Flags in the Dust Page 14

  It was getting well into evening. On either hand cotton and corn showed in green spears upon the rich, dark soil, and in the patches of green woodland doves called moodily. After a time Suratt turned from the highway into a faint; rutted wagon road between a field and a patch of woods and they drove straight into the sun, and Bayard held his hat before his face.

  “Sun hurt yo’ head?” Suratt asked beside him, “Taint long, now,” he added. The road wound presently into the woods where the sun was intermittent, and it rose gradually toward a low merest on which trees stood like a barred grate against the western sky. They crossed this Mil and the land fell away in ragged ill-tended fields, and beyond them in a clump of fruit trees and a grove of silver poplars pale as absinthe and twinkling ceaselessly without wind, a weathered small house squatted. Beyond it and much larger loomed a barn gray arid gaunt with age. The road forked here. One faint arm curved sandily away toward the house; the other went on between rank weeds toward the barn. The youth on the fender leaned his head into the car, “Drive on to the barn,” he directed.

  Suratt obeyed. Beyond the bordering weeds a fence straggled in limp dilapidation, and from the weeds the handles of a plow stood at a gaunt angle while its shard rusted peacefully in the undergrowth, and other implements rusted half concealed in the growth—-skeletons of labor healed over by the earth they were to have violated, kinder than they. The fence turned at an angle and Suratt stopped the car and the youth stepped down and opened a warped wooden gate and Suratt drove on into the barnyard where stood a wagon with drunken wheels and a home-made bed, and the rusting skeleton of a Ford car. Low down upon its domed and hoodless radiator the two lamps gave it an expressions beetling patient astonishment, like a skull, and a lean cow ruminated and watched them without interest.

  The barn doors sagged drunkenly from broken hinges, held to the posts with twists of baling wire; beyond, the cavern of the hallway yawned in stale desolation—a travesty of earth’s garnered fullness and its rich inferences. Bayard sat on the fender and leaned his bandaged head back against the car body and watched Suratt and the youth enter the barn and disappear slowly upward on invisible ladder rungs. The cow stood yet in ruminant dejection, and upon the yellow surface of a pond enclosed by banks of trodden and sun-cracked day beneath a clump of locust shrubs and willows, geese drifted like small muddy clouds. The sun fell in a long slant upon their rumps and their suave necks and upon the cow’s lean rhythmically twitching flank, ridging her visible ribs with dingy gold. Presently Suratt’s legs fumbled into sight, followed by his cautious body, and after him the youth with his slanted hat slid easily down the perpendicular ladder, letting his body from rung to rung in easy one-handed swoops.

  He emerged carrying an earthen jug close against his leg. Suratt followed in his neat tieless blue shirt and jerked his head at Bayard, and they turned the corner of the barn and retreated along the wall, among waist-high jimson weeds. Bayard rose and followed and overtook them as the youth with his jug slid with an agile unceasing motion between two lax strands of barbed wire. Suratt stooped through more sedately and held the top strand taut and pressed the lower one down with his foot until Bayard was through. Behind the barn the land descended into shadow toward a junglish growth of willow and elder, against which a huge beech and a clump of saplings stood like mottled ghosts, and from which a cool dankness rose like a breath to meet them. The spring welled from the roots of the beech into a wooden frame buried to the edge in white sand that quivered ceaselessly and delicately beneath the water’s limpid unrest, and strayed on away into the willow and elder growth without a sound.

  The earth about the spring was trampled smooth and packed as an earthen floor. Near the spring a blackened iron pot sat on four bricks, beneath it was a heap of pale wood ashes and a litter of extinct brands and charred fagot-ends. Against the pot leaned a scrubbing board with a ridged metal face polished to a dull even gleam like old silver, and a rusty tin cup hung from a nail in the beech tree above the spring. The youth set the jug down and he md Suratt squatted gravely beside it.

  “I don’t know if we ain’t a-goin’ to git in trouble givin’ Mr. Bayard whisky, Hub,” Suratt said “Still, Doc Peabody give him one dram hisself, so I reckon we kin give .him one mo’. Ain’t that right, Mr. Bayard?” Squatting he glanced up at Bayard with his shrewd affable face. Hub twisted the corncob stopper from the jug and passed it to Suratt, who tendered it to Bayard “I! been knowin’ Mr. Bayard ever since he was a chap in knee pants,” Suratt confided to Hub, “but this is the first time me and him ever taken a drink together. Ain’t that so, Mr. Bayard?...I reckon you’ll want a drinkin’ cup, won’t you?” But Bayard was already drinking, with the jug tinted across his horizontal forearm and the mouth held to his lips by the same hand, as it should be done. “He knows how to drink outen a jug, don’t he?” Suratt added “I knowed he was all right,” he said in a tone of confidential vindication. Bayard lowered the jug and returned it to Suratt, who offered it formally to Hub.

  “Go ahead,” Hub said “Hit it.” Suratt did so, with measured pistonings of his taut throat in relief against the brooding green of the jungle wall Above the stream gnats whirled and spun in a leveling ray of sunlight like erratic golden chaff. Suratt lowered the jug and passed it to Hub and wiped his mouth on the back of his hand

  “How you fed now, Mr. Bayard?” he asked Then he said heavily: “You’ll have to excuse me. I reckon I ought to said Captain Sartoris, oughtn’t I?”

  “What for?” Bayard asked He squatted also on hi heels, against the bole of the tree beside the limpid soundless laughing of the spring. The rising slope of ground behind them hid the barn and the house, and the three of them squatted in a small bowl of peacefulness remote from the world and its rumors, filled with the cool unceasing breathing of the spring and a seeping of sunlight among the elders and willows like a thinly diffused wine. On the surface of the spring the sky lay reflected, stippled with windless beech leaves. Hub squatted leanly with his brown forearms clasped about his knees, smoking a cigarette beneath the downward tilt of his straw hat. Suratt was across the spring from him. He wore a faded clean blue shirt, and in contrast to it his hands and face were a rich even brown, like mahogany. The jug sat rotundly, benignantly between them.

  “Yes, sir,” Suratt repeated, “I always find the best cure for a wound is plenty of whisky. Doctors, these here fancy young doctors, ‘11 tell a feller different, but old Doc Peabody hisself cut off my gran’pappy’s leg while gran’pappy laid back on the dinin’ table with a demijohn in his hand and a mattress and a chair across his laigs and fo’ men a-holdin’ him down, and him cussin’ and singin’ so scandalous the women-folks and the chillen went down to the pasture behind the barn and waited. Take some mo’,” he said, and he reached the jug across the spring and Bayard drank again. “Reckon you’re beginnin’ to feel pretty fair, ain’t you?”

  “Damned if I know,” Bayard answered. “It’s dynamite, boys.”

  Suratt with the lifted jug guffawed, then he lipped it and his Adam’s apple pumped again in arched relief against the wall of elder and willow. The elder would soon flower, with pale clumps of tiny blooms. Miss Jenny made a little wine of it every year. Good wine, if you knew how and had the patience. Elder flower wine. Like a ritual for a children’s game; a game played by little girls in small pale dresses, between supper and twilight Above the bowl where sunlight yet came in a leveling beam, gnats whirled and spun like dust-motes in a quiet disused room. Suratt’s voice went on affably, ceaselessly recapitulant, in polite admiration of the hardness of Bayard’s head and the fact that this was the first time he and Bayard had ever taken a drink together. They drank again, and Hub began to borrow cigarettes of Bayard and he became also a little profanely and robustly anecdotal in his country idiom, about whisky and girls and dice; and presently he and Suratt were arguing amicably about work. They seemed to be able to sit tirelessly and without discomfort on their heels, but Bayard’s legs had soon grown tened them, tingling with released blood, and he now sat with his back against the tree and his long legs straight before him, hearing Suratt’s voice without listening to it.

  His head was now no more than a sort of taut discomfort; at times it seemed to float away from his shoulders and hang against the wall of green like a transparent balloon within which or beyond which that face that would neither emerge completely and distinguishably nor yet fade completely away and so trouble him no longer, lingered with shadowy exasperation—two eyes round with a grave shocked astonishment, two lifted hands flashing behind little white shirt and blue pants swerving into a lifting rush plunging clatter crash blackness...

  Suratt’s slow plausible voice went on steadily, but without any irritant quality. It seemed to fit easily into the still scene, speaking of earthy things. “Way I learnt to chop cotton,” he was saying, “my oldest brother taken and put me in the same row ahead of him. Started me off, and soon’s I taken a lick or two, here he come behind me. And ever’ time my hoe chopped once I could year his’n chop twice. I never had no shoes in them days, neither,” he added drily.

  “So I had to learn to chop fast But I swo’ then, come what mought, that I wouldn’t never plant nothin’ in the ground, soon’s I could he’p myself. It’s all right for folks that owns land, but folks like my folks was don’t never own no land, and ever’ time we made a furrow, we was scratchin’ earth for somebody else” The gnats danced and whirled more madly yet in the sun above the secret places of the stream, and the sun’s light was taking on a rich copper tinge. Suratt rose. “Well, boys, I got to be gittin’ back to’ds town, myself.” He looked at Bayard again with his shrewd talkative face. “I reckon Mr. Bayard’s clean got over that knock he taken, ain’t he?”

  “Dammit,” Bayard said, “quit calling me Mr. Bayard.”

  Suratt picked up the jug. “I knowed he was all right, when you got to know him,” he said to Hub. “I been knowin’ him since he was knee-high to a grasshopper, but me and him jest ain’t been throwed together like this. I was raised a pore boy, fellers, while Mr. Bayard’s folks has lived on that ‘ere big place with plenty of money in the bank and niggers to wait on ‘em. But he’s all right,’’ he repeated. “He ain’t goin’ to say nothin’ about who give turn this here whisky.”

  “Let him tell, if he wants,” Hub answered. “I don’t give a damn.”

  They drank again. The sun was almost gone and from the secret marshy places of the stream came a fairy-like piping of young frogs. The gaunt invisible cow lowed barnward, and Hub replaced the corncob in the mouth of the jug and drove it home with his palm and they mounted the slope above the spring and crawled through the fence. The cow stood in the barn door and watched diem approach and lowed again, moody and mournful, and the geese had left the pond and they now paraded sedately across the barnyard toward the house, in the door of which, framed by two crepe-myrtle bushes, a woman stood. “Hub,” she said in a flat country voice.

  “Goin’ to town,” Hub answered shortly. “Sue’ll have to milk.”

  The woman stood quietly in the door. Hub carried the jug into the barn. The cow turned and followed him, but he heard her and turned and gave her a resounding kick in her gaunt ribs and cursed her without heat. Presently he reappeared and went on to the gate and opened it and stood so until Suratt drove through. Then he closed it and wired it to again and swung onto the fender. But Bayard moved over in the seat and Hub got inside. The woman stood yet in the door, watching them quietly. About the doorstep the geese surged erratically with discordant cries, their necks undulant and suave as formal gestures in a pantomime.

  The shadow of the poplar grove fell long across the untidy fields, and the car pushed its elongated shadow before it like the shadow of a huge hump-shouldered bird. They mounted the sandy hill in the last of the sun among the trees, and dropped downward out of sunlight and into violet dusk; The road was soundless with sand and the car lurched in the worn and shifting ruts and so out of the woods, between tilled fields again and onto the broad valley road.

  The warring moon stood overhead. As yet it gave off no light though, and they drove on toward town, passing an occasional belated country wagon homeward bound; these Suratt greeted with a grave gesture of his brown hand, and presently where the road crossed a wooden bridge among more willow and elder where dusk was yet denser and more palpable, Suratt stopped the car and climbed out over the door. “You fellers set still,” he said. “I won’t be but a minute.” They heard him at the rear of the car, then he reappeared with a tin bucket and he let himself gingerly down the rank roadside bank beside the bridge. Water chuckled and murmured beneath the bridge, invisible with twilight, its murmur burdened with the voice of cricket and frog. Above the willows that marked its course gnats still spun and whirled, for bullbats appeared from nowhere in long swoops, in mid-swoop vanished, then appeared again against the serene sky swooping, silent as drops of water on a pane of glass; swift and noiseless and intent as though their wings were feathered with twilight and with silence.

  Suratt scrambled up the bank, with his pail, and he removed the radiator cap and tilted the bucket above the mouth of it. The moon stood yet without emphasis overhead, yet a faint shadow of the bucket fell upon the hood of the car and upon the pallid planking of the bridge the leaning willow fronds were repeated, faintly but delicately distinct. The last of the water gurgled with faint rumblings into the engine’s interior and Suratt replaced the bucket and climbed over the blind door again. The lights operated from a generator; he turned these on now. While the car was in low speed the lights glared to a soundless crescendo, but when he let the clutch in they dropped to a wavering glow no more than a luminous shadow on the unrolling monotonous ribbon of the road.

  Night was an accomplished thing before they reached town. Across the unemphatic land the lights on the courthouse clock were like yellow beads suspended above the trees, on the dark horizon line, and upon the green afterglow in the west a column of smoke stood like a balanced plume. Suratt put them out at the restaurant and drove on, and they entered and the proprietor lifted his conical head and his round melting eyes from behind the soda fountain.

  “Great Savior, boy,” he exclaimed. “Ain’t you gone home yet? Doc Peabody’s been huntin’ you ever since four o’clock, and Miss Jenny drove to town in the carriage, lookin’ for you. You’ll kill yourself.”

  “Get to hell back yonder, Deacon,” Bayard answered, “and bring me and Hub about two dollars’ worth of ham and eggs.”

  Later they returned for the jug in Bayard’s car, Bayard and Hub and a third young man, freight agent at the railway station, with three negroes and a bull fiddle in the rear seat But they drove no further than the edge of the field above the house and stopped here while Hub went on afoot down the sandy weed-hedged road toward the barn in its looming silver solitude. The moon stood pale and cold overhead, and on all sides insects shrilled in the dusty undergrowth. In the rear seat the negroes murmured among themselves.

  “Fine night,” Mitch, the freight agent, suggested. But Bayard smoked his cigarette moodily, his head closely helmeted in its white bandage. Moon and insects were one, audible and visible, dimensionless and unsourced.

  After a while Hub materialized against the dissolving vagueness of the road, crowned by the silver gleam of his hat, and he swung the jug onto the door and removed the stopper. Mitch passed it to Bayard.

  “Drink,” Bayard said shortly, and Mitch did so, then the others drank.

  “We ain’t got no thin’ for the niggers to drink out of,” Hub said.

  “That’s so,” Mitch agreed. He turned in his seat, “Ain’t one of you boys got a cup or something?” The negroes murmured again, questioning one another in mellow consternation-

  “I know” Bayard said. He got out and lifted the hood and removed the cap from the breather-pipe, “It’ll taste a little like oil for a drink or two, but you boys won’t notice it after that.”

  “Naw, sub,” the negroes agreed in c
horus. One took the cup and wiped it out with the corner of his coat, and they top drank in turn, with smacking expulsions of breath. Then Bayard replaced the cap and go t into his seat.

  “Anybody want another right now?” Hub asked, poising the corncob above the jug mouth.

  “Give Mitch another,” Bayard directed. “He’ll have to catch up.’’

  Mitch drank again briefly. Then Bayard took the jug and tilted it The others watched him respectfully.

  “Dam’f he don’t drink it,” Mitch murmured. “I’d be afraid to hit it so often, if I was you.”

  “It’s my damned head.” Bayard lowered the jug and passed it to Hub. “I keep thinking another drink will ease it off some.”

  “Doc put that bandage on too tight,” Hub said. “You want it loosened a little?”

  “I don’t know.” Bayard lit another cigarette and threw the match away. “I believe I’ll take it off. It’s been on there long enough.” He raised his hands and fumbled at the bandage.

  “You better let it alone,” Mitch said. But Bayard fumbled at the fastening, then he slid his fingers beneath a turn of the cloth and tugged at it savagely.

  One of the negroes leaned forward with a pocket knife and severed it, and they watched quietly while Bayard stripped it off and flung it away.

  “You ought not to done that,” Mitch told him.

  “Ah, let him take it off, if he wants,” Hub said. “He’s all right.” He got in and stowed the jug away between his knees. Bayard backed the car around. The sandy road hissed beneath its broad tires and rose shaling into the woods again where the dappled moonlight was intermittent, treacherous with dissolving vistas of shadow and formless growth. Invisible and sourceless among the shifting patterns of light and shade whip-poor-wills were like flutes tongued liquidly. The road passed out of the woods and descended, with sand in shifting and silent lurches, and they emerged between fields flattening away to the straight valley road and turned onto it and away from town,