Flags in the Dust (6 page)

Miss Jenny groped in the darkness beside the door and from beside the yawning lesser obscurity of the mirror she took Bayard’s hat from the hook, and carried it out to him and put it in his hand. “Dont sit out here too long, now. It aint summer yet.”

He grunted indistinguishably, but he put the hat on and
she turned and went back to the office and finished the paper and folded it and laid it on the table. She snapped the light off and mounted the dark stairs to her room. The moon shone above the trees at this height and it fell in broad silver bars through the eastern windows.

Before turning up the light she crossed to the southern wall and raised a window there, upon the crickets and frogs and somewhere a mockingbird. Outside the window was a magnolia tree, but it was not to bloom yet, nor had the honeysuckle massed along the garden fence flowered. But this would be soon, and from here she could overlook the garden, could look down upon cape jasmine and syringa and callacanthus where the moon lay upon their bronze and yet unflowered sleep, and upon those other shoots and graftings from the faraway Carolina gardens she had known as a girl.

Just beyond the corner from the invisible kitchen, Elnora’s voice welled in mellow falling suspense.
All folks talkin’ ’bout heaven aint gwine dar
Elnora sang, and presently she and Simon emerged into the moonlight and took the path to Simon’s cabin below the barn. Simon had fired his cigar at last, and the evil smoke of it trailed behind him, fading; but when they had gone the rank pungency of it seemed still to linger within the sound of the crickets and of the frogs upon the silver air, mingled and blended inextricably with the dying fall of Elnora’s voice.

All folks talkin’ ’bout heaven aint gwine dar

His cigar was cold, and he moved and dug a match from his waistcoat and relit it and braced his feet again upon the railing, and again the drifting sharpness of tobacco lay along the windless currents of the silver air, straying and fading slowly amid locust-breaths and the ceaseless fairy reiteration of crickets and frogs. There was a mockingbird somewhere down the
valley, and after a while another sang from the magnolia at the corner of the garden fence. An automobile passed along the smooth valley road, slowed for the railway crossing, then sped on. Before the sound of it had died away, the whistle of the nine-thirty train drifted down from the hills.

Two long blasts with dissolving echoes, two short following ones; but before it came in sight his cigar was cold again, and he sat holding it in his fingers and watched the locomotive drag its string of yellow windows up the valley and into the hills once more, where after a time it whistled again, arrogant and resonant and sad. John Sartoris had sat so on this veranda and watched his two daily trains emerge from the hills and cross the valley into the hills, with lights and smoke and a noisy simulation of speed. But now his railway belonged to a syndicate and there were more than two trains on it that ran from Chicago to the Gulf, completing his dream, while John Sartoris slept among martial cherubim and the useless vain-glory of whatever God he did not scorn to recognise.

Then old Bayard’s cigar was cold again and he sat with it dead in his fingers and watched a tall shape emerge from the lilac bushes beside the garden fence and cross the patchy moonlight toward the veranda. His grandson wore no hat and he came on and mounted the steps and stood with the moonlight bringing the hawk-like planes of his face into high relief while his grandfather sat with his dead cigar and looked at him.

“Bayard, son?” old Bayard said. Young Bayard stood in the moonlight. His eyesockets were cavernous shadows.

“I tried to keep him from going up there on that goddam little popgun,” he said at last with brooding savageness. Then he moved again and old Bayard lowered his feet, but his grandson only dragged a chair violently up beside him and flung himself into it. His motions were abrupt also, like his grandfather’s, but controlled and flowing for all their violence.

“Why in hell didn’t you let me know you were coming?” old Bayard demanded. “What do you mean, straggling in here like this?”

“I didn’t let anybody know.” Young Bayard dug a cigarette from his pocket and raked a match on his shoe.

“What?”

“I didn’t tell anybody I was coming,” he repeated above the cupped match, raising his voice.

“Simon knew it. Do you inform nigger servants of your movements instead of your own granddaddy?”

“Damn Simon, sir,” young Bayard shouted. “Who set him to watching me?”

“Dont yell at me, boy,” old Bayard shouted in turn. His grandson flung the match away and drew at the cigarette in deep troubled draughts. “Dont wake Jenny,” old Bayard added more mildly, striking a match to his cold cigar. “All right, are you?”

“Here,” young Bayard said, extending his hand. “Let me hold it. You’re going to set your moustache on fire.” But old Bayard repulsed him sharply and sucked stubbornly and impotently at the match in his unsteady fingers.

“I said, are you all right?” he repeated.

“Why not?” young Bayard snapped. “Takes damn near as big a fool to get hurt in a war as it does in peacetime. Damn fool, that’s what it is.” He drew at the cigarette again, then he hurled it not half consumed after the match. “There was one I had to lay for four days to catch him. Had to get Sibleigh in an old crate of an
Ak. W. to suck him in for me. Wouldn’t look at anything but cold meat, him and his skull and bones. Well, he got it. Stayed on him for six thousand feet, put a whole belt right into his cockpit. You could a covered ’em all with your hat. But the bastard just wouldn’t burn.” His voice rose again as he talked on. Locust drifted up in sweet gusts, and the crickets
and frogs were clear and monotonous as pipes blown drowsily by an idiot boy. From her silver casement the moon looked down upon the valley dissolving in opaline tranquillity into the serene mysterious infinitude of the hills, and young Bayard’s voice went on and on, recounting violence and speed and death.

“Hush,” old Bayard said again. “You’ll wake Jenny,” and his grandson’s voice sank obediently; but soon it rose again, and after a time Miss Jenny emerged with her white woolen shawl over her night-dress and came and kissed him.

“I reckon you’re all right,” she said, “or you wouldn’t be in such a bad humor. Tell us about Johnny.”

“He was drunk,” young Bayard answered harshly. “Or a fool. I tried to keep him from going up there, on that damn
Camel. You couldn’t see your hand, that morning. Air all full of hunks of cloud and any fool could a known that on their side it’d be full of
Fokkers that could reach twenty-five thousand, and him on a damn Camel. But he was hell-bent on going up there, damn near to Lille. I couldn’t keep him from it. He shot at me,” young Bayard said; “I tried to drive him back, but he gave me a burst. He was already high as he could get, but they must have been five thousand feet above us. They flew all over him. Hemmed him up like a damn calf in a pen while one of them sat right on his tail until he took fire and jumped. Then they streaked for home.” Locust drifted and drifted on the still air, and the silver rippling of the tree frogs. In the magnolia at the corner of the house the mockingbird sang. Down the valley another one replied.

“Streaked for home, with the rest of his gang,” young Bayard said. “Him and his skull and bones. It was Ploeckner,” he added, and for the moment his voice was still and untroubled with vindicated pride. “He was one of the best they had.
Pupil of Richthofen’s.”

“Well, that’s something,” Miss Jenny agreed, stroking his head.

“I tried to keep him from going up there on that goddam little popgun,” he burst out again.

“What did you expect, after the way you raised him?” Miss Jenny asked. “You’re the oldest.…… You’ve been to the cemetery, haven’t you?”

“Yessum,” he answered quietly.

“What’s that?” old Bayard demanded.

“That old fool Simon said that’s where you were.… You come on and eat your supper,” she said briskly and firmly, entering his life again without a by-your-leave, taking up the snarled threads of it after her brisk and capable fashion, and he rose obediently.

“What’s that?” old Bayard repeated.

“And you come on in, too.” Miss Jenny swept him also into the orbit of her will as you gather a garment from a chair in passing. “Time you were in bed.” They followed her to the kitchen and stood while she delved into the ice box and set food on the table, and a pitcher of milk, and drew up a chair.

“Fix him a toddy, Jenny,” old Bayard suggested. But Miss Jenny vetoed this immediately.

“Milk’s what he wants. I reckon he had to drink enough whisky during that war to last him for a while. Bayard used to never come home from his, without wanting to ride his horse up the front steps and into the house. Come on, now,” and she drove old Bayard firmly out of the kitchen and up the stairs. “You go on to bed, you hear? Let him alone for a while.” She saw his door shut and entered young Bayard’s room and prepared his bed, and after a while from her own room she heard him mount the stairs.

His room was treacherously illumined by the moon, and without turning on the light he went and sat on the bed. Outside
the windows the interminable crickets and frogs, as though the moon’s rays were thin glass impacting among the trees and shrubs and shattering in brittle musical rain upon the ground, and above this and with a deep timbrous quality, the measured respirations of the pump in the electric plant beyond the barn.

He dug another cigarette from his pocket and lit it. But he took only two draughts before he flung it away. And then he sat quietly in the room which he and John had shared in the young masculine violence of their twinship, on the bed where he and his wife had lain the last night of his leave, the night before he went back to England and thence out to the Front again, where John already was. Beside him on the pillow the wild bronze swirling of her hair was hushed now in the darkness, and she lay holding his arm with both hands against her breast while they talked quietly, soberly at last.

He had not been thinking of her then. When he thought of her who lay rigid in the dark beside him, holding his arm tightly to her breasts, it was only to be a little savagely ashamed of the heedless thing he had done to her. He was thinking of his brother whom he had not seen in over a year, thinking that in a month they would see one another again.

Nor was he thinking of her now, although the walls held, like a withered flower in a casket, something of that magical chaos in which they had lived for two months, tragic and transient as a blooming of honeysuckle and sharp as the odor of mint. He was thinking of his dead brother; the spirit of their violent complementing days lay like a dust everywhere in the room, obliterating that other presence, stopping his breathing, and he went to the window and flung the sash crashing upward and leaned there, gulping air into his lungs like a man who has been submerged and who still cannot believe that he has reached the surface again.

Later, lying naked between the sheets, he waked himself
with his own groaning. The room was filled now with a gray light, sourceless and chill, and he turned his head and saw Miss Jenny, the woolen shawl about her shoulders, sitting in a chair beside the bed.

“What’s the matter?” he said.

“That’s what I want to know,” Miss Jenny answered. “You make more noise than that water pump.”

“I want a drink.”

Miss Jenny leaned over and raised a glass from the floor beside her. Bayard had risen to his elbow and he took the glass. His hand stopped before the glass reached his mouth and he hunched on his elbow, the glass beneath his nose.

“Hell,” he said. “I said a drink.”

“You drink that milk, boy,” Miss Jenny commanded. “You think I’m going to sit up all night just to feed you whisky? Drink it, now.”

He emptied the glass obediently and lay back. Miss Jenny set the glass on the floor.

“What time is it?”

“Hush,” she said. She laid her hand on his brow. “Go to sleep.”

He rolled his head on the pillow, but he could not evade her hand.

“Get away,” he said. “Let me alone.”

“Hush,” Miss Jenny said. “Go to sleep.”

S
imon said: “You aint never yit planted nothin’ whar hit ought ter be planted.” He sat on the bottom step, whetting the blade of his hoe with a file. Miss Jenny stood with her caller at the edge of the veranda above him, in a man’s felt hat and heavy gloves. A pair of shears dangled below her waist, glinting in the morning sunlight.

“And whose business is that?” she demanded. “Yours, or Colonel’s? Either one of you can loaf on this porch and tell me where a plant will grow best or look best, but if either of you ever grew as much as a weed out of the ground yourselves, I’d like to see it. I dont give two whoops in the bad place where you or Colonel either thinks a flower ought to be planted; I plant my flowers just exactly where I want ’em to be planted.”

“And den dares ’um not ter come up,” Simon added. “Dat’s de way you en Isom gyardens. Thank de Lawd Isom aint got to make his livin’ wid de sort of gyardenin’ he learns in dat place.” Still whetting at the hoe blade he jerked his head toward the corner of the house.

He wore a disreputable hat, of a fabric these many years anonymous. Miss Jenny stared coldly down upon this hat.

“Isom made his living by being born black,” Miss Jenny snapped. “Suppose you quit scraping at that hoe and see if you cant dare some of the grass in that salvia bed to come up.”

“I got to git a aidge on dis curry-comb,” Simon said. “You go’n out dar to yo’ gyarden: I’ll git dis bed cleaned up.” He scraped steadily at the hoe-blade.

“You’ve been at that long enough to find out that you cant possibly wear that blade down to the handle with just a file. You’ve been at it ever since breakfast. I heard you. You get on out there where folks passing will think you’re working, anyhow.”

Simon groaned dismally and spent a half minute laying the file aside. He laid it on a step, then he picked it up and moved it to another step. Then he laid it against the step behind him. Then he ran his thumb along the blade, examining it with morose hopefulness.