Flags in the Dust (49 page)

“Miss Jenny! Whut in de worl’! You git on back to yo’ bed. Here, lemme he’p you back.” But Miss Jenny came firmly on.

“Where’s Isom?” she demanded.

“He at de barn. You come on back to bed. I’m gwine tell Miss Narcissa on you.”

“Get away,” Miss Jenny said. “I’m tired staying in the house. I’m going to town. Call Isom.” Elnora protested still, but Miss Jenny insisted coldly, and Elnora went to the door and called Isom and returned, portentous with pessimistic warnings, and presently Isom entered.

“Here,” Miss Jenny said, handing him the keys. “Get the car out.” Isom departed and Miss Jenny followed more slowly, and Elnora would have followed too, darkly solicitous, but Miss Jenny sent her back to her kitchen; and she crossed the yard and got in beside Isom. “And you drive this thing careful, boy,” she told him, “or I’ll get over there and do it myself.”

When they reached town, from slender spires rising among trees against the puffy clouds of summer, bells were ringing lazily. At the edge of town Miss Jenny bade Isom turn into a grassy lane and they followed this and stopped presently before the iron gates to the cemetery. “I want to see if they fixed Simon all right,” she explained. “I’m not going to church today: I’ve been shut up between walls long enough.” Just from the prospect she got a mild exhilaration, like that of a small boy playing out of school.

The negro ground lay beyond the cemetery proper, and Isom led her to Simon’s grave. Simon’s burying society had taken care of him, and after three weeks the mound was still heaped with floral designs from which the blooms had fallen, leaving a rank, lean mass of stems and peacefully rusting wire
skeletons. Elnora, someone, had been before her, and the grave was bordered with tedious rows of broken gaudy bits of crockery and of colored glass. “I reckon he’ll have to have a headstone, too,” Miss Jenny said aloud, and turning, saw Isom hauling his overalled legs into a tree, about which two catbirds whirled and darted in scolding circles. “You, Isom.”

“Yessum.” Isom dropped obediently to the ground and the birds threatened him with a final burst of hysterical profanity. They entered the whitefolks’ section and passed now between marble shapes bearing names that she knew well, and dates in a stark and peaceful simplicity in the impervious stone. Now and then they were surmounted by symbolical urns and doves and surrounded by clipped tended sward green against the blanched marble and the blue, dappled sky and the black cedars from amid which doves crooned endlessly reiterant. Here and there bright unfaded flowers lay in random bursts against the pattern of white and green; and presently John Sartoris lifted his stone back and his fulsome gesture amid a clump of cedars beyond which the bluff sheered sharply away into the valley.

Bayard’s grave too was a shapeless mass of withered flowers, and Miss Jenny had Isom clear them off and carry them away. The masons were preparing to lay the curbing around it, and the headstone itself sat nearby beneath a canvas cover. She lifted the canvas and read the clean, new lettering: Bayard Sartoris. March 16, 1893-June 11, 1920. That was better. Simple: no Sartoris man to invent bombast to put on it. Cant even lie dead in the ground without strutting and swaggering. Beside the grave was a second headstone; like the other save for the inscription. But the Sartoris touch was there, despite the fact that there was no grave to accompany it, and the whole thing was like a boastful voice in an empty church. Yet withal there was something else, as though the merry wild spirit of him who
had laughed away so much of his heritage of humorless and fustian vainglory, managed somehow even yet, though his bones lay in an anonymous grave beyond the seas, to soften the arrogant gesture with which they had said him farewell:

A faint breeze soughed in the cedars like a long sigh, and the branches moved gravely in it. Across the spaced tranquillity of the marble shapes the doves crooned their endless rising inflections. Isom returned for another armful of withered flowers and bore it away.

Old Bayard’s headstone was simple too, having been born, as he had, too late for one war and too soon for the next, and she thought what a joke They had played on him: forbidding him opportunities for swashbuckling and then denying him the privilege of being buried by men who would have invented vainglory for him. The cedars had almost overgrown his son John’s and John’s wife’s graves. Sunlight reached them only in splashes, dappling the weathered stone with fitful stipplings; only with difficulty could the inscription have been deciphered. But she knew what it would be, what with the virus, the inspiration and the example of that one which dominated them all, which gave to the whole place in which weary people were supposed to be resting, an orotund solemnity having no more to do with mortality than the bindings of books have to do with their characters, and beneath which the headstones of the wives whom they had dragged into their arrogant orbits were, despite their pompous genealogical references, modest and effacing as the song of thrushes beneath the eyrie of an eagle.

He stood on a stone pedestal, in his frock coat and bareheaded, one leg slightly advanced and one hand resting lightly on the stone pylon beside him. His head was lifted a little in that gesture of haughty pride which repeated itself generation after generation with a fateful fidelity, his back to the world and his carven eyes gazing out across the valley where his railroad ran and the blue changeless hills beyond, and beyond that, the ramparts of infinity itself. The pedestal and effigy were mottled with seasons of rain and sun and with drippings from the cedar branches, and the bold carving of the letters was bleared with mold, yet still decipherable:

This inscription had caused some furore on the part of the slayer’s family, and a formal protest had followed. But in complying with popular opinion, old Bayard had had his revenge: he caused the line “by man’s ingratitude he died” to be chiselled crudely out and added beneath it: “Fell at the hand of——Redlaw, Sept. 4,1876.”

Miss Jenny stood for a time, musing, a slender, erect figure in black silk and a small uncompromising black bonnet. The wind drew among the cedars in long sighs, and steadily as pulses the sad hopeless reiteration of the doves came along the sunny air. Isom returned for the last armful of dead flowers, and looking out across the marble vistas where shadows of noon moved, she watched a group of children playing quietly and a little stiffly in their bright Sunday finery, among the tranquil
dead. Well, it was the last one, at last, gathered in solemn conclave about the dying reverberation of their arrogant lusts, their dust moldering quietly beneath the pagan symbols of their vainglory and the carven gestures of it in enduring stone; and she remembered something Narcissa had said once, about a world without men, and wondered if therein lay peaceful avenues and dwellings thatched with quiet; and she didn’t know.

Isom returned, and as they moved away Dr Peabody called her name. He was dressed as usual in his shabby broadcloth trousers and his shiny alpaca coat and a floppy panama hat, and his son was with him.

“Well, boy,” Miss Jenny said, giving young Loosh her hand. His face was big-boned and roughly molded. He had a thatch of straight, stiff black hair and his eyes were steady and brown and his mouth was large; and in all his ugly face there was reliability and gentleness and humor. He was rawboned and he wore his clothing awkwardly, and his hands were large and bony and with them he performed delicate surgical operations with the deftness of a hunter skinning a squirrel and with the celerity of a prestidigitator. He lived in New York, where he was associated with a surgeon whose name was a household word, and once a year and sometimes twice he rode thirty six hours on the train, spent twenty hours with his father (which they passed walking about town or riding about the countryside in the sagging buckboard all day, and sitting on the veranda or before the fire all night talking) and took the train again and ninety two hours later, was back at his clinic. He was thirty years old, only child of the woman Dr Peabody had courted for fourteen years before he was able to marry her. The courtship was during the days when he physicked and amputated the whole county by buckboard; often after a year’s separation he would drive forty miles to see her, to be intercepted on the way and deflected to a childbed or a mangled limb, with only a
scribbled message to assuage the interval of another year. “So you’re home again, are you?” Miss Jenny asked.

“Yes, ma’am. And find you as spry and handsome as ever.”

“Jenny’s too bad-tempered to ever do anything but dry up and blow away,” Dr Peabody said.

“You’ll remember I never let you wait on me, when I’m not well,” she retorted. “I reckon you’ll be tearing off again on the next train, wont you?” she asked young Loosh.

“Yessum, I’m afraid so. My vacation hasn’t come due, yet.”

“Well, at this rate you’ll spend it at an old men’s home somewhere. Why dont you all come out and have dinner, so he can see the boy?”

“I’d like to,” young Loosh answered, “but I dont have time to do all the things I want to, so I just make up my mind not to do any of ’em. Besides, I’ll have to spend this afternoon fishing,” he added.

“Yes,” his father put in, “and choppin’ up good fish with a pocket knife just to see what makes ’em go. Lemme tell you what he did this mawnin’: he grabbed up that dawg that Abe shot last winter and laid its leg open and untangled them ligaments so quick that Abe not only didn’t know what he was up to, but even the dawg didn’t know it till it was too late to holler. Only you forgot to dig a little further for his soul,” he added to his son.

“You dont know if he hasn’t got one,” young Loosh said, unruffled. “Dr Straud has been experimenting with electricity; he says he believes the soul——”

“Fiddlesticks,” Miss Jenny interrupted. “You’d better get him a jar of Will Falls’ salve to carry back to his doctor, Loosh. Well—” she glanced at the sun “—I’d better be going. If you wont come out to dinner——?”

“Thank you, ma’am,” young Loosh answered. His father said:

“I brought him in to show him that collection of yours. We didn’t know we looked that underfed.”

“Help yourself,” Miss Jenny answered. She went on, and they stood and watched her trim back until she passed out of sight beyond the cedars.

“And now there’s another one,” young Loosh said musingly. “Another one to grow up and keep his folks in a stew until he finally succeeds in doing what they all expect him to do. Well, maybe that Benbow blood will sort of hold him down. They’re quiet folks, that girl; and Horace sort of.…… and just women to raise him.……”

His father grunted. “He’s got Sartoris blood in him, too.”

All of Narcissa’s instincts had been antipathetic to him; his idea was a threat and his presence a violation of the very depths of her nature: in the headlong violence of him she had been like a lily in a gale which rocked it to its roots in a sort of vacuum, without any actual laying-on of hands. And now the gale had gone on; the lily had forgotten it as its fury died away into fading vibrations of old terrors and dreads, and the stalk recovered and the bell itself was untarnished save by the friction of its own petals. The gale is gone, and though the lily is sad a little vibration of ancient fears, it is not sorry.

Miss Jenny had arrived home, looking a little spent, and Narcissa had scolded her and at last prevailed on her to lie down after dinner. And here she had dozed while the drowsy afternoon wore away, and waked to lengthening shadows and a sound of piano keys touched softly below stairs. I’ve slept all afternoon, she told herself in a sort of consternation; yet she lay for a time yet while the curtains stirred faintly at the windows and the sound of the piano came up mingled with the jasmine from the garden and with the garrulous evensong of sparrows from the mulberry trees in the back yard. She rose and crossed
the hall and entered Narcissa’s room, where the child slept in its crib; beside him the nurse dozed placidly. Miss Jenny tiptoed out and descended the stairs and entered the parlor and drew her chair out from behind the piano. Narcissa stopped playing.

“Do you feel rested?” she asked. “You shouldn’t have done that this morning.”

“Fiddlesticks,” Miss Jenny rejoined. “It always does me good to see all those fool pompous men lying there with their marble mottoes and things. Thank the Lord, none of ’em will have a chance at me. I reckon the Lord knows His business, but I declare, sometimes.…… Play something.” Narcissa obeyed, touching the keys softly, and Miss Jenny sat listening for a while. The evening drew subtly onward; the shadows in the room grew more and more palpable. Outside the sparrows gossiped in shrill clouds. From the garden jasmine came in to them steady as breathing, and presently Miss Jenny roused and began to talk of the child. Narcissa played quietly on, her white dress with its black ribbon at the waist vaguely luminous in the dusk, with a hushed sheen like wax. Jasmine drifted and drifted; the sparrows were still now, and Miss Jenny talked on in the twilight about little Johnny while Narcissa played with rapt inattention, as though she were not listening. Then, without ceasing and without turning her head, she said:

“He isn’t John. He’s Benbow Sartoris.”

“What?”

“His name is Benbow Sartoris,” she repeated.

Miss Jenny sat quite still for a moment. In the next room Elnora moved about, laying the table for supper. “And do you think that’ll do any good?” Miss Jenny demanded. “Do you think you can change one of ’em with a name?”

The music went on in the dusk softly; the dusk was peopled with ghosts of glamorous and old disastrous things. And if
they were just glamorous enough, there was sure to be a Sartoris in them, and then they were sure to be disastrous. Pawns. But the Player and the game He plays.… He must have a name for His pawns, though, but perhaps Sartoris is the game itself—a game outmoded and played with pawns shaped too late and to an old dead pattern, and of which the Player Himself is a little wearied. For there is death in the sound of it, and a glamorous fatality, like silver pennons downrushing at sunset, or a dying fall of horns along the road to Roncevaux.