After reading The Bear and getting a feel for Faulkner’s southern “mawnins” as they read aloud in class, Lit and Land students had a chance to try out Faulkner’s style with their own twist. Jessica based her Faulknerian interior monologue on this post card from Hallowell, Maine.

new day, new life.

and so he told himself. an overwhelming feeling of guilt wrenched the stomach of the young man, not even a man yet,  just a mature boy, a feeling no one his age should ever feel it wasn’t my fault it wasn’t my fault that goddamn incident wasn’t my fault he kept telling himself but he couldn’t eradicate the sensation and so

in his rundown dirty shack with a dirt floor, a grimy bed, an antediluvian wooden chair with only three legs and a small wobbly desk, the only source of light a flickering candle which sat in a little depression he had dug into the dirt, the candle had been burning the whole night and now was only a stub, it wouldn’t last much longer he should buy another one but he had spent all his money on a train ticket to Milford

the boy on the chair, hunched over the sticky and dirt covered table, a flimsy postcard with a picture of Taintor Stone Works on the front  - what a sick joke that the cheapest postcard in town was one of the company he had just worked at before the incident  - was on the table, a pen poised in his hand but no writing on the page save for the address, to his younger sister. He had purposely used a postcard so he could write little as to avoid explaining the incident on paper to his poor family, his family

his father, bedridden with some sort of mysterious sickness racked with a fiery fever slipping in and out of consciousness, every time his eyes closed they feared they wouldn’t open again, his fifteen year old sister so young and innocent caring for their father every day and night forced to witness his suffering, oversee his pain

their little matchbox where they kept all the coins for food slowly dwindling now, barely enough to provide for all three of them for another month, nowhere near enough for any sort of doctor or medicine, and since Father was too sick to work the boy decided it was finally his turn to make Father proud, offered to go out and work and bring home some money and Father

“But son you can’t do that, you’re too young. I’ll feel better soon, I’ll go to work tomorrow, you just keep going to school and getting a good education, that’s the best thing you can do for me, alright?”

but it wasn’t alright and Father didn’t feel better soon, didn’t go to work the next day or the next day or the next week; his condition worsened until he was physically unable to stand up by himself he had gotten so skinny his ribs sticking out like tree branches in the dead of winter his skin wrinkly and as fragile as burnt parchment mottled to unrecognizable colors, a week later the boy approached his bed and waited until his eyelids fluttered open and recognized his son and then the boy proposed his idea again and Father, his voice a low creak a guttural moan managed to push out the words

“If you … believe that’s … the best thing for you to do.”

and the boy leapt up with joy and gave Father an embrace, being careful not to crush the vulnerable frame of his body and rushed out of the room to pack his few necessities and right as he walked towards the door he heard a wheezing from behind him and

“I’m … proud of you … my son.”

and so he had left the house looking for a job, found one in Maine as a stonemason, traveled up with his neighbor who was generous enough to offer the ride; he remembered the pride and confidence that he exuberated from then, he was powered by that pride, the feeling he got every time he went to the post office to mail a large part of his weekly salary to his family even though his work was dull and repetitive simply using a chisel and hammer to split slabs of granite into smaller slabs of granite but it was gratifying but because of the incident it wouldn’t, couldn’t happen anymore

but how would he break the terrible news to them, without mentioning the incident? He was leaving by train at midnight tonight to Milford and to start his life over, a blank slate and so

he wrote Not going to stay he wanted it to be short and vague, that would be best then he wrote job no good which was technically not true since his job was still fine but there was no way he could go back – it was all his fault and

that creature sleeping in his stomach woke up again and his guilt came back, stronger than ever, all of his guilt could be traced with a clear cut line to the incident -

that one day at work when he wanted a little extra pay so he worked into the night and split a record amount of slabs, the deep rumbling and crash of granite cracking within itself and separating from one into two pleasing him to no end. he was dizzy thinking about the extra bonuses of money he would receive when his boss came in the next morning, dizzy with how elated his father and sister would be and he lost track of time and kept working straight into the morning and he must’ve been so fatigued drunk on that imagined happiness and so

the next morning the sun rose, gradually throwing golden rays through the windows and exposing to the lighted eye the hard work he had done overnight and he was still working, chiseling and hammering on one more and he heard his supervisor’s footsteps coming down the walkway and he worked even harder to show off his efforts and the door opened and the supervisor walked in, surprised to see someone already here and then looked around at all the perfect split slabs stacked up on the floor and his old, stony face, the face of a man who had no children no continuing family whose stonemasonry business and his want for money fueled his avaricious soul, cracked into a smile and he strode up to the boy, positioned himself on the other side of the slab the boy was currently working on and the supervisor

“Well it looks like you’ve done a great job, my boy. I think you deserve a bonus. Come to my office.”

and the boy was overjoyed, everything was going the way he planned but then it didn’t. He had planned to give the slab one final stroke of the hammer to show his boss how skilled he was at this job and he did; the stroke resounded and echoed off the walls with perfect finality and he was pleased, the supervisor was pleased, and then he heard, very faintly the rumbling sound that came from within the granite slab and

he realized too late and he had hit it too hard and now it was going to fall and his supervisor was standing right in the drop area and the supervisor didn’t hear the noise and the boy tried pushing him to the side but he resisted he didn’t know what was going on, oblivious and the slab fell

he wrote leave for Milford tonight he’s going by train he had used the rest of his money to buy a ticket to start a new life. He would become a logger, working days and nights alone in the woods nobody around for him to injure or kill kill the word was like a black cloud overtaking his mind he had killed a man he couldn’t escape it and

fell onto his supervisor, and all the boy could do now was stand from aside and watch it happen, it was like an out-of-body experience he was a bystander to a catastrophe, it was almost in slow motion, the slab tilting sideways and the old sturdy man being crushed under its weight, resisting for a second or two being able to hold the weight, hugging the slab like a dear friend with a look of surprise on his face but not a pleasant surprise a shocking surprise and slowly contorting into pain and then he couldn’t hold the weight no more and gravity took control and they, the supervisor and the slab went down falling like two dominoes in a row and it seemed almost graceful in a sick twisted way

and then the sound. The clash and boom of the granite and the crack of the supervisor’s head on the floor, it seemed to echo and reverberate throughout the room for eternity and then all that sound, that colossal calamitous sound, was like kryptonite to his joyous mood and all of a sudden the sound was transformed into a weight onto his shoulders as he realized what he had done, the enormity of the situation and

he had started to cry, alone in the little wooden shack, the tears that he held in for so long ever since the day he took another man’s life were now a free flowing river down his guilt-ridden face a few tears dripped onto the letter he was writing, leaving some smudges that he tried to fix then he turned away from the letter and gave in and cried openly, heaving sobs that wracked his whole body – he was a shaking quivering mess and

there was no blood, the head hadn’t broken. it was so still and stagnant and the boy couldn’t stop himself from staring at the scene lying on the floor, the supervisor whose face was frozen forever in stricken shock that just one minute ago was smiling and talking to him and he heard the front door open and close and then footsteps, a coworker walking in and he had to leave, he had to get away as far away as possible, so he ran out the back door and kept running back to his dilapidated shack, taking out all his money running back to town buying a train ticket for the next day, he never ever wanted to return back to the scene of the incident the guilt, the guilt

tell father he wrote two simple words seemingly harmless but carrying so much weight and he couldn’t even imagine how they would respond to this postcard, just another spear of guilt to feed the creature in his stomach

the candle was flickering more and more, barely a stub now, the hot wax melting into the ground and so he climbed into his hard lumpy bed and slept there for one final time before the train left tomorrow and so he told himself

new day, new life.

- Jessica Chen, Somers NY