William Faulkner - Flags in the Dust

He took the glass and emptied it obediently and lay back. Miss Jenny set the glass on the floor.

“What time is it?”

“Hush,” she said She laid her hand on his brow. “Go to sleep.”

He rolled his head on the pillow, but he could not evade her hand

“Get away,” he said ‘”Let me alone.”

“Hush,” Miss Jenny said “Go to sleep.”

TWO

1

Simon said: “You ain’t never yit planted nothin’ whar hit ought ter be planted.” He sat on the bottom step, whetting the blade of his hoe with a file. Miss Jenny stood with her caller at the edge of the veranda above him, in a man’s felt hat and heavy gloves. A pair of shears dangled below her waist, glinting in the morning sunlight.

“And whose business is that?” she demanded. “Yours, or Colonel’s? Either one of you can loaf on this porch and tell me where a plant will grow best or look best, but if either of you ever grew as much as a weed out of the ground yourselves, I’d like to see it. I don’t give two whoops in the bad place where you or Colonel either thinks a flower ought to be planted; I plant my flowers just exactly where I want ‘em to be planted.”

“And den dares ‘um not ter come up,” Simon added. “Dat’s de way you en Isom gyardens. Thank de Lawd Isom ain’t got to make his livin’ wid de sort of gyardenin’ he learns in dat gyarden.”

Simon wore a disreputable hat, of a fabric these many years anonymous. Miss Jenny stared coldly down at this hat.

“Isom made his living by being born black,” Miss Jenny snapped. “Suppose you quit scraping at thathoe and see if you can’t dare some of the grass in that salvia bed to come up.”

“I got to git a aidge on dis curry-comb,’’ Simon said. “You go’n out dar to yo’ gyardem:I’ll git dis bed cleaned up.” He scraped steadily at the hoe-blade.

“You’ve been at that long enough to find out that you can’t possibly wear that blade down to the handle with just a file. You’ve been at it ever since breakfast. I heard you. You get out there where folks passing will think you’re working, anyhow.”

Simon groaned and spent a half minute laying the file aside. He laid it on one step, then he picked it up and moved it to another step. Then he laid it against the step behind him. Then he ran his thumb along the blade, examining it with morose hopefulness.

“Hit mought do now,” he said. “But hit’ll be jest like weedin’ wid a curry-c—”

“You try it, anyway,” Miss Jenny said. “Maybe the weeds’U think it’s a hoe. You go give ‘em a chance to, anyhow.”

“Ise gwine, Ise gwine,” Simon answered pettishly, rising and hobbling away. “You go’n see erbout dat place o’ yo’n; I’ll‘tend to dis.”

Miss Jenny and the caller descended the steps and went on around the corner of the house.

“Why he’d rather sit there and rasp at that new hoe with a file instead of grubbing up a dozen weeds in that salvia bed, I can’t see,” Miss Jenny said. “But he’ll do it. He’d sit there and scrape at that hoe until it looked like a saw blade, if I’d let him. Bayard bought a lawn mower three or four years ago-—God knows what for—and turned it over to Simon. The folks that made it guaranteed it for a year. They didn’t know Simon, though. I often thought, readingabout those devastations and things in the papers last year, what a good time Simon would have had in the war. He could have shown ‘em things about devastation they never thought of. Isom!” she shouted.

They entered the garden and Miss Jenny paused at the gate. “You, Isom!”

This time there was a reply, and Miss Jenny went on with her caller and Isom lounged up from somewhere and clicked the gate behind him.

“Why didn’t you—” Miss Jenny began, looking back over her shoulder, then she stopped and regarded Isom’s suddenly military figure with brief, cold astonishment. For Isom now wore khaki, with a divisional emblem on his shoulder and a tarnished service stripe on his cuff. And it didn’t fit him, or rather, it fitted him too well. His lean sixteen-year-old neck rose from the slovenly collar’s limp, overlarge embrace, and an astonishing amount of his wrists was viable beneath the cuffs. The breeches bagged hopelessly into the unskillful wrapping of the putties which, with either a fine sense for the unique or a bland disregard of military usage, he had donned prior to his shoes, and the soiled overseas cap came down most regrettably on his bullet head.

“Where did you get those clothes?” Miss Jenny’s shears dangled below her waist on a heavy black cord, glinting in the sun, and Miss Benbow in a white dress and a soft straw hat turned also and looked at him with a strange expression.

“Dey’s Caspey’s,” Isom answered. “I jes’ bor’d ‘um.”

“Caspey?” Miss Jenny repeated. “ Ishe home?”

“Yessum. He got in las’ night on de nine-thirty.”

“Last night, did he? Where is he now? Asleep, I reckon?”

“Yessum. Dat’s whar he wuz when I lef’ home.”

“And I reckon that’s how you borrowed his uniform,” Miss Jenny said tartly. “Well, let him sleep this morning. Give him a day to get over the war. But if it made a fool out of him like it did Bayard, he’d better put that thing on again and go back to it. I’ll declare, men can’t seem to stand anything.” She strode on, the other in her straight white dress followed.

“You are awfully hard on men, not to have a husband to worry with, Miss Jenny,” she said. “Besides, you’re judging all men by your Sartorises.”

“They ain’t my Sartorises,” Miss Jenny disclaimedpromptly. “I just inherited ‘em. But you just wait;you’ll have one of your own to bother with soon;you just wait until Horace gets home, then see howlong it takes him to get over it. Men can’t seem tostand anything,” she repeated “Can’t even stand helling around with no worry and no responsibility andno limit to all of the meanness they can think aboutwanting to do. Do you think a man could sit dayafter day and month after month in a house milesfrom anywhere and spend the time between casualtylists tearing up bedclothes and window curtains andtable linen to make, lint and watching sugar and flourand meat dwindling away and using pine knots forlight because there aren’t any candles and no candlesticks to put them in, if there were, and hiding innigger cabins while -drunken Yankee generals set fireto the house your great-great-grandfather built andyou and all your folks were born in? Don’t talk to meabout men suffering in war.” Miss Jenny snipped larkspur savagely. “Just you wait until Horace comes home; then you’ll see. John at least had consideration enough after he’d gone and gotten himself intowhere he had no business, not to comeback and worry everybody to death. But Bayard now, coming back in the middle of it and having everybody thinking he was settled down at last, teaching at that Memphis flying school, and then marrying that fool girl

“Miss Jenny!”

“Well, I don’t mean that, but she ought to’ve been spanked, hard. I know: didn’t I do the same tiling, myself? It was all that harness Bayard wore. Talk about men being taken in by a uniform!” Miss Jenny clipped larkspur. “Dragging me up there to the wedding, mind you, with a lot of rented swords and some of Bayard’s pupils trying to drop roses into the street. I reckon some of ‘em were not his pupils, because one of ‘em finally did drop a few that missed the houses.” Miss Jenny snipped larkspur savagely. “I had dinner with ‘em one night. Sat in the hotel an hour until they finally came for me. Then we stopped at a delicatessen and Bayard and Caroline got out and went inside and came back with about a bushel of packages and dumped ‘em into the car under my feet. That was the dinner I’d been invited to, mind you; there wasn’t a sign of anything that looked or smelt like a stove in the whole place. I didn’t offer to help ‘em. I told Caroline I didn’t know anything about that sort of house-keeping, because my folks were so old-fashioned they cooked food at our house.