So SHE vanquished them, horse and foot, just as she had vanquished
their fathers thirty years before about the smell.
That was two years after her father's death and a short time after her
sweetheart--the one we believed would marry her --had deserted her.
After her father's death she went out very little; after her sweetheart went
away, people hardly saw her at all. A few of the ladies had the temerity to
call, but were not received, and the only sign of life about the place was
the Negro man--a young man then--going in and out with a market
basket.
"Just as if a man--any man--could keep a kitchen properly, "the ladies
said; so they were not surprised when the smell developed. It was another
link between the gross, teeming world and the high and mighty
Griersons.
A neighbor, a woman, complained to the mayor, Judge Stevens, eighty
years old.
"But what will you have me do about it, madam?" he said.
"Why, send her word to stop it," the woman said. "Isn't there a law? "
"I'm sure that won't be necessary," Judge Stevens said. "It's probably just a
snake or a rat that nigger of hers killed in the yard. I'll speak to him about
it."
The next day he received two more complaints, one from a man who
came in diffident deprecation. "We really must do something about it,
Judge. I'd be the last one in the world to bother Miss Emily, but we've got
to do something." That night the Board of Aldermen met--three
graybeards and one younger man, a member of the rising generation.
"It's simple enough," he said. "Send her word to have her place cleaned
up. Give her a certain time to do it in, and if she don't. .."
"Dammit, sir," Judge Stevens said, "will you accuse a lady to her face of
smelling bad?"
So the next night, after midnight, four men crossed Miss Emily's lawn and
slunk about the house like burglars, sniffing along the base of the
brickwork and at the cellar openings while one of them performed a
regular sowing motion with his hand out of a sack slung from his
shoulder. They broke open the cellar door and sprinkled lime there, and
in all the outbuildings. As they recrossed the lawn, a window that had
been dark was lighted and Miss Emily sat in it, the light behind her, and
her upright torso motionless as that of an idol. They crept quietly across
the lawn and into the shadow of the locusts that lined the street. After a
week or two the smell went away.
That was when people had begun to feel really sorry for her. People in
our town, remembering how old lady Wyatt, her great-aunt, had gone
completely crazy at last, believed that the Griersons held themselves a
little too high for what they really were. None of the young men were
quite good enough for Miss Emily and such. We had long thought of them
as a tableau, Miss Emily a slender figure in white in the background, her
father a spraddled silhouette in the foreground, his back to her and
clutching a horsewhip, the two of them framed by the back-flung front
door. So when she got to be thirty and was still single, we were not
pleased exactly, but vindicated; even with insanity in the family she
wouldn't have turned down all of her chances if they had really
materialized.
When her father died, it got about that the house was all that was left to
her; and in a way, people were glad. At last they could pity Miss Emily.
Being left alone, and a pauper, she had become humanized. Now she too
would know the old thrill and the old despair of a penny more or less.
The day after his death all the ladies prepared to call at the house and
offer condolence and aid, as is our custom Miss Emily met them at the
door, dressed as usual and with no trace of grief on her face. She told
them that her father was not dead. She did that for three days, with the
ministers calling on her, and the doctors, trying to persuade her to let
them dispose of the body. Just as they were about to resort to law and
force, she broke down, and they buried her father quickly.
We did not say she was crazy then. We believed she had to do that. We
remembered all the young men her father had driven away, and we knew
that with nothing left, she would have to cling to that which had robbed
her, as people will.