Flags in the Dust Read online

  “He went to’ds de back, ma’am.” The negro opened the door and slid his legs, clad in army o.d. and linoleum putties, to the ground. “I’ll go git him.”

  “Thank you. Well, thank the Lord that’s over,” she added. “It’s too bad folks haven’t the sense or courage to send out invitations, then shut up the house and go away. All the fun of parties is in dressing and getting there, I think.” Ladies came in steady shrill groups down the walk and got into various cars or departed on foot with bright, not-quite-musical calls to one another. The northward-swinging sun was down beyond Belle’s house, and in the shadow of the house the soft silken shades of the women’s clothes were hushed delicately until the wearers reached the edge of the shadow and passed into a level spotlight of sun, where they became delicately brilliant as the plumage of paroquets. Narcissa Benbow wore gray and her eyes were violet, and in her face was that serene repose of lilies.

  “Not children’s parties,” she protested.

  “I’m talking about parties, not about having a goodtime,” Miss Jenny retorted. “Speaking of children: What’s the news from Horace?”

  “Oh, hadn’t I told you?” the other said quickly. “I had a wire yesterday. He landed in New York Wednesday. It was such a mixed-up sort of message, I never could understand what he was trying to tell me, except that he would have to stay in New York for a few days. It was over fifty words long.”

  “Was it a straight message?” Miss Jenny asked, and when the other said Yes, she added: ‘‘Horace must have got rich, like the soldiers say all the Y.M.C.A, did. If it has taught a man like him to make money, the war was a pretty good thing, after all.”

  “Miss Jenny! How can you talk that way, after John’s—after—“

  “Fiddlesticks,” Miss Jenny said. “The war just gave John a good excuse to get himself killed. If it hadn’t been that, it would have been some other way that would have been a bother to everybody around.”

  “Miss Jenny!”

  “I know, my dear. I’ve lived with these bullheaded Sartorises for eighty years, and I’ll never give a single ghost of ‘em the satisfaction of shedding a tear over him. What did Horace’s message say?”

  “It was about something he was bringing home with him” the other answered, and her serene face filled with a sort of fond exasperation. “It was such an incoherent message...Horace never could say anything clearly from a distance.” She mused again, gazing down the street with its tunnel of oaks and elms through which sunlight fell in spaced tiger bars. “Do you suppose he could have adopted a war-orphan?”

  “War-orphan,” repeated Miss Jenny. “More likely it’s some war-orphan’s mamma.” Simon appeared at the corner of the house, wiping his mouth on the back of his hand, and came with shuffling celerity across the lawn. His cigar was not in view.

  “No,” the other said quickly, with grave concern. “You don’t believe he would have done that? No, no, he wouldn’t have. Horace wouldn’t have done that. He never does anything without telling me about it first He would have written: I know he would. You really don’t think that sounds like Horace, do you?”

  “Humph,” Miss Jenny said through her high-bridged Norman nose, “an innocent like Horace straying with that trusting air of his among all those man-starved European wimmen? He wouldn’t know it himself, until it was too late; especially in a foreign language. I bet in every town he was in over seven days his landlady or someone was keeping his supper warm on the stove when he was late, or holding sugar out on the other men to sweeten his coffee with. Horace was born to have some woman making a doormat of herself for him, just as some men are born cuckolded...How old are you?”

  “I’m still twenty-six, Miss Jenny,” the younger woman replied equably. Simon unhitched the team and stood at the carriage step in his Miss Jenny attitude. It differed from the bank one; in place of that leashed military imminence, it was now a gallant and slightly patronizing deference. Miss Jenny gazed at the still serenity of the younger woman’s face.

  “Why don’t you get married, and let that baby look after himself for a while? Mark my words, it won’t be six weeks before some other woman will be falling all over herself for the privilege of keeping his feet dry, and he won’t even miss you.”

  “I promised mother,” the other replied quietly and without offense...“I don’t see why he couldn’t have sent an intelligible message.”

  “Well,” Miss Jenny turned to her carriage, “Maybe it’s only an orphan, after all,” she said with comfortless reassurance.

  “I’ll know soon, anyway,” the other agreed, and she crossed to a small car at the curb and opened the door. Miss Jenny mounted with Simon’s assistance, and Simon got in and gathered up the reins.

  “Let us know when he does get home,” she called as the carriage moved forward. “Drive out and get some more jasmine when you want it.”

  “Thank you. Goodbye.”

  “All right, Simon.” The carriage moved on again, and again Simon waited until they were out of town to impart his news.

  “Mist’ Bayard done come home,” he remarked, in his former conversational tone.

  “Where is he?” Miss Jenny demanded immediately;

  “He ain’t come out home yit,” Simon answered. “I ‘speck he went to de graveyard.”

  “Fiddlesticks!” Miss Jenny snapped. “No Sartoris ever goes to the cemetery but one time…Does Colonel know he’s home?”

  “Yessum, I tole him, but he don’t ack like he believed I wuz tellin’ him de troof.”

  “You mean, nobody’s seen him but you?”

  “I ain’t seed him neither,” Simon disclaimed. “Section han’ seed him jump off de train and tole me—”

  “You damn fool nigger!” Miss Jenny stormed. “And you went and blurted a fool thing like that to Bayard? Haven’t you got any more sense than that?”

  “Section han’ seed him,” Simon repeated stubbornly. “I reckon he knowed Mist’ Bayard when he seed him.”

  “Well, where is he, then?”

  “He mought have gone out to de graveyard,” Simon suggested.

  “Drive on!” Miss Jenny said sharply.

  Miss Jenny found her nephew sitting with two bird-dogs in his library. The room was lined with bookcases containing rows of heavy legal tomes bound in dun calf and emanating an atmosphere of dusty and undisturbed meditation, and a miscellany of fiction of the historical-romantic school (all Dumas was there, and the steady progression of the volumes now constituted Bayard Sartoris’ entire reading, and one volume lay always on the night-table beside his bed) and a collection of indiscriminate objects—small packets of seed, old rusted spurs and bits and harness buckles, brochures on animal and vegetable diseases, ornate tobacco containers which people had given him oh various occasions and which he had never used, inexplicable bits of rock and desiccated roots and grain pods—all collected one at a time and for reasons which had long since escaped his mind, yet preserved just the same. The room contained an enormous closet with a padlocked door, and a big table littered with yet other casual objects, and a locked roll-top desk (keys and locks were an obsession with him) and a divan and three big leather chairs. This room was always referred to as the office, and Bayard Sartoris now sat in it with his hat on and still wearing his riding-boots, transferring bourbon whisky from a small compact keg to a silver-stoppered decanter while the two dogs watched him with majestic gravity.

  One of the dogs was quite old and nearly blind. It spent most of the day lying in the sun in the backyard, or during the hot summer days, in the cool dusty obscurity beneath the kitchen floor. But toward the middle of the afternoon it went to the front of the house and waited there quietly until it heard the carriage coming up the drive, and when Bayard Sartoris had descended and passed into the house it returned to the back and waited again until Isom led the mare up to the back porch and Bayard Sartoris came out and mounted. Then together they spent the afternoon going quietly and unhurriedly about the grazing meadows and the planting or harv
esting fields and the peaceful woodlands in their dreaming seasonal mutations—the man on his horse and the ticked setter gravely beside him, while the descending evening of their fives drew toward its peaceful close upon the kind land that had bred them both. The other dog was a two-year-old; his net was too hasty for the sedateness of their society overlong, and though at times he set forth with them or came quartering up, splashed and eager, from somewhere to join them in mid procession, he never remained very long but must presently dash away with lolling tongue and the tense delicate feathering of his tail in pursuit of the maddening elusive smells with which the world surrounded him and tempted him from beyond every thicket and copse and ravine,

  Bayard Sartoris1 boots were wet to the tops and the soles were rimmed with mud, and he bent in intense preoccupation above his keg and bottle under the sober curiosity of the two dogs. The keg was propped in another chair with the bung upward and he was siphoning the rich liquor delicately into the decanter through a slender rubber tube. Miss Jenny came straight through the house and, entered the library with her black bonnet still perched on the exact top of her trim white head, and the two dogs looked up at her, the older with grave dignity, the younger one more quickly, tapping his tail on the floor with fawning diffidence. But Bayard Sartoris did not raise his head. Miss Jenny closed the door and gazed coldly at his boots.

  “Your feet are wet,” she stated. Still he didn’t look up, but held the tube delicately in the bottle-neck, watching the clear brown liquor mount steadily in the decanter. At times Bayard Sartoris’ deafness was very convenient, more convenient than actual, perhaps; but who could know this certainly? “You go upstairs and get those boots off,” Miss Jenny commanded, coming into the room. “I’ll fill the decanter.”

  But within the walled serene tower of his deafness his rapt imperturbability did not falter until the decanter was full and he pinched the tube shut and raised it to drain back into the keg. The older dog sat gravely before him, but the younger one had retreated beyond him, where it lay motionless and alert, its head on its crossed forepaws, watching Miss Jenny with one melting unwinking eye. Bayard Sartoris drew the tube from the keg and looked at his aunt for the first time. “What did you say?”

  But Miss Jenny had returned and opened the door again and she shouted into the hall, eliciting an alarmed response from the kitchen, followed presently by Simon in the flesh. “Go up and get Colonel’s slippers,” she directed. When she turned into the room again neither her nephew nor the keg was visible, but from the open closet door there protruded the young dog’s interested hind quarters and the tense feathering of his barometric tail; then Bayard Sartoris thrust, the dog out of the closet with his foot and emerged himself and locked the door behind him.

  “Has Simon come in yet?” he asked.

  “He’s coming right now,” she answered. “I just called him. Sit down and get those wet boots off,” At that moment Simon entered, with the slippers, and Bayard Sartoris sat obediently; and Simon knelt and drew his boots off under Miss Jenny’s martinet eye. “Are his socks dry?” she asked.

  “No’m, dey ain’t wet,” Simon answered. But she bent and felt them herself.

  “Here,” said her nephew testily, but Miss Jenny ran her hand over both his feet with bland imperturbability.

  “Precious little fault of his, that they ain’t,” she said across the topless wall of his deafness. “And then you have to come along with that fool yarn of yours about Mr. Bayard.”

  “Section han’ seed him,” Simon repeated stubbornly, thrusting the slippers onto Bayard Sartoris’ feet. “I ain’t never said I seed him.” He stood up and rubbed his hands on his thighs.

  Bayard Sartoris stomped his feet into the slippers. “Bring the toddy fixings Simon.” Then to his aunt, in a casual tone: “Simon says Bayard got off the train this afternoon.” But Miss Jenny was storming at Simon again.

  “Come back here and get these boots and set ‘em behind the stove,” she added. Simon returned and sidled swiftly to the hearth and gathered up the boots. “And take these dogs out of here, too,” she said. “Thank the Lord Bayard hasn’t thought about bringing his horse in here, too.” Immediately the old dog came to his feet, and followed by the younger one’s diffident alacrity, departed with that same assumed deliberation with which both Bayard Sartoris and Simon obeyed Miss Jenny’s implacable will.

  “Simon says—” Bayard Sartoris repeated.

  “Simon says fiddlesticks!” Miss Jenny snapped. “Have you lived with Simon sixty years without learning that he don’t know the truth when he sees it?” And she followed Simon from the room and on to the kitchen, and while Simon’s tall yellow daughter bent over her biscuit-board and Simon filled a glass pitcher with fresh water and sliced lemons and set them and a sugar bowl and two tall glasses on a tray, Miss Jenny stood in the doorway and curled what remained of Simon’s grizzled hair to tighter kinks yet. She had a fine command of language at all times, but when her ire was aroused she soared without effort to sublime heights. Hers was a forceful clarity and a colorful simplicity which Demosthenes would have envied and that even mules comprehended and of whose intent the most obtuse persons remained not long unawares; and beneath it Simon’s head bobbed lower and lower and the fine assumption of detached preoccupation moulted like feathers from about his defenseless self, until he caught up the tray and ducked from the room. Miss Jenny’s voice followed him, descending easily with a sweeping comprehensiveness that included a warning and a suggestion for future conduct for Simon and Elnora, and all their descendants actual and problematical, for some years.

  “And the next time,” Miss Jenny finished, “you or any section hand or brakeman or delivery boy either sees or hears anything you think will be of interest to Colonel you tell me about it first: I’ll do all the telling after that.” She gave Elnora another glare for good measure and returned to the library, where her nephew was stirring sugar and water carefully in the two glasses.

  Simon in a white jacket officiated as butler—doubled in brass, you might say, only it was not brass, but silver so fine that some of the spoon handles were worn now almost to paper thinness where fingers in their generations had held them; silver which Simon’s grandfather Joby had buried on a time beneath the ammoniac bam floor while Simon, aged three in a single filthy garment, had looked on with a child’s grave interest in the curious game.

  An effluvium of his primary calling dung about him always, even when he was swept and garnished for church and a little shapeless in a discarded Prince Albert coat of Bayard Sartoris’; and his every advent into the dining room with dishes brought with him, and the easy attitudes into which he fell near the buffet while answering Miss Jenny’s abrupt questions or while pursuing some fragmentary conversation which he and Bayard Sartoris had been engaged in earlier in the day disseminated, and his exits left behind him a faint nostalgia of the stables. But tonight he brought dishes in and set them down and scuttled immediately back to the kitchen: Simon realized that again he had talked too much.

  Miss Jenny, with a shawl of white wool about her shoulders against the evening’s coolness, was doing the talking tonight, immersing herself and her nephew in a wealth of trivialities—petty doings and sayings and gossip—a behavior which was not like Miss Jenny at all. She had opinions, and a pithy, savagely humorous way of putting them into, words, but it was very seldom that she descended to gossip. Meanwhile Bayard Sartoris had-shut himself up in that walled tower of his deafness and raised the drawbridge and clashed the portcullis to, where you never knew whether he heard you or no, while his corporeal self ate his supper steadily. Presently they had done and Miss Jenny rang the little silver bell beside her and Simon opened the door and received again the cold broadside of her glare, and shut the door and lurked behind it until they had left the room.

  Bayard Sartoris lit his cigar in the library and Miss Jenny followed him there and drew her chair up to the table beneath the lamp and opened the daily Memphis newspaper. She enjoyed humanity in
its more colorful mutations, preferring lively romance to the most impeccable of dun fact, so she took in the more lurid afternoon paper even though it was yesterday’s when it reached her, and read with cold avidity accounts of arson and murder and violent dissolution and adultery; in good time and soon the American scene was to supply her with diversion in the form of bootleggers’ wars, but this was not yet. Her nephew sat without the mellow downward pool of the lamp, with his feet braced against the corner of the hearth from which his boot-soles and the boot-soles of John Sartoris before him had long since worn the varnish away, puffing his cigar. He was not reading, and at intervals Miss Jenny glanced above her glasses and across the top of the paper toward him. Then she read again, and there was no sound in the room save the sporadic rustling of the page.

  Presently he rose, with one of his sudden plunging movements, and Miss Jenny watched him while he crossed the room and passed through the door and banged it to behind him. She read on for a while longer, but her attention had followed the heavy tramp of his feet up the hall, and when this ceased she rose and laid the paper aside and followed him to the front door.

  The moon had gotten up beyond the dark eastern wall of the hills and it lay without emphasis upon the valley, mounting like a child’s balloon through the oaks and locusts along the drive. Bayard Sartoris sat with his feet on the veranda rail, in the moonlight His cigar glowed at spaced intervals, and a shrill monotone of crickets rose from the immediate grass, and further away, from among the trees, a fairy-like piping of young frogs like endless silver small bubbles rising, and a thin sourceless odor of locust drifted up intangible as fading tobacco-wraiths, and from the rear of the house, up the dark ball, Elnora’s voice floated in meaningless minor suspense.

  Miss Jenny turned aside just within the door and groped about the yawning lesser obscurity of the mirror until she found her nephew’s felt hat, and she carried it out to him and put it in his hand. “Don’t sit out here too long, now. It ain’t summer yet.”