Flags in the Dust

Bayard lay white and still and a little sheepish in his bed. Old Bayard and the doctor were just leaving, and Miss Jenny waited until they were out of the room, then she raged and stormed at him and stroked his face and. his hair, while Simon bobbed and mowed in the corner between bed and wall. “Dasso, Miss Jenny, dasso! I kep’ a-tellin’ ‘im!”

And so, having eased her soul, she descended to . the veranda where Dr. Alford stood in impeccable departure. Old Bayard sat in the car waiting for him, and on Miss Jenny’s appearance he became his stiff self again and completed his departure, and he and old Bayard drove away.

Miss Jenny also looked up and down the. veranda, then into the hall. “Where—” she said, then she called: “Narcissa.” A reply; and she added: “Where are you?” The reply came again and Miss Jenny reentered the house and saw Narcissa’s white dress in the gloom where she sat on the piano bench. “He’s awake,” Miss Jenny said. “You can come up and see him.” The other rose and turned into the light. “Why, what’s the matter? You look lots worse than he does. You’re white as a sheet.”

“Nothing,” Narcissa answered. “I—” She stared at Miss Jenny a moment, clenching her hands at her sides. “I must go,” she said, and she emerged from the parlor. “It’s late, and Horace…”

“You can come in and speak to him, can’t you?” Miss Jenny asked, watching the other curiously. “There’s not any blood, if that’s what you are afraid of.”

“It isn’t that,”‘ Narcissa answered. “I’m not afraid.” But she was rigid with repressed trembling; Miss Jenny could see her teeth clenched upon her lower lip.

“Why, all right,” Miss Jenny agreed kindly, “if you’d rather not. I just thought perhaps you’d like to see he is all right, as long as you are here. But don’t if you don’t feel like it.”

“Yes. Yes. I feel like it. I want to.” She passed Miss Jenny and went on down the hall. At the foot of the stairs she halted until Miss Jenny came up behind her, and they mounted together, although she kept a step ahead and with her face averted from Miss Jenny’s probing eyes.

‘What’s the matter?” Miss Jenny demanded, still watching the other. “What happened to you? Have you fallen in love with him?”

“In love...him? Bayard?” She swayed “against the rail beside her and paused, and slid her hand along the rail and drew herself onward. She began to laugh thinly, repressing hysteria. Miss Jenny mounted beside her, piercing and curious and cold; Narcissa hurried on. At the stair head she stopped again, holding to the railing, and permitted Miss Jenny to precede her; and just without the door to Bayard’s room she stopped yet again and leaned against it, throttling her laughter and her trembling. Then she entered the room, where Miss Jenny stood beside the bed with head reverted.

For a moment she could see nothing for the. swelling convolutions of laughter in her throat, and she was conscious only of her need to repress them and of a sickly-sweet lingering of ether as she approached the bed and stood blindly beside it, with her hidden writhing hands. On the pillow Bayard’s head lay as she had remembered it on that former day—pallid and calm, like a chiseled mask brushed lightly over with the shadow of his spent violence. He was watching her, and for a while she gazed at him, and Miss Jenny and the room and all, swam away.

“You beast, you beast,” she said thinly. “Why must you always do these things where I’ve got to see you?”

“I didn’t know you were there,” Bayard answered weakly, with mild astonishment.

But this was gone soon; nor did it return. Every few days, by Miss Jenny’s request, she came out and sat beside his bed and read to him, bringing into the room her outward untroubled serenity. He cared nothing at all about books; it is doubtful if he had ever read a book on his own initiative; but he would lie motionless in his cast while her grave contralto voice went on and on in the drowsy room. Sometimes he tried to talk to her, but she ignored his attempts and read on; if he persisted, she went away and left him. So he soon learned to lie, usually with his eyes closed, voyaging alone in the bleak and barren regions of his despair, while her voice flowed and ebbed above the remoter sounds that surrounded them—Miss Jenny scolding Simon or Isom downstairs or in the garden; the twittering of birds in the tree just beyond the window; the ceaseless rhythmic monotone of the water pump below the barn. At times she would cease and look at him and find that he was peacefully sleeping.

6

Old man Falls came through the lush green of early June, came into town through the yet horizontal sunlight of morning, and in his dusty neat overalls he now sat opposite old Bayard in immaculate linen and a geranium like a merry wound. The room was cool and still, reposeful with dingy light and the casual dust of a negro janitor’s casual and infrequent disturbing. Now that old Bayard was aging, and what with the deaf tenor of his stiffening ways, he was showing more and more a desire to surround himself with things of a like undeference; showing an incredible aptitude for choosing servants who circled about him in a sort of pottering and bland futility. The janitor, who dubbed old Bayard General and whom old Bayard and the other clients for whom he performed seemingly interminable duties of a slovenly and minor nature, addressed as Dr. Jones, was one of these. He was black and stooped with querulousness and age, and he took advantage of everyone who would permit him, and old Bayard swore at him’ constantly and permitted him to steal his tobacco and the bank’s winter supply of coal and peddle it to other negroes. The windows behind which old Bayard and his caller sat gave upon a vacant lot of rubbish and dusty weeds. It was bounded by the weathered rears of sundry one-story board buildings within which small businesses—repair and junk shops and such—had their lowly and ofttimes anonymous being. The lot itself was used by day by country people as a depot for their wagons and teams; already some of these were tethered somnolent and ruminant there, and about the stale ammoniac droppings of their patient generations sparrows swirled in garrulous clouds, or pigeons slanted with sounds like rusty shutters, or strode and preened in burnished and predatory pomposity, crooning among themselves with guttural un-emphasis.

Old man Falls sat on the opposite side of the trash-filled fireplace, mopping his face with a blue-figured bandana.

‘It’s my damned old legs,” he explained, faintly apologetic. “Use to be I’d walk twelve-fifteen mile to a picnic or a singin’ with less study than that ‘ere little old three mile into town gives me now.” He mopped the handkerchief about that face of his, browned and cheerful these many years with the ample and abounding earth. “Looks like they’re fixin’ to give out on me, and I ain’t but ninety-three, neither.” He held his parcel in his other hand, but he continued to mop his face, making no motion to open it nor to ascertain its contents.

“Why didn’t you wait on the roadside until a wagon came along?” old Bayard demanded in that overloud tone of the deaf. “Always some damn feller with a field full of weeds coming to town.”

“I reckon I mought,” the other agreed. “But gittin’ here so quick would spile my holiday. I ain’t like you town-folks. I ain’t got so much time I kin hurry it.” He stowed the handkerchief away and rose and laid his parcel carefully on the mantel, and from his shirt he produced a small object wrapped in a clean frayed rag. Beneath his tedious and unhurried fingers there emerged a tin snuff-box polished long since to the dull soft sheen of satin or silver by handling and age. Old Bayard sat in his white linen and watched, watched him quietly as he removed the cap of the box and laid this, too, carefully aside.

“Now, turn yo’ face to the light,” old man Falls directed.

“Loosh Peabody says that stuff will give me blood poisoning, Will.”

The other continued his slow preparations, his blue innocent eyes steadily following the movement of his hands. “Loosh Peabody never said that,” he corrected quietly. “One of them young doctors told you that, Bayard. Lean yo’ face to the light.” But old Bayard sat yet well back in his chair, his hands on the arms of it, watching the other with his piercing old eyes soberly, a little wistful; eyes filled with un-nameable things like the eyes of old lions, and intent.

Old man Falls poised a dark gob of his ointment on one finger and raised his head. Then he set the box carefully on his vacated chair and he put his hand on old Bayard’s face, put old Bayard still resisted, though passively, watching him with his unutterable things; and the other drew him firmly but gently nearer the light.

“Come on, here. I’m too old to waste any time hurtin’ folks. Hold still, now, so’ I won’t spot yo’ face. My hand ain’t steady enough to lift a rifle ball offen a hot stove no mo’.”

He submitted then, and old man Falls patted the salve onto the wen with small deft touches. Then he took up the bit of cloth and removed the surplus from the wen and wiped his fingers and dropped the rag onto the hearth and knelt stiffly and touched a match to it. “We allus do that,” he explained. “My granny got that ‘ere from a Choctaw woman nigh a hundred year ago. Ain’t none of us never told what hit air nor left no after trace.” He rose stiffly again and dusted his knees. He recapped the box with the same unhurried laborious care and put it away and raised his parcel from the mantel and resumed his chair.

“Hit’ll turn black, and long’s hit’s black, hit’s workin’. Don’t put no water on yo’ face befo’ mawnin’, and I’ll come in again in ten days and dose hit again, and on the—” He brooded a moment, computing slowly on his gnarled fingers; his lips moved but with no sound. “—ninth day of July, hit’ll drop off. And don’t you let Miss Jenny nor none of them doctors worry you about it.”

He sat with his over ailed knees close together. The package lay on his knees and he now opened it after the ancient laborious ritual, picking with a sort of patient indomitability at the pink knot of the cord until a younger person would have screamed Old Bayard merely lit a cigar and propped his feet on the fireplace, and in good time old man Falls solved the knot and removed the string and laid it across his chair-arm. It fell to the floor and lie bent and fumbled it into his blunt fingers and laid it again across the chair-arm and watched it a while lest it fall again, then he opened the parcel First was his carton of tobacco, and he removed a plug and sniffed it, turned it about in his hand and sniffed it again. But without biting into it he laid it and its fellows aside and delved further yet lie spread open the throat of the resulting paper bag, and his innocent boy’s eyes gloated soberly into it.

“I’ll declare,” he said. “Sometimes I’m right ashamed for havin’ sech a consarned sweet tooth. Hit don’t give me no rest a-tall.” Still carefully guarding the other objects on his close knees he tilted the sack and shook two or three of the striped, shrimp-like things into his palm, returned all but one, which he put into his mouth. “I’m afeard now I’ll be loosin’ my teeth someday and I’ll have to start gummin’ ‘em or eatin’ soft ones. I never did relish soft candy.” His leathery cheek bulged slightly, with slow regularity like a respiration as he chewed against the hard substance. He peered into the sack again, and he sat weighing it in his hand.

“They was times back in sixty-three and -fo’ when a feller could a bought a section of land and a nigger with this yere bag of candy. Lots of times I mind, with everything goin’ agin us like, and sugar and cawfee gone and food scace, eatin’ stole cawn when they was any to steal and ditch weeds ef they wa’nt; bivouacin’ at night in the rain, more’n like...” His voice trailed away among ancient phantoms of the soul’s and the body’s tribulations, into those regions of glamqrous and useless endeavor where such ghosts abide. Then he chuckled and chewed his peppermint again.

“I mind that day we was a-dodgin’ around Grant’s army, headin’ nawth. Grant was at Grenada then, and Colonel had rousted us boys out and we taken hoss and jined Van Dorn’s cavalry down that-a-way. That was when Colonel had that ‘ere silver stallion. Grant was still at Grenada, but Van Dora lit out one day, headin’ nawth; why, us boys didn’t know. Colonel mought have knowed, but he never told us. Not that we keered much, long’s we was headin’ to’ds home.

“So our comp’ny was ridin’ along to ourselves, goin’ to jine up with the balance of ‘em later. Leastways the rest of ‘em thought we was goin’ to jine ‘em. But Colonel never had no idea of doin’ that; his cawn hadn’t been laid by yit, and he was goin’ home fer a spell. We wasn’t runnin’ away,” he explained. “We knowed Van Dorn could handle ‘em all right fer a week or two. He usually done it. He was a putty good man,” old man Falls said. “A putty good man.’’

“They were all pretty good men in those days,” old Bayard agreed. “But you damn fellers quit fighting and went home too often.”

“Well,” old man Falls replied defensively, “even ef the hull country’s overrun with bears, a feller can’t hunt bears all the time. He’s got to quit once in a while, ef hit’s only to feed and rest up the dogs and hosses. But I reckon them dogs and bosses could stay on the trail long as any. ‘Course everybody couldn’t keep up with that ‘ere mist-colored stallion. They wa’nt but one animal in the Confedrit army could tech him—that last hoss Zeb Fothergill fotch back outen one of Sherman’s cavalry pickets on his last trip into Tennessee.

“Nobody never did know what Zeb done on them trips of his’n; Colonel claimed hit was jest to steal hosses. But he never got back with lessen one. One time he come back with seven of the orneriest critters that ever walked, I reckon. He tried to swap ‘em fer meat and cawn-meal, but wouldn’t nobody have ‘em; then he tried to give ‘em to the army, but even the army wouldn’t have ‘em. So he finally turned ‘em loose and requisitioned to Joe Johnston’s haidquarters fer ten hosses sold to Forrest’s cavalry. I don’t know ef he ever got an answer. Nate, Forrest wouldn’t a had them hosses. I doubt ef they’d even a et ‘em in Vicksburg...I never did put no big reliability in Zeb Fothergill, him comin’ and goin’ by hisself like he done. But he knowed hosses, and he usually fotch a good ‘un home ever’ time he went away to’ds the war. But he never got another’n like this befo’.”

The bulge receded from his cheek and he produced his pocket knife and cut a neat segment from his plug of tobacco and put it in his mouth. Then he rewrapped his parcel and tied the string about it again. The ash of old Bayard’s cigar trembled delicately about its glowing heart, but did not fall; his crossed elastic-sided boots gleamed against the hearth edge.

Old man Falls spat neatly and brownly into the cold fireplace. “That day we was in Calhoun county,” he continued. “Hit was as putty a summer mawnin’ as you ever see; men and hosses rested and fed and feelin’ peart, trottin’ along the road through the woods and fields whar birds was a-singin’ and young rabbits lopin’ across the road. Colonel and Zeb was ridin’ along side by side on them two hosses, Colonel on Jupiter and Zeb on that sorrel two-year-old, and they was a-braggin’ as usual. We all knowed Colonel’s Jupiter, but Zeb kep’ a-contendin’ he wouldn’t take no man’s dust. The road was putty straight across the bottom to’ds the river and Zeb kep’ on aggin’ the Colonel fer a race, until Colonel said All right. He told us boys to come on and him and Zeb would wait fer us at the river bridge ‘bout fo’ mile ahead, and him and Zeb lit out.

“Them hosses was the puttiest livin’ things I ever seen. They went off together like two birds, neck and neck. They was outen sight in no time, with dust swirlin’ behind, but we could foller ‘em fer a ways by the dust they left, watchin’ it kind of suckin’ on down the road like one of these here ottomobiles was in the middle of it. When they come to whar the road drapped down to the river Colonel had Zeb beat by about three hundred yards. Thar was a crick jest under the ridge, and when Colonel sailed over the rise and come in sight of the crick, thar was a comp’ny of Yankee cavalry with their hosses picketed and their muskets stacked, eatin’ dinner by the bridge. Colonel says they was a-settin’ thar gapin’ at the rise when he come over hit, holdin’ cups of caw-fee and hunks of bread in their hands and their muskets stacked abo’ forty foot away buggin’ their eyes and mouths at him.

“It was too late fer him to turn back, anyhow, but I don’t reckon he would ef they’d been time. He jest spurred down the ridge and in amongst ‘em, scatterin’ cook-fires and guns and men, shoutin’ ‘Surround ‘em, boys! Ef you move, you are dead men.’ One or two of ‘em made to break away, but Colonel drawed his pistols and let ‘em off, and they come back and scrouged in amongst the others, and thar they set’ still a-holdin’ their cups and dinner, when Zeb come up. And that was the way we found ‘em when we got thar ten minutes later.” Old man Falls spat again, neatly and brownly, and he chuckled. His eyes shone like periwinkles, “That cawfee was sho’ mighty fine,” he said.

“And thar we was, with a passel of prisoners we didn’t have no use fer. We held ‘em all that day and et their grub; and when night come we taken and throwed their muskets into the crick and taken their ammunition and the rest of the grub and put a guard on their hosses, then the rest of us laid down. And all that night we laid thar in them fine Yankee blankets, listenin’ to them prisoners sneakin’ away one at a time, slippin’ down the bank into the crick and wadin’ off. Time to time one would slip or make a splash er something, then they’d all git right still fer a spell. But pretty soon we’d hear ‘em at it again, crawlin’ through the bushes to’ds the crick, and us layin’ with blanket aidges held to our mouths. Hit was nigh dawn ‘fore the last one had snuck off in a way that suited him.

“Then Colonel from whar he was a-layin’ let out a yell them pore critters could hear fer a mile.

“ ‘Go it Yank,’ he says, ‘and look out fer moccasins!’ ”

“Next mawnin’ we saddled up and loaded our plunder and ever’ man taken him a hoss, and lit out fer home. We’d been home two weeks and Colonel had his cawn laid by, when we heard ‘bout Van Dorn ridin’ into Holly Springs and burnin’ Grants sto’s. Seems like he never needed no help from us, noways.” He chewed his tobacco for a time, quietly retrospective, reliving in the company of men now dust with the dust for which they had, unwittingly perhaps, fought, those gallant, pinch-bellied days into which few who now trod that earth and. drew breath, could enter into with him.

Old Bayard shook the ash from his cigar. “Will,” he said, “what the devil were you folks fighting about, anyhow?”

“Bayard,” old man Falls answered, “damned ef I ever did know.”

After old man Falls had departed with his small parcel and his innocently bulging cheek, old Bayard sat and smoked his cigar. He knew now a sense of finality, of peace; like that of the man who has made his final cast with the dice and from whom all initiative is lifted, leaving him no more than a vegetable until they cease rolling, let them show what they may. He had crossed the Rubicon...but had he? He raised his hand and touched the wen again, but lightly, recalling old man Falls’ parting stricture; and recalling this, the thought that it might not yet be too late, that he might yet remove the paste with water, followed.

He rose and crossed to the lavatory in the corner of the room. Above it was fixed a small cabinet with a mirror in the door, and in it he examined the black spot on his face, touching it again with his fingers, then staring at his hand. Yes, it might still come off...But be damned if he would; be damned to a man who didn’t know his own mind. And Will Falls, too; Will Falls, hale and sane and sound as a dollar; Will Falls who, as he himself had said, was too old to have any reason for injuring anyone. He flung his cigar away and quitted the room and tramped through the lobby toward the door where his chair sat. But before he reached the door he stopped and turned and came up to the teller’s window, behind which the cashier sat in a green eyeshade.

“Res,” he said.

The cashier looked up. “Yes, Colonel?”

“Who is that damn boy that hangs around here, looking through that window all the time?” old Bayard demanded, lowering his voice within a pitch or so of an ordinary conversational tone.

“What boy, Colonel?” Old Bayard pointed, and the cashier raised himself on his stool and peered over the partition and saw without the indicated window a boy of ten or twelve watching him with an innocently casual air. “Oh. That’s Will Beard’s boy, from up at the boarding house,” he shouted. “Friend of Byron’s, I think.”

“What’s he doing, then? Every time I walk through here, there he is looking in that window. What does he want?”

“Maybe he’s a bank robber,” the cashier suggested.

“What?” Old Bayard cupped his ear fiercely in his palm.

“Maybe he’s a bank robber,” the other shouted, leaning forward on his stool. Old Bayard snorted and tramped violently away and slammed his chair back against the door. The cashier sat lumped and shapeless on his stool, rumbling deep within his gross body. He said, without turning his head: “Colonel’s let Will Falls treat that thing on his face with that salve.” The Snopes at his desk made no reply; did not raise his head. After a time the boy moved, and drifted casually and innocently away.

Virgil Beard now possessed, besides the air rifle, a pistol that projected a stream of ammoniac water excruciatingly painful to the eyes, a small magic lantern, and an ex-candy showcase in which he kept birds’ eggs and an assortment of insects that had died slowly on pins, and a modest hoard of nickels and dimes and quarters. With a child’s innocent pleasure he divulged to his parents the source of this beneficence, and his mother took Snopes to her gray heart, fixing him special dishes and performing trifling acts to increase his creature comfort with bleak and awkward gratitude.

At times the boy, already dressed and with his bland shining face, would enter his room and waken him from his troubled sleep and sit on a chair while Snopes donned his clothing, talking politely and vaguely of certain things he aimed to do, and of what he would require to do them successfully with. Or if not this, he was on hand at breakfast while his harried gray mother and the slatternly negress bore dishes back and forth from the kitchen, quiet but proprietorial; blandly and innocently portentous.

And all during the banking day (it was summer now, and school was out) Snopes never knew when he would look over his shoulder and find the boy lounging without the plate glass window of the bank; watching him with profound and static patience. Presently he would take himself away, and for a short time Snopes would be able to forget him until, wrapped in his mad unsleeping dream, he mounted the boarding house veranda at supper time and found the boy sitting there and waiting patiently his return; innocent and bland, steadfast and unassertive as a minor but chronic disease. “Got another business letter to write tonight, Mr. Snopes?”

And sometimes after he had gone to bed and his light was out; he lay in the mad darkness against his sleepless desire moiled in obscene images and shapes, and heard presently outside his door secret, rat-like sounds; and lay so tense in the dark, expecting the door to open and, preceded by breathing above him sourceless and invisible: “Going to write another letter, Mr. Snopes?” And he waked sweating from dreams in which her image lived and moved and thwarted and mocked him, with the pillow crushed against his mean, half-insane face, while the words produced themselves in his ears: “Got air other letter to write yet, Mr. Snopes?”

So he changed his boarding house. He gave Mrs. Beard an awkward, stumbling explanation; vague, composed of sentences with frayed ends. She was sorry to see him go, but she permitted him to pack his meagre belongings and depart without dither anger or complaint, as is the way of country people. He went to live with a relation, that I. O. Snopes who ran the restaurant—a nimble, wiry little man with a talkative face like a nutcracker, and false merry eyes—in a small frame house painted a sultry prodigious yellow, near the railway station. Snopeses did not trust one another enough to develop any intimate relations, and he was permitted to go and come when he pleased. So he found this better than the boarding house, the single deterrent to complete satisfaction being the hulking but catlike presence of I.O.’s son Clarence. But, what with his secretive nature, it had even been his custom to keep all his possessions under lock and key, so this was but a minor matter. Mrs. Snopes was a placid mountain of a woman who swung all day in a faded wrapper, in the porch swing. Not reading, not doing anything: just swinging.

He liked it here. It was more private; no transients appearing at the supper table and tramping up and down the hallways all night; no one to try to engage him in conversation on the veranda after supper. Now, after supper he could sit undisturbed on the tight barren little porch in the growing twilight and watch the motor cars congregating at the station across the way to meet the 7:30 train; could watch the train draw into the station with its rows of lighted windows and the hissing plume from the locomotive, and go on again with bells, trailing its diminishing sound into the distant evening, while he sat on the dark porch with his desperate sleepless lust and his fear. Thus, until one evening after supper he stepped through the front door and found Virgil Beard sitting patiently and blandly on the front steps in the twilight.

So he had been run to earth again, and drawn, and hounded again into flight. Yet outwardly he pursued the even tenor of his days, unchanged, performing his duties with his slow meticulous care. But within him smoldered something of which he himself grew afraid, and at times he found himself gazing at his idle hands on the desk before him as though they were not his hands, wondering dully at them and at what they were- capable, nay importunate, to do. And day by day that lust and fear and despair that moiled within him merged, becoming desperation—a thing blind and vicious and hopeless, like that of a Cornered rat. And always, if he but raised his head and looked toward the window, there was the boy watching him with bland and innocent eye? beneath the pale straw of his hair. Sometimes he blinked; then the boy was gone; sometimes not. So he could never tell whether the face had been there at all, or whether it was merely another face swum momentarily from out the seething of his mind. In the meanwhile he wrote another letter.

7

Miss Jenny’s exasperation and rage when old Bayard arrived that afternoon was unbounded. “You stubborn old fool,” she stormed. “Can’t Bayard kill you fast enough, that you’ve got to let that old quack of a Will Falls give you blood poisoning? After what Dr. Alford told you, when even Loosh Peabody, who thinks- a course of quinine or calomel will cure anything from a broken neck to chilblains, agreed with him? I’ll declare, sometimes I just lose all patience with you folks; wonder what crime I seem to be expiating by having to live with you. Soon as Bayard sort of quiets down and I can quit jumping every time the ‘phone rings, you have to go and let that old pauper daub your face up with axle grease and lamp black. I’m a good mind to pack up and get out, and start life over again in some place where they never heard of a Sartoris.” She raged and stormed on; old Bayard raged in reply, with violent words and profane, and their voices swelled and surged through the house until Simon and Elnora in the kitchen moved about with furtive hushed sounds. Finally old Bayard tramped from the house and mounted his horse and rode away, leaving Miss Jenny to wear her rage out upon the empty air, and then therewas peace for a time.

But at supper the storm brewed and burst again. Simon within the butler’s pantry could hear them beyond the swing door, and young Bayard’s voice too, trying to shout them down. “Let up, let up,” he howled. “For God’s sake. I can’t hear myself chew.”

“And you’re another one.” Miss Jenny turned promptly on him. “You’re just as trying as he is. You and your stiff-necked, sullen ways. Helling around the country in that car just because you think there may be somebody who cares whether or not you break your worthless neck, and then coming into the supper table smelling like a stable-hand! Just because you went to a war. Do you think nobody else ever went to a war? Do you reckon that when my Bayard came back from The War, he made a nuisance of himself to everybody that had to live with him? But he was a gentleman: he raised the devil like a gentleman, not like you Mississippi country people. Clodhoppers. Look what he did with just a horse,” she added. “He didn’t have any flying machine.”

“Look at the little two-bit war he went to,” young Bayard rejoined. “A war that was so sorry that grandfather wouldn’t stay up there in Virginia where it was, even.”

“And nobody wanted him at it,” Miss Jenny retorted. “A man that would get mad just because his men deposed him and elected a better colonel in his place. Got mad and came back to the country to lead a bunch of brigands.”

“Little two-bit war;,” young Bayard repeated. “And on a horse. Anybody can go to a war on a horse. No chance for him to do anything much.”

“At least he got himself decently killed,” Miss Jenny snapped. “He did more with a horse than you could do with that aeroplane.”

“Sho,” Simon breathed against the pantry door. “Ain’t dey gwine it? Takes white folks to sho’ ‘nough quoil.” And so it surged and ebbed through the succeeding days; wore itself out, then surged again when old Bayard returned home with another application of old man Falls’ paste. But by this time Simon was having troubles of his own, troubles which he finally consulted old Bayard about one afternoon. Young Bayard was laid up in bed with his crushed ribs, with: Miss Jenny mothering him with violent and cherishing affection, and Miss Benbow to visit with him and read aloud to him; and Simon came into his own again. The tophat and the duster came down from the nail, and old Bayard’s cigars depleted daily by one, and the fat matched horses spent their accumulated laziness and insolence between home and the bank, before which Simon swung them to a halt each afternoon as of old, with his clamped cigar and his smartly furled whip and all the theatrics of the fine moment. “De ottomobile,” Simon philosophized, “is all right for pleasure and excitement, but fer de genu-wine gen’lmun tone, dey ain’t but one thing: dat’s hosses.”

Thus Simon’s opportunity came ready to his hand, and once they were clear of town and the team had settled into its gait, he took advantage of it.

“Well, Cunnel,” he began, “looks lak me en you’s got to make some financial ‘rangements.”

“What?” Old Bayard brought his attention back from where it wandered about the familiar landscape of planted fields and blue shining hills beyond them.

“I says, it looks lak me en you’s goin’ ter have to arrange about a little cash money.”

“Much obliged, Simon,” old Bayard answered, “but I don’t need any money right now. I’m much obliged, though.”

Simon laughed heartily, from the teeth out. “I declare, Cunnel, you sho’ is comical. Rich man lak you needin’ money!” And he laughed again, with unctuous arid abortive heartiness. “Yes, suh, you sho’ is comical.” Then he ceased laughing and became engrossed with the horses for a moment? Twins they were, Roosevelt and Taft, with sleek hides and broad, comfortable hips. “You, Taf’, lean on ‘dat collar! Laziness gwine go in on you someday, and kill you, sho’.” Old Bayard sat watching his apelike head and the swaggering tilt of the tophat. Then Simon turned his wizened, plausible face over his shoulder. “But sho. ‘nough, now, we is got to quiet dem niggers somehow”

“What have they done? Can’t they find anybody to take their money?”

“Well, suh, hit’s lak dis,” Simon explained “Hit’s kind of all ‘round cu’i’s. You see, dey been collectin’ buildin’ money fer dat church whut burnt down, and ez dey got de money up, dey turnt hit over to me, whut wid my ‘ficial position on de church boa’d and bein’ I wuz a member of de bes’ fembly ‘round here. Dat ‘uz erbout las’ Chris’mus time, and now dey wants de money back.”

“That’s strange,” old Bayard said.

“Yessuh,” Simon agreed readily. “Hit struck me jes’ zackly dat way.”

“Well, if they insist, I reckon you’d better give it back to ’em.”

“Now you’s gittin’ to it.” Simon turned his head again; his manner was confidential, and he exploded his bombshell in a hushed melodramatic tone: “De money’s gone.”

“Dammit, I know that,” old Bayard answered pettishly. “Where is it?”

“I went and put it out,” Simon told him, and his tone was still confidential, with a little pained astonishment at the world’s obtuseness. “And now dem niggers ’cusin ’me of stealin’ it,”

“Do you mean to tell me that you took charge of money belonging to other people, and then went and loaned it to somebody else?”

“You does de same thing ev’y day,” Simon answered. “Ain’t lendin’ out money yo’ main business?”

Old Bayard snorted violently. “You get that money back and give it to those niggers, or you’ll be in jail, you hear?”

“You talks jes’ lak dem uppity town riggers,” Simon told him. “Dat money done been put out, now,” he reminded his patron.

“Get it back. Haven’t you got collateral for it?”

“Is I got which?”

“Something worth the value of the money, to keep until the money is paid back.”

“Yessuh, I got dat” Simon chuckled again, a satyrish chuckle, with smug and complacent innuendo. “Yessuh, I got dat, all right. Only I never heard it called collateral befo’. Naw, suh, not dat.”

“Did you give that money to some nigger wench?” Old Bayard demanded.

‘Well, suh, hit’s lak dis—” Simon began, but the other interrupted him.

“Ah, the devil. And now you expect me to pay it back, do you? How much is it?”

“I don’t rightly remember. Dem niggers claims hit wuz seventy er ninety dollars er somethin’. But don’t you pay ‘um no mind; you jes’ give ‘um whatever you think is right: dey’ll take it.”

“I’m damned if I will. They can take it out of your worthless hide, or send you to jail—whichever they want to, but I’m damned if I’ll pay a cent of it.”

‘‘Now, Cunnel,” Simon said, “you ain’t gwine let dem town niggers ‘cuse a member of yo’ fambly of stealin’, is you?”

“Drive on!” old Bayard shouted. Simon turned on the seat and clucked to the horses and drove on, his cigar tilted toward his hat brim, his elbows out and the whip caught smartly back in his hand, glancing now and then at the field niggers laboring among the cotton rows with tolerant and easy scorn.

Old-man Falls replaced the cap on his tin of salve, wiped the tin carefully with the bit of rag, then knelt on the cold hearth and held a match to the rag.

“I reckon them doctors air still a-tellin’ you hit’s gwine to kill you, ain’t they?” he said.

Old Bayard propped his feet against the hearth, cupping a match to his cigar, cupping two tiny matchflames in his eyes. He flung the match away and grunted.

Old man Falls watched the rag take fire sluggishly, with a pungent pencil of yellowish smoke that broke curling in the still air. “Ever’ now and then a feller has to walk up and spit in deestruction’s face, sort of, fer his own good. He has to kind of put a aidge on hisself, like he’d hold his axe to the grindstone,” he said, squatting before the pungent curling of the smoke as though in a pagan ritual in miniature. “Ef a feller’ll show his face to deestruction ever’ now and then, deestruction’ll leave ‘im be ‘twell his time comes. Deestruction likes to take a feller in the back.”

“What?” old Bayard said

Old man Falls rose and dusted his knees carefully.

“Deestruction’s like ary other coward” he roared. “Hit won’t strike a feller that’s a-lookiln’ hit in the face lessen he pushes hit too clost. Your paw knowed that. Stood in the do’ of that sto’ the day them two cyarpet-baggers brung them niggers in to vote that day in ‘72. Stood thar in his Prince Albert coat and beaver hat, with his arms folded, when everybody else had left, and watched them two Missouri fellers herdin’ them niggers up the road to’ds the sto’; stood right in the middle of the do’ while them two cyarpet-baggers begun backin’ away with their hands in their pockets until they was clar of the niggers, and cussed him. And him standin’ thar jest like this.” He crossed his arms on his breast, his hands in sight, and for a moment old Bayard saw, as through a cloudy glass, that arrogant and familiar shape which the old man in shabby overalls had contrived in some way to immolate and preserve in the vacuum of his own abnegated self .

“Then, when they was gone on back down the road, Cunnel reached around inside the do’ and lifted out the ballot box and sot hit between his feet.

“ ‘You niggers come hyer to vote, did you?’ he says. ‘All right, come up hyer and vote.’

“When they had broke and scattered he let off that ‘ere dern’ger over their haids a couple of times, then he loaded hit again and marched down the road to Miz Winterbottom’s, whar them two fellers boa’ded.

“ ‘Madam,’ he says, liftin’ his beaver, ‘I have a small matter of business to discuss with yo’ lodgers. Permit me,’ he says, and he put his hat back on and marched up the stairs steady as a parade, with Miz Winterbottom gapin’ after him with her mouth open. He walked right into the room whar they was a-settin’ behind a table facin’ the do’ with their pistols layin’ on the table.

“When us boys outside heard the three shots we run in. Thar wuz Miz Winterbottom standin’ thar, a-gapin’ up the stairs, and in a minute hyer comes Cunnel with his hat cocked over his eye, marchin’ down the stairs steady as a co’t jury, breshin’ the front of his coat with his hank’cher. And us standin’ thar, a-watchin’ him. He stopped in front of Miz Wihterbottom and lifted his hat again.

“ ‘Madam,’ he says, ‘I was fo’ced to muss up yo’ guest room right considerable. Pray accept my apologies, and have yo’ nigger clean it up and send the bill to me. My apologies agin, madam, fer havin’ been put to the necessity of exterminating vermin on yo’ premises. Gentlemen,’ he says to us, ‘good mawnin’. And he cocked that ‘ere beaver on his head and walked out.

“And, Bayard,” old man Falls said, “I sort of envied them two nawthuners, be damned ef I didn’t. A feller kin take a wife and live with her a long time, but after all they ain’t no kin. But the feller that brings you into the world or sends you outen hit...”

Lurking behind the pantry door Simon could hear the steady storming of Miss Jenny’s and old Bayard’s voices; later when they had removed to the office and Elnora and Isom and Caspey sat about the table in the kitchen waiting for Simon, the concussion of Miss Jenny’s raging and old Bayard’s rock-like stubbornness came in muffled surges, as of faraway surf.