“Yessum, I ‘speck it is.”
“You’d better,” Miss Jenny rejoined warningly. “Now, how can anybody keep a decent garden, with a fool like that? I expect every spring to find corn or lespedeza coming up in the hyacinth beds or something.” She examined the tulips again, weighing the balanced colors one against another in her mind. “No, you don’t want any tulips,” she decided briskly, moving on.
“No, Miss Jenny,” the guest agreed demurely. They went on to the gate, and Miss Jenny stopped again and took the basket from Isom.
“And you go home and take that thing off, you hear?” she told Isom.
“Yessum.”
“And I want to look out that window in a few minutes and see you in the garden with that hoe again,” she added. “And I want to see both of your right hands on it and I want to see it moving, too. Youhearme?”
“Yessum.”
“And tell Caspey to be ready to go to work in the morning. Even niggers that eat here have got to work some.” But Isom was gone, and they went on and mounted the steps. “Don’t he sound like that’s exactly what he’s going to do?” she confided as they entered the hall.“He knows as well as I do that I won’t dare look out that window, after what I said. Come in,” she added, opening the parlor door.
This room was opened but seldom now, though in John Sartoris’ day it had been constantly in use. He was always giving dinners, and balls too on occasion,with the folding doors between it and the dining room thrown open and three negroes with stringed instruments ensconced on the stairway and all the candles burning. For with his frank love of pageantry, as well as his innate sociability, he liked to surround himself with an atmosphere of scent and delicate garments and food and music. He had lain also in this room in his grey regimentals and so brought to a conclusion the colorful, if not always untarnished, pageant of his own career; perhaps ghosts he knew greeted him there again and surrounded him as of old upon the jocund mellowness of his hearth.
But during Bayard’s time it was less and less in use, and slowly and imperceptibly it lost its jovial but stately masculinity, becoming by mutual and unspoken agreement a place for his wife and his son John’s wife and Miss Jenny to clean thoroughly twice a year and in which, preceded by a ritualistic unswaddling of brown holland, they entertained their more formal callers. This was its status up to the birth of his grandsons and the death of their parents, and it continued thus until his wife died. After that Miss Jenny bothered with formal callers but little and with the parlor not at all She said it gave her the creeps.
And so it stayed closed nearly all the time and slowly acquired an atmosphere of solemn and macabre fustiness and was referred to as the Parlor with a capital P. Occasionally young Bayard or John would open the door and peer into solemn obscurity in which the shrouded furniture loomed with a sort of ghostly benignance, like albino mastodons. But they did not enter; already in their minds the room was associated with death, an idea which even the hollyand tinsel of Christmas tide could not completely obscure. They were away at school by the time they reached party age, but even during vacations, though they had filled the house with the polite bedlam of their contemporaries, the room would be opened only on Christmas eve. And after they had gone to England in ‘16 it was opened twice a year to be cleaned after the ancient ritual that even Simon had inherited from his forefathers, and to have the piano tuned or when Miss Jenny and Narcissa Benbow spent a forenoon or afternoon there, and formally not at all.
The furniture loomed shapelessly in its dun shrouds; the piano alone was uncovered, and the younger woman drew the bench up and removed her hat and let it slip to the floor beside her. Miss Jenny set her basket down and from the gloom beside the piano she drew a straight, hard chair, uncovered also, and sat down and removed her felt hat from her trim white head. Light came through the open door, and faintly through the heavy maroon-and-lace curtains, but it only served to enhance the obscurity and render more shapeless the hooded anonymous furniture.
But behind these dun bulks and in all the corners of the room there waited, as actors stand within the wings beside the waiting stage, figures in crinoline and hooped muslin and silk; in stocks and flowing coats; in grey too, with crimson sashes and sabres in gallant sheathed repose—Jeb Stuart himself perhaps, on his glittering garlanded bay or with his sunny hair falling upon fine broadcloth beneath the mistletoe and holly boughs of Baltimore in ‘58. Miss Jenny sat with her uncompromising grenadier’s back and held her hat upon her knees and fixed herself to look on.Narcissa’s white dress was pliant as light against the gloom and as serene, and her hands touched chords from the keyboard and drew them together and rolled the curtain back upon the scene.
In the kitchen Caspey was having breakfast while Simon his father, and Elnora his sister, and Isom his nephew (still wearing the uniform) watched him. He had been Simon’s: understudy in the stables and general handy-man about the place, doing all the work Simon managed, through the specious excuse of decrepitude, to slough off onto his shoulders and that Miss Jenny could devise for him and which he could not evade. Bayard Sartoris also employed him in the fields occasionally. Then the draft had got him and bore him to France and the St. Sulpice docks as one of a labor battalion, where he did what work corporals and sergeants managed to slough off onto his unmilitary shoulders and that white officers could devise for him and which he could not evade.
Thus all the labor about the place devolved upon Simon and Isom, but Miss Jenny kept Isom piddling about the garden so much of the time that Simon was soon as bitter- against- the. War Lords as any professional Democrat. Meanwhile Caspey was working a little and trifling with continental life in its martial mutations rather to his future detriment, for at last the tumult died and the captains departed and left a vacuum filled with the usual bitter bickering of Armageddon’s heirs-at-law; and Caspey returned to his native land a total loss, sociologically speaking, with a definite disinclination toward labor, honest or otherwise, and two honorable wounds incurred in a razor-hedged crap game. But return he did, to his father’s querulous satisfaction and Elnora’s and Isom’s admiration, and he now sat in the kitchen, telling them about the war.
“I don’t take nothin’ fum no white folks no mo’,” he was saying. “War done changed all dat. If us colored folks is good enough to save France fum de Germans, den us is good enough to have de same rights de Germans has. French folks thinks so, anyhow, and if America don’t, dey’s ways of learnin’‘um. Yes, suh, it wuz de colored soldier saved France and America bofe. Black regiments kilt mo’ Germans dan all de white armies put together, let ‘lone un-loadin’steamboats all day long fer a dollar a day.”
“War ain’t hurt dat big mouf o’ yo’n, anyhow,” Simon said.
“War unloosed de black man’s mouf,”Caspey corrected. “Give him de right to talk. Kill Germans, den do yo’ oratin’, dey tole us. Well, us done it.”
“How many you kilt, Unc’Caspey?” Isom asked deferentially.
“I ain’t never bothered to count ‘um up. Been times I kilt mo’ in one mawnin’ dan dey’s folks on dis whole place. One time we wuz down in de cellar of a steamboat tied up to de bank, and one of dese sub-mareems sailed up and stopped by de boat, and all de white officers run up on de bank and hid. Us boys didn’t know dey wuz anything wrong ‘twell folks started clambin’ down de ladder. We never had no guns wid us at de time, so when we
