Flags in the Dust (18 page)

“Let him tell, if he wants,” Hub answered. “I dont give a damn.”

They drank again. The sun was almost gone and from the secret marshy places of the stream came a fairy-like piping of young frogs. The gaunt invisible cow lowed barnward, and Hub replaced the corn cob in the jug and drove it home with a blow of his palm and they mounted the hill and crawled through the fence. The cow stood in the barn door and watched them approach and lowed again, moody and mournful, and the geese had left the pond and they now paraded sedately across the barnyard toward the house, in the door of which, framed by two crepe-myrtle bushes, a woman stood.

“Hub,” she said in a flat country voice.

“Goin’ to town,” Hub answered shortly. “Sue’ll have to milk.”

The woman stood quietly in the door. Hub carried the jug into the barn and the cow followed him, and he heard her and turned and gave her a resounding kick in her gaunt ribs and cursed her without heat. Presently he reappeared and went on to the gate and opened it and Suratt drove through. Then he closed it and wired it to again and swung onto the fender. Bayard moved over and prevailed on Hub to get inside. The woman stood yet in the door, watching them quietly. About the doorstep the geese surged erratically with discordant cries, their necks undulant and suave as formal gestures in a pantomime.

The shadow of the fruit trees fell long across the untidy fields, and the car pushed its elongated shadow before it like
the shadow of a huge humpshouldered bird. They mounted the sandy hill in the last of the sun and dropped downward out of sunlight and into violet dusk. The road was soundless with sand and the car lurched in the worn and shifting ruts and on to the highroad again.

The waxing moon stood overhead. As yet it gave off no light though, and they drove on toward town, passing an occasional country wagon homeward bound; these Suratt, who knew nearly every soul in the county, greeted with a grave gesture of his brown hand, and presently where the road crossed a wooden bridge among more willow and elder where dusk was yet denser and more palpable, Suratt stopped the car and climbed out over the door. “You fellers set still,” he said. “I wont be but a minute. Got to fill that ’ere radiator.” They heard him at the rear of the car, then he reappeared with a tin bucket and let himself gingerly down the roadside bank beside the bridge. Water chuckled and murmured beneath the bridge, invisible with twilight, its murmur burdened with the voice of cricket and frog. Above the willows that marked the course of the stream gnats still spun and whirled, for bullbats appeared from nowhere in long swoops, in midswoop vanished, then appeared again against the serene sky swooping, silent as drops of water on a window-pane; swift and noiseless and intent as though their wings were feathered with twilight and with silence.

Suratt scrambled up the bank, with his pail, and removed the cap and tilted the bucket above the radiator. The moon stood without emphasis overhead, yet a faint shadow of Suratt’s head and shoulders fell upon the hood of the car and upon the pallid planking of the bridge the leaning willow fronds were faintly and delicately pencilled in shadow. The last of the water gurgled with faint rumblings into the engine’s interior and Suratt replaced the pail and climbed over the blind door. The
lights operated from a generator; he switched these on now. While the car was in low speed the lights glared to crescendo, but when he let the clutch in they dropped to a wavering glow no more than a luminous shadow.

Night was fully come when they reached town. Across the land the lights on the courthouse clock were like yellow beads above the trees, and upon the green afterglow a column of smoke stood like a balanced plume. Suratt put them out at the restaurant and drove on, and they entered and the proprietor raised his conical head and his round melting eyes from behind the soda fountain.

“Great Savior, boy,” he exclaimed. “Aint you gone home yet? Doc Peabody’s been huntin’ you ever since four oclock, and Miss Jenny drove to town in the carriage, lookin’ for you. You’ll kill yourself.”

“Get to hell on back yonder, Deacon,” Bayard answered, “and bring me and Hub about two dollars’ worth of ham and eggs.”

Later they returned for the jug in Bayard’s car, Bayard and Hub and a third young man, freight agent at the railway station, with three negroes and a bull fiddle in the rear seat. But they drove no further than the edge of the field above the house and stopped there while Hub went on afoot down the sandy road toward the barn. The moon stood pale and cold overhead, and on all sides insects shrilled in the dusty undergrowth. In the rear seat the negroes murmured among themselves.

“Fine night,” Mitch, the freight agent, suggested. Bayard made no reply. He smoked moodily, his head closely helmeted in its white bandage. Moon and insects were one, audible and visible, dimensionless and unsourced.

After a while Hub materialized against the dissolving
vagueness of the road, crowned by the silver slant of his hat, and he came up and swung the jug onto the door and removed the stopper. Mitch passed it to Bayard.

“Drink,” Bayard said, and Mitch did so, then the others drank.

“We aint got nothin’ for the niggers to drink out of,” Hub said.

“That’s so,” Mitch agreed. He turned in his seat. “Aint one of you boys got a cup or something?” The negroes murmured again, questioning one another in mellow consternation.

“Wait,” Bayard said. He got out and lifted the hood and removed the cap from the breather-pipe. “It’ll taste a little like oil for a drink or two, but you boys wont notice it after that.”

“Naw, suh,” the negroes agreed in chorus. One took the cup and wiped it out with the corner of his coat, and they too drank in turn, with smacking expulsions of breath. Bayard replaced the cap and got in the car.

“Anybody want another right now?” Hub asked, poising the corn cob.

“Give Mitch another,” Bayard directed. “He’ll have to catch up.”

Mitch drank again. Then Bayard took the jug and tilted it. The others watched him respectfully.

“Dam’f he dont drink it,” Mitch murmured. “I’d be afraid to hit it so often, if I was you.”

“It’s my damned head.” Bayard lowered the jug and passed it to Hub. “I keep thinking another drink will ease it off some.”

“Doc put that bandage on too tight,” Hub said. “Want it loosened some?”

“I dont know.” Bayard lit another cigarette and threw the match away. “I believe I’ll take it off. It’s been on there long enough.” He raised his hands and fumbled at the bandage.

“You better let it alone,” Mitch warned him. But he continued
to fumble at the fastening, then he slid his fingers beneath a turn of the cloth and tugged at it savagely. One of the negroes leaned forward with a pocket knife and severed it, and they watched him as he stripped it off and flung it away.

“You ought not to done that,” Mitch told him.

“Ah, let him take it off, if he wants,” Hub said. “He’s all right.” He got in and stowed the jug away between his knees. Bayard backed the car around. The sandy road hissed beneath the broad tires of it and rose shaling into the woods again where the dappled moonlight was intermittent, treacherous with dissolving vistas. Invisible and sourceless among the shifting patterns of light and shade whip-poor-wills were like flutes tongued liquidly. The road passed out of the woods and descended, with sand in shifting and silent lurches, and they turned on to the valley road and away from town.

The car went on, on the dry hissing of the closed muffler. The negroes murmured among themselves with mellow snatches of laughter whipped like scraps of torn paper away behind. They passed the iron gates and Bayard’s home serenely in the moonlight among its trees, and the silent boxlike flag station and the metal-roofed cotton gin on the railroad siding. The road rose at last into hills. It was smooth and empty and winding, and the negroes fell silent as Bayard increased speed. But still it was not anything like what they had anticipated of him. Twice more they stopped and drank, and then from an ultimate hilltop they looked down upon another cluster of lights like a clotting of beads upon the pale gash where the railroad ran. Hub produced the breather cap and they drank again.

Through streets identical with those at home they moved slowly, toward an identical square. People on the square turned and looked after them curiously. They crossed the square and followed another street and went on between broad lawns and
shaded windows, and presently beyond an iron fence and well back among black and silver trees, lighted windows hung in ordered tiers like rectangular lanterns strung among the branches.

They stopped here in shadow. The negroes descended and lifted the bass viol out, and a guitar. The third one held a slender tube frosted over with keys upon which the intermittent moon glinted in pale points, and they stood with their heads together, murmuring among themselves and touching plaintive muted chords from the strings. Then the one with the clarinet raised it to his lips.

The tunes were old tunes. Some of them were sophisticated tunes and formally intricate, but in the rendition this was lost and all of them were imbued instead with a plaintive similarity, a slurred and rhythmic simplicity, and they drifted in rich plaintive chords upon the silver air fading, dying in minor reiterations along the treacherous vistas of the moon. They played again, an old waltz. The college Cerberus came across the dappled lawn to the fence and leaned his arms upon it, a lumped listening shadow among other shadows. Across the street, in the shadows there, other listeners stood; a car approached and slowed into the curb and shut off engine and lights, and in the tiered windows heads leaned, aureoled against the lighted rooms behind, without individuality, feminine, distant, delicately and divinely young.

They played “Home, Sweet Home” and when the rich minor died away, across to them came a soft clapping of slender palms. Then Mitch sang “Goodnight, Ladies” in his true, oversweet tenor, and the young hands were more importunate; and as they drove away the slender heads leaned aureoled with bright hair in the lighted windows and the soft clapping drifted after them for a long while, fainter and fainter in the silver silence and the moon’s infinitude.

At the top of the first hill out of town they stopped and Hub removed the breather cap. Behind them random lights among the trees, and it was as though there came yet to them across the hushed world that sound of young palms like flung delicate flowers before their masculinity and their youth, and they drank without speaking, lapped yet in the fading magic of the lost moment. Mitch sang to himself softly; the car slid purring on again. The road dropped curving smoothly, empty and blanched. Bayard spoke, his voice harsh, abrupt.

“Cut out, Hub,” he said. Hub bent forward and reached under the dash and the car swept on with a steady leashed muttering like waking thunderous wings, then the road flattened in a long swoop toward another rise and the muttering leaped to crescendo and the car shot forward with neck-snapping violence. The negroes had stopped talking; one of them raised a wailing shout.

“Reno lost his hat,” Hub said, looking back.

“He dont need it,” Bayard replied. The car roared up this hill and rushed across the crest of it and flashed around a tight curve.

“Oh, Lawd,” the negro wailed. “Mr Bayard!” The air-blast stripped his words away like leaves. “Lemme out, Mr Bayard!”

“Jump out, then,” Bayard answered. The road fell from beneath them like a tilting floor and away across a valley, straight now as a string. The negroes clutched their instruments and held to one another. The speedometer showed 55 and 60 and turned gradually on. Sparse houses flashed slumbering away, and fields and patches of woodland like tunnels.

The road went on across the black and silver land. Whip-poor-wills called on either side, one to another in quiring liquid reiterations; now and then as the headlights swept in the road’s abrupt windings two spots of pale fire blinked in the dust before the bird blundered awkwardly somewhere beneath the
radiator. The ridge rose steadily, with wooded slopes falling away on either hand. Sparse negro cabins squatted on the slopes or beside the road, dappled with shadow and lightless and profound with slumber; beneath trees before them wagons stood or warped farm implements leaned, shelterless, after the shiftless fashion of negroes.

The road dipped, then rose again in a long slant broken by another dip; then it stood directly before them like a wall. The car shot upward and over the dip, left the road completely, then swooped dreadfully on, and the negroes’ concerted wail whipped forlornly away. Then the ridge attained its crest and the car’s thunder ceased and it rolled to a stop. The negroes now sat in the bottom of the tonneau.

“Is dis heaven?” one murmured after a time.

“Dey wouldn’t let you in heaven, wid licker on yo’ breaf and no hat, feller,” another said.

“Ef de Lawd dont take no better keer of me dan He done of dat hat, I dont wanter go dar, noways,” the first rejoined.

“Mmmmmmm,” the second agreed. “When us come down dat ’ere las’ hill, dis yere cla’inet almos’ blowed clean outen my han’, let ’lone my hat.”

“And when us jumped over dat ’ere lawg er whutever it wuz back dar,” the third one added, “I thought fer a minute dis whole auto’bile done blowed outen my han’.”

They drank again. It was high here, and the air moved with grave coolness. On either hand lay a valley filled with silver mist and with whip-poor-wills; beyond these valleys the silver earth rolled on into the sky. Across it, mournful and far, a dog howled. Bayard’s head was as cool and clear as a clapperless bell, within it that face emerged clearly at last: those two eyes round with grave astonishment, winged serenely by two dark wings of hair. It was that Benbow girl, he said to himself, and he sat for a while, gazing into the sky. The lights on the town
clock were steadfast and yellow and unwinking in the dissolving distance, but in all other directions the world rolled away in slumberous ridges, milkily opaline.

All of her instincts were antipathetic toward him, toward his violence and his brutally obtuse disregard of all the qualities which composed her being. His idea was like a trampling of heavy feet in those cool corridors of hers, in that grave serenity in which her days accomplished themselves; at the very syllables of his name her instincts brought her upstanding and under arms against him, thus increasing, doubling the sense of violation by the act of repulsing him and by the necessity for it. And yet, despite her armed sentinels, he still crashed with that hot violence of his through the bastions and thundered at the very inmost citadel of her being. Even chance seemed to abet him, lending to his brutal course a sort of theatrical glamor, a tawdry simulation of the virtues which the reasons (if he had reasons) for his actions outwardly ridiculed. That mad flaming beast he rode almost over her car and then swerved it with an utter disregard of consequences to himself onto a wet sidewalk in order to avoid a frightened child; the pallid, suddenly dreaming calm of his bloody face from which violence had been temporarily wiped as with a damp cloth, leaving it still with that fine bold austerity of Roman statuary, beautiful as a flame shaped in bronze and cooled: the outward form of its energy but without its heat.