William Faulkner - Flags in the Dust

The stallion moved beneath him like a tremendous mad music, uncontrolled, splendidly uncontrollable. The rope served only to curb its direction, not its speed, and among shouts from the pavement on either side he swung the animal into another street that broke suddenly upon his vision. This was a quieter street; soon they would be in the country and the stallion could exhaust its rage without the added hazards of motors and pedestrians. Voices faded behind himinto the thunder of shod hooves: “Runaway! Runaway!” but this street was deserted save for a small automobile going in the same direction, and further along beneath the slumbrous tunnel of the trees, bright small spots of color scuttled out of the street and clotted on one side. Children. Hope they stay there, he said to himself. His eyes were streaming a little; beneath him the surging lift and fall; in his nostrils a pungent sharpness of rage and energy and heat like smoke from the animal’s body, and he swept past the motor car, remarking for a flashing second a woman’s face and a mouth partly open and two eyes round with a serene astonishment. But the face flashed away without registering on his mind and he saw the children, small taut shapes of fear in bright colors, and on the other side of the street a negro man playing a hose onto the sidewalk, and beside him a second negro with a pitchfork.

Someone screamed from a neighboring veranda, and the group of children broke, shrieking; a small figure in a white shirt and diminutive pale blue pants darted from the curb into the street, and Bayard leaned forward and dragged at the rope, swerving the beast toward the opposite sidewalk, where the two negroes stood. The small figure came on, flashed safely behind, then rushing green beneath the stallion’s feet; a tree trunk like a wheel spoke in reverse, and the animal struck clashing fire from wet concrete, slipped, lunged, then crashed down; and for Bayard, a red shock, then blackness. The horse scrambled to its feet and whirled and struck viciously at the prone rider with its forefeet, but the negro with the pitchfork drove it away, whereupon it trotted stiffly back up the street and passed the slowing motor car with the woman driver. At the end of the street it submitted docilely to capture by the negrohostler. Rafe MacCallum still clutched his roll of bills.

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They gathered him up and brought him to town in a commandeered motor car and roused Dr. Peabody from slumber. Dr. Peabody profanely bandaged Bayard’s unconscious head and, when he came to, gave him a drink from the bottle which resided in the littered waste basket and threatened to telephone Miss Jenny if Bayard didn’t go straight home. Rafe MacCallum promised to see that he went, and the owner of the impressed automobile offered to drive him. It was a Ford body with, in place of a tonneau, a miniature one-room cabin of sheet iron and larger than a dog kennel, in each painted geometrical window of which a painted housewife simpered benignantly above a painted sewing machine, and into which an actual sewing machine neatly fitted, borne thus about the countryside by the agent The agent’s name was V. K. Suratt and he now sat with his shrewd plausible face behind the wheel. Bayard with his humming head sat beside him, and to the fender clung a youth with brown forearms and a slanted extremely new straw hat, who let his limber body absorb the jolts with negligent young skill as they rattled sedately out of town on the valley road.

The drink Dr. Peabody had given him, instead of quieting his jangled nervous system, rolled sluggishly and hotly in his stomach and served only to nauseate him a little, and against his closed eyelids red antic shapes rolled in throbbing and tedious cycles. He watched them dully and without astonishment as they emerged from blackness and whirled sluggishlyand consumed themselves and reappeared, each time a Hole fainter as his mind cleared And yet, somewhere blended with them, yet at the same time apart and beyond them with a serene aloofness and steadfast among their senseless-convolutions, was a head with twin dark wings of hair. It seemed to have some relation to the instant itself as it culminated in crashing blackness; at the same time it seemed, for all its aloofness, to be a part of the whirling ensuing chaos which now enveloped him; a part of it, yet bringing into the vortex a sort of constant coolness like a faint, shady breeze. So it remained, aloof and not quite distinct, while the coiling shapes faded into a dull unease of physical pain from the jolting of the car, leaving about him like an echo that cool serenity and something more—a sense of shrinking yet fascinated distaste, of which he or something he had done, was the object.

It was getting well into evening. On either hand cotton and corn showed in green spears upon the rich, dark soil, and in the patches of green woodland doves called moodily. After a time Suratt turned from the highway into a faint; rutted wagon road between a field and a patch of woods and they drove straight into the sun, and Bayard held his hat before his face.

“Sun hurt yo’ head?” Suratt asked beside him, “Taint long, now,” he added. The road wound presently into the woods where the sun was intermittent, and it rose gradually toward a low merest on which trees stood like a barred grate against the western sky. They crossed this Mil and the land fell away in ragged ill-tended fields, and beyond them in a clump of fruit trees and a grove of silver poplars pale as absinthe and twinkling ceaselessly without wind, a weathered small house squatted. Beyond itand much larger loomed a barn gray arid gaunt withage. The road forked here. One faint arm curvedsandily away toward the house; the other went onbetween rank weeds toward the barn. The youth onthe fender leaned his head into the car, “Drive on to the barn,” he directed.

Suratt obeyed. Beyond the bordering weeds a fence straggled in limp dilapidation, and from the weeds the handles of a plow stood at a gaunt angle while its shard rusted peacefully in the undergrowth, and other implements rusted half concealed in the growth—-skeletons of labor healed over by the earth they were to have violated, kinder than they. The fence turned at an angle and Suratt stopped the car and the youth stepped down and opened a warped wooden gate and Suratt drove on into the barnyard where stood a wagon with drunken wheels and a home-made bed, and the rusting skeleton of a Ford car. Low down upon its domed and hoodless radiator the two lamps gave it an expressions beetling patient astonishment, like a skull, and a lean cow ruminated and watched them without interest.

The barn doors sagged drunkenly from broken hinges, held to the posts with twists of baling wire; beyond, the cavern of the hallway yawned in stale desolation—a travesty of earth’s garnered fullness and its rich inferences. Bayard sat on the fender and leaned his bandaged head back against the car body and watched Suratt and the youth enter the barn and disappear slowly upward on invisible ladder rungs. The cow stood yet in ruminant dejection, and upon the yellow surface of a pond enclosed by banks of trodden and sun-cracked day beneath a clump of locust shrubs and willows, geese drifted like small muddy clouds. The sun fell in a long slant upon their rumps and their suave necks and upon the cow’s leanrhythmically twitching flank, ridging her visible ribs with dingy gold. Presently Suratt’s legs fumbled into sight, followed by his cautious body, and after him the youth with his slanted hat slid easily down the perpendicular ladder, letting his body from rung to rung in easy one-handed swoops.

He emerged carrying an earthen jug close against his leg. Suratt followed in his neat tieless blue shirt and jerked his head at Bayard, and they turned the corner of the barn and retreated along the wall, among waist-high jimson weeds. Bayard rose and followed and overtook them as the youth with his jug slid with an agile unceasing motion between two lax strands of barbed wire. Suratt stooped through more sedately and held the top strand taut and pressed the lower one down with his foot until Bayard was through. Behind the barn the land descended into shadow toward a junglish growth of willow and elder, against which a huge beech and a clump of saplings stood like mottled ghosts, and from which a cool dankness rose like a breath to meet them. The spring welled from the roots of the beech into a wooden frame buried to the edge in white sand that quivered ceaselessly and delicately beneath the water’s limpid unrest, and strayed on away into the willow and elder growth without a sound.