“Sun hurt yo’ head?” Suratt asked beside him, “Taint long, now,” he added. The road wound presently into the woods where the sun was intermittent, and it rose gradually toward a low merest on which trees stood like a barred grate against the western sky. They crossed this Mil and the land fell away in ragged ill-tended fields, and beyond them in a clump of fruit trees and a grove of silver poplars pale as absinthe and twinkling ceaselessly without wind, a weathered small house squatted. Beyond itand much larger loomed a barn gray arid gaunt withage. The road forked here. One faint arm curvedsandily away toward the house; the other went onbetween rank weeds toward the barn. The youth onthe fender leaned his head into the car, “Drive on to the barn,” he directed.
Suratt obeyed. Beyond the bordering weeds a fence straggled in limp dilapidation, and from the weeds the handles of a plow stood at a gaunt angle while its shard rusted peacefully in the undergrowth, and other implements rusted half concealed in the growth—-skeletons of labor healed over by the earth they were to have violated, kinder than they. The fence turned at an angle and Suratt stopped the car and the youth stepped down and opened a warped wooden gate and Suratt drove on into the barnyard where stood a wagon with drunken wheels and a home-made bed, and the rusting skeleton of a Ford car. Low down upon its domed and hoodless radiator the two lamps gave it an expressions beetling patient astonishment, like a skull, and a lean cow ruminated and watched them without interest.
The barn doors sagged drunkenly from broken hinges, held to the posts with twists of baling wire; beyond, the cavern of the hallway yawned in stale desolation—a travesty of earth’s garnered fullness and its rich inferences. Bayard sat on the fender and leaned his bandaged head back against the car body and watched Suratt and the youth enter the barn and disappear slowly upward on invisible ladder rungs. The cow stood yet in ruminant dejection, and upon the yellow surface of a pond enclosed by banks of trodden and sun-cracked day beneath a clump of locust shrubs and willows, geese drifted like small muddy clouds. The sun fell in a long slant upon their rumps and their suave necks and upon the cow’s leanrhythmically twitching flank, ridging her visible ribs with dingy gold. Presently Suratt’s legs fumbled into sight, followed by his cautious body, and after him the youth with his slanted hat slid easily down the perpendicular ladder, letting his body from rung to rung in easy one-handed swoops.
He emerged carrying an earthen jug close against his leg. Suratt followed in his neat tieless blue shirt and jerked his head at Bayard, and they turned the corner of the barn and retreated along the wall, among waist-high jimson weeds. Bayard rose and followed and overtook them as the youth with his jug slid with an agile unceasing motion between two lax strands of barbed wire. Suratt stooped through more sedately and held the top strand taut and pressed the lower one down with his foot until Bayard was through. Behind the barn the land descended into shadow toward a junglish growth of willow and elder, against which a huge beech and a clump of saplings stood like mottled ghosts, and from which a cool dankness rose like a breath to meet them. The spring welled from the roots of the beech into a wooden frame buried to the edge in white sand that quivered ceaselessly and delicately beneath the water’s limpid unrest, and strayed on away into the willow and elder growth without a sound.
The earth about the spring was trampled smooth and packed as an earthen floor. Near the spring a blackened iron pot sat on four bricks, beneath it was a heap of pale wood ashes and a litter of extinct brands and charred fagot-ends. Against the pot leaned a scrubbing board with a ridged metal face polished to a dull even gleam like old silver, and a rusty tin cup hung from a nail in the beech tree above the spring. The youth set the jug down and he md Suratt squatted gravely beside it.
“I don’t know if we ain’t a-goin’ to git in trouble givin’Mr. Bayard whisky, Hub,” Suratt said “Still, Doc Peabody give him one dram hisself, so I reckon we kingive .him one mo’.Ain’t that right, Mr. Bayard?” Squatting he glanced up at Bayard with his shrewd affable face. Hub twisted the corncob stopper from the jug and passed it to Suratt, who tendered it to Bayard “I! been knowin’Mr. Bayard ever since he was a chap in knee pants,” Suratt confided to Hub, “but this is the first time me and him ever taken a drink together. Ain’t that so, Mr. Bayard?...I reckon you’ll want a drinkin’ cup, won’t you?” But Bayard was already drinking, with the jug tinted across his horizontal forearm and the mouth held to his lips by the same hand, as it should be done. “He knows how to drink outen a jug, don’t he?” Suratt added “I knowed he was all right,” he said in a tone of confidential vindication. Bayard lowered the jug and returned it to Suratt, who offered it formally to Hub.
“Go ahead,” Hub said “Hit it.” Suratt did so, with measured pistonings of his taut throat in relief against the brooding green of the jungle wall Above the stream gnats whirled and spun in a leveling ray of sunlight like erratic golden chaff. Suratt lowered the jug and passed it to Hub and wiped his mouth on the back of his hand
“How you fed now, Mr. Bayard?” he asked Then he said heavily: “You’ll have to excuse me. I reckon I ought to said Captain Sartoris, oughtn’t I?”
“What for?” Bayard asked He squatted also on hi heels, against the bole of the tree beside the limpid soundless laughing of the spring. The rising slope of ground behind them hid the barn and the house, and the three of them squatted in a small bowl of peacefulness remote from the world and its rumors, filled with the cool unceasing breathing of the spring and a seeping of sunlight among the elders and willows like a thinly diffused wine. On the surface of the spring the sky lay reflected, stippled with windless beech leaves. Hub squatted leanly with his brown forearms clasped about his knees, smoking a cigarette beneath the downward tilt of his straw hat. Suratt was across the spring from him. He wore a faded clean blue shirt, and in contrast to it his hands and face were a rich even brown, like mahogany. The jug sat rotundly, benignantly between them.
“Yes, sir,” Suratt repeated, “I always find the best cure for a wound is plenty of whisky. Doctors, these here fancy young doctors, ‘11 tell a feller different, but old Doc Peabody hisself cut off my gran’pappy’s leg while gran’pappy laid back on the dinin’ table with a demijohn in his hand and a mattress and a chair across his laigs and fo’ men a-holdin’ him down, and him cussin’ and singin’ so scandalous the women-folks and the chillen went down to the pasture behind the barn and waited. Take some mo’,” he said, and he reached the jug across the spring and Bayard drank again. “Reckon you’re beginnin’ to feel pretty fair, ain’t you?”
“Damned if I know,” Bayard answered. “It’s dynamite, boys.”
Suratt with the lifted jug guffawed, then he lipped it and his Adam’s apple pumped again in arched relief against the wall of elder and willow. The elder would soon flower, with pale clumps of tiny blooms. Miss Jenny made a little wine of it every year. Good wine, if you knew how and had the patience. Elder flower wine. Like a ritual for a children’s game; a game played by little girls in small pale dresses, between supper and twilight Above the bowl where sunlight yet came in a leveling beam, gnats whirledand spun like dust-motes in a quiet disused room. Suratt’s voice went on affably, ceaselessly recapitulant, in polite admiration of the hardness of Bayard’s head and the fact that this was the first time he and Bayard had ever taken a drink together. They drank again, and Hub began to borrow cigarettes of Bayard and he became also a little profanely and robustly anecdotal in his country idiom, about whisky and girls and dice; and presently he and Suratt were arguing amicably about work. They seemed to be able to sit tirelessly and without discomfort on their heels, but Bayard’s legs had soon grown < numb and he straightened them, tingling with released blood, and he now sat with his back against the tree and his long legs straight before him, hearing Suratt’s voice without listening to it.
His head was now no more than a sort of taut discomfort; at times it seemed to float away from his shoulders and hang against the wall of green like a transparent balloon within which or beyond which that face that would neither emerge completely and distinguishably nor yet fade completely away and so trouble him no longer, lingered with shadowy exasperation—two eyes round with a grave shocked astonishment, two lifted hands flashing behind little white shirt and blue pants swerving into a lifting rush plunging clatter crash blackness...
