In conjunction with Byhalia Books, Flagpole sponsored a “Write Like Faulkner” contest to commemorate the 50th anniversary of his death. The judges agreed on the first and (close) second-place stories but could not agree on a third, and so only these two are published here. The first-place story, “Plowed Fields,” will be read aloud during “The Sound and the Faulkner,” an evening of local people reading from Faulkner’s work. This commemorative gathering takes place at Ciné from 5 to 7 p.m. on Thursday, July 5, the eve of the 50th anniversary of William Faulkner’s passing.

Plowed Fields

She stood in front of the window, telephone in hand.

“Are you ready?” she asked.

He looked past her, through the big window with its single cracked pane, over the grassy yard, and the yards and houses beyond, where there had been plowed fields not so long ago, stretching to the even older woods on the horizon—a view that telescoped both space and time so that the oldest things were the farthest away, like the light from the most distant stars.

Before the subdivision were the plowed fields, a sea of green with its billows and swells frozen in the summer heat, a sea of money that had sent the sons of its masters to academies and colleges, distant towns and remote cities, finally returning in their dotage to sip coffee in the morning, whiskey in the evening, and to shoot birds on the weekend. For some, the sea of green had financed local investment, mills and feed stores, real estate and banking—men whose interests narrowed as their influence grew, inverted pyramids of power and humanity, an expanding cone whose core became more empty as it widened, until at its farthest reaches there was nothing in the center at all. And the sea of green, of cotton, of money, the ocean of white that washed the boundaries of the woods beyond, had given little more than food and shelter to the men and women and children who worked the land, who were brought across the ocean to work the land, whose ancestors and descendants were at home in Ghana and Pauldoe—in homes with packed-dirt floors, in churches where spirits were raised as earthly hopes were suppressed and who had finally left the land, drifting away to Athens, or Atlanta, or up North. And before the big, plowed fields, there was the forest where the aboriginal people had hunted and tended their fields and built their towns, guided by the daily and seasonal needs of survival, whose children played at being hunters and prey; and their time had come and gone, leaving the bones of a hundred generations in the soil, under the fields and roads and towns where deer had grazed and bears had walked and bison had gathered.

She spoke again, and she was Africa and Europe and America, a black-white-and-red vessel holding the blood of Granny Yarky, who was listed in the census of 1790 as “Yarico, Indian,” the blood of a Georgia governor for whom the blending of races was as agreeable as whiskey and water, and the blood of a hundred generations of hunters and farmers and townspeople in Africa, whose time had come and gone and come again. The cracked windowpane above her head was a stylized hieroglyph written on the sky, a cryptic symbol of the macrocosm, a halo.

“We’re going to be late,” she said.

“Yes,” he said, “but it will be all right.”

John Gaither

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Walmart

He (the boy) stepped down through the lilies and crossed the shoals and found the path—it would not be a path for another 20 years—the oak he had slept beside last night was still a sapling—nascent Cherokee Corner—but a path still to frontier bred (or raised, or if not raised at least begot) and climbed the hill. The motionless unaxed woods static and terrific in their disdain, indifferent to men, red and white (not black: at least not yet), who moved through them like impotent wraithy shades, promised a terrific fecundity. He moved silently uphill, following the small clear stream to its source. He was the founder, if any one man coming 10,000 years later than the red men he had seen along the line could be said to found anything, or to have found anything. It was one of that tribe, already lost and blasted but a hundred years away from the Irish president's final solution, that had told him of the spring, almost at the top of the hill, above the dense cedars and the shoals. He would be the first then; girdle trees grub roots and corn between, wispy beans, and venison, Romulus in buckskins, bear, brother to man sharing his food and he without rancor planting again and more this time; without haste building the cabin on the hill above the spring. He would be a man before a woman came upriver, on the skiff with her brothers, roan Colleen 16 years old, nutbrown with slender forearms work-hard, ropey; he amazed, incredulous at the clear bright smile life and promise her brothers strong and open, not vicious gander-pulling crackers he had left outside Augusta. Motionless, with ineffable unwinking gaze, he watched the skiff ground below his shoals. The solitude was at an end (solitude leavened, lightened, by the company of the red men whom he shared with—but they were not his tribe). The scars he bore—not visible—the outrage, fight, had departed with the work, sweat, planting. He looked with a deep and sober astonishment at the uplifted slight breasts, looked now as a man, brave now not false brave but competent to get in a crop, to doctor himself, to not need to take from another to live. He took no more than he needed. He welcomed them. So he was the first. The corn would grow, then cotton university plantations railroads war cottonmill shinglemill bobbinmill; Waddell, White, Thomas, Cobb, Howell, Welch, Church, boll weevil depression; his shoals dammed, covered over, 16-hour workdays for 14-year-old girl children, mansions rising as the soil washed away, the loam of 100,000 centuries that the boy had not been able to dig to the bottom of, gone, his spring filled with the refuse, flotsam of a growing town, paved over, forgotten, he repudiated by his progeny, they contemptful, even destroying the mansions, exuberant, concupiscent, insatiable.  The spring still flowed, invisible almost, refuting the merchants of death, carrying the atoms of the boy long buried with the girl to the shoals below, and on.

Chip Chandler