Flags in the Dust (29 page)

“They were all pretty good men in those days,” old Bayard agreed. “But you damn fellers quit fighting and went home too often.”

“Well,” old man Falls rejoined defensively, “even ef the hull country’s overrun with bears, a feller cant hunt bears all the time. He’s got to quit once in a while, ef hit’s only to rest up the dawgs and hosses. But I reckon them dogs and hosses could stay on the trail long as any,” he added with sober pride. “ ’Course ever’body couldn’t keep up with that ’ere mistcolored
stallion. They wasn’t but one animal in the Confedrit army could tech him—that last hoss Zeb Fothergill fotch back outen one of Sherman’s cavalry pickets on his last trip into Tennessee.

“Nobody never did know what Zeb done on them trips of his’n; Cunnel claimed hit was jest to steal hosses. But he never got back with lessen one. One time he come back with seven of the orneriest critters that ever walked, I reckon. He tried to swap ’em fer meat and cawn-meal, but wouldn’t nobody have ’em; then he tried to give ’em to the army, but even the army wouldn’t have ’em. So he finally turned ’em loose and requisitioned to Joe Johnston’s haidquarters fer ten hosses sold to Forrest’s cavalry. I dont know ef he ever got air answer. Nate Forrest wouldn’t a had them hosses. I doubt ef they’d even a et ’em in Vicksburg.…… I never did put no big reliability in Zeb Fothergill, him comin’ and goin’ by hisself like he done. But he knowed hosses, and he usually fotch a good ’un home ever’ time he went away to’ds the war. But he never got anoth-er’n like this befo’.”

The bulge was gone from his cheek and he produced his pocket knife and cut a neat segment from his plug of tobacco and lipped it from the knife-blade. Then he rewrapped his parcel and tied the string about it. The ash of old Bayard’s cigar trembled delicately about its glowing heart, but did not yet fall.

Old man Falls spat neatly and brownly into the cold fireplace. “That day we was in Calhoun county,” he continued. “Hit was as putty a summer mawnin’ as you ever see; men and hosses rested and fed and feelin’ peart, trottin’ along the road through the woods and fields whar birds was a-singin’ and young rabbits lopin’ acrost the road. Cunnel and Zeb was ridin’ along side by side on them two hosses, Cunnel on Jupiter and Zeb on that sorrel two-year-old, and they was a-braggin’ as usual. We all knowed Cunnel’s Jupiter, but Zeb kep’ a-contendin’ he
wouldn’t take no man’s dust. The road was putty straight across the bottom to’ds the river and Zeb kep’ on a-aggin’ the Cunnel fer a race, until Cunnel says All right. He told us boys to come on and him and Zeb would wait fer us at the river bridge ’bout fo’ mile ahead, and him and Zeb lined up and lit out.

“Them hosses was the puttiest livin’ things I ever seen. They went off together like two hawks, neck and neck. They was outen sight in no time, with dust swirlin’ behind, but we could foller ’em fer a ways by the dust they left, watchin’ it kind of suckin’ on down the road like one of these here ottomobiles was in the middle of it. When they come to whar the road drapped down to the river Cunnel had Zeb beat by about three hundred yards. Thar was a spring-branch jest under the ridge, and when Cunnel sailed over the rise, thar was a comp’ny of Yankee cavalry with their hosses picketed and their muskets stacked, eatin’ dinner by the spring. Cunnel says they was a-settin’ thar gapin’ at the rise when he come over hit, holdin’ cups of cawfee and hunks of bread in their hands and their muskets stacked about fo’ty foot away, buggin’ their eyes at him.

“It was too late fer him to turn back, anyhow, but I dont reckon he would ef they’d been time. He jest spurred down the ridge and rid in amongst ’em, scatterin’ cook-fires and guns and men, shoutin’ ‘Surround ’em, boys! Ef you move, you air dead men.’ One or two of ’em made to break away, but Cunnel drawed his pistols and let ’em off, and they come back and scrouged in amongst the others, and thar they set, still a-holdin’ their dinner, when Zeb come up. And that was the way we found ’em when we got thar ten minutes later.” Old man Falls spat again, neatly and brownly, and he chuckled. His eyes shone like periwinkles. “That cawfee was sho’ mighty fine,” he added.

“And thar we was, with a passel of prisoners we didn’t have
no use fer. We held ’em all that day and et their grub; and when night come we taken and throwed their muskets into the crick and taken their ammunition and the rest of the grub and put a gyard on their hosses, then the rest of us laid down. And all that night we laid thar in them fine Yankee blankets, listen-in’ to them prisoners sneakin’ away one at a time, slippin’ down the bank into the crick and wadin’ off. Time to time one would slip er make a splash er somethin’, then they’d all git right still fer a spell. But putty soon we’d hear ’em at it again, crawlin’ through the bushes to’ds the crick, and us layin’ thar with blanket aidges held agin our faces. Hit was nigh dawn ’fore the last one had snuck off in a way that suited ’im.

“Then Cunnel from whar he was a-layin’ let out a yell them pore critters could hear fer a mile.

“ ‘Go it, Yank,’ he says, ‘and look out fer moccasins!’

“Next mawnin’ we saddled up and loaded our plunder and ever’ man taken him a hoss, and lit out fer home. We’d been home two weeks and Cunnel had his cawn laid by, when we heard ’bout Van Dorn ridin’ into Holly Springs and burnin’ Grant’s sto’s. Seems like he never needed no help from us, noways.” He chewed his tobacco for a time, quietly retrospective, reliving in the company of men now dust with the dust for which they had, unwittingly perhaps, fought, those gallant, pinch-bellied days into which few who now trod that earth could enter with him.

Old Bayard shook the ash from his cigar. “Will,” he said, “what the devil were you folks fighting about, anyhow?”

“Bayard,” old man Falls answered. “Be damned ef I ever did know.”

After old man Falls had departed with his small parcel and his innocently bulging cheek, old Bayard sat and smoked his cigar. Presently he raised his hand and touched the wen on his
face, but lightly, remembering old man Falls’ parting stricture; and recalling this, the thought that it might not yet be too late, that he might yet remove the paste with water, followed.

He rose and crossed to the lavatory in the corner of the room. Above it was fixed a small cabinet with a mirror in the door, and in it he examined the black spot on his cheek, touching it again with his fingers, then examining his hand. Yes, it might still come off.…… But be damned if he would; be damned to a man who didn’t know his own mind. And Will Falls, too; Will Falls, hale and sane and sound as a dollar; Will Falls who, as he himself had said, was too old to have any reason for injuring anyone. He flung his cigar away and quitted the room and tramped through the lobby toward the door where his chair sat. But before he reached the door he turned about and came up to the cashier’s window, behind which the cashier sat in a green eyeshade.

“Res,” he said.

The cashier looked up. “Yes, Colonel?”

“Who is that damn boy that hangs around here, looking through that window all day?” Old Bayard lowered his voice within a pitch or so of an ordinary conversational tone.

“What boy, Colonel?” Old Bayard pointed, and the cashier raised himself on his stool and peered over the partition and saw beyond the indicated window a boy of ten or twelve watching him with an innocently casual air. “Oh. That’s Will Beard’s boy, from up at the boarding house,” he shouted. “Friend of Byron’s, I think.”

“What’s he doing around here? Every time I walk through here, there he is looking in that window. What does he want?”

“Maybe he’s a bank robber,” the cashier suggested.

“What?” Old Bayard cupped his ear fiercely in his palm.

“Maybe he’s a bank robber,” the other shouted, leaning forward on his stool. Old Bayard snorted and tramped violently
on and slammed his chair back against the door. The cashier sat lumped and shapeless on his stool, rumbling deep within his gross body. He said, without turning his head: “Colonel’s let Will Falls treat him with that salve.” Snopes at his desk made no reply; did not raise his head. After a time the boy moved, and drifted casually and innocently away.

Virgil Beard now possessed a pistol that projected a stream of ammoniac water excruciatingly painful to the eyes, a small magic lantern, and an ex-candy showcase in which he kept birds’ eggs and an assortment of insects that had died slowly on pins, and a modest hoard of nickels and dimes. With a child’s innocent pleasure he divulged to his parents the source of this beneficence, and his mother took Snopes to her gray heart, fixing him special dishes and performing trifling acts to increase his creature comfort with bleak and awkward gratitude.

At times the boy, already dressed and with his bland shining face, would enter his room and waken him from his troubled sleep and sit on a chair while Snopes donned his clothing, talking politely and vaguely of certain things he aimed to do, and of what he would require to do them successfully with. Or if not this, he was on hand at breakfast while his harried gray mother and the slatternly negress bore dishes back and forth from the kitchen, quiet but proprietorial; blandly and innocently portentous. And all during the banking day (it was summer now, and school was out) Snopes never knew when he would look over his shoulder and find the boy lounging without the plate glass window of the bank, watching him with profound and static patience. Presently he would take himself away, and for a short time Snopes would be able to forget him until, wrapped in his mad unsleeping dream, he mounted the boarding house veranda at supper time and found the boy sitting there and waiting patiently his return; innocent and
bland, steadfast and unassertive as a minor but chronic disease. “Got another business letter to write tonight, Mr Snopes?”

And sometimes after he had gone to bed and his light was out, he lay in the mad darkness against which his sleepless desire moiled in obscene images and shapes, and heard presently outside his door secret, ratlike sounds; and lay so tense in the dark, expecting the door to open and, preceded by breathing above him sourceless and invisible: “Going to write another letter, Mr Snopes?” And he waked sweating from dreams in which her image lived and moved and thwarted and mocked him, with the pillow crushed against his mean, half insane face, while the words produced themselves in his ears: “Got air other letter to write yet, Mr Snopes?”

So he changed his boarding house. He gave Mrs Beard an awkward, stumbling explanation; vague, composed of sentences with frayed ends. She was sorry to see him go, but she permitted him to pack his meagre belongings and depart without either anger or complaint, as is the way of country people.

He went to live with a relation, that I. O. Snopes who ran the restaurant—a nimble, wiry little man with a talkative face like a nutcracker, and false merry eyes—in a small frame house painted a sultry prodigious yellow, near the railway station. Snopeses did not trust one another enough to develop any intimate relations, and he was permitted to go and come when he pleased. So he found this better than the boarding house, the single deterrent to complete satisfaction being the hulking but catlike presence of I.O.’s son Clarence. But, what with his secretive nature, it had even been his custom to keep all his possessions under lock and key, so this was but a minor matter. Mrs Snopes was a placid mountain of a woman who swung all day in a faded wrapper, in the porch swing. Not reading, not doing anything: just swinging.

He liked it here. It was more private; no transients appearing
at the supper table and tramping up and down the hallways all night; no one to try to engage him in conversation on the veranda after supper. Now, after supper he could sit undisturbed on the tight barren little porch in the growing twilight and watch the motor cars congregating at the station across the way to meet the 7:30 train; could watch the train draw into the station with its rows of lighted windows and the hissing plume from the locomotive, and go on again with bells, trailing its diminishing sound into the distant evening, while he sat on the dark porch with his desperate sleepless lust and his fear. Thus, until one evening after supper he stepped through the front door and found Virgil Beard sitting patiently and blandly on the front steps in the twilight.

So he had been run to earth again, and drawn, and hounded again into flight. Yet outwardly he pursued the even tenor of his days, unchanged, performing his duties with his slow meticulous care. But within him smoldered something of which he himself grew afraid, and at times he found himself gazing at his idle hands on the desk before him as though they were not his hands, wondering dully at them and at what they were capable, nay importunate, to do. And day by day that lust and fear and despair that moiled within him merged, becoming desperation—a thing blind and vicious and hopeless, like that of a cornered rat. And always, if he but raised his head and looked toward the window, there was the boy watching him with bland and innocent eyes beneath the pale straw of his hair. Sometimes he blinked; then the boy was gone; sometimes not. So he could never tell whether the face had been there at all, or whether it was merely another face swum momentarily from out the seething of his mind. In the meanwhile he wrote another letter.

Miss Jenny’s exasperation and rage when old Bayard arrived home that afternoon was unbounded. “You stubborn old fool,” she stormed. “Cant Bayard kill you fast enough, that you’ve got to let that old quack of a Will Falls give you blood poisoning? After what Dr Alford told you, when even Loosh Peabody, who thinks a course of quinine or calomel will cure anything from a broken neck to chilblains, agreed with him? I’ll declare, sometimes I just lose all patience with you folks; wonder what crime I seem to be expiating by having to live with you. Soon as Bayard sort of quiets down and I can quit jumping every time the ’phone rings, you have to go and let that old pauper daub your face up with axle grease and lamp black. I’m a good mind to pack up and get out, and start life over in some place where they never heard of a Sartoris.” She raged and stormed on; old Bayard raged in reply, with violent words and profane, and their voices swelled and surged through the house until Elnora and Simon in the kitchen moved furtively, with cocked ears. Finally old Bayard tramped from the house and mounted his horse and rode away, leaving Miss Jenny to wear her rage out upon the empty air, and then there was peace for a time.