William Faulkner - Flags in the Dust

This occupation too was just a grave centering of her days; there was no hysteria in it, no conviction that she was helping to slay the biblical Beast, or laying up treasure in heaven. Horace was away too; she was waiting for him to return, marking time, as it were. Then Bayard Sartoris had returned home, with a wife. She sensed the romantic glamor of this with interest and grave approval, as of a dramatic scene, but that was all; Bayard Sartoris went away again. Narcissa met his wife now and then, and always with a little curiosity, as though, voluntarily associating so intimately with a Sartoris, she too must be an animal with the temporary semblance of a human being. There was no common ground between them, between Narcissa with her constancy, her serenity which the other considered provincial and a little dull, and the other with her sexless vivid unrepose and the brittle daring of her speech and actions.

She had learned of John Sartoris’ death without any emotion whatever except a faint sense of vindication, a sort of I-told-you-so feeling, which recurred (blended now with a sense of pitying outrage, blaming this too on Bayard) when Bayard’s wife died in childbirth in October of the same year, even though she stood with old Bayard’s deaf and arrogant back and Miss Jenny’s trim indomitability amid sad trees and streaming marble shapes beneath a dissolving afternoon. Then November, and bells and whistles and revolvers. Horace would be coming home soon now, she thought at the time. Before Christmas, perhaps. But before he did so she had seenBayard once on the street, and later, while she and Miss Jenny sat in Miss Jenny’s dim parlor one morning, he came unexpectedly to the door and stood there looking at her with his bleak and brooding gaze.

“It’s Bayard,”Miss Jenny said. “Come in here and speak to Narcissa, sonny.”

He said Hello and she turned on the piano bench, again with that feeling of curiosity and dread. ‘Who is it?” he said, and he came into the room, bringing with him like a raw wind that cold leashed violence which-she remembered.

“It’s Narcissa Benbow,” Miss Jenny repeated testily. “Go on and speak to her and stop acting like you don’t know who sheis.”

Narcissa gave him her hand and he stood holding it, but he was not looking at her. She withdrew her hand, and he glanced at her again, then away, and he loomed above them and stood rubbing his hand through his hair.

“I want a drink,” he said “I can’t find the key to thedesk.”

“Stop and talk to us a few minutes, and you can haveone.”

He stood for a moment above them, thenhemoved abruptly and before Miss Jenny could speakhe had dragged the holland envelope from another chair.

“Let that alone, you Indian!” Miss Jenny exclaimed. She rose. “Here, take my chair, if you’re too weak to stand up any longer. I’ll be back in a minute,” she added to Narcissa. “I’ll have to get my keys.”

He sat laxly in thechair, rubbing his hand through his hair, his gaze brooding somewhere about hisbooted feet. Narcissa sat utterly quiet, watching him with that blending of shrinking and fascination. She said at last:

“I am so sorry about John and your wife. I asked Miss Jenny to tell you when she wrote...”

He sat rubbing his head slowly, in the brooding violence of his temporary repose.

“You aren’t married yourself, are you?” he asked. She sat quietly, watching him. “Ought to try it,” he added. “Everybody ought to get married once, like everybody ought to go to one war.”

Miss Jenny returned with the keys, and he got his long abrupt body erect and left them. After that day, she called on Miss Jenny only when she was sure he was not at home.

2

It was a week before Caspey returned home. In the meantime young Bayard had driven out from Memphis in his car. Memphis was seventy-five miles away and the trip had taken an hour and forty minutes because some of the road was narrow clay country road. The car was long and low and gray; the four-cylinder engine had sixteen valves and eight sparkplugs, and the people had guaranteed that it would run eighty miles an hour, although there was a strip of paper pasted to the windshield, to which he paid no attention whatever, asking him in red letters not to do so for the first five hundred miles.

Miss Jenny was frankly interested: she must get in and sit in it for a while; and though Simon affected to pay it but the briefest derogatory notice, Isom circled quietly about it with an utter and yearning admiration. But old Bayard just looked down at th long, dusty thing from his chair on the veranda, and grunted.

He would not descend to examine it, even, despite Miss Jenny’s insistence, and he sat with his feet on the rail and watched Bayard slide in under the wheel and drive slowly off with Miss Jenny beside him watched them glide noiselessly down the drive and saw the car pass out of sight down the valley. Presently above thetrees a cloud of dust rose into the azure afternoon and hung rosily in the sun, and a sound as of leashed thunder died muttering behind it, but this had no significance for him. Isom squatted below him on the steps.

It had no significance even when they returned in twenty minutes; he did not even see the car until i had entered the gate and was swooping up the drive and came to a stop almost in its former tracks. Miss Jenny had no hat, and she was holding her hair in both hands, and when the car stopped she sat for a moment so, then she drew a long breath.

“I wish I smoked cigarettes,” she said, and then “Is thatas fast asit’llgo?”

“How fer y’all been, Miss Jenny?” Isom asked, rising and circling the car again with his diffident yearning. Miss Jenny opened the door and got out a little stiffly, but her voice was clear as a girl’s and heeyes were shining and her dry old cheeks were flushed.

“We’ve been to town,” she answered proudly. Town was fourmiles away.

After that the significance grew slowly. He received intimations of it from various sources. But because of his deafness, these intimations came slowlysince they must come directly to him and not through overheard talk. The actual evidence, the convincing evidence, came from old man Falls. Eight or ten times a year he walked in from the county farm, always stopping in at the bank. Twice a year old Bayard bought him a complete outfit of clothing, and on the other occasions he had always for him a present of tobacco and a small sack of peppermint candy, of which the old fellow was inordinately fond.He would never take money.

Old Bayard’s office was also the directors’ room. It was a large room containing a long table aligned with chairs, and a tall cabinet in which blank banking forms were kept, and old Bayard’s roll-top desk and swivel chair, and a sofa on which he napped occasionally in the hot afternoons. His desk, like the one . at home, was cluttered with an astonishing variety of objects which had no relation to the banking business whatever, and the mantel above the fireplace bore yet more objects of an agricultural nature, as well as a dusty assortment of pipes and three or four jars of tobacco which furnished solace for all the banking force and for a respectable portion of the bank’s pipe-smoking clientele. Weather permitting, old Bayard spent most of the day sitting in a tilted chair in the bank door, and when these patrons found him there, they would pass on back to the office and fill their pipes. It was a sort of unspoken convention not to take more than a pipeful at a time.

It was to this room that they would retire on old man Falls’ visits, and here they would sit (they were both deaf) and shout at one another for half an hour or so, about John Sartoris and crops. You could hear them plainly from the street and through the wall of the store on either side. Old man Falls’eyes were blue and innocent as a boy’s and his first act after he and old Bayard were seated, was to open Bayard’s parcel and take from it a plug of chewing tobacco,cut off a chew and put it in his mouthy replace the plug and wrap and tie the parcel neatly again. He never cut the string, but always untied the tedious knot with his stiff, gnarled fingers.