William Faulkner - Flags in the Dust

“But you aren’t going to drive it fast anymore,” she reminded him. He lay still, his cigarette burning in his fingers. “You promised,” she insisted.

“When did I promise?”

“Don’t you remember? That...afternoon, when they were...”

“When I scared you?” She sat watching him with her grave troubled eyes. “Come here,” he said. She rose and went to the bed and he took her hand.

“You won’t drive it fast again?” she persisted.

“No,” he answered, “I promise.” And they were still so, her hand in his. The curtains stirred in the breeze, and the leaves on the branch beyond the window twinkled and turned and lisped against one another. Sunset was not far away; it would cease then. He moved.

“Narcissa,” he said, and she looked at him. “Lean your face down here.”

She looked away, and for a while there was no movement, no sound between them.

“I must go,” she said at last, quietly, and he released her hand .

His cast was gone, and he was up and about again, moving a little gingerly, it is true; but already Miss Jenny was beginning to contemplate him a little anxiously. “If we could just arrange to have one of his minor bones broken every month or so, just enough to keep him in the house...”she said.

“That won’t be necessary,” Narcissa told her. “He’s going to behave from now on.”

“How do you know?” Miss Jenny demanded. “What in the world makes you think that?”

“He promised he would.”

“He’ll promise anything when he’s flat on his back,” Miss Jenny retorted. “They all will; always have. But what makes you think he will?”

“He promised me he would,” Narcissa answered serenely.

His first act was to see about his car. It had been pulled into town and patched up after a fashion until it would run under its own power, but it would be necessary to take it to Memphis to have the frame straightened and the body repaired. Bayard was all for doing this himself, fresh-knit ribs and all, but Miss Jenny put her foot down and after a furious half hour, he was vanquished. And so the car was driven in to Memphis by a youth who hung around one of the garages in town. “Narcissa’ll take you driving in her car, if you must ride,” Miss Jenny told him.

“In that little peanut parcher?” Bayard said derisively. “It won’t do more than twenty-one miles an hour.”

“No, thank God,” Miss Jenny answered. “And I’ve written to Memphis and asked ‘em to fix yours so it’ll run just like that, too”

Bayard stared at her with slow and humorless bleakness. “Did you do any such damn thing as that?”

“Oh, take him away, Narcissa,” Miss Jenny exclaimed.“Get him out of my sight. I’m so tired of looking at you.”

But he wouldn’t ride in Narcissa’s car at first. He missed no opportunity to speak of it with heavy, facetious disparagement, but he wouldn’t ride in it Dr. Alford had evolved a tight rubber bandage for his chest so that he could ride a horse, but he had developed an astonishing propensity for lounging about the house when Narcissa was there. And Narcissa came quite often. Miss Jenny thought that it was on Bayard’s account and pinned the guest down in her forthright way; whereupon Narcissa told her about Horace and Belle while Miss Jenny sat indomitably erect on her straight chair beside the piano.

“Poor child,” she said, and “Lord, ain’t they fools?” and then: “Well, you’re right; I wouldn’t marry one of ‘em either.”

“I’m not,” Narcissa answered. “I wish there weren’t any of them in the world.”

Miss Jenny said, “Hmph.”

And then one afternoon they were in Narcissa’s car and Bayard was driving, over Narcissa’s protest atfirst. But he was behaving himself quite sensibly, and. at last she relaxed They drove down the valley road andturned off toward the hills, where the road mounted presently in long curves among dark pines in the slanting afternoon. The road wound on, with changing sunshot vistas of the valley and the opposite hills beyond at every turn, and always the sombre pines and their faint exhilarating odor. At last they topped a hill Below them the road sank, then flattened away toward a line of willows, crossed a stone bridge and rose again curving redly from sight among the pines.

“There’s the place,” he said.

“The place?” she repeated dreamily, rousing; then as the car rolled forward again, gaining speed, she understood. “You promised,” she cried, but he jerked the throttle all the way down its ratchet and she clutched him and tried to scream. But she could make no sound, nor could, she shut her eyes as the harrow bridge hurtleddancing toward them. And then her heart stopped and her breath as they flashed with a sharp reverberation like hail on a tin roof, between willows and a crashing glint of water and shot on up the next hill. The small car swayed on the curve, lost its footing and went into the ditch, bounded out and hurled across the road. Then Bayard straightened it out and with diminishing speed it rocked on up the hill, and at the top he stopped it. She sat beside him, with her bloodless mouth open, beseeching him with her wide hopeless eyes. Then she caught her breath, wailing.

“I didn’t mean—” he began awkwardly. “I just wanted to see if I could do it,” and he put his arms around her and sheclung to him, moving her hands crazily about his shoulders. “I didn’t mean—” he essayed again, and then her crazed hands wereon his face and she was sobbing wildly against his month.

10

Through the morning hours and following his sleepless night, he bent over his desk beneath the green-shaded fight; penning his neat; meticulous figures into the ledgers. The routine of the bank went on; old Bayard sat in his tilted chair in the fresh August morning while passers went to and fro, greeting him with florid cheerful gestures and receiving in return his half military salute—people cheerful and happy with their orderly affairs; the cashier served the morning line of depositors and swapped jovial anecdote with them. For this was the summer cool spell and there was a vividness in the air, a presage of the golden days of frost and yellowing persimmons in the worn-out fields, and of sweet small grapes in the. matted vines along the sandy branches, and the scent of cooking sorghum upon the smoky air. But the Snopes crouched over his desk after his sleepless night, with jealousy and thwarted desire and furious impotent rage in his vitals.

EGs head felt hot and dull, and heavy, and to the cashier’s surprise, he offered to buy the Coca-Colas, ordering two for himself, drank them one after the other and returned to his ledgers. So the morning wore away. His neat figures accumulated slowly in the ruled columns, steadily and, with a maddening aloofness from his own turmoil and without a mistake although his mind coiled and coiled upon itself, tormenting him with fleeing obscene images in which she moved with another. He had thought it dreadful when he was not certain that there was another; but now to know it, to find knowledge of it on every tongue...and young Sartoris, at that: a man whom he had hated instinctively with all his sense of inferiority and all the venom of his worm-like nature. Married, married. Adultery, concealed if suspected, he could have borne; but this, boldly, in the world’s face, flouring him with his own impotence...He dug a cheap, soiled handkerchief from his hip pocket and wiped the saliva from his jaws;

By changing his position a little he could see old Bayard, could catch a glint of his white suit where he sat oblivious in the door. There was a sort of fascination in the old fellow now, serving as he did as an object upon which theSnopes could ventthe secret, vicarious rage of his half-insane mind. And all during the morning he watched the other covertly; once old Bayard entered the cage and passed within arm’s length of him, and when he moved his hand to wipe his drooling mouth, he found that the page had adhered to his wrist, blotting the last entry he had made. With his knife blade he erased the smear and rewrote it,