Sartoris

Set in the fictional town of Jefferson, Mississippi, shortly after World War I, the novel traces the decline of the Sartoris family, once-proud Southern aristocrats whose men have pursued reckless glory across generations, leaving the women to endure the consequences.

The story opens with old man Falls, a ninety-four-year-old resident of the county Poor Farm, visiting old Bayard Sartoris at his bank. Falls brings the carved pipe of old Bayard's dead father, Colonel John Sartoris, a Civil War veteran who built the local railroad, killed two Northern opportunists known as carpetbaggers during Reconstruction, and was shot dead by a man named Redlaw after winning a seat in the state legislature. The Colonel's spirit haunts the Sartoris household, sustained by Falls's stories and by the Colonel's sister, Virginia Du Pre, known as Miss Jenny or Aunt Jenny, who came to the family as a young widow in 1869 and long ago established herself as the household's sharp-tongued, indomitable authority. She tells and retells the story of an earlier Bayard Sartoris who was killed during the Civil War while riding back to seize anchovies from a Union camp on a dare, shot in the back by a cook with a pocket pistol. Confederate cavalry general Jeb Stuart praised him but called him "too reckless," a judgment that echoes through every generation.

Simon, old Bayard's elderly Black driver, brings word that young Bayard Sartoris has returned from the war, jumping off the train on the wrong side and vanishing into the woods. That night, young Bayard appears on the moonlit veranda, tall with a hawklike face and hollow eyes. He immediately speaks of his twin brother John's death: John insisted on flying a Sopwith Camel, a light British fighter plane, into cloudy skies near enemy lines. Young Bayard tried to stop him, but John fired a warning burst to drive him off. German Fokker planes surrounded John and set his aircraft on fire, and John jumped from the burning cockpit. The grief is savage and absolute. Miss Jenny feeds young Bayard milk and later sits beside his bed in the dark as he groans in his sleep. He is haunted not by his wife, who died in childbirth along with their baby the previous October, but by his dead twin, whose presence obliterates everything else.

Young Bayard soon buys a powerful gray automobile and begins driving at terrifying speeds. Old Bayard rides with him, not to slow him down but, as Miss Jenny observes, because he wants to be present if disaster strikes. Meanwhile, old Bayard has developed a wen on his cheek. Dr. Alford, a precise young physician, warns it may become cancerous, while Dr. Peabody, an enormous eighty-seven-year-old country doctor, dismisses the concern but warns that old Bayard's heart cannot withstand his grandson's driving. Old man Falls applies a traditional salve he inherited from a Choctaw woman, and despite all medical protests, the growth falls off cleanly weeks later, exactly on the day Falls predicted.

Narcissa Benbow, a serene twenty-six-year-old woman with violet eyes, begins visiting the Sartoris household. She has been receiving anonymous letters from an obsessive admirer expressing desire and veiled threats. The writer is Byron Snopes, the bookkeeper at old Bayard's bank, who dictates the letters to a boy named Virgil Beard, paying him with candy and unfulfilled promises. Narcissa's brother, Horace Benbow, a lawyer and aspiring glass-blower who served overseas with the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA) during the war, returns home and settles into Jefferson life. He begins an affair with Belle Mitchell, a discontented, voluptuous woman married to the kind-hearted cotton speculator Harry Mitchell. When Narcissa discovers the affair, the close bond between the siblings fractures. She tells Horace that Belle is "dirty," and he agrees unhappily. Their estrangement hardens into silence.

Young Bayard's recklessness escalates. He rides an unbroken stallion through the streets of Jefferson; the horse crashes on wet concrete and Bayard is knocked unconscious. After recovering, he goes serenading through town at night with local men and Black musicians, eventually playing a tune beneath Narcissa's window. Later, Bayard crashes his car off a bridge and is pulled from the creek with broken ribs. Narcissa begins reading to him daily as he lies in his cast. Their intimacy deepens through tension and resistance: He tries to talk to her, and she hides behind the book. One afternoon, he wakes screaming from a nightmare about John's death, seizes her wrists, and tells her the full story of watching his brother's plane catch fire. She weeps, and afterward he strokes her hair and promises not to drive fast anymore.

Horace formally tells Narcissa that he and Belle plan to marry. She responds with cold antagonism. Meanwhile, Snopes's obsession reaches its crisis. He breaks into the Benbow house at night, lies face down on Narcissa's bed, steals one of her undergarments and the packet of anonymous letters from her drawer, then escapes through a window, gashing his leg. He returns to the bank, takes all the cash from the vault, and drives away in a Ford, vanishing from Jefferson.

Once healed, Bayard breaks his promise almost immediately. Driving Narcissa's small car, he floors the throttle as they approach the stone bridge where he crashed before. The car nearly goes off the road, and Narcissa sobs against him in terror and despair. Despite everything, they marry. Through autumn they drive out to watch sorghum-making and go possum-hunting by lantern light. Narcissa is pregnant, and the household settles into a guarded peace. Miss Jenny notes that Bayard should have a son so he can break his neck freely afterward.

On a frosty December day, Bayard drives old Bayard on an icy hill road. A stalled car forces him to swerve, and the automobile plunges over a bank into a ravine. Bayard recovers the road, but his grandfather sits motionless beside him, dead. Unable to face the family, Bayard flees on horseback to the MacCallum place, eighteen miles away in the hills, where he and John used to hunt. The MacCallums, a self-sufficient family led by Confederate veteran Virginius and his six sons, take him in without questions. He hunts with them and endures sleepless nights tormented by memories of John. On Christmas Eve he rides away, spends Christmas night in a Black family's cabin, and boards a train into the unknown.

Postcards arrive sporadically from Bayard, from Tampico to Rio de Janeiro, but he gives no return address. Narcissa's pregnancy advances through the spring. Miss Jenny talks increasingly about "Johnny," confusing the unborn child with the dead John, her mind turning toward the past.

Bayard dies testing an experimental biplane at a government airfield in Dayton, Ohio. The plane's untried wing system fails, the wings tear off in flight, and the aircraft disintegrates. On the same day, Narcissa's child is born. Miss Jenny goes to the telegraph office to wire Bayard to come home, but Dr. Peabody intercepts her and shows her the newspaper headline. She does not need to read it. "They never get into the papers but one way," she says, and adds, "Thank God that's the last one. For a while, anyway."

Simon is found dead in the cabin of Meloney Harris, a woman who had opened a beauty parlor with the church building fund Simon was entrusted to guard. Miss Jenny takes to her bed for three weeks, then rises and visits the cemetery, surveying the Sartoris graves: the Colonel's pompous stone effigy, old Bayard's simple marker, young Bayard's fresh grave, and the empty memorial for John. In the final scene, Narcissa plays the piano at dusk while Miss Jenny listens. When Miss Jenny calls the baby Johnny, Narcissa corrects her: "His name is Benbow Sartoris." The novel closes with a meditation on the Sartoris name as a game "outmoded and played with pawns shaped too late and to an old dead pattern," carrying in its sound "death" and "a glamorous fatality, like silver pennons downrushing at sunset, or a dying fall of horns along the road to Roncevaux."