William Faulkner - Flags in the Dust

“Do you think it would do any good to ask him? There was never a damned one of ‘em ever paid any attention to my wishes yet.”

“Ask the devil,” Miss Jenny said. “Who said anything about ask? Tell him not to. Tell him that if you hear again of his going fast in it, that you’ll frail the life out of him. I believe anyway that you like to ride in that car, only you won’t admit it, and you just don’t want him to ride in it when you can’t go too.” But old Bayard had slammed his feet to the floor and risen, and he tramped heavily from the room.

Instead of mounting the stairs, however, Miss Jenny heard his footsteps the away down the halL and presently she rose and followed to the back porch, where he stood in the darkness there. The night was dark, myriad with drifting odors of the spring and with insects. Dark against lesser dark, the barn loomed upon the sky.

“He hasn’t come yet,” she said impatiently, touching his arm. “I could have told you. Go on up and go to bed, now; don’t you know he’ll let you know when he comes in? You’re going to think him into a ditch somewhere, with these fool notions of yours.” Then more gently: “You’re too childish about that car. It’s no more dangerous at night than it is in daylight. Come on, now.”

He shook her hand off, but he turned obediently and entered the house. This time he mounted the stairs and she could hear him in his bedroom, thumping about. Presently he ceased slamming doors and drawers and lay beneath the reading lamp with his Dumas, and he lay reading quietly. After a time the door opened and young Bayard entered and came into the radius of the light with his bleak eyes.

His grandfather did not remark his presence and he touched old Bayard’s arm. Then old Bayard looked up, and when he did so young Bayard turned and quitted the room.

After the shades on the windows were drawn at three o’clock old Bayard retired to his office to wait until his grandson came for him. In the front of the bank the cashier and the book-keeper could hear him clattering and banging around. The cashier paused, a stack of silver clipped neatly in his fingers.

“Hear ‘im?” he said. “Something on his mind here, lately. Used to be he was quiet as a mouse back, there until they come for him, but last few weeks he tramples and thumps around back there like he was fighting hornets.”

The book-keeper said nothing. The cashier set the stack of silver aside, built up another one.

“Something on his mind, lately. That examiner must a put a bug in his ear, I reckon.”

The book-keeper said nothing. He swung the adding machine to his desk and clicked the lever over. In the back room old Bayard moved audibly about. The cashier stacked the remaining silver neatly and rolled a cigarette. The book-keeper bent above the steady clicking of the adding machine, and the cashier sealed his cigarette and lit it and waddled to the window and lifted the curtain.

“Simon’s brought the carriage, today,” he said

“That boy finally wrecked that car, I reckon. Better call Colonel.”

The book-keeper slid from his stool and went to the door to the office and opened it. Old Bayard glanced up from his desk.

“All right, Byron,” he said. The book-keeper turned away.

Old Bayard stalked through the bank and opened the street door and stopped utterly, the door knob in his hand.

“Where’s Bayard?” he said.

“He ain’t comin’,” Simon answered. Old Bayard crossed the pavement.

“What? Where is he?”

“He en Isom off somewhar in dat cyar,” Simon answered. “Lawd knows whar dey is by now. Takin’ dat boy away fum his work in de middle of de day, cyar-ridin’. After all de time I spent tryin’ to git some sense inter Isom’s haid,” Simon continued. “Cyar-ridin’,” he said. “Cyar-ridin’.” Old Bayard got in the carriage.

“I’ll be damned,” old Bayard said, “if I haven’t got the triflingest set of foils to make a living for in the whole damn world. There’s just one tiling about it: when I finally have to go to the poor house, every damned one of you’ll be there when I come.”

“Now, here you quoilin’ too,” Simon said. “Miss Jenny shoutin’ at me ‘twell I wuz thru de gate, and now you already started at dis end. But ef Mr. Bayard don’t leave dat boy alone, he ain’t gwine to be no better’n a town nigger spite of all I kin do.”

“Jenny’s already ruined him,” old Bayard said. “Bayard can’t hurt him much.”

“You sho’ tole de troof den,” Simon agreed. He gathered up the reins. “Come up, dar.”

“Here, hold up a minute, Simon,” old Bayard said.

Simon reined the horses back! “Whut you want now?”

Old Bayard drew another long breath. “Go back to my office and get me a cigar out of that jar on the mantel.” .

Two days later, as he and Simon tooled sedately homeward through the afternoon, simultaneously almost with the warning thunder of it the car burst upon them on a curve, slewed into the ditch and into the road again and rushed on; and in the flashing instant he and Simon saw the whites of Isom’s eyes and the ivory cropping of his teeth behind the steering wheel. When the car returned home that afternoon Simon conducted Isom to the barn and whipped him with a harness strap.

That night they sat in the office after supper. Old Bayard held his cigar unlighted in his fingers. Miss Jenny was immersed in her paper.

Suddenly old Bayard said: “Maybe he’ll get tired of it after a while.”

Miss Jenny raised her head.

“And when he does,” Miss Jenny said, “don’t you know what he’ll get then? When he finds that car won’t go fast enough fo’ him?” she demanded, staring at him across her newspaper. He sat holding his cigar, his head bent a little. “He’ll buy an aeroplane,” Miss Jenny told him. She rattled the paper and turned a page. “He ought to have a wife,” she added in a detached voice, reading again. “Let him get a son, then he can break his neck as soon and as often as he pleases. Providence doesn’t seem to have any judgment at all,” she said, thinking of the two of them, of his dead brother. She said: “But Lord knows, I’d hate to see any girl I was fond of, married to him.” She rattled the paper again, turning anotherpage. “I don’t know what else you expect from him. From any Sartoris. You don’t waste your afternoons riding in that car because you think it’ll keep him from turning it over: you go because when it does happen, you want to be in it, too. So do you think you’ve got any more consideration for folks than he has?” He sat holding his cigar, his face still averted. Miss Jenny was watching him again across her paper.

“I’m coming down town in the morning, and we’re going and have the doctor look at that bump on your face, you hear?”

In his room, as he removed his collar and tie before the chest of drawers, his eye fell upon the pipe which he had laid there four weeks ago, and he put the collar and tie down and picked up the pipe and held it in his hand, rubbing the charred bowl slowly with his thumb.

Then with sudden decision he quitted the room and tramped down the hall. At the end of the hall a stair mounted into the darkness. At the foot he fumbled a light switch and followed the cramped turnings cautiously in the dark, to a door set at a difficult angle, and opened it upon a broad, low room with a pitched ceiling, smelling of dust and silence and ancient disused things.

The room was cluttered with indiscriminate furniture—chairs and sofas like patient ghosts holding lightly in dry and rigid embrace yet other ghosts—a fitting place for dead Sartorises to gather and speak among themselves of glamorous and old disastrous days. The unshaded light swung on a single cord from the center of the ceiling. He unknotted it and drew it to its full length and carried it across to a nail in the wall above a cedar chest. He fastened it here and drew a chair across to the chest and sat down.