William Faulkner - Flags in the Dust

“Goin’ to town,” Hub answered shortly. “Sue’ll have to milk.”

The woman stood quietly in the door. Hub carried the jug into the barn. The cow turned and followed him, but he heard her and turned and gave her a resounding kick in her gaunt ribs and cursed her without heat. Presently he reappeared and went on to the gate and opened it and stood so until Suratt drove through. Then he closed it and wired it to again and swung onto the fender. But Bayard moved over in the seat and Hub got inside. The woman stood yet in the door, watching them quietly. About the doorstep the geese surged erratically with discordant cries, their necks undulant and suave as formal gestures in a pantomime.

The shadow of the poplar grove fell long across the untidy fields, and the car pushed its elongated shadow before it like the shadow of a huge hump-shouldered bird. They mounted the sandy hill in the last of the sun among the trees, and dropped downward out of sunlight and into violet dusk; The road was soundless with sand and the car lurched in the worn and shifting ruts and so out of the woods, between tilled fields again and onto the broad valley road.

The warring moon stood overhead. As yet it gave off no light though, and they drove on toward town, passing an occasional belated country wagon homeward bound; these Suratt greeted with a grave gesture of his brown hand, and presently where the road crossed a wooden bridge among more willow and elder where dusk was yet denser and more palpable,Suratt stopped the car and climbed out over the door. “You fellers set still,” he said. “I won’t be but a minute.” They heard him at the rear of the car, then he reappeared with a tin bucket and he let himself gingerly down the rank roadside bank beside the bridge. Water chuckled and murmured beneath the bridge, invisible with twilight, its murmur burdened with the voice of cricket and frog. Above the willows that marked its course gnats still spun and whirled, for bullbats appeared from nowhere in long swoops, in mid-swoop vanished, then appeared again against the serene sky swooping, silent as drops of water on a pane of glass; swift and noiseless and intent as though their wings were feathered with twilight and with silence.

Suratt scrambled up the bank, with his pail, and he removed the radiator cap and tilted the bucket above the mouth of it. The moon stood yet without emphasis overhead, yet a faint shadow of the bucket fell upon the hood of the car and upon the pallid planking of the bridgethe leaning willow fronds were repeated, faintly but delicately distinct. The last of the water gurgled with faint rumblings into the engine’s interior and Suratt replaced the bucket and climbed over the blind door again. The lights operated from a generator; he turned these on now. While the car was in low speed the lights glared to a soundless crescendo, but when he let the clutch in they dropped to a wavering glow no more than a luminous shadow on the unrolling monotonous ribbon of the road.

Night was an accomplished thing before they reached town. Across the unemphatic land the lights on the courthouse clock were like yellow beads suspended above the trees, on the dark horizon line, and upon the green afterglow in the west a column of smoke stood like a balanced plume. Suratt put themout at the restaurant and drove on, and they entered and the proprietor lifted his conical head and his round melting eyes from behind the soda fountain.

“Great Savior, boy,” he exclaimed. “Ain’t you gone home yet? Doc Peabody’s been huntin’ you ever since four o’clock, andMiss Jenny drove to town in the carriage, lookin’ for you. You’ll kill yourself.”

“Get to hell back yonder, Deacon,” Bayard answered, “and bring me and Hub about two dollars’ worth of ham and eggs.”

Later they returned for the jug in Bayard’s car, Bayard and Hub and a third young man, freight agent at the railway station, with three negroes and a bull fiddle in the rear seat But they drove no further than the edge of the field above the house and stopped here while Hub went on afoot down the sandy weed-hedged road toward the barn in its looming silver solitude. The moon stood pale and cold overhead, and on all sides insects shrilled in the dusty undergrowth. In the rear seat the negroes murmured among themselves.

“Fine night,” Mitch, the freight agent, suggested. But Bayard smoked his cigarette moodily, his head closely helmeted in its white bandage. Moon and insects were one, audible and visible, dimensionless and unsourced.

After a while Hub materialized against the dissolving vagueness of the road, crowned by the silver gleam of his hat, and he swung the jug onto the door and removed the stopper. Mitch passed it to Bayard.

“Drink,” Bayard said shortly, and Mitch did so, then the others drank.

“We ain’t got no thin’ for the niggers to drink out of,” Hub said.

“That’s so,” Mitch agreed. He turned in his seat, “Ain’t one of you boys got a cup or something?” The negroes murmured again, questioning one another in mellow consternation-

“I know” Bayard said. He got out and lifted the hood and removed the cap from the breather-pipe, “It’ll taste a little like oil for a drink or two, but you boys won’t notice it after that.”

“Naw, sub,” the negroes agreed in chorus. Onetook the cup and wiped it out with the corner of hiscoat, and they top drank in turn, with smacking expulsions of breath. Then Bayard replaced the cap and go t into his seat.

“Anybody want another right now?” Hub asked,poising the corncob above the jug mouth.

“Give Mitch another,” Bayard directed. “He’ll have to catch up.’’

Mitch drank again briefly. Then Bayard took the jug and tilted it The others watched him respectfully.

“Dam’f he don’t drink it,” Mitch murmured. “I’d be afraid to hit it so often, if I was you.”

“It’s my damned head.” Bayard lowered the jug and passed it to Hub. “I keep thinking another drink will ease it off some.”

“Doc put that bandage on too tight,” Hub said. “You want it loosened a little?”

“I don’t know.” Bayard lit another cigarette and threw the match away. “I believe I’ll take it off. It’s been on there long enough.” He raised his hands and fumbled at the bandage.

“You better let it alone,” Mitch said. But Bayard fumbled at the fastening, then he slid his fingers beneath a turn of the cloth and tugged at it savagely.

One of the negroes leaned forward with a pocket knife and severed it, and they watched quietly while Bayard stripped it off and flung it away.

“You ought not to done that,” Mitch told him.

“Ah, let him take it off, if he wants,” Hub said. “He’s all right.” He got in and stowed the jug away between his knees. Bayard backed the car around. The sandy road hissed beneath its broad tires and rose shaling into the woods again where the dappled moonlight was intermittent, treacherous with dissolving vistas of shadow and formless growth. Invisible and sourceless among the shifting patterns of light and shade whip-poor-wills were like flutes tongued liquidly. The road passed out of the woods and descended, with sand in shifting and silent lurches, and they emerged between fields flattening away to the straight valley road and turned onto it and away from town,

The car swept onward, borne on the sustained hiss of its muffled intake like a dry sibilance of sand in a huge hour glass. The negroes in the back murmured quietly among themselves in mellow snatches, mellow snatches of laughter whipped from their lips like scraps of torn paper swirling away behind. They passed the iron gates and Bayard’s home dreaming serenely in the moonlight among its trees, and the silent boxlike flag station and the metal-roofed cotton gin on the railroad siding. Then the road rose into the hills. It was broad and smooth and empty for all its winding, and the negroes sat now a little tensely anticipatory. But Bayard drove at a steady smooth gait,, not slow, but hot anything like what they had expected of him. Twice more they stopped and drank, and then from an ultimate hilltop they looked downward upon, clustered lights again. Hub produced the breather cap and they drank once more.