William Faulkner - Flags in the Dust

Simon drove rapidly on to town, but he had been forestalled. The two negroes had told a merchant about finding Bayard on the roadside and the news had reached Colonel Sartoris at the bank, who had sent for Dr. Peabody. But Dr. Peabody was gone fishing, so he took Dr. Alford instead, and the two of them in Dr. Alford’s car passed Simon just as he drove into town. He turned around and followed them, but by the time he arrived home they had young Bayard anaesthetized and temporarily incapable of further harm; and when Miss Jenny and Narcissa Benbow drove unsuspectingly up the drive an hour later, he was bandaged and conscious again. They had not heard of it, and Dr. Alford’s car was the first intimation. Although Miss Jenny did not recognize the car, she knew immediately what it meant. “That fool has killed himself at last,” she said, and got out and sailed into the house.

Bayard lay white and still and a little sheepish in his bed. Old Bayard and the doctor were just leaving, and Miss Jenny waited until they were out of the room, then she raged and stormed at him and stroked his face and. his hair, while Simon bobbed and mowed in the corner between bed and wall. “Dasso, Miss Jenny, dasso! I kep’ a-tellin’‘im!”

And so, having eased her soul, she descended to . the veranda where Dr. Alford stood in impeccable departure. Old Bayard sat in the car waiting for him, and on Miss Jenny’s appearance he became his stiff self again and completed his departure, and he and old Bayard drove away.

Miss Jenny also looked up and down the. veranda, then into the hall. “Where—” she said, then she called: “Narcissa.” A reply; and she added: “Where are you?” The reply came again and Miss Jenny reentered the house and saw Narcissa’s white dress inthe gloom where she sat on the piano bench. “He’s awake,” Miss Jenny said. “You can come up and see him.” The other rose and turned into the light. “Why, what’s the matter? You look lots worse than he does. You’re white as a sheet.”

“Nothing,” Narcissa answered. “I—” She stared at Miss Jenny a moment, clenching her hands at her sides. “I must go,” she said, and she emerged from the parlor. “It’s late, and Horace…”

“You can come in and speak to him, can’t you?” Miss Jenny asked, watching the other curiously. “There’s not any blood, if that’s what you are afraid of.”

“It isn’t that,”‘ Narcissa answered. “I’m not afraid.” But she was rigid with repressed trembling; Miss Jenny could see her teeth clenched upon her lower lip.

“Why, all right,” Miss Jenny agreed kindly, “if you’d rather not. I just thought perhaps you’d like to see he is all right, as long as you are here. But don’t if you don’t feel like it.”

“Yes. Yes. I feel like it. I want to.” She passed Miss Jenny and went on down the hall. At the foot of the stairs she halted until Miss Jenny came up behind her, and they mounted together, although she kept a step ahead and with her face averted from Miss Jenny’s probing eyes.

‘What’s the matter?” Miss Jenny demanded, still watching the other. “What happened to you? Have you fallen in love with him?”

“In love...him? Bayard?” She swayed “against the rail beside her and paused, and slid her hand along the rail and drew herself onward. She began to laugh thinly, repressing hysteria. Miss Jenny mounted beside her, piercing and curious and cold; Narcissa hurried on. At the stair head she stoppedagain, holding to the railing, and permitted Miss Jenny to precede her; and just without the door to Bayard’s room she stopped yet again and leaned against it, throttling her laughter and her trembling. Then she entered the room, where Miss Jenny stood beside the bed with head reverted.

For a moment she could see nothing for the. swelling convolutions of laughter in her throat, and she was conscious only of her need to repress them and of a sickly-sweet lingering of ether as she approached the bed and stood blindly beside it, with her hidden writhing hands. On the pillow Bayard’s head lay as she had remembered it on that former day—pallid and calm, like a chiseled mask brushed lightly over with the shadow of his spent violence. He was watching her, and for a while she gazed at him, and Miss Jenny and the room and all, swam away.

“You beast, you beast,” she said thinly. “Why must you always do these things where I’ve got to see you?”

“I didn’t know you were there,” Bayard answered weakly, with mild astonishment.

But this was gone soon; nor did it return. Every few days, by Miss Jenny’s request, she came out and sat beside his bed and read to him, bringing into the room her outward untroubled serenity. He cared nothing at all about books; it is doubtful if he had ever read a book on his own initiative; but he would lie motionless in his cast while her grave contralto voice went on and on in the drowsy room. Sometimes he tried to talk to her, but she ignored his attempts and read on; if he persisted, she went away and left him. So he soon learned to lie, usually with his eyes closed, voyaging alone in the bleak and barren regions of his despair, while her voice flowed and ebbed above the remoter sounds that surrounded them—Miss Jenny scolding Simon or Isom downstairs or in the garden; the twittering of birds in the tree just beyond the window; the ceaseless rhythmic monotone of the water pump below the barn. At times she would cease and look at him and find that he was peacefully sleeping.

6

Old man Falls came through the lush green of early June, came into town through the yet horizontal sunlight of morning, and in his dusty neat overalls he now sat opposite old Bayard in immaculate linen and a geranium like a merry wound. The room was cool and still, reposeful with dingy light and the casual dust of a negro janitor’s casual and infrequent disturbing. Now that old Bayard was aging, and what with the deaf tenor of his stiffening ways, he was showing more and more a desire to surround himself with things of a like undeference; showing an incredible aptitude for choosing servants who circled about him in a sort of pottering and bland futility. The janitor, who dubbed old Bayard General and whom old Bayard and the other clients for whom he performed seemingly interminable duties of a slovenly and minor nature, addressed as Dr. Jones, was one of these. He was black and stooped with querulousness and age, and he took advantage of everyone who would permit him, and old Bayard swore at him’ constantly and permitted him to steal his tobacco and the bank’s winter supply of coal and peddle it to other negroes. The windows behind which old Bayard and hiscaller sat gave upon a vacant lot of rubbish and dusty weeds. It was bounded by the weathered rears of sundry one-story board buildings within which small businesses—repair and junk shops and such—had their lowly and ofttimes anonymous being. The lot itself was used by day by country people as a depot for their wagons and teams; already some of these were tethered somnolent and ruminant there, and about the stale ammoniac droppings of their patient generations sparrows swirled in garrulous clouds, or pigeons slanted with sounds like rusty shutters, or strode and preened in burnished and predatory pomposity, crooning among themselves with guttural un-emphasis.

Old man Falls sat on the opposite side of the trash-filled fireplace, mopping his face with a blue-figured bandana.

‘It’s my damned old legs,” he explained, faintly apologetic. “Use to be I’d walk twelve-fifteen mile to a picnic or a singin’ with less study than that ‘ere little old three mile into town gives me now.” He mopped the handkerchief about that face of his, browned and cheerful these many years with the ample and abounding earth. “Looks like they’re fixin’ to give out on me, and I ain’t but ninety-three, neither.” He held his parcel in his other hand, but he continued to mop his face, making no motion to open it nor to ascertain its contents.