William Faulkner - Flags in the Dust

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 dreamhigh 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 bodyseemed 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,” she 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.

But both of these were utterly beyond her; it was not in her nature to differentiate between motives whose results were the same, and on occasions when she had seen them conducting themselves as civilized beings, had been in the same polite room with them, she found herself watching them with shrinking and fearful curiosity, as she might have looked upon wild beasts with a temporary semblance of men and engaged in human activities, morally acknowledging the security of the cage but spiritually unreassured.

But she had not seen them often. They were either away at school, or if at home they passed their headlong days in the country, coming into town at rare intervals and then on horseback, in stained corduroy and flannel shirts. Yet rumors of their doings came in to her from time to time, causing always in her that shrinking, fascinated distaste, that blending of curiosity and dread, as if a raw wind had blown into that garden wherein she dwelt. Then they would be gone again, and she would think of them only to remember Horace and his fine and electric delicacy, and to thank her gods he was not as they.

Then the war, and she learned without any surprise whatever that they had gone to it. That was exactly what they would do, and her nature drowsed again beneath the serene belief that they had been removed from her life for good and always; to her the war had been brought about for the sole purpose of removing them from her life as noisy dogs are shut up in a kennel afar off. Thus her days. Man became amphibious and lived in mud and filth and died and was buried in it; the world looked on in hysterical amazement. But she, within her walled and windless garden, thought of them only with a sober and pointless pity, like a flower’s exhalation, and like the flower, uncaring if the scent be sensed or not. She gave clothing and money to funds, and she knitted things also, but she did not know where Saloniki was and was incurious as to how Rheims or Przemysl were pronounced.

Then Horace departed, with his Snopes, and the war became abruptly personal But it was still not the same war to which the Sartoris boys had gone; and soon she was readjusted again, with Aunt Sally Wyatt in the house and the steady unemphasis of their feminine days. She joined the Red Cross and various other welfare organizations, and she knitted harsh wool with intense brooding skill and performed other labors while other women talked of their menfolks into her grave receptivity.

There was a family of country people moved recently to town—a young man and his pregnant wife and two infant children. They abode in a rejuvenated rented cabin on the edge of town, where the woman did her own housework,while the man was employed by the local distributor for an oil company, laboring all day with a sort of ^ager fury of willingness and a desire to get on. He was a steady, exemplary sort, willing and unfailingly good-natured “and reliable, so he was drafted immediately and denied exemption and ravished celeritously overseas. His family accompanied him to the station in an automobile supplied by the charity of an old lady of the town, and they watched him out of their lives with that tearless uncomplaining gravity of primitive creatures. The Red Cross took charge of the family, but Narcissa Benbow adopted them. She was present when the baby was born two weeks later, she superintended the household—meals and clothing—until the woman was about again, and for the next twelvemonths she wrote a monthly letter to the husband and father who, having no particular aptitude for it save his unflagging even temper and a ready willingness to do as he was told, was now a company cook in the S.O.S.