salve fiasco upon him. And here she held daily councils with Isom and Elnora, and at the most unexpected times she would storm with unimpaired vigor from her window at Isom or Caspey in the yard beneath.
The child and the placid, gaily turbaned mountain who superintended his hours, spent most of the day in this room, and presently Narcissa herself; and the three of them would sit for rapt murmurous hours in a sort of choral debauch of abnegation while the object of it slept digesting, waked, stoked himself anew and slept again.
“He’s a Sartoris, all right,” Miss Jenny said, “but an improved model. He hasn’t got that wild look of ‘em. I believe it was the name. Bayard. We did well to name him Johnny.”
“Yes,” Narcissi said, watching her sleeping son with grave and tranquil serenity.
* * *
And there Miss Jenny staid until her while was up. Three weeks it was. She set the date before she went to bed and held to it stubbornly, refusing even to rise and attend the christening. That day fell on Sunday. It was late in June and jasmine drifted into the house in steady waves. Narcissa and the nurse, in an even more gaudy turban, had brought the baby, bathed and garnished and scented in his ceremonial robes, in to her, and later she heard them drive away, and the house was still again. The curtains stirred peacefully at the windows, and all the peaceful scents of summer came up on the sunny breeze, and sounds—birds, and somewhere a Sabbath bell, and Elnora’s voice, chastened a little with her recent bereavement but still rich and mellow as she went about getting dinner. She sang sadly and endlessly and without words as she moved about the kitchen, but she broke off short when she looked up and saw Miss Jenny looking a little frail but fully dressed and erect as ever, in the door.
“Miss Jenny! Whut in de worl’! You git on back to yo’ bed. Here,” and Elnora crossed the kitchen, but Miss Jenny came firmly on.
“Where’s isom?” she demanded.
“He atde barn. You come on back to bed. I’m gwine tell Miss Narcissa on you.”
“I’m tired staying in the house,” Miss Jenny stated. “I’m going to town. Call Isom.” Elnora protested still, but Miss Jenny insisted coldly, and Elnora called Isom from the door and returned, still portentous with pessimistic warnings, and presently Isom entered.
“Here,” Miss Jenny said, handing him the keys. “Get the car out.” Isom departed and Miss Jenny followed more slowly, and Elnora would have followed too, solicitous, but Miss Jenny drove her back to herkitchen; and unassisted she crossed the yard and got in beside Isohl “And you drive this thing careful, boy,” she told him, “or I’ll get over there and do it myself.”
When they reached town, from slender spires rising among trees against the puffy summer clouds, church bells rang lazily upon the ebbing Reaches of the sunny air. But at the edge of town Miss Jenny bade Isom turn into a narrow lane and they followed this and stopped presently before the iron gates to the cemetery. “I want to see if they fixed Simon all right,” she explained. “I’m not going to church today: I’ve been shut up between walls long enough.” Just from the prospect she got a mild exhilaration, like that of a small boy playing out of school
The negro ground lay beyond the cemetery proper and its orderly plots, and Isom led her to Simon’s grave. Simon’s burying society had taken care of him, and after two weeks the mound was still heaped with floral designs from which the blooms had fallen, leaving a rank, lean mass of stems and peacefully rusting wire skeletons. Elnora, someone, bad also been before her, and the grave was bordered with tedious rows of broken gaudy bits of crockery and of colored glass. “I reckon hell have to have a headstone, too,” Miss Jenny said aloud, and turning, saw Isom hauling his overalled legs into a tree, about which two catbirds whirled and darted in scolding circles. “You, Isom.”
“Yessum,” Isom answered and he dropped to the ground and the birds threatened him with a final burst of hysterical profanity, and followed her. They went on and into the white folks’ section and passed now between marble shapes bearing names that she knew well, and dates in a stark and peaceful simplicity in the impervious stone. Now and then they weresurmounted by symbolical urns and doves and surrounded by dipped tended sward green against the, blanched marble and the blue, dappled sky and the black cedars from among which doves crooned endlessly reiterant. Here and there bright unfaded flowers lay in random bursts against the pattern of green and white; and presently John Sartoris lifted his stone back and his fulsome gesture amid a clump of cedars beyond which the bluff sheered sharply away into the valley.
Bayard’s grave too was a shapeless mass of withered flowers, and Miss Jenny had Isom clear them off and carry them away. The masons were just beginning to lay the curbing around it, and the headstone itself sat nearby beneath a canvas cover. She lifted the cover and read the clean, new lettering: Bayard Sartoris. March 16, 1893—June 5, 1920. That was better. Simple: no Sartoris man to invent bombast to put on it. Can’t lie dead in the ground without strutting and swaggering. Beside the grave was a second headstone; like the other save for the inscription. But the Sartoris touch was there, despite the fact that there was no grave to accompany it, and the whole thing was like a boastful voice in an empty church. Yet withal there was something else, as though the merry wild spirit of him who had laughed away so much of his heritage of humorless and fustian vainglory, managed somehow even yet to soften the arrogant gesture with which they had said farewell:
LIEUT. JOHN SARTORIS, R.A.F.
Killed in action, July 19,1918.
A faint breeze soughed in the cedars like a long sigh and the branches moved gravely in it. Across the spaced tranquility of the marble shapes the doves crooned their endless rising inflections. Isom retained for another armful of withered flowers and bore it away.
Old Bayard’s headstone was simple too, having been born, as he had, too late for one war and too soon for the next one, and she thought what a joke They had played on him: denying him opportunities for swashbuckling and then denying him the privilege of being buried by men who would have invented vainglory for him. The cedars had almost overgrown his son John’s and John’s wife’s, graves. Sunlight reached them only in fitful splashes, dappling the weathered stone with brief stipplings; only with difficulty could the inscription have been deciphered. But she knew what it would be, what with the virus, the inspiration and the example of that one which dominated them all, which gave to the whole place in which weary people were supposed to rest, a hushed, orotund solemnity having no more to do with mortality than the bindings of books have to do with that of the characters, and beneath which the headstones of the wives whom they had dragged into their arrogant orbits were, despite their pompous genealogical references, modest and effacing as the song of thrushes beneath the eyrie of an eagle.
He stood on a stone pedestal, in his frock coat and bareheaded, one leg slightly advanced and one hand resting lightly on the stone pylon beside him. His head was lifted a little in that gesture of haughty arrogance which repeated itself generation after generation with a fateful fidelity, his back to the world and his carven eyes gazing out across the valley where hisrailroad ran and beyond it to the blue changeless hills, and beyond that The pedestal and effigy were mottled with sessions of rain and sun and with drippings from the cedar branches, and the bold carving of the letters was bleared with mold, yet easily decipherable:
COLONEL JOHN SARTORIS,
1823 - 1876
Soldier, Statesman, Citizen of the World
