Flags in the Dust Read online

  “Miss Jenny!”

  “Well, I don’t mean that, but she ought to’ve been spanked, hard. I know: didn’t I do the same tiling, myself? It was all that harness Bayard wore. Talk about men being taken in by a uniform!” Miss Jenny clipped larkspur. “Dragging me up there to the wedding, mind you, with a lot of rented swords and some of Bayard’s pupils trying to drop roses into the street. I reckon some of ‘em were not his pupils, because one of ‘em finally did drop a few that missed the houses.” Miss Jenny snipped larkspur savagely. “I had dinner with ‘em one night. Sat in the hotel an hour until they finally came for me. Then we stopped at a delicatessen and Bayard and Caroline got out and went inside and came back with about a bushel of packages and dumped ‘em into the car under my feet. That was the dinner I’d been invited to, mind you; there wasn’t a sign of anything that looked or smelt 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 house-keeping, because my folks were so old-fashioned they cooked food at our house.

  “Then the others came in—some of Bayard’s soldier friends, and a herd of other folks’ wives, near as I could gather. Young women that ought to have 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 wouldn’t like. They began to unwrap bottles—about a dozen, I reckon, and Bayard and Caroline came in with that silver I gave ‘em and monogrammed napkins and that delicatessen stuff that tasted like wet swamp grass, on paper plates. We ate it there, sitting on the floor tor 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. About thirty-five, I suppose she meant. Thin as a rail; there wouldn’t have been much to spank. But she’d ought to’ve had it, just the same. Soon as she found out about the baby, she named it Named it Bayard 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 its thickening trees, the garden lay in the 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 skirling 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 sail beyond the veil impalpable but sufficient

  Miss Jenny stooped over the bed of larkspur, her narrow back, though stooping, erect still, indomitable. A thrush flashed modestly across the bright air and into the magnolia tree in a dying parabola. “And then, when he bad to go back to the war, of course he brought her down here and left her on my hands.” The caller stood tall 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; when he couldn’t have come to her if he had? And you can say that?”

  “Bayafd love anybody, that cold brute?” Miss Jenny clipped larkspur: “He never cared a snap of his fingers for anybody in his life except Johnny.” 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 lead the bank’s money to a man that owns one...Do you want some sweerpeas?”

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

  “Just look yonder, will you?” she said, pointing with hear shears. “That’s how they suffer from the 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 each end of his beat, he mumbled to himself in measured singsong. “You, Isom!” Miss Jenny shouted.

  He halted in midstride, still at shoulder arms. “Ma’am?” he answered 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 keep both hands on it; I’d certainly buy you one.”

  “Yessum.”

  “If you want to play soldier, you go off somewhere with Bayard and do it. I can raise flowers without any help from the army,” she added, turning to her guest with her handful of larkspur. “And what are you laughing at?” she demanded sharply.

  “You both looked so funny,” the younger woman explained “You looked so much more like a soldier than poor Isom, for all his uniform.” She touched her eyes with her fingertips. “I’m sorry: please forgive me for laughing.”

  “Hmph,” Miss Jenny sniffed. She put the larkspur into the basket and went on to the sweet pea frame and snipped again, viciously, ‘the guest followed, as did Isom with the basket; and presently Miss Jenny was done with sweet peas and she moved on again with her train, pausing to cut a rose here and there, and stopped before a bed where tulips lifted their bright bells. She and Isom had guessed happily, this time; the various colors formed an orderly pattern.

  “When we dug ‘em up last fall” she told her guest, “I’d put a red one in Isom’s right hand and a white one in his left, and then I’d say ‘All right, Isom, give me the red one.’ He’d never fail to hold out his left hand, and if I just looked at him long enough, he’d hold out both hands. Didn’t I tell you to hold that red one in your right hand?’ I’d say. ‘Yessum, here ‘tis.’ And out would come his left hand again. That ain’t your right hand, stupid,’ I’d say. ‘Dat’s de one you said wuz my right hand a while ago,’ Mr. Isom says. Ain’t that so, nigger?” Miss Jenny glared at Isom, who again performed his deprecatory effacing movement behind the slow equanimity of his ivory grin.

  “Yessum, I ‘speck it is.”

  “You’d better,” Miss Jenny rejoined warningly. “Now, how can anybody keep a decent garden, with a fool like that? I expect every spring to find corn or lespedeza coming up in the hyacinth beds or something.” She examined the tulips again, weighing the balanced colors one against another in her mind. “No, you don’t want any tulips,” she decided briskly, moving on.

  “No, Miss Jenny,” the guest agreed demurely. They went on to the gate, and Miss Jenny stopped again and took the basket from Isom.

  “And you go home and take that thing off, you hear?” she told Isom.

  “Yessum.”

  “And I want to look out that window in a few minutes and see you in the garden with that hoe again,” she added. “And I want to see both of your right hands on it and I want to see it moving, too. You hear me?”

  “Yessum.”

  “And tell Caspey to be ready to go to work in the morning. Even niggers that eat here have got to work some.” But Isom was gone, and they went on and mounted the steps. “Don’t he sound like that’s exactly what he’s going to do?” she confided as they entered the hall. “He knows as well as I do that I won’t dare look out that window, after what I said. Come in,” she added, opening the parlor door.

  This room was opened but seldom now, though in John Sartoris’ day it had been constantly in use. He was always giving dinners, and balls too on occasion, with the folding doors between it and the d
ining room thrown open and three negroes with stringed instruments ensconced on the stairway and all the candles burning. For with his frank love of pageantry, as well as his innate sociability, he liked to surround himself with an atmosphere of scent and delicate garments and food and music. He had lain also in this room in his grey regimentals and so brought to a conclusion the colorful, if not always untarnished, pageant of his own career; perhaps ghosts he knew greeted him there again and surrounded him as of old upon the jocund mellowness of his hearth.

  But during Bayard’s time it was less and less in use, and slowly and imperceptibly it lost its jovial but stately masculinity, becoming by mutual and unspoken agreement a place for his wife and his son John’s wife and Miss Jenny to clean thoroughly twice a year and in which, preceded by a ritualistic unswaddling of brown holland, they entertained their more formal callers. This was its status up to the birth of his grandsons and the death of their parents, and it continued thus until his wife died. After that Miss Jenny bothered with formal callers but little and with the parlor not at all She said it gave her the creeps.

  And so it stayed closed nearly all the time and slowly acquired an atmosphere of solemn and macabre fustiness and was referred to as the Parlor with a capital P. Occasionally young Bayard or John would open the door and peer into solemn obscurity in which the shrouded furniture loomed with a sort of ghostly benignance, like albino mastodons. But they did not enter; already in their minds the room was associated with death, an idea which even the holly and tinsel of Christmas tide could not completely obscure. They were away at school by the time they reached party age, but even during vacations, though they had filled the house with the polite bedlam of their contemporaries, the room would be opened only on Christmas eve. And after they had gone to England in ‘16 it was opened twice a year to be cleaned after the ancient ritual that even Simon had inherited from his forefathers, and to have the piano tuned or when Miss Jenny and Narcissa Benbow spent a forenoon or afternoon there, and formally not at all.

  The furniture loomed shapelessly in its dun shrouds; the piano alone was uncovered, and the younger woman drew the bench up and removed her hat and let it slip to the floor beside her. Miss Jenny set her basket down and from the gloom beside the piano she drew a straight, hard chair, uncovered also, and sat down and removed her felt hat from her trim white head. Light came through the open door, and faintly through the heavy maroon-and-lace curtains, but it only served to enhance the obscurity and render more shapeless the hooded anonymous furniture.

  But behind these dun bulks and in all the corners of the room there waited, as actors stand within the wings beside the waiting stage, figures in crinoline and hooped muslin and silk; in stocks and flowing coats; in grey too, with crimson sashes and sabres in gallant sheathed repose—Jeb Stuart himself perhaps, on his glittering garlanded bay or with his sunny hair falling upon fine broadcloth beneath the mistletoe and holly boughs of Baltimore in ‘58. Miss Jenny sat with her uncompromising grenadier’s back and held her hat upon her knees and fixed herself to look on. Narcissa’s white dress was pliant as light against the gloom and as serene, and her hands touched chords from the keyboard and drew them together and rolled the curtain back upon the scene.

  In the kitchen Caspey was having breakfast while Simon his father, and Elnora his sister, and Isom his nephew (still wearing the uniform) watched him. He had been Simon’s: understudy in the stables and general handy-man about the place, doing all the work Simon managed, through the specious excuse of decrepitude, to slough off onto his shoulders and that Miss Jenny could devise for him and which he could not evade. Bayard Sartoris also employed him in the fields occasionally. Then the draft had got him and bore him to France and the St. Sulpice docks as one of a labor battalion, where he did what work corporals and sergeants managed to slough off onto his unmilitary shoulders and that white officers could devise for him and which he could not evade.

  Thus all the labor about the place devolved upon Simon and Isom, but Miss Jenny kept Isom piddling about the garden so much of the time that Simon was soon as bitter- against- the. War Lords as any professional Democrat. Meanwhile Caspey was working a little and trifling with continental life in its martial mutations rather to his future detriment, for at last the tumult died and the captains departed and left a vacuum filled with the usual bitter bickering of Armageddon’s heirs-at-law; and Caspey returned to his native land a total loss, sociologically speaking, with a definite disinclination toward labor, honest or otherwise, and two honorable wounds incurred in a razor-hedged crap game. But return he did, to his father’s querulous satisfaction and Elnora’s and Isom’s admiration, and he now sat in the kitchen, telling them about the war.

  “I don’t take nothin’ fum no white folks no mo’,” he was saying. “War done changed all dat. If us colored folks is good enough to save France fum de Germans, den us is good enough to have de same rights de Germans has. French folks thinks so, anyhow, and if America don’t, dey’s ways of learnin’ ‘um. Yes, suh, it wuz de colored soldier saved France and America bofe. Black regiments kilt mo’ Germans dan all de white armies put together, let ‘lone un-loadin’steamboats all day long fer a dollar a day.”

  “War ain’t hurt dat big mouf o’ yo’n, anyhow,” Simon said.

  “War unloosed de black man’s mouf,” Caspey corrected. “Give him de right to talk. Kill Germans, den do yo’ oratin’, dey tole us. Well, us done it.”

  “How many you kilt, Unc’ Caspey?” Isom asked deferentially.

  “I ain’t never bothered to count ‘um up. Been times I kilt mo’ in one mawnin’ dan dey’s folks on dis whole place. One time we wuz down in de cellar of a steamboat tied up to de bank, and one of dese sub-mareems sailed up and stopped by de boat, and all de white officers run up on de bank and hid. Us boys didn’t know dey wuz anything wrong ‘twell folks started clambin’ down de ladder. We never had no guns wid us at de time, so when we seed dem green legs comin’ down de ladder we crope up to de een of de ladder, and as dey come down one of de boys would hit ‘um over de haid wid a stick of wood an another would drag ‘um outen de way and cut dey th’oat wid a razor. Dey wuz about thirty of ‘um…Elnora, is dey any mo’ of dat coffee lef’ ?”

  “Sho,” Simon murmured. Isom’s eyes popped quietly and Elnora removed the coffee pot from the stove and refilled Caspey’s cup.

  Caspey drank coffee for a moment. “And another time me and a boy wuz gwine along a road. We got tired unloadin’ steamboats all day long, so one day de Captain’s dog-robber foun’ whar he kep’ dese here unloaded passes and he took a hanful of ‘um, and me and him wuz on de road to town when a truck come along and de boy axed us did us want a lif. He wuz a school boy, so he writ on three of de passes whenever we come to a place dat mought be M.P. invested, and we got along fine, ridin’ about de country oil dat private truck, ‘twell one mawnin’ we looked out whar de truck wuz and dey wuz a M.P. settin’ on de seat whilst de truck boy wuz tryin’ to explain to him. So we turned de other way and lit out walkin’. After dat we had to dodge de M.P. towns, ‘case me and de other boy couldn’t write on de passes.

  “One day we wuz gwine along a road. It wuz a busted-up road and it didn’t look much like M.P. country, but dey wuz some of ‘um in de las’ town us dodged, so we didn’t know us wuz so close to whar de fightin’ wuz gwine on ‘twell we turned a corner onto a bridge and come right onto a whole regiment of Germans, swimmin’ in de river. Dey seed us about de same time we seed dem and dived under de water, and me and de other boy grabbed up two machine guns settin’ dar and we sot on de bridge rail, and ev’y time a German stuck his haid up to take a new breaf, us shot him. It wuz jes’ like shoorin’ turkles in a slough. I reckon dey wuz clost to a hundred us kilt befo’ de machine guns run dry. Dat’s whut de Captain give me dis fer.” He drew from his pocket a florid plated medal of Porto Rican origin, and Isom came quietly up to see it.

  “Umumuh,” Simon said. He sat with his hands on his knees, watching his son with rapt astonis
hment. Elnora came up to see also, with her arms daubed with flour.

  “Whut does dey look like?” Elnora asked. “Like folks?”

  “Dey’s big,” Caspey answered. “Sort of pink lookin’ and about eight foot tall. Only folks in de whole American war dat could handle ‘um wuz de colored regiments.” Isom returned to his corner beside the woodbox.

  “Ain’t you got some gyardenin’ to do, boy?” Simon demanded of him.

  “Naw, suh,” Isom answered, his enraptured gaze still on his uncle. “Miss Jenny says us done caught up dis mawnin’.”

  “Well, don’t you come whinin’ to me when she jumps on you,” Simon warned him. “Whar did you kill de nex’ lot?” he asked his son.

  “We didn’t kill no mo’ after dat,” Caspey answered. “We decided dat wuz enough and dat we better leave de rest of ‘um fer de boys dat wuz gittdn’ paid fer killin’ ‘um. We went on ‘twell de road played out in a field. Dey wuz some ditches and ole wire fences and holes in de field, wid folks livin’ in ‘um. De folks wuz white American soldiers and dey egvised us to pick us out a hole and stay dere fer a while, if us wanted de peace and comfort of de war. So we picked out a dry hole and moved in. Dey wasn’t nothin’ to do all day long but lay in de shade and watch de air balloons and listen to de shootin’ about fo’ miles up de road. De white boys could write, so dey fixed up de passes and we took time about gwine up to whar de army wuz and gittin’ grub. When de passes give out we found whar a French army wid some cannons was livin’ over in de woods a ways, so we went over whar dey wuz and got grub.