Flags in the Dust (4 page)

“And so,” he said, “Redlaw’ll kill me tomorrow, for I shall be unarmed. I’m tired of killing men.… Pass the wine, Bayard.”

And the next day he was dead, whereupon, as though he had but waited for that to release him of the clumsy cluttering of bones and breath, by losing the frustration of his own flesh he could now stiffen and shape that which sprang from him into the fatal semblance of his dream; to be evoked like a genie or a deity by an illiterate old man’s tedious reminiscing or by a charred pipe from which even the rank smell of burnt tobacco had long since faded away.

Old Bayard roused himself and went and laid the pipe on his chest of drawers. Then he quitted the room and tramped heavily down the stairs and out through the back.

The negro lad waked easily and untethered the mare and held the stirrup. Old Bayard mounted and remembered the cigar at last and fired it. The negro opened the gate into the lot and trotted on ahead and opened the second gate and let the rider into the field beyond. Bayard rode on, trailing his pungent smoke. From somewhere a ticked setter came up and fell in at the mare’s heels.

Elnora stood barelegged on the kitchen floor and soused her mop into the pail and thumped it on the floor again.

Simon’s destination was a huge brick house set well up onto the street. The lot had been the site of a fine old colonial house which stood among magnolias and oaks and flowering shrubs. But the house had burned and some of the trees had been felled to make room for an architectural garbling so imposingly terrific as to possess a kind of majesty. It was a monument to the frugality (and the mausoleum of the social aspirations of his women) of a hillman who had moved in from a small settlement called Frenchman’s Bend and who, as Miss Jenny Du Pre put it, had built the handsomest house in Frenchman’s Bend on the most beautiful lot in Jefferson. The hillman had stuck it out for two years during which his women-folks sat about the veranda all morning in lace-trimmed “boudoir caps” and spent the afternoons in colored silk riding about town in a rubber-tired surrey; then the hillman sold his house to a new-comer to the town and took his women back to the country and doubtless set them to work again.

A number of motor-cars ranked along the street lent a formally festive air to the place, and Simon with his tilted cigar
stub wheeled up and drew rein and indulged in a brief colorful altercation with a negro sitting behind the wheel of a car parked before the hitching-block. “Dont block off no Sartoris ca’iage, black boy,” Simon concluded, when the other had moved the motor and permitted him access to the post. “Block off de commonality, ef you wants, but dont intervoke no equipage waitin’ on Cunnel er Miss Jenny. Dey wont stan’ fer it.”

He descended and tethered the horses, and his spirit mollified by the rebuke administered and laved with the beatitude of having gained his own way, Simon paused and examined the motor-car with curiosity and no little superciliousness tinged faintly with respectful envy, and spoke affably with its conductor. But not for long, for Simon had sisters in the Lord in this kitchen, and presently he let himself into the yard and followed the gravel driveway around to the back. He could hear the party going on as he passed beneath the windows: that sustained unintelligible gabbling with which white ladies could surround themselves without effort and which they seemed to consider a necessary (or unavoidable) adjunct to having a good time. The fact that it was a card party would have seemed neither paradoxical nor astonishing to Simon, for time and much absorbing experience had taught him a fine tolerance of white folks’ vagaries and for those of ladies of any color.

The hillman had built his house so close to the street that the greater part of the original lawn with its fine old trees lay behind it. There were once crepe-myrtle and syringa and lilac and jasmine bushes without order, and massed honeysuckle on fences and tree trunks; and after the first house had burned these had taken the place and made of its shaggy formality a mazed and scented jungle loved of mockingbirds and thrushes, where boys and girls lingered on spring and summer nights among drifting fireflies and quiring whip-poor-wills and usually
the liquid tremolo of a screech owl. Then the hillman had bought it and cut some of the trees in order to build his house near the street after the country fashion, and chopped out the jungle and whitewashed the remaining trees and ran his barn- and hog- and chicken-lot fences between their ghostly trunks. He didn’t remain long enough to learn of garages.

Some of the antiseptic desolation of his tenancy had faded now, and its present owner had set out more shrubbery—jasmine and mock-orange and verbena—with green iron tables and chairs beneath them and a pool and a tennis court; and Simon passed on with discreet assurance, and on a consonantless drone of female voices he rode into the kitchen where a thin woman in a funereal purple turban and poising a beaten biscuit heaped with mayonnaise, and a mountainous one in the stained apron of her calling and drinking melted ice-cream from a saucer, rolled their eyes at him.

“I seed him on de street yistiddy and he looked bad; he jes’ didn’t favor hisself,” the visitor was saying as Simon entered, but they dropped the theme of conversation and made him welcome.

“Ef it aint Brother Strother,” they said in unison. “Come in, Brother Strother. How is you?”

“Po’ly, ladies; po’ly,” Simon replied. He doffed his hat and unclamped his cigar stub and stowed it away in the hat-band. “I’se had a right smart mis’ry in de back. Is y’all kep’ well?”

“Right well, I thank you, Brother Strother,” the visitor replied. Simon drew a chair up to the table, as he was bidden.

“Whut you gwine eat, Brother Strother?” the cook demanded hospitably. “Dey’s party fixin’s, en dey’s some col’ greens en a little sof’ ice-cream lef’ fum dinner.”

“I reckon I’ll have a little ice-cream en some of dem greens, Sis’ Rachel,” Simon replied. “My teef aint much on party doin’s no mo’.” The cook rose with majestic deliberation
and waddled across to a pantry and reached down a platter. She was one of the best cooks in Jefferson: no mistress dared protest against the social amenities of Rachel’s kitchen.

“Ef you aint de beatin’es’ man!” the first guest exclaimed. “Eatin’ ice-cream at yo’ age!”

“I been eatin’ ice-cream sixty years,” Simon said. “Whut reason I got fer quittin’ now?”

“Dat’s right, Brother Strother,” the cook agreed, placing the dish before him. “Eat yo’ ice-cream when you kin git it. Jes’ a minute en I’ll——Here, Meloney,” she interrupted herself as a young light negress in a smart white apron and cap entered, bearing a tray of plates containing remnants of edible edifices copied from pictures in ladies’ magazines and possessing neither volume nor nourishment, with which the party had been dulling its palates against supper, “git Brother Strother a bowl of dat ’ere ice-cream, honey.”

The girl clashed the tray into the sink and rinsed a bowl at the water tap while Simon watched her with his still little eyes. She whipped the bowl through a towel with a fine show of derogatory carelessness, and with her chin at a supercilious angle she clattered on her high heels across the kitchen, still under Simon’s unwinking regard, and slammed a door behind her. Then Simon turned his head.

“Yes, ma’am,” he repeated, “I been eatin’ ice-cream too long ter quit at my age.”

“Dey wont no vittle hurt you ez long ez you kin stomach ’um,” the cook agreed, raising her saucer to her lips again. The girl returned and with her head still averted she set the bowl of viscid liquid before Simon who, under cover of this movement, dropped his hand on her thigh. The girl smacked him sharply on the back of his gray head with her flat palm.

“Miss Rachel, cant you make him keep his hands to hisself?” she said.

“Aint you ’shamed,” Rachel demanded, but without rancor. “A ole gray-head man like you, wid a fam’ly of grown chillen and one foot in de graveyard?”

“Hush yo’ mouf, woman,” Simon said placidly, spooning spinach into his melted ice-cream. “Aint dey erbout breakin’ up in yonder yit?”

“I reckon dey’s erbout to,” the other guest answered, putting another laden biscuit into her mouth with a gesture of elegant gentility. “Seems like dey’s talkin’ louder.”

“Den dey’s started playin’ again,” Simon corrected. “Talkin’ jes’ eased off whiles dey et. Yes, suh, dey’s started playin’ again. Dat’s white folks. Nigger aint got sense ernough ter play cards wid all dat racket gwine on.”

But they were breaking up. Miss Jenny Du Pre had just finished a story which left the three players at her table avoiding one another’s eyes a little self-consciously, as was her way. Miss Jenny travelled very little, and in Pullman smoke-rooms not at all, and people wondered where she got her stories; who had told them to her. And she repeated them anywhere and at any time, choosing the wrong moment and the wrong audience with a cold and cheerful audacity. Young people liked her, and she was much in demand as a chaperone for picnic parties.

She now spoke across the room to the hostess. “I’m going home, Belle,” she stated. “I think we are all tired of your party. I know I am.” The hostess was a plump, youngish woman and her cleverly-rouged face showed now an hysterical immersion that was almost repose, but when Miss Jenny broke into her consciousness with the imminence of departure this faded quickly, and her face resumed its familiar expression of strained and vague dissatisfaction and she protested conventionally but with a petulant sincerity, as a well-bred child might.

But Miss Jenny was adamant and she rose and her slender
wrinkled hand brushed invisible crumbs from the bosom of her black silk dress. “If I stay any longer I’ll miss Bayard’s toddy time,” she explained with her usual forthrightness. “Come on, Narcissa, and I’ll drive you home.”

“I have my car, thank you, Miss Jenny,” the young woman to whom she spoke replied in a grave contralto, rising also; and the others got up with sibilant gathering motions above the petulant modulation of the hostess’ protestings, and they drifted slowly into the hall and clotted again before various mirrors, colorful and shrill. Miss Jenny pushed steadily on toward the door.

“Come along, come along,” she repeated. “Harry Mitchell wont want to run into all this gabble when he comes home from work.”

“Then he can sit in the car out in the garage,” the hostess rejoined sharply. “I do wish you wouldn’t go. Miss Jenny, I dont think I’ll ask you again.”

But Miss Jenny only said “Goodbye, goodbye” with cold affability, and with her delicate replica of the Sartoris nose and that straight grenadier’s back of hers which gave the pas for erectness to only one back in town—that of her nephew Bayard—she stood at the steps, where Narcissa Benbow joined her, bringing with her like an odor that aura of grave and serene repose in which she dwelt. “Belle meant that, too,” Miss Jenny said.

“Meant what, Miss Jenny?”

“About Harry.…… Now, where do you suppose that damn nigger went to?” They descended the steps and from the parked motors along the street came muffled starting explosions, and the two women traversed the brief flower-bordered walk to the street. “Did you see which way my driver went?” Miss Jenny asked of the negro in the nearest car.

“He went to’ds de back, ma’am.” The negro opened the
door and slid his legs, clad in army o.d. and a pair of linoleum putties, to the ground. “I’ll go git ’im.”

“Thank you. Well, thank the Lord that’s over,” she added. “It’s too bad folks haven’t the sense or courage to send out invitations, then shut up the house and go away. All the fun of parties is in dressing up and getting there.” Ladies came in steady shrill groups down the walk and got into cars or departed on foot with bright, not-quite-musical calls to one another. The sun was down behind Belle’s house, and when the women passed from the shadow into the level bar of sunlight beyond they became delicately brilliant as paroquets. Narcissa Benbow wore gray and her eyes were violet, and in her face was that tranquil repose of lilies.

“Not children’s parties,” she protested.

“I’m talking about parties, not about having fun,” Miss Jenny said. “Speaking of children: What’s the news from Horace?”

“Oh, hadn’t I told you?” the other said quickly. “I had a wire yesterday. He landed in New York Wednesday. It was such a mixed-up sort of message, I never could understand what he was trying to tell me, except that he would have to stay in New York for a week or so. It was over fifty words long.”

“Was it a straight message?” Miss Jenny asked. The other said Yes, and she added: “Horace must have got rich, like the soldiers say all the Y.M.C.A. did. Well, if it has taught a man like Horace to make money, the war was a pretty good thing, after all.”

“Miss Jenny! How can you talk that way, after John’s——after——”

“Fiddlesticks,” Miss Jenny said. “The war just gave John a good excuse to get himself killed. If it hadn’t been that, it would have been some other way that would have been a bother to everybody around.”

“Miss Jenny!”

“I know, my dear. I’ve lived with these bullheaded Sartorises for eighty years, and I’ll never give a single ghost of ’em the satisfaction of shedding a tear over him. What did Horace’s message say?”

“It was about something he was bringing home with him,” the other answered, and her serene face filled with a sort of fond exasperation. “It was such an incoherent message.

……Horace never could say anything clearly from a distance.” She mused again, gazing down the street with its tunnel of oaks and elms through which sunlight fell in spaced tiger bars. “Do you suppose he could have adopted a warorphan?”

“War-orphan,” Miss Jenny repeated. “More likely it’s some war-orphan’s mamma.” Simon appeared at the corner of the house, wiping his mouth on the back of his hand, and crossed the lawn with shuffling celerity. His cigar was not visible.