William Faulkner - Flags in the Dust

Later Aunt Sally sat and talked monotonously above her interminable fancy-work. Aunt Sally would never divulge what is was to be when completed, nor for whom, and she had been working on it for fifteen years, carrying always about with her a shapeless bag of dingy threadbare brocade containing odds and ends of colored fabric in all possible shapes. She could never bring herself to trim any of them to any pattern, so she shifted and fitted and mused and shifted them like pieces of a puzzle picture, trying to fit them to a pattern or to create a pattern about them without cutting them, smoothing her colored scraps on a card table with flaccid, patient putty-colored fingers, shifting and shifting them. From the bosom of her dress the needle Narcissa had threaded for her dangled its spidery skein,

Across the room Narcissa sat on her curled legs, with a book. Aunt Sally’s voice droned on with bland querulous interminability, and Narcissa turned the pages restively under her unseeing eyes. Suddenly she rose and laid the book down and crossed the hall into another room and sat in the half-light at her piano: But still between herself and the familiar keyboard the thunderous climacteric of the afternoon’s moment recurred and she saw his calm and bloodless face as a piece of flotsam unwelcome and too heavy to move, washed onto the grave unshadowed beach of her days, disrupting that serene constancy to which she clung so fiercely; and at last she rose with abrupt decision and went to the telephone.

Miss Jenny thanked her for her solicitude tardy, and dared to say that Bayard was all right, still an active member of the so-called human race, that is, since they had received no official word from the coroner. No, she had heard nothing of him since Loosh Peabody had ‘phoned her at four o’clock that Bayard was on his way home with a broken head. The broken head she readily believed, but the otherpart of the message she had put no credence in whatever, having lived with those damn Sartorises eighty years and knowing that home would be the last place in the world a Sartoris with a broken head would ever consider going. No, she was not even interested in his present whereabouts, and she hoped he hadn’t injured the horse? Horses were valuable animals.

Well, if Miss Jenny wasn’t alarmed, she certainly had no call to be, and she returned to the living room and explained to Aunt Sally whom she had been talking to and why, and drew a low chair to the lamp and picked up her book. She put the afternoon from her mind deliberately, and for a while and with a sort of detachment she watched her other self sink further and further into the book, until at last the book absorbed her attention. But then the vacuum of her relaxed will roused her again, and although she read deliberately on, a minor part of her consciousness probed ceaselessly, seeking the reason, until with a stabbing rush like a touched nerve it filled her mind again—the bronze fury of them, the child become an intent and voiceless automaton of fear, Bayard’s bleeding head chiseled and calm and cold. Then the long effort of thrusting him without her bastions again.

Aunt Sally fumbled her colored scraps together and returned them to their receptacle and rose and said goodnight and hobbled from the room. Narcissa sat and turned the pages on, hearing the other mount the stairs with measured laborious tappings of her ebony stick, and for a while longer she read with a mounting crescendo of nervous effort. For a paragraph or two, sometimes for a page, the book would absorb her; then again she would find her muscles tensing as she relived the afternoon. She flung the book away and returned to the piano again, determined to exorcise it, but Aunt Sally thumped on the floor overhead with her stick, and she desisted and returned to her discarded book. So it was with actual relief that she greeted Dr. Alford shortly after.

“I was passing and heard your piano” he said. “You haven’t stopped?”

She explained that Aunt Sally had gone to bed, and he sat formally and talked to her in his cultured pedantic voice on cold and erudite subjectsfor two hours. Then he departed and she stood in the door and watched him down the drive. The moon stood in the sky; along the drive cedars in a grave descending curve were pointed inkyandmotionless on the pale, faintly spangled sky, and upon the unstirring silver air the thin stringent odor of them lay like an exhalation.

She returned to the living room and got her book and turned out the lights and mounted tie stairs. Across the corridor Aunt Sally snored with genteel placidity, and Narcissa stood for a moment, listening to the homely noise. I will be glad when Horry gets home, she thought going on.

She turned on her light and undressed and took her book to bed, where she again held her consciousness deliberately submerged as you hold a puppy under water until its body ceases to resist And after a time her mind surrendered wholly to the book and she read on, pausing to think warmly of sleep, reading a page more. And so when tie negroes first blended their instruments beneath her window, she paid them only the most perfunctory notice. Why in the world are those jelly-beans serenading me? she thought with faint amusement, visioning immediately Aunt Sally In her night-cap leaning from a window and shouting them away.

But in the midst of this amusing picture she satbolt upright, with a sharp and utter certainty; then she rose and entered the adjoining room and looked out the window.

The negroes were grouped on the lawn, in the moonlight: the frosted clarinet, the guitar, the grave comic bulk of the viol. At the street entrance to the drive a motor car loomed in shadow, whose and occupied by whom she could not discern. The musicians played once, then they retreated across the lawn and down the drive, and presently the car drove on, without lights. It was he: no one else would play one tune beneath a lady’s midnight window, just enough to waken her from sleep, then go away.

She returned to her room. The book lay face downward on the bed. But the labor was undone again, and she stood for a while at her window, between the parted curtains, looking out upon the black and silver world and the peaceful night. The air moved upon her face and amid the fallen dark wings of her hair with grave coolness, but inwardly...“The beast, the beast,” she whispered to herself. She let the curtains fall and on her silent feet she descended the stairs again and sought the telephone in the darkness. She miffled its bell with her fingers when she rang.

Miss Jenny’s voice came out of the night with its usual brisk and cold asperity, and without surprise or curiosity. No, he had not returned home, for he was now safely locked up in jail, she believed, unless the city officers were too corrupted to obey a lady’s request. Serenading? Fiddlesticks. What would he want to go serenading for? he couldn’t injure himself serenading, unless someone killed him with a flat iron or an alarm clock. And why was she concerned about him?

Narcissa hung up, and for a moment she stood in the darkness, beating her fists on the telephone’s unresponsive box. The beast, the beast.

She had received three callers that night One came formally and with intent; the second came informally and without any particular effort to remain anonymous or otherwise; the third came anonymously and with calculated intent The garage which sheltered her car was a small brick building surrounded by evergreens. One side of it was a continuation of the garden wall. Beyond the wall a grass-grown lane led back to another street The garage was about fifteen yards from the house and its roof rose to the level of the second story of the house. Narcissa’s bedroom windows looked out upon the slate roof of it.

This third caller entered by the lane and mounted onto the wall and thence onto the garage roof, where he now lay in the shadow of a cedar branching above it, sheltered so from the moon. He had lain there for a long time. The room facing him was dark when he arrived, but he had Iain in his fastness quiet as an animal and with an animal’s patience, without movement save to occasionally raise his head and reconnoiter the immediate scene with covert dartings of hiseyes.