William Faulkner - Flags in the Dust

“Not that way. I m-mean she’s—she’s—’’ Narcissa turned suddenly and laid her head on the piano.

“Oh,” Miss Jenny said. “All women are, if that’s what you mean.” She sat stiffly indomitable, musing on the younger woman’s shaking shoulders. “Hmph,” she said again, “Horace has spent so much time being educated thathe never has learned anything...Why didn’t you break it up in time? Didn’t you see it coming?”

The other wept more quietly now. She sat up and dried her eyes on Miss Jenny’shandkerchief. “It started before he went away. Don’t you remember?”

“That’s so. I do sort of remember at lot of women’s gabble. Who told you about it, anyway? Horace?”

“Mrs. Marders did. And then Horace did But I never thought that he’d—I never thought— ” again her head dropped to the piano, hidden in her arms. “I wouldn’t have treated Horace that way.”

“Sarah Marders, was it? I might have known.... I admire strong character, even if it is bad,” Miss Jenny stated. “Well, crying won’t help any.” She rose briskly. “We’ll think what to do about it. Only I’d let him go ahead; it’ll do him good if she’ll just turn around and make a doormat of him...Too bad Harry hasn’t got spunk enough to... But I reckon he’ll be glad; I know I would—There, there,” she said, at the other’s movement of shocked alarm, “I don’t reckon Harry’ll hurt him. Dry your face, now. You better go to the bathroom and fix up. Bayard’ll be coming in soon, and you don’t want him to see you’ve been crying, you know.” Narcissa glanced swiftly and a little fearfully toward the door and dabbed hastily at her cheeks with Miss Jenny’s handkerchief.

At times the dark lifted, the black trees were no longer sinister, and then Horace and Narcissa walked the road in sunlight, as of old. Then he would seek her through the house and cross the drive and descend the lawn in the sunny afternoon to where she sat in the white dresses he loved beneath the oak into which a mockingbird came each afternoon and sang, bringing her the result of his latest venture in glass-blowing. lie had five now, in different colors and all nearly perfect, and each of them had a name. And as he finished them and before they were scarce cooled, he must bring them across the lawn to where she sat with a book or with a startled caller perhaps, in his stained disheveled clothes and his sooty hands in which the vase lay demure and fragile as a bubble, and with his face blackened too with smoke and a little mad, passionate and fine and austere.

But then the dark would descend once more, and beyond the black and motionless trees Belle’s sultry imminence was like a presence, like the odor of death. And then he and Narcissa were strangers again, tugging and straining at the shackles of custom and old affection that bound them with slipping bonds.

And then they were no longer even side by side. At times he called back to her through the darkness, making no sound and receiving no reply; at times he hovered distractedly like a dark bird between the two of them. But at last he merged with himself, fused in the fatalism of his nature, and set his face steadily up the road, looking not back again. And then the footsteps behind him ceased,

5

For a time the earth held him in a smoldering hiatus that might have been called contentment. He was up at sunrise, planting things in the ground and watching them grow and tending them; he cursed and harried niggers and males into motion and kept them there, and put the grist mill into raining shape and taught Caspey to drive the tractor, and came in at mealtimes and at night smelling of machine oil and of stables and of the earth and went to bed with grateful muscles and with the sober rhythms of the earth in his body, and so to sleep. But he still waked at times in the peaceful darkness of his familiar bed and without previous warning, tense and sweating with old terror; and always and constant beneath activity and bodily fatigue and sleep and all, that stubborn struggling of his heart which would not wear away.

But his days were filled, at least, and he discovered pride again. Nowadays he drove the car into town to fetch his grandfather from habit alone, and though he still considered forty-five miles an hour merely cruising speed, he no longer took cold and fiendish pleasure in turning curves on two wheels or in detaching mules from wagons by striking the whiffle-trees with his bumper in passing. Old Bayard still insisted on riding with him when he must ride, but with freer breath; and once he aired to Miss Jenny his growing belief that at last young Bayard had outworn his seeking for violent destruction.

Miss Jenny, being a true optimist—that is, expecting the worst at all times and so being daily agreeably surprised—promptly disillusioned him. Meanwhile she made young Bayard drink plenty of milk and otherwise superintended his diet and hours in her martinetish way, and at times she entered his room at night and sat for a while quietly beside the bed where he slept.

Nevertheless, young Bayard improved in his ways. Without being aware of the progress of it, he had become submerged in a monotony of days, had beensnared by a rhythm of activities repeated arid repeated until his muscles grew so familiar with them as to get his body through the days without assistance from him at all. He had been so neatly tricked by earth, that ancient Delilah, that he was not aware that his locks were shorn, was not aware that Miss Jenny and old Bayard were wondering how long it would be before they grew out again. He needs a wife, was Miss Jenny’s thought. Then maybe he’ll stay sheared. “A young person to worry with him,” she said to herself. “Bayard’s too old, and I’ve got too much to do, to worry with the long devil.”

He saw Narcissa about the house now and then, sometimes at the table, and he was aware of her shrinking and of her distaste. But not for long at a time and with no other emotion save a mild curiosity as to why she had not married. Miss Jenny told him that she was twenty-six, the same age as himself.

Then sowing time was over, and it was summer. Cotton and corn was out of the ground and laid-by; the grist mill was ready to run arid the gin had been overhauled, and one day he found himself with nothing to do. It was like coming dazed out of sleep, out of the warm, sunny valleys where people lived; and again the cold peak of his stubborn despair stood bleakly among black and savage stars and the valleys were obscured by shadow.

The road descended in a quiet red curve between pines through which the hot July winds swelled with a long sound like a faraway passing of trains, descended to a mass of lighter green of willows, where a creek ran beneath a stone bridge. At the top of the . grade the scrubby, rabbit-like mules stopped and theyounger negro got down and lifted a gnawed white-oak sapling from the wagon and locked the off rear wheel by wedging the pole between the warped wire-bound spokes of it and across the axle tree. Then he climbed into the crazy wagon again, where the other negro sat motionless with the lifted rope-spliced reins in his hand and his head tilted creek* ward “Whut ‘uz dat?” he said.

“What ‘uz whut?” the other asked. But his father sat yet in his attitude of motionless grave attention, and the younger negro listened also. But there was no further sound save the long sough of the wind among the sober pines and the liquid whistling of a quail somewhere among diem. “Whut you hear, pappy?” he repeated.

“Somethin’ busted down dar. Tree fell, mebbe.” He jerked the reins. “Hwup, mules.” The mules flapped their jackrabbit ears and lurched the wagon into motion, and they descended among the cool dappled shadows, on the jarring scrape of the locked wheel that left behind it a glazed bluish ribbon in the soft red dust At the foot of the hill the road crossed the bridge and went on mounting again; beneath the bridge the creek rippled and flashed brownly among willows, and beside the bridge and bottom up in the creek, a motor car lay. Its front wheels were still spinning and the engine yet ran at idling speed, trailing a faint shimmer of exhaust The older negro drove onto the bridge and stopped, and the two of them sat and stared quietly down upon the car’s long belly. The younger negro spoke suddenly: