WILDERNESS AND CIVILIZATION
347
had not been there before and which could be translated back into
money...." The ownership of the land through money as well as
its use for money and profit-making are part of the guilt, because
God
created the earth to hold it "mutual and intact in the communal
anonymity of brotherhood."
Two of McCaslin's grandsons figure prominently in these stories:
Isaac McCaslin, the only white descendant in the male line, and the
Negro Lucas Beauchamp, son of McCaslin's son by a black mistress.
Isaac, who was initiated to the wilderness, and manhood and hunter–
ship, by Sam Fathers, inherits the land but relinquishes it to
his
cousin
Edmonds, a son of old McCaslin's daughter (it seems all good heroes
of Faulkner have to give up their inheritance) :
"I can't repudiate it.
It
was never mine to repudiate. It was never
Father's and Uncle Buddy's to bequeath me to repudiate because it was
never Grandfather's ... because on the instant when Ikkemotubbe dis–
covered, realized that he could sell it for money, on that instant it
ceased ever to have been his forever, father
to
father to father, and the
man who bought it bought nothing."
Isaac McCaslin pays back, and increases, to his black cousins the
money intended for them by his grandfather in atonement of his
guilt. After he has given up the land, he possesses "but one object
more than he could wear and carry in his pockets and his hands at
one time and that was an iron cot and the stained lean mattress
which he used camping in the woods for deer and bear or for fishing
or simply because he loved the woods." He takes up the trade of a
carpenter, "because if the Nazarene had found carpenting good for
the life and end He had assumed and elected to serve, it would be all
right too for Isaac McCaslin." Isaac, who renounces the rapacity
and guilt of property is in that sense
.a
forerunner of the Corporal in
A Fable,
though without quite realizing as yet that this
is
a renun–
ciation of civilization and all it implies. However, we find him in
such close communion with the wilderness that this in itself
is
already
a repudiation of civilization; and he rejects the responsibility of keep–
ing the farm, which his wife demands of him. But like the Corporal,
he only establishes an example of refusal; he saves nobody but him–
self perhaps.
The McCaslin saga
is
another of Faulkner's representations of
the story of the South: the ownership of the land by one man (the
