William Faulkner: Flags in the Dust

“Simon’s here, Colonel,” he said in an inflectionless voice.

“What?” Old Bayard turned his head, the cigar between his teeth and the match in his cupped hands.

“Simon’s come,” the other shouted flatly.

“Oh. All right” Old Bayard flung the match into the grate and thrust the cigar into his breast pocket. He took his black felt hat from the desk and followed the other and stalked through the lobby of the bank and emerged onto the street, where Simon in a linen duster and an ancient tophat held the matched geldings at the curb.

There was a hitching-post there, which old Bayard retained with a testy disregard of industrial progress, but Simon never used it. Until the door opened and Bayard emerged from behind the drawn green shades, Simon sat on the seat with the reins in his left hand and the thong of the whip caught smartly backin his right and usually the unvarying and seemingly incombustible fragment of a cigar in his mouth, talking to the horses in a steady, lover-like flow. Simon spoiled horses. He admired Sartorises and he had for them a warmly protective tenderness, but he loved horses, and beneath his hands the sorriest beast bloomed and acquired comeliness like a .caressed woman, temperament like an opera star.

Bayard crossed tothe carriage with that stiff erectness of his which, as a countryman once remarked, was so straight as to almost meet itself walking along the street. One or two passers and a merchant or so in his shop door saluted him with a sort of florid servility; and behind him the shade on one window drew aside upon the. disembodied face of the man in the green eyeshade. The book-keeper was a hillman of indeterminate age, a silent man who performed his duties with tedious slow care and who watched Bayard constantly and covertly all the while he was in view.

Nor did Simon dismount even then. With his race’s fine feeling for potential theatrics he drew himself up and arranged the limp folds of the duster, communicating by some means the histrionic moment to the horses so that they too flicked their glittering coats and tossed their leashed heads, and into Simon’s wizened black face there came an expression indescribably majestical as he touched his hat brim with his whiphand. Bayard got in the carriage and Simon clucked to the horses, and the shade fell before the book-keeper’s face, and the bystanders, halted to admire the momentary drama of the departure, fell behind.

There was something different in Simon’s air today, however; in the very shape of his back and the angle of his hat: he appeared to be bursting withsomething momentous and ill-contained. But he withheld it for the time being, and at a dashing, restrained pace he drove among the tethered wagons about the square and swung into a broad street where what Bayard called paupers sped back and forth in automobiles, and withheld it until the town was behind them and they trotted on across burgeoning countryside cluttered still with gasoline-propelled paupers but at greater intervals, and his employer had settled back into that drowsing peace which the rhythmic clopping of the horses and the familiar changeful monotony of the land always gave him. Then Simon slowed to a more sedate pace and turned his head.

Simon’s voice was not particularly robust nor resonant, yet somehow he could talk to Bayard without difficulty. Others must shout in order to penetrate that wall of deafness beyond which Bayard lived; yet Simon could and did hold long, rambling conversations with him in that monotonous, rather high singsong of his, particularly while in the carriage, the vibration of which helped Bayard’s hearing a little.

“Mist’ Bayard done got home,” Simon remarked in a conversational tone.

Bayard returned from his region of drowsy abstraction and sat perfectly and furiously still while his heart went on, a little too fast and a little too lightly, cursing his grandson for a furious moment; sat so still that Simon looked back and found him gazing quietly out across the land. Simon raised his voice a little.

“He got offen de two o’clock train,” he continued. “Jumped off de wrong side and lit out th’ough de woods. Section hand seed ‘im. Only he ain’t never come out home yit when I lef’. I thought he wuz wid you, maybe.” Dust spun from beneath thehorses’ feet and moiled in a sluggish cloud behind them. Against the thickening hedgerows their shadow rushed in failing surges, with twinkling spokes and high-stepping legs in a futility of motion without progress. “Wouldn’t even git off at de dee-po,” Simon continued, with a kind of fretful exasperation. “De dee-po his own folks built.Jumpin’ offen de blind side like a hobo. He never even-had on no sojer-clothes,” he added with frank injury. “Jes’ a suit, lak a drummer er somethin’. And when I ‘members dem shiny boots and dem light yeller pants and dat ‘ere double-jinted backin’-up strop he wo’ home las’ year…” Simon turned and looked back again, sharply. “Cunnel, you reckon dem war folks is done somethin’ ter him?”

“What do you mean?” Bayard demanded. “Is he lame?”

“I mean, him sneakm’ into his own town. Sneakin’ into de town his own gran’pappy built, on de ve’y railroad his own folks owns, jes’ like he wuz trash. Dem foreign white folks done done somethin’ ter him, er dey done sot dey police after him. I kep’ a-tellin’ him when he fust went off to dat ‘ere foreign war him and Mr. Johnny neither never had no business at—”

“Drive on,” Bayard said sharply…“Drive on, damn your black hide,” he repeated.

Simon clucked to the horses and shook them to a swifter gait. The road went on between hedgerows paralleling them with the senseless terrific antics of their shadow. Beyond the bordering gums and locusts and massed vines, fields new-broken or being broken spread on toward patches of woodland newly green and splashed with dogwood and judas trees. Behind the laborious plows viscid shards of new-turned earth glinted damply in the sun.

This was upland country, lying in tilted slopes against the unbroken blue of the hills, but soon the road dropped sheerly into a valley of good broad fields richly somnolent in the levelling afternoon. This was Bayard Sartoris’ land, and as they went on from time to time a negro lifted his hand from the plow handle in salute to the passing carriage. Then the road approached the railroad and crossed it, and a partridge and her brood of tiny dusty balls scuttered in the dust before them; and at last the house John Sartoris had built and rebuilt stood among locusts and oaks where mockingbirds were won’t to sing.

There was a bed of salvia where that Yankee patrol had halted on that day long ago. Simon brought up here with a flourish and Bayard descended and Simon clucked to the team again and drove off down the drive, rolling his cigar to a freer angle, and took the road back to town.

Bayard stood for a moment before his house, but the white simplicity of it dreamed unbroken amid its ancient sunshot trees. Wistaria mounting one end of the veranda had bloomed and fallen, and a faint drift of shattered petals lay palely about the dark roots of it and about the roots of a rose trained onto the same frame. The rose was slowly but steadily killing the other vine, and it bloomed now thickly with buds no bigger than a thumbnail and blown flowers no larger than silver dollars, myriad, odorless and unpickable.

But the house itself was still and serenely benignant, and he mounted to the empty, colonnaded veranda and crossed it and entered the high spacious hallway. The house was silent, richly desolate of motion or any sound.

“Bayard.”

The stairway with its white spindles and red carpet mounted in a tall slender curve into upper gloom. From the center of the ceiling hung a chandelier of crystal prisms and shades, fitted originally for candles but since wired for electricity; to the right of the entrance, beside folding doors opened upon a room emanating an atmosphere of dim and seldom violated stateliness and known as the parlor, stood a tall mirror pied with grave obscurity like a still pool of evening water. At the end of the hallway checkered sunlight fell in a long slant across the door and the world was drowsily monotonous without, and from somewhere beyond the bar of sunlight a voice rose and fell in a rapid preoccupied minor, like a chant. The words were not always distinguishable, but Bayard Sartoris could not hear them at all. He raised his voice again,