“It’s like some women I’ve known,” she said. “It just don’t know how to give up gracefully and be a grandmamma.”
“Let it have the summer out,” Narcissa in her dark woolen dress protested. She had a trowel too, and she pottered serenely after Miss Jenny’s scolding and brisk impatience, accomplishing nothing. Worse than nothing, worse than Isom even, because she demoralized Isom, who had immediately given his unspoken allegiance to the left, or passive, wing. “It’s entitled to its summer.”
“Some folks don’t know when summer’s over,” Miss Jenny rejoined. “Indian summer’s no excuse for senile adolescence.”
“It isn’t senility, either.”
“All right. You’ll see, some day.”
“Oh, some day. I’m not quite prepared to be a grandmother, yet.”
“You’re doing pretty well.” Miss Jenny troweled a tulip bulb carefully and expertly up and removed the clotted earth from its roots. “We seem to have pretty well worn out Bayard, for the time being.” she continued. “I reckon we’d better name him John this time.”
“Yes?”
“Yes,” Miss Jenny repeated. “We’ll name him John. You, Isom!”
The gin had been running steadily for a month, now, what with the Sartoris cotton and that of other planters further up the valley, and of smaller croppers with their tilted fields among the hills. The Sartoris place was farmed on shares. Most of the tenants had picked their cotton, and gathered the late corn; and of late afternoons, with Indian summer on the land and an ancient sadness sharp as wood-smoke on the windless air, Bayard and Narcissa would drive out where, beside a spring on the edge of the woods, the negroes brought their cane and made their communal winter sorghum molasses.
One of the negroes, a sort of patriarch among the tenants, owned the mill and the mule that furnished the motive power. He did the grinding and superintended the cooking of the sap for a tithe, and when Bayard and Narcissa arrived the mule would be plodding in its monotonous and patient circle. its feet rustling in the dried cane-pith, while one of the patriarch’s grandsons fed the cane into the crusher.
Round and round the mule went, setting its narrow, deerlike feet delicately down in the hissing cane-pith, its neck bobbing limber as a section of rubber hose in the collar, with its trace-galled flanks and flopping, lifeless ears and its half-closed eyes drowsing venomously behind pale lids, apparently asleep with the monotony of its own motion.
Some Homer of the cotton fields should sing the saga of the mule and of his place in the South. He it was. more than any other one creature or thing, who, steadfast to the land when all else faltered before the hopeless juggernaut of circumstance, impervious to conditions that broke men’s hearts because of his venomous and patient preoccupation with the immediate present, won the prone South from beneath the iron heel of Reconstruction and taught it pride again through humility, and courage through adversity overcome; who accomplished the well-nigh impossible despite hopeless odds, by sheer and vindictive patience.
Father and mother he does not resemble, sons and daughters he will never have; vindictive and patient (it is a known fact that he will labor ten years willingly and patiently for you, for the privilege of kicking you once); solitary but without pride, self-sufficient but without vanity; his voice is his own derision.
Outcast and pariah he has neither friend, wife, mistress, nor sweetheart; celibate, he is unscarred, possesses neither pillar nor desert cave, he is not assaulted by temptations nor flagellated by dreams nor assuaged by vision; faith, hope and charity are not his. Misanthropic, he labors six days without reward for one creature whom he hates, bound with chains to another whom he despises, and spends the seventh day kicking or being kicked by his fellows.
Misunderstood even by that creature, the nigger who drives him, whose impulses and mental processes most closely resemble his, he performs alien actions in alien surroundings; he finds bread not only for a race, but for an entire form of behavior; meek, his inheritance is cooked away from him along with his soul in a glue factory.
Ugly, untiring and perverse, he can be moved neither by reason, flattery, nor promise of reward; he performs his humble monotonous duties without complaint, and his meed is blows. Alive, he is haled through the world, an object of general derision; unwept, un-honored and unsung, he bleaches his awkward accusing bones among rusting cans and broken crockery and wornout automobile tires on lonely hillsides while his flesh soars unawares against the blue in the craws of buzzards.
As they approached, the groaning and creaking of the mill would be the first intimation, unless the wind happened to blow toward them; then it would be the sharp, subtly exciting odor of fermentation and of boiling molasses. Bayard liked the smell of it and they would drive up and stop for a time while the boy rolled his eyes covertly at them as he fed cane into the mill, while they watched the patient mule and the old man stooped over the simmering pot.
Sometimes Bayard got out and went over and talked to him, leaving Narcissa in the car, lapped in the ripe odors of the failing year and all its rich, vague sadness, her gaze brooding on Bayard and the old negro—the one lean and tall and fatally young and the other stooped with time, and her spirit went out in serene and steady waves, surrounding him unawares.
Then he would return and get in beside her and she would touch his rough clothing, but so lightly that he was not conscious of it, and they would drive back along the faint, uneven road, beside the Haunting woods, and soon, above turning locusts and oaks, the white house simple and huge and steadfast, and the orange disk of the harvest moon getting above the ultimate hills, ripe as cheese.
Sometimes they went back after dark. The mill was still then, its long arm motionless across the firelit scene. The mule was munching in stable, or stamping and nuzzling its empty manger, or asleep standing, boding not of tomorrow; and against the firelight many shadows moved.
The negroes had gathered now: old men and women sitting on crackling cushions of cane about the blaze which one of their number fed with pressed stalks until its incense-laden fury swirled licking at the boughs overhead, making more golden still the twinkling golden leaves; and young men and girls, and children squatting and still as animals, staring into the fire.
Sometimes they sang—quavering, wordless chords in which plaintive minors blent with mellow bass in immemorial and sad suspense, their grave dark faces bent to the flames and with no motion of lips.
But when the white folks arrived the singing ceased, and they sat or lay about the fire on which the blackened pot simmered, talking in broken, murmurous overtones ready with sorrowful mirth, while in shadowy beds among the dry whispering cane-stalks youths and girls murmured and giggled.
Always one of them, and sometimes both, stopped in the office where old Bayard and Miss Jenny were. There was a fire of logs on the hearth now and they would sit in the glow of it—Miss Jenny beneath the light with her lurid daily paper; old Bayard with his slippered feet propped against the fireplace, his head wreathed in smoke and the old setter dreaming fitfully beside his chair, reliving proud and ancient stands perhaps, or further back still, the lean, gawky days of his young doghood, when the world was full of scents that maddened the blood in him and pride had not taught him self-restraint; Narcissa and Bayard between them—Narcissa dreaming too in the firelight, grave and tranquil, and young Bayard smoking his cigarettes in his leashed and moody repose.
At last old Bayard would throw his cigar into the fire and drop his feet to the floor, and the dog would wake and raise its head and blink and yawn with such gaping deliberation that Narcissa, watching him, invariably yawned also.
“Well, Jenny?”
Miss Jenny would lay her paper aside and rise. “Let me,” Narcissa would say. “Let me go.” But Miss Jenny never would, and presently she would return with a tray and three glasses, and old Bayard would unlock his desk and fetch the silver-stoppered decanter and compound three toddies with ritualistic care.
Once Bayard persuaded her into khaki and boots and carried her ’possum-hunting. Caspey with a streaked lantern and a cow’s horn slung over his shoulder, and Isom with a gunny sack and an ax and four shadowy, restless hounds waited for them at the lot gate and they set off among ghostly shocks of corn, where every day Bayard kicked up a covey of quail, toward the woods.
“Where we going to start tonight, Caspey?” Bayard asked.
“Back of Unc’ Henry’s. Dey’s one in dat grapevine behine de cotton house. Blue treed ’im down dar las’ night.”
“How do you know he’s there tonight, Caspey?” Narcissa asked.
“He be back,” Caspey answered confidently. “He right dar now, watchin’ dis lantern wid his eyes scrooched up, listenin’ to hear ef de dawgs wid us.”
They climbed through a fence and Caspey stooped and set the lantern down. The dogs moiled and tugged about his legs with sniffings and throaty growls at one another as he unleashed them. “You, Ruby! Stan’ still, dar. Hole up here, you potlickin’ fool.” They whimpered and surged, their eyes melting in fluid brief gleams; then they faded soundlessly and swiftly into the darkness. “Give ’um a little time,” Caspey said; “let ’um see ef he dar yit.” From
