Flags in the Dust (41 page)

Presently before him lay a glade—an old field, sedge-grown, its plow-scars long healed over. The sun filled it with dying gold, and he pulled Perry short upstanding: there, at the corner of the field beside the road, sat the fox. It sat there on its haunches like a dog, watching the trees across the glade, and Bayard shook Perry forward again. The fox turned its head and looked at him with a covert, fleeting glance, but without alarm, and Bayard halted Perry in intense astonishment. The clamor of the dogs swept nearer through the woods, yet still the fox sat on its haunches, watching the man with covert stolen glances, paying the dogs no heed. It revealed no alarm whatever, not even when the puppies burst yapping madly into the glade. They moiled at the wood’s edge for a time while the fox divided its attention between them and the man. At last the largest puppy, evidently the leader, saw the quarry. Immediately they stopped their noise and trotted across the glade and squatted in a circle facing the fox, their tongues lolling. Then with one accord they turned about and faced the darkening woods, from which and nearer and nearer, came that spent, frantic yapping in a higher key. The largest dog barked once; the yapping among the trees swelled with frantic relief and the two smaller puppies appeared and burrowed like moles through the sedge and came up. Then the fox rose and cast another quick, furtive glance at the horseman, and surrounded by the amicable weary calico of the puppies, trotted up the
road and vanished among the trees. “Well, I’ll be damned,” Bayard said, gazing after them. “Come up, Perry.”

At last a pale and windless plume of smoke stood above the trees ahead, and he emerged from the woods, and in the rambling wall of the house a window glowed with ruddy invitation across the twilight. Dogs had already set up a resonant bell-like uproar; above it Bayard could distinguish the clear tenor of puppies and a voice shouting at them, and as he halted Perry in the yard, the fox was vanishing diffidently but without haste beneath the house. A lean figure faced him in the dusk, with an axe in one hand and an armful of wood, and Bayard said:

“What the devil’s that thing, Buddy? That fox?”

“That’s Ethel,” Buddy answered. He put the wood down deliberately, and the axe, and he came and shook Bayard’s hand once, limply, in the country fashion, but his hand was hard and firm. “How you?”

“All right,” Bayard answered. “I came out to get that old fox Rafe was telling me about.”

“Sure,” Buddy agreed in his slow, infrequent voice. “We been expectin’ you. Git down and lemme take yo’ pony.”

“No, I’ll do it. You take the wood on in; I’ll put Perry up.” But Buddy was firm, without insistence or rudeness, and Bayard surrendered the horse to him.

“Henry,” Buddy shouted at the house. “Henry.” A door opened upon jolly leaping flames; a figure stood squatly in it. “Here’s Bayard,” he said. “Go on in and warm,” he added leading Perry away. Dogs surrounded Bayard; he picked up the wood and the axe and went on toward the house in a ghostly spotted surge of dogs, and the figure stood in the lighted door while he mounted the veranda and leaned the axe against the wall.

“How you?” Henry said, and again the handshake was limp; again the hand was firm and kind, flabbier though than
Buddy’s hard young flesh. He relieved Bayard of the wood and they entered the house. The walls were of chinked logs; upon them hung two or three outdated calendars and a patent medicine lithograph in colors. The floor was bare, of hand-trimmed boards scuffed with heavy boots and polished by the pads of generations of dogs; two men could lie side by side in the fireplace. In it now four foot logs blazed against the clay fireback, swirling in wild plumes into the chimney’s dark maw, and in silhouette against it, his head haloed by the shaggy silver disorder of his hair, Virginius MacCallum sat. “Hyer’s Bayard Sartoris, pappy,” Henry said.

The old man turned in his chair with grave, leonine deliberation and extended his hand without rising. In 1861 he was sixteen and he had walked to Lexington, Virginia, and enlisted, served four years in the Stonewall brigade and walked back to Mississippi and built himself a house and got married. His wife’s
dot
was a clock and a dressed hog; his own father gave them a mule. His wife was dead these many years, and her successor was dead, but he sat now before the fireplace at which that hog had been cooked, beneath the roof he had built in ’66, and on the mantel above him the clock sat, deriding that time whose servant it once had been. “Well, boy?” he said. “You took yo’ time about comin’. How’s yo’ folks?”

“Pretty well, sir,” Bayard answered. He looked at the old man’s hale ruddy face intently and sharply. No, they hadn’t heard yet.

“We been expectin’ you ever since Rafe seen you in town last spring. Henry, tell Mandy to put another plate on.”

Four dogs had followed him into the room. Three of them watched him gravely with glowing eyes; the other one, a blue-ticked hound with an expression of majestic gravity, came up and touched its cold nose to his hand. “Hi, Gen’ral,” he said,
rubbing its ears; whereupon the other dogs approached and thrust their noses against his hands.

“Pull up a cheer,” Mr MacCallum said. He squared his own chair around and Bayard obeyed, and the dogs followed him, surging with blundering decorum about his knees. “I keep sendin’ word in to git yo’ granpappy out hyer,” the old man continued, “but he’s too ’tarnal proud, or too damn lazy to come. Hyer, Gen’ral! Git away from thar. Kick ’em away, Bayard. Henry!” he shouted. Henry appeared. “Take these hyer damn dawgs out till after supper.”

Henry drove the dogs from the room. Mr MacCallum picked up a long pine sliver from the hearth and fired it and lit his pipe, and smothered the sliver in the ashes and laid it on the hearth again. “Rafe and Lee air in town today,” he said. “You could have come out in the waggin with them. But I reckon you’d ruther have yo’ own hoss.”

“Yes, sir,” he answered quietly. Then they would know. He stared into the fire for a time, rubbing his hands slowly on his knees, and for an instant he saw the recent months of his life coldly in all their headlong and heedless wastefulness; saw its entirety like the swift unrolling of a film, culminating in that which he had been warned against and that any fool might have foreseen. Well, damn it, suppose it had: was he to blame? had he insisted that his grandfather ride with him? had he given the old fellow a bum heart? And then, coldly:
You were afraid to go home. You made a nigger sneak your horse out to you. You, who deliberately do things your judgment tells you may not be successful, even possible, are afraid to face the consequences of your own acts
. Then again something bitter and deep and sleepless in him blazed out in vindication and justification and accusation; what, he knew not, blazing out at what, Whom, he did not know:
You did it! You caused it all: you killed Johnny
.

Henry had drawn a chair up to the fire, and after a while the old man tapped his clay pipe carefully out against his palm and drew a huge, turnip-shaped silver watch from his corduroy vest. “Half after five,” he said. “Aint them boys got in yet?”

“They’re here,” Henry answered briefly. “Heard ’em takin’ out when I put out the dawgs.”

“Git the jug, then,” his father ordered. Henry rose and departed again, and presently feet clumped heavily on the porch and Bayard turned in his chair and stared bleakly at the door. It opened and Rafe and Lee entered.

“Well, well,” Rafe said, and his lean dark face lighted a little. “Got here at last, did you?” He shook Bayard’s hand, and Lee followed him. Lee’s face, like all of them, was a dark, saturnine mask. He was not so stocky as Rafe, and least talkative of them all. His eyes were black and restless; behind them lurked something wild and sad: he shook Bayard’s hand without a word.

But Bayard was watching Rafe. There was nothing in Rafe’s face; no coldness, no questioning—Was it possible that he could have been to town, and not heard? Or had Bayard himself dreamed it? But he remembered that unmistakable feel of his grandfather when he had touched him, remembered how he had suddenly slumped as though the very fibre of him, knit so erect and firm for so long by pride and the perverse necessity of his family doom, had given way all at once, letting his skeleton rest at last. Mr MacCallum spoke.

“Did you git to the express office?”

“We never got to town,” Rafe answered. “Axle tree broke just this side of Vernon. Had to uncouple the wagon and drive to Vernon and get it patched up. Too late to go in, then. We got our supplies there and come on home.”

“Well, hit dont matter. You’ll be goin’ in next week, for Christmas,” the old man said. Bayard drew a long breath and
lit a cigarette, and on a draft of vivid darkness Buddy entered and came and squatted leanly in the shadowy chimney corner.

“Got that fox you were telling me about hid out yet?” Bayard asked Rafe.

“Sure. And we’ll get ’im, this time. Maybe tomorrow. Weather’s changin’.”

“Snow?”

“Might be. What’s it goin’ to do tonight, pappy?”

“Rain,” the old man answered. “Tomorrow, too. Scent wont lay good till Wen’sday. Henry!” After a moment he shouted Henry again, and Henry entered, with a blackened kettle trailing a faint plume of vapor and a stoneware jug and a thick tumbler with a metal spoon in it. There was something domestic, womanish, about Henry, with his squat, slightly tubby figure and his mild brown eyes and his capable, unhurried hands. He it was who superintended the kitchen (he was a better cook now than Mandy) and the house, where he could be found most of the time, pottering soberly at some endless task. He visited town almost as infrequently as his father; he cared little for hunting, and his sole relaxation was making whisky, good whisky and for family consumption alone, in a secret fastness known only to his father and to the negro who assisted him, after a recipe handed down from lost generations of his usquebaugh-bred forbears. He set the kettle and the jug and the tumbler on the hearth, and took the clay pipe from his father’s hand and put it on the mantel, and reached down a cracked cup of sugar and seven tumblers, each with a spoon in it. The old man leaned forward into the firelight and made the toddies one by one, with tedious and solemn deliberation. When he had made one around, there were two glasses left. “Aint them other boys come in yet?” he asked. Nobody answered, and he corked the jug. Henry set the two extra glasses back on the mantel.

Mandy came to the door presently, filling it with her homely calico expanse. “Y’all kin come on in now,” she said, and as she turned waddling Bayard spoke to her and she stopped as the men rose. The old man was straight as an Indian, and with the exception of Buddy’s lean and fluid length, he towered above his sons by a head. Mandy waited beside the door and gave Bayard her hand. “You aint been out in a long while, now,” she said. “And I bet you aint fergot Mandy, neither.”

“Sure I haven’t,” Bayard answered. But he had. Money, to Mandy, did not compensate for some trinket of no value which John never forgot to bring her when he came. He followed the others into the frosty darkness again. Beneath his feet the ground was already stiffening; overhead the sky was brilliant with stars. He stumbled a little behind the crowding backs until Rafe opened a door into a separate building, and stood aside until they had entered. This room was filled with warmth and a thin blue haze pungent with cooking odors, in which a kerosene lamp burned steadily on a long table. At one end of the table was a single chair; the other three sides were paralleled by backless wooden benches. Against the further wall was the stove, and a huge cupboard of split planks, and a woodbox. Behind the stove two negro men and a half grown boy sat, their faces shining with heat and their eyeballs rolling whitely; about their feet five puppies snarled with mock savageness at one another or chewed damply at the negroes’ static ankles or prowled about beneath the stove and the adjacent floor with blundering, aimless inquisitiveness.

“Howdy, boys,” Bayard said, calling them by name, and they bobbed their heads at him with diffident flashes of teeth and polite murmurs.

“Put dem puppies up, Richud,” Mandy ordered. The negroes gathered the puppies up one by one and tumbled
them into a smaller box behind the stove, where they continued to move about with sundry scratchings and bumpings and an occasional smothered protest. From time to time during the meal a head would appear, staring above the rim of the box with blinking and solemn curiosity, then vanish with an abrupt scuffling thump and more protests, and moiling, infant-like noises rose again. “Hush up dawgs! G’awn to sleep, now,” Richard would say, rapping the box with his knuckles. After a while the noise ceased.

The old man took the lone chair, his sons around him, and the guest; some coatless, all collarless, with their dark, saturnine faces stamped all clearly from the same die. They ate. Sausage, and spare ribs, and a dish of hominy and one of fried sweet potatoes, and corn bread and a molasses jug of sorghum, and Mandy poured coffee from a huge enamelware pot. In the middle of the meal the two missing ones came in—Jackson, the eldest, a man of fifty-two, with a broad, high forehead and thick brows and an expression at once dreamy and intense—a sort of shy and impractical Cincinnatus; and Stuart, forty-four and Rafe’s twin. Yet although they were twins, there was no closer resemblance between them than between any two of them. As though the die was too firm and made too clean an imprint to be either hurried or altered, even by nature. Stuart had none of Rafe’s easy manner (Rafe was the only one of them that, by any stretch of the imagination, could have been called loquacious); on the other hand, he had much of Henry’s placidity. He was a good farmer and a canny trader, and he had a respectable bank account of his own. Henry, fifty, was the second son.

They ate with silent and steady decorum, with only the barest essential words, but amicably. Mandy moved back and forth between table and stove.

Before they had finished a sudden bell-like uproar of dogs
floated up from the night and seeped through the tight walls, into the room. “Dar, now.” The negro Richard cocked his head. Buddy poised his coffee.