Flags in the Dust by William Faulkner Page A

her hand. “Goodbye.”
    The negro had moved down the road, slowly, and had stopped again, and he was watching her covertly as she approached. As she passed he looked full at her and she knew he was about to hail her. She opened the throttle and passed him with increasing speed and drove swiftly on to town, where she lived in a brick house among cedars on a hill.
    She was arranging the larkspur in a dull lemon urn on the piano. Aunt Sally Wyatt rocked steadily in her chair beside the window, clapping her feet flatly on the floor at each stroke. Her work basket sat on the window ledge between the gentlebillowing of the curtains, her ebony walking-stick leaned beside it.
    “And you were out there two hours,” she said, “and never saw him at all?”
    “He wasn’t there,” Narcissa answered. “He’s gone to Memphis.”
    Aunt Sally rocked steadily. “If I was them, I’d make him stay there. I wouldn’t have that boy around 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 hair-brained fool.”
    “I dont know,” Narcissa answered, arranging the larkspur. “He’ll be back soon, I suppose. You can ask him then.”
    “Me ask him? I never said two words to him in his life. And I dont intend to. I been used to associating with gentlefolks.”
    Narcissa broke some of the stems, arranging the blooms in a pattern. “What’s he done that a gentleman doesn’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 tank. He just swung off of it on a rope and dived into the swimming pool. And it was John that went up in the balloon.”
    “That wasn’t what I heard. I heard he jumped off that tank, across a whole row 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 answered.
    “There! What’d I tell you? And what was the use of it?”
    “I dont know.”
    “Of course you dont. 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, with an effect as of sleight-of-hand. Still crouching it blinked into the room for a moment, then it sank to its belly 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