Flags in the Dust Page 5

  He grunted indistinguishably, but he put the hat on and she turned away and went back to the library 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 it fell in broad silver bars through the eastern windows:

  Before turning up the light she crossed to the southern wall and raised a window there, upon the crickets and frogs and somewhere a mockingbird. Outside this window was a magnolia tree, but it was not to 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 calycanthus where the moon lay upon their bronze and yet unflowered sleep, and upon those other shoots and graftings from Carolina and Virginian gardens she had known as a girl.

  Just beyond the corner from this window the kitchen lay, and Elnora’s voice welled in mellow falling suspense. All folks talkin’ ‘bout heaven ain’t gwine dere Elnora sang, and presently she and Simon emerged into the moonlight and took the path to Simon’s house 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 it still seemed that the rank pungency of it lingered yet 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 dere

  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 amid locust-breaths and the ceaseless fairy reiteration of crickets and frogs. There was a mockingbird somewhere down the valley, far away, and in 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 again, and when the sound of it had died away, the whistle of the nine-thirty train swelled from among 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 old fingers and watched the locomotive drag its string of yellow windows up the valley and into the hills again, where after a time it whistled once more, arrogant and resonant and sad. John Sartoris had sat so on this veranda and watched his two trains emerge from the hills and traverse the valley into the hills again, with lights and smoke and bells and a noisy simulation of speed. But now his railway belonged to a syndicate and there were more than two trains on it, and they ran from Chicago to the Gulf, completing his dream, though John Sartoris himself slept these many years unawares perhaps amid martial cherubim, lapped in the useless vainglory of that Lord which his forefathers had imagined themselves in the rare periods of their metaphysical speculations.

  Then his cigar was cold again and he sat and held it in his fingers and watched a tall shape emerge from the lilac bushes along the garden fence and across the patchy moonlight toward the veranda where he sat 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 holding his dead cigar and looked at him.

  “Bayard, son?” old Bayard said. Young Bayard stood in the .moonlight His eyesockets 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 from the rail; 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 didn’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 gran’daddy?”

  “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 and spent cigar. “All right, are you?” Young Bayard saw that his hands were trembling.

  “Here,” he said, extending his hand. “Let me hold it. You’re going to set your moustache 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 him. Had to get Sibleigh in an old crate of a D.H. 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.” Young Bayard’s voice rose again as he talked on. Locust drifted up in sweet gusts upon the air, 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 tranquility into the serene mysterious infinitude of the hills, and young Bayard’s voice went on and on, recounting violence and speed and death.

  “Hush,” old Bayard said again. “You’ll wake Jenny,” and his grandson’s voice Sank obediently; but soon it rose again; above the dark and stubborn struggling of his heart, and soon Miss Jenny emerged with her white woolen shawl over her night-dress and came and kissed him.

  “I reckon you’re all right,” she said, “or you wouldn’t be in such a bad humor. Tell us about Johnny.”

  “He was drunk,” young Bayard answered harshly. “Or a fool. I tried to keep him from going up there, on that damn Camel You couldn’t see. your hand, that morning. Air all full of hunks of cloud and any fool could a known that on their side it’d be full of Fokkers that could reach twenty-five thousand, and him on a damn Camel. But he was hell-bent on going up there, damn hear to Lille. I couldn’t keep him from it. He shot at me,” young Bayard said. “I tried to head him off and drive him back, but he gave me a burst. He was already high as he could get, but they must have been five thousand feet above us when they spotted us. They flew all over him. Hemmed him up like a damn calf in a pen while one of them sat right on his tail until he took fire and jumped. Then they streaked for home.” Locust drifted and drifted on the still air, and the silver rippling of the tree frogs. In the magnolia at the corner of the house the mockingbird sang. Down the valley another one replied.

  “Streaked for home, with the rest of his gang,” young Bayard said. “Him and his skull and bones. It was Ploeckner,” he added, and for the moment his voice was still and untroubled with vindicated pride. “He was one of the best they had. Pupil of Richthofen’s.”

  “Well, that’s something,” Miss Jenny agreed, stroking his head. Young Bayard brooded for a time.

  “I tried to keep him from going up there on that goddam little popgun,” he burst out again.

  “What did you expect, after the way you raised him?” Miss Jenny demanded. “You’re the oldest...You’ve been to the cemetery, haven’t you?”

  “Yessum,” he answered quietly.

  “What’s that?” old Bayard demanded.

  “That old fool Simon said that’s where you were...You come on and eat your sup
per,” she said briskly and firmly, entering his life again without a by-your-leave, taking up the snarled threads of it after her brisk and capable fashion, and he rose obediently.

  “What’s that?” old Bayard repeated.

  “And you come on in, too.” Miss Jenny swept him also into the orbit of her will as you gather a garment from a chair in passing. “Time you were in bed.” They followed her to the kitchen and stood while she delved into the ice box and set food on the table, and a pitcher of milk, and drew a chair up.

  “Fix him a toddy, Jenny,” old Bayard suggested. But Miss Jenny vetoed this immediately.

  “Milk’s what he wants. I reckon he had to drink enough whisky during that war to last him for a while. Bayard used to never come home from his, without wanting to ride his horse up the front steps and into the house. Come on, now,” and she drove old Bayard firmly out of the kitchen and up the stairs. “You go on to bed, you hear? Let him alone for a while.” She saw his door shut and she entered young Bayard’s room and prepared his bed, and after a while from her own room she heard him mount the stairs.

  His room too was treacherously illumined by the moon, and the old familiarity of it was sharp with ghosts that neither slept nor waked. Without turning on the light he went and sat on the bed. Outside the windows the interminable Crickets and frogs, as though the moon’s rays were thin glass impacting among the trees and shrubs and shattering in brittle musical rain upon the ground, and above this and with a deep timbrous quality, the measured respirations of the pump in the electric plant beyond the barn.

  He dug another cigarette from his pocket and lit it. But he took only two draughts before he flung it away. And then he sat quietly in the room which he and John had shared in the young masculine violence of their twinship, on the bed where he and his wife had lain the last night of his leave, the night before he went back to England and thence out to the Front again, where John already Was. Beside him on the pillow the wild bronze flame of her hair was hushed now in the darkness, and she lay holding his arm with both hands against her breast while they talked quietly, soberly at last.

  But he was not thinking of her then. When he thought of her who lay rigid in the dark beside him, holding his arm tightly between her breasts, it was only to be a little savagely ashamed of the heedless thing he had done to her. He was thinking of his brother whom he had not seen in over a year, thinking that in a month they would see one another again.

  Nor was he thinking of her now, although the walls held, like a withered flower in a casket, the fragrance of that magical chaos in which they had briefly lived, tragic and transient as a blooming of honeysuckle. He was thinking of his dead brother; the spirit of their violent complementing days lay like a dust everywhere in the room, obliterating the scent of that other presence, stopping his breathing, and he went to the window and flung the sash crashing upward and leaned there, gulping air into his lungs like a man who has been submerged and who still cannot believe that he has reached the surface again.

  Later, lying naked between the sheets, he waked himself with his own groaning. The room was filled now with a gray light, sourceless and chill, and he turned his head and saw Miss Jenny, the woolen shawl about her shoulders, sitting in a chair beside the bed.

  “What’s the matter?” he said.

  “That’s what I want to know,” Miss Jenny answered. “You make more noise than that water pump.”

  “I want a drink.”

  Miss Jenny leaned forward and raised a glass from the floor beside her and extended it to him. Bayard had risen on his elbow. “I said a drink,” he said.

  “You drink this milk, boy,” Miss Jenny commanded. “You think I’m going to sit up all night just to feed you whisky? Drink it, now.”

  He took the glass and emptied it obediently and lay back. Miss Jenny set the glass on the floor.

  “What time is it?”

  “Hush,” she said She laid her hand on his brow. “Go to sleep.”

  He rolled his head on the pillow, but he could not evade her hand

  “Get away,” he said ‘”Let me alone.”

  “Hush,” Miss Jenny said “Go to sleep.”

  TWO

  1

  Simon said: “You ain’t never yit planted nothin’ whar hit ought ter be planted.” He sat on the bottom step, whetting the blade of his hoe with a file. Miss Jenny stood with her caller at the edge of the veranda above him, in a man’s felt hat and heavy gloves. A pair of shears dangled below her waist, glinting in the morning sunlight.

  “And whose business is that?” she demanded. “Yours, or Colonel’s? Either one of you can loaf on this porch and tell me where a plant will grow best or look best, but if either of you ever grew as much as a weed out of the ground yourselves, I’d like to see it. I don’t give two whoops in the bad place where you or Colonel either thinks a flower ought to be planted; I plant my flowers just exactly where I want ‘em to be planted.”

  “And den dares ‘um not ter come up,” Simon added. “Dat’s de way you en Isom gyardens. Thank de Lawd Isom ain’t got to make his livin’ wid de sort of gyardenin’ he learns in dat gyarden.”

  Simon wore a disreputable hat, of a fabric these many years anonymous. Miss Jenny stared coldly down at this hat.

  “Isom made his living by being born black,” Miss Jenny snapped. “Suppose you quit scraping at that hoe and see if you can’t dare some of the grass in that salvia bed to come up.”

  “I got to git a aidge on dis curry-comb,’’ Simon said. “You go’n out dar to yo’ gyardem: I’ll git dis bed cleaned up.” He scraped steadily at the hoe-blade.

  “You’ve been at that long enough to find out that you can’t possibly wear that blade down to the handle with just a file. You’ve been at it ever since breakfast. I heard you. You get out there where folks passing will think you’re working, anyhow.”

  Simon groaned and spent a half minute laying the file aside. He laid it on one step, then he picked it up and moved it to another step. Then he laid it against the step behind him. Then he ran his thumb along the blade, examining it with morose hopefulness.

  “Hit mought do now,” he said. “But hit’ll be jest like weedin’ wid a curry-c—”

  “You try it, anyway,” Miss Jenny said. “Maybe the weeds’U think it’s a hoe. You go give ‘em a chance to, anyhow.”

  “Ise gwine, Ise gwine,” Simon answered pettishly, rising and hobbling away. “You go’n see erbout dat place o’ yo’n; I’ll ‘tend to dis.”

  Miss Jenny and the caller descended the steps and went on around the corner of the house.

  “Why he’d rather sit there and rasp at that new hoe with a file instead of grubbing up a dozen weeds in that salvia bed, I can’t see,” Miss Jenny said. “But he’ll do it. He’d sit there and scrape at that hoe until it looked like a saw blade, if I’d let him. Bayard bought a lawn mower three or four years ago-—God knows what for—and turned it over to Simon. The folks that made it guaranteed it for a year. They didn’t know Simon, though. I often thought, reading about those devastations and things in the papers last year, what a good time Simon would have had in the war. He could have shown ‘em things about devastation they never thought of. Isom!” she shouted.

  They entered the garden and Miss Jenny paused at the gate. “You, Isom!”

  This time there was a reply, and Miss Jenny went on with her caller and Isom lounged up from somewhere and clicked the gate behind him.

  “Why didn’t you—” Miss Jenny began, looking back over her shoulder, then she stopped and regarded Isom’s suddenly military figure with brief, cold astonishment. For Isom now wore khaki, with a divisional emblem on his shoulder and a tarnished service stripe on his cuff. And it didn’t fit him, or rather, it fitted him too well. His lean sixteen-year-old neck rose from the slovenly collar’s limp, overlarge embrace, and an astonishing amount of his wrists was viable beneath the cuffs. The breeches bagged hopelessly into the unskillful wrapping of the putties which, with either a fine sense for
the unique or a bland disregard of military usage, he had donned prior to his shoes, and the soiled overseas cap came down most regrettably on his bullet head.

  “Where did you get those clothes?” Miss Jenny’s shears dangled below her waist on a heavy black cord, glinting in the sun, and Miss Benbow in a white dress and a soft straw hat turned also and looked at him with a strange expression.

  “Dey’s Caspey’s,” Isom answered. “I jes’ bor’d ‘um.”

  “Caspey?” Miss Jenny repeated. “Is he home?”

  “Yessum. He got in las’ night on de nine-thirty.”

  “Last night, did he? Where is he now? Asleep, I reckon?”

  “Yessum. Dat’s whar he wuz when I lef’ home.”

  “And I reckon that’s how you borrowed his uniform,” Miss Jenny said tartly. “Well, let him sleep this morning. Give him a day to get over the war. But if it made a fool out of him like it did Bayard, he’d better put that thing on again and go back to it. I’ll declare, men can’t seem to stand anything.” She strode on, the other in her straight white dress followed.

  “You are awfully hard on men, not to have a husband to worry with, Miss Jenny,” she said. “Besides, you’re judging all men by your Sartorises.”

  “They ain’t my Sartorises,” Miss Jenny disclaimed promptly. “I just inherited ‘em. But you just wait; you’ll have one of your own to bother with soon; you just wait until Horace gets home, then see how long it takes him to get over it. Men can’t seem to stand anything,” she repeated “Can’t even stand helling around with no worry and no responsibility and no limit to all of the meanness they can think about wanting to do. Do you think a man could sit day after day and month after month in a house miles from anywhere and spend the time between casualty lists tearing up bedclothes and window curtains and table linen to make, lint and watching sugar and flour and meat dwindling away and using pine knots for light because there aren’t any candles and no candlesticks to put them in, if there were, and hiding in nigger cabins while -drunken Yankee generals set fire to the house your great-great-grandfather built and you and all your folks were born in? Don’t talk to me about men suffering in war.” Miss Jenny snipped larkspur savagely. “Just you wait until Horace comes home; then you’ll see. John at least had consideration enough after he’d gone and gotten himself into where he had no business, not to come back and worry everybody to death. But Bayard now, coming back in the middle of it and having everybody thinking he was settled down at last, teaching at that Memphis flying school, and then marrying that fool girl