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The festivities lasted well into the night. A Dixieland band played and people danced. Colonel Reb, the Ole Miss mascot made an appearance and we all had our pictures taken with him. People talked and laughed and formed new friendships and they drank and made merry. Later in the evening as the clock swept toward midnight and the moon crept up over the standing pines, when all the drink had been drunk, food had been eaten, dances danced and goodbyes said, we stepped out the front door and into the night. It had been a fine Oxford wedding.

Night changes a person from what he was in the day to what he becomes in the night; it brings freedom and daring of spirit. Especially when you’ve had a few. Standing under the night sky on the lawn of the Isom House, three of us coalesced into a trio still not satisfied that the evening was at an end. There was my wife Patty and columnist Laurie Steiber and myself. We all were staying at the same hotel in town, and something still called to us that said the night was not finished. It was just one a.m. according to my watch as a voice spoke up and suggested we go down and visit “Bill.” Then I realized the voice belonged to me.

"Bill" was William Faulkner, who lay in his final rest beside his wife Estelle less than four blocks away beneath the oak and magnolia benused shades of St. Peter’s cemetery. We all thought it a fine adventure to finish off the night, and so we set out.

Visiting Faulkner is never an ordinary experience. Visiting at night - especially very late at night - is far a different thing than visiting in the day. Nightime dalliances with the creator of famed Yoknapatawpha County is an old tradition that began decades ago by the university students who were just looking for a little fun. They typically come armed with a bottle of snakebite or something else which most of them have already had more than a taste of by then, and they sit for hours telling stories and talking and waiting for something to happen. Maybe "Mister Bill" as locals call him will make an appearance? Either way, Bill has never seemed to quite mind the intrusion or ever bothered to make a fuss about being disturbed in the middle of the night. In fact, seems to enjoy the attention more than anything else. We, certainly, were hoping he would welcome us in the same fashion.

The moon was already cresting the tall pines above the hill as we arrived, throwing long dark shadows across the mossy headstones leaning in the night. Then all at once there he was...the man himself beneath a long marble slab with his name and the words "Go With God." The three of us sat on the low, poured concrete wall that frames the gravesite and were silent for a long time. We didn’t bring any snakebite with us to place on the grave like the college kids do. We didn’t have to; by now the wedding had made each of us into our own self-contained, walking adult beverages. It was a small detail Bill probably would have approved of.

Faulkner's reputation for drinking is well known still. When asked once if he drank while he wrote, he said he always wrote with a bottle nearby. . .just in case. Working as a script writer in Hollywood in the 1930's, he often disappeared for weeks into binges. Actress Lauren Bacall once asked him what prompted him to drink and he replied, “With one martini, ah feel bigger, wiser, taller, and with two it goes to the superlative...ah feel biggest, wisest, tallest. And with three there ain’t no holdin’ me!” That was Bill in a nutshell: a crossroads of contradictions, a destination to which few travelers have ever dared to venture.

That was the human Bill we all know. What makes him such a fascinating figure even today is that he was such a contradiction in himself: he drank prolifically, couldn't hold a job, was stubborn and cranky, had affairs with women...yet he was a