Sartoris Read online

  Old man Falls’ eyes were blue and innocent as a boy’s and his first act was to open the parcel which old Bayard had for him and take out a plug of chewing tobacco, cut off a chew and put it in his mouth, replace the plug and tie the parcel neatly again. Twice a year the parcel contained an entire outfit of clothing, on the other occasions tobacco and a small sack of peppermint candy. He would never cut the string, but always untied it with his stiff, gnarled fingers and tied it back again. He would not accept money.

  He sat now in his clean, faded overalls, with the parcel on his knees, telling Bayard about the automobile that had passed him on the road that morning. Old Bayard sat quite still, watching him with his fierce old eyes until he had finished.

  “Are you sure who it was?” he asked.

  “Hit passed me too fast fer me to tell whether they was anybody in hit a-tall or not. I asked when I fetched town who ’twas. Seems like ever’body but you knows how fast he runs hit.”

  Old Bayard sat quietly for a time. Then he raised his voice.

  “Byron.”

  The door opened and the bookkeeper entered.

  “Yes, sir, Colonel,” he said without inflection.

  “’Phone out to my house and tell my grandson not to touch that car until I come home.”

  “Yes, sir, Colonel.” And he was gone as silently as he appeared.

  Bayard slammed around in his swivel chair again and old man Falls leaned forward, peering at his face.

  “What’s that ’ere wen you got on yo’ face, Bayard?” he asked.

  “What?” Bayard demanded, then he raised his hand to a small spot which the suffusion of his face had brought into relief. “Here? I don’t know what it is. It’s been there about a week. Why?”

  “Is it gittin’ bigger?” the other asked. He rose and laid his parcel down and extended his hand. Old Bayard drew his head back.

  “It’s nothing,” he said testily. “Let it alone.” But old man Falls put the other’s hand aside and touched the spot with his fingers.

  “H’m,” he said. “Hard’s a rock. Hit’ll git bigger, too. I’ll watch hit, and when hit’s right, I’ll take it off. ’Tain’t ripe, yit.” The bookkeeper appeared suddenly and without noise beside them.

  “Yo’ cook says him and Miss Jenny is off car-ridin’ somewheres, I left yo’ message.”

  “Jenny’s with him, you say?” old Bayard asked. “That’s what yo’ cook says,” the bookkeeper repeated in his inflectionless voice.

  “Well. All right.”

  The bookkeeper withdrew and old man Falls picked up his parcel. “I’ll be gittin’ on too,” he said. I’ll come in next week and take a look at it. You better let hit alone till I git back.” He followed the bookkeeper from the room, and presently old Bayard rose and stalked through the lobby and tilted his chair in the door.

  That afternoon when he arrived home, the car was not in sight nor did his aunt answer his call. He mounted to his room and put on his riding boots and lit a cigar, but when he looked down from his window into the back yard, neither Isom nor the saddled mare was visible. The old setter sat looking up at his window. When old Bayard’s head appeared there the dog rose and went to the kitchen door and stood there; then it looked up at his window again. Old Bayard tramped down the stairs and on through the house and entered the kitchen, where Caspey sat at the table, eating and talking to Isom and Elnora.

  “And one mo’ time me and another boy—” Caspey was saying. Then Isom saw Bayard, and rose from his seat in the wood box corner, and his eyes rolled whitely in his bullet head. Elnora paused also with her broom, but Caspey turned his head without rising, and still chewing steadily, he blinked his eyes at old Bayard in the door.

  “I sent you word a week ago to come on out here at once, or not to come at all,” Bayard said. “Did you get it?” Caspey mumbled something, still chewing, and old Bayard came into the room. “Get up from there and saddle my horse.”

  Caspey turned his back deliberately and raised his glass of buttermilk. “Git on, Caspey!” Elnora hissed at him. “I ain’t workin’ here.” he answered, just beneath Bayard’s deafness. He turned to Isom. “Whyn’t you go’n git his hoss fer him? Ain’t you workin’ here?”

  “Caspey, fer Lawd’s sake!” Elnora implored. “Yes, suh, Cunnel; he’s gwine,” she said loudly.

  “Who, me?” Caspey said. “Does I look like it?” He raised the glass steadily to his mouth; then Bayard moved again and Caspey lost his nerve and rose quickly before the other reached him, and crossed the kitchen toward the door, but with sullen insolence in the very shape of his back. As he fumbled with the door Bayard overtook him.

  “Are you going to saddle that mare?” he demanded.

  “Ain’t gwine skip it, big boy,” Caspey answered, just below Bayard’s deafness.

  “What?”

  “Oh, Lawd, Caspey!” Elnora moaned. Isom crouched into his corner. Caspey raised his eyes swiftly to Bayard’s face and opened the screen door.

  “I says, I ain’t gwine skip it,” he repeated, raising his voice. Simon stood at the foot of the steps beside the setter, gaping his toothless mouth at them, and old Bayard reached a stick of stove wood from the box at his hand and knocked Caspey through the opening door and down the steps at his father’s feet.

  “Now, you go saddle that mare,” he said.

  Simon helped his son to rise and led him away toward the barn while the setter looked after them, gravely interested. “I kep’ tellin’ you dem new-fangled war notions of yo’n wa’n’t gwine ter work on dis place,” he said angrily. “And you better thank de good Lawd fer makin’ yo’ haid hard ez hit is. You go’n git dat mare, and save dat nigger freedom talk fer town-folks: dey mought stomach it. Whut us niggers want ter be free fer, anyhow? Ain’t we got ez many white folks now ez we kin support?”

  That night at supper, old Bayard looked at his grandson across the roast of mutton. “Will Falls told me you passed him on the poorhouse hill today running forty miles an hour.”

  “Forty fiddlesticks,” Miss Jenny answered promptly.

  “It was fifty-four. I was watching the—what do you call it, Bayard?—speedometer.”

  Old Bayard sat with his head bent a little, watching his hands trembling on the carving knife and fork; hearing beneath the napkin tucked into his waistcoat, his heart a little too light and a little too fast; feeling Miss Jenny’s eyes upon his face.

  “Bayard,” she said sharply, “what’s that on your cheek?” He rose so suddenly that his chair tipped over backward with a crash, and he tramped blindly from the room.

  3

  “I know what you want me to do,” Miss Jenny told old Bayard across her newspaper. “You want me to let my housekeeping go to the dogs and spend all my time in that car, that’s what you want. Well, I’m not going to do it. I don’t mind riding with him now and then, but I’ve got too much to do with my time to spend it keeping him from running that car too fast. Neck, too,” she added. She rattled the paper crisply.

  She said: “Besides, you ain’t foolish enough to believe he’ll drive slow just because there’s somebody with him, are you? If you do think so, you’d better send Simon along. Lord knows Simon can spare the time. Since you quit using the carriage, if he does anything at all, I don’t know it.” She read the paper again.

  Old Bayard’s cigar smoked in his still hand. “I might send Isom,” he said.

  Miss Jenny’s paper rattled sharply and she stared at her nephew for a long moment. “God in heaven, man, why don’t you put a block and chain on him and have done with it?”

  “Well, didn’t you suggest sending Simon with him, yourself? Simon has his work to do, but all Isom ever does is saddle my horse once a day, and I can do that myself.”

  “I was trying to be ironical,” Miss Jenny said. “God knows, I should have learned better by this time. But if you’ve got to invent something
new for the niggers to do you let it be Simon. I need Isom to keep a roof over your head and something to eat on the table.” She rattled the paper. “Why don’t you come right out and tell him not to drive fast? A man that has to spend eight hours a day sitting in a chair in that bank door ought not to have to spend the rest of the afternoon helling around the country in an automobile if he don’t want to.”

  “Do you think it would do any good to ask him? There never was a damned one of ’em yet ever paid any attention to my wishes.”

  “Ask, the devil,” Miss Jenny said. “Who said anything about ask? Tell him not to. Tell him that if you hear again of his going fast in it, that you’ll frail the life out of him. I believe anyway that you like to ride in that car, only you won’t admit it, and you just don’t want him to ride in it when you can’t go too.” But old Bayard had slammed his feet to the floor and risen, and he tramped from the room.

  Instead of mounting the stairs, however, Miss Jenny heard his footsteps die away down the hall, and presently she rose and followed to the back porch, where he stood in the darkness there. The night was dark, myriad with drifting odors of the spring, and with insects. Dark upon lesser dark, the barn loomed against the sky.

  “He hasn’t come in yet,” she said impatiently, touching his arm. “I could have told you. Go on up and go to bed, now; don’t you know he’ll let you know when he comes in? You’re going to think him into a ditch somewhere, with these fool notions of yours.” Then, more gently: “You’re too childish about that car. It’s no more dangerous at night than it is in daytime. Come on, now.”

  He shook her hand off, but he turned obediently and entered the house. This time he mounted the stairs and she could hear him in his bedroom, thumping about. Presently he ceased slamming doors and drawers and lay beneath the reading lamp with his Dumas. After a time the door opened and young Bayard entered and came into the radius of the light with his bleak eyes.

  His grandfather did not remark his presence and he touched his arm. Old Bayard looked up, and when he did so young Bayard turned and quitted the room.

  After the shades on the bank windows were drawn at three o’clock old Bayard retired to the office. Inside the grille the cashier and the bookkeeper could hear him clattering and banging around beyond the door. The cashier paused, a stack of silver clipped neatly in his fingers.

  “Hear ’im?” he said. “Something on his mind here, lately. Used to be he was quiet as a mouse back there until they come for him, but last few days he tromples and thumps around back there like he was fighting hornets.”

  The bookkeeper said nothing. The cashier set the stack of silver aside, built up another one.

  “Something on his mind lately. That examiner must ’a’ put a bug in his ear, I reckon.”

  The bookkeeper said nothing. He swung the adding machine to his desk and clicked the lever over. In the back room old Bayard moved audibly about. The cashier stacked the remaining silver neatly and rolled a cigarette. The bookkeeper bent above the steady clicking of the machine, and the cashier sealed his cigarette and lit it and waddled to the window and lifted the curtain.

  “Simon’s brought the carriage, today,” he said. “That boy finally wrecked that car, I reckon. Better call Colonel.”

  The bookkeeper slid from his stool and went back to the door and opened it. Old Bayard glanced up from his desk, with his hat on.

  “All right, Byron,” he said. The bookkeeper returned to his desk.

  Old Bayard stalked through the bank and opened the street door and stopped utterly, the doorknob in his hand.

  “Where’s Bayard?” he said.

  “He ain’t comin’,” Simon answered. Old Bayard crossed to the carriage.

  “What? Where is he?”

  “Him en Isom off somewhar in dat cyar,” Simon said.

  “Lawd knows whar dey is by now. Takin’ dat boy away fum his work in de middle of de day, cyar-ridin’.” Old Bayard laid his hand on the stanchion, the spot on his face coming again into white relief. “Atter all de time I spend tryin’ to git some sense inter Isom’s haid,” Simon continued. He held the horses’ heads up, waiting for his employer to enter. “Cyar-ridin’,” he said. “Cyar-ridin’.”

  Old Bayard got in and sank heavily into the seat.

  “I’ll be damned,” he said, “if I haven’t got the triflingest set of folks to make a living for God ever made. There’s one thing about it: when I finally have to go to the poorhouse, every damned one of you’ll be there when I come.”

  “Now, here you quoilin’ too,” Simon said, “Miss Jenny yellin’ at me twell I wuz plum out de gate, and now you already started at dis en’. But ef Mist’ Bayard don’t leave dat boy alone, he ain’t gwine ter be no better’n a town nigger spite of all I kin do.”

  “Jenny’s already ruined him,” old Bayard said. “Even Bayard can’t hurt him much.”

  “You sho’ tole de troof den,” Simon agreed. He shook the reins. “Come up, dar.”

  “Here, Simon,” old Bayard said. “Hold up a minute.” Simon reined the horses back. “Whut you want now?” The spot on old Bayard’s cheek had resumed its normal appearance.

  “Go back to my office and get me a cigar out of that jar on the mantel,” he said.

  Two days later, as he and Simon tooled sedately homeward through the afternoon, simultaneously almost with the warning thunder of it, the car burst upon him on a curve, slewed into the ditch and on to the road again and rushed on, and in the flashing instant he and Simon saw the whites of Isom’s eyes and the ivory cropping of his teeth behind the steering wheel. When the car returned home that afternoon Simon conducted Isom to the barn and whipped him with a harness strap.

  That night they sat in the office after supper. Old Bayard held his cigar unlighted in his fingers. Miss Jenny read the paper. Faint airs blew in, laden with spring.

  Suddenly old Bayard said, “Maybe he’ll get tired of it after a while.”

  Miss Jenny raised her head. “And when he does, don’t you know what he’ll get then?—when he finds that car won’t go fast enough?” she demanded, staring at him across the paper. He sat with his unlighted cigar, his head bent a little, not looking at her. “He’ll buy an aeroplane.” She rattled the paper, turned the page. “He ought to have a wife,” she added, reading again. “Let him get a son, then he can break his neck as soon and as often as he pleases. Providence doesn’t seem to have any judgment at all,” she said, thinking of the two of them, of his dead brother. She said: “But Lord knows, I’d hate to see any girl I was fond of married to him.” She rattled the paper again, turned another page. “I don’t know what else you expect of him. Of any Sartoris. You don’t waste your afternoons riding with him just because you think it’ll keep him from turning that car over. You go because when it does happen, you want to be in it, too. So do you think you’ve got any more consideration for folks than he has?”

  He held his cigar, his face still averted. Miss Jenny was watching him again across the paper.

  “I’m coming down town in the morning and we’re going and have the doctor look at that bump on your face, you hear?”

  In his room, as he removed his collar and tie before his chest of drawers, his eye fell upon the pipe which he had laid there four weeks ago, and he put the collar and tie down and picked up the pipe and held it in his hand, rubbing the charred bowl slowly with his thumb.

  Then with sudden decision he quitted the room and tramped down the hall, at the end of which a stair mounted into the darkness. He fumbled the light switch beside it and mounted, following the cramped turnings cautiously in the dark, to a door set at a difficult angle, and opened it upon a broad, low room with a pitched ceiling, smelling of dust and silence and ancient disused things.

  The room was cluttered with indiscriminate furniture—chairs and sofas like patient ghosts holding lightly in dry and rigid embrace yet other ghosts—a fitting place f
or dead Sartorises to gather and speak among themselves of glamorous and old disastrous days. The unshaded light swung on a single cord from the center of the ceiling. He unknotted it and drew it across to a nail in the wall above a cedar chest and fastened it here, and drew a chair to the chest and sat down.

  The chest had not been opened since 1901, when his son John had succumbed to yellow fever and an old Spanish bullet wound. There had been two occasions since, in July and in October of last year, but the other grandson still possessed quickness and all the incalculable portent of his heritage. So he had forborne for the time being, expecting to be able to kill two birds with one stone, as it were.

  The lock was stiff, and he struggled patiently with it for some time. Rust shaled off, rubbed off, onto his hands, and he desisted and rose and rummaged about and returned to the chest with a heavy, cast-iron candlestick and hammered the lock free and removed it and raised the lid. From the chest there rose a thin exhilarating odor of cedar, and something else: a scent drily and muskily nostalgic, as of old ashes. The first object was a garment. The brocade was richly hushed, and the fall of fine Mechlin was dustily yellow, pale and textureless as February sunlight. He lifted the garment carefully out. The lace cascaded mellow and pale as spilled wine upon his hands, and he laid it aside and lifted out next a rapier. It was a Toledo, a blade delicate and fine as the prolonged stroke of a violin bow, in a velvet sheath. The sheath was elegant and flamboyant and soiled, and the seams had cracked drily.

  Old Bayard held the rapier upon his hands for a while, feeling the balance of it. It was just such an implement as a Sartoris would consider the proper equipment for raising tobacco in a virgin wilderness, it and the scarlet heels and the ruffled wristbands in which he broke the earth and fought his stealthy and simple neighbors.