So SHE vanquished them, horse and foot, just as she had vanquished their fathers thirty years before about the smell. "See Colonel Sartoris." (Colonel Sartoris had been dead almost ten years.) "I have no taxes in Jefferson. "But there is nothing on the books to show that, you see We must go by the-" "Perhaps he considers himself the sheriff. "I received a paper, yes," Miss Emily said. Didn't you get a notice from the sheriff, signed by him?" Perhaps one of you can gain access to the city records and satisfy yourselves." Then they could hear the invisible watch ticking at the end of the gold chain. She just stood in the door and listened quietly until the spokesman came to a stumbling halt. Her eyes, lost in the fatty ridges of her face, looked like two small pieces of coal pressed into a lump of dough as they moved from one face to another while the visitors stated their errand. She looked bloated, like a body long submerged in motionless water, and of that pallid hue. Her skeleton was small and spare perhaps that was why what would have been merely plumpness in another was obesity in her. They rose when she entered-a small, fat woman in black, with a thin gold chain descending to her waist and vanishing into her belt, leaning on an ebony cane with a tarnished gold head. On a tarnished gilt easel before the fireplace stood a crayon portrait of Miss Emily's father.
#Diarey of emily rpse rpse cracked
When the Negro opened the blinds of one window, they could see that the leather was cracked and when they sat down, a faint dust rose sluggishly about their thighs, spinning with slow motes in the single sun-ray. It was furnished in heavy, leather-covered furniture. It smelled of dust and disuse-a close, dank smell. They were admitted by the old Negro into a dim hall from which a stairway mounted into still more shadow. A deputation waited upon her, knocked at the door through which no visitor had passed since she ceased giving china-painting lessons eight or ten years earlier. They called a special meeting of the Board of Aldermen. The tax notice was also enclosed, without comment. A week later the mayor wrote her himself, offering to call or to send his car for her, and received in reply a note on paper of an archaic shape, in a thin, flowing calligraphy in faded ink, to the effect that she no longer went out at all. They wrote her a formal letter, asking her to call at the sheriff's office at her convenience. On the first of the year they mailed her a tax notice. When the next generation, with its more modern ideas, became mayors and aldermen, this arrangement created some little dissatisfaction. Only a man of Colonel Sartoris' generation and thought could have invented it, and only a woman could have believed it. Colonel Sartoris invented an involved tale to the effect that Miss Emily's father had loaned money to the town, which the town, as a matter of business, preferred this way of repaying. Not that Miss Emily would have accepted charity. And now Miss Emily had gone to join the representatives of those august names where they lay in the cedar-bemused cemetery among the ranked and anonymous graves of Union and Confederate soldiers who fell at the battle of Jefferson.Īlive, Miss Emily had been a tradition, a duty, and a care a sort of hereditary obligation upon the town, dating from that day in 1894 when Colonel Sartoris, the mayor-he who fathered the edict that no Negro woman should appear on the streets without an apron-remitted her taxes, the dispensation dating from the death of her father on into perpetuity. But garages and cotton gins had encroached and obliterated even the august names of that neighborhood only Miss Emily's house was left, lifting its stubborn and coquettish decay above the cotton wagons and the gasoline pumps-an eyesore among eyesores. It was a big, squarish frame house that had once been white, decorated with cupolas and spires and scrolled balconies in the heavily lightsome style of the seventies, set on what had once been our most select street. WHEN Miss Emily Grierson died, our whole town went to her funeral: the men through a sort of respectful affection for a fallen monument, the women mostly out of curiosity to see the inside of her house, which no one save an old man-servant-a combined gardener and cook-had seen in at least ten years.
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