Flags in the Dust (12 page)

Bayard sat for a long time, regarding the stark dissolving apotheosis of his name. Sartorises had derided Time, but Time was not vindictive, being longer than Sartorises. And probably unaware of them. But it was a good gesture, anyway.

“In the nineteenth century,” John Sartoris said, “genealogy is poppycock. Particularly in America, where only what a man takes and keeps has any significance, and where all of us have a common ancestry and the only house from which we can claim descent with any assurance, is the Old Bailey. Yet the man who professes to care nothing about his forbears is only a little less vain than he who bases all his actions on blood precedent.
And I reckon a Sartoris can have a little vanity and poppycock, if he wants it.”

Yes, it was a good gesture, and Bayard sat and mused quietly on the tense he had unwittingly used. Was. Fatality: the augury of a man’s destiny peeping out at him from the roadside hedge, if he but recognise it; and again he ran panting through undergrowth while the fading thunder of the smoke-colored stallion swept on in the dusk and the Yankee patrol crashed behind him, crashed fainter and fainter until he crouched with spent, laboring lungs in a brier thicket and heard the pursuit rush on. Then he crawled forth and went to a spring he knew that flowed from the roots of a beech; and as he leaned down to it the final light of day was reflected onto his face, bringing into sharp relief forehead and nose above the cavernous sockets of his eyes and the panting snarl of his teeth, and from the still water there stared back at him for a sudden moment, a skull.

The unturned corners of man’s destiny. Well, heaven, that crowded place, lay just beyond one of them, they claimed; heaven, filled with every man’s illusion of himself and with the conflicting illusions of him that parade through the minds of other illusions.… He stirred and sighed quietly, and took out his fountain pen. At the foot of the column he wrote:

and beneath that:

When the ink was dry he closed the book and replaced it and took the pipe from his pocket and put it in the rosewood case with the duelling pistols and the derringer and replaced the other things and closed the chest and locked it.

——

Miss Jenny found old Bayard in his tilted chair in the door, and he looked up at her with a fine assumption of surprise and his deafness seemed more pronounced than ordinary. But she got him up with cold implacability and led him still grumbling down the street, where merchants and others spoke to her as to a martial queen, old Bayard stalking along beside her with sullen reluctance.

They turned presently and mounted a narrow stairway debouching between two stores, beneath an array of dingy professional signs. At the top was a dark corridor with doors. The nearest door was of pine, its gray paint scarred at the bottom as though it had been kicked repeatedly at the same height and with the same force. In the door itself two holes an inch apart bore mute witness to the missing hasp, and from a staple in the jamb depended the hasp itself, fixed there by a huge rusty lock of an ancient pattern. Bayard offered to stop here, but Miss Jenny led him firmly on to a door across the hall.

This door was freshly painted and grained to represent walnut. Into the top half of it was let a pane of thick, opaque glass bearing a name in raised gilt letters, and two embracing office hours. Miss Jenny opened this door and Bayard followed her into a small cubbyhole of a room of spartan but suave asepsis. The walls were an immaculate new gray, with a reproduction of a Corot and two spidery dry-points in narrow frames, and it contained a new rug in warm buff tones and a bare table and four chairs in fumed oak—all impersonal and clean and inexpensive, but revealing at a glance the proprietor’s soul; a soul hampered now by material strictures, but destined and determined to someday function amid Persian rugs and mahogany or teak, and a single irreproachable print on the chaste walls. A young woman in a starched white dress rose from a smaller table on which a telephone sat, and patted her hair.

“Good morning, Myrtle,” Miss Jenny said. “Tell Dr Alford we’d like to see him, please.”

“You have an appointment?” the girl said in a voice without any inflection at all.

“We’ll make one now, then,” Miss Jenny replied. “You dont mean to say Dr Alford dont come to work before ten oclock, do you?”

“Dr Alford dont—doesn’t see anyone without an appointment,” the girl parrotted, gazing at a point above Miss Jenny’s head. “If you have no appointment, you’ll have to have an ap—”

“Tut, tut,” Miss Jenny interrupted briskly, “you run and tell Dr Alford Colonel Sartoris wants to see him, there’s a good girl.”

“Yessum, Miss Jenny,” the girl said obediently and she crossed the room, but at the other door she paused again and again her voice became parrot-like. “Wont you sit down? I’ll see if the doctor is engaged.”

“You go and tell Dr Alford we’re here,” Miss Jenny repeated affably. “Tell him I’ve got some shopping to do this morning.”

“Yessum, Miss Jenny,” the girl agreed, and disappeared, and after a dignified interval she returned, once more clothed faultlessly in her professional manner. “The doctor will see you now. Come in, please.” She held the door open and stood aside.

“Thank you, honey,” Miss Jenny replied. “Is your mamma still in bed?”

“No’m, she’s sitting up now, thank you.”

“That’s good,” Miss Jenny agreed. “Come on, Bayard.”

This room was smaller than the other, and brutally carbolized. There was a white enamelled cabinet filled with vicious nickel gleams, and a metal operating table and an array
of electric furnaces and ovens and sterilizers. The doctor in a white linen jacket bent above a small desk, and for a while he proffered them his sleek oblivious profiles. Then he glanced up, and rose.

He was in the youthful indeterminate thirties; a newcomer to the town and nephew of an old resident. He had made a fine record in medical school and was of a personable exterior, but there was a sort of preoccupied dignity, a sort of erudite and cold unillusion regarding mankind, about him that precluded the easy intimacy of the small town and caused even those who remembered him as a visiting boy to address him as doctor or mister. He had a small moustache and a face like a mask—a comforting face, but cold; and while Bayard sat restively the doctor probed delicately with dry, scrubbed fingers at the wen on his face. Miss Jenny asked him a question, but he continued his exploration raptly, as though he had not heard, as though she had not even spoken; inserting a small electric bulb which he first sterilized, into Bayard’s mouth and snapping its ruby glow on and off within his cheek. Then he removed it and sterilized it again and returned it to the cabinet.

“Well?” Miss Jenny said impatiently. The doctor shut the cabinet carefully and washed and dried his hands and came and stood over them, and with his thumbs hooked in his jacket pockets he became solemnly and unctuously technical, rolling the harsh words from his tongue with an epicurean deliberation.

“It should be removed at once,” he concluded. “It should be removed while in its early stage; that is why I advise an immediate operation.”

“You mean, it might develop into cancer?” Miss Jenny asked.

“No question about it at all, madam. Course of time. Neglect it, and I can promise you nothing; have it out now, and
he need never worry about it again.” He looked at Bayard again with lingering and chill contemplation. “It will be very simple. I’ll remove it as easily as that.” And he made a short gesture with his hand.

“What’s that?” Bayard demanded.

“I say, I can take that growth off so easily you wont know it, Colonel Sartoris.”

“I’ll be damned if you do!” Bayard rose with one of his characteristic plunging movements.

“Sit down, Bayard,” Miss Jenny ordered. “Nobody’s going to cut on you without your knowing it. Should it be done right away?” she asked.

“Yes, ma’am. I wouldn’t have that thing on my face overnight. Otherwise, it is only fair to warn you that no doctor can assume responsibility for what might ensue.… I could remove it in two minutes,” he added, looking at Bayard’s face again with cold speculation. Then he half turned his head and stopped in a listening attitude, and beyond the thin walls a voice in the other room boomed in rich rolling waves.

“Mawnin’, sister,” it said. “Didn’t I hear Bayard Sartoris cussin’ in here?” The doctor and Miss Jenny held their arrested attitudes, then the door surged open and the fattest man in Yocona county filled it. He wore a shiny alpaca coat over waistcoat and trousers of baggy black broadcloth; above a plaited shirt the fatty rolls of his dewlap practically hid his low collar and a black string tie. His Roman senator’s head was thatched with a vigorous curling of silvery hair. “What the devil’s the matter with you?” he boomed, then he sidled into the room, filling it completely, dwarfing its occupants and its furnishings.

This was Doctor Lucius Quintus Peabody, eighty-seven years old and weighing three hundred and ten pounds and possessing a digestive tract like a horse. He had practiced medicine in Yocona county when a doctor’s equipment consisted
of a saw and a gallon of whisky and a satchel of calomel; he had been John Sartoris’ regimental surgeon, and up to the day of the automobile he would start out at any hour of the twenty-four in any weather and for any distance, over practically impassable roads in a lopsided buckboard to visit anyone, white or black, who sent for him; accepting for fee usually a meal of corn pone and coffee or perhaps a small measure of corn or fruit, or a few flower bulbs or graftings. When he was young and hasty he had kept a daybook, kept it meticulously until these hypothetical assets totalled $10,000.00. But that was forty years ago, and since then he hadn’t bothered with a record at all; and now from time to time a countryman enters his shabby office and discharges an obligation, commemorating sometimes the payor’s entry into the world, incurred by his father or grandfather and which Dr Peabody himself had long since forgotten about. Every one in the county knew him and sent him hams and wild game at Christmas, and it was said that he could spend the balance of his days driving about the county in the buckboard he still used, with never a thought for board and lodging and without the expenditure of a penny for either. He filled the room with his bluff and homely humanity, and as he crossed the floor and patted Miss Jenny’s back with one flail-like hand the whole building trembled to his tread.

“Mawnin’, Jenny,” he said. “Havin’ Bayard measured for insurance?”

“This damn butcher wants to cut on me,” Bayard said querulously. “You come on and make ’em let me alone, Loosh.”

“Ten A.M.’s might early in the day to start carvin’ white folks,” Dr Peabody boomed. “Nigger’s different. Chop up a nigger any time after midnight. What’s the matter with him, son?” he asked of Dr Alford.

“I dont believe it’s anything but a wart,” Miss Jenny said. “But I’m tired of looking at it.”

“It’s no wart,” Dr Alford corrected stiffly. He recapitulated his diagnosis in technical terms while Dr Peabody enveloped them all in the rubicund benevolence of his presence.

“Sounds pretty bad, dont it?” he agreed, and he shook the floor again and pushed Bayard firmly into the chair with one huge hand, and with the other he dragged his face up to the light. Then he dug a pair of iron-bowed spectacles from the pocket of his coat and examined Bayard’s wen through them. “Think it ought to come off, do you?”

“I do,” Dr Alford answered coldly. “I think it is imperative that it be removed. Unnecessary there. Cancer.”

“Folks got along with cancer a long time befo’ they invented knives,” Dr Peabody said drily. “Hold still, Bayard.”

And people like you are one of the reasons, was on the tip of the younger man’s tongue. But he forbore and said instead: “I can remove that growth in two minutes, Colonel Sartoris.”

“Damned if you do,” Bayard rejoined violently, trying to rise. “Get away, Loosh.”

“Sit still,” Dr Peabody said equably, holding him down while he probed at the wen. “Does it hurt any?”

“No. I never said it did. And I’ll be damned—”

“You’ll probably be damned anyway,” Dr Peabody told him. “You’d be about as well off dead, anyhow. I dont know anybody that gets less fun out of living than you do.”

“You told the truth for once,” Miss Jenny agreed. “He’s the oldest person I ever knew in my life.”

“And so,” Dr Peabody continued blandly, “I wouldn’t worry about it. Let it stay there. Nobody cares what your face looks like. If you were a young fellow, now, out sparkin’ the gals every night——”

“If Dr Peabody is permitted to interfere with impunity——”

Dr Alford began.

“Will Falls says he can cure it,” Bayard said.

“With that salve of his?” Dr Peabody asked quickly.

“Salve?” Dr Alford repeated. “Colonel Sartoris, if you permit any quack that comes along to treat that growth with homemade or patent remedies, you’ll be dead in six months. Dr Peabody even will bear me out,” he added with fine irony.

“I dont know,” Dr Peabody replied slowly. “Will has done some curious things with that salve of his.”

“I must protest against this,” Dr Alford said. “Mrs Du Pre, I protest against a member of my profession sanctioning even negatively such a procedure.”

“Pshaw, boy,” Dr Peabody answered, “we aint goin’ to let Will put his dope on Bayard’s wart. It’s all right for niggers and livestock, but Bayard dont need it. We’ll just let this thing alone, long as it dont hurt him.”

“If that growth is not removed immediately, I wash my hands of all responsibility,” Dr Alford stated. “To neglect it will be as fatal as Mr Falls’ salve. Mrs Du Pre, I ask you to witness that this consultation has taken this unethical turn through no fault of mine and over my protest.”

“Pshaw, boy,” Dr Peabody said again. “This aint hardly worth the trouble of cuttin’ out. We’ll save you an arm or a leg as soon as that fool grandson of his turns that automobile over with ’em. Come on with me, Bayard.”

“Mrs Du Pre——” Dr Alford essayed.

“Bayard can come back, if he wants to.” Dr Peabody patted the younger man’s shoulder with his heavy hand. “I’m going to take him to my office and talk to him a while. Jenny can bring him back if she wants to. Come on, Bayard.” And he led Bayard from the room. Miss Jenny rose also.