Flags in the Dust (7 page)

“Hit mought do now,” he said. “But hit’ll be jes’ like weed-in’ wid a curry-c——”

“You try it, anyway,” Miss Jenny said. “Maybe the weeds’ll think it’s a hoe. You go give ’em a chance to, anyhow.”

“Ise gwine, Ise gwine,” Simon answered pettishly, rising and hobbling away. “You go’n see erbout dat place o’ yo’n; I’ll ’tend ter dis.”

Miss Jenny and the caller descended the steps and went on around the corner of the house.

“Why he’d rather sit there and rasp at that new hoe with a file instead of grubbing up a dozen blades of grass in that salvia bed, I cant see,” Miss Jenny said. “But he’ll do it. He’d sit there and scrape at that hoe until it looked like a saw blade, if I’d let him. Bayard bought a lawn mower three or four years ago—God knows what for—and turned it over to Simon. The folks that made it guaranteed it for a year. They didn’t know Simon, though. I often thought, reading about those devastations and things in the papers last year, what a good time Simon would have had in the war. He could have shown ’em things about devastation they never thought of. Isom!” she shouted.

They entered the garden and Miss Jenny paused at the gate. “You, Isom!”

This time there was a reply, and Miss Jenny went on with her caller and Isom lounged up from somewhere and clicked the gate after him.

“Why didn’t you——” Miss Jenny looked back over her shoulder, then she stopped and regarded Isom’s suddenly military figure with brief, cold astonishment. He now wore khaki, with a divisional emblem on his shoulder and a tarnished service stripe on his cuff. His lean sixteen-year-old neck rose from the slovenly collar’s limp, overlarge embrace, and a surprising amount of wrist was visible below the cuffs. The breeches bagged hopelessly into the unskillful wrapping of the putties which, with either a fine sense for the unique or a bland disregard of military usage, he had donned prior to his shoes, and the soiled overseas cap came down regrettably on his bullet head.

“Where did you get those clothes?” The sunlight glinted on Miss Jenny’s shears, and Miss Benbow in a white dress and a soft straw hat turned also and looked at him with a strange expression.

“Dey’s Caspey’s,” Isom answered. “I jes’ bor’d ’um.”

“Caspey?” Miss Jenny repeated. “Is he home?”

“Yessum. He got in las’ night on de nine-thirty.”

“Last night, did he? Where is he now? Asleep, I reckon?”

“Yessum. Dat’s whar he wuz when I lef’ home.”

“And I reckon that’s how you borrowed his uniform,” Miss Jenny said tartly. “Well, let him sleep this morning. Give him one day to get over the war. But if it made a fool out of him like it did Bayard, he’d better put that thing on again and go back to it. I’ll declare, men cant seem to stand anything.” She went on, the guest in her straight white dress following.

“You are awfully hard on men, not to have a husband to
bother with, Miss Jenny,” she said. “Besides, you’re judging all men by your Sartorises.”

“They aint my Sartorises,” Miss Jenny disclaimed promptly. “I just inherited ’em. But you just wait: you’ll have one of your own to bother with soon; you just wait until Horace gets home, then see how long it takes him to get over it. Men cant stand anything,” she repeated. “Cant even stand helling around with no worry and no responsibility and no limit to all of the meanness they can think about wanting to do. Do you think a man could sit day after day and month after month in a house miles from nowhere and spend the time between casualty lists tearing up bedclothes and window curtains and table linen to make lint and watching sugar and flour and meat dwindling away and using pine knots for light because there aren’t any candles and no candlesticks to put ’em in, if there were, and hiding in nigger cabins while drunken Yankee generals set fire to the house your great-great-great-grandfather built and you and all your folks were born in? Dont talk to me about men suffering in war.” Miss Jenny snipped larkspur savagely. “Just you wait until Horace comes home; then you’ll see. Just a good excuse for ’em to make nuisances of themselves and stay in the way while the women-folks are trying to clean up the mess they left with their fighting. John at least had consideration enough, after he’d gone and gotten himself into something where he had no business, not to come back and worry everybody to distraction. But Bayard now, coming back in the middle of it and having everybody thinking he was settled down at last, teaching at that Memphis flying school, and then marrying that fool girl.”

“Miss Jenny!”

“Well, I dont mean that, but she ought to’ve been spanked, hard. I know: didn’t I do the same thing, myself? It was all that harness Bayard wore. Talk about men being taken in by a uniform!”
She clipped larkspur. “Dragging me up there to the wedding, mind you, with a church full of rented swords and some of Bayard’s pupils trying to drop roses on ’em when they came out. I reckon some of ’em were not his pupils, because one of ’em finally did drop a handful that missed everything and fell in the street.” She snipped larkspur savagely. “I had dinner with ’em one night. Sat in the hotel an hour until they remembered to come for me. Then we stopped at a delicatessen and Bayard and Caroline got out and went in and came back with about a bushel of packages and dumped ’em into the car where they leaked grease on my new stockings. That was the dinner I’d been invited to, mind you; there wasn’t a sign of anything that looked or smelt like a stove in the whole place. I didn’t offer to help ’em. I told Caroline I didn’t know anything about that sort of house-keeping, because my folks were old-fashioned enough to cook food.

“Then the others came in—some of Bayard’s soldier friends, and a drove of other folks’ wives, near as I could gather. Young women that ought to’ve been at home, seeing about supper, gabbling and screeching in that silly way young married women have when they’re doing something they hope their husbands won’t like. They were all unwrapping bottles—about two dozen, I reckon, and Bayard and Caroline came in with that silver I gave ’em and monogrammed napkins and that delicatessen fodder that tasted like swamp grass, on paper plates. We ate it there, sitting on the floor or standing up or just wherever you happened to be.

“That was Caroline’s idea of keeping house. She said they’d settle down when they got old, if the war was over by then. About thirty-five, I suppose she meant. Thin as a rail; there wouldn’t have been much to spank. But she’d ought to’ve had it, just the same. Soon as she found out about the baby, she named it. Named it nine months before it was born and told
everybody about it. Used to talk about it like it was her grandfather or something. Always saying Bayard wont let me do this or that or the other.”

Miss Jenny continued to clip larkspur, the caller tall in a white dress beside her. The fine and huge simplicity of the house rose among thickening trees, the garden lay in sunlight bright with bloom, myriad with scent and with a drowsy humming of bees—a steady golden sound, as of sunlight become audible—all the impalpable veil of the immediate, the familiar; just beyond it a girl with a bronze skirling of hair and a small, supple body in a constant epicene unrepose, a dynamic fixation like that of carven sexless figures caught in moments of action, striving, a mechanism all of whose members must move in performing the most trivial action, her wild hands not accusing but passionate still beyond the veil impalpable but sufficient.

Miss Jenny stooped over the flowerbed, her narrow back, though stooping, erect still, indomitable. A thrush flashed modestly across the bright air and into the magnolia tree in a dying parabola. “And then, when he had to go back to the war, of course he brought her out here and left her on my hands.” The caller stood motionless in her white dress, and Miss Jenny said: “No, I dont mean that.” She snipped larkspur.

“Poor women,” she said. “I reckon we do have to take our revenge wherever and whenever we can get it. Only she ought to’ve taken it out on Bayard.”

“When she died,” Narcissa said, “and he couldn’t know about it; couldn’t have come to her if he had? And you can say that?”

“Bayard love anybody, that cold devil?” Miss Jenny clipped larkspur. “He never cared a snap of his fingers for anybody in his life except Johnny.” She snipped larkspur savagely. “Swelling around here like it was our fault, like we made ’em
go to that war. And now he’s got to have an automobile, got to go all the way to Memphis to buy one. An automobile in Bayard Sartoris’ barn, mind you; him that wont even lend the bank’s money to a man that owns one.…… Do you want some sweet peas?”

“Yes, please,” Narcissa answered. Miss Jenny straightened up, then she stopped utterly still.

“Just look yonder, will you?” she pointed with the shears. “That’s how they suffer from war, poor things.” Beyond a frame of sweet peas Isom in his khaki strode solemnly back and forth. Upon his right shoulder was a hoe and on his face an expression of rapt absorption, and as he reversed at the end of his beat, he murmured to himself in measured singsong. “You, Isom!” Miss Jenny shouted.

He halted in midstride, still at shoulder arms. “Ma’am?” he said mildly. Miss Jenny continued to glare at him, and his military bearing faded and he lowered his piece and executed a sort of effacing movement within his martial shroud.

“Put that hoe down and bring that basket over here. That’s the first time in your life you ever picked up a garden tool of your own free will. I wish I could discover the kind of uniform that would make you dig in the ground with it; I’d certainly buy you one.”

“Yessum.”

“If you want to play soldier, you go off somewhere with Bayard and do it. I can raise flowers without any help from the army,” she added, turning to the guest with her handful of larkspur. “And what are you laughing at?” she demanded.

“You both looked so funny,” the younger woman explained. “You looked so much more like a soldier than poor Isom, for all his uniform.” She touched her eyes with her fingertips. “I’m sorry: please forgive me for laughing.”

“Hmph,” Miss Jenny sniffed. She put the larkspur into the
basket and went on to the sweet pea frame and snipped again, viciously. The guest followed, as did Isom with the basket; and presently Miss Jenny was done with sweet peas and she moved on again with her train, pausing to cut a rose here and there, and stopped before a bed where tulips lifted their bright inverted bells. She and Isom had guessed happily, this time; the various colors formed an orderly pattern.

“When we dug ’em up last fall,” she told her guest, “I’d put a red one in Isom’s right hand and a yellow one in his left, and then I’d say ‘All right, Isom, give me the red one.’ He’d never fail to hold out his left hand, and if I just looked at him long enough, he’d hold out both hands. ‘Didn’t I tell you to hold that red one in your right hand?’ I’d say. ‘Yessum, here ’tis.’ And out would come his left hand again. ‘That aint your right hand, stupid,’ I’d say. ‘Dat’s de one you said wuz my right hand a while ago,’ Mr Isom says. Aint that so, nigger?” Miss Jenny glared at Isom, who again performed his deprecatory effacing movement behind the slow equanimity of his grin.

“Yessum, I ’speck it is.”

“You’d better,” Miss Jenny rejoined warningly. “Now, how can anybody have a decent garden, with a fool like that? I expect every spring to find corn or lespedeza coming up in the hyacinth beds or something.” She examined the tulips again, weighing the balanced colors one against another in her mind. “No, you dont want any tulips,” she decided, moving on.

“No, Miss Jenny,” the guest agreed demurely. They went on to the gate, and Miss Jenny stopped and took the basket from Isom.

“And you go home and take that thing off, you hear?”

“Yessum.”

“And I want to look out that window in a few minutes and see you in the garden with that hoe again,” she added. “And I
want to see both of your right hands on it and I want to see it moving, too. You hear me?”

“Yessum.”

“And tell Caspey to be ready to go to work in the morning. Even niggers that eat here have got to work some.” But Isom was gone, and they went on and mounted to the veranda. “Dont he sound like that’s exactly what he’s going to do?” she confided as they entered the hall. “He knows as well as I do that I wont dare look out that window, after what I said. Come in,” she added, opening the parlor doors.

This room was opened but seldom now, though in John Sartoris’ day it had been constantly in use. He was always giving dinners, and balls too on occasion, with the folding doors between it and the dining room thrown open and three negroes with stringed instruments on the stairway and all the candles burning, surrounding himself with a pageantry of color and scent and music against which he moved with his bluff and jovial arrogance. He lay also overnight in this room in his gray regimentals and so brought to a conclusion the colorful, if not always untarnished, pageant of his own career, contemplating for the last time his own apotheosis from the jocund mellowness of his generous hearth.

But during his son’s time it fell less and less into use, and slowly and imperceptibly it lost its jovial but stately masculinity, becoming by mutual agreement a place for his wife and his son John’s wife and Miss Jenny to clean thoroughly twice a year and in which, preceded by a ritualistic unswaddling of brown holland, they entertained their more formal callers. This was its status at the birth of his grandsons and it continued thus until the death of their parents, and later, to that of his wife. After that Miss Jenny bothered with formal callers but little and with the parlor not at all. She said it gave her the creeps.

And so it stayed closed nearly all the time and slowly acquired an atmosphere of solemn and macabre fustiness. Occasionally young Bayard or John would open the door and peer into the solemn obscurity in which the shrouded furniture loomed with a sort of ghostly benignance, like albino mastodons. But they did not enter; already in their minds the room was associated with death, an idea which even the holly and tinsel of Christmas tide could not completely obscure. They were away at school by the time they reached party age, but even during vacations, though they had filled the house with the polite bedlam of their contemporaries, the room would be opened only on Christmas eve, when the tree was set up and a fire lighted, and a bowl of eggnog on the table in the center of the hearth. And after they went to England in ’16 it was opened twice a year to be cleaned after the ancient ritual that even Simon had inherited from his forefathers, and to have the piano tuned or when Miss Jenny and Narcissa spent a forenoon or afternoon there, and formally not at all.