Sartoris Read online

  “Hush,” old Bayard said again. “You’ll wake Jenny.” And his grandson’s voice sank obediently, but soon it rose again, and after a time Miss Jenny emerged with the white woolen shawl over her nightdress 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 near to Lille. I couldn’t keep him from it. He shot at me,” young Bayard said; “I tried to 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. 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 frogs. In the magnolia at the corner of the house the mockingbird sang; down the valley the other 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 god-dam little popgun,” he burst out again.

  “What did you expect, after the way you raised him?” Miss Jenny asked. “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 supper,” 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 icebox and set food on the table, and a pitcher of milk, and drew up a chair.

  “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 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 was treacherously illuminated by the moon, and 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 out to the Front again, where John already was. Beside him on the pillow the wild bronze swirling of her hair was hushed now in the darkness, and she lay holding his ami with both hands against her breast while they talked quietly, soberly at last.

  But he had not been thinking of her then. When he thought of her who lay rigid in the dark beside him, holding his arm tightly to her breast, 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, something of that magical chaos in which they had lived for two months, tragic and transient as a blooming of honeysuckle and sharp as the odor of mint. He was thinking of his dead brother; the spirit of their violent complementing days lay like dust everywhere in the room, obliterating 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 over and raised a glass from the floor beside her. Bayard had risen to his elbow and he took the glass. His hand stopped before the glass reached his mouth and he hunched on his elbow, the glass beneath his nose.

  “Hell,” he said, “I said a drink.”

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

  He emptied the glass 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.”

  Part Two

  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 a 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’ve never seen 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 place.” Still whetting at the hoe blade he jerked his head toward the corner of the house.

  He wore a disreputable hat, of a fabric these many years anonymous. Miss Jenny stared coldly down upon 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 weeds 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’ gyarden: I’ll git dis bed cleaned up.” He scraped steadily at the hoe blade.

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

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

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

  “You try it, anyway,” Miss Jenny said. “Maybe the weeds’ll 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 ter dis.”

  Miss Jenny and the caller descended the steps and went on toward 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 blades of grass 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 paper 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 after him.

  “Why didn’t you—” Miss Jenny looked back over her shoulder, then she stopped and regarded Isom’s suddenly military figure with brief and cold astonishment. He now wore khaki, with a divisional emblem on the shoulder and a tarnished service stripe on his cuff. His lean sixteen-year-old neck rose from the slovenly collar’s limp, over-large embrace and, a surprising amount of wrist was visible below 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 regrettably on his bullet head.

  “Where did you get those clothes?” The sunlight glinted on Miss Jenny’s shears, and Miss Benbow in her white dress and 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 one day to get over the war. But if it made a fool out of him like it did out of 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 went on, the guest in her straight white dress following.

  “You are awfully hard on men, not to have a husband to bother 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 stand anything,” she repeated, “Can’t even stand helling around with no worry and no responsibility and no limit to all 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 nowhere 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 ’em 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. Just a good excuse for ’em to make nuisances of themselves and stay in the way while the womenfolks are trying to clean up the mess they left with their fighting. John at least had consideration enough, after he’d gone and gotten himself into something where he had no business, not to come back and worry everybody to distraction. 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.”

  “Miss Jenny!”

  “Well, I don’t mean that, but she’d ought’ve been spanked, hard. I know: didn’t I do the same thing, myself? It was all that harness that Bayard wore. Talk about men being taken in by a uniform!” She clipped larkspur. “Dragging me up there to the wedding, mind you, with a church full of rented swords and some of Bayard’s pupils trying to drop roses on ’em when they came out. I reckon some of ’em were not his pupils, because one of ’em finally did drop a handful that missed everything and fell in the street.” She snipped larkspur savagely. “I had dinner with ’em one night. Sat in the hotel an hour until they remembered to come for me. Then we stopped at a delicatessen and Bayard and Caroline got out and went in and came back with about a bushel of packages and dumped ’em into the car, where they leaked grease on my new stockings. That was the dinner I’d been invited to, mind you; there wasn’t a sign of anything that looked or smelled like a stove in the whole place. I didn’t offer to help ’em. I told Caroline I didn’t know anything about that sort of housekeeping because my folks were old-fashioned enough to cook food.

  “Then the others came in—some of Bayard’s soldier friends, and a drove of other folks’ wives, near as I could gather. Young women that ought to’ve been at home, seeing about supper, gabbling and screeching in that silly way young married women have when they’re doing something they hope their husbands won’t like. They were all unwrapping bottles—about two dozen, I reckon, and Bayard and Caroline came in with that silver I gave ’em and monogrammed napkins and that delicatessen fodder that tasted like swamp grass, on paper plates. We ate it there, sitting on the floor or standing up or just wherever you happened to be.

  “That was Caroline’s idea of keeping house. She said they’d settle down when they got old, if the war was over by then. About thirty-five, I suppose she meant. Thin as a rail; there wouldn’t have been much to spank. But she’d ought to have had it, just the same. Soon as she found out about the baby, she named it. Named it nine months before it was born and told everybody about it. Used to talk about it like it was her grandfather or something. Always saying Bayard won’t let me do this or that or the other.”

  Miss Jenny continued to clip larkspur, the caller tall in a white dress beside her. The fine and huge simplicity of the house rose among thickening trees, the garden lay in sunlight bright with bloom, myriad with scent and with a drowsy humming of bees—a steady golden sound, as of sunlight become audible—all the impalpable veil of the immediate, the familiar; just beyond it a girl with a bronze swirling of hair and a small, supple body in a constant epicene unrepose, a dynamic fixation like that of carven sexless figures caught in moments of action, striving, a mechanism all of whose members must move in performing the most trivial action, her wild hands not accusing but passionate still beyond the veil impalpable but sufficient.

  Miss Jenny stooped above the flower bed, her narrow back, though stooping, erect still, indomitable. A thrush flashed modestly across the bright air and into the m
agnolia tree in a dying parabola. “And then, when he had to go back to the war, of course he brought her out here and left her on my hands.” The caller stood motionless in her white dress, and Miss Jenny said, “No, I don’t mean that.” She snipped larkspur.

  “Poor women,” she said, “I reckon we do have to take our revenge wherever and whenever we can get it. Only she ought to’ve taken it out on Bayard.”

  “When she died,” Narcissa said, “and he couldn’t know about it; couldn’t have come to her if he had? And you can say that?”

  “Bayard love anybody, that cold devil?” Miss Jenny clipped larkspur. “He never cared a snap of his fingers for anybody in his life except John.” She snipped larkspur savagely. “Swelling around here like it was our fault, like we made ’em go to that war. And now he’s got to have an automobile, got to go all the way to Memphis to buy one. An automobile in Bayard Sartoris’ barn; mind you; him that won’t even lend the bank’s money to a man that owns one. . . . Do you want some sweet peas?”

  “Yes, please,” Narcissa answered. Miss Jenny straightened up, then she stopped utterly still.

  “Just look yonder, will you?” She pointed with the shears. “That’s how they suffer from war, poor things.” Beyond a frame of sweet peas Isom in his khaki strode solemnly back and forth. Upon his right shoulder was a hoe and on his face an expression of rapt absorption, and as he reversed at the end of his beat be murmured to himself in measured singsong.

  “You, Isom!” Miss Jenny shouted.

  He halted in mid stride, still at shoulder arms.

  “Ma’am?” he said mildly. Miss Jenny continued to glare at him, and his military bearing faded and he lowered his piece and executed a sort of effacing movement within his martial shroud.

  “Put that hoe down and bring that basket over here. That’s the first time in your life you ever picked up a garden tool of your own free will. I wish I could discover the kind of uniform that would make you dig in the ground with it; I’d certainly buy you one.”