Flags in the Dust (17 page)

The stallion moved beneath him like a tremendous mad music, uncontrolled, splendidly uncontrollable. The rope served only to curb its direction, not its speed, and among shouts from the pavement on either hand he swung the animal into another street. This was a quieter street; soon they would be in the country and the stallion could exhaust its rage without the added hazards of motors and pedestrians. Voices faded behind him in his own thunder: “Runaway! Runaway!” but the street was deserted save for a small automobile going in the same direction, and further along beneath the green tunnel, bright small spots of color scuttled out of the street. Children. Hope they stay there, he said to himself. His eyes were streaming a little; beneath him the surging lift and fall; in his nostrils a sharpness of rage and energy and violated pride like smoke from the animal’s body, and he swept past the motor car, remarking in a flashing second a woman’s face and a mouth partly open and two eyes round with tranquil astonishment. But the face flashed away without registering on his mind and he saw the children huddled on one side of the street, and on the opposite side a negro playing a hose on the sidewalk, and beside him a second negro with a pitchfork.

Someone screamed from a veranda, and the huddle of children broke, shrieking; a small figure in a white shirt and diminutive pale blue pants darted into the street, and Bayard leaned forward and wrapped the rope about his hand and
swerved the beast toward the opposite sidewalk, where the two negroes stood gapemouthed. The small figure came on, flashed safely behind, then a narrow band of rushing green; a tree trunk like a wheel spoke in reverse, and the stallion struck clashing fire from wet concrete. It slid, clashed, fighting for balance, lunged and crashed down; and for Bayard, a red shock, then blackness. The horse scrambled up and whirled and poised and struck viciously at the prone man with its hooves, but the negro with the pitchfork drove it away and it trotted stiffly and with tossing head up the street and passed the halted motor car. At the end of the street it stood trembling and snorting and permitted the negro hostler to touch it. Rafe MacCallum still clutched his roll of bills.

They gathered him up and brought him to town in a commandeered motor car and roused Dr Peabody from slumber. Dr Peabody profanely bandaged Bayard’s head and gave him a drink from the bottle which resided in the cluttered waste basket and threatened to telephone Miss Jenny if he didn’t go straight home. Rafe MacCallum promised to see that he did so, and the owner of the impressed automobile offered to drive him out. It was a ford body with, in place of a tonneau, a miniature one room cabin of sheet iron and larger than a dog kennel, in each painted window of which a painted housewife simpered across a painted sewing machine, and in it an actual sewing machine neatly fitted, borne thus about the countryside by the agent. The agent’s name was V. K. Suratt and he now sat with his shrewd plausible face behind the wheel. Bayard with his humming head sat beside him, and to the fender clung a youth with brown forearms and a slanted
extremely new straw hat, who let his limber body absorb the jolts with negligent ease as they rattled sedately out of town on the valley road.

The drink Dr Peabody had given him, instead of quieting his jangled nerves, rolled sluggishly and hotly in his stomach and served only to nauseate him a little, and against his closed eyelids red antic shapes coiled in throbbing and tedious cycles. He watched them dully and without astonishment as they emerged from blackness and swirled sluggishly and consumed themselves and reappeared, each time a little fainter as his mind cleared. And yet, somewhere blended with them, yet at the same time apart and beyond them with a tranquil aloofness and steadfast among their senseless convolutions, was a face. It seemed to have some relation to the instant itself as it culminated in crashing blackness; at the same time it seemed, for all its aloofness, to be a part of the whirling ensuing chaos; a part of it, yet bringing into the red vortex a sort of constant coolness like a faint, shady breeze. So it remained, aloof and not quite distinct, while the coiling shapes faded into a dull unease of physical pain from the jolting of the car, leaving about him like an echo that cool serenity and something else—a sense of shrinking yet fascinated distaste, of which he or something he had done, was the object.

Evening was coming. On either hand cotton and corn thrust green spears above the rich, dark soil, and in the patches of woodland where the sun slanted among violet shadows doves called moodily. After a time Suratt turned from the highway into a faint, rutted wagon road between a field and a patch of woods and they drove straight into the sun, and Bayard removed his hat and held it before his face.

“Sun hurt yo’ haid?” Suratt asked. “ ’Taint long, now.” The road wound presently into the woods where the sun was intermittent, and it rose to a gradual, sandy crest. Beyond this the
land fell away in ragged, ill-tended fields and beyond them in a clump of sorry fruit trees and a stunted grove of silver poplar shrubs pale as absinthe and twinkling ceaselessly with no wind, a weathered small house squatted. Beyond it and much larger loomed a barn gray and gaunt with age. The road forked here. One faint arm curved sandily away toward the house; the other went on between rank weeds toward the barn. The youth on the fender leaned his head into the car. “Drive on to the barn,” he directed.

Suratt obeyed. Beyond the bordering weeds a fence straggled in limp dilapidation, and from the weeds beside it the handles of a plow stood at a gaunt angle while its shard rusted peacefully in the undergrowth, and other implements rusted half concealed there—skeletons of labor healed over by the earth they were to have violated, kinder than they. The fence turned at an angle and Suratt stopped the car and the youth stepped down and opened the warped wooden gate and Suratt drove on into the barnyard where stood a wagon with drunken wheels and a home-made bed, and the rusting skeleton of a ford car. Low down upon its domed and bald radiator the two lamps gave it an expression of beetling patient astonishment, like a skull, and a lean cow ruminated and watched them with moody eyes.

The barn doors sagged drunkenly from broken hinges, held to the posts with twists of rusty wire; beyond, the cavern of the hallway yawned in stale desolation—a travesty of earth’s garnered fullness and its rich inferences. Bayard sat on the fender and leaned his bandaged head against the side of the car and watched Suratt and the youth enter the barn and mount slowly on invisible ladder rungs. The cow chewed in slow dejection, and upon the yellow surface of a pond enclosed by banks of trodden and sun-cracked clay, geese drifted like small muddy clouds. The sun fell in a long slant
upon their rumps and upon their suave necks and upon the cow’s gaunt rhythmically twitching flank, ridging her visible ribs with dingy gold. Presently Suratt’s legs fumbled into view, followed by his cautious body, and after him the youth slid easily down the ladder in one-handed swoops.

He emerged carrying an earthen jug close against his leg. Suratt followed in his neat tieless blue shirt and jerked his head at Bayard, and they turned the corner of the barn among waist-high jimson weeds. Bayard overtook them as the youth with his jug slid with a single motion between two lax strands of barbed wire. Suratt stooped through more sedately and held the top strand taut and set his foot on the lower one until Bayard was through. Behind the barn the ground descended into shadow toward a junglish growth of willow and elder, against which a huge beech and a clump of saplings stood like mottled ghosts, and from which a cool dankness rose like a breath to meet them. The spring welled from the roots of the beech into a wooden frame sunk to its top in white sand that quivered ceaselessly and delicately beneath the water’s limpid unrest, and went on into the willow and elder growth.

The earth about the spring was trampled smooth and packed as an earthen floor. Near the spring a blackened iron pot sat on four bricks, beneath it was a heap of pale wood-ashes and a litter of extinct brands and charred fagot-ends. Against the pot leaned a scrubbing board with a ridged metal face, and a rusty tin cup hung from a nail in the tree above the spring. The youth set the jug down and he and Suratt squatted beside it.

“I dont know if we aint a-goin’ to git in trouble, givin’ Mr Bayard whisky, Hub,” Suratt said. “Still, Doc Peabody give him one dram hisself, so I reckon we kin give him one mo’. Aint that right, Mr Bayard?” Squatting he looked up at Bayard with his shrewd affable face. Hub twisted the corn cob stopper from the jug and passed it to Suratt, who tendered it to Bayard. “I
been knowin’ Mr Bayard ever since he was a chap in knee pants,” Suratt confided to Hub, “but this is the first time me and him ever taken a drink together. Aint that so, Mr Bayard?.… I reckon you’ll want a drinkin’ cup, wont you?” But Bayard was already drinking, with the jug tilted across his horizontal forearm and the mouth held to his lips by the same hand, as it should be done. “He knows how to drink outen a jug, dont he?” Suratt added. “I knowed he was all right,” he said in a tone of confidential vindication. Bayard lowered the jug and returned it to Suratt, who tendered it formally to Hub.

“Go ahead,” Hub said. “Hit it.” Suratt did so, with measured pistonings of his adam’s apple. Above the stream gnats whirled and spun in a levelling ray of sunlight like erratic golden chaff. Suratt lowered the jug and passed it to Hub and wiped his mouth on the back of his hand.

“How you feel now, Mr Bayard?” he asked. Then he said heavily: “You’ll have to excuse me. I reckon I ought to said Cap’m Sartoris, oughtn’t I?”

“What for?” Bayard asked. He squatted also on his heels, against the bole of the beech tree. The rising slope of ground behind them hid the barn and the house, and the three of them squatted in a small bowl of peacefulness remote from the world and time, and filled with the cool and limpid breathing of the spring and a seeping of sunlight among the elders and willows like a thinly diffused wine. On the surface of the spring the sky lay reflected, stippled over with windless beech leaves. Hub squatted leanly with his brown forearms clasped about his knees, smoking a cigarette beneath the tilt of his hat. Suratt was across the spring from him. He wore a faded blue shirt, and in contrast to it his hands and his face were a rich even brown, like mahogany. The jug sat rotundly, benignantly between them.

“Yes, sir,” Suratt repeated, “I always find the best cure fer a wound is plenty of whisky. Doctors, these here fancy young
doctors, ’ll tell a feller different, but old Doc Peabody hisself cut off my granpappy’s laig while granpappy laid back on the kitchen table with a demijohn in his hand and a mattress and a cheer acrost his laigs and fo’ men a-holdin’ him down, and him cussin’ and singin’ so scandalous the women-folks and the chillen went down to the pasture behind the barn and waited. Take some mo’,” he said, and he reached the jug across the spring and Bayard drank again. “Reckon you’re beginnin’ to feel pretty fair, aint you?”

“Damned if I know,” Bayard answered. “It’s dynamite, boys.”

Suratt poised the jug and guffawed, then he lipped it and his adam’s apple pumped again in relief against the wall of elder and willow. The elder would soon flower, with pale clumps of tiny blooms. Miss Jenny made a little wine of it every year. Good wine, if you knew how and had the patience. Elder flower wine. Like a ritual for a children’s game; a game played by little girls in small pale dresses, between supper and twilight. Above the bowl where sunlight yet came in a levelling beam, gnats whirled and spun like dust-motes in a still, disused room. Suratt’s voice went on affably, ceaselessly recapitulant, in polite admiration of the hardness of Bayard’s head and the fact that this was the first time he and Bayard had ever taken a drink together. They drank again, and Hub began to borrow cigarettes of Bayard and he too became a little profanely and robustly anecdotal in his country idiom, about whisky and girls and dice; and presently he and Suratt were arguing amicably about work. They appeared to be able to sit tirelessly and without discomfort on their heels, but Bayard’s legs had soon grown numb and he straightened them, tingling with released blood, and he now sat with his back against the tree and his long legs straight before him, hearing Suratt’s voice without listening to it.

His head was now no more than a sort of taut discomfort; at times it seemed to float away from his shoulders and hang against the green wall like a transparent balloon within which or beyond which that face that would neither emerge completely nor yet fade completely away, lingered with shadowy exasperation—two eyes round with a grave shocked astonishment, two lifted hands flashing behind little white shirt and blue pants swerving into a lifting rush plunging clatter crash blackness.……

Suratt’s slow plausible voice went on steadily, but without any irritant quality. It seemed to fit easily into the still scene, speaking of earthy things. “Way I learnt to chop cotton,” he was saying, “my oldest brother taken and put me in the same row ahead of him. Started me off, and soon’s I taken a lick or two, here he come behind me. And ever’ time my hoe chopped once I could year his’n chop twice. I never had no shoes in them days, neither,” he added drily. “So I had to learn to chop fast, with that ’ere hoe of his’n cuttin’ at my bare heels. But I swo’ then, come what mought, that I wouldn’t never plant nothin’ in the ground, soon’s I could he’p myself. It’s all right fer folks that owns the land, but folks like my folks was dont never own no land, and ever’ time we made a furrow, we was scratchin’ dirt fer somebody else.” The gnats danced and whirled more madly yet in the sun above the secret places of the stream, and the sun’s light was taking on a rich copper tinge. Suratt rose. “Well, boys, I got to git on back to’ds town, myself.” He looked at Bayard again with his shrewd kind face. “I reckon Mr Bayard’s clean fergot that knock he taken, aint he?”

“Dammit,” Bayard said. “Quit calling me Mr Bayard.”

Suratt picked up the jug. “I knowed he was all right, when you got to know him,” he told Hub. “I been knowin’ him since he was knee-high to a grasshopper, but me and him jest aint
been throwed together like this. I was raised a pore boy, fellers, while Mr Bayard’s folks has lived on that ’ere big place with plenty of money in the bank and niggers to wait on ’em. But he’s all right,” he repeated. “He aint goin’ to say nothin’ about who give him this here whisky.”