Flags in the Dust

  “Don’t know,” Buddy answered, from his shadow. “Just ain’t had time to learn, I reckon.”

  The fire crackled and swirled; from time to time Stuart, nearest the box, put another log on. The dog at the old man’s feet dreamed, snuffed; soft ashes swirled on the hearth at its nose and it sneezed and woke, raised its head and blinked up at the old man’s face, then dozed again. They sat without word or movement, their grave, aquiline faces as though carved by the firelight out of the shadowy darkness, shaped by a angle thought and smoothed and colored by the same hand. The old man tapped his pipe carefully out upon his palm and consulted his fat silver watch. Eight o’clock.

  “We’uns git up at fo’ o’clock, Bayard,” he said.

  “But you don’t have to git up till daylight. Henry, git the jug.”

  “Four o’clock,” Bayard repeated, as he and Buddy undressed in the lamplit chill of the lean-to room in which, in a huge wooden bed with a faded patchwork quilt, Buddy slept. “I don’t see why you bother to go to bed at all.” As he spoke his breath vaporized in the chilly air.

  “Yes,” Buddy agreed, ripping his shirt over his head and kicking his lean, race-horse shanks out of his shabby khaki pants. “Don’t take long to spend the night at our house. You’re comp’ny, though.” Buddy’s preparations for sleeping were simple: he removed his boots and pants and shirt and went to bed in his woolen underwear, and he now lay with only his round head in view, watching Bayard who stood in a sleeveless jersey and short thin trunks. “You ain’t goin’ to sleep warm that-a-way,” Buddy added. ‘You want one o’ my heavy ‘uns?”

  “I’ll sleep warm, I guess,” Bayard answered. He blew the lamp out and groped his way to the bed, his toes curling away from the icy floor, and got in. The mattress was filled with corn shucks; it rattled beneath him, drily sibilant, and whenever he or Buddy moved at all or took a deep breath even, the shucks shifted with small ticking sounds.

  “Git that ‘ere quilt tucked in good over there,” Buddy advised from the darkness, emitting his breath in a short explosive sound of relaxation and contentment He yawned, audible but invisible. “Ain’t seen you in a long while,” he suggested.

  “That’s right. Let’s see, when was it? Two—three years, wasn’t it?”

  “Nineteen fifteen,” Buddy answered. “Last time you and him...” He ceased suddenly. Then he added quietly: “I seen in a paper, when it happened. The name. Kind of knowed right off ‘twas him. It was a limey paper.”

  “You did? Where were you?”

  “Up there,” Buddy answered. “Where them limeys was. Where they sent us. Flat country. Don’t see how they ever drained it enough to make a crop, with all that rain.”

  “Yes,” Bayard said. His nose was like a lump of ice. He could feel his breath warming his nose a little, could almost see the pale smoke of it as he breathed; could feel the inhalation chilling his nostrils again. It seemed too that he could feel the planks of the ceiling as they sloped down to the low wall on Buddy’s side, could feel the atmosphere packed into the low corner, bitter and chill and thick, too thick for breathing, like invisible slush; and he lay beneath it...He was aware of the dry ticking of shucks beneath him and discovered so that he was breathing in deep troubled draughts and he wished dreadfully to be up, moving, before a fire, light; anywhere, anywhere. Buddy lay beside him in the oppressive, half-congealed solidity of the chill, talking in his slow, inarticulate idiom of the war. It was a vague, dreamy sort of tale, without beginning or end and with stumbling reference to places wretchedly pronounced—you got an impression of people, creatures without initiation or background or future, caught tunelessly in a maze of solitary conflicting preoccupations, like bumping tops, against an imminent but incomprehensible nightmare.

  “How’d you like the army, Buddy?”

  “Not much,” Buddy answered. “Ain’t enough to do. Good life for a lazy man.” He mused a moment.

  “They gimme a medal,” he added, in a burst of shy, diffident confidence and sober pleasure. “I aimed to show it to you, but I fergot. Do it tomorrow. That ‘ere flo’s to dang cold to tech till I have to. I’ll watch a chance when pappy’s outen the house.”

  “Why? Don’t he know you got it?”

  “He knows,” Buddy answered. “Only he don’t like it because he claims it’s a Yankee medal. Rafe says pappy and Stonewall Jackson ain’t never surrendered.”

  “Yes,” Bayard repeated. After a while Buddy ceased and sighed again, emptying his body for sleep. But Bayard lay rigidly oh his back, his eyes wide open. It was like being drunk and whenever you close your eyes the room starts going round and round, and so you sit rigid in the dark with your eyes wide open not to get sick. Buddy had ceased talking; presently his breathing became longer, steady and regular, and the shuck; shifted with sibilant complaint, as Bayard turned slowly onto his side.

  But Buddy breathed on in the darkness, steadily and peacefully. Bayard could hear his own breathing also, but above it, all around it, surrounding him, that other breathing. As though he were one thing breathing with restrained laboring, within himself breathing with Buddy’s breathing; using up all the air so that the lesser thing must pant for it. Meanwhile the greater thing breathed peacefully and steadily and unawares, asleep, remote; ay, perhaps dead. Perhaps he was dead, and he recalled that morning, relived it again with strained and intense attention from the time he had seen the first tracer smoke, until from his steep side-slip he watched the flame burst like the gay flapping of an orange pennon from John’s Camel and saw his brother’s familiar gesture and the sudden awkward sprawl of his plunging body as it lost equilibrium in midair; relived it again as you might run over a printed tale, trying to remember, feel, a bullet going into his body or head that might have slain him at the same instant. That would account for it, would explain so much: that he too was dead and this was hell, through which he moved forever and ever with an illusion of quickness, seeking his brother who in turn was somewhere seeking him, never the two to meet. He turned onto his back again; the shucks whispered beneath him with dry derision. .

  The house was full of noises; to his sharpened senses the silence was myriad: the dry agony of wood in the black frost; the ticking of shucks as he breathed; the very atmosphere itself like slush ice in the vice of the cold, oppressing his lungs. His feet were cold, his limbs sweated with it, and about his hot heart his body was rigid and shivering and he raised his naked arms above the covers and lay for a time with the cold like a lead cast about them. And all the while Buddy’s steady breathing and his own restrained and labored breath, both sourceless yet involved one with the other.

  Beneath the covers again his arms were cold across his chest and his hands were like ice upon his ribs, and he moved with infinite caution while the chill croached from his shoulders downward and the hidden shucks chattered at him, and swung his legs to the floor, and his curling toes. He knew where the door was and he groped his way to it. It was fastened by a wooden bar, smooth as ice; he fumbled this out of its slots carefully and without noise. The door had sagged from the hinges and after the first jarring scrape, he grasped the edge of it in his chill fingers and raised it and swung it back, and stood in the door.

  In the sky no star showed, and the sky was the sagging corpse of itself. It lay upon the earth like a deflated balloon; into it the dark shape of the kitchen rose without depth, and the trees beyond, and homely shapes like chill ghosts in the cold corpse-light—the woodpile; a farming tool; a barrel beside the broken stoop at the kitchen door, where he had stumbled, supperward. The gray chill seeped into him like water into sand, with short trickling runs; halting, groping about an obstruction, then on again, trickling at last along his unimpeded bones. He was shaking slowly and steadily with cold; beneath his hands his flesh was rough and without sensation, yet still it jerked and jerked as though something within the dead envelope of him strove to free itself. Above his head, upon the wooden roof, there sounded a single light tap, and as though at a signal, the gray silence
began to dissolve. He shut the door silently and returned to bed.

  In the bed he lay shaking more than ever, to the cold derision of the shucks under him, and he lay quietly on his back, hearing the winter rain whispering on the roof. There was no drumming, as when summer rain falls through the buoyant air, but a whisper of unemphatic sound, as though the atmosphere lying heavily upon the roof dissolved there and dripped sluggishly and steadily from the eaves. His blood flowed again, and the covers felt like iron or like ice; but while he lay motionless beneath the rain his blood warmed yet more, until at last his body ceased trembling and he lay presently in something like a tortured and fitful doze, surrounded by coiling images and shapes of stubborn despair and the ceaseless striving for…not vindication so much as comprehension, a hand, no matter whose, to touch him out of his black chaos. He would spurn it, of course, but it would restore his cold sufficiency again.

  The rain dripped on, dripped and dripped; beside him Buddy breathed placidly and steadily: he had not even changed his position. At times Bayard dozed fitfully: dozing, he was wide awake; waking, he lay in a hazy state filled with improbable moiling and in which there was neither relief nor rest: drop by drop the rain wore the night away, wore time away. But it was so long, so damn long. His spent blood, wearied with struggling, moved through his body in slow beats, like the rain, wearing his flesh away. It comes to all...Bible...some preacher, anyway. Maybe he knew. Peace. It comes to all.

  At last, from beyond walls, he heard movement. It was indistinguishable, yet he knew it was of human origin, of people he knew ‘waking again into the world he had not been able even temporarily to lose, people to whom he was...and he was comforted. The sounds continued, and at last and unmistakably he heard a door, and a voice Which he knew that with a slight effort of concentration he” could name; and best of all, that he could rise and go where they were gathered about a crackling fire. Arid he lay, at ease at last, intending to rise the next moment and go to them, putting it off a little longer while his blood beat slowly through his body and his heart was quieted. Buddy breathed steadily beside him, and his own breath was quiet now as Buddy’s while the human sounds came murmurously into the cold room with grave and homely reassurance. It comes to all, it comes to all, his tired heart comforted him, and at last he slept.

  He waked in the gray morning, his body weary and heavy and dull: his sleep had not rested him. Buddy was gone, and it still rained, though now it was a definite sound on the roof and the air was warmer, with a rawness that probed into the very bones of him; and in his stockings and carrying his scarred, expensive boots in his hands, he traversed the cold room where Lee and Rafe and Stuart slept, and found Rafe and Jackson before the living-room fire.

  “We let you sleep,” Rafe said, then he said: “Good Lord, boy, you look like a hant. Didn’t you sleep last night?”

  “Yes, I slept all right,” Bayard answered. He sat down and stamped into his boots, and buckled the thongs below his knees. Jackson sat at one side of the hearth; in the shadowy corner near his feet a number of small, living creatures moiled silently, and still bent over his boots Bayard said:

  “What you got there, Jackson? What sort of puppies are them?”

  “New breed Tin trying Jackson answered, and Rafe approached with a half a tumbler of Henry’s pale amber whisky.

  “Them’s Ethel’s pups,” he said. “Git Jackson to tell you about ‘em after you eat Here, drink this. You look all wore but. Buddy must a kept you awake, talkin’,” he added, with dry irony.

  Bayard accepted the glass and emptied it, and lit a cigarette. “Mandy’s got yo’ breakfast on the stove,” ‘ Rafe added.

  ‘‘Ethel?’’ Bayard repeated. “Oh, that fox. I aimed to ask about her, last night.”

  “Yes, Jackson aims to revolutionize the huntin’ business, with her. Aims to raise a breed of animals with a hound’s wind and bottom, and a fox’s smartness and speed.”

  Bayard approached the shadowy corner and examined the small creatures with interest and curiosity.

  “I never saw many fox pups,” he said at last, “but I never saw any that looked like them.”

  “That’s what Gen’ral seems to think,” Rafe answered,

  Jackson spat into the fire and stooped over the creatures. They knew his hands, and the moiling of them became more intense, and Bayard then noticed that they made no sound at all, not even puppy whimperings. “Hit’s a experiment,” Jackson explained. “The boys makes fun of ‘em, but they haint no more’n weaned, yet. You wait and see.”

  “Don’t know what you’ll do with ‘em,” Rafe said brutally. “They won’t be big enough for work stock. Better git yo’ breakfast, Bayard.”

  “You wait and see,” Jackson repeated. He touched the scramble of small bodies with his hands, in a gentle, protective gesture. “You can’t tell nothin’ ‘bout a dawg ‘twell hit’s at least two months old, can you?” he appealed to Bayard, looking up at him with his vague, intense gaze from beneath his shaggy brows.

  “Go git yo’ breakfast, Bayard,” Rafe repeated. “Buddy’s done gone and left you.”

  He bathed his face with icy water in a tin pan on the porch, and ate his breakfast—ham and eggs and flapjacks and sorghum and coffee—while Mandy talked to him about his brother. When he returned to the house old Mr. MacCallum was there. The puppies moiled inextricably in their corner, and the old man sat with his hands on his knees, watching them with bluff and ribald merriment, while Jackson sat nearby in a sort of Covering concern, like a hen,

  “Come hyer, boy,” the old man ordered when Bayard appeared “Hyer, Rafe, git me that ‘ere bait line.” Rafe went out, returning presently with a bit of pork rind on the end of a string. The old man took it and rose, and hauled the puppies ungently into the light, where they crouched abjectly moiling—as strange a litter as Bayard had ever seen. No two of them looked alike, and none of them looked like anything else. Neither fox nor hound; partaking of both, yet neither; and despite their soft infancy, there was about them something monstrous and contradictory and obscene. Here a fox’s keen, cruel muzzle between the melting, sad eyes of a hound and its mild ears; there limp fears tried valiantly to stand erect and failed ignobly in flapping points; shoebutton eyes in meek puppy faces, and limp brief tails brushed over with a faint, golden fuzz like the inside of a chestnut burr. As regards color,, they ranged from pure reddish brown through ail indiscriminate brindle to pure ticked beneath a faint dun cast; and one of them had, feature for feature, old General’s face in comical miniature, even to his expression of sad and dignified disillusion. “Watch ‘em, now,” the old man ordered.

  He got them all facing forward, then he dangled the meat directly behind them. Not one noticed it; he swept it back and forth above their heads; not one looked up. Then he swung it directly before their eyes; still they crouched diffidently on their young, unsteady legs and gazed at the meat with curiosity but without any interest at all and fell again to moiling soundlessly among themselves.

  “You can’t tell nothin’ about a dawg—” Jackson began. His father interrupted him.

  “Now, watch.” He held the puppies with one hand and with the other he forced the meat into their mouths. Immediately they surged clumsily and eagerly over his hand, but he moved the meat away and at the length of the string he dragged it along the floor just ahead of them until they had attained a sort of scrambling lope. Then in midfloor he flicked the meat slightly aside, but without seeing it the group blundered on and into a shadowy corner, where the wall stopped them and from which there rose presently the patient, voiceless confusion of them. Jackson left his chair and picked them up and brought them back to the fire.

  “Now, what do you think of them, for a pack of huntin’ dogs?” the old man demanded. “Can’t smell, can’t bark, and damn ef I believe they kin see.”

  “You can’t tell nothin’ about a dawg—” Jackson essayed patiently.

  “Gen’ral kin,” his father interrupted. “Hyer, Rafe, call Gen’ral i
n hyer.”

  Rafe went to the door and called, and presently General entered, his claws hissing a little on the bare floor and his ticked coat beaded with rain, and he stood and looked into the old man’s face with grave inquiry. “Corne hyer,” Mr. MacCallum said, and the dog moved again, with slow dignity. At that moment he saw the puppies beneath Jackson’s chair. He paused in midstride and for a moment he stood looking at them with fascination and bafflement and a sort of grave horror, then he gave his master one hurt, reproachful look and turned and departed, his tail between his legs. Mr. MacCallum sat down and rumbled heavily within himself.

  “You can’t tell about dawgs—” Jackson repeated. He stooped and gathered up his charges, and stood up.

  Mr. MacCallum continued to rumble and shake. “Well, I don’t blame the old feller,” he said. “Ef I had to look around on a passel of chaps like them and say to myself Them’s my boys—” But Jackson was gone. The old man sat and rumbled again, with enjoyment.

  “Yes, suh, I reckon I’d feel ‘bout as proud as he does. Rafe, han’ me down my pipe.”

  All that day it rained, and the following day and the day after that. The dogs lurked about the house all morning, underfoot, or made brief excursions into the weather, returning to sprawl before the fire, drowsing and malodorous and steaming, until Henry came along and drove them out; twice from the door Bayard saw the fox, Ethel, fading with brisk diffidence across the yard. With the exception of Henry and Jackson, who had a touch of rheumatism, the others were somewhere out in the rain most of the day. But at mealtimes they gathered again, shucking their wet outer garments on the porch and stamping in to thrust their muddy, smoking boots to the fire while Henry was fetching, the kettle and the jug. And last of all, Buddy, soaking wet.