Read Online Flags in the Dust by William Faulkner - Free Book Online

something where he had no business, not to come back and worry everybody to distraction. But Bayard now, coming back in the middle of it and having everybody thinking he was settled down at last, teaching at that Memphis flying school, and then marrying that fool girl.”
    “Miss Jenny!”
    “Well, I dont mean that, but she ought to’ve been spanked, hard. I know: didn’t I do the same thing, myself? It was all that harness Bayard wore. Talk about men being taken in by a uniform!”She clipped larkspur. “Dragging me up there to the wedding, mind you, with a church full of rented swords and some of Bayard’s pupils trying to drop roses on ’em when they came out. I reckon some of ’em were not his pupils, because one of ’em finally did drop a handful that missed everything and fell in the street.” She snipped larkspur savagely. “I had dinner with ’em one night. Sat in the hotel an hour until they remembered to come for me. Then we stopped at a delicatessen and Bayard and Caroline got out and went in and came back with about a bushel of packages and dumped ’em into the car where they leaked grease on my new stockings. That was the dinner I’d been invited to, mind you; there wasn’t a sign of anything that looked or smelt like a stove in the whole place. I didn’t offer to help ’em. I told Caroline I didn’t know anything about that sort of house-keeping, because my folks were old-fashioned enough to cook food.
    “Then the others came in—some of Bayard’s soldier friends, and a drove of other folks’ wives, near as I could gather. Young women that ought to’ve been at home, seeing about supper, gabbling and screeching in that silly way young married women have when they’re doing something they hope their husbands won’t like. They were all unwrapping bottles—about two dozen, I reckon, and Bayard and Caroline came in with that silver I gave ’em and monogrammed napkins and that delicatessen fodder that tasted like swamp grass, on paper plates. We ate it there, sitting on the floor or standing up or just wherever you happened to be.
    “That was Caroline’s idea of keeping house. She said they’d settle down when they got old, if the war was over by then. About thirty-five, I suppose she meant. Thin as a rail; there wouldn’t have been much to spank. But she’d ought to’ve had it, just the same. Soon as she found out about the baby, she named it. Named it nine months before it was born and toldeverybody about it. Used to talk about it like it was her grandfather or something. Always saying Bayard wont let me do this or that or the other.”
    Miss Jenny continued to clip larkspur, the caller tall in a white dress beside her. The fine and huge simplicity of the house rose among thickening trees, the garden lay in sunlight bright with bloom, myriad with scent and with a drowsy humming of bees—a steady golden sound, as of sunlight become audible—all the impalpable veil of the immediate, the familiar; just beyond it a girl with a bronze skirling of hair and a small, supple body in a constant epicene unrepose, a dynamic fixation like that of carven sexless figures caught in moments of action, striving, a mechanism all of whose members must move in performing the most trivial action, her wild hands not accusing but passionate still beyond the veil impalpable but sufficient.
    Miss Jenny stooped over the flowerbed, her narrow back, though stooping, erect still, indomitable. A thrush flashed modestly across the bright air and into the magnolia tree in a dying parabola. “And then, when he had to go back to the war, of course he brought her out here and left her on my hands.” The caller stood motionless in her white dress, and Miss Jenny said: “No, I dont mean that.” She snipped larkspur.
    “Poor women,” she said. “I reckon we do have to take our revenge wherever and whenever we can get it. Only she ought to’ve taken it out on Bayard.”
    “When she died,” Narcissa said, “and