Flags in the Dust

  “You fergot de fawty cents, whitefolks.”

  “What?”

  “He says you lef out de extry fawty cents “Simon shouted. Old Bayard exploded; Miss Jenny chapped her hands over her ears and the committee rolled its eyes in fearsome admiration while he soared to magnificent heights, alighting finally upon Simon.

  “You give him that forty cents, and get’em out of here,” old Bayard finished. “And if you ever bring ‘em back here again, I’ll take a horsewhip to the whole lot of you.”

  “Lawd, Cunnel, I ain’t got fawty cents, en you knows it. Can’t dey do widout dat, after gittin’ de rest of it?”

  “Yes you have, Simon,” Miss Jenny said, “Yon had a half a dollar left after I ordered those shoes for you last night.” Again Simon looked at her with pained astonishment.

  “Give it to ‘em,” old Bayard commanded. Slowly Simon reached into his trousers and produced a half dollar and turned it slowly in his palm.

  “I mought need dis money, Cunnel,” he protested. “Seems like dey mought leave me dis.”

  “Give ‘em that money!” old Bayard thundered. “I reckon you can pay forty cents of it, at least.” Simon rose reluctantly, and the minister approached to meet him.

  “Whar’s my dime change?” he demanded, nor would he surrender the coin until the two nickels were in his hand. Then the committee departed.

  “Now,” old Bayard said, “I want to know; what you did with that money.”

  “Well, suh,” Simon began, “it wuz like dis. I put dat money out” Miss Jenny rose.

  “My Lord,” she said, “are you all going over that again?” And she left them. In her room, where she sat in a sunny window, she could still hear them—old Bayard’s stormy rage, and Simon’s bland and ready evasion rising and falling on the drowsy Sabbath air.

  There was a rose, a single remaining rose. Through the sad, dead days of late summer it had continued to bloom, and now though persimmons had long swung their miniature suns among the caterpillar-festooned branches, and gum and maple and hickory had flaunted four gold-and-scarlet weeks, and the grass, where grandfathers of grasshoppers squatted sluggishly like sullen octogenarians, had been pencilled twice delicately with frost, and the sunny noons were scented with sassafras, it still bloomed Overripe now, and a little gallantly blowsy, like a fading burlesque star. Miss Jenny worked in a sweater, nowadays, and her trowel glinted brightly in her earthy glove.

  “It’s like some women I’ve known,” she said. “It just don’t know how to give up gracefully and be a grandmamma.”

  “Let it have the summer out,” Narcissa, in her dark woolen dress, protested. She had a trowel too, and she pottered serenely after Miss Jenny’s scolding brisk impatience, accomplishing nothing. Worse than Isom, because she demoralized Isom, who had immediately given his unspoken alliance to the Left, or passive, Wing. “It’s entitled to its summer.”

  “Some folks don’t know when summer’s over,” Miss Jenny rejoined. “Indian summer’s no excuse for senile adolescence.”

  “It isn’t senility, either.”

  “All right. You’ll see, someday.”

  “Oh, someday. I’m not quite prepared to be a grandmother, yet.”

  “You’re doing pretty well.” Miss Jenny trowelled a tulip bulb carefully and expertly up and removed the clotted earth from its roots. “We seem to have pretty well worn out Bayard, for the time being,” she continued. “I reckon we’d better name him John.”

  “Yes?”

  “Yes,” Miss Jenny repeated. “We’ll name him John. You, Isom!”

  The gin had been running steadily for a month, now, what with the Sartoris cotton and that of other planters further up the valley, and of smaller croppers with their tilted fields among the hills. The Sartoris place was farmed on shares. Most of the tenants had picked their cotton, and gathered the late corn; and of late afternoons, with Indian summer upon the land and an ancient sadness sharp as woodsmoke on the still air, Bayard and Narcissa would drive out to where, beside a dilapidated cotton house on the edge of a wooden ravine above a spring, the tenants brought their cane and made their winter supply of sorghum molasses. One of the negroes, a sort of patriarch among them, owned the mill and the mule that furnished the motive power. He did the community grinding and superintended the cooking of the juice for a tithe, and when Bayard and Narcissa arrived the mule would be plodding in a monotonous circle, its feet rustling in the dried cane-pith, drawing the long wooden beam which turned the mill into which one of the patriarch’s grandsons fed the cane.

  Round and round the mule went, setting its narrow, deerlike feet delicately down in the hissing cane-pith, its neck bobbing limber as a section of rubber hose in the collar, with its trace-galled flanks and flopping, lifeless ears, and its half-closed eyes drowsing venomously behind pale lids, apparently asleep with the monotony of its own motion. Some Cincinnatus of the cotton fields should contemplate the lowly destiny, some Homer should sing the saga, of the mule and of his place in the South. He it was, more than any one creature or thing, who, steadfast to the land when all else faltered before the hopeless juggernaut of circumstance, impervious to conditions that broke men’s hearts because of his venomous and patient preoccupation with the immediate present, won the prone South from beneath the iron heel of Reconstruction and taught it pride again through humility and courage through adversity overcome; who accomplished the well-nigh impossible despite hopeless odds, by sheer and vindictive patience. Father and mother he does not resemble, sons and daughters he will -never have; vindictive and patient (it is a known fact that he will labor ten years willingly and patiently for you, for the privilege of kicking you once); solitary but without pride, self-sufficient but without vanity; his voice is his own derision. Outcast and pariah, he has neither friend, wife, mistress nor sweetheart; celibate, he is unscarred, possesses neither pillar nor desert cave, he is not assaulted by temptations nor flagellated by dreams nor assuaged by visions; faith, hope and charity are not his. Misanthropic, he labors six days without reward for one creature whom he hates, bound with chains to another whom he despises, and spends the seventh day kicking or being kicked by his fellows. Misunderstood even by that creature (the nigger who.drives him) whose impulses and mental processes most closely resemble his, he performs alien actions among alien surroundings; he finds bread not only for a race, but for an entire form of behavior; meek, his inheritance is cooked away from him along with his soul in a glue factory. Ugly, untiring and perverse, he can be moved neither by reason, flattery, nor promise of reward; he performs his humble monotonous duties without complaint, and his meed is blows. Alive, he is haled through the world, an object of general execration; unwept, unhonored and unsung, he bleaches his awkward, accusing bones among rusting cans and broken crockery and worn-out automobile tires on lonely hillsides, while his flesh soars unawares against the blue in the craws of buzzards.

  As they approached, the groaning; and creaking of the mill would be the first intimation^ unless the wind happened to blow toward them. Then it would be the sharp, subtly exciting odor of fermentation and of cooking molasses to greet them. Bayard liked the smell of it, and they would drive up and sit for a time while the boy rolled his eyes covertly at them as he fed the mill, watching the patient unceasing mule and the old man stooped above the simmering pot. Sometimes Bayard got out and went over and talked to him, leaving Narcissa alone in the car, lapped in the ripe odors of the failing year and all its vague, rich sadness, her gaze brooding quietly upon Bayard and the old negro—the one lean and tall and fatally young and the other stooped with time, while her spirit went out in serene and steady waves, surrounding him unawares.

  Then he would return and get in beside her, and she would touch his rough clothing but so lightly that he was not conscious of it, and they would drive back along the faint road, beside the flaunting woods, and soon, above turning oaks and locusts, the white house simple and huge and steadfast, and the orange disc of the harvest moon beyond the trees, h
alved like a cheese by the ultimate hills.

  Sometimes they went back after dark. The mill was still then, its long motionless arm like a gesture across the firelit scene. The mule was munching somewhere in stable, or stamping and nuzzling its empty manger, or asleep standing, boding not of tomorrow; and against the .firelight many forms moved. The negroes had gathered now: old men and women sitting on crackling cushions of cane about the blaze which one of their number fed with pressed stalks until its incense-laden fury swirled licking at the boughs overhead, making more golden still the twinkling golden leaves; and young men and girls, and children squatting and still as animals, staring into the fire. Sometimes they sang—quavering, wordless chords in which sad monotonous minors blent with mellow bass in passionless suspense and faded along the quivering golden air, to be renewed. But when the white folks arrived the singing ceased, and they sat or lay about the crackling scented blaze on which the blackened pot simmered, talking in broken phrases murmurous with overtones ready with sorrowful mirth, while in shadowy beds among the dry whispering canestalks youths and girls murmured and giggled.

  Always one of them, and sometimes both, stopped in the “office” where old Bayard and Miss Jenny sat. There was a fire of logs on the hearth now, and they would sit in the glow of it—Miss Jenny beneath the light with her lurid daily paper; old Bayard with his slippered feet propped against the fireplace, his head wreathed in smoke and the old setter dreaming fitfully beside his chair, reliving proud and ancient stands perhaps, or further back still, the lean, gawky days of his young doghood, when the world was full . of scents that maddened the blood in him and pride had not yet taught him self-restraint; Narcissa and Bayard between them—Narcissa dreaming too in the firelight, grave and still and serene, and young Bayard smoking his cigarettes in his leashed and moody repose.

  At last old Bayard would throw his cigar into the fire and drop his feet to the floor, and the dog would raise its head and blink and yawn with such gaping deliberation that Narcissa, watching him, invariably yawned also. “Well, Jenny?”

  Then Miss Jenny would lather paper aside and rise. “Let me,” Narcissa would say. “Let me go.” But Miss Jenny never would, and presently she would return with a tray and three glasses, and old Bayard would unlock his desk and fetch the silver-stoppered decanter and compound three toddies with ritualistic care.

  Once Bayard persuaded Narcissa into khaki and boots and carried her ‘possum hunting. Caspey with a streaked and blackened lantern and a cow’s horn slung over his shoulder, and Isom with a gunny sack and an axe, and four shadowy, restless hounds waited for them at the lot gate and they set off among ghostly shocks of corn, where every day almost Bayard kicked up a covey of quail, toward the woods.

  “Where we going to start tonight, Caspey?” Bayard asked.

  “Back of Unc’ Henry’s. Day’s one in dat grape vine behind de cotton house. Blue treed ‘im down dar las’ night.”

  “How do you know he’s there tonight, Caspey?” Narcissa asked.

  “He be back,” Caspey answered confidently. “He right dar now, watchin’ dis lantern wid his eyes scrooched up, listenin’ to hear ef de dawgs wid us.”

  They climbed through a fence and Caspey stooped and set the lantern on the ground. The dogs moiled and tugged about his legs with sniffings and throaty growls at one another as he unleashed them. “You, Ruby! Stan’ still, dar. Hole up here, you potlickin’ fool.” They whimpered and surged, their eyes melting in fluid brief gleams, then they faded soundlessly and swiftly into the darkness. “Give ‘um a little time,” Caspey said. “Let ‘um see ef he dar yit.” From the darkness ahead a dog yapped three times on a high note. “Dat’s dat young dawg,” Caspey explained. “Jes’ showin’ off. He ain’t smelt nothin’.” Overhead the stars swam vaguely in the hazy sky; the air was not yet chill, and the earth was warm yet. They stood in a steady oasis of lantern light in a world with but one dimension, a vague cistern of darkness filled with meagre light and topped with an edgeless canopy of ragged stars. It was smoking and emanating a faint odor of heat. Caspey lifted it and turned the wick down and set it at his feet again. Then from tie darkness there came a single note, resonant and low and grave.

  “Dar he,” Isom said.

  “Hit’s Ruby,” Caspey agreed, picking up the lantern. “She got ‘im.” The young dog yapped again, with fierce hysteria, then the single low cry chimed once more. Narcissa slid her arm through Bayard’s and they hurried on. “ ‘Taint no rush,” Caspey told her. “Dey ain’t treed yit. Whooy. H’mon, dawg.” The young dog had ceased its yapping, but still at intervals the other one bayed her single timbrous note,” and they followed it. “H’mon, dawg.”

  They stumbled a little over fading plow-scars, after Casper’s bobbing lantern, and the darkness ahead was suddenly crescendic with short steady cries in four keys. “Dey got ‘im,” Isom said.

  “Dat’s right,” Caspey replied. “Le’s go. Hold ‘im, dawg!” They trotted now, Narcissa clinging to Bayard’s arm, and plunged through rank grass and over another fence and so among trees. Eyes gleamed fleetingly from the darkness ahead, and another gust of barking interspersed with tense and eager whimperings, and among stumbling half-lit shadows dogs surged about them. “He up dar,” Caspey said. “Ole Blue sees ‘im.” He raised the lantern and set it upon his head, peering up into the vine-matted sapling, and Bayard drew a flashlight from his jacket and turned its beam into the tree. The three older hounds sat in a tense circle about the tree, whimpering or barking in short spaced gusts, but the young one yapped steadily in mad, hysterical rushes. “Kick dat’ puppy still,” Caspey commanded.

  “You, Ginger, hush yo’ mouf,” Isom shouted; he laid his axe and sack down and caught the puppy and held it between his knees. Caspey and Bayard moved slowly around the tree, among the tease dogs; Narcissa followed them. “Dem vines is so thick...” Caspey said.

  “Here he is,” Bayard said suddenly “I’ve got ‘im.” He steadied his light and Caspey moved behind him and stared over his shoulder.

  “Where?” Narcissa asked.

  “Dat’s right,” Caspey agreed. “Dar he is. Ruby don’t lie. When she say he dar, he dar.”

  ‘Where is he, Bayard?” Narcissa repeated. He drew her before him and trained the light over her head, into the tree, and presently from the massed vines two reddish joints of fire not a match-breadth apart; gleamed at her, winked out, then shone again. “He moving” Caspey said. He young ‘possum. Git up dar and shake ‘im out, Isom.” Bayard held his light on the creature’s eyes and Caspey set his lantern down and herded the dogs together at his knees, Isom scrambled up into the tree and vanished in the vine, but they could follow his progress by the shaking branches and his panting as he threatened the animal with a mixture of cajolery and adjuration,

  “Hah,” he panted. “Ain’t gwine hurt you. Ain’t gwine do nothin’ ter you but th’ow you in de cook-pot. Look out, mister; I’se coming up dar.” He stopped; they could hear him moving the branches cautiously. “Here he,” he called suddenly. “Hole dem dawgs, now.”

  “Little ‘un, ain’t he?” Caspey asked.

  “Can’t tell. Can’t see nothin’ but his face. Watch dem dawgs.” The upper part of the tree burst into violent and sustained commotion; Isom’s voice whooped louder and louder as he shook the branches. “Here he comes,” he shouted, and something dropped sluggishly and reluctantly from branch to branch, stopped, and the dogs set up a straining clamor, then fell again, and Bayard’s light followed a lumpy object that dropped with a resounding thud to the earth and vanished immediately beneath a swirl of hounds. Caspey and Bayard leaped among them, and at last Narcissa saw the creature in the pool of the flashlight, lying on its side in a grinning curve, its eyes closed and its pink, baby-like hands doubled against its breast. She watched the motionless thing with a little loathing—such a contradiction, its vulpine, skull-like grin and those tiny, human-looking hands, and the long, rat-like tail of it. Isom dropped from the tree, and Caspey turned the
two straining clamorous dogs he held over to him and picked up the axe, and while Narcissa watched in shrinking curiosity, he laid the axe across the thing’s neck and put his foot on either end of the axe, and grasped the animal’s tail...She turned and fled, her hand to her mouth.

  But the wall of darkness stopped her and she stood trembling and a little sick, watching them as they moved about the lantern. Then Caspey drove the dogs away and Isom picked up the lumpy sack and swung it to his shoulder, and Bayard turned and looked for her. “Narcissa?”

  “Here,” she answered. He came to her.

  “That’s one. We ought to get a dozen, tonight.”

  “No,” she said, shuddering. “No;” He peered at her in the darkness.

  “Not tired already, are you?”

  “No,” she answered, “I just....Come on; they’re going.”

  Caspey led than on through the woods, now. They walked in a dry sibilance of leaves and crackling undergrowth. Trees loomed out of the darkness; above them, among the thinning branches, stars swam in the hushed, vague sky. The dogs were on ahead, and they went on over the uneven ground, sliding down into washes and ditches where sand gleamed in the pale glow of the lantern and the scissoring shadow of Caspey’s legs was enormous, struggled up the other side.

  “We better head away fum de creek bottom,” Caspey suggested. “Dey mought strike a ‘coon, and den dey won’t git home ‘fo’ day.” He bore away toward the fields again.“H’mon, dawg.” They went on. Narcissa was beginning to tire, but Bayard strode on with a fine obliviousness of that possibility, and she followed without complaint. At last, from far away, came that single ringing cry. Caspey stopped. “Le’s see which way he gwine.” They stood in the darkness, in the sad, faintly chill decline of the year, among the dying trees. “Whooy,” Caspey shouted mellowly. “Go git ‘im.”

  The dog replied, and they moved again, slowly, pausing at intervals to listen. The hound bayed again; there were two voices now, and they seemed to be moving in a circle across their path. “Whooy,” Caspey called, his voice ebbing in falling echoes among the motionless trees. They went on. Again the dogs gave tongue, this time from a direction opposite that where the first one had bayed. “He ca’yin’ ‘um right back whar he come fum,” Caspey said. ‘We better wait ‘twell dey gits ‘im straightened out.” He set the lantern down and squatted beside it, and Isom sloughed his burden and squatted also, and Bayard sat against a tree trunk and drew Narcissa down beside him. The dogs bayed again, nearer. Caspey turned his head and stared off into the darkness toward the sound.