William Faulkner - Flags in the Dust

The chest had not been opened since 1901, whenhis son John had succumbed to yellow fever and an old Spanish bullet-wound. There had been two occasions since, in July and in October of last year, but the other grandson still possessed quickness and all the incalculable portent of his heritage. So he had forborne for the time being, expecting to kill two birds with one stone, as it were.

Thus each opening was in a way ceremonial, commemorating the violent finis to some, phase of his family’s history, and while he struggled with the stiff lock it seemed to him that a legion of ghosts breathed quietly at his shoulder, and he pictured a double line of them with their arrogant identical faces waiting just beyond a portal and stretchingaway toward the invisible dais where Something sat waiting the latest arrival among them; thought of them chafing a little and a little bewildered, thought and desire being denied them, in a place where, immortal, there were no opportunities for vainglorious swashbuckling. Denied that Sartoris heaven in which they could spend eternity dying deaths of needless and magnificent violence while spectators doomed to immortality looked eternally on. The Valhalla which John Sartoris, turning the wine glass in his big, well-shaped hand that night at the supper table, had seen in its chaste and fragile bubble.

The lock gave at last and he raised the lid. The ghosts fell away and .from the chest there rose a thin exhilarating odor of cedar, and something else: a scent drily and muskily nostalgic, as of old ashes, and his hands, well-shaped but not so large and a shade less capable than his father’s, rested for a moment upon a brocade garment. The brocade was richly hushed and the fall of fine Mechlin was dustily yellow, pale and textureless as winter sunlight. He raised the garment carefully. The lace cascaded mellow andpale as spilled wine upon his hands, and he laid it aside and lifted out next a rapier. It was a Toledo, a blade delicate and fine as the prolonged stroke of a violin bow, in a velvet sheath. The sheath was elegant and flamboyant and soiled, and the seams had cracked drily.

Old Bayard held the rapier upon his hands for a while, feeling the balance of it. It was just such an implement as a Sartoris would consider the proper equipment for raising tobacco in a virgin wilderness; it and the scarlet heels and the ruffled wristbands in which he fought his stealthy and simple neighbors. And old Bayard held it upon his two hands, seeing in its stained fine blade and shabby elegant sheath the symbol of his race; that too in the tradition: the thing itself fine and clear enough, only the instrument had become a little tarnished in its very aptitude for shaping circumstance to its arrogant ends.

He laid it aside. Next came a heavy cavalry sabre, and a rosewood box containing two dueling pistols with silver mountings and with the lean, deceptive delicacy of race horses, and what old man Falls had called “that ‘ere dang der’nger.” It was a stubby, evil-looking thing with its three barrels; viciously and coldly utilitarian, and between the other two weapons it lay like a cold and deadly insect between two flowers.

He lifted out next the blue army forage-cap of the ‘forties and a small pottery vessel and a Mexican machete, and a long-necked oil can such as locomotive drivers use. It was of silver, and engraved upon it, surrounded by a carven ornate wreath, was the picture of a locomotive with a huge bell-shaped funnel Beneath it, the name, “Virginia” and the date, “August 9, 1874.”

He laid these aside and with sudden purposefulnesshe removed the other objects—a frogged and braided coat of Confederate grey and a gown of sprigged muslin scented faintly of lavender and evocative of old formal minuets and drifting honeysuckle among steady candle flames—and came upon a conglomeration of yellowed papers neatly bound in packets, and at last upon a huge, brass-bound Bible. He raised this to the edge of the chest and opened it. The paper was brown and mellow. with years, and it had a texture like that of slightly-moist wood ashes, as though each page were held intact by Its archaic and fading print lie turned the pages carefully back to the fly leaves. Beginning near the bottom of the final blank page, a column of names and dates rose in stark, fading simplicity, growing fainter and fainter where time had lain upon; them. At the top they were still legible, as they were at the foot of the preceding page. But halfway up this page they ceased, and from there on the sheet was blank save for the faint soft mottlings of time and an occasional brownish penstroke significant but without meaning.

Bayard sat for a long time, regarding the stark dissolving apotheosis of his name. Sartorises had derided Time, but Time was not vindictive, because it was longer than Sartorises. And probably unaware of them. But it was a good gesture, anyway. And he recalled his father’s words.

“In the nineteenth century,” John Sartoris had said, ‘‘chording over genealogy anywhere is poppycock. But particularly so in America, where only what a man takes and keeps has any significance, and where all of lis have a common ancestry and the only house from which we can claim descent with any assurance, is the Old Bailey, Yet the man Who professes to care nothing about his forbears is only a little lessvain than he who bases all his actions on blood precedent. And a Sartoris is entitled to a little vanity and poppycock, if he wants it.”

Yes, it was a good gesture, and Bayard sat and mused quietly on the tense he had unwittingly used. Was. Fatality again: the augury of a man’s destiny peeping out at him from the roadside hedge, if he but recognize it; and as he sat and gazed with blind eyes at the page, Time rolled back again and again he ran panting through undergrowth while a Yankee cavalry patrol crashed behind him, crashed fainter and fainter until he crouched with spent, laboring lungs in a bramble thicket and heard their fading thunder along a dim wagon road. Then he crawled forth again and went to a spring he knew that flowed from the roots of a beech tree; and as he leaned his mouth to it the final light of day was reflected onto his face, bringing into sharp relief forehead and nose above the cavernous sockets of his eyes and the panting animal snarl of his teeth, and from the still water there stared back at him for a sudden moment, a skull.

The unturned corners of man’s destiny. Well, heaven, that crowded place, lay just beyond one of them, they claimed; heaven, filled with every man’s illusion of himself and with the conflicting illusions of him that parade through the minds of other illusions...He stirred again and sighed quietly, and took out his fountain pen. At the bottom of the column he wrote:

“John Sartoris. July 5,1918.”

and beneath that:

“Caroline White Sartoris and son. October 27, 1918.”

When the ink was dry he closed the book and replaced it and took the pipe from his pocket and putit in the rosewood box with the dueling pistols and the derringer and replaced the other things and closed the chest and locked it again.

Young Bayard drove her to town the next morning, Old Bayard sat tilted in his chair in the door, and he looked up at her with a fine assumption of surprise and his deafness seemed more pronounced than ordinary. But she got him out of his chair with cold implacability and led him still grumbling along the street, where merchants and loungers before the stores spoke to her as to a martial queen, old Bayard stalking along beside her, with laggard reluctance, like that of a small boy.

But she carriedhim firmly on, and at a row of dingy signs tackedflatto the wall, she turned and mounted a narrow stairway debouching between two stores. At the top was a dark corridor with doors. The nearest door was of pine, its gray paint scarred at the bottom as though it had been kicked repeatedly by feet that struck it at the same height and with the same force. In the door itself, near the edge, two holes an inch apart bore mute witness to the missing hasp, and from a staple in the jamb depended the hasp itself , fixed there by a huge rusty lock of a pattern which had not been manufactured in twenty years. Bayard offered to stop here, but Miss Jenny led him firmly on to the second door across the hall