Flags in the Dust (11 page)

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

“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.

“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 dont 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 fast. Neck, too,” she added. She rattled the paper crisply.

She said: “Besides, you aint 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 dont 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 dont 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 dont 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 dont want to.”

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

“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 wont admit it, and you just dont want him to ride in it when you cant 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; dont 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 windows were drawn at three oclock old Bayard retired to the office. Inside the grille the cashier and the book-keeper 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 book-keeper 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 book-keeper 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 book-keeper 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 book-keeper 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 book-keeper 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 aint 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 spent 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 just 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 plumb out de gate, and now you already started at dis en’. But ef Mist’ Bayard dont leave dat boy alone, he aint 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 cant 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,” Miss Jenny said, “dont you know
what he’ll get then? When he finds that car wont 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 and turned a 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 dont know what else you expect of him. Of any Sartoris. You dont 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 the hall 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 for 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. He fastened it here and drew a chair across 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.

Thus each opening was in a way ceremonial, commemorating the violent finis to some phase of his family’s history, and while he struggled with the stiff lock it seemed to him that a legion of ghosts breathed quietly at his shoulder, and he pictured a double line of them with their arrogant identical faces waiting just beyond a portal and stretching away toward the invisible dais where Something sat waiting the latest arrival among them; thought of them chafing a little and a little bewildered, thought and desire being denied them, in a place where, immortal, there were no opportunities for vainglorious swashbuckling. Denied that Sartoris heaven in which they could spend eternity dying deaths of needless and magnificent violence while spectators doomed to immortality looked eternally on. The Valhalla which John Sartoris, turning the wine glass in his big, well-shaped hand that night at the supper table, had seen in its chaste and fragile bubble.

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. And old Bayard held it upon his two hands, seeing in its stained fine blade and shabby elegant sheath the symbol of his race; that too in the tradition: the thing itself fine and clear enough, only the instrument had become a little tarnished in its very aptitude for shaping circumstance to its arrogant ends.

He laid it aside. Next came a heavy cavalry sabre, and a rosewood case containing two duelling pistols with silver mountings and the lean, deceptive delicacy of race horses, and what old man Falls had called “that ’ere dang der’nger.” It was a stubby, evil looking thing with its three barrels; viciously and coldly utilitarian, and between the other two weapons it lay like a cold and deadly insect between two flowers.

He removed next the blue army forage-cap of the ’forties and a small pottery vessel and a Mexican machete, and a long-necked oil can such as locomotive drivers use. It was of silver, and engraved upon it was the picture of a locomotive with a
huge bell-shaped funnel and surrounded by an ornate wreath. Beneath it, the name, “Virginia” and the date, “August 9, 1873.”

He put these aside and with sudden purposefulness he removed the other objects—a frogged and braided coat of Confederate gray and a gown of sprigged muslin scented faintly of lavender and evocative of old formal minuets and drifting honeysuckle among steady candle flames—and came upon a conglomeration of yellowed papers neatly bound in packets, and at last upon a huge, brass-bound bible. He lifted this to the edge of the chest and opened it. The paper was brown and mellow with years, and it had a texture like that of slightly-moist wood ashes, as though each page were held intact by its archaic and fading print. He turned the pages carefully back to the fly leaves. Beginning near the bottom of the final blank page, a column of names and dates rose in stark, fading simplicity, growing fainter and fainter where time had lain upon them. At the top they were still legible, as they were at the foot of the preceding page. But halfway up this page they ceased, and from there on the sheet was blank save for the faint soft mottlings of time and an occasional brownish penstroke significant but without meaning.