Flags in the Dust (45 page)

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 chill bright air on his face like icy water, wondering where he was. Then he remembered, and moving, found that he was stiff with stale cold and that his blood began to move through his limbs 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 salutation, and Bayard spoke to him and touched his cold nose. Then he untied the sack and drank from the jug. The negro with a milk pail appeared in the door.

“Chris’mus gif’, whitefolks,” he said, eying the jug. Bayard gave him a drink. “Thanky, suh. You g’awn to de house to de
fire. I’ll feed yo’ hawss. De ole woman got yo’ breakfus’ ready.” Bayard picked up the sack; at the well behind the cabin he 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 like a drug. A woman bent over the hearth replied to his greeting diffidently. Three pickaninnies became utterly still in a corner and watched him with rolling 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.

The woman placed a chair before the fire with a dark, effacing gesture. Bayard seated himself and thrust his chilled feet to the fire. “Had your Christmas dram yet, aunty?” he asked.

“Naw, suh. Aint got none, dis year,” she answered from somewhere behind him.

He swung the sack toward her voice. “Help yourself. Plenty 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 them in a chiding tone.

“Show de whitefolks yo’ Sandy Claus,” she prompted. “Thanky, suh,” she added, putting a tin plate on his knees and setting a cracked china cup on the hearth at his feet. “Show
’im,” she repeated. “You want folks to think Sandy Claus dont know whar you lives at?”

The children moved 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 solemnly, 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 broke it in two and dusted it off and put that too on the 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 found them watching him steadily and covertly. The man entered with his pail of milk.

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

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

“My brudder-in-law bor’d my mules,” the negro replied readily. “I aint got but de one span, and he done bor’d dem.”

“I’ll pay you five dollars.”

The negro set the pail 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, whitefolks.”

“Ten dollars,” Bayard said impatiently. “Cant you get your mules back from your brother-in-law?”

“I reckon so. I reckon he’ll bring ’em back by dinner time. We kin go den.”

“Why cant you get ’em now? Take my horse and go get ’em. I want to catch a train.”

“I aint had no Chris’mus yit, whitefolks. Feller workin’ ev’y day of de year wants a little Chris’mus.”

Bayard swore shortly and bleakly, but he said: “All right, then. Right after dinner. But you see your brother-in-law has ’em back here in plenty of time.”

“Dey’ll be here: dont you 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 hard 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 its vain attempts with peaceful detachment. But at last it succeeded and reached him: 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 an illusion—humankind forgetting its lust and cowardice and greed for a day. “Chris’mus,” the woman murmured shyly. “Thanky, suh.” 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 at last that they were holding back until he had done, but he overrode them and they dined together; and at last (the mules having been miraculously returned by a yet uncorporeal brother-in-law) with his depleted jug between his feet in the
wagon bed, he looked once back at the cabin, at 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 brown ridges the ultimate hills stood bluely against the plumbless sky. “Heyo.”

They stopped and drank, and Bayard gave his companion a cigarette. The sun behind them now; no cloud, no wind, no bird 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 in jagged bastions. They crested this, and a plateau rolled away before them with its pattern of burnished sedge and fallow dark 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 copper balloon tethered an hour up the sky. They drank again.

It had touched the horizon when they looked down into the final valley where the railroad’s shining threads vanished among roofs and trees, and along the air to them distantly came a slow, heavy explosion. “Still celebratin’,” the negro said.

Out of the sun they descended into violet shadow where windows gleamed behind wreaths and paper bells, across
stoops littered with spent firecrackers. Along the streets children in bright sweaters and jackets sped on shiny coasters and skates and wagons. Again a heavy explosion in the dusk ahead, and they debouched into the square with its Sabbath calm, littered too with shattered scraps of paper. It looked the same way at home, he knew, with men and youths he had known from boyhood lounging the holiday away, drinking a little and shooting fireworks, giving nickels and dimes and quarters to negro lads who shouted Chris’mus gif’! Chris’mus gif’! as they passed. And out home the tree in the parlor and the bowl of eggnog before the fire, and Simon entering his and Johnny’s room on tense and clumsy tiptoe and holding his breath above the bed where they lay feigning sleep until his tenseness relaxed, whereupon they both roared “Christmas gift!” at him, to his pained disgust. “Well, I’ll de-clare, ef dey aint done caught me ag’in!” But by mid morning he would be recovered, by dinnertime he would be in a state of affable and useless loquacity, and by nightfall completely
hors de combat
, with Aunt Jenny storming about the house and swearing that never again should it be turned into a barroom for trifling niggers as long as she had her strength, so help her Jupiter. And after dark, somewhere a dance, with holly and mistletoe and paper streamers, and the girls he had always known with their new bracelets and watches and fans amid lights and music and glittering laughter.…

A small group stood on a corner, and as the wagon passed and preceded by an abrupt scurrying, yellow flame was stenciled on the twilight and the heavy explosion reverberated in sluggish echoes between the silent walls. The mules quickened against the collars and the wagon rattled on. Through the dusk now, from lighted doorways where bells and wreaths hung, voices called with mellow insistence; children’s voices replied, expostulant, reluctantly regretful. Then the station,
where a ’bus and four or five cars stood, and Bayard descended and the negro lifted down the sack.

“Much obliged,” Bayard said. “Goodbye.”

“Goodbye, whitefolks.”

In the waiting room a stove glowed red hot and about the room stood cheerful groups, in sleek furs and overcoats, but he did not enter. He set the sack against the wall and tramped up and down the platform, warming his blood again. In both directions along the tracks green switch lights were steady in the dusk; a hands-breadth above the western trees the evening star was like an electric bulb in a glass wall. He tramped back and forth, glancing into the ruddy windows, into the waiting room where the cheerful groups in their furs and overcoats gesticulated with festive though soundless animation, and into the colored waiting room, whose occupants sat patiently and murmurously about the stove in the dingy light. As he turned here a voice spoke diffidently from the shadow beside the door. “Chris’mus gif’, boss.” He took a coin from his pocket without stopping. Again from the square a firecracker exploded heavily, and above the trees a rocket arced, hung for a moment, then opened like a fist, spreading its golden and fading fingers upon the tranquil indigo sky without a sound.

Then the train came and brought its lighted windows to a jarring halt, and he picked up his sack again. And in the midst of a cheerful throng shouting goodbyes and holiday greetings and messages to absent ones, he got aboard, unshaven, in his scarred boots and stained khaki pants, and his shabby, smoke-colored tweed jacket and his disreputable felt hat, and found a vacant seat and stowed the jug away beneath his legs.

“
 … and since the essence of spring is loneliness and a little sadness and a sense of mild frustration, I suppose you do get a keener purifaction when a little nostalgia is thrown in for good measure. At home I always found myself remembering apple trees or green lanes or the color of the sea in other places, and I’d be sad that I couldn’t be everywhere at once, or that all the spring couldn’t be one spring, like Byron’s ladies’ mouths. But now I seem to be unified and projected upon one single and very definite object, which is something to be said for me, after all.” Horace’s pen ceased and he gazed at the sheet scrawled over with his practically illegible script, while the words he had just written echoed yet in his mind with a little gallant and whimsical sadness, and for the time being he had quitted the desk and the room and the town and all the crude and blatant newness into which his destiny had brought him, and again that wild and fantastic futility of his roamed unchallenged through the lonely region into which it had at last concentrated its conflicting parts. Already the thick cables along the veranda eaves would be budding into small lilac matchpoints, and with no effort at all he could see the lawn below the cedars, splashed with random narcissi among random jonquils and gladioli waiting to bloom in turn.

But his body sat motionless, its hand with the arrested pen lying upon the scrawled sheet, the paper lying upon the yellow varnished surface of his new desk. The chair in which he sat was new too, as was the room with its dead white walls and imitation oak woodwork. All day long the sun fell upon it, untempered by any shade. In the days of early spring it had been pleasant, falling as it now did through his western window and across the desk where a white hyacinth bloomed in a bowl of glazed maroon pottery. But as he sat musing, gazing out the window where, beyond a tarred roof that drank heat like a sponge and radiated it, against a brick wall a clump of ragged heaven trees lifted shabby, diffident bloom, he dreaded the long hot summer days of sunlight upon the roof directly above him, remembered his dim and musty office at home, in which a breeze seemed always to move, with its serried rows of books dusty and undisturbed that seemed to emanate coolness and quietude even on the hottest days. And thinking of this, he was again lost from the harsh newness in which his body sat. The pen moved again.