The Essential Faulkner by William Faulkner Page B

then. Herman Basket said it was just like when he and pappy and Doom were boys, sleeping on the same pallet, and Doom would wake them at night and make them get up and go hunting with him, or when he would make them stand up with him and fight with their fists, just for fun, until Herman Basket and pappy would hide from Doom.
    “They fixed the sapling across the two posts and Doom said to the nigger: ‘This is a fence. Can you climb it?’
    “Herman Basket said the nigger put his hand on the sapling and sailed over it like a bird.
    “Then Doom said to pappy: ‘Climb this fence.’
    “ ‘This fence is too high to climb,’ pappy said.
    “ ‘Climb this fence, and I will give you the woman,’ Doom said.
    “Herman Basket said pappy looked at the fence a while. ‘Let me go under this fence,’ he said.
    “ ‘No,’ Doom said.
    “Herman Basket told me how pappy began to sit down on the ground. ‘It’s not that I don’t trust you,’ pappy said.
    “ ‘We will build the fence this high,’ Doom said.
    “ ‘What fence?’ Herman Basket said.
    “ ‘The fence around the cabin of this black man,’ Doom said.
    “ ‘I can’t build a fence I couldn’t climb,’ pappy said.
    “ ‘Herman will help you,’ Doom said.
    “Herman Basket said it was just like when Doom used to wake them and make them go hunting. He said the dogs found him and pappy about noon the next day, and that they began the fence that afternoon. He told me how they had to cut the saplings in the creek bottom and dragthem in by hand, because Doom would not let them use the wagon. So sometimes one post would take them three or four days. ‘Never mind,’ Doom said. “You have plenty of time. And the exercise will make Craw-ford sleep at night.’
    “He told me how they worked on the fence all that winter and all the next summer, until after the whiskey trader had come and gone. Then it was finished. He said that on the day they set the last post, the nigger came out of the cabin and put his hand on the top of a post (it was a palisade fence, the posts set upright in the ground) and flew out like a bird. ‘This is a good fence,’ the nigger said. ‘Wait,’ he said. ‘I have something to show you,’ Herman Basket said he flew back over the fence again and went into the cabin and came back. Herman Basket said that he was carrying a new man and that he held the new man up so they could see it above the fence. ‘What do you think about this for color?’ he said.”
    Grandfather called me again. This time I got up. The sun was already down beyond the peach orchard. I was just twelve then, and to me the story did not seem to have got anywhere, to have had point or end. Yet I obeyed Grandfather’s voice, not that I was tired of Sam Fathers’ talking, but with that immediacy of children with which they flee temporarily something which they do not quite understand; that, and the instinctive promptness with which we all obeyed Grandfather, not from concern of impatience or reprimand, but because we all believed that he did fine things, that his waking life passed from one fine (if faintly grandiose) picture to another.
    They were in the surrey, waiting for me. I got in; the horses moved at once, impatient too for the stable. Caddy had one fish, about the size of a chip, and she was wet to the waist. We drove on, the team already trotting. When we passed Mr. Stokes’ kitchen we could smell ham cooking. The smell followed us on to the gate. When we turned onto the road home it was almost sundown. Thenwe couldn’t smell the cooking ham any more. “What were you and Sam talking about?” Grandfather said.
    We went on, in that strange, faintly sinister suspension of twilight in which I believed that I could still see Sam Fathers back there, sitting on his wooden block, definite, immobile, and complete, like something looked upon after a long time in a preservative bath in a museum. That was it. I was just twelve then, and I would have to