Flags in the Dust (9 page)

“If he’d just signed his name. I wouldn’t mind who it was.

But like this.…… Please, Miss Jenny.”

“Dont be a fool,” Miss Jenny repeated. “How can we find who it is, if you destroy the evidence?”

“I dont want to know.” Miss Jenny released the paper and Narcissa tore it into bits and cast them over the rail and rubbed her hands on her dress. “I dont want to know. I want to forget all about it.”

“Nonsense. You’re dying to know, right now. I bet you look
at every man you pass and wonder if it’s him. And as long as you dont do something about it, it’ll go on. Get worse, probably. You better let me tell Bayard.”

“No, no. I’d hate for him to know, to think that I would——might have.…… It’s all right: I’ll just burn them up after this, without opening them.… I must really go.”

“Of course: you’ll throw ’em right into the stove,” Miss Jenny agreed with cold irony. Narcissa descended the steps and Miss Jenny came forward into the sunlight again, letting her glasses whip back into the case. “It’s your business, of course. But I’d not stand for it, if ’twas me. But then, I aint twenty-six years old.… Well, come out again when you get another one, or you want some more flowers.”

“Yes, I will. Thank you for these.”

“And let me know what you hear from Horace. Thank the Lord, it’s just a glass-blowing machine, and not a war widow.”

“Yes, I will. Goodbye.” She went on through the dappled shade in her straight white dress and her basket of flowers stippled upon it, and got in her car. The top was back and she put her hat on and started the engine, and looked back again and waved her hand. “Goodbye.”

The negro had moved down the road, slowly, and had stopped again, and he was watching her covertly as she approached. As she passed he looked full at her and she knew he was about to hail her. She opened the throttle and passed him with increasing speed and drove swiftly on to town, where she lived in a brick house among cedars on a hill.

She was arranging the larkspur in a dull lemon urn on the piano. Aunt Sally Wyatt rocked steadily in her chair beside the window, clapping her feet flatly on the floor at each stroke. Her work basket sat on the window ledge between the gentle
billowing of the curtains, her ebony walking-stick leaned beside it.

“And you were out there two hours,” she said, “and never saw him at all?”

“He wasn’t there,” Narcissa answered. “He’s gone to Memphis.”

Aunt Sally rocked steadily. “If I was them, I’d make him stay there. I wouldn’t have that boy around me, blood or no blood.…… What did he go to Memphis for? I thought that aeroplane what-do-you-call-it was broke up.”

“He went on business, I suppose.”

“What business has he got in Memphis? Bayard Sartoris has got more sense than to turn over any business to that hair-brained fool.”

“I dont know,” Narcissa answered, arranging the larkspur. “He’ll be back soon, I suppose. You can ask him then.”

“Me ask him? I never said two words to him in his life. And I dont intend to. I been used to associating with gentlefolks.”

Narcissa broke some of the stems, arranging the blooms in a pattern. “What’s he done that a gentleman doesn’t do, Aunt Sally?”

“Why, jumping off water tanks and going up in balloons just to scare folks. You think I’d have that boy around me? I’d have him locked up in the insane asylum, if I was Bayard and Jenny.”

“He didn’t jump off of the tank. He just swung off of it on a rope and dived into the swimming pool. And it was John that went up in the balloon.”

“That wasn’t what I heard. I heard he jumped off that tank, across a whole row of freight cars and lumber piles and didn’t miss the edge of the pool an inch.”

“No he didn’t. He swung on a rope from the top of a house and then dived into the pool. The rope was tied to the tank.”

“Well, didn’t he have to jump over a lot of lumber and freight cars? And couldn’t he have broken his neck just as easy that way as jumping off the tank?”

“Yes,” Narcissa answered.

“There! What’d I tell you? And what was the use of it?”

“I dont know.”

“Of course you dont. That was the reason he did it.” Aunt Sally rocked triumphantly for a while. Narcissa put the last touches to the blue pattern of the larkspur. A tortoise-shell cat bunched suddenly and silently in the window beside the work basket, with an effect as of sleight-of-hand. Still crouching it blinked into the room for a moment, then it sank to its belly and with arched neck fell to grooming its shoulder with a narrow pink tongue. Narcissa moved to the window and laid her hand on the creature’s sleek back.

“And then, going up in that balloon, when—”

“That wasn’t Bayard,” Narcissa repeated. “That was John.”

“That wasn’t what I heard. I heard it was the other one and that Bayard and Jenny were both begging him with tears in their eyes not to do it. I heard——”

“Neither one of them were there. Bayard wasn’t even there. It was John did it. He did it because the man that came with the balloon got sick. John went up in it so the country people wouldn’t be disappointed. I was there.”

“Stood there and let him do it, did you, when you could a telephoned Jenny or walked across the square to the bank and got Bayard? You stood there and never opened your mouth, did you?”

“Yes,” Narcissa answered. Stood there beside Horace in the slow, intent ring of country people, watching the globe swelling and tugging at its ropes, watched John Sartoris in a faded flannel shirt and corduroy breeches, while the carnival man explained the rip-cord and the parachute to him; stood
there feeling her breath going out faster than she could draw it in again and watched the thing lurch into the air with John sitting on a frail trapeze bar swinging beneath it, with eyes she could not close, saw the balloon and people and all swirl slowly upward and then found herself clinging to Horace behind the shelter of a wagon, trying to get her breath.

He landed three miles away in a brier thicket and disengaged the parachute and regained the road and hailed a passing negro in a wagon. A mile from town they met old Bayard driving furiously in the carriage and the two vehicles stopped side to side in the road while old Bayard in the one exhausted the accumulate fury of his rage and in the other his grandson sat in his shredded clothes and on his scratched face that look of one who has gained for an instant a desire so fine that its escape was a purifaction, not a loss.

The next day, as she was passing a store, he emerged with that abrupt violence which he had in common with his brother, pulling short up to avoid a collision with her.

“Oh, ex——Why, hello,” he said. Beneath the crisscrosses of tape his face was merry and bold and wild, and he wore no hat. For a moment she gazed at him with wide, hopeless eyes, then she clapped her hand to her mouth and went swiftly on, almost running.

Then he was gone, with his brother, shut away by the war as two noisy dogs are penned in a kennel far away. Miss Jenny gave her news of them, of the dull, dutiful letters they sent home at sparse intervals; then he was dead. But away beyond seas, and there was no body to be returned clumsily to earth, and so to her he seemed still to be laughing at that word as he had laughed at all the other mouthsounds that stood for repose, who had not waited for Time and its furniture to teach him that the end of wisdom is to dream high enough not to lose the dream in the seeking of it.

Aunt Sally rocked steadily in her chair.

“Well, it dont matter which one it was. One’s bad as the other. But I reckon it aint their fault, raised like they were. Rotten spoiled, both of ’em. Lucy Sartoris wouldn’t let anybody control ’em while she lived. If they’d been mine, now.…” She rocked on. “Beat it out of ’em, I would. Raising two wild Indians like that. But those folks, thinking there wasn’t anybody quite as good as a Sartoris. Even Lucy Cranston, come from as good people as there are in the state, acting like it was divine providence that let her marry one Sartoris and be the mother of two more. Pride, false pride.”

She rocked steadily in her chair. Beneath Narcissa’s hand the cat purred with lazy arrogance.

“It was a judgment on ’em, taking John instead of that other one. John at least tipped his hat to a lady on the street, but that other boy.……” She rocked monotonously, clapping her feet flatly against the floor. “You better stay away from that boy. He’ll be killing you same as he did that poor little wife of his.”

“At least, give me benefit of clergy first, Aunt Sally,” Narcissa said. Beneath her hand, beneath the cat’s sleek hide, muscles flowed suddenly into tight knots, like wire, and the animal’s body seemed to elongate like rubber as it whipped from beneath her hand and flashed out of sight across the veranda.

“Oh,” Narcissa cried. Then she whirled and caught up Aunt Sally’s stick and ran from the room.

“What—” Aunt Sally said. “You bring my stick back here,” she said. She sat staring at the door, hearing the swift clatter of the other’s heels in the hall and then on the veranda. She rose and leaned in the window. “You bring my stick back here,” she shouted.

Narcissa sped on across the porch and to the ground. In
the canna bed beside the veranda the cat, crouching, jerked its head around and its yellow unwinking eyes. Narcissa rushed at it, the stick raised.

“Put it down!” she cried. “Drop it!” For another second the yellow eyes glared at her, then the animal ducked its head and leaped away in a long fluid bound, the bird between its jaws.

“Oh-h-h, damn you! Damn you! You——you Sartoris!” and she hurled the stick after the final tortoise flash as the cat flicked around the corner of the house.

“You get my stick and bring it right back this minute!” Aunt Sally shouted from the window.

She had seen Bayard once from a distance. He appeared as usual at the time—a lean figure in casual easy clothes unpressed and a little comfortably shabby, and with his air of smoldering abrupt violence. He and his brother had both had this, but Bayard’s was a cold, arrogant sort of leashed violence, while in John it was a warmer thing, spontaneous and merry and wild. It was Bayard who had attached a rope to a ninety foot water tank and, from the roof of an adjoining building, swung himself across the intervening fifty yards of piled lumber and freight cars and released the rope and dived into a narrow concrete swimming pool while upturned faces gaped and screamed—a cold nicety of judgment and unnecessary cruel skill; John who, one County Fair day, made the balloon ascension, the aeronaut having been stricken with ptomaine poisoning, that the county people might not be disappointed, and landed three miles away in a brier thicket, losing most of his clothing and skin and returning to town cheerful and babbling in the wagon of a passing negro.

But both of these were utterly beyond her; it was not in her nature to differentiate between motives whose results were the same, and on occasions when she had seen them conducting
themselves as civilized beings, had been in the same polite room with them, she found herself watching them with shrinking and fearful curiosity, as she might have looked upon wild beasts with a temporary semblance of men and engaged in human activities, morally acknowledging the security of the cage but spiritually unreassured.

But she had not seen them often. They were either away at school, or if at home they passed their headlong days in the country, coming into town at rare intervals and then on horseback, in stained corduroy and flannel shirts. Yet rumors of their doings came in to her from time to time, causing always in her that shrinking, fascinated distaste, that blending of curiosity and dread, as if a raw wind had blown into that garden wherein she dwelt. Then they would be gone again, and she would think of them only to remember Horace and his fine and electric delicacy, and to thank her gods he was not as they.

Then the war, and she learned without any surprise whatever that they had gone to it. That was exactly what they would do, and her nature drowsed again beneath the serene belief that they had been removed from her life for good and always; to her the war had been brought about for the sole purpose of removing them from her life as noisy dogs are shut up in a kennel afar off. Thus her days. Man became amphibious and lived in mud and filth and died and was buried in it; the world looked on in hysterical amazement. But she, within her walled and windless garden, thought of them only with a sober and pointless pity, like a flower’s exhalation, and like the flower, uncaring if the scent be sensed or not. She gave clothing and money to funds, and she knitted things also, but she did not know where Saloniki was and was incurious as to how Rheims or Przemysl were pronounced.

Then Horace departed, with his Snopes, and the war became abruptly personal. But it was still not the same war to
which the Sartoris boys had gone; and soon she was readjusted again, with Aunt Sally Wyatt in the house and the steady unemphasis of their feminine days. She joined the Red Cross and various other welfare organizations, and she knitted harsh wool with intense brooding skill and performed other labors while other women talked of their menfolks into her grave receptivity.

There was a family of country people moved recently to town—a young man and his pregnant wife and two infant children. They abode in a rejuvenated rented cabin on the edge of town, where the woman did her own housework, while the man was employed by the local distributor for an oil company, laboring all day with a sort of eager fury of willingness and a desire to get on. He was a steady, exemplary sort, willing and unfailingly goodnatured and reliable, so he was drafted immediately and denied exemption and ravished celeritously overseas. His family accompanied him to the station in an automobile supplied by the charity of an old lady of the town and they watched him out of their lives with that tearless uncomplaining gravity of primitive creatures. The Red Cross took charge of the family, but Narcissa Benbow adopted them. She was present when the baby was born two weeks later, she superintended the household—meals and clothing—until the woman was about again, and for the next twelve months she wrote a monthly letter to the husband and father who, having no particular aptitude for it save his unflagging even temper and a ready willingness to do as he was told, was now a company cook in the
S.O.S.