That day fell on Sunday. It was late in June and jasmine drifted into the house in steady waves. Narcissa and the nurse, in an even more gaudy turban, had brought the baby, bathed and garnished and scented in his ceremonial robes, in to her, and later she heard them drive away in the carriage, and then the house was still again.
The curtains stirred peacefully at the windows, and all the peaceful scents of summer came up on the sunny breeze, and sounds—birds, somewhere a Sabbath bell, and Elnora’s voice, chastened a little by her recent bereavement but still rich and mellow as she went about getting dinner.
She sang sadly and endlessly and without words as she moved about the kitchen, but she broke off short when she looked around and saw Miss Jenny, looking a little frail but dressed and erect as ever, in the door.
“Miss Jenny! Whut in de worl’! You git on back to yo’ bed. Here, lemme he’p you back.” But Miss Jenny came firmly on.
“Where’s Isom?” she demanded.
“He at de barn. You come on back to bed. I’m gwine tell Miss Narcissa on you.”
“Get away,” Miss Jenny said. “I’m tired of staying in the house. I’m going to town. Call Isom.” Elnora protested still, but Miss Jenny insisted coldly, and Elnora went to the door and called Isom and returned, portentous with pessimistic warnings, and presently Isom entered.
“Here,” Miss Jenny said, handing him the keys. “Get the car out.” Isom departed and Miss Jenny followed more slowly. Elnora would have followed too, darkly solicitous, but Miss Jenny sent her back to her kitchen; and she crossed the yard and got in beside Isom. “And you drive this thing careful, boy,” she told him, “or I’ll get over there and do it myself.”
When they reached town, from slender spires rising among trees, against the puffy clouds of summer, bells were ringing lazily. At the edge of town Miss Jenny bade Isom turn into a grassy lane and they followed this and stopped presently before the iron gates to the cemetery.
“I want to see if they fixed Simon all right,” she explained. “I’m not going to church today: I’ve been shut up between walls long enough.” Just from the prospect she got a mild exhilaration, like that of a small boy playing out of school.
The negro burying-ground lay beyond the cemetery proper, and Isom led her to Simon’s grave. Simon’s burying society had taken care at him, and after three weeks the mound was still heaped with floral designs from which the blooms had fallen, leaving a rank, lean mass of stems and peacefully rusting wire skeletons. Elnora, someone, had been before her, and the grave was bordered with tedious rows of broken gaudy bits of crockery and of colored glass.
“I reckon he’ll have to have a headstone too,” Miss Jenny said aloud, and turning, saw Isom hauling his overalled legs into a tree about which two catbirds whirled and darted in scolding circles. “You, Isom.”
“Yessum.” Isom dropped obediently to the ground and the birds threatened him with a final burst of hysterical profanity. They entered the white folks’ section and passed now between marble shapes bearing names that she knew well, and dates in stark and peaceful simplicity in the impervious stone.
Now and then they were surmounted by symbolical urns and doves and surrounded by clipped, tended sward green against the blanched marble and the blue dappled sky and the black cedars from amid which doves crooned, endlesssly reiterant. Here and there bright unfaded flowers lay in random bursts against the pattern of white and green, and presently John Sartoris lifted his stone back and his fulsome gesture amid a clump of cedars beyond which the bluff sheared sharply away into the valley.
Bayard’s grave too was a shapeless mass of withered flowers, and Miss Jenny had Isom clear them off and carry them away. The masons were preparing to lay the curbing around it, and the headstone itself sat nearby beneath a canvas covering. She lifted the canvas and read the clean, new lettering. Bayard Sartoris. March 16, 1893—June 11, 1920. That was better. Simple: no Sartoris man to invent bombast to put on it. Can’t even lie dead in the ground without strutting and swaggering.
Beside the grave was a second headstone, like the other save for the inscription. But the Sartoris touch was here, despite the fact that there was no grave to accompany it; and the whole thing was like a boastful voice in an empty church. Yet withal there was something else, as though the merry wild spirit of him who had laughed away so much of his heritage of humorless and fustian vainglory managed somehow even yet, though his bones lay in an anonymous grave beyond seas, to soften the arrogant gesture with which they had bade him farewell:
LIEUT. JOHN SARTORIS, R.A.F.
Killed in action, July 5, 1918
‘I bare him on eagles’ wings
and brought him unto Me’
A faint breeze soughed in the cedars like a long sigh, and the branches moved gravely in it. Across the spaced tranquillity of the marble shapes the doves crooned their endless rising inflections. Isom returned for another armful of withered flowers and bore it away.
Old Bayard’s headstone was simple too, having been born, as he had, too late for one war and too soon for the next, and she thought what a joke they had played on him—forbidding him opportunities for swashbuckling and then denying him the privilege of being buried by men, who would have invented vainglory for him. The cedars had almost overgrown his son John’s and John’s wife’s graves.
Sunlight reached them only in splashes, dappling the weathered stone with fitful stipplings; only with difficulty could the inscription have been deciphered. But she knew what it would be, what with the virus, the inspiration and example of that one which dominated them all, which gave the whole place, in which weary people were supposed to be resting. an orotund solemnity having no more to do with mortality than the bindings of books have to do with their characters, and beneath which the headstones of the wives whom they had dragged into their arrogant orbits were, despite their pompous genealogical references, modest and effacing as the song of thrushes beneath the eyrie of an eagle.
He stood on a stone pedestal, in his frock coat and bareheaded, one leg slightly advanced and one hand resting lightly on the stone pylon beside him. His head was lifted a little in that gesture of haughty pride which repeated itself generation after generation with a fateful fidelity, his back to the world and his carven eyes gazing out across the valley where his railroad ran, and the blue changeless hills beyond, and beyond that, the ramparts of infinity itself.
The pedestal and effigy were mottled with seasons of rain and sun and with drippings from the cedar branches, and the bold carving of the letters was bleared with mold, yet still decipherable:
COLONEL JOHN SARTORIS, C.S.A.
1823-1876
Soldier, Statesman, Citizen of the World
For man’s enlightenment he lived
By man’s ingratitude he died
Pause here, son of sorrow; remember death
This inscription had caused some furor on the part of the slayer’s family, and a formal protest had followed. But in complying with popular opinion, old Bayard had had his revenge: he caused the line “By man’s ingratitude he died” to be chiseled crudely out, and added beneath it: “Fell at the hand of—Redlaw, Sept. 4, 1876.”
Miss Jenny stood for a time, musing, a slender, erect figure in black silk and a small, uncompromising black bonnet. The wind drew among the cedars in long sighs, and steadily as pulses the sad hopeless reiteration of the doves came along the sunny air. Isom returned for the last armful of dead flowers, and looking out across the marble vistas where the shadows of noon moved, she watched a group of children playing quietly and a little stiffly in their bright Sunday finery, among the tranquil dead.
Well, it was the last one, at last, gathered in solemn conclave about the dying reverberation of their arrogant lusts, their dust moldering quietly beneath the pagan symbols of their vainglory and the carven gestures of it in enduring stone; and she remembered something Narcissa had said once, about a world without men, and wondered if therein lay peaceful avenues and dwellings thatched with quiet; and she didn’t know.
Isom returned, and as they moved away Dr. Peabody called her name. He was dressed as usual in his shabby broadcloth trousers and his shiny alpaca coat and floppy Panama hat, and his son was with him.
“Well, boy,” Miss Jenny said, giving young Loosh her hand. His face was big-boned and roughly molded. He had a thatch of straight, stiff black hair and his eyes were steady and brown and his mouth was large, and in all his ugly face there was reliability and gentleness and humor.
He was raw-boned and he wore his clothing awkwardly, and his hands were large and bony and with them he performed delicate surgical operations with the deftness of a hunter skinning a squirrel and with the celerity of a prestidigitator.
He lived in New York, where he was associated with a surgeon whose name was a household word, and once a year and sometimes twice he rode thirty-six hours on the train, spent twenty hours with his father (which they passed walking about town or riding about the countryside in the sagging buckboard all day and sitting on the veranda or before the fire all night, talking) and took the train again and, ninety-two hours later, was back