“Be lookin’ fer you,” he said briefly, and Bayard wheeled away, and when he looked back they lifted their hands gravely. Then Buddy shouted after him and he reined Perry about and returned. Henry had vanished, and he reappeared with a weighted tow sack.
“I nigh fergot it,” he said. “Jug of cawn pappy’s sendin’ in to yo’ granddaddy. You won’t git no better’n this in Looeyvul ner nowhar else, neither,” he added with quiet pride. Bayard thanked him and Buddy fastened the sack to the pommel, where it lay solidly against his leg.
“There. That’ll ride.”
“Yes, that’ll ride. Much obliged.”
“So long.”
“So long.”
Perry moved on, and he looked back. They still stood there, quiet and grave and steadfast. Beside the kitchen door the fox, Ellen, sat, watching him covertly; near her the half-grown puppies rolled and played in the sunlight. The sun was an hour high above the western hills; the road wound on into the trees. He looked back again. The house sprawled its rambling length in the wintry afternoon, its smoke like a balanced plume on the windless sky. The door was empty, and he shook Perry into his easy, tireless fox trot, the jug of whisky jouncing a little against his knee.
5
Where the dim, infrequent road to MacCallum’s left the main road, rising, he halted Perry and sat for a while in the sunset. Jefferson, fourteen miles. Rafe and the other boys would not be along for some time yet, what with Christmas Eve in town and the slow, festive gathering of the county. Still, they may have left town early, so as to get home by dark; might not be an hour away. The sun’s rays, slanting, released the chill they had held prisoned in the ground during the perpendicular hours and it rose slowly about him as he sat Perry in the middle of the road, and slowly his blood cooled with the cessation of Perry’s motion. He turned the pony’s head away from town and shook him into his fox trot again.
Darkness overtook him soon, but he rode on beneath the leafless trees, along the pale road in the gathering starlight. Already Perry was thinking of stable and supper and he went on with tentative, inquiring tossings of his head, but obediently and without slackening his gait, knowing not where they were going nor why, save that it was away from home, and a little dubious, though trustfully. The chill grew in the silence and the loneliness and the monotony. Bayard reined Perry to a halt and untied the jug and drank, and fastened it to the saddle again.
The hills rose wild and black about them. No sign of any habitation, no trace of man’s hand did they encounter. On all sides the hills rolled blackly away in the starlight, or when the road dipped into valleys where the ruts were already stiffening into ironlike shards that clattered beneath Perry’s hooves, they stood darkly towering and sinister overhead, lifting their leafless trees against the spangled sky. Where a stream of winter seepage trickled across the road Perry’s feet crackled brittlely in thin ice and Bayard slacked the reins while the pony snuffed at the water. He drank from the jug again.
He fumbled a match clumsily in his numb fingers and lit a cigarette, and pushed his sleeve back from his wrist. Eleven-thirty. “Well, Perry,” his voice sounded loud and sudden. in the stillness and the darkness and the cold, “I reckon we better look for a place to hole up till morning.” Perry raised his head and snorted, as though he understood the words, as though he would enter the bleak loneliness in which his rider moved if he could. They went on, mounting again.
The darkness spread away, lessening a little presently where occasional fields lay in the vague starlight, breaking the monotony of trees; and after a time during which he rode with the reins slack on Perry’s neck and his hands in his pockets, seeking warmth between leather and groin, a cotton house squatted beside the road, its roof dusted over with a frosty sheen as of silver. Not long, he told himself, leaning forward and laying his hand on Perry’s neck, feeling the warm, tireless blood there. “House soon, Perry, if we look sharp.”
Again Perry whinnied a little, as though he understood, and presently he swerved from the road, and as Bayard reined him back, he too saw the faint wagon trail leading away toward a low vague clump of trees. “Good boy, Perry,” he said, slackening the reins again.
The house was a cabin. It was dark, but a hound came gauntly from beneath it and bayed at him and continued its uproar while he reined Perry to the door and knocked on it with his numb hand. From within the house at last a voice, and he shouted “Hello” again. Then he added, “I’m lost. Open the door.” The hound bellowed at him indefatigably. After a moment the door cracked on a dying glow of embers, emitting a rank odor of negroes, and against the crack of warmth, a head.
“You, Jule,” the head commanded, “hush yo’ mouf.” The hound ceased obediently and retired beneath the house, though still growling. “Who dar?”
“I’m lost,” Bayard repeated. “Can I stay in your barn tonight?”
“Ain’t got no barn,” the negro answered. “Dey’s anudder house down de road a piece.”
“I’ll pay you,” Bayard said. He fumbled in his pocket with his numb hand. “My horse is tired out.” The negro’s head peered around the door, against the crack of firelight. “Come on, Uncle,” Bayard added impatiently. “Don’t keep a man standing in the cold.”
“Who is you, white folks?”
“Bayard Sartoris, from Jefferson. Here.” He extended his hand. The negro made no effort to take it.
“Banker Sartoris’s folks?”
“Yes. Here.”
“Wait a minute.” The door closed. But Bayard tightened the reins and Perry moved readily and circled the house confidently and went on among frost-stiffened cotton stalks that clattered drily about his knees. As Bayard dismounted on to frozen rutted earth beneath a gaping doorway, a lantern appeared from the cabin, swung low among the bitten stalks and the shadowy scissoring of the man’s legs, and the negro came up with a shapeless bundle under his arm and held the lantern while Bayard stripped the saddle and bridle off.
“How you manage to git so fur fum home dis time o’ night, white folks?” he asked curiously.
“Lost,” Bayard answered briefly. “Where can I put my horse?”
The negro swung the lantern into a stall. Perry stepped carefully over the sill and turned into the lantern light, his eyes rolling in phosphorescent gleams, and Bayard followed and rubbed him down with the dry side of the saddle blanket. The negro had vanished; he now appeared with a few ears of corn and shucked them into Perry’s manger beside the pony’s eager nuzzling. “You gwine be keerful about fire, ain’t you, white folks?” he asked.
“Sure. I won’t strike any matches at all.”
“I got all my stock and tools and feed in here,” the negro explained. “I can’t affo’d to git burnt out. Insu’ance don’t reach dis fur fum town.”
“Sure,” Bayard repeated. He shut Perry’s stall and while the negro watched him he drew the sack forth from where he had set it against the wall, and produced the jug. “Got a cup here?” The negro vanished again; Bayard could see the lantern through the cracks in the crib in the opposite wall; then he emerged with a rusty can from which he blew a bursting puff of chaff. They drank. Behind them Perry munched his corn. The negro showed him the ladder to the loft.
“You won’t fergit about dat fire, white folks?” he repeated anxiously.
“Sure,” Bayard said. “Good night.” He laid his hand on the ladder, and the negro stopped him and handed him the shapeless bundle he had brought out with him.
“Ain’t got but one to spare, but it’ll help some. You gwine sleep cole, tonight.” It was a quilt, ragged and filthy to the touch, and impregnated with that unmistakable odor of negroes.
“Thanks,” Bayard answered. “Much obliged to you. Good night.”
“Good night, white folks.”
The lantern winked away, to the criss-crossing of the negro’s legs, and Bayard mounted into darkness and the dry, pungent scent
of hay. Here, in the darkness, he made himself a nest of it and crawled into it and rolled himself into the quilt, filth and odor and all, and thrust his icy hands inside his shirt, against his flinching chest. After a time and slowly his hands began to warm, tingling a little, but still his body lay shivering and jerking with weariness and with cold. Below him Perry munched steadily and peacefully in the darkness, occasionally he stamped, and gradually the jerking of Bayard’s body ceased. Before he slept he uncovered his arm and looked at the luminous dial on his wrist. One o’clock. It was already Christmas.
The sun waked him, falling in red bars through the cracks in the wall, and he lay for a while 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 house-top, 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 of 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’, white folks,” 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’ breakfast 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 on 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 woolen underclothes. It was too small to walk and it crawled about the floor in a sort of intent 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. Ain’t 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 white folks 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 don’t 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 on to 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 negro told him—eight miles away. “Can you drive me over there this morning and take my horse back to Mr. MacCallum’s someday this week?”
“My brudder-in-law bor’d my mules,” the negro replied readily. “I ain’t 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, white folks.”
“Ten dollars,” Bayard said impatiently. “Can’t 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 can’t you get ’em now? Take my horse and go get ’em. I want to catch a train.”
“I ain’t had no Chris’mus yit, white folks. 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 in plenty of time.”
“Dey’ll be here; don’t you worry about dat.”
“All right. You and aunty help yourselves to the jug.”
“Thanky, suh.”
The stale, air-tight 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, 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 ash cake, 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 the 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 incorporeal 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 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 on to 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 and 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 ain’t done caught me ag’in!” But by mid-morning he would be recovered, by dinner-time 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. . . .
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