William Faulkner - Flags in the Dust

At last a pale and windless plume of smoke stood above the trees, against the sky, and in the rambling, mud-chinked wall a window glowed with ruddy invitation across the twilight Dogs had already set up a resonant, bell-like uproar; above it Bayard could distinguish the dear tenor of puppies and a voice shouting at them, and as he pulled Perry to a halt in the yard, the fox was vanishing diffidently but without haste beneath the back porch. A lean figure faced him in the dusk, with an axe in one hand and an armful of wood, and Bayard said:

“What the devil’s that thing, Buddy? That fox?”

“That’s Ethel,” Buddy answered. He put the wood down deliberately, and the axe, and he came and shook Bayard’s hand once, limply, in the country fashion, but his hand was hard and firm. “How you?”

“All right,” Bayard answered. “I came out to get that old fox Rafe was telling me about.”

“Sure,” Buddy agreed in his Slow, infrequent voice. “We been expectin’ you. Git down and lemme take yo’pony.”

“No, I’ll do it. You take the wood on in; I’ll putPerry up.” But Buddy was firm, without insistence or rudeness, and Bayard surrendered the horse to him. :

“Henry,” Buddy shouted toward the house, “Henry.” A door opened upon jolly leaping flames; a figure stood squatly in it.“Here’s Bayard,” Buddy said. “Go on in and warm,” he added, leading the horse away. Dogs surrounded him; he picked up the wood and the axe and moved toward the house in a ghostly surge of dogs, and the figure stood in the door while he mounted the veranda and leaned the axe against the wall.

“How you?” Henry said, and again the handshake was limp; again the hand was firm and kind, harsher though than Buddy’s hard young flesh. He relieved Bayard of the wood and they entered the house. The walls were of chinked logs; upon them bung two colored outdated calendars and a patent medicine lithograph. The floor was bare, of hand-trimmed boards scuffed with heavy boots and polished by the pads of generations of dogs; two men could lie side by side in the fireplace. In it now four-foot logs blazed against the clay fireback, swirling in wild plumes into the chimney’s dark maw, and in silhouette against it, his head haloed by the fine shaggy disorder of his hair, Virginius MacCallum sat.“Hyer’s Bayard Sartoris, pappy,” Henry said.

The old man turned in his chair with grave, leonine deliberation and extended his hand without rising. In 1861 he was sixteen and he walked to Lexington, Virginia, and enlisted, served four years in the Stonewall brigade and walked back to Mississippi and built himself a house and got married. His wife’s dot was a clock and a dressed hog; his own father gave them a mule. His wife was dead these many years, and her successor was dead, but he satnow before the fireplace at which that hog had been cooked, beneath the roof he had built in ‘66, and on the mantel above him the clock sat, deriding that time whose creature it had once been. ‘Well, boy?” he said. “You took yo’ time about comin’. How’s yo’ folks?”

“Pretty well, sir,” Bayard answered. He looked at the old man’s hale, ruddy face intently and sharply. No, they hadn’t heard yet.

“We been expectin’ you ever since Rafe seen you in town last spring. Hyer, Henry, tell Mandy to set another plate.”

Four dogs had followed him into the room. Three of them watched him gravely with glowing eyes; the other one, a blue-ticked hound with an expression of majestic gravity, came up and touched its cold nose to his head “Hi, Gen’ral,” he said, rubbing its ears, whereupon the other dogs approached and thrust their noses against his hands.

“Pull up a cheer,”Mr. MacCallum said. He squared his own chair around and Bayard obeyed, and the dogs followed him, surging with blundering decorum about his knees, “I keep sendin’ word in to git yo’ gran’pappy out hyer,” the old man continued, “but he’s too ‘tarnal proud, or too damn lazy to come. Hyer, Gen’ral! Git away from thar. Kick ‘em away, Bayard. Henry!” he shouted. Henry appeared “Take these hyer damn dawgs out till after supper.”

Henry drove the dogs from the room. Mr. MacCallum picked up a long pine sliver from the hearth and fired it and lit his pipe, and smothered the sliver in the ashes and laid it on the hearth again. “Rafe and Lee air in town today,” he said. “You could have come out in the waggin with them. But I reckon you’d ruther have yo’own hoss.”

“Yes, sir,” he answered quietly. Then they would. know. He stared into the fee for a time, robbing his hands slowly on his knees, and for an instant he saw the recent months of his life coldly in all their headlong and heedless wastefulness; saw it like the swift unrolling of a film, culminating in that which any fool might have foreseen. Well, dammit, suppose it had: was he to blame? had he insisted that his grandfather ride with him? had he given the old fellow a bum heart? And then, coldly: you were scared to go home. You made a nigger sneak your horse out for yon. Yon, who deliberately do things your judgment tells you may not be successful, even possible, are afraid to face the consequences of your own acts. Then again something bitter and deep and sleepless in him blazed out in vindication and justification and accusation; what, he knew not, blazing out at what. Whom, he did not know: You did it! You caused it all: you killed Johnny.

Henry had drawn a chair up to the fire, and after a while the old man tapped his clay pipe carefully out against his palm and drew a huge, turnip-shaped silver watch from his corduroy vest “Half after five,” he said. “Ain’t them boys come yet?”

“They’re here,” Henry answered briefly. “Heard ‘em takin’ out when I put out the dawgs.”

“Git the jug, then,” his father ordered. Henry rose and departed again, and feet clumped heavily on the porch and Bayard turned in his chair and stared bleakly at the door. It opened and Rafe and Lee entered

“Well, well,” Rafe said, and his lean dark face lighted a little. “Got here at last, did you?” He shook Bayard’s hand, and Lee followed him. Lee’s face, like all of them, was a dark, saturnine mask. He was not so stocky as Rafe, and least talkative of them all. Hiseyes were black and restless; behind them livedsomething quick and wild and sad: he shook Bayard’shand without a word.

But Bayard was watching Rafe. There was nothing in Rafe’s face; no coldness, no questioning—Was it possible that he could have been to town, and not heard? Or had Bayard himself dreamed it? But he remembered that unmistakable feel of his grandfather when he had touched him, remembered how he had suddenly slumped as though the very fibre of him, knit so erect and firm for so long by pride and by his unflagging and hopeless struggling against the curse of his name, had given way all at once, letting his skeleton rest at last Mr. MacCallum spoke.

“Did you go by the express office?”

“We never got to town,” Rafe answered. “Axle tree broke just this side of Vernon. Had to uncouple the wagon and drive to Vernon and get it patched up. Too late to go in, then. We got our supplies there and come on home.”

“Well, no matter. You’ll be goin’ in next week, for Christmas,” the old man said, and upon a breath of vivid darkness Buddy entered and came and squatted leanly in the shadowy chimneycorner.

“Got that fox you were telling me about hid out yet?” Bayard asked Rafe.

“Sure. And we’ll get ‘im, this time. Maybe tomorrow. Weather’s changin’.”

“Snow?”

“Might be. What’s it goin’ to do tonight, pappy?”

“Rain,”the old man answered. “Tomorrow, too. Scent won’t lay good until Wen’sday. Henry!” After a moment he shouted Henry again, and Henry entered, with a blackened steaming kettle and a stoneware jug and a thick tumbler with a metal spoon in it. There was somethingdomestic, womanish, aboutHenry, with his squatslightly tubby figure and his mild brown eyes and his capable, unhurried hands. He it was who superintended the kitchen (he was a better cook now than Mandy) and the house, where he could be found most of the day, pottering soberly at some endless task. He visited town almost as infrequently as his father; he cared little for hunting, and his sole relaxation was making whisky, good whisky, in a secret fastness known only to his father and to the negro who assisted him, after a recipe handed down from lost generations of his dour and uncommunicative forbears. He set the kettle and the jug and the tumbler on the hearth, and took the clay pipe from his father’s hand and put it on the mantel, and reached down a cracked tumbler of sugar and seven glasses, each with a spoon in it. The old man leaned forward into the firelight and made the toddies one by one, with tedious and sober deliberation. When he had made one around, there were two glasses left. “Ain’t them other boys come in yet?” he asked. Nobody answered, and he corked the jug. Henry set the two extra glasses back on the mantel.