William Faulkner - Flags in the Dust

8

She passed from the fresh, hot morning into the cool hall, where Simon uselessly and importantly proprietorial with a duster, bobbed his head to her. “Dey done gone to Memphis today,” he told her, “but Mist’ Bayard waitin’ fer you. Walk right up, missy.”

“Thank you,” she said, and she went on and mounted the stairs and left Mm busily wafting dust from one surface to another and then back again. The stairs curved onward into the upper hall and she mounted into a steady drift of air that blew through the open doors at the end of the hall; through these doors she could see a segment of blue dissolving lulls and salt-colored sky. At Bayard’s door she stopped and stood there for a time, clasping the book to her breast.

The house, despite Simon’s activity in the hall below, was a little portentously quiet, without the reassurance of Miss Jenny’s bustling presence and the cold ubiquity of her scolding. Faint sounds reached her from far away—out-of-doors sounds whose final drowsy reverberations drifted into the house on thevivid July air; sounds too somnolent and remote to the away.

But from the room before her no sound came at all Perhaps he was asleep; and the initial impulse—her given word, and the fortitude of her desperate heart which had enabled her to come out despite Miss Jenny’s absence—having served its purpose and deserted her, she stood just without the door, hoping that he was asleep, that he would sleep all day. Thus she found that she could still hope, and found in this fact a thin and derisive amusement.

But she would have to enter the room in order to find out if he slept, so she touched her hands to her face, as though by that she would restore to it its wonted serene repose for him to see, and entered.

“Simon?” Bayard said, having felt her presence through that sharpened sixth sense of the sick He lay onhis back, his hands beneath his head, gazing out the window, and she paused again just inside the door. At last; roused by her silence, he turned his head and Jus bleak gaze. “Well, I’ll be damned. I didn’t believe you’d come out today.”

“Yes,” she answered. “How do you feel?”

“Not after the way you sit with one foot in the hall all the time Aunt Jenny’s out of the room,” he continued. “Did she make you come out?”

“She asked me to come out. She doesn’t want you tobe alone all day, with just Simon in the house. Do you feel better today?”

“So?” he drawled. “Won’t you sit down, then?” She crossed to where her customary chair had been moved into a corner and drew it across the floor. He lay with his head cradled in his hands, watching her as she turned the chair about and seated herself. “What do you think about it?”

“About what?”

“About coming out to keep me company?”

“I’ve brought a new book,” she said evasively: “One H—one I just got. I hope you’ll like this one.”

“I hope so,” he agreed, but without conviction. “Seems like I’d like one after a while, doesn’t it? But what do you think about coming out here today?”

“I don’t think a sick person should be left alone with just negroes around. The name of this one is—”

“Why not send a nurse out, then? No use your coming, way out here.” She met his gaze at last, with her grave desperate eyes. “Why do you come, when you don’t want to?” he persisted.

“I don’t mind,” she answered hopelessly. She freed her gaze with an effort and opened the book. “The name of this one is—”

“Don’t,” he interrupted. “I’ll have to listen to that damn thing all day. Let’s talk a while.” But she presented him now the dark crown of her head, and her hands were motionless upon the book on her knees. “What makes you afraid to talk to me?” he demanded.

“Afraid?” she repeated, with her head bent above the book. “Had you rather I’d go?”

“What? No, dammit. I want you to be human for one time and talk to me. Come over here.” She would not look at him, but she could feel the moody, leashed violence of him like a steady glare of light beneath which she shrank and recoiled, and despite the assurance of his helpless immobility she was swept by sudden and unreasoning fear, and she raised her hands between them though he lay two yards away and helpless on his back. “Come over here closer,” he commanded. She rose, clutching the book.

“I’m going,” she said “I’ll tell Simon to stay where he can hear you call. Goodbye.”

“Here,” he exclaimed.She went swiftly to the door.

“Goodbye.”

“After what you just said; about leaving me alone with just niggers on the place?” She paused at the door, and he added with cold cunning: “After what Aunt Jenny told you? What’ll I tell her, tonight? Why are you afraid of a man flat on his back, in a damn cast-iron strait-jacket, anyway?” But she only looked at him with her desperate, hopeless eyes; “All right, dammit,” lie said violently. “Go, then.” And he jerked his head savagely on the pillow and stared again out the window while she returned to her chair. He said, mildly: “What’s the name of this one?” She told him. “Let her go, then. I reckon I’ll be asleep soon, anyway.”

She opened the book and began to read, swiftly, as though she were crouching behind the screen of words her voice raised between them. She read steadily on, her head bent over the book. She finished a sentence and stopped and sat utterly still above the book, but almost immediately he spoke. “Go on; I’m still here. Better luck next time.”

The forenoon passed on. Somewhere a clock rang the quarter hours, but saving this there was no sound from the other parts of the house. Simon’s activity below stairs had long ceased, but a murmur of voices reached her at intervals from somewhere, murmurously indistinguishable. The leaves on the tree beyond the window did not stir in the hot air, and upon it a myriad noises blended in a drowsy monotone— the negroes’ voices, sounds of stock from the barnyard, the rhythmic groaning of the water pump; a sudden cacophony of fowls in the garden beneath the window interspersed with Isom’s meaningless cries as he drove them out.

He was asleep now, and as she realized this she realized also that she did not know just when she had stopped reading. And she sat with the page open upon her knees, a page whose words left no echoes whatever in her mind, watching his calm face. It was again like a bronze made, purged by illness of the heat of its violence, yet with the violence still slumbering there and only refined a little.

She sat with the book open upon her lap, her hands lying motionless upon the opened page, gazing out the window. The curtains stirred faintly, and in the branches of the tree athwart the window the leaves twinkled lighdy beneath the intermittent fingers of the sun.

The clock rang again: a sound cool as stroked silver in the silent house, and preceded by cautious, stertorious breathing someone crept up the stairs, and after more surreptitious sounds Simon peered his disembodied head, like that of the curious and wizened grandfather of all apes, around the door. “Is you ‘sleep, Mist? Bayard?” he said in a loud, rasping tone.

“Shhhhhhhh,” she cautionedhim. “What is it?”

“Ef he ‘sleep, I don’t reckon he wants no dinnernow, do he?” Simon rasped.

“Be quiet. You’ll have to keep it until he wakes.”

“Yessum, I ‘speck so,” Simon agreed, lowering his voice a little. He entered on tiptoe, and while Narcissa watched him in mounting exasperation arid alarm, he scuffed across to the table with sounds as of a huge rat.

“What are you going to do?” she whispered. “You’d better go and tell Elnora to keep his dinner for him. I’ll call you when he wakes.”