William Faulkner - Flags in the Dust

And all during the banking day (it was summer now, and school was out) Snopes never knew when he would look over his shoulder and find the boy lounging without the plate glass window of the bank; watching him with profound and static patience. Presently he would take himself away, and for a short time Snopes would be able to forget him until, wrapped in his mad unsleeping dream, he mounted the boarding house veranda at supper time and found the boy sitting there and waiting patiently his return; innocent and bland, steadfast and unassertive as a minor but chronic disease. “Got another business letter to write tonight, Mr. Snopes?”

And sometimes after he had gone to bed and his light was out; he lay in the mad darkness against his sleepless desire moiled in obscene images and shapes, and heard presently outside his door secret, rat-like sounds; and lay so tense in the dark, expecting the door to open and, preceded by breathing above him sourceless and invisible: “Going to write another letter, Mr. Snopes?” And he waked sweating from dreams in which her image lived and moved and thwarted and mocked him, with the pillow crushed against his mean, half-insane face, while the words produced themselves in his ears: “Got air other letter to write yet, Mr. Snopes?”

So he changed his boarding house. He gave Mrs. Beard an awkward, stumbling explanation; vague, composed of sentences with frayed ends. She was sorry to see him go, but she permitted him to pack his meagre belongings and depart without dither anger or complaint, as is the way of country people. He went to live with a relation, that I. O. Snopes who ran the restaurant—a nimble, wiry little man with a talkative face like a nutcracker, and false merry eyes—in a small frame house painted a sultryprodigious yellow, near the railway station. Snopeses did not trust one another enough to develop any intimate relations, and he was permitted to go and come when he pleased. So he found this better than the boarding house, the single deterrent to complete satisfaction being the hulking but catlike presence of I.O.’s son Clarence. But, what with his secretive nature, it had even been his custom to keep all his possessions under lock and key, so this was but a minor matter. Mrs. Snopes was a placid mountain of a woman who swung all day in a faded wrapper, in the porch swing. Not reading, not doing anything: just swinging.

He liked it here. It was more private; no transients appearing at the supper table and tramping up and down the hallways all night; no one to try to engage him in conversation on the veranda after supper. Now, after supper he could sit undisturbed on the tight barren little porch in the growing twilight and watch the motor cars congregating at the station across the way to meet the 7:30 train; could watch the train draw into the station with its rows of lighted windows and the hissing plume from the locomotive, and go on again with bells, trailing its diminishing sound into the distant evening, while he sat on the dark porch with his desperate sleepless lust and his fear. Thus, until one evening after supper he stepped through the front door and found Virgil Beard sitting patiently and blandly on the front steps in the twilight.

So he had been run to earth again, and drawn, and hounded again into flight. Yet outwardly he pursued the even tenor of his days, unchanged, performing his duties with his slow meticulous care. But within him smoldered something of which he himself grew afraid, and at times he found himself gazing at hisidle hands on the desk before him as though they were not his hands, wondering dully at them and at what they were- capable, nay importunate, to do. And day by day that lust and fear and despair that moiled within him merged, becoming desperation—a thing blind and vicious and hopeless, like that of a Cornered rat. And always, if he but raised his head and looked toward the window, there was the boy watching him with bland and innocent eye? beneath the pale straw of his hair. Sometimes he blinked; then the boy was gone; sometimes not. So he could never tell whether the face had been there at all, or whether it was merely another face swum momentarily from out the seething of his mind. In the meanwhile he wrote another letter.

7

Miss Jenny’s exasperation and rage when old Bayard arrived that afternoon was unbounded. “You stubborn old fool,” she stormed. “Can’t Bayard kill you fast enough, that you’ve got to let that old quack of a Will Falls give you blood poisoning? After what Dr. Alford told you, when even Loosh Peabody, who thinks- a course of quinine or calomel will cure anything from a broken neck to chilblains, agreed with him? I’ll declare, sometimes I just lose all patience with you folks; wonder what crime I seem to be expiating by having to live with you. Soon as Bayard sort of quiets down and I can quit jumping every time the ‘phone rings, you have to go and let that old pauper daub your face up with axle grease and lamp black. I’m a good mind to pack up and get out, and start life over again in some place where they never heard of a Sartoris.” She raged andstormed on; old Bayard raged in reply, with violent words and profane, and their voices swelled and surged through the house until Simon and Elnora in the kitchen moved about with furtive hushed sounds. Finally old Bayard tramped from the house and mounted his horse and rode away, leaving Miss Jenny to wear her rage out upon the empty air, and then therewas peace for a time.

But at supper the storm brewed and burst again. Simon within the butler’s pantry could hear them beyond the swing door, and young Bayard’s voice too, trying to shout them down. “Let up, let up,” he howled. “For God’s sake. I can’t hear myself chew.”

“And you’re another one.” Miss Jenny turned promptly on him. “You’re just as trying as he is. You and your stiff-necked, sullen ways. Helling around the country in that car just because you think there may be somebody who cares whether or not you break your worthless neck, and then coming into the supper table smelling like a stable-hand! Just because you went to a war. Do you think nobody else ever went to a war? Do you reckon that when my Bayard came back from The War, he made a nuisance of himself to everybody that had to live with him? But he was a gentleman: he raised the devil like a gentleman, not like you Mississippi country people. Clodhoppers. Look what he did with just a horse,”she added. “He didn’t have any flying machine.”

“Look at the little two-bit warhewent to,” young Bayard rejoined. “A war that was so sorry that grandfather wouldn’t stay up there in Virginia where it was, even.”

“And nobody wanted him at it,” Miss Jenny retorted. “A man that would get mad just because his men deposed him and elected a better colonel in hisplace. Got mad and came back to the country to lead a bunch of brigands.”

“Little two-bit war;,” young Bayard repeated. “And on a horse. Anybody can go to a war on a horse. No chance for him to do anything much.”

“Atleast he got himself decently killed,” Miss Jenny snapped. “He did more with a horse than you could do with that aeroplane.”

“Sho,” Simon breathed against the pantry door. “Ain’t dey gwine it? Takes white folks to sho’‘noughquoil.” And so it surged and ebbed through the succeeding days; wore itself out, then surged again when old Bayard returned home with another application of old man Falls’ paste. But by this time Simon was having troubles of his own, troubles which he finally consulted old Bayard about one afternoon. Young Bayard was laid up in bed with his crushed ribs, with: Miss Jenny mothering him with violent and cherishing affection, and Miss Benbow to visit with him and read aloud to him; and Simon came into his own again. The tophat and the duster came down from the nail, and old Bayard’s cigars depleted daily by one, and the fat matched horses spent their accumulated laziness and insolence between home and the bank, before which Simon swung them to a halt each afternoon as of old, with his clamped cigar and his smartly furled whip and all the theatrics of the fine moment. “De ottomobile,” Simon philosophized, “is all right for pleasure and excitement, but fer de genu-wine gen’lmun tone, dey ain’t but one thing: dat’s hosses.”