Freedom remains tantalizing in William Faulkner’s If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem because of moral ever-presence. In Old Man, this ethical force helps to direct the tall convict, informing his thoughts and actions. “When the woman asked him if he had a knife,” with which to cut the umbilical cord of her newborn child, the convict “standing there in the streaming bedticking garments which had got him shot at, the second time by a machine gun, on the two occasions when he had seen any human life after leaving the levee four days ago, the convict felt exactly as he had in the fleeing skiff when the woman suggested that they had better hurry”; that is: “he felt the same outrageous affronting of a condition purely moral, the same raging impotence to find any answer to it” (IF 650). Nevertheless, like the tall convict, his female charge is a pure, wild, product of America, and for that reason, morality conditions their relationship: “she still saying nothing since she too doubtless knew what his reason was, not from that rapport of the wedded conferred upon her by the two weeks during which they had jointly suffered all the crises emotional social economic and even moral which do not always occur even in the ordinary fifty married years […]—not because of this but because she too had stemmed at some point from the same dim hill-bred Abraham” (IF 667).