“Come home you fool and see your family or I will have you arrested” the message read in her firm, lucid script. “It’s more than ten words,” she told the operator, “but that don’t matter this time. He’ll come now: you watch. Or I’ll send the sheriff after him, sure as his name’s Sartoris.”
“Yes, ma’am,” the operator said. He was apparently having trouble reading it, and he looked up after a time and was about to speak when Miss Jenny remarked his distraction and repeated the message briskly.
“And make it stronger than that if you want to,” she added.
“Yes, ma’am,” the operator said again, and he ducked down behind his desk, and presently and with a little mounting curiosity and impatience Miss Jenny leaned across the counter with a silver dollar in her fingers and watched him count the words three times in a sort of painful flurry;
“What’s the matter, young man?” she demanded. “The government don’t forbid the mentioning of a day-old child in a telegram, does it?”
The operator looked up. “Yes, ma’am, it’s all right,” he said at last, and she gave him the dollar, and as he sat holding it and Miss Jenny watched him with yet more impatience. Dr. Peabody came in and touched her arm.
“Come away, Jenny,” he said.
“Good morning,” she said, taming at his voice. ‘Well, ifs about time you took notice. This is the first Sartoris you’ve been a day late on in how many years, Loosh? And soon’s I get that fool boy home, it’ll be like old times again, as Simon says.”
“Yes. Simon told me. Come away.”
“Let me get my change.” She turned to the operator, who stood with the yellow sheet in one hand and the coin in the other. “Well, young man? Ain’t a dollar enough?”
“Yes, ma’am,” he repeated, turning upon Dr. Peabody his dumb, distracted eyes. Dr. Peabody reached fatly and took the message and the coin from him.
“Come away, Jenny,” he said again.
Miss Jenny stood motionless for a moment, in her black silk dress and her black bonnet set squarely on her head, staring at him with her piercing old eyes that saw so much and so truly. Then she turned and walked steadily to the door and stepped into the street and waited until he joined her, and her hand was steady too as she took the folded paper he offered. Mississippi boy it said in discreet capitals, and she returned it to him immediately and from her waist she took a small sheer handkerchief and wiped her fingers lightly.
“I don’t have to read it,” she said. “They never get into the papers but one way. And I know that he was somewhere he had no business being, doing something that wasn’t any affair of his.”
“Yes,” Dr. Peabody said. He followed her to the carriage and put his hands clumsily upon her as she mounted.
“Don’t paw me, Loosh,” she snapped. “I’m not a cripple.” But he supported her elbow with his huge, gentle hand until she was seated, then he stood with his hat off while Simon laid the linen robe across her knees.
“Here,” he said, and extended her the silver dollar and she returned it to her bag and clicked it shut and wiped her fingers again on her handkerchief.
“Well,” she said, “thank God that’s the last one. For a while, anyway. Home, Simon.”
Simon sat with leashed magnificence, but under the occasion he unbent a little. “When you gwine come out en see de young marster, Doctuh?”
“Soon, Simon,” he answered; and Simon clucked to the horses and wheeled away with a flourish, his hat tilted and the whip caught smartly back. Dr. Peabody stood in the street, a shapeless hogshead of a man in a shabby alpaca coat, his hat in one hand and the folded newspaper and the yellow unsent message in the other, until Miss Jenny’s straight slender back and the squarely indomitable angle of her bonnet had passed from sight.
But that was not the last one. One morning a week later, Simon was found in a negro cabin in town, with his grizzled head crushed ir^ by a blunt instrument anonymously wielded.
“In whose house?” Miss Jenny demanded into the telephone. In that of a woman named Meloney Harris, the voice told her. Meloney...Mel...Belle Mitchell’s face flashed before her, and she remembered: the mulatto girl whose smart apron and cap and lean shining shanks had lent such an air to Belle’s parties, and who had quit Belle in order to set up a beauty parlor. Miss Jenny thanked the voice and hung up the receiver.
“The old gray-headed reprobate,” she said, and she went into the office and sat down. “So that’s what became of that church money he ‘put out,’ I wondered...” She sat stiffly and uncompromisingly erect in her chair, her hands idle on her lap. Well, that is the last one of ‘em, she said. But no, he was hardly a Sartoris: he had at least had some shadow of a reason, while the others … “I think,” Miss Jenny said, who had not spent a day in bed since she was forty years old, “that I’ll be sick for a while.”
And she did just exactly that. Went to bed, where she lay propped on pillows in a frivolous lace cap, and would permit no doctor to see her save Dr. Peabody who called once informally and who sat sheepishly and mountainously for thirty minutes while Miss Jenny vented her invalid’s spleen and the recurred anger of the salve fiasco upon him. And here she held daily councils with Isom and Elnora, and at the most unexpected times she would storm with unimpaired vigor from her window at Isom or Caspey in the yard beneath.
The child and the placid, gaily turbaned mountain who superintended his hours, spent most of the day in this room, and presently Narcissa herself; and the three of them would sit for rapt murmurous hours in a sort of choral debauch of abnegation while the object of it slept digesting, waked, stoked himself anew and slept again.
“He’s a Sartoris, all right,” Miss Jenny said, “but an improved model. He hasn’t got that wild look of ‘em. I believe it was the name. Bayard. We did well to name him Johnny.”
“Yes,” Narcissi said, watching her sleeping son with grave and tranquil serenity.
* * *
And there Miss Jenny staid until her while was up. Three weeks it was. She set the date before she went to bed and held to it stubbornly, refusing even to rise and attend the christening. That day fell on Sunday. It was late in June and jasmine drifted into the house in steady waves. Narcissa and the nurse, in an even more gaudy turban, had brought the baby, bathed and garnished and scented in his ceremonial robes, in to her, and later she heard them drive away, and the house was still again. The curtains stirred peacefully at the windows, and all the peaceful scents of summer came up on the sunny breeze, and sounds—birds, and somewhere a Sabbath bell, and Elnora’s voice, chastened a little with her recent bereavement but still rich and mellow as she went about getting dinner. She sang sadly and endlessly and without words as she moved about the kitchen, but she broke off short when she looked up and saw Miss Jenny looking a little frail but fully dressed and erect as ever, in the door.
“Miss Jenny! Whut in de worl’! You git on back to yo’ bed. Here,” and Elnora crossed the kitchen, but Miss Jenny came firmly on.
“Where’s isom?” she demanded.
“He at de barn. You come on back to bed. I’m gwine tell Miss Narcissa on you.”
“I’m tired staying in the house,” Miss Jenny stated. “I’m going to town. Call Isom.” Elnora protested still, but Miss Jenny insisted coldly, and Elnora called Isom from the door and returned, still portentous with pessimistic warnings, and presently Isom entered.
“Here,” Miss Jenny said, handing him the keys. “Get the car out.” Isom departed and Miss Jenny followed more slowly, and Elnora would have followed too, solicitous, but Miss Jenny drove her back to her kitchen; and unassisted she crossed the yard and got in beside Isohl “And you drive this thing careful, boy,” she told him, “or I’ll get over there and do it myself.”
When they reached town, from slender spires rising among trees against the puffy summer clouds, church bells rang lazily upon the ebbing Reaches of the sunny air. But at the edge of town Miss Jenny bade Isom turn into a narrow lane and they followed this and stoppe
d presently before the iron gates to the cemetery. “I want to see if they fixed Simon all right,” she explained. “I’m not going to church today: I’ve been shut up between walls long enough.” Just from the prospect she got a mild exhilaration, like that of a small boy playing out of school
The negro ground lay beyond the cemetery proper and its orderly plots, and Isom led her to Simon’s grave. Simon’s burying society had taken care of him, and after two weeks the mound was still heaped with floral designs from which the blooms had fallen, leaving a rank, lean mass of stems and peacefully rusting wire skeletons. Elnora, someone, bad also been before her, and the grave was bordered with tedious rows of broken gaudy bits of crockery and of colored glass. “I reckon hell have to have a headstone, too,” Miss Jenny said aloud, and turning, saw Isom hauling his overalled legs into a tree, about which two catbirds whirled and darted in scolding circles. “You, Isom.”
“Yessum,” Isom answered and he dropped to the ground and the birds threatened him with a final burst of hysterical profanity, and followed her. They went on and into the white folks’ section and passed now between marble shapes bearing names that she knew well, and dates in a stark and peaceful simplicity in the impervious stone. Now and then they were surmounted by symbolical urns and doves and surrounded by dipped tended sward green against the, blanched marble and the blue, dappled sky and the black cedars from among which doves crooned endlessly reiterant. Here and there bright unfaded flowers lay in random bursts against the pattern of green and white; and presently John Sartoris lifted his stone back and his fulsome gesture amid a clump of cedars beyond which the bluff sheered sharply away into the valley.
Bayard’s grave too was a shapeless mass of withered flowers, and Miss Jenny had Isom clear them off and carry them away. The masons were just beginning to lay the curbing around it, and the headstone itself sat nearby beneath a canvas cover. She lifted the cover and read the clean, new lettering: Bayard Sartoris. March 16, 1893—June 5, 1920. That was better. Simple: no Sartoris man to invent bombast to put on it. Can’t lie dead in the ground without strutting and swaggering. Beside the grave was a second headstone; like the other save for the inscription. But the Sartoris touch was there, despite the fact that there was no grave to accompany it, and the whole thing was like a boastful voice in an empty church. Yet withal there was something else, as though the merry wild spirit of him who had laughed away so much of his heritage of humorless and fustian vainglory, managed somehow even yet to soften the arrogant gesture with which they had said farewell:
LIEUT. JOHN SARTORIS, R.A.F.
Killed in action, July 19, 1918.
‘I bare him on eagle’s wings
and brought him unto Me’
A faint breeze soughed in the cedars like a long sigh and the branches moved gravely in it. Across the spaced tranquility of the marble shapes the doves crooned their endless rising inflections. Isom retained for another armful of withered flowers and bore it away.
Old Bayard’s headstone was simple too, having been born, as he had, too late for one war and too soon for the next one, and she thought what a joke They had played on him: denying him opportunities for swashbuckling and then denying him the privilege of being buried by men who would have invented vainglory for him. The cedars had almost overgrown his son John’s and John’s wife’s, graves. Sunlight reached them only in fitful splashes, dappling the weathered stone with brief stipplings; only with difficulty could the inscription have been deciphered. But she knew what it would be, what with the virus, the inspiration and the example of that one which dominated them all, which gave to the whole place in which weary people were supposed to rest, a hushed, orotund solemnity having no more to do with mortality than the bindings of books have to do with that of the characters, and beneath which the headstones of the wives whom they had dragged into their arrogant orbits were, despite their pompous genealogical references, modest and effacing as the song of thrushes beneath the eyrie of an eagle.
He stood on a stone pedestal, in his frock coat and bareheaded, one leg slightly advanced and one hand resting lightly on the stone pylon beside him. His head was lifted a little in that gesture of haughty arrogance which repeated itself generation after generation with a fateful fidelity, his back to the world and his carven eyes gazing out across the valley where his railroad ran and beyond it to the blue changeless hills, and beyond that The pedestal and effigy were mottled with sessions of rain and sun and with drippings from the cedar branches, and the bold carving of the letters was bleared with mold, yet easily decipherable:
COLONEL JOHN SARTORIS, CSA
1823 - 1876
Soldier, Statesman, Citizen of the World
For marts enlightenment he lived
By man’s ingratitude he died
Pause here, son of sorrow; remember death.
This inscription had caused some furor on the part of the slayer’s family, and a formal protest followed. But in complying with opinion, old Bayard had his revenge: he caused the line ‘by man’s ingratitude he died’ to be chiseled crudely out and added beneath it: ‘Fell at the hand of —— Redlaw, Aug, 4, 1876.’
Miss Jenny stood for a time, musing, a slender, erect figure in black silk and a small uncompromising black bonnet. The wind drew among the cedars in long sighs, and steadily as pulses the sad hopeless reiteration of the doves came along the sunny air. Isom returned for the last armful of dead flowers, and looking out across the marble vistas where shadows of noon moved, she watched a group of children playing quietly and a little stiffly in their bright Sunday finery, among the tranquil dead. Well, it was the last one, at last, gathered in solemn conclave about the dying reverberation of their arrogant lusts, their dust moldering quietly beneath the pagan symbols of their vainglory and the carven gestures of it in enduring stone; and she .remembered something Narcissa had said once, about a world without men, and wondered if therein lay peaceful avenues and dwellings thatched with quiet; and she didn’t know.
Isom returned, and as she turned away Dr. Peabody called her name. He was dressed as usual in his shabby broadcloth trousers and his shiny alpaca coat and a floppy panama hat, and his son was with him.
“Well, boy,” Miss Jenny said, giving young Loosh her hand. His face was big-boned and roughly molded. He had a thatch of straight, stiff black hair and his eyes were steady and brown and his mouth was large; and in all his ugly face there was reliability and gentleness and humor. He was rawboned and he wore his clothing awkwardly, and his hands were large and bony and with them he performed delicate surgical operations with the deftness of a hunter skinning a squirrel and the celerity of a prestidigitator. He lived in New York, where he was associated with a surgeon whose name was a household word, and once a year and sometimes twice he rode thirty-six hours on the train, spent twenty hours with his father (which they passed walking about the town or riding over the countryside in the sagging buck-board all day, and sitting on the veranda or before the fire all the following night), took the train again and ninety-two hours later, was at his clinic again. He was thirty years old, only child of the woman Dr. Peabody had courted for fourteen years before he Was able to marry her. The courtship was during the days when he physicked and amputated the whole county by buckboard; often after a year’s separation he would drive thirty miles to see her, to be met on the way and deflected to a childbed or a mangled limb, with only a scribbled message to assuage the interval of another year, “So you’re home again, are you?” Miss Jenny asked.
“Yes, ma’am. And find you as spry and handsome as ever.”
“Jenny’s too bad-tempered to ever do anything but dry up and blow away,” Dr. Peabody said.
“You’ll remember I never let you wait on me, when I’m not well,” she retorted. “I reckon you’ll be tearing off again on the next train, won’t you?” she asked young Loosh.
“Yessum, I’m afraid so. My vacation hasn’t come due, yet.”
‘Well, at this rate you’ll spend it at an old men’s home
somewhere. Why don’t you all come out and have dinner, so he can see the boy?”
“I’d like to,” young Loosh answered, “but I don’t have time to do all the things I want to, so I just make up my mind not to do any of ‘em. Besides, I’ll have to spend this afternoon fishing” he added.
“Yes,” his father put in, “and choppin’ up good fish with a pocket knife just to see what makes ‘em go. Lemme tell you what he did this mawnin’: he grabbed that old lame hound of Abe’s and operated on its shoulder so quick that Abe not only didn’t know what he was doing, but even the dawg didn’t. Only you forgot to look for his soul,” he added.
“You don’t know if he hasn’t got one,” young Loosh said, unruffled. “Dr. Straud is trying to find the soul by electricity; he says—”
“Fiddlesticks,”Miss Jenny snapped. “You better get a jar of Will Falls’ salve and give it to him, Loosh. Well—” she glanced at the sun “—I’d better be going. If you won’t come out to dinner—?”
“Thank you, ma’am,” young Loosh answered. His father said:
“I brought him in to show him that collection of yours. We didn’t know we looked that underfed.”
“Help yourself,” Miss Jenny answered. She went on, and they stood and watched her trim back until it passed from view.
“And now there’s another one,” young Loosh said musingly. “Another one to grow up and keep his folks in a stew until he finally succeeds in doing what they all expect of him. Well, maybe that Benbow blood will sort of hold him down. They’re quiet folks, that girl; .and Horace sort of...and just women to raise him...”