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Said Maw one day: "That lady downstairs was a-talking to me this morning, Paw, and she mentioned something about the smell." "I had noticed that Rinno was gitting to kind of smell," said Paw, "I intended to make 'rangements with that feller that hauled us around here . . . to take Rinno out to London Hill but somehow hit slipped my mind." "Hit disturbs ever'body," said Jutland, "even us out in the hall. Cain't we put him out in the yard just at nights?" "Well, now," said Paw, "hit wouldn't be treating Rinno just right to put him out like that." "No, it wouldn't," said Maw, "Rinno wouldn't want nothing like that."
Soon they were being put out of one house after another. Paw, as the man who had kept his WPA job longest, had drifted into leadership. He had a kind of mild dignity and guileless cunning. His job was to inveigle landlords who had not yet heard of the WPA horde into renting them houses for which they could not pay. Paw never felt he was swindling the landlords because he always knew that some day he would get back on WPA. And he never troubled to tell the landlords that he was renting for six families besides his own because the landlords might be needlessly upset. Sooner or later trie neighbors always complained, the landlord always discovered what was up, the Board of Health always stepped in.
Author Faulkner leaves his farmers squatting on their hunkers, outside the WPA office door, "patient to resignation, diffident, self-contained, pleased with small considerations as children upon being noticed, wanting little and getting less . . . shy of every man yet believing in them all, not immoral but unmoraled, trained through generations to unambition and canny greed, open-handed yet subversive, different in shape and form and fashion, yet with identical expressions and summations of vagueness and bewilderment and despair . . . incongruous and incomplete away from their ill-tended fields and the poverty of their disreputable shacks . . . bringing disaster on themselves with eager hands, tragic in their ignorance, and the ultimate tragedy was that they were unaware of the tragedy that they were."
The Author. John Faulkner, 39, thinks Brother William, 43, "has no superior today" as a writer, does not believe that anyone has excelled him "since the beginning of the printed word." The brothers look so much alike that Oxford, Miss, neighbors have a hard time telling them apart. "They average seeing each other about once a month," usually in front of the post office.
John and his wife, Dolly, Sons Jimmy, 18, and "Chooky" (to whom Men Working is dedicated), 13, live with Mrs. Faulkner's father, J. 0. ("Pete") Ramey, "within hollering distance" of Brother William's palatial colonial house. They moved in about a year ago to take care of widowed Mr. Ramey, but, says John, "Mr. Ramey contends he's taking care of us."