Flags in the Dust (42 page)

“Wher are they, Dick?”

“Right back of de spring-house. Dey got ’im, too.” Buddy rose and slid leanly from his corner.

“I’ll go with you,” Bayard said, rising also. The others ate steadily. Richard got a lantern down from the cupboard top and lit it, and the three of them passed out into the chill darkness across which the baying of the dogs came in musical gusts, ringing as frosty glass. It was chill and dark. The house loomed, its rambling low wall broken only by the ruddy glow of the window. “Ground’s about hard already,” Bayard remarked.

“ ’Twont freeze tonight,” Buddy answered. “Will it, Dick?”

“Naw, suh. Gwine rain.”

“Go on,” Bayard said. “I dont believe it.”

“Pappy said so,” Buddy replied. “Warmer’n ’twas at sundown.”

“Dont feel like it, to me,” Bayard insisted. They passed the wagon motionless in the starlight, its tires glinting like satin ribbons, and the long, rambling stable, from which placid munchings came, and an occasional snuffing snort as the lantern passed. Then the lantern twinkled among tree trunks as the path descended; the clamor of the dogs swelled just beneath them and the ghostly shapes of them shifted in the faint glow, and in a sapling just behind the spring house they found the ’possum, curled motionless and with its eyes tightly shut, in a fork not six feet from the ground. Buddy lifted it down by the tail, unresisting. “Hell,” Bayard said.

Buddy called the dogs away, and they mounted the path again. In a disused shed behind the kitchen what seemed like at least fifty eyes gleamed in matched red points as Buddy
swung the lantern in and flashed it onto a cage screened with chicken wire, from which rose a rank, warm odor and in which grizzled furry bodies moved sluggishly or swung sharp, skulllike faces into the light. He opened the door and dumped his latest capture in among its fellows and gave the lantern to Richard. They emerged. Already the sky was hazed over a little, losing some of its brittle scintillation.

The others sat in a semicircle before the blazing fire; at the old man’s feet the blue-ticked hound dozed. They made room for Bayard, and Buddy squatted again in the chimney corner.

“Git ’im?” Mr MacCallum asked.

“Yes, sir,” Bayard answered. “Like lifting your hat off a nail in the wall.”

The old man puffed again. “We’ll give you a sho’ ’nough hunt befo’ you leave.”

Rafe said: “How many you got now, Buddy?”

“Aint got but fo’teen,” Buddy answered.

“Fo’teen?” Henry repeated. “We wont never eat fo’teen ’possums.”

“Turn ’em ’loose and run ’em again, then,” Buddy answered. The old man puffed slowly at his pipe. The others smoked or chewed also, and Bayard produced his cigarettes and offered them to Buddy. Buddy shook his head.

“Buddy aint never started yet,” Rafe said.

“You haven’t?” Bayard asked. “What’s the matter, Buddy?”

“Dont know,” Buddy answered, from his shadow. “Just aint had time to learn, I reckon.”

The fire crackled and swirled; from time to time Stuart, nearest the box, put another log on. The dog at the old man’s feet dreamed, snuffed; soft ashes swirled on the hearth at its nose and it sneezed, waking itself, and raised its head and blinked up at the old man’s face, then dozed again. They sat
without word and with very little movement, their grave, aquiline faces as though carved by the firelight out of the shadowy darkness, shaped by a single thought and smoothed and colored by the same hand. The old man tapped his pipe carefully out upon his palm and consulted his fat silver watch. Eight oclock.

“We’uns git up at fo’ oclock, Bayard,” he said. “But you dont have to git up till daylight. Henry, git the jug.”

“Four oclock,” Bayard repeated, as he and Buddy undressed in the lamplit chill of the lean- to room in which, in a huge wooden bed with a faded patchwork quilt, Buddy slept. “I dont see why you bother to go to bed at all.” As he spoke his breath vaporized in the chill air.

“Yes,” Buddy agreed, ripping his shirt over his head and kicking his lean, racehorse shanks out of his shabby khaki pants. “Dont take long to spend the night at our house. You’re comp’ny, though,” he added, and in his voice was just a trace of envy and of longing. Never again after twenty-five will sleep in the morning be so golden. His preparations for sleeping were simple: he removed his boots and pants and shirt and went to bed in his woolen underwear, and he now lay with only his round head in view, watching Bayard who stood in a sleeveless jersey and short thin trunks. “You aint goin’ to sleep warm that a way,” Buddy said. “You want one o’ my heavy ’uns?”

“I’ll sleep warm, I guess,” Bayard answered. He blew the lamp out and groped his way to the bed, his toes curling away from the icy floor, and got in. The mattress was filled with corn shucks: it rattled beneath him, drily sibilant, and whenever he or Buddy moved at all or took a deep breath even, the shucks shifted with small ticking sounds.

“Git that ’ere quilt tucked in good over thar,” Buddy advised from the darkness, expelling his breath in a short
explosive sound of relaxation. He yawned, audible but invisible. “Aint seen you in a long while,” he suggested.

“That’s right. Let’s see, when was it? Two—three years, wasn’t it?”

“Nineteen fifteen,” Buddy answered. “Last time you and him.……” Then he added quietly: “I seen in a paper, when it happened. The name. Kind of knowed right off ’twas him. It was a limey paper.”

“You did? Where were you?”

“Up there,” Buddy answered. “Where them limeys was. Where they sent us. Flat country. Dont see how they ever git it drained enough to make a crop, with all that rain.”

“Yes.” Bayard’s nose was like a lump of ice. He could feel his breath warming his nose a little, could almost see the pale smoke of it as he breathed; could feel the inhalation chilling his nostrils again. It seemed to him that he could feel the planks of the ceiling as they sloped down to the low wall on Buddy’s side, could feel the atmosphere packed into the low corner, bitter and chill and thick, too thick for breathing, like invisible slush; and he lay beneath it.… He was aware of the dry ticking of shucks beneath him and discovered so that he was breathing in deep troubled draughts and he wished dreadfully to be up, moving, before a fire, light; anywhere, anywhere. Buddy lay beside him in the oppressive, half-congealed solidity of the chill, talking in his slow, inarticulate idiom of the war. It was a vague, dreamy sort of tale, without beginning or end and filled with stumbling references to places wretchedly pronounced—you got an impression of people, creatures without initiation or background or future, caught timelessly in a maze of solitary conflicting preoccupations, like bumping tops, against an imminent but incomprehensible nightmare.

“How’d you like the army, Buddy?” Bayard asked.

“Not much,” Buddy answered. “Aint enough to do. Good
life for a lazy man.” He mused a moment. “They gimme a charm,” he added, in a burst of shy, diffident confidence and sober pleasure.

“A charm?” Bayard repeated.

“Uhuh. One of them brass gimcracks on to a colored ribbon. I aimed to show it to you, but I fergot. Do it tomorrow. That ’ere flo’s too dang cold to tech till I have to. I’ll watch a chance tomorrow when pappy’s outen the house.”

“Why? Dont he know you got it?”

“He knows,” Buddy answered. “Only he dont like it because he claims it’s a Yankee charm. Rafe says pappy and Stonewall Jackson aint never surrendered.”

“Yes,” Bayard repeated. Buddy ceased talking and presently he sighed again, emptying his body for sleep. But Bayard lay rigidly on his back, his eyes wide open. It was like being drunk and whenever you close your eyes, the room starts going round and round, and so you lie rigid in the dark with your eyes wide open, not to get sick. Buddy had ceased talking; presently his breathing became longer, steady and regular, and the shucks shifted with sibilant complaint as Bayard turned slowly onto his side.

Buddy breathed on in the darkness, steadily and peacefully. Bayard could hear his own breathing also, but above it, all around it, enclosing him, that other breathing. As though he were one thing breathing with restrained laboring pants, within himself breathing with Buddy’s breathing; using up all the air so that the lesser thing must pant for it. Meanwhile the greater thing breathed deeply and steadily and unawares, asleep, remote; ay, perhaps dead. Perhaps he was dead, and he recalled that morning, relived it again with strained attention from the time he had seen the first tracer smoke, until from his steep sideslip he watched the flame burst like the gay flapping of an orange pennon from the nose of John’s Camel and saw
his brother’s familiar gesture and the sudden awkward sprawl of his plunging body as it lost equilibrium in midair; relived it again as you might run over a printed oft-read tale, trying to remember, feel, a bullet going into his body or head that might have slain him at the same instant. That would account for it, would explain so much: that he too was dead and this was hell, through which he moved forever and ever with an illusion of quickness, seeking his brother who in turn was somewhere seeking him, never the two to meet. He turned onto his back again; the shucks whispered beneath him with dry derision.

The house was full of noises; to his sharpened senses the silence was myriad: the dry agony of wood in the black frost; the ticking of shucks as he breathed; the very atmosphere itself like slush ice in the vise of the cold, oppressing his lungs. His feet were cold, his limbs sweated with it, and about his hot heart his body was rigid and shivering and he raised his naked arms above the covers and lay for a time with the cold like a lead cast about them. And all the while Buddy’s steady breathing and his own restrained and panting breath, both sourceless yet involved one with the other.

Beneath the covers again his arms were cold across his chest and his hands were like ice upon his ribs, and he moved with infinite caution while the chill croached from his shoulders downward and the hidden shucks chattered at him, and swung his legs to the floor. He knew where the door was and he groped his way to it on curling toes. It was fastened by a wooden bar, smooth as ice, and fumbling at it he touched something else beside it, something chill and tubular and upright, and his hand slid down it and he stood for a moment in the icy pitch darkness with the shotgun in his hands, and as he stood so, his numb fingers fumbling at the breach, he remembered the box of shells on the wooden box on which the lamp sat. A moment longer he stood so, his head bent a little
and the gun in his numb hands; then he leaned it again in the corner and lifted the wooden bar from its slots carefully and without noise. The door sagged from the hinges and after the first jarring scrape, he grasped the edge of it and lifted it back, and stood in the door.

In the sky no star showed, and the sky was the sagging corpse of itself. It lay upon the earth like a deflated balloon; into it the dark shape of the kitchen rose without depth, and the trees beyond, and homely shapes like sad ghosts in the chill corpse-light—the woodpile; a farming tool; a barrel beside the broken stoop at the kitchen door, where he had stumbled, supperward. The gray chill seeped into him like water into sand, with short trickling runs; halting, groping about an obstruction, then on again, trickling at last along his unimpeded bones. He was shaking slowly and steadily with cold; beneath his hands his flesh was rough and without sensation, yet still it jerked and jerked as though something within the dead envelope of him strove to free itself. Above his head, upon the plank roof, there sounded a single light tap, and as though at a signal, the gray silence began to dissolve. He shut the door silently and returned to bed.

In the bed he lay shaking more than ever, to the cold derision of the shucks under him, and he lay quietly on his back, hearing the winter rain whispering on the roof. There was no drumming, as when summer rain falls through the buoyant air, but a whisper of unemphatic sound, as though the atmosphere lying heavily upon the roof dissolved there and dripped sluggishly and steadily from the eaves. His blood ran again, and the covers felt like iron or like ice; but while he lay motionless beneath the rain his blood warmed yet more, until at last his body ceased trembling and he lay presently in something like a tortured and fitful doze, surrounded by coiling images and shapes of stubborn despair and the ceaseless striving for … not
vindication so much as comprehension, a hand, no matter whose, to touch him out of his black chaos. He would spurn it, of course, but it would restore his cold sufficiency again.

The rain dripped on, dripped and dripped; beside him Buddy breathed placidly and steadily: he had not even changed his position. At times Bayard dozed fitfully: dozing, he was wide awake; waking, he lay in a hazy state filled with improbable moiling and in which there was neither relief nor rest: drop by drop the rain wore the night away, wore time away. But it was so long, so damn long. His spent blood, wearied with struggling, moved through his body in slow beats, like the rain, wearing his flesh away. It comes to all … bible … somepreacher, anyway. Maybe he knew. Peace. It comes to all

At last, from beyond walls, he heard movement. It was indistinguishable, yet he knew it was of human origin, made by people whose names and faces he knew waking again into the world he had not been able even temporarily to lose, people to whom he was … and he was comforted. The sounds continued; unmistakably he heard a door, and a voice which with a slight effort of concentration he knew he could name; and best of all, knew that now he could rise and go where they were gathered about a crackling fire where light was, and warmth. And he lay, at ease at last, intending to rise the next moment and go to them, putting it off a little longer while his blood beat slowly through his body and his heart was quieted. Buddy breathed steadily beside him, and his own breath was untroubled now as Buddy’s while the human sounds came murmurously into the cold room with grave and homely reassurance. It comes to all, it comes to all his tired heart comforted him, and at last he slept.

He waked in the gray morning, his body weary and heavy and dull: his sleep had not rested him. Buddy was gone, and it
still rained, though now it was a definite purposeful sound on the roof and the air was warmer, with a rawness that probed to the very bones of him; and in his stockings and carrying his boots in his hands, he crossed the cold room where Lee and Rafe and Stuart slept, and found Rafe and Jackson before the living room fire.