Sartoris Read online

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

  “I ain’t seed ’im neither,” Simon disclaimed. “Section han’ seed ’im 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 ’im,” Simon repeated stubbornly. “I reckon he knowed Mist’ Bayard when he seed ’im.”

  “Well, where is he, then?”

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

  “Drive on!”

  Miss Jenny found her nephew with two bird dogs in his office. 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’s 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 on various occasions and anniversaries 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 memory, yet preserved just the same. The room contained an enormous closet with a padlocked door, and a big table littered with yet more casual objects, and a locked roll-top desk (keys and locks were an obsession with him), and a sofa and three big leather chairs. This room was always referred to as the office, and Bayard now sat here with his hat on and still in his riding boots, transferring bourbon whisky from a small rotund 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 day, in the cool dusty obscurity beneath the kitchen. But toward the middle of the afternoon it went around to the front and waited there quietly and gravely until the carriage came up the drive; and when Bayard had descended and entered the house it returned to the back and waited again until Isom led the mare up and Bayard came out and mounted. Then together they spent the afternoon going quietly and unhurriedly about the meadows and fields and woods in their seasonal mutations—the man on his horse and the ticked setter gravely beside him, while the descending evening of their lives drew toward its peaceful close upon the kind land that had bred them both.

  The young dog was not yet two years 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 midfield, it was not for long, and soon he must dash away with his tongue flapping 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 every thicket and copse and ravine.

  Bayard’s boots were wet to the tops and the sales were caked with mud, and he bent with intent preoccupation over his keg and bottle under the sober curiosity of the dogs. The keg was propped bung-upward in a second chair and he was siphoning the rich brown liquor delicately into the decanter by means of a rubber tube. Miss Jenny entered with her black bonnet still perched on the exact top of her trim white head and the dogs looked up at her, the older with grave dignity, the younger more quickly, tapping his tail on the floor with fawning diffidence. But Bayard didn’t raise his head. Miss Jenny closed the door and stared 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 while the liquor mounted steadily in the decanter. At times his deafness was very convenient, more convenient than actual, perhaps; but who could know certainly? “You go upstairs and get those boots off,” Miss Jenny commanded, raising her voice; “I’ll fill the decanter.”

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

  But Miss Jenny returned to the door and opened it and 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 Bayard nor the keg was visible, but from the open closet door there protruded the young dog’s interested hindquarters and the tense feathering of his barometric tail; then Bayard 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 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 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,” Bayard said testily, but Miss Jenny ran her hand over both his feet with brusque imperturbability.

  “Precious little fault of his if 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.”

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

  Bayard stamped into the slippers: “Bring the toddy fixings, Simon. Then to his aunt, in a tone which he contrived to make casual. “Simon says Bayard got off the team this afternoon. But Miss Jenny was storming at Simon again.

  “Come back here and get these boots and set ’em behind the stove,” she said. Simon returned and sidled swiftly to the hearth and gathered up the boots. “And take these dogs out of here, too,” she added. “Thank the Lord he hasn’t thought about bringing his horse in with him.” 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 and Simon obeyed Miss Jenny’s brisk implacability.

  “Simon says—” Bayard 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 Simon’s grizzled remaining hair into 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 and a bold use of metaphor that Demosthenes would have envied and which even mules comprehended and of whose intent the most obtuse persons remained not long in doubt; and beneath it Simon’s head bobbed lower and lower and the fine assumption of detached preoccupation moulted like feathers from about him, 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,” she concluded, “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 office, 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 and soft that some of the spoons 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 barn 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 clung about him always, however, even when he was swept and garnished for church and a little shapeless in a discarded Prince Albert coat of Bayard’s; and his every advent into the dining room with dishes brought with him, and the easy attitudes into which he fell near the sideboard while answering Miss Jenny’s abrupt questions or while pursuing some fragmentary conversation which he and Bayard 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 the 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 stating them, but it was very seldom that she descended to gossip. Meanwhile Bayard 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 not, while his corporeal self ate its supper steadily. Presently they had done, and Miss Jenny rang the little silver bell at her hand and Simon opened the pantry door and received again the cold broadside of her displeasure, and shut the door and lurked behind it until they had left the room.

  Bayard lit his cigar in the office and Miss Jenny followed him there and drew her chair 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 furnish her with diversion in the form of bootleggers’ wars, but this was not yet. Her nephew sat beyond the mellow downward pool of the lamp, 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 at him. Then she read again, and. there was no sound in the room save the sporadic rustling of the page.

  After a time he rose, with one of his characteristic plunging movements, and she watched him as he crossed the room and passed through the door and banged it 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 got up beyond the dark eastern wall of hills and it lay without emphasis upon the valley, mounting like a child’s balloon behind the oaks and locusts along the drive. Bayard 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. A thin, sourceless odor of locust drifted up, intangible as fading tobaccco-wraiths, and from the rear of the house, up the dark hall, Elnora’s voice floated in meaningless minor suspense.

  Miss Jenny groped in the darkness beside the door, and from beside the yawning lesser obscurity of the mirror she took Bayard’s hat from the hook and carried it out to him and put it in his hand. “Don’t sit out here too long, now. It ain’t summer yet.”

  He grunted indistinguishably, but he put the hat on and she turned and went back to the office, and finished the paper and folded it and laid it on the table. She snapped the light off and mounted the dark stairs to her room. The moon shone above the trees at this height and fell in broad silver bars through the eastern windows.

  Before turning on the light she crossed to the southern wall and raised a window there, upon the crickets and frogs and somewhere a mockingbird. Outside the window was a magnolia tree, but it was not in bloom yet, nor had the honeysuckle massed along the garden fence flowered. But this would be soon, and from here she could overlook the garden, could look down upon Cape jasmine and syringa and callacanthus where the moon lay upon their bronze and yet unflowered sleep, and upon other shoots and graftings from the far-away Carolina gardens she had known as a girl.

  Just beyond the corner, from the invisible kitchen, Elnora’s voice welled in mellow, falling suspense. “All folks talkin’ ’bout heaven ain’t gwine dar,” Elnora sang, and presently she and Simon emerged into the moonlight and took the path to Simon’s cabin below the barn. Simon had fired his cigar at last, and the evil smoke of it trailed behind him, fading. But when they had gone the rank pungency of it seemed still to linger within the sound of the crickets and of the frogs upon the silver air, mingled and blended inextricably with the dying fall of Elnora’s voice: “All folks talkin’ ’bout heaven ain’t gwine dar.”

  His cigar was cold, and he moved and dug a match from his waistcoat and relit it and braced his feet again upon the railing, and again the drifting sharpness of tobacco lay along the windless currents of the silver air, straying and fading slowly with locust-breaths and the ceaseless fairy reiteration of crickets and frogs. There was a mockingbird somewhere down the valley, and after a while another sang from the magnolia at the corner of the garden fence. An automobile passed along the smooth valley road, slowed for the railway crossing, then sped on. Before the sound of it had died away the whistle of the nine-thirty train drifted down from the hills.

  Two long blasts with dissolving echoes, two short following ones, but before it came in sight his cigar was cold again and he sat holding it in his fingers and watched the locomotive drag its string of yellow windows up the valley and into the hills once more, where after a time it whistled again, arrogant and resonant and sad. John Sartoris had sat so on this veranda and watched his two daily trains emerge from the hills and cross the valley into the hills, with lights and smoke and a noisy simulation of speed. But now the railway belonged to a syndicate and there were more than two trains on it that ran from Lake Michigan to the Gulf of Mexico, completing his dream, while John Sartoris slept among marital cherubim and the useless vainglory of whatever God he did not scorn to recognize.

  Old Bayard’s cigar was cold again. He sat with it dead in his fingers and watched a tall shape emerge from the lilac bushes beside the garden fence and cross the patchy moonlight toward the veranda. His grandson wore no hat and he came on and mounted the steps and stood with the moonlight bringing the hawklike planes of his face into high relief while his grandfather sat with his dead cigar and looked at him.

  “Bayard, son?” old Bayard said. Young Bayard stood in the moonlight. His eye sockets were cavernous shadows.

  “I tried to keep him from going up there on that goddam little popgun,” he said at last with brooding savageness. Then he moved again and old Bayard lowered his feet, but his grandson only dragged a chair violently up beside him and flung himself into it. His motions were abrupt also, like his grandfather’s, but controlled and flowing for all their violence.

  “Why in hell didn’t you let me know you were coming?” old Bayard demanded. “What do you mean, straggling in here like this?”

  “I di
dn’t let anybody know.” Young Bayard dug a cigarette from his pocket and raked a match on his shoe.

  “What?”

  “I didn’t tell anybody I was coming,” he repeated above the cupped match, raising his voice.

  “Simon knew it. Do you inform nigger servants of your movements instead of your own granddaddy?”

  “Damn Simon, sir,” young Bayard shouted. “Who set him to watching me?”

  “Don’t yell at me, boy,” old Bayard shouted in turn. His grandson flung the match away and drew at the cigarette in deep, troubled draughts. “Don’t wake Jenny,” old Bayard added more mildly, striking a match to his cold cigar. “All right, are you?”

  “Here,” young Bayard said, extending his hand, “let me hold it. You’re going to set your mustache on fire.” But old Bayard repulsed him sharply and sucked stubbornly and impotently at the match in his unsteady fingers.

  “I said, are you all right?” he repeated.

  “Why not?” young Bayard snapped. “Takes damn near as big a fool to get hurt in a war as it does in peacetime. Damn fool, that’s what it is.” He drew at the cigarette again, then he hurled it, not half consumed, after the match. “There was one I had to lay for four days to catch. Had to get Sibleigh in an old crate of an Ak. W. to suck him in for me. Wouldn’t look at anything but cold meat, him and his skull and bones. Well, he got it. Stayed on him for six thousand feet, put a whole belt right into his cockpit. You could ’a’ covered ’em all with your hat. But the bastard just wouldn’t burn.” His voice rose again as he talked on. Locust drifted up in sweet gusts, and the crickets and frogs were clear and monotonous as pipes blown drowsily by an idiot boy. From her silver casement the moon looked down upon the valley dissolving in opaline tranquillity into the serene mysterious infinitude of the hills, and young Bayard’s voice went on and on, recounting violence and speed and death.