William Faulkner - Flags in the Dust

“It’ll take more’n a good driver to keep this”—he tapped Bayard’s chest with his blunt finger—“goin’, time that boy whirls that tiling around another curve or two like I’ve seen him do.”

“Did you ever hear of a Sartoris dying from a natural cause, like anybody else?” Miss Jenny demanded. “Don’t you know that heart ain’t going to take Bayard off before his time? You get up from there, and come on with me,” she added to her nephew. Bayard buttoned his shirt, and Dr. Peabody sat onthe sofa and watched him quietly.

“Bayard,” he said suddenly, “why don’t you stay out of that damn thing?”

“What?”

“If you don’t keep out of that car, you ain’t goin’ to need me nor Will Falls, nor that boy in yonder with all his hand-boiled saws and razors, neither.”

“What business is it of yours?” Bayard demanded. “By God, can’t I break my neck in peace if I want to?” He rose. He was trembling again, fumbling at his waistcoat buttons, and Miss Jenny rose also and made to button it for him, but he put her roughly aside. Dr. Peabody sat quietly, thumping his fat fingers on one fat knee. “I have already outlived my time,” Bayard continued more mildly. “I am the first Sartoris there is any record of, who saw sixty years. I reckon Old Marster is keeping me for a reliable witness to the extinction of my race.”

“Now,” Miss Jenny said icily, “you’ve made your speech, and Loosh Peabody has wasted the morning for you, so I reckon we can leave now and let Loosh go out and doctor mules for a while, and you can sit around the rest of the day, being a Sartoris and feeling sorry for yourself. Good morning, Loosh.”

“Make him let that place alone, Jenny,”Dr. Peabody said.

“Ain’t you and Will Falls going to cure it for him?”

“You keep him from letting Will Falls put anything on it,”Dr. Peabody repeated equably. “It’s all right. Just let it alone.”

“We’re going to a doctor, that’s what we’re going to do,” Miss Jenny replied. “Come on here.”

When the door had closed he sat motionless and heard them quarrelling beyond it. Then the sound of their voices moved down the corridor toward the stairs, and still quarrelling loudly and on Bayard’s part with profane emphasis, the voices died away. Then Dr. Peabody lay back on the sofa shaped already to the bulk of him, and with random deliberation he reached a nickel thriller from the stack at the head of the couch.

4

As they neared the bank Narcissa Benbow came along from the opposite direction, and they met at the door. Old Bayard liked her, liked to rally her in a ponderously gallant way on imaginary affairs of the heart, and she had for him a diffident sort of affection and she stopped in her pale print dress and shouted her grave voice into his deafness, and when he took his tilted chair again Miss Jenny followed her into the bank and to the window. There was no one behind the grille at the moment save the book-keeper. He glanced briefly and covertly over his shoulder at them, then slid from his stool and crossed to the window with his surreptitious tread but without raising his eyes again.

He took Narcissa’s check, and while she listened to Miss Jenny’s recapitulation of Bayard’s and Loosh Peabody’s stubborn masculine stupidity, she remarked beneath the brim of her hat his forearms, from which the sleeves had been turned back, and the fine, reddish hair which clothed them down to the second joints of his fingers; and while Miss Jennyceased momentarily to nurse her sense of helpless outrage, she remarked with a faint distinct distaste and a little curiosity, since it was not particularly warm today, the fact that his arms and hands were beaded with perspiration.

But this was not long in her consciousness, and she took the notes he pushed under the grille to her and opened her bag. From its blue satin maw the corner of an envelope and some of its superscription .peeped suddenly, but she crumpled it quickly from sight and put the money in and closed the bag before Miss Jenny had seen. They turned away. At the door she paused again, clothed in her still and untarnished aura, and stood for a moment while old Bayard made her a heavy and involved compliment upon her appearance. Then she went on, surrounded by her grave tranquility like a visible presence or an odor or a sound.

As long as she was in sight at the door, the bookkeeper stood where she had left him. His head was bent and his hand made a series of neat, meaningless figures on the pad beneath it, until she moved again and went on out of sight. Then he moved, and in doing so he found that the pad had adhered to his sweating wrist, so that when he removed his arm it came away also, then its own weight freed it and it dropped to the floor.

He finished the forenoon stooped on his high stool at his high desk beneath the green-shaded light, penning his neat figures into ledgers and writing words into them in the flowing Spencerian hand he had been taught in a Memphis business college. At times he slid from the stool and crossed to the window with his covert evasive eyes and served a client, then returned to his stool and picked up his pen. The cashier, a rotund man with bristling hair and lappingjowls like a Berkshire hog, returned presently, accompanied by a director, who followed him inside the grille. They ordered Coca-Colas from a neighboring drug store by telephone and stood talking until the refreshment arrived by negro boy. Snopes had been included and he descended again and took his glass. The other two sipped theirs; he spooned the ice from his into a spittoon and emptied it at a draught and replaced the glass on the tray and spoke a general and ignored thanks in his sober country idiom and returned to his desk.

Noon came. Old Bayard rose crashing from his tilted chair and stalked back to his office, where he would eat his frugal cold lunch and then sleep for an hour, and banged the door behind him. The cashier took his hat and departed also: for an hour Snopes would have the bank to himself. Outside the square lay motionless beneath noon; the dinnerward exodus of lawyers and merchants and clerks did not disturb its atmosphere of abiding and timeless fixation; in the elms surrounding the courthouse no leaf stirred in the May sunlight. Across the bank windows an occasional shadow passed, but none turned into the door, and presently the square was motionless as a theatre drop.

Snopes drew a sheet of paper from a drawer and laid it beneath the light and wrote slowly upon it, pausing at intervals, drawing his pen through a sentence or a word, writing again. Someone entered; without looking up he slid the paper beneath a ledger, crossed to the window and served the customer, returned and wrote again. The clock on the wall ticked into the silence and into the slow, mouse-like scratching of the pen. The pen ceased at last, but the clock ticked on like a measured dropping of small shot.

He re-read the firstdraught, slowly. Then he drew out a second sheet and made a careful copy. When this was done he re-read it also, comparing the two; then he folded the copy again until it was a small square thickness, and stowed it awayin the fob-pocket of his trousers. The original he carried across to the cuspidor, and holding it above the receptacle he struck a match to it and held it in his fingers until the final moment. Then he dropped it into the spittoon and when it was completely consumed, he crushed the charred thing to powder. Quarter to one. He returned to his stool and opened his ledgers again.

At one the cashier with a toothpick appeared at the door talking to someone, then he entered and went to old Bayard’s office and opened the door. “One o’clock, Colonel,” he shouted into the room, and old Bayard’s heels thumped heavily on the floor. As the Snopes took his hat and emerged from the grille old Bayard stalked forth again and tramped on ahead and took the tilted chair in the doorway.