Flags in the Dust

  “Dat went on fer a long time, ‘twell one day de balloons wuz gone and de white boys says it wuz time to move again. But we didn’t see no use in gwine no whar else, so we stayed, me and de other colored boy. Dat evenin, we went over to whar de French army wuz fer some grub, but dey wuz gone too. De boy wid me says maybe de Germans done caught ‘um, but we didn’t know; hadn’t heard no big racket since yistiddy. So we went back to de cave. Dey wasn’t no grub, so we crawled in and went to bed and slep’ dat night, and early de nex’ mawnin’ somebody come into de hole and tromped on us and we woke up. It wuz one of dese army upliftin’ ladies huntin’ German bayonets and belt-buckles. She says Who dat in here?’ and de boy wid me says ‘Us shock troops.’ So we got out, but we hadn’t gone no piece befo’ here come a wagon-load of M.P.s And de passes had done give out.”

  “Whut you do den?” Simon asked. Isom’s eyes bulged quietly in the gloom behind the woodbox.

  “Dey taken and shut us up in de jail-house fer a while. But de war wuz mos’ thu’ and dey needed us to load dem steamboats back up, so dey sont us to a town name’ Bres,...I don’t take nothin’ offen no white man, M.P. er not,” Caspey stated again. “Us boys wuz in a room one night, shootin’ dice. De bugle had done already played de lights out tone, but we wuz in de army, whar a man kin do whut he wants as long as dey’ll let him, so when de M.P. come along and says “Put out dat light,’ one of de boys says ‘Come in here, and we’ll put yo’n out.’ Dey wuz two of de M.P.s and dey kicked de do’ in and started shootin’, and somebody knocked de light over and we run. Dey foun’ one of de M.P.s de nex’ mawnin’ widout nothin’ to hole his collar on, and two of de boys wuz dead, too. But dey couldn’t fin’ who de rest of us wuz. And den we come home.”

  Caspey emptied his cup. “I don’t take nothin’ offen no white man no mo’, lootenant ner captain ner M.P. War showed de white folks dey can’t git along widout de colored man. Tromple him in de dust, but when de trouble bust loose, hit’s ‘Please, suh, Mr. Colored Man; right dis way whar de bugle blowin’, Mr. Colored Man; you is de savior of de country.’ And now de colored race gwine reap de benefits of de war, and dat soon.”

  “Sho,” said Simon, impressed.

  “Yes, suh. And de women, too. I got my white in France, and I’m gwine git it here, too.”

  “Lemme tell you somethin, nigger,” Simon said, “de good Lawd done took keer of you fer a long time now, but He ain’t gwine bother wid you always.”

  “Den I reckon I’ll git along widout Him,” Caspey retorted. He rose and stretched. “Reckon I’ll go down to de big road and ketch a ride into town. Gimme dem clothes, Isom.”

  Miss Jenny and her guest stood on the veranda when he passed along beside the house and crossed the lawn toward the drive.

  “There goes your gardener,” Narcissa said. Miss Jenny looked.

  “That’s Caspey,” she corrected. “Now, where do you reckon he’s headed? Town, I’ll bet a dollar,” she added, watching his lounging khaki back, by means of which he contrived in some way to disseminate a sort of lazy insolence. “You, Caspey!”

  He slowed in pacing Narcissa’s car where it stood on the drive and examined it with a disparagement too lazy to sneer even, then slouched on without quickening his pace.

  “You, Caspey!” Miss Jenny called, raising her voice. But he went steadily on down the drive, insolent and slouching and unhurried. “He heard me,” she said ominously. “We’ll see about this when he comes back. Who was the fool anyway, who thought of putting niggers into the same uniform with white men? Mr. Vardaman knew better; he told those fools at Washington at the time that it wouldn’t do. But politicians!” She invested the innocent word with an utter and blasting derogation, “If I ever get tired of associating with gentlefolks, I know what I’ll do: I’ll run for Congress...Listen at me! tiradin’ again. I declare, at times I believe these Sartorises and all their possessions just set out to plague and annoy me. Thank the Lord, I won’t have to live with ‘em after I’m dead. I don’t know where they’ll be, but no Sartoris is going to stay in heaven any longer than he can help.”

  The other laughed. “You seem very sure of your own destination, Miss Jenny”

  “Why shouldn’t I be?” Miss Jenny demanded. “Haven’t I been storing up crowns and harps for a long time?” She shaded her eyes with her hand and stared down the drive. Caspey had reached the gate and he now stood beside the road, waiting for a ride to town. “Don’t you stop for him, you hear?” she said suddenly. “Why won’t you stay for dinner?”

  “No,” the other answered. “I must get on home. Aunt Sally’s not well today…” She stood for a moment in the sunlight, with her hat and the basket of flowers on her arm, musing. Then with a motion of sudden decision she drew a folded paper from the front of her dress.

  “Got another one, did you?” Miss Jenny asked, watching her. “Lemme see it.” She took the paper and opened it and stepped back out of the sun. Her nose glasses hung on a slender silk cord that rolled onto a spring in a small gold case pinned to her bosom. She snapped the cord out and set the glasses on her high-bridged nose, and behind them her gray eyes were cold and piercing as a surgeon’s.

  The paper was a single sheet of unmarked foolscap; it bore writing in a frank, open script that at first glance divulged no individuality whatever; a hand youthful yet at the same time so blandly and neatly unsecretive that presently you speculated a little.

  “You did not answer mine of 25th. I did not expect you would yet. You will answer soon. I can wait. I will not harm you. I am square and honest as you will learn when our ways come together. I do not expect you to answer Yet. But you know where.”

  Miss Jenny refolded the paper with a gesture of fine and delicate distaste. “I’d burn this thing, if it wasn’t the only thing we have to catch him with. I’ll give it to Bayard tonight.”

  “No, no,” the other protested quickly, extending her hand. “Please, not that. Let me have it and tear it up.”

  “It’s our only evidence, child—this and the other one. We’ll get a detective.”

  “No, no; please! I don’t want anybody else to know about it. Please, Miss Jenny.” She reached her hand again.

  “You want to keep it,” Miss Jenny accused coldly.

  “Just like a young fool of a woman, to be flattered over a thing like this.”

  “I’ll tear it up,” the other repeated. “I would have sooner, but I wanted to tell someone. It—it—I thought I wouldn’t feel so filthy, after I had shown it to someone else. Let me have it, please.”

  “Fiddlesticks. Why should you feel filthy? You haven’t encouraged it, have you?”

  “Please, Miss Jenny.”

  But Miss Jenny still held on to it. “Don’t be a fool,” she snapped. “How can this thing make you feel filthy? Any young woman is liable to get an anonymous letter. And a lot of ‘em like it We all are convinced that men feel that way about us, and we can’t help but admire one that’s got the courage to tell us about it, no matter who he is”

  “If he’d just signed his name. I wouldn’t mind who it was. But like this...Please, Miss Jenny.”

  “Don’t be a fool,” Miss Jenny repeated. “How can we find who it is, if you destroy the letter?”

  “I don’t want to know.” Miss Jenny released the paper and Narcissa tore it into bits and cast them over the rail and rubbed her hands on her dress. “I don’t want to know. I want to forget all about it.”

  “Nonsense. You’re dying to know, right now. I bet you look at every man you pass and wonder if it’s him. And as long as you don’t do something about it, it’ll go on. Get worse, probably. You better let me tell Bayard.”

  “No, no. I’d hate for him to know, to think that I would—might have...It’s all right: I’ll just burn them up after this, without opening them...I must really go.”

  “Of course: you’ll throw ‘em right into the stove,” Miss Jenny agreed with cold irony. Narcissa descended the steps and Miss Jenny came forward into the sunl
ight again, letting her glasses snap back into the case. ‘It’s your business, of course. But Td not stand for it, if ‘twas me. But then, I ain’t twenty-six years old...Well, come out again when you get another one^ or you want some flowers.”

  “Yes, I will. Thank you for these.”

  “And let me know what you hear from Horace. Thank the Lord, it’s just a glass-blowing machine, and not a war widow.”

  “Yes, I will. Goodbye.” She went on through the dappled shade in her straight white dress and her basket of flowers stippled against it, and got in her car. The top was back and she put her hat on and started the engine, and looked back again and waved her hand. “Goodbye.”

  The negro had moved down the road, slowly, and had stopped again, and he was watching her covertly as she approached. As she passed him he looked full at her and she knew he was about to hail her. She opened the throttle and passed him with increasing speed and drove swiftly all the way to town, where she lived in at brick house among cedars on a hilt

  She was arranging the larkspur in a dull lemon urn on the piano. Aunt Sally rocked steadily in Her chair beside the window, clapping her feet flatly on the floor at each stroke. Her work basket sat on the window ledge between the gentle billowing of the curtains, her ebony walking-stick leaned beside it.

  “And you were out there two hours,” Aunt Sally said, “and you never saw him at all?”

  “He wasn’t there,” Narcissa Answered. “He’s gone to Memphis.”

  Aunt Sally rocked steadily. “If I was them, I’d make him stay there. I wouldn’t have that boy around me, blood or no blood...What did he go to Memphis for? I thought that aeroplane what-do-you-call-it was broke up.”

  “He went on business, I suppose.”

  “What business has he got in Memphis? Bayard Sartoris has got more sense than to turn over any business to that wild fool.”

  “I don’t know,” Narcissa answered, arranging the larkspur. “He’ll be back soon, I suppose. You can ask him then.”

  “Me ask him? I never said two words to him in his life. And I don’t want to. I been used to associating with gentlemen.”

  Narcissa broke some of the stems, arranging the blooms in a pattern. “What’s he done that gentlemen don’t do, Aunt Sally?”

  “Why, jumping off water tanks and going up in balloons just to scare folks. You think I’d have that boy around me? I’d have him locked up in the insane asylum, if I was Bayard and Jenny.”

  “He didn’t jump off of the tank. He just swung off of it on a rope and dived into the swimming pool And it was John that went up in the balloon.”

  “That wasn’t what I heard. I heard he jumped off that tank, across a whole line of freight cars and lumber piles and didn’t miss the edge of the pool an inch.”

  “No he didn’t. He swung on a rope from the top of a house and then dived into the pool. The rope was tied to the tank.”

  “Well, didn’t he have to jump over a lot of lumber and freight cars? And couldn’t he have broken his neck just as easy that way as jumping off the tank?”

  “Yes,” Narcissa said.

  “There! What’d I tell you? And what was the use of it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Of course you don’t know. That was the reason he did it.” Aunt Sally rocked triumphantly for a while. Narcissa put the last touches to the blue pattern of the larkspur. A tortoise-shell cat bunched suddenly and silently in the window beside the work basket. Still crouching it blinked into the room for a moment, then it sank to the window sill and with arched neck fell to grooming its shoulder with a narrow pink tongue. Narcissa moved to the window and laid her hand on the creature’s sleek back.

  “And then, going up in that balloon, when...”

  “That wasn’t Bayard,” Narcissa repeated. “That was John.”

  “That wasn’t what I heard. I heard it was the other one and that Bayard and Jenny were both begging him with tears in their eyes not to do it. I heard...”

  “Neither one of them were there. Bayard wasn’t even there. It was John did it. He did it because the man that came with the balloon got sick. John went up in it so the country people wouldn’t be disappointed. I was there.”

  “Stood there and let him do it, did you, when you could a telephoned Jenny or walked across the square to the bank and got Bayard? You stood there and never opened your mouth, did you?”

  “Yes,” Narcissa answered. Stood there beside Horace in the slow, intent ring of country people, watching the globe swelling and tugging at its ropes, watched John Sartoris in a faded flannel shirt and corduroy breeches, while the carnival man explained the rip-cord and the parachute to him; stood there feeling her breath going out faster than she could draw it in and watched the thing lurch into the air with John sitting on a frail trapeze bar swinging below it, with eyes she could not close, saw the balloon and people and all swirl slowly upward and then found herself clinging to Horace behind the shelter of a wagon, trying to get her breath.

  He landed three miles away in a brier thicket and disengaged the parachute and regained the road and hailed a passing negro in a wagon. A mile from town they met old Bayard driving furiously in the carriage and the two vehicles stopped side by side in the road while old Bayard in the one exhausted the accumulate fury of his rage and in the other his grandson sat in his shredded clothes and on his scratched face that look of one who has gained for an instant a desire so fine that its escape was a purification, not a loss.

  The next day, as Narcissa was passing a store, he emerged with that abrupt violence which he had in common with his brother, pulling up short to avoid a collision with her.

  “Oh, ex—Why, hello,” he said. Beneath the crisscrosses of tape his face was merry and wild, and his unruly hair was hatless. For a moment she gazed at him with wide, hopeless eyes, then she clapped her hand to her mouth and went swiftly on, almost running.

  Then he was gone, with his brother, shut away by that foreign war as two noisy dogs are penned in a kennel far away, the bold, jolly face of him and his rough, shabby clothes. Miss Jenny gave her news of them, of the dull, dutiful letters they wrote home at sparse intervals; then he was dead. But far away beyond seas, and there was no body to be returned clumsily and tediously to earth, and so to her he seemed still to be laughing at that word as he had laughed at all the other mouthsounds that stood for repose, who had not waited for Time and its furniture to teach him that the end of wisdom is to dream high enough not to lose the dream in the seeking of it.

  Aunt Sally rocked steadily in her chair.

  “Well, it don’t matter which one it was. One’s bad as the other. But I reckon it ain’t their fault, raised like they were. Rotten spoiled, both of ‘em. Lucy Sartoris wouldn’t let anybody control ‘em while she lived. If they’d been mine, now...” She rocked on. “Beat it but of ‘em, I would. Raising two wild Indians like that. But those folks, thinking there wasn’t anybody quite as good as a Sartoris. Even Lucy Cranston, come from as good people as there are in the state, acting like it was divine providence that let her marry one Sartoris and be the mother of two more. Pride, false pride.”

  She rocked steadily in her chair. Beneath Narcissa’s hand the cat purred with lazy arrogance.

  “It was a judgment on ‘em, taking John instead of that other one. John at least tipped his hat to a lady on the street, but that other boy...” She rocked monotonously, dapping her feet flatly against the floor. “You better stay away from that; boy. He’ll be killing you same as he did he did that wife of his.”

  “At least, give me benefit of clergy first, Aunt Sally,” Narcissa said. Beneath her hand, beneath the cat’s sleek hide, muscles flowed suddenly into, tight knots, like wire, and the animal’s body seemed to elongate as it whipped from beneath her hand and flashed out of sight across the veranda.

  “Oh,” Narcissa said. Then she whirled and caught up Aunt Sally’s stick and ran from the room.

  ‘What—? Aunt Sally said. “You bring my stick back here,” s
he said. She sat staring at tie door, hearing the swift clatter of the other’s heels in the hall and then on the veranda. She rose and leaned in the window. “You bring my stick here,” she shouted.

  Narcissa sped across the veranda and to the ground In the canna bed the cat, crouching, jerked its head back and its yellow unwinking eyes. Narcissa rushed at it, raising the stick,

  “Put it down!” she cried. “Drop it!” For another second the yellow eyes glared at her, then the animal ducked its head and lept in a Jong fluid bound, the bird between its jaws.

  “Oh-h-h, damn you! Damn you! You—you Sartoris!” and she hurled the stick after the final tortoise flash as the cat whipped around the corner of the house.

  “You get my stick and bring it right back this minute!” Aunt Sally shouted through the window.

  She had seen Bayard once from a distance. He appeared as usual at the time—a lean figure in casual easy clothes unpressed and at little comfortably shabby, and with his air of smoldering abrupt violence. He and his brother had both had this, but Bayard’s was a cold, arrogant sort of leashed violence, while in John it was a warmer thing, spontaneous and merry and wild. It was Bayard who had attached a rope to a ninety-foot water tank and, from the roof of the adjoining building, swung himself across the intervening fifty yards of piled lumber and freight cars and released the rope and dived into a narrow concrete swimming pool while upturned faces gaped and screamed-^a cold nicety of judgment and unnecessary cruel skill; John who, one County Fair day, made the balloon ascension, the aeronaut having been stricken with ptomaine poisoning, that the county people might not be disappointed, and landed three miles away in a brier thicket, losing most of his clothing and skin and returning to town cheerful and babbling in the wagon of a passing negro.