Flags in the Dust by William Faulkner

a damn calf in a pen while one of them sat right on his tail until he took fire and jumped. Then they streaked for home.” Locust drifted and drifted on the still air, and the silver rippling of the tree frogs. In the magnolia at the corner of the house the mockingbird sang. Down the valley another one replied.
    “Streaked for home, with the rest of his gang,” young Bayard said. “Him and his skull and bones. It was Ploeckner,” he added, and for the moment his voice was still and untroubled with vindicated pride. “He was one of the best they had.Pupil of Richthofen’s.”
    “Well, that’s something,” Miss Jenny agreed, stroking his head.
    “I tried to keep him from going up there on that goddam little popgun,” he burst out again.
    “What did you expect, after the way you raised him?” Miss Jenny asked. “You’re the oldest.…… You’ve been to the cemetery, haven’t you?”
    “Yessum,” he answered quietly.
    “What’s that?” old Bayard demanded.
    “That old fool Simon said that’s where you were.… You come on and eat your supper,” she said briskly and firmly, entering his life again without a by-your-leave, taking up the snarled threads of it after her brisk and capable fashion, and he rose obediently.
    “What’s that?” old Bayard repeated.
    “And you come on in, too.” Miss Jenny swept him also into the orbit of her will as you gather a garment from a chair in passing. “Time you were in bed.” They followed her to the kitchen and stood while she delved into the ice box and set food on the table, and a pitcher of milk, and drew up a chair.
    “Fix him a toddy, Jenny,” old Bayard suggested. But Miss Jenny vetoed this immediately.
    “Milk’s what he wants. I reckon he had to drink enough whisky during that war to last him for a while. Bayard used to never come home from his, without wanting to ride his horse up the front steps and into the house. Come on, now,” and she drove old Bayard firmly out of the kitchen and up the stairs. “You go on to bed, you hear? Let him alone for a while.” She saw his door shut and entered young Bayard’s room and prepared his bed, and after a while from her own room she heard him mount the stairs.
    His room was treacherously illumined by the moon, and without turning on the light he went and sat on the bed. Outsidethe windows the interminable crickets and frogs, as though the moon’s rays were thin glass impacting among the trees and shrubs and shattering in brittle musical rain upon the ground, and above this and with a deep timbrous quality, the measured respirations of the pump in the electric plant beyond the barn.
    He dug another cigarette from his pocket and lit it. But he took only two draughts before he flung it away. And then he sat quietly in the room which he and John had shared in the young masculine violence of their twinship, on the bed where he and his wife had lain the last night of his leave, the night before he went back to England and thence out to the Front again, where John already was. Beside him on the pillow the wild bronze swirling of her hair was hushed now in the darkness, and she lay holding his arm with both hands against her breast while they talked quietly, soberly at last.
    He had not been thinking of her then. When he thought of her who lay rigid in the dark beside him, holding his arm tightly to her breasts, it was only to be a little savagely ashamed of the heedless thing he had done to her. He was thinking of his brother whom he had not seen in over a year, thinking that in a month they would see one another again.
    Nor was he thinking of her now, although the walls held, like a withered flower in a casket, something of that magical chaos in which they had lived for two months, tragic and transient as a blooming of honeysuckle and sharp as the odor of mint. He was thinking of his dead brother; the spirit of their violent complementing days lay like a dust everywhere in the room, obliterating that other