He sat motionless for a moment. “Whew,” he said. And then, “Great God in the mountain.” His grandfather sat motionless beside him, his hand still clutching the door and his head bent a little. “Think I’ll have a cigarette after that,” Bayard added. He dug one from his pocket, and a match; his hands were shaking. “I thought of that damn concrete bridge again, just as we went over,” he explained, apologetically. He took a deep draught at his cigarette and glanced at his grandfather. “Y’all right?” Old Bayard made no reply, and with his cigarette poised Bayard looked at him. He sat as before, his head bent a little and his hand on the door. “Grandfather?” Bayard said sharply. Still old Bayard didn’t move, even when his grandson flung the cigarette away and shook him roughly.
4
Up the last hill the tireless pony bore him and in the low December sun their shadow fell long across the ridge and into the valley beyond, from which the high shrill yapping of the dogs came on the frosty, windless air. Young dogs, Bayard told himself, and he sat his horse in the faint scar of the road, listening as the high-pitched hysteria of them swept echoing across his aural field. Motionless, he could feel frost in the air. Above him the pines, though there was no wind in them, made a continuous dry, wild sound, as though the frost in the air had found voice; above them, against the high evening blue, a shallow V of geese slid. “There’ll be ice tonight,” he thought, watching them and thinking of black backwaters where they would come to rest, of rank bayonets of dead grass about which water would shrink soon in fixed glassy ripples in the brittle darkness. Behind him the earth rolled away ridge on ridge blue as wood-smoke, on into a sky like thin congealed blood. He turned in his saddle and stared unwinking into the sun that spread like a crimson egg broken on the ultimate hills. That meant weather; he snuffed the still, tingling air, hoping he smelled snow.
The pony snorted and tossed his head experimentally and found the reins slack and lowered his nose and snorted again into the dead leaves and delicate sere needles of pine beneath his feet. “Come up, Perry,” Bayard said, Jerking the reins. Perry raised his head and broke into a stiff, jolting trot, but Bayard lifted him smartly out of it and into his steady fox trot again.
He had not gone far when the dogs broke again into clamorous uproar to his left and suddenly near, and as he reined Perry back and peered ahead along the fading scar of the road, he saw the fox trotting sedately toward him in the middle of it. Perry saw it at the same time and laid his fine ears back and rolled his young eyes. But the animal came on unawares at its steady, unhurried trot, glancing back over its shoulder from time to time, “Well, I’ll be damned,” Bayard whispered, holding Perry rigid between his knees. The fox was not forty yards away; still it came on, seemingly utterly unaware of the horseman. Then Bayard shouted.
The animal glanced at him; the level sun swam redly and fleeting in its eyes; then with a single modest flash of brown it was gone. Bayard expelled his breath: his heart was thumping against his ribs. “Whooy,” he yelled. “Come on, dogs!” The din of them swelled to a shrill pandemonium and the pack boiled into the road in a chaos of spotted hides and flapping tongues and ears. None of them was more than half grown, and ignoring the horse and rider they surged still clamoring into the undergrowth where the fox had vanished and shrieked frantically on; and as Bayard stood in his stirrups and gazed after them, preceded by yapping in a still higher and more frantic key, two even smaller puppies swarmed out of the woods and galloped past him on their short legs with whimpering cries and expressions of ludicrous and mad concern. Then the clamor died into hysterical echoes and so away.
He rode on. On either hand was a ridge: the one darkling like a bronze bastion, on the other the final rays of the sun lying redly. The air crackled and tingled in his nostrils and seared his lungs with exhilarating needles. The road followed the valley. But half the sun now showed above the western wall, and among intermittent trees he rode stirrup-deep in shadow like cold water. He would just about reach the house before dark, and he shook Perry up a little. The clamor of the dogs swelled again ahead of him, approaching the road, and he lifted Perry into a canter.
Presently before him lay a glade—an old field, sage-grown, its plow scars long healed over. The sun filled it with dying gold and he pulled Perry short upstanding; there, at the corner of the field beside the road, sat the fox. It sat there on its haunches like a dog, watching the trees across the glade, and Bayard sent Perry forward again. The fox turned its head and looked at him with a covert, fleeting glance, but without alarm, and Bayard halted Perry in intense astonishment. The clamor of the dogs swept nearer through the woods; yet the fox sat on its haunches, watching the man with covert stolen glances, paying the dogs no heed. It revealed no alarm whatever, not even when the puppies burst yapping madly into the glade. They moiled at the wood’s edge for a time while the fox divided its attention between them and the man.
At last the largest puppy, evidently the leader, saw the quarry. Immediately they stopped their noise and trotted across the glade and squatted in a circle facing the fox, their tongues lolling. Then with one accord they turned about and faced the darkening woods, from which, and nearer and nearer, came that spent, frantic yapping in a higher key. The largest dog barked once; the yapping among the trees swelled with frantic relief and the two smaller puppies appeared and burrowed like moles through the sedge and came up. Then the fox rose and cast another quick, furtive glance at the horseman, and surrounded by the amicable weary calico of the puppies, trotted up the road and vanished among the trees. “Well, I’ll be damned,” Bayard said, gazing after them. “Come up, Perry.”
At last a pale and windless plume of smoke stood above the trees ahead, and he emerged from the woods and in the rambling wall of the house a window glowed with ruddy invitation across the twilight. Dogs had already set up a resonant, bell-like uproar; above it Bayard could distinguish the clear tenor of puppies and a voice shouting at them, and as he halted Perry in the yard, the fox was vanishing diffidently but without haste beneath the house. A lean figure faced him in the dusk, with an ax in one hand and an armful of wood, and Bayard said:
“What the devil’s that thing, Buddy? That fox?”
“That’s Ellen,” Buddy answered. He put the wood down deliberately, and the ax, and he came and shook Bayard’s hand once limply, in the country fashion, but his hand was hard and firm. “How you?”
“All right,” Bayard answered. “I came out to get that old fox Rafe was telling me about.”
“Sure,” Buddy agreed in his slow, infrequent voice. “We been expectin’ you. Git down and lemme take yo’ pony.”
“No, I’ll do it. You take the wood on in; I’ll put Perry up.” But Buddy was firm, without insistence or rudeness, and Bayard surrendered the horse to him.
“Henry,” Buddy shouted at the house, “Henry.” A door opened on jolly leaping flames; a figure stood squatly in it. “Here’s Bayard,” he said. “Go on in and warm,” he added, leading Perry away. Dogs surrounded Bayard; he picked up the wood and the ax and went on toward the house in a ghostly, spotted surge at dogs, and the figure stood in the lighted doorway while he mounted the veranda and leaned the ax against the wall.
“How you?” Henry said, and again the handshake was limp, again the band firm and kind; flabbier though than Buddy’s hard young flesh. He relieved Bayard of the wood and they entered the house. The walls of the room were of chinked logs. On them hung two or three out-dated calendars and a patent medicine lithograph in colors. The floor was bare, of hand-trimmed boards scuffed with heavy boots and polished by the pads of generations of dogs; two men could lie side by side in the fireplace. In it now four-foot logs blazed against the clay fireback, swirling in wild plumes into the chimney’s dark maw, and in silhouette against it, his head haloed by the shaggy silver disorder of his hair, Virginius MacCallum sat. “Hyer’s Bayard Sartoris, pappy,” Henry said.
The old man turned in his chair with grave, leonine
deliberation and extended his hand without rising. In 1861 he was sixteen and he had walked to Lexington, Virginia, and enlisted, served four years in the Stonewall brigade and walked back to Mississippi and built himself a house and got married. His wife’s dot was a clock and a dressed hog; his own father gave them a mule. His wife was dead these many years, and her successor was dead, but he sat now before the fireplace at which that hog had been cooked, beneath the roof he had built in ’66, and on the mantel above him the clock sat, deriding that time whose servant it once had been. “Well, boy?” he said. “You took yo’ time about comin’. How’s yo’ folks?”
“Pretty well, sir,” Bayard answered. He looked at the old man’s hale, ruddy face intently and sharply. No, they hadn’t heard yet.
“We been expectin’ you ever since Rafe seen you in town last spring. Henry, tell Mandy to set another plate.”
Four dogs had followed him into the room. Three of them watched him gravely with glowing eyes; the other one, a blue-ticked hound with an expression of majestic gravity, came and touched its cold nose to his hand. “Hi, Gen’ral,” he said, rubbing its ears, whereupon the other dogs approached and thrust their noses against his hands.
“Pull up a cheer,” Mr. MacCallum said. He squared his own chair around and Bayard obeyed. The dogs followed him, surging with blundering decorum about his knees. “I keep sendin’ word in to git yo’ granpappy out hyer,” the old man continued, “but he’s too ’tarnal proud, or too damn lazy to come. Hyer, Gen’ral! Git away from thar. Kick ’em away, Bayard. Henry!” he shouted. Henry appeared. “Drive these damn dogs out of hyer till after supper.”
Henry drove the dogs from the room. Mr. MacCallum picked up a long sliver of pine from the hearth and fired it and lit his pipe, and smothered the sliver in the ashes and laid it on the hearth again. “Rafe and Lee air in town today,” he said. “You could have come out with them in a waggin. But I reckon you’d ruther have yo’ own hoss.”
“Yes, sir,” he answered quietly. Then they would know. He stared into the fire for a time, rubbing his hands slowly on his knees, and for an instant he saw the recent months of his life coldly in their headlong and heedless wastefulness; saw its entirety like the swift unrolling of a film, culminating in that which he had been warned against and that any fool might have forseen. Well, damn it, suppose it had: was he to blame? Had he insisted that his grandfather ride with him? Had he given the old fellow a bum heart? and then, coldly: You were afraid to go home. You made a nigger sneak your horse out to you. You, who deliberately do things your judgment tells you may not be successful, even possible, are afraid to face the consequences of your own acts. Then again something bitter and deep and sleepless in him blazed out in vindication and justification and accusation; what, he knew not, blazing out at what, Whom, he did not know: You did it! You caused it all; you killed Johnny.
Henry had drawn a chair up to the fire, and after a while the old man tapped his clay pipe carefully out against his palm and drew a huge, turnip-shaped silver watch from his corduroy vest. “Half after five,” he said. “Ain’t them boys got in yet?”
“They’re here,” Henry answered briefly. “Heard ’em takin’ out when I put out the dawgs.”
“Git the jug, then,” his father ordered. Henry rose and departed again, and presently feet clumped heavily on the porch and Bayard turned in his chair and stared bleakly at the door. It opened and Rafe and Lee entered.
“Well, well,” Rafe said, and his lean, dark face lighted a little. “Got here at last, did you?” He shook Bayard’s hand, and Lee followed him. Lee’s face, like all of them, was a dark, saturnine mask. He was not so stocky as Rafe, and least talkative of them all. His eyes were black and restless; behind them lurked something wild and sad. He shook Bayard’s hand without a word.
But Bayard was watching Rafe. There was nothing in Rafe’s face; no coldness, no questioning. Was it possible that he could have been to town, yet not heard? Or had Bayard himself dreamed it? But he remembered that unmistakable feel of his grandfather when he had touched him; remembered how he had slumped suddenly as though the very fiber of him, knit so erect and firm for so long by pride and the perverse necessity of his family doom, had given way all at once, letting his skeleton rest at last. Mr. MacCallum spoke.
“Did you git to the express office?”
“We never got to town,” Rafe answered. “Axle tree broke just this side of Vernon. Had to uncouple the wagon and drive to Vernon and get it patched up. Too late to go in, then. We got our supplies there and come on home.”
“Well, hit don’t matter. You’ll be goin’ in next week, for Christmas,” the old man said. Bayard drew a long breath and lit a cigarette, and on a draft of vivid darkness Buddy entered and came and squatted leanly in the shadowy chimney corner.
“Got that fox you were telling me about hid out yet?” Bayard asked Rafe.
“Sure. And we’ll get him, this time. Maybe tomorrow. Weather’s changin’.”
“Snow?”
“Might be. What’s it gain’ to do tonight, pappy?”
“Rain,” the old man answered. “Tomorrow, too. Scent won’t lay good till We’n’sday. Henry!” After a moment he shouted “Henry” again, and Henry entered with a blackened kettle trailing a faint plume of vapor and a stoneware jug and a thick tumbler with a metal spoon in it. There was something domestic, womanish, about Henry, with his squat, slightly tubby figure and his mild brown eyes and his capable, unhurried hands. He it was who superintended the kitchen (he was a better cook now than Mandy) and the house, where he could be found most of the time, pottering soberly at some endless task. He visited town almost as infrequently as his father; he cared little for hunting, and his sole relaxation was making whisky, good whisky and for family consumption alone, in a secret fastness known only to his father and the” negro who assisted him, after a recipe handed down from lost generations of his usquebaugh-bred forbears. He set the kettle and the jug and the tumbler on the hearth and took the clay pipe from his father’s hand and put it on the mantel and reached down a cracked cup of sugar and seven tumblers, each with a spoon in it. The old man leaned forward into the firelight and made the toddies one by one, with tedious and solemn deliberation. When he had made one around, there were two glasses left. “Ain’t them other boys come in yet?” he asked. Nobody answered, and he corked the jug. Henry set the two glasses back on the mantel.
Mandy came to the door presently, filling it with her homely calico expanse. “Y’all kin come on in now,” she said, and as she turned, waddling, Bayard spoke to her and she stopped as the men rose and trooped from the room. The old man was straight as an Indian, and with the exception of Buddy’s lean and fluid length, he towered above his sons by a head. Mandy waited beside the door and gave Bayard her hand. “You ain’t been out in a long while, now,” she said. “And I bet you ain’t fergot Mandy, neither.”
“Sure I haven’t,” Bayard answered. But he had. Money, to Mandy, did not compensate for some trinket of no value which John never forgot to bring her when he came. He followed the others into the frosty darkness. Beneath his feet the ground was already stiffening; overhead the sky was brilliant with stars, He stumbled a little behind the crowding backs until Rafe opened a door into a separate building and stood aside until they had entered. This room was filled with warmth and a thin blue haze pungent with cooking odors, in which a kerosene lamp burned steadily on a long table. At one end of the table was a single chair; the other three sides were paralleled by backless wooden benches. Against the further wall was the stove, and a huge cupboard of split planks, and a wood-box. Behind the stove two negro men and a half-grown boy sat, their faces shining with heat and their eyeballs rolling whitely; about their feet five puppies snarled with mock savageness at one another or chewed damply at the negroes’ motionless ankles or prowled about beneath the stove and the adjacent floor with blundering, aimless inquisitiveness.
“How
dy, boys,” Bayard said, calling them by name, and they bobbed their heads at him with diffident flashes of teeth and polite murmurs.
“Put dem puppies up, Richud,” Mandy ordered. The negroes gathered the puppies up one by one and tumbled them into a smaller box behind the stove, where they continued to move about with sundry scratchings and bumpings and an occasional smothered protest. From time to time during the meal a head would appear, staring above the rim of the box with blinking and solemn curiosity, then vanish with an abrupt scuffling thump and more protests, and the moiling, infant-like noises rose again. “Hush up, dawgs! G’wan to sleep now,” Richard would say, rapping on the box with his knuckles. After a while the noises ceased.
The old man took the lone chair, his sons around him and the guest; some coatless, all collarless, with their dark, saturnine faces all stamped clearly from the same die. They ate—sausage and spare ribs, and a dish of hominy and one of fried sweet potatoes, and corn bread and a molasses jug of sorghum, and Mandy poured coffee from a huge enamelware pot. In the middle of the meal the two missing ones came in—Jackson, the eldest, a man of fifty-two, with a broad, high forehead and thick brows and an expression at once dreamy and intense—a sort of shy and impractical Cincinnatus; and Stuart, forty-four and Rafe’s twin. Although they were twins, there was no closer resemblance between them than between any two of the others, as though the die were too certain and made too clean an imprint to be either hurried or altered, even by nature. Stuart had none of Rafe’s easy manner (Rafe was the only one of them that, by any stretch of the imagination, could have. been called loquacious); on the other hand, he had much of Henry’s placidity. He was a good farmer and a canny trader, and he had a respectable bank account of his own. Henry, fifty, was the second son.
Sartoris Page 28
