could like I did like I do. He didn't even have a sister. And Benjy was even a lie because he was Maury really or was he really Benjy three times three times The clock rang in Shreve's room and I could hear it Spoade asking about his husband
Caroline I heard Father from upstairs We will make this right
There can be no right don't you see don't you see how we are ruined how this is just the beginning? I have to get Jason out he's the only one I have to -
Quentin will go and then you'll see No, no, don't cry now
Don't touch me! Not now! Not when everything is falling apart it's too late, it's already too late
Caroline Father says and I know that I will go
The scarf Caddy knitted for me scratched against my throat pressing against the spot where I cut myself shaving that morning. Like your average American boy except I was from the South and didn't that change everything? Spoade was singing O Come All Ye Faithful and he knew Latin and I knew Latin so it should have been Adeste Fidelis because we studied like good young Southern boys though it always seemed that those Yanks knew more when it came to the classics which didn't make any sense because the South was classic, was pure, was untouched, except that the North came down and raped her and can countries have sisters? Jesus didn't have a sister but he had a mother and she was a virgin and his Father was not the man his mother was married to but he was holy all the same. So why couldn't Caddy and I I mean why couldn't Father let me do or take the fall but women always fall He said that is their curse the curse of Eve and up here someone not a Father surely mentioned Hagar and I thought but she had a bastard child and therefore -
I bundled up the layers, more than I ever needed in the South. I liked the weight against my skin arms chest throat somehow safer than the looser South except that was backward wasn't it? I thought about how we sang O Come All Ye Faithful in Latin here at Harvard, and how Benjy wouldn't have understood the words and Caddy would have laughed. Trying to be so Northern she would have said and I would have blushed except that it never happened I never sang in Latin before Caddy and so she never had the chance.
She never had the chance I said to Father and he said They always have a choice and I thought But she didn't she couldn't have she wouldn't have but the muddy drawers and Do you believe in fate?
But that day it was snowing and I was worried about making it home. The train lines, have you heard? Shreve didn't answer. Shreve always seemed to move forward in spite of despite of everything. Even if he was Northern, not even American, he was somehow my husband and a man should not be a virgin even if he has a sister but I will be thirty-three and still a virgin someone has to do it be it but there was Shreve not virginal at all just moving along the way things came as if life were a river and he was a boat but I had no rudder and I wanted to shake him I wanted to say Did you have a sister but the answer wouldn't have mattered anyway. He had become a Harvard boy the way we were all supposed to except I couldn't give up the smell of dogwoods and magnolias, of Caddy according to Benjy, Caddy Candace Caddy the sister the no no-not virgin.
The trains are running Spoade said offhand like he didn't care like he didn't have family waiting for him back in the South back where things mattered the way things were supposed to. We would meet the Deacon at the station and we would go back to where we started back to where belonged back to the places roots mattered back to the place where Adam and Eve bit into the apple.
I knew paradise I thought I knew Paradise. And I left it because they asked me because it was my duty because Southern honor cannot be denied or refuted and I left it for thirty pieces of silver and Benjy's pasture. I was the betrayer the one that ruined it all. I kissed my sister's cheek I took the silver But now I was going home back to the roots back to the place that disintegrated on the edge of the creek back to the place I belonged I knew I belonged back to my family and my sister and
It was cold at Harvard, cold as my suitcase bumped my knees across the Quad and other students were calling goodbye and wishing things that couldn't happen. The trees were like skeletons shivering and leaving slivers of cold shadows. There were no more leaves, there was time for them to grow back, if they would because it was strange seeing trees without leaves trees that seemed dead and though I tried I couldn't smell anything couldn't smell those trees. The other boys seemed so carefree and ready as if this was usual as if it happened everyday a boy leaving his home to go to school again and again. Home and school and so much is in a name there's prestige and Maury wasn't right so Mother called him Benjy and tried to erase the past but I knew better I knew even then that certain things couldn't be erased. The shadows cast forlorn shapes before and behind me as I made my way into the Past into the South that the North didn't quite believe existed. Everything is and was and will be, forever and ever Amen.
That would mean a merry Christmas even if the clock kept ticking against my skin and I knew it would end, that way, eventually. Iron to sink the soul of a sinner until redemption, if there was ever such a thing.