Flags in the Dust (28 page)

Still kneeling, he lifted the objects out one by one and laid them on the floor. He picked up the coat again, and its fading stale acridity drifted in his nostrils with an intimation of life and warmth. “Johnny,” he whispered, “Johnny.” Suddenly he raised he garment toward his face but halted it as sharply, and with the coat half raised he looked swiftly over his shoulder. But immediately he recovered himself and turned his head and lifted the garment and laid his face against it, defiantly and deliberately, and knelt so for a time.

Then he rose and gathered up the book and the trophy and the coat and crossed to his chest of drawers and took from it a photograph. It was a picture of John’s Princeton eating club group, and he gathered this also under his arm and descended the stairs and passed on out the back door. As he emerged
Simon was just crossing the yard with the carriage, and as he passed the kitchen Elnora was crooning one of her mellow endless songs.

Behind the smoke-house squatted the black pot and the wooden tubs where Elnora did her washing in fair weather. She had been washing today; the clothes line swung with its damp, limp burden, and beneath the pot smoke yet curled from the soft ashes. He thrust the pot over with his foot and rolled it aside, and from the woodshed he fetched an armful of rich pine and laid it on the ashes. Soon a blaze, pale in the sunny air; and when the wood was burning strongly he laid the coat and the bible and the trophy and the photograph on the flames and prodded them and turned them until they were consumed. In the kitchen Elnora crooned mellowly as she labored; her voice came rich and plaintful and sad along the sunny reaches of the air. He must remember to breathe shallowly.

Simon drove rapidly to town, but he had been forestalled. The two negroes had told a merchant about finding Bayard on the roadside and the news had reached the bank, and old Bayard sent for Dr Peabody. But Dr Peabody was gone fishing, so he took Dr Alford instead, and the two of them in Dr Alford’s car passed Simon just on the edge of town. He turned about and followed them, but by the time he arrived home they had young Bayard anaesthetized and temporarily incapable of further harm; and when Miss Jenny and Narcissa drove unsuspectingly up the drive an hour later, he was bandaged and conscious again. They had not heard of it. Miss Jenny did not recognise Dr Alford’s car standing in the drive, but she had one look at the strange motor. “That fool has killed himself at last,” she said, and she got out of Narcissa’s machine and sailed into the house and up the stairs.

Bayard lay white and still and a little sheepish in his bed. Old Bayard and the doctor were just leaving, and Miss Jenny waited until they were out of the room, then she raged and stormed at him and stroked his hair, while Simon bobbed and bowed in the corner between bed and wall. “Dasso, Miss Jenny, dasso! I kep’ a-tellin’ ’im!”

She left him then and descended to the veranda where Dr Alford stood in impeccable departure. Old Bayard sat in the car waiting for him, and on Miss Jenny’s appearance he became his stiff self again and completed his departing, and he and old Bayard drove away.

Miss Jenny also looked up and down the veranda, then into the hall. “Where—” she said, then she called: “Narcissa.” A reply; “Where are you?” she added. The reply came again and Miss Jenny reentered the house and saw Narcissa’s white dress in the gloom where she sat on the piano bench. “He’s awake,” Miss Jenny said. “You can come up and see him.” The other rose and turned her face to the light. “Why, what’s the matter?” Miss Jenny demanded. “You look lots worse than he does. You’re white as a sheet.”

“Nothing,” the other answered. “I——” She stared at Miss Jenny a moment, clenching her hands at her sides. “I must go,” she said, and she emerged into the hall. “It’s late, and Horace.……”

“You can come up and speak to him, cant you?” Miss Jenny asked, curiously. “There’s not any blood, if that’s what you are afraid of.”

“It isn’t that,” Narcissa answered. “I’m not afraid.”

Miss Jenny approached her, piercing and curious. “Why, all right,” she said kindly. “If you’d rather not. I just thought perhaps you’d like to see he’s all right, as long as you are here. But dont, if you dont feel like it.”

“Yes. Yes. I feel like it. I want to.” She passed Miss Jenny
and went on. At the foot of the stairs she paused until Miss Jenny came up behind her, then she went on, mounting swiftly and with her face averted.

“What’s the matter with you?” Miss Jenny demanded, trying to see the other’s face. “What’s happened to you? Have you gone and fallen in love with him?”

“In love … him? Bayard?” She paused, then hurried on, clutching the rail. She began to laugh thinly, and put her hand to her mouth. Miss Jenny mounted beside her, piercing and curious and cold; Narcissa hurried on. At the stair head she stopped again, still with her face averted, and let Miss Jenny pass her; and just without the door she stopped and leaned against it, throttling her laughter and her trembling. Then she entered the room, where Miss Jenny stood beside the bed watching her.

There was a sickish-sweet lingering of ether in the room, and she approached the bed blindly and stood beside it with her hidden clenched hands. Bayard’s head was pallid and calm, like a chiseled mask brushed lightly over with his spent violence, and he was watching her, and for a while she gazed at him; and Miss Jenny and the room and all, swam away.

“You beast, you beast,” she cried thinly. “Why must you always do these things where I’ve got to see you?”

“I didn’t know you were there,” Bayard answered mildly, with weak astonishment.

Every few days, by Miss Jenny’s request, she came out and sat beside his bed and read to him. He cared nothing at all about books; it is doubtful if he had ever read a book on his own initiative; but he would lie motionless in his cast while her grave contralto voice went on and on in the quiet room. Sometimes he tried to talk to her, but she ignored his attempts and read on; if he persisted, she went away and left him. So he soon
learned to lie, usually with his eyes closed, voyaging alone in the bleak and barren regions of his despair, while her voice flowed on and on above the remoter sounds that came up to them—Miss Jenny scolding Simon or Isom downstairs or in the garden; the twittering of birds in the tree just beyond the window; the ceaseless groaning of the water pump below the barn. At times she would cease and look at him and find that he was peacefully sleeping.

Old man Falls came through the lush green of early June, came into town through the yet horizontal sunlight of morning, and in his dusty neat overalls he now sat opposite old Bayard in immaculate linen and a geranium like a merry wound. The room was cool and still, with the clear morning light and the casual dust of a negro janitor’s casual and infrequent disturbing. Now that old Bayard was aging, and what with the deaf tenor of his stiffening ways, he was showing more and more a preference for surrounding himself with things of a like nature; showing an incredible aptitude for choosing servants who shaped their days to his in a sort of pottering and hopeless futility. The janitor, who dubbed old Bayard General and whom old Bayard and the other clients for whom he performed seemingly interminable duties of a slovenly and minor nature, addressed as Dr Jones, was one of these. He was black and stooped with querulousness and age, and he took advantage of everyone who would permit him, and old Bayard swore at him all the time he was around and allowed him to steal his tobacco and the bank’s winter supply of coal by the scuttleful and peddle it to other negroes.

The windows behind which old Bayard and his caller sat
gave upon a vacant lot of rubbish and dusty weeds. It was bounded by the weathered rears of sundry one storey board buildings within which small businesses—repair- and junk-shops and such—had their lowly and ofttimes anonymous being. The lot itself was used by day by country people as a depot for their teams; already some of these were tethered somnolent and ruminant there, and about the stale ammoniac droppings of their patient generations sparrows swirled in garrulous clouds, or pigeons slanted with sounds like rusty shutters, or strode and preened in burnished and predatory pomposity, crooning among themselves with guttural unemphasis.

Old man Falls sat on the opposite side of the trash-filled fireplace, mopping his face with a clean blue bandanna.

“It’s my damned old legs,” he roared, faintly apologetic. “Used to be I’d walk twelve-fifteen mile to a picnic or a singin’ with less study than what that ’ere little old three mile into town gives me now.” He mopped the handkerchief about that face of his browned and cheerful these many years with the simple and abounding earth. “Looks like they’re fixin’ to give out on me, and I aint but ninety-three, neither.” He held his parcel in his other hand, but he continued to mop his face, making no motion to open it.

“Why didn’t you wait on the road until a wagon came along?” old Bayard shouted. “Always some damn feller with a field full of weeds coming to town.”

“I reckon I mought,” the other agreed. “But gittin’ here so quick would spile my holiday. I aint like you townfolks. I aint got so much time I kin hurry it.” He stowed the handkerchief away and rose and laid his parcel carefully on the mantel, and from his shirt he produced a small object wrapped in a clean frayed rag. Beneath his tedious and unhurried fingers there emerged a tin snuff-box polished long since to the dull soft
sheen of silver by handling and age. Old Bayard sat and watched, watched quietly as the other removed the cap of the box and put this, too, carefully aside.

“Now, turn yo’ face up to the light,” old man Falls directed.

“Loosh Peabody says that stuff will give me blood-poisoning, Will.”

The other continued his slow preparations, his blue innocent eyes raptly preoccupied. “Loosh Peabody never said that,” he corrected quietly. “One of them young doctors told you that, Bayard. Lean yo’ face to the light.” Old Bayard sat tautly back in his chair, his hands on the arms of it, watching the other with his piercing old eyes soberly, a little wistful; eyes filled with unnameable things like the eyes of old lions, and intent.

Old man Falls poised a dark gob of his ointment on one finger and set the box carefully on his vacated chair, and put his hand on old Bayard’s face. But old Bayard still resisted, though passively, watching him with unutterable things in his eyes. Old man Falls drew his face firmly and gently into the light from the window.

“Come on, here. I aint young enough to waste time hurtin’ folks. Hold still, now, so I wont spot yo’ face up. My hand aint steady enough to lift a rifle ball offen a hot stove-led no mo’.”

Bayard submitted then, and old man Falls patted the salve onto the wen with small deft touches. Then he took the bit of cloth and removed the surplus from Bayard’s face and wiped his fingers and dropped the rag onto the hearth and knelt stiffly and touched a match to it. “We allus do that,” he explained. “My granny got that ’ere from a Choctaw woman nigh a hundred and thutty year ago. Aint none of us never told what hit air nor left no after trace.” He rose stiffly and dusted his knees. He recapped the box with the same unhurried care and put it away and picked up his parcel from the mantel and resumed his chair.

“Hit’ll turn black tomorrer, and long’s hit’s black, hit’s workin’. Dont put no water on yo’ face befo’ mawnin’, and I’ll come in again in ten days and dose hit again, and on the——” he mused a moment, computing slowly on his gnarled fingers; his lips moved, but with no sound. “——the ninth day of July, hit’ll drap off. And dont you let Miss Jenny nor none of them doctors worry you about hit.”

He sat with his knees together. The parcel lay on his knees and he now opened it after the ancient laborious ritual, picking patiently at the pink knot until a younger person would have screamed at him. Old Bayard merely lit a cigar and propped his feet against the fireplace, and in good time old man Falls solved the knot and removed the string and laid it across his chair-arm. It fell to the floor and he bent and fumbled it into his blunt fingers and laid it again across the chair-arm and watched it a moment lest it fall again, then he opened the parcel. First was his carton of tobacco, and he removed a plug and sniffed it, turned it about in his hand and sniffed it again. But without biting into it he laid it and its fellows aside and delved further yet. He spread open the throat of the resulting paper bag, and his innocent boy’s eyes gloated soberly into it.

“I’ll declare,” he said. “Sometimes I’m right ashamed for havin’ sech a consarned sweet-tooth. Hit dont give me no rest a-tall.” Still carefully guarding the other objects on his knees he tilted the sack and shook two or three of the striped, shrimplike things into his palm, returned all but one, which he put into his mouth. “I’m afeard now I’ll be loosin’ my teeth someday and I’ll have to start gummin’ ’em or eatin’ soft ones. I never did relish soft candy.” His leathery cheek bulged slightly, with slow regularity like a respiration. He peered into the sack again, and he sat weighing it in his hand.

“They was times back in sixty three and fo’ when a feller could a bought a section of land and a couple of niggers with
this yere bag of candy. Lots of times I mind, with ever’thing goin’ agin us like, and sugar and cawfee gone and food scace, eatin’ stole cawn when they was any to steal and ditch weeds ef they wa’nt; bivouackin’ at night in the rain, more’n like.……” His voice trailed away among ancient phantoms of the soul’s and body’s tribulations, into those regions of glamorous and useless strivings where such ghosts abide. He chuckled and mouthed his peppermint again.

“I mind that day we was a-dodgin’ around Grant’s army, headin’ nawth. Grant was at Grenada then, and Cunnel had rousted us boys out and we taken hoss and jined
Van Dorn down that-a-way. That was when Cunnel had that ’ere silver stallion. Grant was still at Grenada, but Van Dorn lit out one day, headin’ nawth; why, us boys didn’t know. Cunnel mought have knowed, but he never told us. Not that we keered much, long’s we was headin’ to’ds home.

“So our boys was ridin’ along to ourselves, goin’ to jine up with the balance of ’em later. Leastways the rest of ’em thought we was goin’ to jine ’em. But Cunnel never had no idea of doin’ that; his cawn hadn’t been laid by yit, and he was goin’ home fer a spell. We wasn’t runnin’ away,” he explained. “We knowed Van Dorn could handle ’em all right fer a week or two. He usually done it. He was a putty good man,” old man Falls said. “A putty good man.”