“Don’t paw me, Loosh,” she snapped. “I’m not a cripple.” But he supported her elbow with his huge, gentle hand until she was seated, then he stood with his hat off while Simon laid the linen robe across her knees.
“Here,” he said, and extended her the silver dollar and she returned it to her bag and clicked it shut and wiped her fingers again on her handkerchief.
“Well,” she said, “thank God that’s the last one. For a while, anyway. Home, Simon.”
Simon sat with leashed magnificence, but under the occasion he unbent a little. “When you gwine come out en see de young marster, Doctuh?”
“Soon, Simon,” he answered; and Simon clucked to the horses and wheeled away with a flourish, his hat tilted and the whip caught smartly back. Dr. Peabody stood in the street, a shapeless hogshead of a man in a shabby alpaca coat, his hat in one hand and the folded newspaper and the yellow unsent message in the other, until Miss Jenny’s straight slender back and the squarely indomitable angle of her bonnet had passed from sight.
But that was not the last one. One morning a week later, Simon was found in a negro cabin in town, with his grizzled head crushed ir^ by a blunt instrument anonymously wielded.
“In whose house?” Miss Jenny demanded into the telephone. In that of a woman named Meloney Harris, the voice told her. Meloney...Mel...Belle Mitchell’s face flashed before her, and she remembered: the mulatto girl whose smart apron and cap and lean shining shanks had lent such an air to Belle’s parties, and who had quit Belle in order to set up a beauty parlor. Miss Jenny thanked the voice and hung up the receiver.
“The old gray-headed reprobate,” she said, and she went into the office and sat down. “So that’s what became of that church money he ‘put out,’ I wondered...” She sat stiffly and uncompromisingly erect in her chair, her hands idle on her lap. Well, that is the last one of ‘em, she said. But no, he was hardly a Sartoris: he had at least had some shadow of a reason, while the others … “I think,” Miss Jenny said, who had not spent a day in bed since she was forty years old, “that I’ll be sick for a while.”
And she did just exactly that. Went to bed, where she lay propped on pillows in a frivolous lace cap, and would permit no doctor to see her save Dr. Peabody who called once informally and who sat sheepishly and mountainously for thirty minutes while Miss Jenny vented her invalid’s spleen and the recurred anger of the salve fiasco upon him. And here she held daily councils with Isom and Elnora, and at the most unexpected times she would storm with unimpaired vigor from her window at Isom or Caspey in the yard beneath.
The child and the placid, gaily turbaned mountain who superintended his hours, spent most of the day in this room, and presently Narcissa herself; and the three of them would sit for rapt murmurous hours in a sort of choral debauch of abnegation while the object of it slept digesting, waked, stoked himself anew and slept again.
“He’s a Sartoris, all right,” Miss Jenny said, “but an improved model. He hasn’t got that wild look of ‘em. I believe it was the name. Bayard. We did well to name him Johnny.”
“Yes,” Narcissi said, watching her sleeping son with grave and tranquil serenity.
* * *
And there Miss Jenny staid until her while was up. Three weeks it was. She set the date before she went to bed and held to it stubbornly, refusing even to rise and attend the christening. 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, and 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, and somewhere a Sabbath bell, and Elnora’s voice, chastened a little with 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 up and saw Miss Jenny looking a little frail but fully dressed and erect as ever, in the door.
“Miss Jenny! Whut in de worl’! You git on back to yo’ bed. Here,” and Elnora crossed the kitchen, 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.”
“I’m tired staying in the house,” Miss Jenny stated. “I’m going to town. Call Isom.” Elnora protested still, but Miss Jenny insisted coldly, and Elnora called Isom from the door and returned, still 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, and Elnora would have followed too, solicitous, but Miss Jenny drove her back to her kitchen; and unassisted she crossed the yard and got in beside Isohl “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 summer clouds, church bells rang lazily upon the ebbing Reaches of the sunny air. But at the edge of town Miss Jenny bade Isom turn into a narrow 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 ground lay beyond the cemetery proper and its orderly plots, and Isom led her to Simon’s grave. Simon’s burying society had taken care of him, and after two 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, bad also been before her, and the grave was bordered with tedious rows of broken gaudy bits of crockery and of colored glass. “I reckon hell 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 answered and he dropped to the ground and the birds threatened him with a final burst of hysterical profanity, and followed her. They went on and into the white folks’ section and passed now between marble shapes bearing names that she knew well, and dates in a stark and peaceful simplicity in the impervious stone. Now and then they were surmounted by symbolical urns and doves and surrounded by dipped tended sward green against the, blanched marble and the blue, dappled sky and the black cedars from among which doves crooned endlessly reiterant. Here and there bright unfaded flowers lay in random bursts against the pattern of green and white; and presently John Sartoris lifted his stone back and his fulsome gesture amid a clump of cedars beyond which the bluff sheered 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 just beginning to lay the curbing around it, and the headstone itself sat nearby beneath a canvas cover. She lifted the cover and read the clean, new lettering: Bayard Sartoris. March 16, 1893—June 5, 1920. That was better. Simple: no Sartoris man to invent bombast to put on it. Can’t 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 there, 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 to soften the arrogant gesture with which they had said farewelclass="underline"