William Faulkner: Flags in the Dust

“Bayard.”

The chanting ceased, and as he turned toward the stairs a tall mulatto woman appeared in the slanting sunlight without the back door and came sibilantly into the hall. Her faded blue garment was pinned up about her knees and it was darkly and irregularly blotched. Beneath it her shanks were straight and lean as the legs of a tall bird, and her bare feet were pale coffee splashes on the dark polished floor.

“Wuz you callin’ somebody, Cunnel?” she said, raising her voice to penetrate his deafness. Bayard Sartoris paused with his hand on the walnut newel post and looked down at the woman’s pleasant yellow face.

“Has anybody come in this afternoon?” he asked.

“Why, naw, suh,” Elnora answered.“Dey ain’t nobody here a-tall, dat I knows about. Miss Jenny done gone to huh club-meetin’ in town dis evening,” she added. Bayard Sartoris stood with his foot raised to the step, staring down at her.

“Why in hell can’t you niggers tell me the truth about things?” he raged suddenly. “Or not tell me anything at all?”

“Lawd, Cunnel, who’d be comin’ out here, lessen you er Miss Jenny sont ‘um?” But he had gone on, tramping furiously up the stairs. The woman looked after him, then she called to him: “Does you want Isom, er anything?” But he went on without looking back. Perhaps he had not heard her, and she stood and watched him out of sight “He’s gittin’ old,” she said to herself quietly, and she turned on her sibilant bare feet and returned down the hall whence she had come.

Bayard Sartoris stopped again in the upper hall. The western windows were closed with latticed blinds, through which sunlight seeped in pale dissolving bars that but served to increase the gloom. At the opposite end a tall door opened upon a shallow grilled balcony which offered the valley and the cradling semicircle of the eastern hills in panorama. On either side of this door was a narrow window set with leaded varicolored panes that, with the bearer of them, constituted his mother’s deathbed legacy to him, which John Sartoris’ youngest sister had brought from Carolina in a straw-filled hamper in ‘69.

This was Virginia Du Pre, who came to them, two years a wife and seven years a widow at thirty—a slender woman with a delicate replica of the Sartoris nose and that expression of indomitable and utter weariness which all Southern women had learned to wear, bringing with her the clothing in which she stood and a wicker hamper filled with colored glass. It was she who told them of the manner of Bayard Sartoris’ death prior to the second battle of Manassas. She had told the story many times since (at eightyshe still told it, on occasions usually inopportune) and as she grew older the tale itself grew richer and richer, taking on a mellow splendor like wine; until what had been a hair-brained prank of two heedless and reckless boys wild with their own youth, was become a gallant and finely tragical focal-point to which the history of the race had been raised from out the old miasmic swamps of spiritual sloth by two angels valiantly and glamorously fallen and strayed, altering the course of human events and purging the souls of men.

That Carolina Bayard had been rather a handful, even for Sartorises. Not so much a black sheep as a nuisance all of whose qualities were positive and unpredictable. His were merry blue eyes , and his rather long hair fell in tawny curls about his temples. His high-colored face wore that expression of frank and high-hearted dullness which you visualize Richard First as wearing before he went crusading, and he once hunted his pack of fox hounds through a rustic tabernacle in which a Methodist revival was being conducted; and thirty minutes later (having caught the fox) he returned alone and rode his horse into the ensuing indignation meeting. In a spirit of fun purely: he believed too firmly in Providence, as all his actions clearly showed, to have any religious convictions at all. So when Fort Moultrie fell and the governor of South Carolina refused to surrender it, the Sartorises were privately a little glad, for now Bayard would have something to do.

In Virginia, as an A.D.C. of Jeb Stuart’s, he found plenty to do. As the A.D.C. rather, for though Stuart had other aides, they were soldiers trying to win a war and needing sleep occasionally: Bayard Sartoris alone was willing, nay eager, to defer sleep and security to that time when monotony should return tothe world. But now was a holiday without any restrictions whatever.

The war was also a godsend to Jeb Stuart, and shortly thereafter, against the dark and bloody obscurity of the northern Virginia campaigns, Jeb Stuart at thirty and Bayard Sartoris at twenty-three stood briefly like two flaming stars garlanded with Fame’s burgeoning laurel and the myrtle and roses of Death, incalculable and sudden as meteors in General Pope’s troubled military sky, thrusting upon him like an unwilling garment that notoriety which his skill as a soldier could never have won him. And still in a spirit of pure fun: neither Jeb Stuart nor Bayard Sartoris, as their actions clearly showed, had any political convictions involved at all.

Aunt Jenny told the story first shortly after she came to them. It was Christmas time and they sat before a hickory fire in the rebuilt library—Aunt Jenny with her sad resolute face and John Sartoris, bearded and hawklike, and his three children and a guest: a Scottish engineer whom John Sartoris had met in Mexico in ‘45 and who was now helping him to build his railway.

Work on the railroad had ceased for the holiday season and John Sartoris and his engineer had ridden in that dusk from the suspended railhead in the hills to the north, and they now sat after supper in the firelight. The sun had set ruddily, leaving the air brittle as thin glass with frost, and presently Joby came in with an armful of firewood. He put a fresh billet on the fire, and in the dry air the flames crackled and snapped, popping in fading embers outward upon the hearth.

“Chris’mus!” Joby exclaimed with the grave and simple pleasure of his race, prodding at the blazing logs with the Yankee musket-barrel which stood inthe chimney corner until sparks swirled upward into the dark maw of the chimney like wild golden veils. “Year dat, chilluns?” John Sartoris’ eldest daughter was twenty-two and would be married in June, Bayard was twenty, and the younger girl seventeen; and so Aunt Jenny for all her widowhood was one of the chillen too, to Joby. Then he replaced the musket-barrel in its niche and fired a long pine sliver at the hearth in order to light the candles. But Aunt Jenny stayed him, and he was gone—a shambling figure in an old formal coat too large for him, stooped and gray with age; and Aunt Jenny, speaking always of Jeb Stuart as Mister Stuart, told her story.

It had to do with an April evening, and coffee. Or the lack of it, rather; and Stuart’s military family sat in scented darkness beneath a new moon, talking of ladies and dead pleasures and thinking of home. Away in the darkness horses moved invisibly with restful sounds, and bivouac fires fell to glowing points like spent fireflies, and somewhere neither near nor far the General’s body servant touched a guitar in lingering random chords. Thus they sat in the poignance of spring and youth’s immemorial sadness, forgetting travail and glory, remembering instead other Virginian evenings with fiddles above the myriad candles and slender grave measures picked out with light laughter and lighter feet; thinking Whenwill this be again? Shall I make one? until they had talked themselves into a state of savage nostalgia and words grew shorter and shorter and less and less frequent. Then the General roused himself and brought them back by speaking of coffee, or its lack.