Flags in the Dust Read online

  As long as she was in sight at the door, the bookkeeper stood where she had left him. His head was bent and his hand made a series of neat, meaningless figures on the pad beneath it, until she moved again and went on out of sight. Then he moved, and in doing so he found that the pad had adhered to his sweating wrist, so that when he removed his arm it came away also, then its own weight freed it and it dropped to the floor.

  He finished the forenoon stooped on his high stool at his high desk beneath the green-shaded light, penning his neat figures into ledgers and writing words into them in the flowing Spencerian hand he had been taught in a Memphis business college. At times he slid from the stool and crossed to the window with his covert evasive eyes and served a client, then returned to his stool and picked up his pen. The cashier, a rotund man with bristling hair and lapping jowls like a Berkshire hog, returned presently, accompanied by a director, who followed him inside the grille. They ordered Coca-Colas from a neighboring drug store by telephone and stood talking until the refreshment arrived by negro boy. Snopes had been included and he descended again and took his glass. The other two sipped theirs; he spooned the ice from his into a spittoon and emptied it at a draught and replaced the glass on the tray and spoke a general and ignored thanks in his sober country idiom and returned to his desk.

  Noon came. Old Bayard rose crashing from his tilted chair and stalked back to his office, where he would eat his frugal cold lunch and then sleep for an hour, and banged the door behind him. The cashier took his hat and departed also: for an hour Snopes would have the bank to himself. Outside the square lay motionless beneath noon; the dinnerward exodus of lawyers and merchants and clerks did not disturb its atmosphere of abiding and timeless fixation; in the elms surrounding the courthouse no leaf stirred in the May sunlight. Across the bank windows an occasional shadow passed, but none turned into the door, and presently the square was motionless as a theatre drop.

  Snopes drew a sheet of paper from a drawer and laid it beneath the light and wrote slowly upon it, pausing at intervals, drawing his pen through a sentence or a word, writing again. Someone entered; without looking up he slid the paper beneath a ledger, crossed to the window and served the customer, returned and wrote again. The clock on the wall ticked into the silence and into the slow, mouse-like scratching of the pen. The pen ceased at last, but the clock ticked on like a measured dropping of small shot.

  He re-read the first draught, slowly. Then he drew out a second sheet and made a careful copy. When this was done he re-read it also, comparing the two; then he folded the copy again until it was a small square thickness, and stowed it away in the fob-pocket of his trousers. The original he carried across to the cuspidor, and holding it above the receptacle he struck a match to it and held it in his fingers until the final moment. Then he dropped it into the spittoon and when it was completely consumed, he crushed the charred thing to powder. Quarter to one. He returned to his stool and opened his ledgers again.

  At one the cashier with a toothpick appeared at the door talking to someone, then he entered and went to old Bayard’s office and opened the door. “One o’clock, Colonel,” he shouted into the room, and old Bayard’s heels thumped heavily on the floor. As the Snopes took his hat and emerged from the grille old Bayard stalked forth again and tramped on ahead and took the tilted chair in the doorway.

  There is in Jefferson a boarding house known as the Beard hotel It is a rectangular frame building with a double veranda, just off the square, and it is conducted theoretically by a countryman, but in reality by his wife. Beard is a mild, bleached man of indeterminate age and of less than medium size, dressed always in a collarless shirt and a black evil pipe. He also owns the grist mill near the square, and he may be found either at the mill, or on the outskirts of the checker-game in the courthouse yard, or sitting in his stocking feet on the veranda of his hostelry, He is supposed to suffer from some obscure ailment puzzling to physicians, which prevents, him exerting himself physically. His wife is a woman in a soiled apron, with straggling, damp grayish hair and an air of spent but indomitable capability. They have one son, a pale, quiet boy of twelve or so, who is always on the monthly honor roll at school; he may be seen on spring mornings schoolward bound with a bouquet of flowers. His rating among his contemporaries is not high.

  Men only patronize the Beard hotel. Itinerant horse- and cattle-traders; countrymen in town overnight during court or the holiday season or arrested perhaps by inclement weather, stop there; and juries during court week—twelve good men and true marching in or out in column of twos, or aligned in chairs and spitting across the veranda rail with solemn and awesome decorum; and two of the town young bloods keep a room there, in which it is rumored dice and cards progress Sundays and drinking is done. But no women. If a skirt (other than Mrs. Beard’s gray apron) so much as flashes in the vicinity of its celibate portals, the city fathers investigate immediately, and woe to the peripatetic Semiramis if she be run to earth. Here, in company with a number of other bachelors—clerks, mechanics and such— the book-keeper Snopes lives.

  And here he repaired when the bank day was finished. The afternoon was a replica of the morning. Then at three o’clock the green shades were drawn upon door and windows, and Snopes and the cashier went about striking a daily balance. At 3:30 young Bayard arrived in his car and old Bayard stalked forth and got in it and was driven away. Presently thereafter the janitor, an ancient, practically incapacitated negro called Doctor Jones, came in and doddered futilely with a broom. By 4:30 he was done, and the cashier locked the vault and switched on the light above it, and he and the book-keeper emerged and locked the front door, and the cashier shook it experimentally.

  Snopes crossed the square and passed through the courthouse and entered a street It was a tawdry street; lined with shabby and odorous stores. Into one of these he turned. This was a restaurant, a concrete-floored space bounded by a wooden counter polished by eating elbows and lined with a row of backless and excruciating stools, It was owned and operated by a cousin Snopes, and here he purchased fifteen cents’ worth of gaudy stale candy.

  He recrossed the square and entered the Beard hotel. The hall was empty; it smelled of damp, harsh soap, and its linoleum floor covering gleamed, still wet From the rear came the unmistakable sounds of Mrs. Beard’s ceaseless and savage activity, and he followed these sounds and she ceased mopping and looked across her gray shoulder at him, sweeping her lank hair aside with a reddened forearm.

  “Evening Miz Beard,” he said. “Virgil come home yet?’’

  “He was through here a minute ago,” she answered. “If he ain’t out front, I reckon he ain’t fur. You got some mo’ work fer him?”‘

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

  “Call him in the back yard. He don’t usually go fur away;” She dragged her dank hair aside again; shaped long to labor, her muscles were restive under inaction. She grasped the mop again.

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

  “Virgil,” he called. The yard was desolate with ghosts; ghosts of discouraged weeds, of food in the shape of tin cans, broken boxes and barrels, a pile of stove wood and a chopping block across which lay an axe whose helve had been mended with rusty wire amateurishly wound. Presently he descended into it, and the chickens remarked him and raised a discordant clamor, anticipating food, doubtless.

  “Virgil.”

  Sparrows found sustenance of some sort in the dust among the fowls, but the fowls, perhaps with a foreknowledge 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 doin’ anything special,” Snopes answered, and they reentered the house and passed the room where the boy’s mother labored with drab fury, and mounted a stairs carpeted too with linoleum fastened to each step by a treacherous sheet-iron strip treated to resemble brass and scuffed and scarred by tired or careless feet. Snopes’ room contained a bed, a chair, a dressing table and a wash-stand with a slop-jar beside it. The floor was covered with straw matting frayed in places. The single light hung unshaded from 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; nevertheless 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 the chair up and dragged his suitcase from beneath the bed and set it in the chair. Then he took a 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 inches, 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 together 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. “Our’n’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 burned the folded sheet over his hearth and ground the carbonized paper to dust under his heel With his knife he cut the fictitious address from the top of the first sheet, the signature from the bottom of the second, then he 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 it with labored printed letters. That night he took it to the station and mailed it on the train. In the meantime he stopped in at Watts’ and bought an air rifle.

  5

  At times, as Simon puttered about the place during the day, he could look out across the lot into the pasture and see the carriage horses growing daily shabbier and less prideful with idleness and the cessation of their once daily grooming, or he would pass the carriage motionless in its shed, its tongue propped at an accusing angle on the wooden mechanism he had invented for that purpose, and in the harness room the duster and tophat gathered slow dust on the nail in the wall, holding too in their mute waiting a patient and questioning uncomplaint. And at times when he stood shabby and stooped a little with stubborn bewilderment and age on the veranda with its ancient roses and wisteria and all its unchangeable 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 only a fool would ride in, it seemed to him that John Sartoris stood beside him with his bearded, hawklike face and an expression of haughty and fine contempt

  And standing so, with the afternoon slanting athwart the southern end of the porch and the heady and myriad odors of the ripening spring and the drowsy hum of insects and the singing of birds steady upon it, Isom rolling his eyes in the dark, cool doorway or near the corner of the house would hear his grandfather mumbling in a monotonous singsong in which was incomprehension and the petulant querulousness of age, and Isom would withdraw to the kitchen where his mother labored steadily with her placid yellow face and her endless crooning song.

  “Pappy out dar talkin’ ter Marse John agin,” Isom told her. “Gimme dem cole ‘taters, mammy.”

  “Ain’t Miss Jenny got some work fer you dis evenin’?” Elnora demanded, pausing to give him
the cold potatoes. “No’m. She gone off in de cyar agin.”

  “Hit’s de Lawd’s blessin’ you and her ain’t bofe out in it, like you isw henever 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 ghost which dominated the house and its occupants and the whole scene itself across which the railroad he had built ran punily with distance but distinct, 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.

  “Gent’mun equipage,” Simon mumbled. He was working again with his hoe in the salvia bed at the top of the drive. “Ridin’ in,.dat thing, wid a gent’mun’s proper equipage goin’ to rack and ruin in de barn.” He wasn’t thinking of Miss Jenny. It didn’t make much difference what women rode in, their menfolks permitting of course. They only showed off a gentleman’s equipage anyhow; they were but tie barometers of a gentleman’s establishment, the glass of his gentility: horses themselves knew that “Yo’ own son, yo’ own twin grandson ridin’ right up in yo’ face in a contraption like dat,” he continued, “and you lettin’ ‘um do it. You bad as dey is. You jes’ got ter lay down de law ter ‘um, Marse John; wid all dese foreign wars and sich de young folks is growed away fum de correck behavior; dey don’t know how ter conduck deyselfs in de gent’mun way. Whut you reckon folks gwine think when dey sees yo’ own folks ridin’ in de same kine o’ rig trash rides in? you jes’ got ter resert you’self, Marse John. Ain’t Sartorises set de quality in dis country since you wuz bawn? And now jes’ look at ‘um.”