A ROSE FOR EMILY in Chinese
One
Emily? Miss Grilson passed away, and the whole town went to mourn: the men out of admiration, because a monument had fallen: the women, for the most part, out of curiosity, to see the interior of her house. No one had been inside the house for at least ten years, except for an old servant who was a florist and cook.
It was a big, four-square wooden house, painted white, on one of the finest streets of its day, and decorated with the rounded roofs, minarets and swirling balconies of the 1870s, with a strong air of lightness. But the automobile room and the cotton gin and such things had violated the stately names of the neighborhood and painted them over. Only Miss Emily's house stood alone, surrounded by clusters of cotton wagons and gasoline pumps. The house was in a state of disrepair, but it was still obstinate and pretentious, the ugliest of uglies. Now Miss Emily has joined the ranks of those whose names are solemnly represented as sleeping in the cedar-surrounded cemetery lined with the graves of unknown soldiers from the South and the North who were killed at the Battle of Jefferson during the Civil War.
Miss Emily, while she lived, was always the embodiment of a tradition, the symbol of duty and the object of attention. From the time that Colonel Saddoris, the townsman, sometime in 1894--that is, when he gave an order that no Negro woman should be allowed to go out in the street without an apron--exempted her from all taxes due, for a period beginning on the day of her father's death and continuing until her death, it was a duty to her inherited by the whole town. an obligation to her inherited by the whole town. Nor was this to say that Emily was a willing recipient of charity; it turned out that Colonel Chardonnay had invented a great deal of nonsense, saying that Emily's father had made a loan to the township, and that the township, as a matter of trade, would therefore prefer to pay it back in this way. It was a set of words that only a man of Shaddoris's generation and a man with a mind like Shaddoris's could have made up, and only a woman's family would have believed it.
By the time the more enlightened-minded second generation became mayors and senators, the arrangement caused some minor discontent. That New Year's Day, they sent her a tax notice. February came and went, and still no word. They sent an official letter asking her to stop by the Attorney General's office in the middle of the day. A week later, the mayor himself wrote to Emily, offering to pay her a visit, or send a car to meet her, and the reply came in the form of a note, written on antique stationery, with fluent calligraphy and tiny handwriting, but the ink was no longer bright, to the effect that she was no longer going out at all. The tax notice was attached and returned without expressing an opinion.
The senators met in special session and sent a delegation to visit her. They knocked on the door, which no one had entered or exited through since she stopped teaching china-painting classes eight or 10 years ago. The older black manservant received them into the shadowy foyer, and from there up by the stairs, where the light was even dimmer. A dusty odor came to their noses, and the air was damp and airless; the house had not been inhabited for a long time. The negro led them into the parlor, which was furnished with bulky furniture all wrapped in leather covers. The negro opened one of the shutters, when it became more evident that the leather was chapped; and when they sat down, a puff of dust rose on either side of their thighs, and the particles swirled slowly in the rays of the sun. A charcoal portrait of Emily's father sat on top of the easel that had lost its golden sheen in front of the fireplace.
The moment she entered the room, they all stood up. A small-modeled, round-waisted woman, dressed in black, a thin gold watch chain trailing down to her waist and falling into her belt, was supported by an ebony cane, the inlaid gold of the head of which had lost its luster. Her frame was short, and perhaps because of this, whereas on other women she appeared no more than plump, she gave the impression of fatness. She looked like a dead body that had been long soaked in stagnant water, swollen and white. As her guest explained his purpose, her eyes, sunken into a face of bulging fat, moved about like two small briquettes kneaded in a ball of raw flour, now looking at this face, now measuring that one.
She did not ask them to sit down. She simply stood in the doorway and listened quietly until the speaker stammered out, at which point they heard the pendant watch, hidden at the end of a gold chain, tick.
The tone of her voice was cold. "I have no taxes to pay in Jefferson. Colonel Sardoris explained that to me a long time ago. Perhaps one of you could check the township records and clear things up."
"We have checked the files, Miss Emily, and we are the Administration. Have you not received a notice signed by the Marshal himself?"
"A mistake, I have received a notice," said Miss Emily, "Perhaps he has appointed himself Marshal ...... but I have no taxes to pay in Jefferson."
"But the tax rolls do not so state, you understand. We are to be governed by ......"
"You go to Colonel Sardoris. I have no taxes to pay in Jefferson."
"But Miss Emily-"
"You go to Colonel Shaddoris, (Colonel Shaddoris has been dead nearly ten years) I have no taxes to pay in Jefferson. Toby!" The negro answered. "Get these gentlemen out of here."
Two
She had thus defeated them "man and horse," just as she had defeated their fathers thirty years before over the matter of the odor. It was two years after her father's death, and not long after her sweetheart, whom we all believed would marry her, had deserted her. After her father's death she seldom went out; and after the departure of her sweetheart she was practically invisible. A few women had ventured to visit her, but they had been disappointed. The only sign of life around her place was the Negro man who carried a basket in and out when he was a young man.
"It was as if a man, any kind of man, could have kept the kitchen in order." The women said so. So they weren't surprised when that odor grew stronger, another link between the world of the rue and the noble and powerful Grilson family.
A woman in a neighboring house complained to Mayor Stephens, an eighty-year-old judge.
"But ma'am, what do you ask me to do about it?" He said.
"Heck, inform her to get rid of the odor," the woman said. "Isn't that expressly stated in the law?"
"I don't think that's necessary," Judge Stephens said. "It may be that the nigger she used killed a snake or a mouse in the yard. I'll talk to him about it."
The next day, he received two more complaints, one from a man making comments in a mild tone. "Judge, we can't afford not to ask questions about this. I'm the last person who wants to bother Miss Emily, but we have to do something." That night the entire Senate - three seniors and a younger member of the new generation - got together for a meeting.
"This is a simple matter," the younger man said. "Tell her to clean her house and get it right by a deadline or else ......"
"Sir, how is that going to work?" Judge Stephens said, "Can you say in front of a noblewoman that she has a bad odor there?"
So, the next day, after midnight, four men crossed the lawn of Miss Emily's house, and stalked round the house like burglars in the night, sniffing desperately along the corners of the walls, and in the cellar ventilators, while one of them pulled something out of a bag that was slung over his shoulder with his hand, and kept on making motions of sowing. They opened the cellar door and sprinkled lime there and in all the outbuildings. When they turned back and crossed the lawn again, a light came on in one of the windows that had been darkened: there sat Miss Emily, with the lamp behind her, her straight figure moving like an idol. They crept across the lawn and into the shade of the acacia trees that lined the street. After a week or two, the smell was gone.
And that's when people began to really feel sorry for her. The townspeople, remembering that Miss Emily's aunt and grandmother, old Mrs. Wyatt, had finally become completely insane, were convinced that the Grilson family thought too highly of themselves and didn't understand the position they were in. Miss Emily and women like her had no eye for any young man. For a long time we had seen the family as figures in a painting: the slender, white-clad Miss Emily standing behind, her father in profile with his feet crossed in front, his back to Emily, a riding-whip in his hand, and a backward-opening front door just nestling the two of them. So when she was nearly thirty and had not yet married, we really had no joyful feeling, only a feeling that our earlier opinion had been confirmed. Even if her family had the blood of madness in it, I suppose, she would not have let it go out of hand if she had really had every opportunity before her.
After her father's death, it was rumored that all that was left to her was the house; and people were kind of glad about that. In the end, they could show compassion for Emily. Alone and poor, she became humane. And now she had come to realize that it was human to be thrilled at a penny more and bitterly disappointed at a penny less.
The day after her father's death, all the women were ready to call at her house to express their condolences and their willingness to help, as is our custom. Miss Emily received them at the door of her house, dressed as usual, and without a trace of sorrow on her face. She told them that her father was not dead. This she did for three days in succession, whether the minister of the church visited her, or the doctors tried to persuade her to let them dispose of the body. Just as they were about to resort to law and force, she collapsed, so they quickly buried her father.
We didn't say she was crazy at the time. We believed she did it because she couldn't control herself. We remembered that her father had driven away all the young men, and we knew that she now had nothing left but to drag to death, as people often did, the man who had robbed her of everything.
Three
She was ill for a long time. When I saw her again, her hair had been cut short and she looked like a girl, not unlike the angel statues on the stained-glass windows in the church - with a touch of pathos and solemnity.
The administration had contracted to pave the sidewalks, and the work began the summer of her father's death, when the building company came with a crew of Negroes, mules, and machinery, and the foreman was a Yankee named Homer? Burrone, a tall, dark, shrewd man with a loud voice and eyes lighter than his face. Groups of children followed him and listened to him scold the Negroes with unpleasant words, while the Negroes hummed rhythmically with the up and down of the picks. It didn't take much time before he knew everyone in town. Whenever one heard the sound of laughter in any part of the square, Homer Burrone was sure to be in the center of the crowd. Bronn was sure to be in the center of the crowd. Soon afterward, on Sunday afternoons, we saw him and Miss Emily traveling together in a moped. The yellow wheelbarrow was a perfect match for the chestnut-colored stallion picked out of the stable.
At first we were all glad to see Miss Emily more or less pinned down, for the women said, "The Grilson's would never really fancy a Yankee, a man on a day-wage." But there were others, some of the older ones, who said that even grief would not make a really noble woman forget "noble manners," though they did not call them "noble manners" in words. They simply say, "Poor Emily, her relatives should have come to her side." She had relatives in Alabama; but years ago her father fell out with them over the title of old Mrs. Wyatt, a crazy old woman, and there has been no intercourse between the two families since. They didn't even send anyone to the funeral.
As soon as the old people spoke of "Emily the lovely," they exchanged pleasantries. They said to each other, "Do you really think that's what happened?" "Of course I do. What else could it be? ......" and this they said softly, with their hands over their mouths; and as the brisk hoofs of the horses drove away, shutting the shutters against the blazing sun of the Sunday afternoon, the rustle of satin could be heard: "Poor Emily. "
She held her head high--even when we were convinced that she had fallen, as if she demanded more than ever that her dignity as the last of the Grilson family should be recognized; as if her dignity required contact with the world to reaffirm her unaffected character. Take, for instance, the case of her purchase of rat poison and arsenic. It was more than a year after people had begun to say "poor Emily," and two of her cousins were visiting her at the time.
"I'm going to buy some poison." She told the pharmacist. She was in her early thirties, still a slender-shouldered woman, just thinner than usual, with cold, haughty dark eyes, the flesh of her face taut at her temples and eye sockets on either side of her face, and that facial expression you'd expect from a lighthouse keeper. "I'm going to buy some poison." She said.
"Got it, Ms. Emily. Which kind would you like to buy? Is it poison for rats or something? Then I'll refer-"
"I want the most effective poison you have in the store, I don't care about the type."
The apothecary rattled off several kinds in one breath. "They poison anything, even elephants. But foot what you want is--"
"Arsenic," said Miss Emily. "Does arsenic work?"
"Is ...... arsenic? Got it, miss. But you want ......"
"I want arsenic."
Medicine and Master looked downward at her. She glanced back at him, her body straight, her face like a pulled-tight flag. "Oooooh, of course I do," said the apothecary. "If that's the kind of poison you want. But the law says you have to specify for what use."
Miss Emily just stared at him, tilting her head back so that her eyes could look him squarely in the eye, until she saw him look away and walk in to get the arsenic packet. The Negro delivery man brought the packet out to her; the pharmacist did not show up again. She went home and opened the packet, and under the skull-and-crossbones marking on the box it stated, "Medicine for poisonous rats."
Four
So the next day all of us said, "She's going to kill herself"; and all of us said it couldn't be better. The first time we saw her with Homer? Bertram, we all said, "She's going to marry him." Then we said, "She's still got to convince him." For the former Homer himself said that he liked to associate with men, and it was known that he drank with the young men at the Mee Deer Club, and that he himself had said that he had no intention of having a family. Every Sunday afternoon thereafter they galloped past in a pretty moped: Miss Emily with her head held high, and Homer with his hat askew, cigar-smoke in his mouth, and his yellow-gloved hand holding the bridle and whip. We couldn't help but say behind the shutters, "Poor Amy just now."
Then some of the women began to say that it was a disgrace to the whole town and a bad example for the youth. The men didn't want to interfere, but the women finally forced the Baptist minister -- Miss Emily's family belonged to the Episcopal Church -- to visit her. The visit passed he never disclosed, but he never wanted to go a second time. The next Sunday they appeared on the street again in a horse-drawn carriage, whereupon the next day the pastor's wife wrote to inform Emily that she was staying at the pro-house in Alabama.
It turned out that she still had close relatives in the house, so we sat back and waited to see what would happen. At first there was no movement, then we got the definite news that they were about to be married. We also heard that Miss Emily had been to a jewelry store and ordered a set of silver men's toiletries, each engraved with the word "Homer". Burr." Two days later we were told that she had bought a full set of men's clothes, including pajamas, so we said, "They are married." We were really happy. We were happy that the two cousins were more Greilson family than Miss Emily.
So when Homer? We were not at all surprised when Homer Bertram left town -- the paving of the streets had been completed for some time. We were rather disappointed at the lack of a farewell buzz. We all believed, however, that he had gone to make some preparations for the reception of Miss Emily, or to give her an opportunity of dismissing her two cousins. (A secret clique had formed by this time, and we all sided with Miss Emily in helping her kick out the cousins.) Not bad at all, they were gone a week later. And, just as we had been expecting, Homer? Burrone is back in town. A neighbor witnessed the black man open the kitchen door at dusk one day and let him in.
That was the last we saw of Homer? Burrone. As for Miss Emily, we did not see her for some time. Negroes came in and out with their shopping baskets, but the front door was always closed. Occasionally her figure could be seen passing by the window, as one used to see it on the night of the scattering of the ashes, but for six whole months she did not appear in the street. We understand that this was not unexpected; "her father's character had thrice added to the ups and downs of her life as a woman, and it seemed as if it were too great a malignity and too furious to disappear.
By the time we saw Miss Emily again, she had put on weight, and her hair was gray. In the years that followed, her hair grew grayer and grayer, becoming a peppery, iron-gray color, and the color ceased to change. Until the day of her death at the age of seventy-four, it remained that exuberant iron gray, like the hair of an active man.
Since that time her front door has been closed, except for a period of about six or seven years when she was about forty. During that period, she taught classes in china painting. In a room downstairs she had improvised a studio, and all of Colonel Sardoris's contemporaries sent their daughters and granddaughters to her to learn to paint, with the same punctuality and earnestness as if they had been sent to church on Sunday, and had been given quarter coins to put in the offering-basin. By this time, she was exempt from the tax.
Then the new generation became the backbone and spirit of the town, and the pupils who had been learning to paint grew up and gradually left, without letting their own girls go to Miss Emily's with their color boxes, their tiresome brushes, and their cut-outs from women's magazines to learn to paint. After the last pupil left, the front door closed, and closed forever. Miss Emily was the only one who refused to have a metal door number nailed to her front door with a mail box attached after the town instituted free mail. She ignored them any way she could.
Day after day, month after month, year after year, we watched the Negro's hair turn gray, her back hunch, and she carried her basket of goods in and out. Every December we sent her a tax notice, but it was returned by the post office a week later, unanswered. From time to time we saw her figure in a window at the bottom of the building - she apparently closed off the upstairs - like the sculpted torso of an idol in a shrine, and we couldn't tell if she was watching us or not. And so she passes from generation to generation - regal, serene, inescapable, inaccessible, oddly well-behaved.
And so she passed away. Got sick in a dusty, haunted house, and the only person who waited on her was an aging black man. We didn't even know she was sick; and we had long since tried to find out anything from the negro. He spoke to no one, and I am afraid to her, and his voice seemed to have become hoarse from long neglect.
She died in a room downstairs, with the drapery still hanging over the bulky walnut bed, and the pillow on which her iron-gray-haired head rested yellowed and moldy from years of use and lack of sunlight.
Five
The negro greeted the first women at the front door and invited them in, their words low and sibilant, and they scanned everything quickly with curious eyes. The black man then disappeared, walking through the house and out the back door, and has not been seen since.
Two cousins followed, and they held the funeral service the next day, and the whole town came running to see the flower-covered body of Miss Emily. A charcoal portrait of her father hung above the morgue with a look of deep contemplation, and the women chirped about the death, while the older men - some in their well-painted Confederate uniforms - were on the porches and on the lawns in droves talking about Miss Emily's life as if she were their contemporary, and believing that they had danced with her and even courted her, they were upsetting the mathematical progression of time. This is often the case with older people. To them, the years of the past are not a narrowing path, but a vast meadow to which even winter has no influence, and it is only in the last decade that they have been cut off from the past like the mouth of a narrow bottle.
We already know that there is a room in that upstairs lot that no one has seen in forty years, and that to get in you have to pry the door open. They waited until after Miss Emily was buried before they managed to get to the door.
The door slammed open, shaking the room with dust. The room, which had been furnished like a new house, seemed to have the faintly dismal atmosphere of a crypt hanging over it everywhere: failing rose-colored curtains, rose-colored lampshades, dressers, rows of fine crystal work and men's toiletries in silver, but the silver was so devoid of luster that even the engraved monograms of the names were unrecognizable. Among the clutter was a stiff collar and tie, as if they had just been removed from the body, and when they were picked up they left faint crescent marks in the dust that had accumulated on the countertop. A suit of clothes lay on a chair, nicely folded; underneath were two lonely, silent shoes and a pair of thrown-away socks.
The man lay on the bed.
We stood there for a long time, looking down at the inscrutable grimace on that fleshless face. The body lay there, showing what was once an embracing posture, but the long eternal sleep that outlasted love, that overcame its torment, had tamed him. The flesh he had left behind had rotted under his tattered nightgown and stuck indissolubly to the wooden bed on which he lay. An even layer of dust that had accumulated over the years covered him and the pillow beside him.
It was only later that we noticed the marks of a human head pressed into the pillow next to us. One of us picked up something from it, and we all looked closer - when a faint dry, stinking odor entered our nostrils - and it turned out to be a long lock of iron-gray hair.