Flags in the Dust

  Buddy had a way of getting his lean length up from his niche beside the chimney at any hour of the day and departing without a word, to return in an hour or six hours, or twelve or twenty-four or forty-eight, during which periods and despite the presence of Jackson and Henry and usually Lee, the place had a vague air of vacancy, until Bayard realized that the majority of the dogs were absent also. Hunting, they told Bayard when Buddy had been missing since breakfast.

  “Why didn’t he let me know?” he demanded.

  “Maybe he thought you wouldn’t keen to be out in the weather,” Jackson suggested.

  “Buddy don’t mind weather,” Henry explained. “One day’s like another to him.”

  “Nothing ain’t anything to Buddy,” Lee put in, in his bitter, passionate voice. He sat brooding in the fire, his womanish hands moving restlessly on his knees. “He’s spent his whole life in that ‘ere river bottom, with a hunk of cold cawnbread to eat and a passel of dawgs fer comp’ny.” He rose abruptly and quitted the room. Lee was in the late thirties. As a child he had been sickly. He had a good tenor voice and lie was much in demand at Sunday singings. He was supposed to be keeping company with a young woman living in the hamlet of Mount Vernon, six miles away. He spent much of his time tramping moodily and alone about the countryside.

  Henry spat into the fire and jerked his head after tie departing brother. “He been to Vernon lately?”

  “Him and Rale was there two days ago,” Jackson answered.

  Bayard said; “Well, I won’t melt. I wonder if I could catch up with him now?” They pondered for a while, spitting gravely into the fire. “I misdoubt it,” Jackson said at last “Buddy’s liable to be ten mile away by now. You ketch ‘im next time ‘fo’ he starts out.”

  After that Bayard did so, and he and Buddy tried for birds in the ragged, skeletoned fields in the rain, in which the guns made a flat, mournful sound that lingered in the streaming air like a spreading stain, or tried the stagnant backwaters along the river channel for duck and geese; ‘or, accompanied now and then by Rafe, hunted ‘coon and wildcat in the bottom. At times and far away, they would hear the shrill yapping of the young dogs in mad career. “There goes Ethel,” Buddy would remark. Then toward the end of the week the weather cleared, and in a twilight imminent with frost and while the scent lay well upon the muddy earth, old General started the red fox that had baffled him so many times.

  All through the night the ringing, bell-like tones quavered and swelled and echoed among the hills, and all of them save Henry followed on horseback, guided by the cries of the hounds but mostly by the old man’s and Buddy’s uncanny and seemingly clairvoyant skill, in anticipating the course of the race. Occasionally they stopped while Buddy and his father wrangled about where the quarry would head next, but usually they agreed, apparently anticipating the animal’s movements before it knew them itself; and once and again they halted their horses upon a hill and sat so in the frosty starlight until the dogs’ voices welled out of the darkness mournful and chiming, swelled louder and nearer and swept invisibly past not half a mile away; faded diminishing and with a falling suspense, as of bells, into the darkness again.

  “Thar, now!” the old man exclaimed, shapeless in his overcoat, upon his white horse. “Ain’t that music fer a man, now?”

  “I hope they git ‘im this time,” Jackson said. “Hit hurts Gen’ral’s conceit so much every time he fools ‘im.”

  “They won’t git ‘im,” Buddy said. “Soon’s he gits tired, he’ll hole up in them rocks.”

  “I reckon we’ll have to wait till them pups of Jackson’s gits big enough,” the old man agreed. “Unless they’ll refuse to run they own gran’pappy. They done refused ever’ tiling else excep’ vittles “

  “You jest wait,” Jackson repeated, indefatigable. “When them puppies git old enough to—”

  “Listen.”

  The talking ceased, and again across the silence the dogs’ voices rang among the hills. Long, ringing cries fading, falling with a quavering suspense, like touched bells or strings, repeated and sustained by bell-like echoes repeated and dying among the dark hills beneath the stars, lingering yet in the ears crystal-clear, mournful and valiant and a little sad.

  “Too bad Johnny ain’t here,” Stuart said quietly. “He’d enjoy this race.”

  “He was a feller far huntin’, now,” Jackson agreed. “He’d keep up with Buddy, even.”

  “John was a fine boy,” the old man said.

  “Yes, suh,” Jackson repeated. “A right warmhearted boy. Henry says he never come out hyer withouten he brung Mandy and the boys a little sto’-bought somethin’.”

  “He neve’ sulled on a hunt,” Stuart said. “No matter how cold and wet it was, even when he was a little chap, with that ‘ere single bar’l he bought with his own money, that kicked ‘im so hard every time he shot it. And yit he’d tote it around, instead of that ‘ere sixteen old Colonel give ‘im, jest because he saved his money and bought hit hisself.”

  “Yes,” Jackson agreed, “ef a feller gits into some-thin’ on his own accord, he ought to go through with hit cheerful.”

  “He was sho’ a feller fer singin’ and shoutin’,” Mr. MacCallum said. “Skeer all the game in ten mile. I mind that night he headed off a race down at Samson’s bridge, and next we knowed, here him and the fox come a-floatin’ down river on that ‘ere drift lawg.”

  “That ‘uz Johnny, all over,” Jackson agreed. “Gittin’ a whoppin’ big time outen ever’ thing that come up.”

  “He was a fine boy,” Mr. MacCallum said again.

  “Listen.”

  Again the hounds gave tongue in the darkness below them. The sound floated up upon the chill air, died into echoes that repeated the sound again until its source was lost and the very earth itself might have found voice, mournful and sad and wild with all regret.

  Christmas was two days away, and they sat again about the fire after supper; again old General dozed at his master’s feet. Tomorrow was Christmas eve and the wagon was going into town, and although, with that grave and unfailing hospitality of theirs, no word had been said to Bayard about his departure, he believed that in all their minds it was taken for granted that he would return home the following day for Christmas; and, since he had not mentioned it himself, a little curiosity and quiet speculation also.

  It was cold again, with a vivid chill that caused the blazing logs to pop and crackle with vicious sparks and small glowing embers that leaped out upon the floor, to be crushed out by a lazy boot, and Bayard sat drowsily in a drowse of heat, his tired muscles relaxed in the cumulate waves of it as in a warm bath, and the stubborn struggling of his heart glozed over too, for the time. Time enough tomorrow to decide whether to go or not. Perhaps he’d just stay on, without offering that explanation that would never be demanded of him. Then he realized that Rafe, Lee, whoever went, would talk to people, would learn about that which he had not the courage to tell them.

  Buddy had come out of his shadowy niche and he now squatted in the center of the. semicircle, his back to the fire and his arms around his knees, with his motionless and seemingly tireless ability for sitting timelessly on his heels. He was the baby, twenty years old. His mother was the old man’s second wife, and his hazel eyes and the reddish thatch cropped closely to his round head was a noticeable contrast to the others’ brown eyes and black hair. But the old man had stamped Buddy’s face as clearly as ever a one of the other boys, and despite its youth, it too was like the others—aquiline and spare, reserved and grave though a trifle ruddy with his fresh coloring and finer skin.

  The others were of medium height or under, ranging from Jackson’s faded, vaguely ineffectual lank-ness, through Henry’s placid rotundity and Rafe’s (Raphael Semmes he was) and Stuart’s poised and stocky muscularity, to Lee’s thin and fiery unrepose; but Buddy with his sapling-like leanness stood eye to eye with that father who wore his eighty-two years as though they were a thin shirt. “Long, spindlin’ scoundrel,” the old
man would say, with bluff, assumed derogation. “Keeps hisself wore to a shadder totin’ around all that ‘ere grub he eats.” And they would sit in silence, looking at Buddy’s lean, jack-knifed length with the same identical thought, a thought which each believed peculiar to himself and which none ever divulged—that someday Buddy would marry and perpetuate the name.

  Buddy also bore his father’s name, though it is doubtful if anyone outside the family and the War Department knew it. He had run away at eighteen and enlisted; at the infantry concentration camp in Arkansas to which he had been sent, a fellow recruit called him Virge and Buddy had fought him steadily and without anger for seven minutes; at the New Jersey embarkation depot another man had done the same thing, and Buddy had fought him, again steadily and thoroughly and without anger. In Europe, still following the deep but uncomplex compulsions of his nature, he had contrived, unwittingly perhaps, to perpetrate something which was later ascertained by authority to have severely annoyed the enemy, for which Buddy had received his charm, as he called it. What it was he did, he could never be brought to tell, and the gaud not only failing to placate his father’s rage over the fact that a son of his had joined the Federal army, but on the contrary adding fuel to it, the bauble languished among Buddy’s sparse effects and his military career was never mentioned in the family circle; and now as usual Buddy squatted among them, his back to the fire and his arms around his knees^ while they sat about the hearth with their bedtime toddies, talking of Christmas.

  “Turkey,” the old man was saying, with fine and rumbling disgust. “With a pen full of ‘possums, and a river bottom full of squir’ls and ducks and a smokehouse full of hawg meat, you damn boys have got to go clean to town and buy a turkey fer Christmas dinner.”

  “Christmas ain’t Christmas lessen a feller has a little somethin’ different from ever’ day,” Jackson pointed out mildly.

  “You boys jest wants a excuse to git to town and loaf around all day and spend money,” the old man retorted. “I’ve seen a sight mo’ Christmases than you have, boy, and ef hit’s got to be sto’-bought, hit ain’t Christmas.”

  “How ‘bout town-folks?” Rafe asked. “You ain’t allowin’ them no Christmas a-tall.”

  “Don’t deserve none,” the old man snapped. “Livin’ on a little two-by-fo’ lot, jam right up in the next feller’s back do’, eatin’outen tin cans.”

  “Sposin’ they all broke up in town,” Stuart said, “and moved out here and took up land; you’d hear pappy cussin’ town then. You couldn’t git along without town to keep folks bottled up in, pappy, and you knows it.”

  “Buyin’ turkeys,” Mr. MacCallum repeated with savage disgust. “Buyin’ ‘em. I mind the time when I could take a gun and step out that ‘ere do’ and git a gobbler in thirty minutes. And a venison ham in a hour mo’. Why, you fellers don’t know nothin’ about Christmas. All you knows is a sto’ winder full of cocoanuts and Yankee-made popguns and sich.”

  “Yes, suh,” Rafe said, and he winked at Bayard, “that was the biggest mistake the world ever made, when Lee surrendered. The country ain’t never got over it.”

  The old man snorted again. “I’ll be damned ef I ain’t raised the damdest smartest set of boys in the world. Can’t tell ‘em nothin’, can’t learn ‘em nothin’; can’t even set in front of my own fire fer the whole passel of ‘em tellin’ me how to run the whole damn country. Hyer, you boys, git on to bed.”

  Next morning Jackson and Rafe and Stuart and Lee left for town at sunup in the wagon. Still none of . them had made any sign, expressed any curiosity as to whether they would find him there when they returned that night, or whether it would be another three years before they saw him again. And Bayard stood on the frost-whitened porch, smoking a cigarette in the chill, vivid air while the yet hidden sun painted the eastern hills, and looked after the wagon and the four muffled figures in it and wondered if it would be three years again, or ever. The hounds came and nuzzled about him and he dropped his hand among their icy noses and the warm flicking of their tongues, gazing after the wagon, hidden now among the trees from which the dry rattling of it came unimpeded upon the soundless clear morning. “Ready to go?” Buddy said behind him, and he turned and picked up his shotgun where it leaned against the wall The hounds surged about them with eager whimperings and frosty breaths and Buddy led them across to a shed and huddled them inside and fastened the door upon their surprised protests. From another kennel he unfastened the young pointer, Dan. Behind them the hounds continued to raise their baffled and mellow expostulations.

  Until noon they hunted the ragged, fallow fields and woods-edges in the warming am The frost was soon gone, and the air warmed to a windless languor; and twice in brier thickets they saw redbirds darting like arrows of scarlet flame. At last Bayard lifted his eyes unwinking into the sun.

  “I must go back, Buddy,” he said. “Tin going home this afternoon.”

  “All right,” Buddy agreed without protest, and he called the dog in. “You come back next month.”

  Mandy got them some cold food and they ate, and while Buddy went to saddle Perry, Bayard went into the house where he found Henry laboriously soling fr pair of shoes and the old man reading a week-old . newspaper through steel-bowed spectacles.

  “I reckon yo’ folks will be lookin’ fer you,” Mr. MacCallum agreed. “We’ll be expectin’ you back nest month, though, to git that ‘ere fox. Ef we don’t git ‘im soon, Gen’ral won’t be able to hold up his head befo’ them puppies.”

  “Yes, sir,” Bayard answered, “I will.”

  “And try to git yo’ gran’pappy to come with you. He kin lay around hyer and eat his head off well as he kin in town.”

  “Yes, sir, I will.”

  Then Buddy led the pony up to the door, and the old man extended his hand without rising, and Henry put aside his cobbling and followed him onto the porch. “Come out again,” he said diffidently, giving Bayard’s hand a single pump-handle shake; and from a slobbering inquisitive surging of half-grown hounds Buddy reached up his hand

  “Be lookin’ fer you,” he said briefly, and together they stood and watched Bayard wheel away, and when he looked back they lifted their hands gravely. Then Buddy shouted after him and he reined Perry about and returned. Henry had vanished, and he reappeared with a weighted tow sack.

  “I nigh fergot it,” he said. “Jug of cawn pappy’s sendin’ in to yo’ gran’paw. You won’t git no better in Looeyvul or nowhar else, neither,” he added with quiet pride. Bayard thanked him, and Buddy fastened the sack to the pommel, where it lay solidly against his leg.

  “There. That’ll ride. So long.”

  “So long.”

  Perry moved on, and he looked back. They still stood there, quiet and grave and steadfast. Beside the kitchen door the fox, Ethel, sat, looking at him covertly; near her the half-grown puppies moved about in the sun. The sun was an hour above the western hills; the road wound on into the trees. He looked back again, the house sprawled its rambling length against the further trees, its smoke like a balanced plume against the windless sky. The door was empty again. He shook Perry into his easy, tireless foxtrot, the jug of whisky jouncing a little against his knee.

  6

  Where the dim, infrequent road to MacCallum’s left the main road, rising, he halted Perry and sat for a while in the sunset. Jefferson, 14 miles. Rafe and the other boys would not be along for some time, yet, what with Christmas eve in town and the slow festive gathering of the county. Still, they may have left town early, so as to get home by dark; might not be an hour away. The sun’s rays, slanting away, released the chill they had held prisoned in the ground during the perpendicular hours, and it rose slowly and gradually about him as he sat Perry in the middle of the road, and slowly his blood cooled with the cessation of Perry’s motion. He turned the pony’s back to town and shook him into his foxtrot again,

  Darkness overtook him soon, but he rode on beneath the leafless trees, along the pale road in the gathering starlight
Already Perry was thinking of stable and supper and he went on with tentative, inquiring tossings of his head, but obediently and without slackening his gait, knowing not where they were going nor why, save that it was away from home, and a little dubious, though trustfully. The chill grew in the silence and the loneliness and the monotony of their progress. He reined Perry to a halt and produced the jug and drank, and fastened the sack to the saddle again.

  The hills rose wild and black about him; no sign of any habitation, no trace of man’s hand did they encounter. On all sides the hills rolled blackly away in the starlight, or when the road dipped into valleys where the ruts were already stiffening into iron-like shards that rattled beneath Perry’s hooves, they stood about him darkly towering and sinister, feathering their leafless branches against the spangled sky. Where a stream of winter seepage trickled across the road Perry’s feet crackled brittly in this ice, and Bayard slacked the reins while the pony snuffed at the water, and drank again from the jug.

  He fumbled a match clumsily in his cold Angers and lit a cigarette, and pushed his sleeve back from his wrist 11:30. “Well, Perry,” his voice sounded loud and sudden in the stillness and darkness and the cold, “I reckon we better look for a place to hole up till morning.” Perry raised his head and snorted, as though he understood the words, as though he would enter the bleak loneliness in which his rider moved, if he could. They went on, mounting again.

  The darkness spread away, lessening a little presently where occasional fields lay in the vague starlight, breaking the monotony of trees; and after a time during which he rode with the reins slack on Perry’s neck and his hands in his pockets seeking warmth between leather and groin, a cotton house squatted beside the road, its roof dusted over with a frosty sheen as of hushed silver. Not long, he said to himself, leaning forward and laying his hand on Perry’s neck, feeling the warm, tireless blood there. “House soon, Perry, if we look sharp.”