William Faulkner - Flags in the Dust

The sun waked him, falling in red bars through the cracks in the wall, and he lay for a time in his hard bed, with vivid chill upon his face like fresh city water, wondering where he was. Then he remembered, and moving, found that he was stiff with stale cold and that his blood moved through his arms and legs in small pellets like bird-shot. He dragged his legs from his odorous bed, but within his boots his feet were dead, and he sat flexing his knees and ankles for some time before his feet waked as with stinging needles. His movements were stiff and awkward, and he descended the ladder slowly and gingerly into the red sun that fell like a blare of trumpets into the hallway. The sun was just above the horizon, huge and red; and housetop, fenceposts, the casual farming tools rusting about the barnyard and the dead cotton stalks where the negro had farmed his land right up to his back door, were dusted over with frost which the sun changed to a scintillant rosy icing like that on a festive cake. Perry thrust his slender muzzle across the stall door and whinnied at his master with vaporous fading puffs of frosty breath, and Bayard spoke to him and touched his cold nose. Then he uncovered the jug again and. drank, and the negro with a milk pail appeared hi the doorway.

“Mawnin’ whitefolks. You g’awn to de house to de fire. I’ll feed yo’ hawss. De ole woman got yo’ breakfus’ ready.” He was eyeing the jug and Bayard gave him another drink and picked up the sack. Atthe well he stopped and drew a pail of icy water and splashed his face.

A fire burned on the broken hearth, amid ashes and charred wood-ends and a litter of cooking vessels. Bayard shut the door behind him, upon the bright cold, and warmth and rich, stale rankness enveloped him. A woman bent over the fire replied to his greeting diffidently. Three pickaninnies became utterly still in a corner and watched him with rolling white eyes. One of them was a girl in greasy, nondescript garments, her wool twisted into tight knots of soiled wisps of colored cloth. The second one might have been either or anything. The third one was practically helpless in a garment made from a man’s suit of wool underclothes. It was too small to walk and it crawled about the floor in a sort of intense purposelessness, a glazed path running from either nostril to its chin, as though snails had crawled there.

Without looking at him the woman placed a chair before the fire, and Bayard seated himself and thrust his boots to the blaze. “Had your Christmas dram yet, aunty?” he asked.

“Naw,suh.Ain’t got none, dis year.”

He swung the sack across his legs and set it on the floor. “Help yourself,” he said. “Plenty in there.” The three children squatted against the wall, watching him steadily, without movement and without sound. “Christmas come yet, chillen?” he asked them. But they only stared at him with the watchful gravity of animals until the woman returned and spoke to than in a chiding tone.

“Show de whitefolks yo’ Sandy Claus,” she prompted. “Thanky, suh,” she added, putting a tin plate on his lap and setting a cracked china cup on the hearth at his feet “Show ‘im,” she repeated.

“You want folks to think Sandy Claus don’t know whar you lives at?”

The children stirred then, and from the shadow behind them, where they had hidden them when he entered, they produced a small tin automobile, a string of colored wooden beads, a small mirror and a huge stick of peppermint candy to which trash adhered and which they immediately fell to licking gravely, turn and turn about. The woman filled the cup from the coffee pot set among the embers, and she uncovered an iron skillet and forked a thick slab of sizzling meat onto his plate, and raked a grayish object from the ashes and dusted it off and put that too on his plate. Bayard ate his side meat and hoecake and drank the thin, tasteless liquid. The children now played quietly with their Christmas, but from time to time he looked up and found them watching him again. Presently the man entered with his pail of milk.

“Ole ‘oman give you a snack?” he asked.

“Ye. What’s the nearest town on the railroad?” he inquired. The other told him—eight miles away. “Can you drive me over there this morning, and take my horse back to MacCallum’s some day this week?”

“My brudder-in-law bor’d my mules,” the negro answered readily. “I ain’t got but de one span, and he done bor’d dem.”

“I’ll pay you five dollars.”

The negro set thepail down, and the woman came and got it. He scratched his head slowly. “Five dollars,” Bayard repeated.

“You’s in a pow’ful rush, fer Chris’mus, white-folks.”

“Ten dollars;” Bayard said impatiently; “Can’t you get your mules from your brother-in-law?”

“I reckon so. I reckon he’ll bring ‘um back. By dinnertime. We kin go den.”

“Why can’t you get ‘em now? Take my horse and go get’em. I want to catch a train.”

“I ain’t had no Chris’mus yit, whitefolks. Feller workin’ ev’y day of de year wants a little Chris’mus.”

Bayard swore beneath his breath, but he said: “All right, then. After dinner. But you see your brother-in-law has’em back here in time.”

“He’ll be here: don’tyou worry about dat.”

“All right . You and aunty help yourselves to the jug.”

“Thanky,suh.”

The stale, airtight room dulled him; the warmth was insidious to his bones wearied and stiff after the chill night. The negroes moved about the single room, the woman busy at the hearth with her cooking, the pickaninnies with their frugal and sorry gewgaws and filthy candy. Bayard sat in his chair and dozed the morning away. Not asleep, but time was lost in a timeless region where he lingered unawake and into which he realized after a long while that something was trying to penetrate; watched the vain attempts with peaceful detachment. But at last it succeeded: a voice. “Dinner ready.”

The negroes drank with him again, amicably, a little diffidently—two opposed concepts antipathetic by race, blood, nature and environment, touching for a moment and fused within the illusion of a contradiction—humankind forgetting its lust and cowardice and greed for a day. Then dinner: ‘possum with yams, more gray ashcake, the dead and tasteless liquid in the coffee pot; a dozen bananas and jagged shards of cocoanut, the children crawling about his feet like animals scenting food. He realized that theywere holding back until he ate, but he overrode them; and at last (the mules having been miraculously returned by a yet incorporeal brother-in-law) with his depleted jug between his feet in the wagon bed, he looked once back at the cabin, with the woman standing in the door and a pale windless drift of smoke above its chimney.

Against the mules’ gaunt ribs the broken harness rattled and jingled. The air was warm, yet laced too with a thin distillation of chill that darkness would increase. The road went on across the bright land. From time to time across the shining sedge or from beyond brown and leafless woods, came the flat reports of guns; occasionally they passed other teams or horsemen or pedestrians, who lifted dark restful hands to the negro buttoned into an army overcoat, with brief covert glances for the white man on the seat beside him. “Heyo, Chris’mus!” Beyond the yellow sedge and the brown leafless ridges the ultimate hills stood bluely against the immaculate sky. “Heyo.”

They stopped and drank, and Bayard gave his companion a cigarette. The sun behind them now; no cloud, no wind in the serene pale cobalt. “Shawt days! Fo’ mile mo’. Come up, mules.” Between motionless willows, stubbornly green, a dry clatter of loose planks above water in murmurous flashes. The road lifted redly; pines stood against the sky. They crested this, and a plateau rolled away before them with its pattern of burnished sedge and fallow fields and brown woodland, and now and then a house, on into a shimmering azure haze, and low down on the horizon, smoke. “Two mile, now.” Behind them the sun was a balloon tethered an hour above the trees. They drank again.