Flags in the Dust by William Faulkner Page B

he’d rather sit there and rasp at that new hoe with a file instead of grubbing up a dozen blades of grass in that salvia bed, I cant see,” Miss Jenny said. “But he’ll do it. He’d sit there and scrape at that hoe until it looked like a saw blade, if I’d let him. Bayard bought a lawn mower three or four years ago—God knows what for—and turned it over to Simon. The folks that made it guaranteed it for a year. They didn’t know Simon, though. I often thought, reading about those devastations and things in the papers last year, what a good time Simon would have had in the war. He could have shown ’em things about devastation they never thought of. Isom!” she shouted.
    They entered the garden and Miss Jenny paused at the gate. “You, Isom!”
    This time there was a reply, and Miss Jenny went on with her caller and Isom lounged up from somewhere and clicked the gate after him.
    “Why didn’t you——” Miss Jenny looked back over her shoulder, then she stopped and regarded Isom’s suddenly military figure with brief, cold astonishment. He now wore khaki, with a divisional emblem on his shoulder and a tarnished service stripe on his cuff. His lean sixteen-year-old neck rose from the slovenly collar’s limp, overlarge embrace, and a surprising amount of wrist was visible below the cuffs. The breeches bagged hopelessly into the unskillful wrapping of the putties which, with either a fine sense for the unique or a bland disregard of military usage, he had donned prior to his shoes, and the soiled overseas cap came down regrettably on his bullet head.
    “Where did you get those clothes?” The sunlight glinted on Miss Jenny’s shears, and Miss Benbow in a white dress and a soft straw hat turned also and looked at him with a strange expression.
    “Dey’s Caspey’s,” Isom answered. “I jes’ bor’d ’um.”
    “Caspey?” Miss Jenny repeated. “Is he home?”
    “Yessum. He got in las’ night on de nine-thirty.”
    “Last night, did he? Where is he now? Asleep, I reckon?”
    “Yessum. Dat’s whar he wuz when I lef’ home.”
    “And I reckon that’s how you borrowed his uniform,” Miss Jenny said tartly. “Well, let him sleep this morning. Give him one day to get over the war. But if it made a fool out of him like it did Bayard, he’d better put that thing on again and go back to it. I’ll declare, men cant seem to stand anything.” She went on, the guest in her straight white dress following.
    “You are awfully hard on men, not to have a husband tobother with, Miss Jenny,” she said. “Besides, you’re judging all men by your Sartorises.”
    “They aint my Sartorises,” Miss Jenny disclaimed promptly. “I just inherited ’em. But you just wait: you’ll have one of your own to bother with soon; you just wait until Horace gets home, then see how long it takes him to get over it. Men cant stand anything,” she repeated. “Cant even stand helling around with no worry and no responsibility and no limit to all of the meanness they can think about wanting to do. Do you think a man could sit day after day and month after month in a house miles from nowhere and spend the time between casualty lists tearing up bedclothes and window curtains and table linen to make lint and watching sugar and flour and meat dwindling away and using pine knots for light because there aren’t any candles and no candlesticks to put ’em in, if there were, and hiding in nigger cabins while drunken Yankee generals set fire to the house your great-great-great-grandfather built and you and all your folks were born in? Dont talk to me about men suffering in war.” Miss Jenny snipped larkspur savagely. “Just you wait until Horace comes home; then you’ll see. Just a good excuse for ’em to make nuisances of themselves and stay in the way while the women-folks are trying to clean up the mess they left with their fighting. John at least had consideration enough, after he’d gone and gotten himself into