The courtship was during the days when he physicked and amputated the whole county by buckboard; often after a year’s separation he would drive forty miles to see her, to be intercepted on the way and deflected to a childbed or a mangled limb, with only a scribbled message to assuage the interval of another year. “So you’re home again, are you?” Miss Jenny asked.
“Yes, ma’am. And find you as spry and handsome as ever.”
“Jenny’s too bad-tempered to ever do anything but dry up and blow away,” Dr. Peabody said.
“You’ll remember I never let you wait on me when I’m not well,” she retorted. “I reckon you’ll be tearing off again on the next train, won’t you?” she asked young Loosh.
“Yessum, I’m afraid so. My vacation hasn’t come due, yet.”
“Well, at this rate you’ll spend it in an old men’s home somewhere. Why don’t you all come out and have dinner, so he can see the boy?”
“I’d like to,” young Loosh answered, “but I don’t have time to do all the things I want to, so I just make up my mind not to do any of ’em. Besides, I’ll have to spend this afternoon fishing,” he added.
“Yes,” his father put in, “and choppin’ up good fish with a pocket knife just to see what makes ’em go. Lemme tell you what he did this mawnin’: he grabbed up that dawg that Abe shot last winter and laid its leg open and untangled them ligaments so quick that Abe not only didn’t know what he was up to, but even the dawg didn’t know it ’til it was too late to holler. Only you forgot to dig a little further for his soul,” he added to his son.
“You don’t know if he hasn’t got one,” young Loosh said, unruffled. “Dr. Straud has been experimenting with electricity; he says he believes the soul—”
“Fiddlesticks,” Miss Jenny interrupted. “You’d better get him a jar of Will Falls’ salve to carry back to his doctor, Loosh. Well”—she glanced at the sun—“I’d better be going. If you won’t come out to dinner—”
“Thank you, ma’am,” young Loosh answered.
His father said: “I brought him in to show him that collection of yours. We didn’t know we looked that underfed.”
“Help yourself,” Miss Jenny answered. She went on, and they stood and watched her trim back until she passed out of sight beyond the cedars.
“And now there’s another one,” young Loosh said musingly. “Another one to grow up and keep his folks in a stew until he finally succeeds in doing what they all expect him to do. Well, maybe that Benbow blood will sort of hold him down. They’re quiet folks, that girl; and Horace sort of . . . and just women to raise him . . .”
His father grunted. “He’s got Sartoris blood in him, too.”
Miss Jenny arrived home, looking a little spent, and Narcissa scolded her and at last prevailed on her to lie down after dinner. And here she had dozed while the drowsy afternoon wore away, and waked to lengthening shadows and a sound of piano keys touched softly below stairs.
“I’ve slept all afternoon,” she told herself, in a sort of consternation; yet she lay for a time yet while the curtains stirred faintly at the windows and the sound of the piano came up mingled with the jasmine from the garden and with the garrulous evensong of sparrows from the mulberry trees in the back yard. She rose and crossed the hall and entered Narcissa’s room, where the child slept in its crib.
Beside him the nurse dozed placidly. Miss Jenny tiptoed out and descended the stairs and entered the parlor and drew her chair out from behind the piano. Narcissa stopped playing.
“Do you feel rested?” she asked. “You shouldn’t have done that this morning.”
“Fiddlesticks,” Miss Jennie rejoined. “It always does me good to see all those fool pompous men lying there with their marble mottoes and things. Thank the Lord, none of ’em will have a chance at me. I reckon the Lord knows His business, but I declare, sometimes . . . Play something.”
Narcissa obeyed, touching the keys softly, and Miss Jenny sat listening for a while. The evening drew subtly onward; the shadows in the room grew more and more palpable. Outside the sparrows gossiped in shrill clouds.
From the garden jasmine came in to them steady as breathing, and presently Miss Jenny roused and began to talk of the child. Narcissa played quietly on, her white dress with its black ribbon at the waist vaguely luminous in the dusk, with a hushed sheen like wax. Jasmine drifted and drifted; the sparrows were still now, and Miss Jenny talked on in the twilight about little Johnny while Narcissa played with rapt inattention, as though she were not listening. Then, without ceasing and without turning her head, she said:
“He isn’t John. He’s Benbow Sartoris.”
“What?”
“His name is Benbow Sartoris,” she repeated.
Miss Jenny sat quiet still for a moment. In the next room Elnora moved about, laying the table for supper. “And do you think that’ll do any good?” Miss Jenny demanded. “Do you think you can change one of ’em with a name?”
The music went on in the dusk softly; the dusk was peopled with ghosts of glamorous and old disastrous things. And if they were just glamorous enough, there was sure to be a Sartoris in them, and then they were sure to be disastrous. Pawns. But the Player, and the game He plays . . .
He must have a name for His pawns, though. But perhaps Sartoris is the game itself—a game outmoded and played with pawns shaped too late and to an old dead pattern, and of which the Player Himself is a little wearied. For there is death in the sound of it, and a glamorous fatality, like silver pennons downrushing at sunset, or a dying fall of horns along the road to Roncevaux.
“Do you think,” Miss Jenny repeated, “that because his name is Benbow, he’ll be any less a Sartoris and a scoundrel and a fool?”
Narcissa played on as though she were not listening. Then she turned her head and without stopping her hands she smiled at Miss Jenny quietly, a little dreamily, with serene, fond detachment. Beyond Miss Jenny’s trim, fading head the maroon curtains hung motionless; beyond the window evening was a windless lilac dream, foster dam of quietude and peace.
1929
The End
