As I No Longer Lay Dying (Part IV)

This is a continuation. To start from the beginning, click here.


“You know how I am. If I don’t take pictures it’s like I wasn’t even here.” So we went all around Rowan Oak that morning and I took pictures of everything and from every angle. And Renee was patient. There may have about forty people with the tour bus, and thirty of them were crowded into the house. The docent was a kindly black man, knowledgeable while avoiding pedantry (a trap I’ve never been able to avoid, I must confess; it’s hard for me to resist teaching when I get excited about something. One step into each room was all we were granted; our curiosity was checked by a semi-circular Plexiglas barrier. The interior was pleasant enough, but by our antiseptic, commercially-scrubbed notions of design and décor it seemed stark: remove its Nobel Prize-winning ghost, and the library was provincial and ordinary, the parlor and dining room—the bedrooms too, for that matter—an inarguably genteel throwback in this age of belligerent tackiness and unapologetic ignorance, but lacking any special significance in and of itself, at least until you got to his office; anyone looking on that room, be he cultured or common, seeing Faulkner’s old typewriter staring out through the window on the paddock and post oak barn, seeing the grease pencil marks telescoping a week’s worth of events in World War I France onto two walls, should have been impressed and reflected and thought and reached a special truth, that Art, far from being irrelevant or dead, seeks and collects the best of us. Nonetheless, Faulkner’s office is located next to the bathroom for public use; there was a line for both. You can guess what Renee was waiting for). As he was the only official present, the docent stayed close to the counter to keep an eye on the register, although the visitors were amiable as the elderly on vacation tend to be (thus explaining the line to the bathroom) and his mindfulness owed more to attentiveness to duty than to suspicion. But without the oversight of the docent, and after a quick defeat of my conscience, I granted myself leave to use the flash on my digital camera, ignoring the clear prohibition posted in the entryway, next to Faulkner’s drawings of Yoknapatawpha County and Jefferson. It was a violation, and I now wish I had been caught and reprimanded; if one of the many track-suited ladies had taken me to task, I would have been embarrassed, irritated even, but surely when the opportunity arose to take the loose brick from the cedar tree walk as a souvenir, I wouldn’t have dared.

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