Flags in the Dust (14 page)

“Evenin’, Miz Beard,” Snopes said. “Virgil come home yet?”

“He was through here a minute ago,” she answered. “If he aint out front, I reckon his paw sent him on a arr’nd. Mr Beard’s taken one of his spells in the hip agin. He might a sent Virgil on a arr’nd.” Her hair fell lankly across her face again. Again she brushed it aside with a harsh gesture. “You got some mo’ work fer him?”

“Yessum. You dont know which-a-way he went?”

“Ef Mr Beard aint sont him nowheres he mought be in the back yard. He dont usually go fur away.” Again she dragged her dank hair aside; shaped so long to labor, her muscles were restive under inaction. She grasped the mop again.

Snopes went on, and stood on the kitchen steps above an enclosed space barren of grass and containing a chicken pen also grassless, in which a few fowls huddled or moved about in forlorn distraction in the dust. On one hand was a small kitchen garden of orderly, tended rows. In the corner of the yard was an outhouse of some sort, of weathered boards.

“Virgil,” he said. The yard was desolate with ghosts; ghosts of discouraged weeds, of food in the shape of empty tins, broken boxes and barrels, a pile of stove wood and a chopping block across which lay an axe whose helve had been mended with rusty wire amateurishly wound. He descended the steps, and the chickens raised a discordant clamor, anticipating food.

“Virgil.”

Sparrows found sustenance of some sort in the dust among the fowls, but the fowls themselves, perhaps with a foreknowledge of frustration and of doom, huddled back and forth along the wire, discordant and distracted, watching him with predatory importunate eyes. He was about to turn and reenter the kitchen when the boy appeared silently and innocently from the outhouse, with his straw-colored hair and his bland eyes.
His mouth was pale and almost sweet, but secretive at the corners. His chin was negligible.

“Hi, Mr Snopes, you calling me?”

“Yes, if you aint doin’ anything special,” Snopes answered.

“I aint,” the boy said. They entered the house and passed the room where the woman labored with drab fury. The reek of the pipe, the lugubrious reiteration of the phonograph, filled the hall, and they mounted stairs carpeted also with linoleum fastened to each step by a treacherous sheet-iron strip treated to resemble brass and scuffed and scarred by heavy feet. The upper hall was lined by two identical rows of doors. They entered one of these. The room contained a bed, a chair, a dressing-table and a washstand with a slop-jar beside it. The floor was covered with straw matting frayed in places. The single light hung unshaded from a greenish-brown cord; upon the wall above the paper-filled fireplace a framed lithograph of an Indian maiden in immaculate buckskin leaned her naked bosom above a formal moonlit pool of Italian marble. She held a guitar and a rose, and dusty sparrows sat on the window ledge and watched them brightly through the dusty screen.

The boy entered politely. His pale eyes took in the room and its contents at a comprehensive glance. He said: “That air gun aint come yet, has it, Mr Snopes?”

“No, it aint,” Snopes answered. “It’ll be here soon, though.”

“You ordered off after it a long time, now.”

“That’s right. But it’ll be here soon. Maybe they haven’t got one in stock, right now.” He crossed to the dresser and took from a drawer a few sheets of foolscap and laid them on the dresser top, and drew a chair up and dragged his suitcase from beneath the bed and set it on the chair. Then he took his fountain pen from his pocket and uncapped it and laid it beside the paper. “It ought to be here any day, now.”

The boy seated himself on the suitcase and took up the pen. “They got ’em at Watts’ hardware store,” he suggested.

“If the one we ordered dont come soon, we’ll git one there,” Snopes said. “When did we order it, anyway?”

“Week ago Tuesday,” the boy answered glibly. “I wrote it down.”

“Well, it’ll be here soon. You ready?”

The boy squared himself before the paper. “Yes, sir.” Snopes took a folded paper from the top pocket of his trousers and spread it open.

“Code number forty eight. Mister Joe Butler, Saint Louis, Missouri,” he read, then he leaned over the boy’s shoulder, watching the pen. “That’s right: up close to the top,” he commended. “Now.” The boy dropped down the page about two inches, and as Snopes read, he transcribed in his neat, copybook hand, pausing only occasionally to inquire as to the spelling of a word.

“ ‘I thought once I would try to forget you. But I cannot forget you because you cannot forget me. I saw my letter in your hand satchel today. Every day I can put my hand out and touch you you do not know it. Just to see you walk down the street To know what I know what you know. Some day we will both know to gether when you got use to it. You kept my letter but you do not anser. That is a good sign you do——’ ” The boy had reached the foot of the page. Snopes removed it, leaving the next sheet ready. He continued to read in his droning, inflectionless voice:

“ ‘——not forget me you would not keep it. I think of you at night the way you walk down the street like I was dirt. You will get over this I can tell you something you will be surprised I know more than watch you walk down the street with cloths. I will some day you will not be surprised then. You pass me you
do not know it I know it. You will know it some day. Be cause I will tell you.’ Now,” he said, and the boy dropped on to the foot of the page. “ ‘Yours truly Hal Wagner. Code number twenty one.’” Again he looked over the boy’s shoulder. “That’s right.” He blotted the final sheet and gathered it up also. The boy recapped the pen and thrust the chair back, and Snopes produced a small paper bag from his coat.

The boy took it soberly. “Much obliged, Mr Snopes,” he said. He opened it and squinted into it. “It’s funny that air gun dont come on.”

“It sure is,” Snopes agreed. “I dont know why it dont come.”

“Maybe it got lost in the postoffice,” the boy suggested.

“It may have. I reckon that’s about what happened to it. I’ll write ’em again, tomorrow.”

The boy rose, but he stood yet with his straw-colored hair and his bland, innocent face. He took a piece of candy from the sack and ate it without enthusiasm. “I reckon I better tell papa to go to the postoffice and ask ’em if it got lost.”

“No, I wouldn’t do that,” Snopes said quickly. “You wait; I’ll ’tend to it. We’ll get it, all right.”

“Papa wouldn’t mind. He could go over there soon’s he comes home and see about it. I could find him right now, and ask him to do it, I bet.”

“He couldn’t do no good,” Snopes answered. “You leave it to me. I’ll get that gun, all right.”

“I could tell him I been working for you,” the boy pursued. “I remember them letters.”

“No, no, you wait and let me ’tend to it. I’ll see about it first thing tomorrow.”

“All right, Mr Snopes.” He ate another piece of candy, without enthusiasm. He moved toward the door. “I remember
ever’ one of them letters. I bet I could sit down and write ’em all again. I bet I could. Say, Mr Snopes, who is Hal Wagner? Does he live in Jefferson?”

“No, no. You never seen him. He dont hardly never come to town. That’s the reason I’m ’tending to his business for him. I’ll see about that air gun, all right.”

The boy opened the door, then he paused again. “They got ’em at Watts’ hardware store. Good ones. I’d sure like to have one of ’em. Yes, sir, I sure would.”

“Sure, sure,” Snopes repeated. “Our’n’ll be here tomorrow. You just wait: I’ll see you git that gun.”

The boy departed. Snopes locked the door, and for a while he stood beside it with his head bent, his hands slowly knotting and writhing together. Then he took up the folded sheet and burned it over the hearth and ground the carbonized ash to dust under his heel. With his knife he cut the address from the top of the first sheet, the signature from the bottom of the second, then he folded them and inserted them in a cheap envelope. He sealed this and stamped it, and took out his pen and with his left hand he addressed the envelope in labored printed characters. That night he took it to the station and mailed it on the train.

The next afternoon Virgil Beard killed a mockingbird. It was singing in the peach tree that grew in the corner of the chicken-yard.

At times, as Simon puttered about the place during the day, he could look out across the lot and into the pasture and see the carriage horses growing daily shabbier and less prideful with idleness and the lack of their daily grooming, or he would
pass the carriage motionless in its shed, its tongue propped at an accusing angle on the wooden mechanism he had invented for that purpose, and in the harness room the duster and tophat gathered slow dust on the nail in the wall, holding too in their mute waiting a patient and questioning uncomplaint. And at times when he stood shabby and stooped a little with stubborn bewilderment and age on the veranda with its ancient roses and wistaria and all its spacious and steadfast serenity and watched Sartorises come and go in a machine a gentleman of his day would have scorned and which any pauper could own and only a fool would ride in, it seemed to him that John Sartoris stood beside him with his bearded and hawklike face and an expression of haughty and fine contempt.

And as he stood so, with afternoon slanting athwart the southern end of the porch and the heady and myriad odors of the waxing spring and the drowsy hum of insects and the singing of birds steady upon it, Isom within the cool doorway or at the corner of the house would hear his grandfather mumbling in a monotonous singsong in which were incomprehension and petulance and querulousness, and Isom would withdraw to the kitchen where his mother labored steadily with her placid yellow face and her endless crooning song.

“Pappy out dar talkin’ to ole Marster agin,” Isom told her. “Gimme dem cole ’taters, mammy.”

“Aint Miss Jenny got some work fer you dis evenin’?” Elnora demanded, giving him the potatoes.

“No’m. She gone off in de cyar agin.”

“Hit’s de Lawd’s blessin’ you and her aint bofe gone in it, like you is whenever Mist’ Bayard’ll let you. You git on outen my kitchen, now. I got dis flo’ mopped and I dont want it tracked up.”

Quite often these days Isom could hear his grandfather talking to John Sartoris as he labored about the stable or the
flower beds or the lawn, mumbling away to that arrogant shade which dominated the house and the life that went on there and the whole scene itself across which the railroad he had built ran punily with distance but distinct with miniature verisimilitude, as though it were a stage set for the diversion of him whose stubborn dream, flouting him so deviously and cunningly while the dream was impure, had shaped itself fine and clear now that the dreamer was purged of the grossness of pride with that of flesh.

“Gent’mun equipage,” Simon mumbled. He was busy again with his hoe in the salvia bed at the top of the drive. “Rid-in’ in dat thing, wid a gent’mun’s proper equipage goin’ ter rack en ruin in de barn.” He wasn’t thinking of Miss Jenny. It didn’t make much difference what women rode in, their men-folks permitting. They only showed off a gentleman’s equipage anyhow; they were but the barometers of his establishment, the glass of his gentility: horses themselves knew it. “Yo’ own son, yo’ own twin grandson ridin’ right up in yo’ face in a contraption like dat,” he continued, “and you lettin’ ’um do it. You bad ez dey is. You jes’ got ter lay down de law ter ’um, Marse John; wid all dese foreign wars en sich de young folks is growed away fum de correck behavior; dey dont know how ter conduck deyselfs in de gent’mun way. Whut you reckon folks gwine think when dey sees yo’ own folks ridin’ in de same kine o’ rig trash rides in? You jes’ got ter resert yo’self, Marse John. Aint Sartorises sot de quality in dis country since befo’ de War? And now jes’ look at ’um.”

He leaned on his hoe and watched the car swing up the drive and stop before the house. Miss Jenny and young Bayard got out and mounted to the veranda. The engine was still running, a faint shimmer of exhaust drifted upon the bright forenoon. Simon came up with his hoe and peered at the array of dials and knobs on the dash. Bayard turned in the door and spoke his name.

“Cut the switch off, Simon,” he ordered.

“Cut de which whut off?” Simon said.

“That little bright lever by the steering wheel there. Turn it down.”

“Naw, suh,” Simon answered, backing away. “I aint gwine tech it. I aint gwine have it blowin’ up in my face.”

“It wont hurt you,” Bayard said impatiently. “Just put your hand on it and pull it down. That little bright jigger there.”

Simon peered doubtfully at the gadgets and things, but without coming any nearer, then he craned his neck further and stared over into the car. “I dont see nothin’ but dis yere big lever stickin’ up thoo de flo’. Dat aint de one you mentionin’, is hit?” Bayard said “Hell.” He descended in two strides and leaned across the door and cut the switch under Simon’s curious blinking regard. The purr of the engine ceased.

“Well, now,” Simon said. “Is dat de one you wuz talkin’ erbout?” He stared at the switch for a time, then he straightened up and stared at the hood. “She’s quit b’ilin’ under dar, aint she? Is dat de way you stops her?” But Bayard had mounted the steps again and entered the house. Simon lingered a while longer, examining the gleaming long thing, dynamic as a motionless locomotive and little awesome, touching it lightly with his hand, then rubbing his hand on his thigh. He walked slowly around it and touched the tires, mumbling to himself and shaking his head, then he returned to his salvia bed, where Bayard emerged presently and found him.

“Want to take a ride, Simon?” he said.

Simon’s hoe ceased and he straightened up. “Who, me?”

“Sure. Come on. We’ll go up the road a piece.” Simon stood with his static hoe rubbing his head slowly. “Come on,” Bayard said, “we’ll just go up the road a piece. It wont hurt you.”

“Naw, suh,” Simon agreed. “I dont reckon hit’s gwine ter
hurt me.” He allowed himself to be drawn gradually toward the car, gazing at its various members with slow blinking speculation, now that it was about to become an actual quantity in his life. At the door and with one foot raised to the running board he made a final stand against the subtle powers of evil judgment. “You aint gwine run it thoo de bushes like you en Isom done dat day, is you?”