“Who is been?” Elnora said.
“Miss Jenny get along all right with Miss Narcissa,” Isom said. “Seem to me like she the one to say. I ain’t heard her say nothing about it.”
“Because Miss Jenny quality,” Elnora said. “That’s why. And that’s something you don’t know nothing about, because you born too late to see any of it except her.”
“Look to me like Miss Narcissa good quality as anybody else,” Isom said. “I don’t see no difference.”
Elnora moved suddenly from the table. Isom as suddenly sprang up and moved his chair out of his mother’s path. But she only went to the cupboard and took a platter from it and returned to the table, to the tomatoes. “Born Sartoris or born quality of any kind ain’t is, it’s does.” She talked in a level, inflectionless voice above her limber, brown, deft hands.
When she spoke of the two women she used “she” indiscriminately, putting the least inflection on the one which referred to Miss Jenny. “Come all the way here by Herself, and the country still full of Yankees. All the way from Callina, with Her folks all killed and dead except old Marse John, and him two hundred miles away in Missippi—”
“It’s moren two hundred miles from here to Cal-lina,” Isom said. “Learnt that in school. It’s nigher two thousand.”
Elnora’s hands did not cease. She did not seem to have heard him. “With the Yankees done killed Her paw and Her husband and burned the Cal-lina house over Her and Her mammy’s head, and She come all the way to Missippi by Herself, to the only kin She had left.
Getting here in the dead of winter without nothing in this world of God’s but a basket with some flower seeds and two bottles of wine and them colored window panes old Marse John put in the library window so She could look through it like it was Callina.
She got here at dusk-dark on Christmas Day and old Marse John and the chillen and my mammy waiting on the porch, and Her setting high-headed in the wagon for old Marse John to lift Her down.
They never even kissed then, out where folks could see them. Old Marse John just said, ‘Well, Jenny,’ and she just said, ‘Well, Johnny,’ and they walked into the house, him leading Her by the hand, until they was inside the house where the commonalty couldn’t spy on them. Then She begun to cry, and old Marse John holding Her, after all them four thousand miles—”
“It ain’t four thousand miles from here to Cal-lina,” Isom said. “Ain’t but two thousand. What the book say in school.”
Elnora paid no attention to him at all; her hands did not cease. “It took Her hard, the crying did. ‘It’s because I ain’t used to crying,’ she said. ‘I got out of the habit of it. I never had the time. Them goddamn Yankees,’ she said. ‘Them goddamn Yankees.’” Elnora moved again, to the cupboard. It was as though she walked out of the sound of her voice on her silent, naked feet, leaving it to fill the quiet kitchen though the voice itself had ceased.
She took another platter down and returned to the table, her hands busy again among the tomatoes and lettuce, the food which she herself could not eat. “And that’s how it is that she” (she was now speaking of Narcissa; the two Negroes knew it) “thinks she can pick up and go to Memphis and frolic, and leave Her alone in this house for two nights without nobody but niggers to look after Her. Move out here under a Sartoris roof and eat Sartoris food for ten years, and then pick up and go to Memphis same as a nigger on a excursion, without even telling why she was going.”
“I thought you said Miss Jenny never needed nobody but you to take care of her,” Isom said. “I thought you said yesterday you never cared if she come back or not.”
Elnora made a sound, harsh, disparaging, not loud. “Her not come back? When she worked for five years to get herself married to Bayard? Working on Miss Jenny all the time Bayard was off to that war? I watched her.
Coming out here two or three times a week, with Miss Jenny thinking she was just coming out to visit like quality. But I knowed. I knowed what she was up to all the time. Because I knows trash. I knows the way trash goes about working in with quality. Quality can’t see that, because it quality. But I can.”
“Then Bory must be trash, too,” Isom said.
Elnora turned now. But Isom was already out of his chair before she spoke. “You shut your mouth and get yourself ready to serve supper.” She watched him go to the sink and prepare to wash his hands. Then she turned back to the table, her long hands brown and deft among the red tomatoes and the pale absinth-green of the lettuce. “Needings,” she said. “It ain’t Bory’s needings and it ain’t Her needings. It’s dead folks’ needings.
Old Marse John’s and Cunnel’s and Mister John’s and Bayard’s that’s dead and can’t do nothing about it. That’s where the needings is. That’s what I’m talking about. And not nobody to see to it except Her yonder in that chair, and me, a nigger, back here in this kitchen. I ain’t got nothing against her. I just say to let quality consort with quality, and unquality do the same thing. You get that coat on, now. This here is all ready.”
III
It was the boy who told her. She leaned forward in the wheel chair and watched through the window as the woman and the child crossed the garden and passed out of sight beyond the angle of the house. Still leaning forward and looking down into the garden, she heard them enter the house and pass the library door and mount the stairs.
She did not move, nor look toward the door. She continued to look down into the garden, at the now stout shrubs which she had fetched from Carolina as shoots not much bigger than matches.
It was in the garden that she and the younger woman who was to marry her nephew and bear a son, had become acquainted. That was back in 1918, and young Bayard and his brother John were still in France. It was before John was killed, and two or three times a week Narcissa would come out from town to visit her while she worked among the flowers.
“And she engaged to Bayard all the time and not telling me,” the old woman thought. “But it was little she ever told me about anything,” she thought, looking down into the garden which was beginning to fill with twilight and which she had not entered in five years.
“Little enough about anything. Sometimes I wonder how she ever got herself engaged to Bayard, talking so little. Maybe she did it by just being, filling some space, like she got that letter.” That was one day shortly before Bayard returned home. Narcissa came out and stayed for two hours, then just before she left she showed the letter.
It was anonymous and obscene; it sounded mad, and at the time she had tried to get Narcissa to let her show the letter to Bayard’s grandfather and have him make some effort to find the man and punish him, but Narcissa refused. “I’ll just burn it and forget about it,” Narcissa said. “Well, that’s your business,” the older woman said.
“But that should not be permitted. A lady should not be at the mercy of a man like that, even by mail. Any gentleman will believe that, act upon it. Besides, if you don’t do something about it, he’ll write you again.” “Then I’ll show it to Colonel Sartoris,” Narcissa said. She was an orphan, her brother also in France. “But can’t you see I just can’t have any man know that anybody thought such things about me.”
“Well, I’d rather have the whole world know that somebody thought that way about me once and got horsewhipped for it, than to have him keep on thinking that way about me, unpunished. But it’s your affair.” “I’ll just burn it and forget about it,” Narcissa said. Then Bayard returned, and shortly afterward he and Narcissa were married and Narcissa came out to the house to live.
Then she was pregnant, and before the child was born Bayard was killed in an airplane, and his grandfather, old Bayard, was dead and the child came, and it was two years before she thought to ask her niece if any more letters had come; and Narcissa told her no.
So they had lived quietly then, their women’s life in the big house without men. Now and then she had urged Narcissa to marry again. But the other had refused, quietly, and they had gone on so for years, the two of them and the child whom she persisted in calling after his dead uncle.
Then one evening a week ago, Narcissa had a guest for supper; when she learned that the guest was to be a man, she sat quite still in her chair for a time. “Ah,” she thought, quietly. “It’s come. Well. But it had to; she is young. And to live out here alone with a bedridden old woman. Well. But I wouldn’t have her do as I did.
Would not expect it of her. After all, she is not a Sartoris. She is no kin to them, to a lot of fool
