William Faulkner - Flags in the Dust

“Ten A.M.’s mighty early in the day to start car-vin’ white folks,”Dr. Peabody boomed. “Nigger’s different. Chop up a nigger any time after midnight What’s the matter with him, son?” he asked of Dr. Alford.

‘1 don’t believe it’s anything but a wart,” Miss Jenny said, “but I’m tired of looking at it.”

“It’s no wart,”Dr. Alford corrected stiffly. He recapitulated his diagnosis in technical terms while Dr. Peabody enveloped them all in the, rubicund benevolence of his presence.

“Sounds pretty bad, don’t it?” he agreed, and he shook the floor again and pushed Bayard firmly into the chair again with one huge hand, and with the other he dragged his face up to the light. Then he dug a pair of iron-bowed spectacles from the side pocket of his coat and examined Bayard’s wen through them. “Think it ought to come off, do you?”

“I do,”Dr. Alford answered coldly. “I think it is imperative that it be removed. Unnecessary there. Cancer.”

“Folks got along with cancer a long time beforethey invented knives,”Dr. Peabody said drily. “Hold still, Bayard.”

And people like you are one of the reasons, was on the tip of the younger man’s tongue. But he forbore and said instead: “I can remove that growth in two minutes, Colonel Sartoris.”

“Damned if you do,” Bayard rejoined violently, trying to rise. “Get away, Loosh.”

“Sit still,”Dr. Peabody said equably, holding him down while he probed at the wen. “Does it hurt any?”

“No. I never said it did. And I’ll be damned—”

“You’ll probably be damned anyway,”Dr. Peabody told him. “You’d be about as well off dead, anyhow. I don’t know anybody that gets less fun out of living than you seem to.”

“You told the truth for once,” Miss Jenny agreed. “He’s the oldest person I ever knew in my life.”

“And so,”Dr. Peabody continued blandly, “I wouldn’t.worry about it. Let it stay there. Nobody cares what your face looks like. If you were a young fellow, now, out sparkin’ the gals every night—”

“If Dr. Peabody is permitted to interfere with impunity—” the younger man began.

‘Will Falls says he can cure it,” Bayard said.

“With that salve of his?”Dr. Peabody asked.

“Salve?”Dr. Alford repeated. “Colonel Sartoris, if you let any quack that comes along treat that growth with homemade or patent remedies, you’ll be dead in six months. Dr. Peabody even will bear me out,” he added with fine irony.

“I don’t know,”Dr. Peabody replied slowly. “Will has done some curious things with that salve of his.”

“I must protest against this,”Dr. Alford said. “Mrs. Du Pre, I protest against a member of my profession sanctioning even negatively such a practice.”

“Pshaw, boy,”Dr. Peabody answered. “We ain’t goin’ to let Will put his dope on Bayard’s wart. It’s all right for niggers and livestock, but Bayard don’t need it. We’ll just let this thing alone, long as it don’t hurt him.”

“If that growth is not removed immediately, I wash my hands of all responsibility,”Dr. Alford stated. “To neglect it will be as fatal as Mr. Falls’ salve. Mrs. Du Pre, I ask you to witness that this consultation has taken this unethical turn through no fault of mine and over my protest.”

“Pshaw, boy,”Dr. Peabody said again. “This ain’t hardly worth the trouble of cuttin’ out. We’ll save you an arm or a leg as soon as that fool grandson of his turns that automobile over with ‘em. Come on, Bayard.”

“Mrs. Du Pre—”Dr. Alford essayed.

“Bayard can come back, if he wants to.”Dr. Peabody patted the younger man’s shoulder with his heavy hand. “I’m going to take him to my office and talk to him a while. Jenny can bring him back if she wants to. Come on, Bayard.” And he led Bayard from the room. Miss Jenny rose also.

“That Loosh Peabody is as big a fogy as old Will Falls,” she said. “Old people just fret me to death. You wait: I’ll bring him right back here, and we’ll finish this business.”Dr. Alford held the door open for her and she sailed in a stiff silk-clad rage from the room and followed her nephew and Dr. Peabody across the corridor and through the scarred door with its rusty lock, and into a room resembling a miniature cyclonic devastation mellowed peacefully over with dust ancient and long undisturbed.

“You, Loosh Peabody,” Miss Jenny said.

“Sit down, Jenny,”Dr. Peabody told her, “and be quiet. Unfasten your shirt, Bayard.”

“What?” Bayard said belligerently. The other thrust him into a chair.

‘Want to see your chest,” he explained. He crossed to an ancient roll-top desk and rummaged through the dusty litter which it bore. There was litter and dust everywhere in the huge room. Its four windows gave, upon the square, but the elms and mulberry trees ranged along the sides of the square shaded these first-floor offices, so that light entered them but it was tempered, like light which has passed through water. In the corners of the ceiling were spider webs thick and heavy as Spanish moss and dingy as gray lace; and the once-white walls were an even and unemphatic drab save for a paler rectangle here and there where an outdated calendar had hung and been removed. Besides the desk the room contained three or four huge chairs with broken springs, and a rusty stove in a sawdust-filled box, and a leather sofa holding mutely in its worn surface Dr. Peabody’s recumbent shape; beside it arid slowly gathering successive lasers of dust, was a stack of lurid paper-covered nickel novels. This was Dr. Peabody’s library, and on this sofa he passed his office hours, reading them over and over. Other books there were none,

But the waste basket beside the desk and the desk itself and the mantel above the trash-filled fireplace, and the window ledges too were cluttered with circular mail matter and mail-order catalogues and government bulletins of all kinds. In one corner, on an upended packing-box, sat a water cooler of stained oxidized glass; in another corner leaned a clump of cane fishing poles warping slowly of their own weight; and on every horizontal surface rested a collection of objects not to be found outside of a second-hand store—old garments, bottles, a kerosenelamp, a wooden box of tins of axle grease, lacking one, a clock in the shape of a bland china morning-glory supported by four garlanded maidens who had suffered sundry astonishing anatomical mischances, and here and there among their dusty indiscrimination various instruments pertaining to the occupant’s profession. It was one of these that Dr. Peabody sought now, in the littered desk on which sat a framed photograph of his son, and though Miss Jenny said again, “You, Loosh Peabody, you listen to me,” he continued to seek it with undisturbed equanimity.

“You fasten your clothes and we’ll go back to that doctor,” Miss Jenny said to her nephew. “Neither you nor I can waste any more time with a doddering old fool.”

“Sit down, Jenny,”Dr. Peabody repeated, and he drew out a drawer and removed from it a box of cigars and a handful of faded artificial trout flies and a soiled collar and lastly a stethoscope, then he tumbled the other things back into the drawer and shut it with his knee.

Miss Jenny sat trim and outraged, fuming while he listened to Bayard’s heart.

“Well,” she snapped, “does it tell you how to take that wart off his face? Will Falls didn’t need any telephone to find that out.”

“It tells more than that,”Dr. Peabody answered. “It tells how Bayard’ll get rid of all his troubles, if he keeps on riding in that hellion’s automobile.”

“Fiddlesticks,” Miss Jenny said. “Bayard’s a good driver. I never rode with a better one.”