Sartoris

  Evening was coming. On either hand cotton and com thrust green spears above the rich, dark soil, and in the patches of woodland where the sun slanted among violet shadows, doves called moodily. After a time Suratt turned from the highway into a faint, rutted wagon-road between a field and a patch of woods, and they drove straight into the sun and Bayard removed his hat and held it before his face.

  “Sun hurt yo’ haid?” Suratt said. “’Tain’t long, now.” The road wound presently into the woods, where the sun was intermittent, and it rose to a gradual, sandy crest. Beyond this the land fell away in ragged, ill-tended fields and beyond them, in a clump of sorry fruit trees and a stunted grove of silver poplar shrubs pale as absinthe and twinkling ceaselessly with no wind, a small weathered house squatted. Beyond it and much larger, loomed a barn gray and gaunt with age. The road forked here. One faint arm curved sandily away toward the house: the other went on between rank weed toward the barn. The youth on the tender leaned his head into the car. “Drive on to the barn,” he directed.

  Suratt obeyed. Beyond the bordering weeds a fence straggled in limp dilapidation, and from the weeds beside it the handles of a plow stood at a gaunt angle while its share rusted peacefully in the undergrowth, and other implements rusted half concealed there—skeletons of labor healed over by the earth they were to have violated, kinder than they. The fence turned at an angle and Suratt stopped the car and the youth stepped down and opened the warped wooden gate and Suratt drove on into the barnyard where stood a wagon with drunken wheels and a homemade bed, and the rusting skeleton at a Ford car. Low down upon its domed and bald radiator the two lamps gave it an expression of beetling and patient astonishment and a lean cow ruminated and watched them with moody eyes.

  The barn doors sagged drunkenly from broken hinges, held to the posts with twists of rusty wire; beyond, the cavern of the hallway yawned in stale desolation—a travesty of earth’s garnered fullness and its rich inferences. Bayard sat on the tender and leaned his bandaged head against the side of the car and watched Suratt and the youth enter the barn and mount slowly on invisible ladder-rungs. The cow chewed in slow dejection, and upon the yellow surface at a pond enclosed by banks at trodden and sun-cracked clay, geese drifted like small muddy clouds. The sun fell in a long-slant upon their rumps and upon their suave necks, and upon the cow’s gaunt, rhythmically twitching flank, ridging her visible ribs with dingy gold. Presently Suratt’s legs tumbled into view, followed by his cautious body, and after him the youth slid easily down the ladder in one-handed swoops.

  He emerged carrying an earthen jug dose against his leg. Suratt followed in his neat, tieless blue shirt and jerked his head at Bayard, and they turned the corner of the barn among waist-high jimson weeds. Bayard overtook them as the youth with his lug slid with a single motion between two lax strands at barbed wire. Suratt stooped through more sedately, and he held the top strand taut and set his foot on the lower one until Bayard was through. Behind the barn the ground descended into shadow, toward a junglish growth of willow and elder, against which a huge beech and a clump of saplings stood like mottled ghosts and from which a cool dankness rose like a breath to meet them. The spring welled from the roots of the beech, into a wooden frame sunk to its top in white sand that quivered ceaselessly and delicately beneath the water’s limpid unrest, and went on into the willow and elder growth.

  The earth about the spring was trampled smooth and packed as an earthen floor. Near the spring a blackened iron pot sat on four bricks; beneath it was a heap of pale wood-ashes and a litter of extinct brands and charred fagot-ends. Against the pot leaned a scrubbing board with a ridged metal face, and a rusty tin cup hung from a nail in the tree above the spring. The youth set the jug down and he and Suratt squatted beside it.

  “I don’t know if we ain’t a-gain to git in trouble, givin’ Mr. Bayard whiskey, Hub,” Suratt said. “Still, Doc Peabody give him one dram hisself; so I reckon we kin give him one mo’. Ain’t that right, Mr. Bayard?” Squatting, he looked up at Bayard with his shrewd affable face. Hub twisted the corn-cob stopper from the jug and passed it to Suratt, who tendered it to Bayard. “I been knowin’ Mr. Bayard ever since he was a chap in knee pants,” Suratt confided to Hub. “But this is the first time me and him ever taken a drink together. Ain’t that so, Mr. Bayard? . . . I reckon you’ll want a drinkin’-cup, won’t you?” But Bayard was already drinking, with the jug tilted across his horizontal forearm and the mouth held to his lips by the same hand, as it should be done. “He knows how to drink outen a jug, don’t he?” Suratt added. “I knowed he was all right,” he said in a tone of confidential vindication. Bayard lowered the jug and returned it to Suratt, who tendered it formally to Hub.

  “Go ahead,” Hub said. “Hit it.” Suratt did so, with measured pistonings of his Adam’s apple. Above the stream gnats whirled and spun in a leveling ray of sunlight, like erratic golden chaff. Suratt lowered the jug and passed it to Hub and wiped his mouth on the back of his hand.

  “How you feel now, Mr. Bayard?” he asked. Then he said heavily: “You’ll have to excuse me. I reckon I ought to said Cap’m Sartoris, oughtn’t I?”

  “What for?” Bayard asked. He squatted also on his heels against the bole of the beech tree. The rising slope of ground behind them hid the barn and the house, and the three of them squatted in a small bowl of peacefulness remote from the world and time, and filled with the cool and limpid breathing of the spring and a seeping of sunlight among the elders and willows like a thinly diffused wine. On the surface of the spring the sky lay reflected, stippled over with windless beech leaves. Hub squatted leanly, his brown forearms clasped about his knees, smoking a cigarette beneath the tilt of his hat. Suratt was across the spring from him. He wore a faded blue shirt, and in contrast to it his hands and face were a rich, even brown, like mahogany. The jug sat rotund and benignant between them.

  “Yes, sir,” Suratt repeated, “I always find the best cure fer a wound is plenty of whisky. Doctors, these here fancy young doctors’ll tell a feller different, but old Doc Peabody hisself cut off my granpappy’s laig while granpappy laid back on the kitchen table with a demijohn in his hand and a mattress and a cheer acrost his laigs and fo’ men a-hold in’ him down, and him cussin’ and singin’ so scandalous the womenfolks and the chillen went down to the pasture behind the barn and waited. Take some mo’,” he said, and he passed the jug across the spring and Bayard drank again. “Reckon you’re beginnin’ to feel pretty fair, ain’t you?”

  “Damned if I know,” Bayard answered. “It’s dynamite, boys.”

  Suratt poised the jug and guffawed, then he lipped it and his Adam’s apple pumped again, in relief against the wall of elder and willow. The elder would soon flower with pale clumps of tiny bloom. Miss Jenny made a little wine of it every year. Good wine, if you knew how and had the patience. Elderflower wine. Like a ritual for a children’s game; a game played by little girls in small pale dresses, between supper and twilight. Above the bowl where sunlight yet came in a leveling beam, gnats whirled and spun like dust motes in a still disused room. Suratt’s voice went on affably, ceaselessly recapitulant, in polite admiration of the hardness of Bayard’s head and the fact that this was the first time he and Bayard had ever taken a drink together.

  They drank again, and Hub began to borrow cigarettes of Bayard and he too became a little profanely and robustly anecdotal in his country idiom, about whisky and girls and dice; and presently he and Suratt were arguing amicably about work. They appeared to be able to sit tirelessly and without discomfort on their heels, but Bayard’s legs had soon grown numb and he straightened them, tingling with released blood, and he now sat with his back against the tree and his long legs straight before him, hearing Suratt’s voice without listening to it.

  His head was now no more than a sort of taut discomfort; at times it seemed to float away from his shoulders and hang against the green wall like a transparent balloon, within which or beyond which tha
t lace that would neither emerge completely nor yet fade completely away, lingered with shadowy exasperation—two eyes round with grave, shocked astonishment, two lifted hands flashing behind little white shirt and blue pants swerving into a lilting rush plunging clatter crash blackness. . . .

  Suratt’s slow, plausible voice went on steadily, but without any irritant quality. It seemed to fit easily into the still scene, speaking of earthy things. “Way I learnt to chop cotton,” he was saying, “my oldest brother taken and put me in the row ahead of him. Started me oft, and soon’s I taken a lick or two, here he come behind me. And ever’ time my hoe chopped once, I could hear hisn chop twice. I never had no shoes in them days, neither,” he added drily. “So I had to learn to chop last, with that ’ere hoe of hisn curtin’ at my bare heels. But I swo’ then, come what mought. I wouldn’t never plant nothin’ in the ground, soon’s I could he’p myself. It’s all right fer folks that owns the land, but folks like my folks was don’t never own no land, and ever’ time we made a furrow, we was scratchin’ dirt fer somebody else.” The gnats danced and whirled more madly yet in the sun, above the secret places of the stream, and the sun’s light was taking on a rich copper tinge. Suratt rose. “Well, boys, I got to git on back to’rds town, myself.” He looked at Bayard again with his shrewd, kind face. “I reckon Mr. Bayard’s clean fergot about that knock he taken, ain’t he?”

  “Dammit,” Bayard said, “quit calling me Mr. Bayard.”

  Suratt picked up the jug. “I knowed he was all right, when you got to know him,” he told Hub. “I been knowin’ him since he was knee-high to a grasshopper, but me and him jest ain’t been throwed together like this. I was raised a pore boy, fellers, while Mr. Bayard’s folks has lived on that ’ere big place with plenty of money in the bank and niggers to wait on ’ern. But he’s all right,” he repeated. “He ain’t goin’ to say nothin’ about who give him this here whiskey.”

  “Let him tell if he wants to,” Hub answered. “I don’t give a damn.”

  They drank again. The sun was almost gone, and from the secret marshy places of the stream carne a fairylike piping of young frogs. The gaunt invisible cow lowed barnward, and Hub replaced the corn cob in the jug and drove it home with a blow of his palm, and they mounted the hill and crawled through the fence. The cow stood in the barn door and watched them approach and lowed again, moody and mournful. The geese had left the pond and’ they now paraded sedately across the barnyard towards the house, in the door of which, framed by two crape myrtle bushes, a woman stood.

  “Hub,” she said in a flat, country voice.

  “Goin’ to town,” Hub answered shortly. “Sue’ll have to milk.”

  The woman stood quietly in the door. Hub carried the jug into the barn and the cow followed him, and he heard her and turned and gave her a resounding kick in her gaunt ribs and cursed her without heat. Presently he reappeared and went on to the gate and opened it, and Suratt drove through. Then he closed it and wired it to again and swung on to the fender. Bayard moved over and prevailed on Hub to get inside. The woman stood yet in the door, watching them quietly. About the doorstep the geese surged erratically with discordant cries, their necks undulant and suave as formal gestures in a pantomime.

  The shadow of the fruit trees fell long across the untidy fields, and the car pushed its elongated shadow before it like the shadow of a huge, hump-shouldered bird. They mounted the sandy hill in the last of the sun and dropped downward out of the sunlight and into violet dusk. The road was soundless with sand, and the car lurched in the worn and shifting ruts and on to the highroad again.

  The waxing moon stood overhead. As yet it gave off no night, though, and they drove on toward town, passing an occasional country wagon homeward bound. These Suratt who knew nearly every soul in the county, greeted with a grave gesture of his brown hand, and presently where the road crossed a wooden bridge among more willows and elder and where dusk was denser and more palpable, Suratt stopped the car and climbed out over the door.

  “You fellers set still,” he said. “I won’t be but a minute. Got to fill that ’ere radiator.” They heard him at the rear of the car; then he reappeared with a tin bucket and let himself gingerly down the roadside bank beside the bridge. Water chuckled and murmured beneath the bridge, invisible in the twilight, its murmur burdened with the voice of cricket and frog. Above the willows that marked the course of the stream gnats still spun and whirled, for bull bats appeared from nowhere in long swoops, in mid swoop vanished, then appeared again swooping against the serene sky, silent as drops of water on a window-pane; swift and noiseless and intent as though their wings were feathered with twilight and with silence.

  Suratt scrambled up the bank with his pail and removed the cap and tilted the bucket above the radiator. The moon stood without emphasis overhead; yet a faint shadow of Suratt’s head and shoulders fell upon the hood of the car, and upon the pallid planking of the bridge the leaning willow fronds were faintly and delicately penciled in shadow. The last of the water gurgled with faint rumblings into the engine’s interior and Suratt replaced the pail and climbed over the blind door. The lights were operated from a generator; he switched these on now. While the car was in low speed, the lights glared to crescendo, but when he let the clutch in they dropped to a wavering glow no more than a luminous shadow.

  Night was fully come when they reached town. Across the land the lights on the courthouse clock were like yellow beads above the trees, and upon the green afterglow a column of smoke stood like a balanced plume. Suratt put them out at the restaurant and drove on, and they entered and the proprietor raised his conical head and his round, melting eyes from behind the soda-fountain.

  “Great Savior, boy,” he exclaimed, “ain’t you gone home yet? Doc Peabody’s been huntin’ you ever since four o’clock, and Miss Jenny drove to town in the carriage, looking for you. You’ll kill yourself.”

  “Get to hell on back yonder, Deacon,” Bayard answered, “and bring me and Hub about two dollars’ worth of ham and eggs.”

  Later they returned for the jug in Bayard’s car, Bayard and Hub and a third young man, freight agent at the railway station, with three negroes and a bull fiddle in the rear seat. But they drove no farther than the edge of the field above the house and stopped there while Hub went on afoot down the sandy road toward the barn. The moon stood pale and cold overhead, and on all sides insects shrilled in the dusty undergrowth. In the rear seat the negroes murmured among themselves.

  “Fine night,” Mitch, the freight agent, suggested. Bayard made no reply. He smoked moodily, his head closely helmeted in its white bandage. Moon and insects were one, audible and visible, dimensionless and without source.

  After a while Hub materialized against the dissolving vagueness of the road, crowned by the silver slant of his hat, and he came up and swung the jug on to the door and removed the stopper. Mitch passed it to Bayard.

  “Drink,” Bayard said, and Mitch did so. The others drank.

  “We ain’t got nothin’ for the niggers to drink out of,” Hub said.

  “That’s so,” Mitch agreed. He turned in his seat. “Ain’t one of you boys got a cup or something?” The negroes murmured again, questioning one another in mellow consternation.

  “Wait,” Bayard said. He got out and lifted the hood and removed the cap from the breather-pipe. “It’ll taste a little like oil for a drink or two. But you boys won’t notice it after that.”

  “Naw, suh,” the negroes agreed in chorus. One took the cup and wiped it out with the corner of his coat, and they too drank in turn, with smacking expulsions of breath. Bayard replaced the cap and got in the car.

  “Anybody want another right now?” Hub asked, poising the corn cob.

  “Give Mitch another,” Bayard directed. “He’ll have to catch up.”

  Mitch drank again. Then Bayard took the jug and tilted it. The others watched him respectfully.

  “Da
m’f he don’t drink it,” Mitch murmured. “I’d be afraid to hit it so often, if I was you.”

  “It’s my damned head.” Bayard lowered the jug and passed it to Hub. “I keep thinking another drink will ease it off some.”

  “Doc put that bandage on too tight,” Hub said. “Want it loosened some?”

  “I don’t know.” Bayard lit another cigarette and threw the match away. “I believe I’ll take it off. It’s been on there long enough.” He raised his hands and fumbled at the bandage.

  “You better let it alone,” Mitch warned him. But he continued to fumble at the fastening; then he slid his fingers beneath a turn of the cloth and tugged at it savagely. One of the negroes leaned forward with a pocket knife and severed it, and they watched him as he stripped it off and flung it away.

  “You ought not to done that,” Mitch told him.

  “Ah, let him take it off if he wants.” Hub said. “He’s all right.” He got in and stowed the jug away between his knees, and Bayard turned the car about. The sandy road hissed beneath the broad tires of it and rose shaling into the woods again where the dappled moonlight was intermittent, treacherous with dissolving vistas. Invisible and sourceless among the shifting patterns of light and shade, whippoorwills were like flutes tongued liquidly. The road passed out of the woods and descended, with sand in shifting and silent lurches, and they turned on to the valley road and away from town.