Flags in the Dust by William Faulkner Read Free Book Online Page B

Bayard’s cigar was cold again and he sat with it dead in his fingers and watched a tall shape emerge from the lilac bushes beside the garden fence and cross the patchy moonlight toward the veranda. His grandson wore no hat and he came on and mounted the steps and stood with the moonlight bringing the hawk-like planes of his face into high relief while his grandfather sat with his dead cigar and looked at him.
    “Bayard, son?” old Bayard said. Young Bayard stood in the moonlight. His eyesockets were cavernous shadows.
    “I tried to keep him from going up there on that goddam little popgun,” he said at last with brooding savageness. Then he moved again and old Bayard lowered his feet, but his grandson only dragged a chair violently up beside him and flung himself into it. His motions were abrupt also, like his grandfather’s, but controlled and flowing for all their violence.
    “Why in hell didn’t you let me know you were coming?” old Bayard demanded. “What do you mean, straggling in here like this?”
    “I didn’t let anybody know.” Young Bayard dug a cigarette from his pocket and raked a match on his shoe.
    “What?”
    “I didn’t tell anybody I was coming,” he repeated above the cupped match, raising his voice.
    “Simon knew it. Do you inform nigger servants of your movements instead of your own granddaddy?”
    “Damn Simon, sir,” young Bayard shouted. “Who set him to watching me?”
    “Dont yell at me, boy,” old Bayard shouted in turn. His grandson flung the match away and drew at the cigarette in deep troubled draughts. “Dont wake Jenny,” old Bayard added more mildly, striking a match to his cold cigar. “All right, are you?”
    “Here,” young Bayard said, extending his hand. “Let me hold it. You’re going to set your moustache on fire.” But old Bayard repulsed him sharply and sucked stubbornly and impotently at the match in his unsteady fingers.
    “I said, are you all right?” he repeated.
    “Why not?” young Bayard snapped. “Takes damn near as big a fool to get hurt in a war as it does in peacetime. Damn fool, that’s what it is.” He drew at the cigarette again, then he hurled it not half consumed after the match. “There was one I had to lay for four days to catch him. Had to get Sibleigh in an old crate of anAk. W. to suck him in for me. Wouldn’t look at anything but cold meat, him and his skull and bones. Well, he got it. Stayed on him for six thousand feet, put a whole belt right into his cockpit. You could a covered ’em all with your hat. But the bastard just wouldn’t burn.” His voice rose again as he talked on. Locust drifted up in sweet gusts, and the cricketsand frogs were clear and monotonous as pipes blown drowsily by an idiot boy. From her silver casement the moon looked down upon the valley dissolving in opaline tranquillity into the serene mysterious infinitude of the hills, and young Bayard’s voice went on and on, recounting violence and speed and death.
    “Hush,” old Bayard said again. “You’ll wake Jenny,” and his grandson’s voice sank obediently; but soon it rose again, and after a time Miss Jenny emerged with her white woolen shawl over her night-dress and came and kissed him.
    “I reckon you’re all right,” she said, “or you wouldn’t be in such a bad humor. Tell us about Johnny.”
    “He was drunk,” young Bayard answered harshly. “Or a fool. I tried to keep him from going up there, on that damnCamel. You couldn’t see your hand, that morning. Air all full of hunks of cloud and any fool could a known that on their side it’d be full ofFokkers that could reach twenty-five thousand, and him on a damn Camel. But he was hell-bent on going up there, damn near to Lille. I couldn’t keep him from it. He shot at me,” young Bayard said; “I tried to drive him back, but he gave me a burst. He was already high as he could get, but they must have been five thousand feet above us. They flew all over him. Hemmed him up like