“When we dug ’em up last fall,” she told her guest, “I’d put a red one in Isom’s right hand and a yellow one in his left. Then I’d say, ‘All right, Isom, give me the red one.’ He’d never fail to hold out his left hand, and if I just looked at him long enough, he’d hold out both hands, ‘Didn’t I tell you to hold that red one in your right hand?’ I’d say. ‘Yessum, here ’tis,’ and out would come his left hand again. ‘That ain’t your right hand, stupid,’ I’d say. ‘Dat’s de one you said wuz my right hand a while ago,’ Isom says. Ain’t that so, nigger?” Miss Jenny glared at Isom, who again performed his deprecatory effacing movement behind the slow equanimity of his grin.
“Yessum, I ’speck it is.”
“You’d better,” Miss Jenny rejoined warningly. “Now, how can anybody have a decent garden, with a fool like that? I expect every spring to find corn or lespedeza coming up in the hyacinth beds or something.” She examined the tulips again, weighing the balanced colors one against the other in her mind. “No, you don’t want any tulips,” she decided, moving on.
“No, Miss Jenny,” the guest agreed demurely. They went on to the gate, and Miss Jenny stopped and took the basket from Isom.
“And you go home and take that thing off, you hear?”
“Yessum.”
“And I want to look out that window in a few minutes and see you in the garden with that hoe again,” she added. “And I want to see both of your hands on it this time, and I want to see it moving, too. You hear me?”
“Yessum.”
“And tell Caspey to be ready to go to work in the morning. Even niggers that eat here have got to work some.” But Isom was gone, and they went on and mounted to the veranda. “Don’t he sound like that’s exactly what he’s going to do?” she confided as they entered the hall. “He knows as well as I do that I won’t dare look out that window, after what I said. Come in,” she added, opening the parlor doors.
This room was open but seldom now, though in John Sartoris’ day it had been constantly in use. He was always giving dinners, and balls too on occasion, with the folding doors between it and the dining room thrown open and three negroes with stringed instruments on the stairway and all the candles burning, surrounding himself with a pageantry of color and scent and music against which he moved with his bluff and jovial arrogance. He lay also overnight in this room in his gray regimentals and so brought to a conclusion the colorful, if not always untarnished, pageant of his own career, contemplating for the last time his own apotheosis from the jocund mellowness of his generous hearth.
But during his son’s time it fell less and less into use, and slowly and imperceptibly it lost its jovial but stately masculinity, becoming by mutual agreement a place for his wife and his son John’s wife and Miss Jenny to clean thoroughly twice a year and in which, preceded by a ritualistic unswaddling of brown holland, they entertained their more formal callers. This was its status at the birth of his grandsons and it continued thus until the death of their parents, and later, to that of his wife. After that Miss Jenny bothered with formal callers but little and with the parlor not at all. She said it gave her the creeps.
And so it stayed closed nearly all the time, and slowly acquired an atmosphere of solemn and macabre fustiness. Occasionally young Bayard or John would open the door and peer into the solemn obscurity in which the shrouded furniture loomed with a sort of ghostly benignance, like albino mastodons. But they did not enter; already in their minds the room was associated with death, an idea which even the holly and tinsel of Christmastide could not completely obscure.
They were away at school by the time they reached party age, but even during vacations, though they had filled the house with the polite bedlam of their contemporaries, the room would be opened only on Christmas Eve, when the tree was set up and a fire lighted, and a bowl of eggnog on the table in the center of the hearth. And after they went to England in ’16 it was opened twice a year to be cleaned after the ancient ritual that even Simon had inherited from his forefathers, and to have the piano tuned, or when Miss Jenny and Narcissa spent a forenoon or afternoon there, but formally not at all.
The furniture loomed shapelessly in its dun shrouds. The piano alone was uncovered, and Narcissa drew the bench out and removed her hat and dropped it beside her. Miss Jenny set the basket down and from the gloom back of the instrument she drew a straight, hard chair, uncovered also, and sat down and removed her felt hat from her trim white head. Light came through the open door, but the windows were shuttered behind heavy maroon curtains, and it served only to enhance the obscurity and to render more shapeless the hooded anonymous furniture.
But behind these dun bulks and in all the corners of the room there waited, as actors stand within the wings beside the waiting stage, figures in crinoline and hooped muslin and silk; in stocks and flowing coats, in gray too, with crimson sashes and sabers in gallant, sheathed repose; Jeb Stuart himself, perhaps, on his glittering garlanded bay or with his sunny hair falling upon fine broadcloth beneath the mistletoe and holly boughs of Baltimore in ’58. Miss Jenny sat with her uncompromising grenadier’s back and held her hat upon her knees and fixed herself to look on as her guest touched chords from the keyboard and wove them together, and rolled the curtain back upon the scene.
In the kitchen Caspey was having breakfast while Simon his father, and Elnora his sister, and Isom his nephew (in uniform) watched him. He had been Simon’s understudy in the stables, and general handy man about the place, doing all the work that Simon managed, through the specious excuse of decrepitude and filial gratitude, to slough on to his shoulders and that Miss Jenny could devise for him and he could not evade. Old Bayard also employed him in the fields occasionally.
The draft had got him and bore him to France and the Saint Sulpice docks as one of a labor battalion, where he did what work corporals and sergeants managed to slough on to his unmilitary shoulders, and that white officers could devise for him and he could not evade.
Thus all the labor about the place devolved on Simon and Isom. But Miss Jenny kept Isom piddling about the house so much of the time that Simon was soon as bitter against the War Lords as any professional Democrat.
Meanwhile Caspey was working a little and trifling with continental life in its martial phases rather to his future detriment, for at last the tumult died and the captains departed and left a vacuum filled with the usual bitter bickerings of Armageddon’s heirs-at-law: and Caspey returned to his native land a total loss, sociologically speaking, with a definite disinclination toward labor, honest or otherwise, and two honorable wounds incurred in a razor hedged crap game. But return he did, to his father’s querulous satisfaction and Elnora’s and Isom’s admiration, and he now sat in the kitchen, telling them about the war.
“I don’t take nothin’ fum no white folks no mo’,” he was saying. “War done changed all dat. If us cullud folks is good enough ter save France fum de Germans, den us is good enough ter have de same rights de Germans is. French folks think so, anyhow, and ef America don’t, dey’s ways of learnin’ ’urn.
Yes, suh, it wuz de cullud soldier saved France and America bofe. Black regiments kilt mo’ Cermans dan all de white armies put together, Jet ’lone unloadin’ steamboats all day long fer a dollar a day.”
“War ain’t hurt dat big mouf o’ yo’n, anyhow,” Simon said.
“War unloosed de black man’s’ mouf,” Caspey corrected, “Give him de right to’ talk. Kill Germans, den do yo’ oratin’, dey tole us. Well, us done it.”
“How many you kilt, Unc’ Caspey?” Isom asked deferentially.
“I ain’t never bothered to count ’um up. Been times kilt mo’ in one mawnin’ dan dey’s folks on dis whole place. One time we wuz down in de cellar of a steamboat tied up to de bank, and one of these submareems come up and stopped, and all de white officers run up on de bank and hid. Us boys downstairs didn’t know dey wuz anything wrong ’twell folks started clambin’ down de ladder.
We never had no guns wid us at de time, so when we seed dem green legs comin’ down de ladder, we crape up behin’ ’um, and ez dey come down one of de boys would hit ’um over de haid wid a piece of scantlin’ and another would drag ’um outen de way and cut dey th’oat wid a meat-plow. Dey wuz about thirty of ’um. . . . Elnora, is dey any mo’ of dat coffee lef’?”
“Sho,” Simon murmured. Isom’s eyes popped quietly and Elnora lifted the coffee pot from the
