William Faulkner - Flags in the Dust

On the other side of the road a ravine dropped sheer away, among-scrub cedars and corroded ridges skeletoned brittly with frost and muddy ice where the sun had not yet reached; the rear end of the carhung timelessly over this before it swung again, with the power full on, swung on until its nose pointed downhill again, with never a slackening of its speed. But still it would not come into the ruts again and it had lost the crown of the road, and though they had almost reached the foot of the hill, Bayard saw they would not make it. just before the rear wheel slipped off he wrenched the steering wheel over and swung the nose straight over the bank, and the car poised lazily for a moment, as though taking bread. “Hang on,” he shouted to his grandfather. Then they plunged.

An interval utterly without sound and in which all sensation of motion was lost. Then scrub cedar burst crackling about them and whipping branches of it exploded upon the nose of the car and slapped viciously at them as they sat with braced feet, and the car slewed in a long bounce. Another vacuum-like interval, then a shock that banged the wheel into Bayard’s chest and wrenched it in his tight hands, wrenched his arm-socket. Beside him his grandfather lurched forward and he threw out his arm just in time to keep the other from crashing through the windshield. “Hang on,” he shouted again. The car had never faltered and he dragged the leaping wheel over and swung it down the ravine arid opened the engine again, and with the engine and the momentum of the pilings they crashed on down the ravine ‘ and turned and heaved up the now shallow bank and onto the road again. Bayard brought it to a stop.

He sat motionless for a moment, “Whew,” he said. And then: “Great God in the mountain.” His grandfather sat quietly beside him, his hand still on the door and his head bent a little. “Think I’ll have a cigarette, after that,” Bayard added. He found one in his pocket, and a match; his hands were shaking. “Ithought of that damn concrete bridge again, just as she went over,” he explained, a little apologetically. He took a deep draught at his cigarette and glanced at his grandfather. “Y’all right?” Old Bayard made no reply, and with the cigarette poised, Bayard looked at him. He sat as before, his head bent a little and his hand on the door. “Grandfather?” Bayard said sharply. Still old Bayard didn’t move, even when his grandson flung the cigarette away and shook him roughly.

5

Up the last hill the tireless pony bore him, and in the low December sun their shadow fell longly across the hardwood ridge and into the valley, from which the high, shrill yapping of the dogs came again upon the frosty windless air. Young dogs, Bayard told himself, and he sat his horse in the faint scar of the road, listening as the high breathless hysteria of them swept echoing across his aural field though the race itself was hidden beyond the trees. Motionless, he could feel frost in the air. Above him the pines, though there was no wind in them, made a continuous dry, wild sound; above them against the high evening blue, a shallow V of geese slid. There’ll be ice tonight, he thought, thinking of black backwaters where they would come to rest, of rank bayonets of dead grasses about which the water would shrink soon in the brittle darkness, in fixed glassy ripples. Behind him the earth rolled away ridge on ridge blue as woodsmoke, on into a sky like thin congealed blood. He turned in his saddle and stared unwinking into the bloody west against which the sun spread like a crimson egg broken upon the ultimate hills.

That meant weather: he snuffed the motionless tingling air, hoping he smelled snow.

The pony snorted and tossed ins head experimentally, and found the reins were slack and lowered his head and snorted again into the dead leaves and the delicate sere needles of pine at his feet. “Come up, Perry,” Bayard said, jerking the reins. Perry raised his head and broke into a stiff, jolting trot, but Bayard lifted him out of it and curbed him again into his steady foxtrot. The sound of the dogs had ceased, but he had not gone far when they broke again into clamorous uproar to his left, and suddenly near, and as he reined Perry back and peered ahead along the quiet, fading scar of it, he saw the fox trotting sedately toward him in the middle of the road. Perry saw it at the same time and laid his fine ears back and rolled his young eyes. But the animal came on, placidly unawares at its steady, unhurried trot, glancing back over its shoulder from time to time. ‘Well, PU be damned,’’ Bayard whispered, holding Perry rigid between his knees. The fox was not forty yards away, yet still it came on, seemingly utterly unaware of the man and horse. Then Bayard shouted.

The fox glanced at him;;the level sun swam redly and fleetingly in its eyes, then with a single modest flash of brown it was gone. Bayard expelled his breath: his heart was thumping against his ribs. “Whooy,” he yelled. “Come on, dogs!” The dogs heard him and their din swelled to a shrill pandemonium and the pack swarmed wildly into the road in a mad chaos of spotted hides and flapping ears and tongues, and surged toward him. None of them was more than half grown, and ignoring the horse and rider they burst still clamoring into the undergrowth where the fox had vanished and shrieked frantically on; and as Bayard stood in his stirrups and peeredafter them, preceded by yapping in a yet higher and more frantic key, two even smaller puppies moiled out of the woods and galloped past him on their short legs with whimpering cries and expressions of ludicrous and mad concern. Then the clamor died into hysterical echoes, and so away.

He rode on. On either hand were hills: the one darkling like a bronze bastion, upon the other the final rays of the sun lay redly. The air crackled with frost and tingled in his nostrils and seared his lungs with fiery, exhilarating needles. The road followed the valley; but half the sun now showed above the western wall, and among trees stark as the bars of a grate, he rode stirrup-deep in shadow like cold water. He would just about reach the house before dark. The clamor of the dogs swelled again ahead of him, approaching the road again, and he lifted Perry into a canter.

Presently before him lay a glade—an old field, sedge-grown, its plow-scars long healed over. The sun filled it with dying light, and he pulled Perry short upstanding: there, at the corner of the field beside the road, sat the fox. It sat there like a tame dog, watching the woods across the glade, and Bayard shook Perry forward again. The fox turned its head and looked at him with a covert, fleeting glance, but without alarm, and Bayard stopped again in intense astonishment. The clamor of the dogs swept nearer through the woods, yet still the fox sat on its haunches, watching the man with-covert quick glances. It revealed no alarm whatever, not even when the puppies burst yapping madly from the trees. They moiled at the wood’s edge for a time while the fox watched them. The largest one, evidently the leader, saw the quarry. Immediately they ceased their noise and trotted across the glade andsquatted in a circle facing the fox, their tongues lolling. Then with one accord they all faced about and watched the darkening woods, from which and nearer and nearer, came that spent yapping in a higher key and interspersed with whimpering. The leader barked once; the yapping among the trees swelled with frantic relief and the two smaller puppies burst forth and burrowed like moles through the sedge and came up. Then the fox rose and cast another quick, covert glance at the horseman, and surrounded by the amicable weary calico of the puppies, trotted across the glade and vanished among the darkening trees. “Well, I’ll be damned,” Bayard said. “Come up, Perry.”