Aunt Sally rocked steadily. “If I was them, I’d make him stay there. I wouldn’t have that boyaround me, blood or no blood...What did he go to Memphis for? I thought that aeroplane what-do-you-call-it was broke up.”
“He went on business, I suppose.”
“What business has he got in Memphis? Bayard Sartoris has got more sense than to turn over any business to that wild fool.”
“I don’t know,” Narcissa answered, arranging the larkspur. “He’ll be back soon, I suppose. You can ask himthen.”
“Me ask him? I never said two words to him in his life. And I don’t want to. I been used to associating with gentlemen.”
Narcissa broke some of the stems, arranging the blooms in a pattern. “What’s he done that gentlemen don’t do, Aunt Sally?”
“Why, jumping off water tanks and going up in balloons just to scare folks. You think I’d have that boy around me? I’d have him locked up in the insane asylum, if I was Bayard and Jenny.”
“He didn’t jump off of the
“That wasn’t what I heard. I heard he jumped off that tank, across a whole line of freight cars and lumber piles and didn’t miss the edge of the pool an inch.”
“No he didn’t. He swung on a rope from the top of a house and then dived into the pool. The rope was tied to the tank.”
“Well, didn’t he have to jump over a lot of lumber and freight cars? And couldn’t he have broken his neck just as easy that way as jumping off the tank?”
“Yes,” Narcissa said.
“There! What’d I tell you? And what was the use ofit?”
“I don’t know.”
“Of course you don’t know. That was the reason he did it.” Aunt Sally rocked triumphantly for a while. Narcissa put the last touches to the blue pattern of the larkspur. A tortoise-shell cat bunched suddenly and silently in the window beside the work basket. Still crouching it blinked into the room for a moment, then it sank to the window sill and with arched neck fell to grooming its shoulder with a narrow pink tongue. Narcissa moved to the window and laid her hand on the creature’s sleek back.
“And then, going up in that balloon, when...”
“That wasn’t Bayard,” Narcissa repeated. “That was John.”
“That wasn’t what I heard. I heard it was the other one and that Bayard and Jenny were both begging him with tears in their eyes not to do it. I heard...”
“Neither one of them were there. Bayard wasn’t even there. It was John did it. He did it because the man that came with the balloon got sick. John went up in it so the country people wouldn’t be disappointed. I was there.”
“Stood there and let him do it, did you, when you could a telephoned Jenny or walked across the square to the bank and got Bayard? You stood there and never opened your mouth, did you?”
“Yes,” Narcissa answered. Stood there beside Horace in the slow, intent ring of country people, watching the globe swelling and tugging at its ropes, watched John Sartoris in a faded flannel shirt and corduroy breeches, while the carnival man explained the rip-cord and the parachute to him; stood there feeling her breath going out faster than she could draw it in and watched the thing lurch into the air with John sitting on a frail trapeze bar swingingbelow it, with eyes she could not close, saw the balloon and people and all swirl slowly upward and then found herself clinging to Horace behind the shelter of a wagon, trying to get her breath.
He landed three miles away in a brier thicket and disengaged the parachute and regained the road and hailed a passing negro in a wagon. A mile from town they met old Bayard driving furiously in the carriage and the two vehicles stopped side by side in the road while old Bayard in the one exhausted the accumulate fury of his rage and in the other his grandson sat in his shredded clothes and on his scratched face that look of one who has gained for an instant a desire so fine that its escape was a purification, not a loss.
The next day, as Narcissa was passing a store, he emerged with that abrupt violence which he had in common with his brother, pulling up short to avoid a collision with her.
“Oh, ex—Why, hello,” he said. Beneath the crisscrosses of tape his face was merry and wild, and his unruly hair was hatless. For a moment she gazed at him with wide, hopeless eyes, then she clapped her hand to her mouth and went swiftly on, almost running.
Then he was gone, with his brother, shut away by that foreign war as two noisy dogs are penned in a kennel far away, the bold, jolly face of him and his rough, shabby clothes. Miss Jenny gave her news of them, of the dull, dutiful letters they wrote home at sparse intervals; then he was dead. But far away beyond seas, and there was no body to be returned clumsily and tediously to earth, and so to her he seemed still to be laughing at that word as he had laughed at all the other mouthsounds that stood for repose, who had not waited for Time and its furniture to teach him that the end of wisdom is to dreamhigh enough not to lose the dream in the seeking of it.
Aunt Sally rocked steadily in her chair.
“Well, it don’t matter which one it was. One’s bad as the other. But I reckon it ain’t their fault, raised like they were. Rotten spoiled, both of ‘em. Lucy Sartoris wouldn’t let anybody control ‘em while she lived. If they’d been mine, now...” She rocked on. “Beat it but of ‘em, I would. Raising two wild Indians like that. But those folks, thinking there wasn’t anybody quite as good as a Sartoris. Even Lucy Cranston, come from as good people as there are in the state, acting like it was divine providence that let her marry one Sartoris and be the mother of two more. Pride, false pride.”
She rocked steadily in her chair. Beneath Narcissa’s hand the cat purred with lazy arrogance.
“It was a judgment on ‘em, taking John instead of that other one. John at least tipped his hat to a lady on
