It seemed to have some relation to the instant itself as it culminated in crashing blackness; at the same time it seemed, for all its aloofness, to be a part of the whirling ensuing chaos; a part of it, yet bringing into the red vortex a sort of constant coolness like that of a faint, shady breeze.
So it remained, aloof, not quite distinct, while the coiling shapes faded into a dull unease of physical pain from the jolting of the car, leaving about him like an echo that cool serenity and something else—a sense of shrinking, yet fascinated distaste of which he or something he had done was the object.
Evening was coming. On either hand cotton and com thrust green spears above the rich, dark soil, and in the patches of woodland where the sun slanted among violet shadows, doves called moodily. After a time Suratt turned from the highway into a faint, rutted wagon-road between a field and a patch of woods, and they drove straight into the sun and Bayard removed his hat and held it before his face.
“Sun hurt yo’ haid?” Suratt said. “’Tain’t long, now.” The road wound presently into the woods, where the sun was intermittent, and it rose to a gradual, sandy crest. Beyond this the land fell away in ragged, ill-tended fields and beyond them, in a clump of sorry fruit trees and a stunted grove of silver poplar shrubs pale as absinthe and twinkling ceaselessly with no wind, a small weathered house squatted. Beyond it and much larger, loomed a barn gray and gaunt with age. The road forked here. One faint arm curved sandily away toward the house: the other went on between rank weed toward the barn. The youth on the tender 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 beside it the handles of a plow stood at a gaunt angle while its share rusted peacefully in the undergrowth, and other implements rusted half concealed there—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 the warped wooden gate and Suratt drove on into the barnyard where stood a wagon with drunken wheels and a homemade bed, and the rusting skeleton at a Ford car. Low down upon its domed and bald radiator the two lamps gave it an expression of beetling and patient astonishment and a lean cow ruminated and watched them with moody eyes.
The barn doors sagged drunkenly from broken hinges, held to the posts with twists of rusty 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 tender and leaned his bandaged head against the side of the car and watched Suratt and the youth enter the barn and mount slowly on invisible ladder-rungs.
The cow chewed in slow dejection, and upon the yellow surface at a pond enclosed by banks at trodden and sun-cracked clay, geese drifted like small muddy clouds. The sun fell in a long-slant upon their rumps and upon their suave necks, and upon the cow’s gaunt, rhythmically twitching flank, ridging her visible ribs with dingy gold. Presently Suratt’s legs tumbled into view, followed by his cautious body, and after him the youth slid easily down the ladder in one-handed swoops.
He emerged carrying an earthen jug dose 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 among waist-high jimson weeds. Bayard overtook them as the youth with his lug slid with a single motion between two lax strands at barbed wire. Suratt stooped through more sedately, and he held the top strand taut and set his foot on the lower one until Bayard was through.
Behind the barn the ground 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 sunk to its top in white sand that quivered ceaselessly and delicately beneath the water’s limpid unrest, and went on into the willow and elder growth.
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, and a rusty tin cup hung from a nail in the tree above the spring. The youth set the jug down and he and Suratt squatted beside it.
“I don’t know if we ain’t a-gain to git in trouble, givin’ Mr. Bayard whiskey, Hub,” Suratt said. “Still, Doc Peabody give him one dram hisself; so I reckon we kin give him one mo’. Ain’t that right, Mr. Bayard?” Squatting, he looked up at Bayard with his shrewd affable face. Hub twisted the corn-cob 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 tilted 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 tendered it formally to Hub.
“Go ahead,” Hub said. “Hit it.” Suratt did so, with measured pistonings of his Adam’s apple. 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 feel now, Mr. Bayard?” he asked. Then he said heavily: “You’ll have to excuse me. I reckon I ought to said Cap’m Sartoris, oughtn’t I?”
“What for?” Bayard asked. He squatted also on his heels against the bole of the beech tree. 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 time, and filled with the cool and limpid 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 over with windless beech leaves.
Hub squatted leanly, his brown forearms clasped about his knees, smoking a cigarette beneath the tilt of his hat. Suratt was across the spring from him. He wore a faded blue shirt, and in contrast to it his hands and face were a rich, even brown, like mahogany. The jug sat rotund and benignant between them.
“Yes, sir,” Suratt repeated, “I always find the best cure fer a wound is plenty of whisky. Doctors, these here fancy young doctors’ll tell a feller different, but old Doc Peabody hisself cut off my granpappy’s laig while granpappy laid back on the kitchen table with a demijohn in his hand and a mattress and a cheer acrost his laigs and fo’ men a-hold in’ him down, and him cussin’ and singin’ so scandalous the womenfolks and the chillen went down to the pasture behind the barn and waited. Take some mo’,” he said, and he passed 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 poised the jug and guffawed, then he lipped it and his Adam’s apple pumped again, in relief against the wall of elder and willow. The elder would soon flower with pale clumps of tiny bloom. Miss Jenny made a little wine of it every year. Good wine, if you knew how and had the patience.
Elderflower 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 whirled and spun like dust motes in a still 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 too became 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 appeared 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
