Flags in the Dust (15 page)

Bayard reassured him, and he got in slowly, with mumbled sounds of anticipatory concern, and he sat well forward on the seat with his feet drawn under him, clutching the door with one hand and a lump of shirt on his chest with the other as the car moved down the drive. They passed through the gates and onto the road and still he sat hunched forward on the seat, as the car gained speed, and with a sudden convulsive motion he caught his hat just as it blew off his head.

“I ’speck dis is fur ernough, aint it?” he suggested, raising his voice. He pulled his hat down on his head, but when he released it he had to clutch wildly at it again, and he removed it and clasped it beneath his arm, and again his hand fumbled at his breast and clutched something beneath his shirt. “I got to weed dat bed dis mawnin’,” he said, louder still. “Please, suh, Mist’ Bayard,” he added and his wizened old body sat yet further forward on the seat and he cast quick covert glances at the steadily increasing rush of the roadside growth.

Then Bayard leaned forward and Simon watched his forearm tauten, and then they shot forward on a roar of sound like blurred thunder. Earth, the unbelievable ribbon of the road, crashed beneath them and away behind into mad dust con-volvulae: a dun moiling nausea of speed, and the roadside greenery was a tunnel rigid and streaming and unbroken. But he said no word, made no other sound, and when Bayard glanced the lipless cruel derision of his teeth at him presently, Simon knelt in the floor, his old disreputable hat under his
arm and his hand clutching a fold of his shirt on his breast. Later the white man glanced at him again, and Simon was watching him and the blurred irises of his eyes were no longer a melting pupilless brown: they were red, and in the blast of wind they were unwinking and in them was that mindless phosphorescence of an animal’s. Bayard jammed the throttle down to the floor.

The wagon was moving drowsily and peacefully along the road. It was drawn by two mules and was filled with negro women asleep in chairs. Some of them wore drawers. The mules themselves didn’t wake at all, but ambled sedately on with the empty wagon and the overturned chairs, even when the car crashed into the shallow ditch and surged back onto the road again and thundered on without slowing. The thunder ceased, but the car rushed on under its own momentum, and it began to sway from side to side as Bayard tried to drag Simon’s hands from the switch. But Simon knelt in the floor with his eyes shut tightly and the air blast toying with the grizzled remnant of his hair, holding the switch off with both hands.

“Turn it loose!” Bayard shouted.

“Dat’s de way you stops it, Lawd! Dat’s de way you stops it, Lawd!” Simon chanted, keeping the switch covered with his hands while Bayard hammered them with his fist. And he clung to it until the car slowed and stopped. Then he fumbled the door open and climbed out. Bayard called to him, but he went on back down the road at a limping rapid shuffle.

“Simon!” Bayard called again. But Simon went on stiffly, like a man who has been deprived of the use of his legs for a long time. “Simon!” But he neither slowed nor looked back, and Bayard started the car again and drove on until he could turn it. Simon now stood in the ditch beside the road, his head bent above his hands when Bayard overtook him and stopped.

“Come on here and get in,” he commanded.

“Naw, suh. I’ll walk.”

“Jump in, now,” Bayard ordered sharply. He opened the door, but Simon stood in the ditch with his hand thrust inside his shirt, and Bayard could see that he was shaking as with an ague. “Come on, you old fool; I’m not going to hurt you.”

“I’ll walk home,” Simon repeated stubbornly but without heat. “You git on wid dat thing.”

“Ah, get in, Simon. I didn’t know I’d scared you that bad. I’ll drive slow. Come on.”

“You git on home,” Simon said again. “Dey’ll be worried erbout you. You kin tell ’um whar I’m at.”

Bayard watched him a moment, but Simon was not looking at him, and presently he slammed the door and drove on. Nor did Simon look up even then, even when the car burst once more into thunder and a soundless dun crash of fading dust. After a while the wagon emerged from the dust, the mules now at a high flop-eared trot, and jingled past him, leaving behind it upon the dusty insect-rasped air a woman’s voice in a quavering wordless hysteria, passive and quavering and sustained. This faded slowly down the shimmering reaches of the valley and Simon removed from the breast of his shirt an object slung by a greasy cord about his neck. It was small and of no particular shape and it was covered with soiled napped fur: the first joint of the hind leg of a rabbit, caught supposedly in a graveyard in the dark of the moon, and Simon rubbed it through the sweat on his forehead and on the back of his neck, then he returned it to his bosom. His hands were still trembling, and he put his hat on and got back onto the road and turned toward home through the dusty noon.

Bayard drove on down the valley toward town, passing the iron gates and the serene white house among its old trees, and went on at speed. The sound of the unmuffled engine crashed
into the dust and swirled it into lethargic bursting shapes, and faded across the planted land. Just outside of town he came upon another wagon and he held the car upon it until the mules reared, tilting the wagon; then he swerved and whipped past with not an inch to spare, so close that the yelling negro in the wagon could see the lipless and savage derision of his teeth.

He went on. In a mounting swoop like a niggard zoom the cemetery with his great-grandfather in pompous effigy gazing out across the valley and his railroad, flashed past, and he thought of old Simon trudging along the dusty road toward home, clutching his rabbit’s foot, and again he felt savage and ashamed.

Town among its trees, its shady streets like green tunnels along which tight lives accomplished their peaceful tragedies, and he closed the muffler and at a sedate pace he approached the square. The clock on the courthouse lifted its four faces above the trees, in glimpses seen between arching vistas of trees. Ten minutes to twelve. At twelve exactly his grandfather would repair to the office in the rear of the bank and drink the pint of buttermilk which he brought in with him in a vacuum bottle every morning, and then sleep for an hour on the sofa there. When Bayard turned onto the square the tilted chair in the bank door was already vacant, and he slowed his car and eased it into the curb before a propped sandwich board. Fresh Catfish Today the board stated in letters of liquefied chalk, and through the screen doors beyond it came a smell of refrigerated food—cheese and pickle and such—with a faint overtone of fried grease.

He stood for a moment on the sidewalk while the noon throng parted and flowed about him. Negroes slow and aimless as figures of a dark placid dream, with an animal odor, murmuring and laughing among themselves. There was in their consonantless murmuring something ready with mirth, in
their laughter something grave and sad; country people—men in overalls or corduroy or khaki and without neckties, women in shapeless calico and sunbonnets and snuff-sticks; groups of young girls in stiff mail-order finery, the young heritage of their bodies’ grace dulled already by self-consciousness and labor and unaccustomed high heels and soon to be obscured forever by childbearing; youths and young men in cheap tasteless suits and shirts and caps, weather-tanned and clean-limbed as race horses and a little belligerently blatant. Against the wall squatting a blind negro beggar with a guitar and a wire frame holding a mouthorgan to his lips, patterned the background of smells and sounds with a plaintive reiteration of rich monotonous chords, rhythmic as a mathematical formula but without music. He was a man of at least forty and his was that patient resignation of many sightless years, yet he too wore filthy khaki with a corporal’s stripes on one sleeve and a crookedly-sewn Boy Scout emblem on the other, and on his breast a button commemorating the fourth
Liberty Loan and a small metal brooch bearing two gold stars, obviously intended for female adornment. His weathered derby was encircled by an officer’s hat cord, and on the pavement between his feet sat a tin cup containing a dime and three pennies.

Bayard sought a coin in his pocket, and the beggar sensed his approach and his tune became a single repeated chord but without a break in the rhythm until the coin rang into the cup, and still without a break in the rhythm and the meaningless strains of the mouthorgan, his left hand dropped groping a little to the cup and read the coin in a single motion, then once more the guitar and mouthorgan resumed their monotonous pattern. As Bayard turned away someone spoke at his side—a broad squat man with a keen weathered face and gray temples. He wore corduroys and boots, and his body was the supple body of a horseman and his brown still hands were the hands
that horses love. MacCallum his name, one of a family of six brothers who lived eighteen miles away in the hills, and with whom Bayard and John hunted foxes and ’coons during their vacations.

“Been hearing about that car of yourn,” MacCallum said. “That’s her, is it?” He stepped down from the curb and moved easily about the car, examining it, his hands on his hips. “Too much barrel,” he said, “and she looks heavy in the withers. Clumsy. Have to use a curb on her, I reckon?”

“I dont,” Bayard answered. “Jump in and I’ll show you what she’ll do.”

“No, much obliged,” the other answered. He stepped onto the pavement again, among the negroes gathered to stare at the car. The clock on the courthouse struck twelve, and already along the street there came in small groups children going home from school for the noon recess—little girls with colored boxes and skipping-ropes and talking sibilantly among themselves of intense feminine affairs, and boys in various stages of déshabillé shouting and scuffling and jostling the little girls, who shrank together and gave the little boys cold reverted glares. “Going to eat a snack,” he explained. He crossed the pavement and opened the screen door. “You ate yet?” he asked, looking back. “Come on in a minute, anyway.” And he patted his hip significantly.

The store was half grocery and confectionery and half restaurant. A number of customers stood about the cluttered but clean front section, with sandwiches and bottles of soda water, and the proprietor bobbed his head with flurried, slightly distrait affability above the counter to them. The rear half was filled with tables at which a number of men and a woman or so, mostly country people, sat eating with awkward and solemn decorum. Next to this was the kitchen, filled with frying odors and the brittle hissing of it, where two negroes
moved like wraiths in a blue lethargy of smoke. They crossed this room and MacCallum opened a door set in an outthrust angle of the wall and they entered a smaller room, or rather a large closet. There was a small window high in the wall, and a bare table and three or four chairs, and presently the younger of the two negroes followed them.

“Yes, suh, Mr MacCallum and Mr Sartoris.” He set two freshly rinsed glasses to which water yet adhered in sliding beads, on the table and stood drying his hands on his apron. He had a broad untroubled face, a reliable sort of face.

“Lemons and sugar and ice,” MacCallum said. “You dont want none of that soda pop, do you?” The negro paused with his hand on the door.

“No,” Bayard answered. “Rather have a toddy myself.”

“Yes, suh,” the negro agreed. “Y’all wants a toddy.” And he bowed again with grave approval, and turned again and stepped aside as the proprietor in a fresh apron entered at his customary distracted trot and stood rubbing his hands on his thighs.

“Morning, morning,” he said. “How’re you, Rafe? Bayard, I saw Miss Jenny and the old Colonel going up to Doc Peabody’s office the other day. Aint nothing wrong, is there?” His head was like an inverted egg; his hair curled meticulously away from the part in the center into two careful reddish-brown wings, like a toupée, and his eyes were a melting passionate brown.

“Come in here and shut that door,” MacCallum ordered, drawing the other into the room. He produced from beneath his coat a bottle of astonishing proportions and set it on the table. It contained a delicate amber liquid and the proprietor rubbed his hands on his thighs and his hot mild gaze gloated upon it.

“Great Savior,” he said, “where’d you have that demijohn hid? in your pants leg?” MacCallum uncorked the bottle and
extended it and the proprietor leaned forward and sniffed it, his eyes closed. He sighed.

“Henry’s,” MacCallum said. “Best run he’s made in six months. Reckon you’d take a drink if Bayard and me was to hold you?” The other cackled loudly, unctuously.

“Aint he a comical feller, now?” he asked Bayard. “Some joker, aint he?” He glanced at the table. “You aint got but two gl——” Someone tapped at the door: the proprietor leaned his conical head to it and waggled his hand at them. MacCallum concealed the bottle without haste as the other opened the door. It was the negro, with another glass, and lemons and sugar and a cracked bowl of ice. The proprietor admitted him.

“If they want me up front, tell ’em I’ve stepped out but I’ll be back in a minute, Houston.”

“Yes, suh,” the negro replied, setting his burden on the table. MacCallum produced the bottle again.

“What do you keep on telling your customers that old lie, for?” he asked. “Everybody knows what you are doing.”

The proprietor cackled again, gloating upon the bottle. “Yes, sir,” he repeated, “he’s sure some joker. Well, you boys have got plenty of time, but I got to get on back and keep things running.”

“Go ahead,” MacCallum told him, and the proprietor made himself a toddy. He raised the glass, stirring it and sniffing it alternately while the others followed suit. Then he removed his spoon and laid it on the table.

“Well, I hate to hurry a good thing mighty bad,” he said, “but business dont wait on pleasure, you know.”

“Work does interfere with a man’s drinking,” MacCallum agreed.

“Yes, sir, it sure does,” the other replied. He raised his glass. “Your father’s good health,” he said. He drank. “I dont see the old gentleman in town much, now a days.”

“No,” MacCallum answered. “He aint never got over Buddy being in the Yankee army. Claims he aint coming to town again until the Democratic party denies Woodrow Wilson.”