Flags in the Dust (19 page)

Her appetite was gone at supper, and Aunt Sally Wyatt mouthed her prepared soft food and mumbled querulously at her because she wouldn’t eat.

“My mother saw to it that I drank a good cup of bark tea when I come sulking to the table and wouldn’t eat,” Aunt Sally stated, “but folks nowadays think the good Lord’s going to keep ’em well and them lifting no finger.”

“I’m all right,” Narcissa insisted. “I just dont want any supper.”

“That’s what you say. Let yourself get down, and Lord knows, I aint strong enough to wait on you. In my day young folks had more consideration for their elders.” She mouthed her food unprettily, querulously and monotonously retrospective, while Narcissa toyed restively with the food she could not eat.

Later Aunt Sally continued her monologue while she rocked with her interminable fancy-work on her lap. She would never divulge what it was to be when completed, nor for whom, and she had been working on it for fifteen years, carrying about with her a shapeless bag of dingy threadbare brocade containing odds and ends of colored fabric in all possible shapes. She could never bring herself to trim any of them to any pattern, so she shifted and fitted and mused and fitted and shifted them like pieces of a patient puzzle picture, trying to fit them to a pattern or to create a pattern about them without using her scissors, smoothing her colored scraps with flaccid, putty-colored fingers, shifting and shifting them. From the bosom of her dress the needle Narcissa had threaded for her dangled its spidery skein.

Across the room Narcissa sat, with a book. Aunt Sally’s voice droned on with querulous interminability while Narcissa read. Suddenly she rose and laid the book down and crossed the room and entered the alcove where her piano sat. But she had not played four bars before her hands crashed in discord, and she shut the piano and went to the telephone.

Miss Jenny thanked her for her solicitude tartly, and dared to say that Bayard was all right, still an active member of the so-called human race, that is, since they had received no official word from the coroner. No, she had heard nothing of him since Loosh Peabody had phoned her at four oclock that
Bayard was on his way home with a broken head. The broken head she readily believed, but the other part of the message she had put no credence in whatever, having lived with those damn Sartorises eighty years and knowing that home would be the last place in the world a Sartoris with a broken head would ever consider going. No, she was not even interested in his present whereabouts, and she hoped he hadn’t injured the horse? Horses were valuable animals.

Narcissa returned to the living room and explained to Aunt Sally whom she had been talking to and why, and drew a low chair to the lamp and took up her book.

“Well,” Aunt Sally said after a time, “if you aint going to talk any.…” She fumbled her scraps together and crammed them into the bag. “I thank the Lord sometimes you and Horace aint any blood of mine, the way you all go on. But if you’d drink it, I dont know who’s to get sassafras for you: I aint able to, and you wouldn’t know it from dog fennel or mullein, yourself.”

“I’m all right,” Narcissa protested.

“Go ahead,” Aunt Sally repeated, “get flat on your back, with me and that trifling nigger to take care of you. She aint wiped off a picture frame in six months, to my certain knowledge. And I’ve done everything but beg and pray.”

She rose and said goodnight and hobbled from the room. Narcissa sat and turned the pages on, hearing the other mount the stairs with measured laborious tappings of her stick, and for a while longer she sat and turned the pages of her book. But presently she flung the book away and went to the piano again, but Aunt Sally thumped on the floor overhead with her stick, and she desisted and returned to her book. So it was with actual pleasure that she greeted Dr Alford a moment later.

“I was passing and heard your piano,” he explained. “You haven’t stopped?”

She explained that Aunt Sally had gone to bed, and he sat formally and talked to her in his stiff pedantic way on cold and erudite subjects for two hours. Then he departed and she stood in the door and watched him down the drive. The moon stood overhead; along the drive cedars in a rigid curve were pointed against the pale, faintly spangled sky.

She returned to the living room and got her book and turned out the lights and mounted the stairs. Across the hall Aunt Sally snored with genteel placidity, and Narcissa stood for a moment, listening to the homely noise. I will be glad when Horry gets home, she thought, going on.

She turned on her light and undressed and took her book to bed, where she again held her consciousness submerged deliberately as you hold a puppy under water until its struggles cease. And after a time her mind surrendered to the book and she read on, pausing from time to time to think warmly of sleep, reading again. And so when the negroes first blended their instruments beneath the window, she paid them only the most perfunctory notice. Why in the world are those jellybeans serenading me? she thought with faint amusement, visioning immediately Aunt Sally in her night-cap leaning from a window and shouting them away. And she lay with the book open, seeing upon the spread page the picture she had created while the plaintive rhythm of the strings and clarinet drifted into the open window.

Then she sat bolt upright, with a sharp and utter certainty, and clapped the book shut and slipped from bed. From the adjoining room she looked down.

The negroes were grouped on the lawn: the frosted clarinet, the guitar, the sober comic bulk of the viol. At the street entrance to the drive a motor car stood in shadow. The musicians played once, then a voice called from the car, and they retreated across the lawn and the car moved away, without lights. She was certain, then: no one else would play one tune
beneath a lady’s window, just enough to waken her from sleep, then go away.

She returned to her room. The book lay face down upon the bed, but she went to the window and stood there, between the parted curtains, looking out upon the black and silver world and the peaceful night. The air moved upon her face and amid the fallen dark wings of her hair with grave coolness.… “The beast, the beast,” she whispered to herself. She let the curtains fall and on her silent feet she descended the stairs again and found the telephone in the darkness, muffling its bell when she rang.

Miss Jenny’s voice came out of the night with its usual brisk and cold asperity, and without surprise or curiosity. No, he had not returned home, for he was by now safely locked up in jail, she believed, unless the city officers were too corrupt to obey a lady’s request. Serenading? Fiddlesticks. What would he want to go serenading for? he couldn’t injure himself serenading, unless someone killed him with a flat iron or an alarm clock. And why was she concerned about him?

Narcissa hung up, and for a moment she stood in the darkness, beating her fists on the telephone’s unresponsive box. The beast, the beast.

She received three callers that night. One came formally, the second came informally, the third came anonymously. The garage which sheltered her car was a small brick building surrounded by evergreens. One side of it was a continuation of the garden wall. Beyond the wall a grass-grown lane led back to another street. The garage was about fifteen yards from the house and its roof rose to the level of the first-floor windows: Narcissa’s bedroom windows looked out upon the slate roof of it.

This third caller entered by the lane and mounted onto
the wall and thence onto the garage roof, where he now lay in the shadow of a cedar, sheltered so from the moon. He had lain there for a long time. The room facing him was dark when he arrived, but he had lain in his fastness quiet as an animal and with an animal’s patience, without movement save to occasionally raise his head and reconnoiter the immediate scene with covert dartings of his eyes.

But the room facing him remained dark while an hour passed. In the meantime a car entered the drive (he recognised it; he knew every car in town) and a man entered the house. The second hour passed and the room was still dark and the car stood yet in the drive. Then the man emerged and drove away, and a moment later the lights downstairs went out, and then the window facing him glowed and through the sheer curtains he saw her moving about the room, watched the shadowy motions of her disrobing. Then she passed out of his vision. But the light still burned and he lay with a still and infinite patience, lay so while another hour passed and another car stopped before the house and three men carrying an awkwardly shaped burden came up the drive and stood in the moonlight beneath the window; lay so until they played once and went away. When they had gone she came to the window and parted the curtains and stood for a while in the dark fallen wings of her hair, looking directly into his hidden eyes.

Then the curtains fell again, and once more she was a shadowy movement beyond them. Then the light went off, and he lay face down on the steep pitch of the roof, utterly motionless for a long time, darting from beneath his hidden face covert ceaseless glances, quick and darting and all-embracing as those of an animal.

To Narcissa’s house they came finally. They had visited the dark homes of all the other unmarried girls one by one and sat
in the car while the negroes stood on the lawn with their blended instruments. Heads had appeared at darkened windows, sometimes lights went up; once they were invited in, but Hub and Mitch hung diffidently back, once refreshment was sent out to them, once they were heartily cursed by a young man who happened to be sitting with the young lady on the dark veranda. In the meantime they had lost the breather cap, and as they moved from house to house all six of them drank fraternally from the jug, turn and turn about. At last they reached the Benbows’ and played once beneath the cedars. There was a light yet in one window, but none came to it.

The moon stood well down the sky. Its light was now a cold silver upon things, spent and a little wearied, and the world was empty as they rolled without lights along a street lifeless and fixed in black and silver as any street in the moon itself. Beneath stippled intermittent shadows they went, passed quiet intersections dissolving away, occasionally a car motionless at the curb before a house. A dog crossed the street ahead of them trotting, and went on across a lawn and so from sight, but saving this there was no movement anywhere. The square opened spaciously about the absinthe-cloudy mass of elms that surrounded the courthouse. Among them the round spaced globes were more like huge pallid grapes than ever. Above the exposed vault in each bank burned a single bulb; inside the hotel lobby, before which a row of cars was aligned, another burned. Other lights there were none.

They circled the courthouse, and a shadow moved near the hotel door and detached itself from shadow and came to the curb, a white shirt glinting within a spread coat, and as the slow car swung away toward another street, the man hailed them. Bayard stopped and the man came through the blanched dust and laid his hand on the door.

“Hi, Buck,” Mitch said. “You’re up pretty late, aint you?”

The man had a sober, good-natured horse’s face and he wore a metal star on his unbuttoned waistcoat. His coat humped slightly on his hip.

“What you boys doin’?” he asked. “Been to a dance?”

“Serenading,” Bayard answered. “Want a drink, Buck?”

“No, much obliged.” He stood with his hand on the door, gravely and goodnaturedly serious. “Aint you fellers out kind of late, yourselves?”

“It is gettin’ on,” Mitch agreed. The marshal lifted his foot to the running board. Beneath his hat his eyes were in shadow. “We’re going in now,” Mitch said. The other pondered quietly, and Bayard added:

“Sure; we’re on our way home now.”

The marshal moved his head slightly and spoke to the negroes.

“I reckon you boys are about ready to turn in, aint you?”

“Yes, suh,” the negroes answered, and they got out and lifted the viol out. Bayard gave Reno a bill and they thanked him and said goodnight and picked up the viol and departed quietly down a side street. The marshal turned his head again.

“Aint that yo’ car in front of Rogers’ café, Mitch?” he asked.

“Reckon so. That’s where I left it.”

“Well, suppose you run Hub out home, lessen he’s goin’ to stay in town tonight. Bayard better come with me.”

“Aw, hell, Buck,” Mitch protested.

“What for?” Bayard demanded.

“His folks are worried about him,” the other answered. “They aint seen hide nor hair of him since that stallion throwed him. Where’s yo’ bandage, Bayard?”

“Took it off,” he answered shortly. “See here, Buck, we’re going to put Mitch out and then Hub and me are going straight home.”

“You been on yo’ way home ever since fo’ oclock, Bayard,” the marshal replied soberly, “but you dont seem to git no nearer there. I reckon you better come with me tonight, like yo’ aunt said.”

“Did Aunt Jenny tell you to arrest me?”

“They was worried about you, son. Miss Jenny just ’phoned and asked me to kind of see if you was all right until mawnin’. So I reckon we better. You ought to went on home this evenin’.”

“Aw, have a heart, Buck,” Mitch protested.

“I ruther make Bayard mad than Miss Jenny,” the other answered patiently. “You boys go on, and Bayard better come with me.”

Mitch and Hub got out and Hub lifted out his jug and they said goodnight and went on to where Mitch’s ford stood before the restaurant. The marshal got in beside Bayard. The jail was not far. It loomed presently above its walled court, square and implacable, its slitted upper windows brutal as sabre blows. They turned into an alley and the marshal descended and opened a gate. Bayard drove into the grassless littered compound and stopped while the other went on ahead to a small garage in which stood a ford. He backed this out and motioned Bayard forward. The garage was built to the ford’s dimensions, and about a third of Bayard’s car stuck out the door of it.

“Better’n nothin’, though,” the marshal said. “Come on.” They entered through the kitchen, into the jailkeeper’s living quarters, and Bayard waited in a dark passage until the other found a light. Then they entered a bleak neat room, containing spare conglomerate furnishings and a few scattered articles of masculine apparel.