Sartoris Read online

  But the wastebasket beside the desk and the desk itself and the mantel above the trash-filled fireplace, and the window ledges too, were cluttered with circular mail matter and mail order catalogues and government bulletins of all kinds. In one corner, on an up-ended packing box, sat a water cooler of stained oxidized glass, in another corner leaned a clump of cane fishing poles warping slowly of their own weight; and on every horizontal surface rested a collection of objects not to be found outside of a second-hand store—old garments, bottles, a kerosene lamp, a wooden box of tins of axle grease, lacking one; a clock in the shape of a bland china morning glory supported by four garlanded maidens who had Suffered sundry astonishing anatomical mishaps, and here and there among the dusty indiscrimination, various instruments pertaining to the occupant’s profession. It was one of these that Dr. Peabody sought now in the littered desk on which sat a single photograph in a wooden frame, and though Miss Jenny said again, “You, Loosh Peabody, you listen to me,” he continued to seek it with bland and unhurried equanimity.

  “You fasten your clothes and we’ll go back to that doctor,” Miss Jenny ordered her nephew. “Neither you nor I can waste any more time with a doddering old fool.”

  “Sit down, Jenny,” Dr. Peabody repeated, and he drew out a drawer and removed from it a box of cigars and a handful of faded artificial trout flies and a soiled collar, and lastly a stethoscope; then he tumbled the other things back into the drawer and shut it with his knee.

  Miss Jenny sat trim and outraged, fuming while he listened to old Bayard’s heart.

  “Well,” she snapped, “does it tell you how to take that wart off his face? Will Falls didn’t need any telephone to find that out.”

  “It tells more than that,” Dr. Peabody answered. “It tells how Bayard’ll get rid of all his troubles, if he keeps on riding in that hellion’s automobile.”

  “Fiddlesticks,” Miss Jenny said, “Bayard’s a good driver. I never rode with a better one.”

  “It’ll take more’n a good driver to keep this—” he tapped Bayard’s chest with his blunt finger—“goin’, time that boy whirls that thing around another curve or two like I’ve seen him do.”

  “Did you ever hear of a Sartoris dying from a natural cause, like anybody else?” Miss Jenny demanded. “Don’t you know that heart ain’t going to take Bayard off before his time? You get up from there, and come on with me,” she added to her nephew. Bayard buttoned his shirt. Dr. Peabody sat on the sofa and watched him quietly.

  “Bayard,” he said suddenly, “why don’t you stay out of that damn thing?”

  “What?”

  “If you don’t stay out of that car, you ain’t gain’ to need me nor Will Falls, nor that boy in yonder with all his hand-boiled razors, neither.”

  “What business is it of yours?” old Bayard demanded.

  “By God, can’t I break my neck in peace if I want to?” He rose. He was trembling, fumbling at his waistcoat buttons, and Miss Jenny rose also and made to help him, but he put her roughly aside. Dr. Peabody sat quietly, thumping his fat fingers on one fat knee. “I have already outlived my time,” old Bayard continued more mildly. “I am the first of my name to see sixty years that I know of. I reckon Old Marster is keeping me for a reliable witness to the extinction of it.”

  “Now,” Miss Jenny said icily, “you’ve made your speech, and Loosh Peabody has wasted the morning for you, so I reckon we can leave now and let Loosh go out and doctor mules for a while, and you can sit around the rest of the day, being a Sartoris and feeling sorry for yourself. Good morning, Loosh.”

  “Make him let that place alone, Jenny,” Dr. Peabody said.

  “Ain’t you and Will Falls going to cure it for him?”

  “You keep him from letting Will Falls put anything on it,” Dr. Peabody repeated equably. “It’s all right. Just leave it alone.”

  “We’re going to a doctor, that’s what we’re going to do,” Miss Jenny replied. “Come on here.”

  When the door had closed, he sat motionless and heard them quarreling beyond it. Then the sound of their voices moved on down the corridor toward the stairs, and still quarreling loudly and, on old Bayard’s part, with profane emphasis, the voices died away. Then Dr. Peabody lay back on the sofa shaped already to the bulk of him, and with random deliberation he reached a nickel thriller blindly from the stack at the head of the couch.

  4

  As they neared the bank Narcissa Benbow came along from the opposite direction, and they met at the door, where he made her a ponderous compliment on her appearance while she stood in her pale dress and shouted her grave voice into his deafness. Then he took his tilted chair, and Miss Jenny followed her into the bank and to the teller’s window. There was no one behind the grille at the moment save the bookkeeper. He looked at them briefly and covertly across his shoulder, then slid from his stool and crossed to the window, but without raising his eyes again.

  He took Narcissa’s check, and while she listened to Miss Jenny’s recapitulation of Bayard’s and Loosh Peabody’s stubborn masculine stupidity she remarked the reddish hair which clothed his arms down to the second joints of his fingers, and remarked with a faint yet distinct distaste, and a little curiosity since it was not particularly warm, the fact that his hands and arms were beaded with perspiration.

  Then she made her eyes blank again and took the notes which he pushed under the grille to her and opened her bag. From its blue satin maw the corner of an envelope and some of its superscription peeped suddenly, but she crumpled it quickly from sight and put the money in and closed the bag. They turned away, Miss Jenny still talking, and she paused at the door again, clothed in her still aura of quietness, while old Bayard twitted her heavily on imaginary affairs of the heart which furnished the sole theme of conversation between them, shouting serenely at him in return. Then she went on, surrounded by tranquillity like a visible presence or an odor or a sound.

  As long as she was in sight the bookkeeper stood at the window. His head was bent and his hand made a series of neat, meaningless figures on the pad beneath it. Then she went on and passed from sight. He moved, and in doing so he found that the pad had adhered to his damp wrist, so that when he moved his arm it came also. Then its own weight freed it and it fell to the floor.

  After the bank closed that afternoon Snopes crossed the square and entered a street and approached a square frame building with a double veranda, from which the mournful cacophony of a cheap talking-machine came upon the afternoon. He entered. The music came from the room to the right and as he passed the door he saw a man in a collarless shirt sitting in a chair with his sock feet on another chair, smoking a pipe, the evil reek of which followed him down the hall. The hall smelled of damp, harsh soap, and the linoleum carpet gleamed, still wet. He followed it and approached a sound of steady, savage activity, and came upon a woman in a shapeless gray garment, who ceased mopping and looked at him across her gray shoulder, sweeping her lank hair from her brow with a reddened forearm.

  “Evenin’, Miz Beard,” Snopes said. “Virgil come home yet?”

  “He was through here a minute ago,” she answered.

  “If he ain’t out front, I reckon his paw sent him on a arr’nd, Mr. Beard’s takin’ one of his spells in the hip agin. He might ’a’ sent Virgil on a arr’nd.” Her hair fell lankly across her face again. Again she brushed it aside with a harsh gesture. “You got some mo’ work fer him?”

  “Yessum. You don’t know which-a-way he went?”

  “Ef Mr. Beard ain’t sont him nowheres he mought be in the back yard. He don’t usually go fur away.” Again she dragged her lank hair aside; shaped so long to labor, her muscles were restive under inaction. She grasped the mop again.

  Snopes went on and stood on the kitchen steps above an enclosed space barren of grass and containing a chicken pen, also grassless, in which a few fowls huddled or moved about in forlorn distraction in the d
ust. On one hand was a small kitchen garden of orderly, tended rows. In the corner of the yard was an outhouse of some sort, of weathered boards.

  “Virgil,” he said. The yard was desolate with ghosts; ghosts of discouraged weeds, of food in the shape of empty tins, broken boxes and barrels; a pile of stove wood and a chopping block across which lay an ax whose helve had been mended with rusty wire amateurishly wound. He descended the steps and the chickens raised a discordant clamor, anticipating food.

  “Virgil.”

  Sparrows found sustenance of some sort in the dust among the fowls, but ‘the fowls themselves, perhaps with a foreknowledge of frustration and of doom, huddled back and forth along the wire, discordant and distracted, watching him with predatory, importunate eyes. He was about to turn and reenter the kitchen when the boy appeared silently and innocently from the outhouse, with his straw-colored hair and his bland eyes. His mouth was pale and almost sweet, but secretive at the corners. His chin was negligible.

  “Hi, Mr. Snopes. You calling me?”

  “Yes. If you ain’t doing anything special,” Snopes answered.

  “I ain’t,” the boy said. They entered the house and passed the room where the woman labored with drab fury. The reek of the pipe, the lugubrious reiteration of the phonograph, filled the hall, and they mounted stairs carpeted also with linoleum fastened to each step by a treacherous sheet-iron strip treated to resemble brass and scuffed and scarred by heavy feet. The upper hall was lined by two identical rows of doors. They entered one of these.

  The room contained a bed, a chair, a dressing table, and a washstand with a slop jar beside it. The floor was covered with straw matting, frayed in places. The single light hung unshaded on a greenish-brown cord. Upon the wall above the paper-filled fireplace a framed lithograph of an Indian maiden in immaculate buckskin leaned her naked bosom above a formal moonlit pool of Italian marble. She held a guitar and a rose, and dusty sparrows sat on the window ledge and watched them brightly through the dusty screen.

  The boy entered politely. His pale eyes took in the room and its contents at a comprehensive glance. He said, “That air gun ain’t come yet, has it, Mr. Snopes?”

  “No, it ain’t,” Snopes answered. “It’ll be here soon, though.”

  “You ordered off after it a long time, now.”

  “That’s right. But it’ll be here soon. Maybe they haven’t got one in stock, right now.” He crossed to the dresser and took from a drawer a few sheets of foolscap and laid them on the dresser top and drew a chair up and dragged his suitcase from beneath the bed and set it on the chair. Then he took his fountain pen from his pocket and uncapped it and laid it beside the paper. “It ought to be here any day, now.”

  The boy seated himself on the suitcase and took up the pen. “They got ’em at Watts’ hardware store,” he suggested.

  “If the one we ordered don’t come soon, we’ll git one there,” Snopes said. “When did we order it, anyway?”

  “Week ago Tuesday,” the boy answered glibly. “I wrote it down.”

  “Well, it’ll be here soon. You ready?”

  The boy squared himself before the paper. “Yes, sir.” Snopes took a folded paper from the top pocket of his trousers and spread it open.

  “Code number forty-eight. Mister Joe Butler, Saint Louis, Missouri,” he read, then he leaned over the boy’s shoulder, watching the pen. “That’s right: up close to the top,” he commended. “Now.” The boy dropped down the page about two indies, and as Snopes read, he transcribed in his neat, copybook hand, pausing only occasionally to inquire as to the spelling of a word.

  “‘I thought once I would try to forget you. But I cannot forget you because you cannot forget me. I saw my letter in your hand satchel today. Every day I can put my hand out and touch you you do not know it. Just to see you walk down the street. To know what I know what you know. Some day we will both know to gether when you got use to it. You kept my letter but you do not answer. That is a good sign you do—’” The boy had reached the foot of the page. Snopes removed it, leaving the next sheet ready. He continued to read in his droning, inflectionless voice:

  “‘—not forget me you would not keep it. I think of you at night the way you walk down the street like I was dirt. I can tell you something you will be surprised I know more than watch you walk down the street with cloths. I will someday you will not be surprised then. You pass me you do not know it I know it. You will know it someday. Because I will tell you.’ Now,” he said, and the boy dropped on to the foot of the page. “Yours truly Hal Wagner. Code number twenty four.” Again he looked over the boy’s shoulder. “That’s right.” He blotted the final sheet and gathered it up also. The boy recapped the pen and thrust the chair back, and Snopes produced a small paper bag from his coat.

  The boy took it soberly. “Much obliged, Mr. Snopes,” he said. He opened it and squinted into it. “It’s funny that air gun don’t come on.”

  “It sure is,” Snopes agreed. “I don’t know why it don’t come.”

  “Maybe it got lost in the post office,” the boy suggested. “It may have. I reckon that’s about what happened to it, I’ll write ’em again, tomorrow.”

  The boy rose, but he stood yet with his straw-colored hair and his bland, innocent face. He took a piece of candy from the sack and ate it without enthusiasm. “I reckon I better tell papa to go to the post office and ask ’em if it got lost.”

  “No, I wouldn’t do that,” Snopes said quickly. “You wait; I’ll ’tend to it. We’ll get it, all right.”

  “Papa wouldn’t mind. He could go over there soon’s he comes home and see about it. I could find him right now, and ask him to do it, I bet.”

  “He couldn’t do no good,” Snopes answered. “You leave it to me. I’ll get that gun, all right.”

  “I could tell him I been working for you,” the boy pursued. “I remember them letters.”

  “No, no, you wait and let me ’tend to it. I’ll see about it first thing tomorrow.”

  “All right, Mr. Snopes.” He ate another piece of candy, without enthusiasm. He moved toward the door. “I remember ever’ one of them letters. I bet I could sit down and write ’em all again. I bet I could. Say, Mr. Snopes, who is Hal Wagner? Does he live in Jefferson?”

  “No, no. You never seen him. He don’t hardly never come to town. That’s the reason I’m ’tending to his business for him. I’ll see about that air gun, all right.”

  The boy opened the door, then he paused again. “They got em at Watts’ hardware store. Good ones. I’d sure like to have one of ’em. Yes, sir, I sure would.”

  “Sure, sure,” Snopes repeated. “Ourn’ll be here tomorrow. You just wait; I’ll see you git that gun.”

  The boy departed. Snopes locked the door, and for a while he stood beside it with his head bent, his hands slowly knotting and writhing together. Then he took up the folded sheet and burned it over the hearth and ground the carbonized ash to dust under his heel. With his knife he cut the address from the top of the first sheet and the signature from the bottom of the second, and folded them and inserted them in a cheap envelope. He sealed this and stamped it, and took out his pen and with his left hand he addressed the envelope in labored printed characters. That night he took it to the station and mailed it on the train.

  The next afternoon Virgil Beard killed a mockingbird. It was singing in the peach tree that grew in the corner of the chicken yard.

  5

  At times, as Simon puttered about the place during the day, he could look out across the lot and into the pasture and see the carriage horses growing daily shabbier and less prideful with idleness and lack of their daily grooming, or he would pass the carriage motionless in its shed, its tongue propped at an accusing angle, and in the harness room the duster and the top hat gathered slow dust on the nail in the wall, holding too in their mute waiting a patient and questioning uncomplaint. And at tim
es, when he stood shabby and stooped a little with stubborn bewilderment and age, on the veranda with its ancient roses and wistaria and all its spacious and steadfast serenity, and watched Sartorises come and go in a machine a gentleman of his day would have scorned and which any pauper could own and any fool would ride in, it seemed to him that John Sartoris stood beside him, with his bearded and hawklike face and an expression of haughty and fine contempt.

  And as he stood so, with afternoon slanting athwart the southern end of the porch and the heady and myriad odors of the waxing spring and the drowsy humming of insects and the singing of birds steady upon it, Isom within the cool doorway or at the corner of the house would hear his grandfather mumbling in a monotonous sing-song in which was incomprehension and petulance and querulousness; and Isom would withdraw to the kitchen where his mother with her placid yellow face and her endless crooning labored steadily.

  “Pappy out dar talkin’ to Ole Marster again,” Isom told her. “Gimme dem cole ’taters, mammy.”

  “Ain’t Miss Jenny got some work fer you dis evenin’?” Elnora demanded, giving him the potatoes.

  “No’m. She gone off in de cyar again.”

  “Hit’s de Lawd’s blessin’ you and her ain’t bofe gone in it, like you is whenever Mist’ Bayard’ll let you. You git on outen my kitchen, now. I got dis flo’ mopped and I don’t want it tracked up.”

  Quite often these days Isom could hear his grandfather talking to John Sartoris as he labored about the stable or the flower beds or the lawn, mumbling away to that arrogant shade which dominated the house and the life that went on there and the whole scene itself, across which the railroad he had built ran punily with distance. But distinct with miniature verisimilitude, as though it were a stage set for the diversion of him whose stubborn dream, flouting him so deviously and cunningly while the dream was impure, had shaped itself fine and clear, now that the dreamer was purged of the grossness of pride with that of flesh.