The Unvanquished Page 11

  The officer began to laugh; he sat on the horse, laughing. “So that’s your real name, hey? Well, well, well. So you have begun to tell the truth at last. Come now, tell me where those mules are, and tell me where the others you have stolen from us are hid——”

  Then Ringo hollered. He and Ab Snopes and the mules had turned off into the woods on the right side of the road, but when he hollered now he was on the left side. “Heyo the road!” he hollered. “One busted loose! head um off the road!”

  And that was all of that. The soldier dropped the lightwood splinter and the officer whirled his horse, already spurring him, hollering, “Two men stay here.” Maybe they all thought he meant two others, because there was just a big noise of bushes and trees like a cyclone was going through them, and then Granny and I were sitting in the wagon like before we had even heard the hooves. “Come on,” Granny said. She was already getting out of the wagon.

  “Are we going to leave the team and wagon,” I said.

  “Yes,” Granny said. “I misdoubted this all the time.”

  We could not see at all in the woods; we felt our way, and me helping Granny along and her arm didn’t feel any bigger than a pencil almost, but it wasn’t trembling. “This is far enough,” she said. I found a log and we sat down. Beyond the road we could hear them thrashing around, shouting and cursing. It sounded far away now. “And the team too,” Granny said.

  “But we have nineteen new ones,” I said. “That makes two hundred and forty-eight.”

  It seemed like a long time, sitting there on the log in the dark. After a while they came back; we could hear the officer cursing and the horses crashing and thumping back into the road. And then he found the wagon empty and he cursed sure enough—Granny and me and the two men he had told to stay there. He was still cursing while they turned the wagon around. Then they went away. After a while we couldn’t hear them. Granny got up and we felt our way back to the road and we went on too, toward home. After a while I persuaded her to stop and rest and while we were sitting beside the road we heard the buggy coming. We stood up and Ringo saw us and stopped the buggy.

  “Did I holler loud enough?” he said.

  “Yes,” Granny said. Then she said, “Well?”

  “All right,” Ringo said. “I told Ab Snopes to hide out with them in Hickahala bottom until tomorrow night. All cep these two.”

  “Mister Snopes,” Granny said.

  “All right,” Ringo said. “Git in and les go home.”

  Granny didn’t move; I knew why even before she spoke: “Where did you get this buggy?”

  “I borrowed hit,” Ringo said. “Twarn’t no Yankees handy, so I never needed no paper.”

  We got in. The buggy went on. It seemed to me like it had already been all night, but it wasn’t midnight yet: I could tell by the stars; we would be home by midnight almost. We went on. “I reckon you went and told um who we is now,” Ringo said.

  “Yes,” Granny said.

  “Well I reckon that completes that,” Ringo said. “Anyway, we handled two hundred and forty-eight head while the business lasted.”

  “Two hundred and forty-six,” Granny said. “We have lost the team.”

  2.

  It was after midnight when we reached home; it was already Sunday and when we reached the church that morning there was the biggest crowd waiting there had ever been, though Ab Snopes would not get back with the new mules until tomorrow. So I believed that somehow they had heard about last night and they knew too, like Ringo, that this was the end and that now the books would have to be balanced and closed. We were late, because Granny made Ringo get up at sunup and take the buggy back where he had got it. So when we reached the church they were already inside, waiting. Brother Fortinbride met us at the door, and they all turned in the pews and watched Granny—the old men and the women and the children and the maybe a dozen niggers that didn’t have any white people now; they looked at her exactly like Father’s fox hounds would look at him when he would go into the dogrun while we went up the aisle to our pew. Ringo had the book; he went up to the gallery; I looked back and saw him leaning his arms on the book on the balustrade. We sat down in our pew, like before there was a war only for Father: Granny still and straight in her Sunday calico dress and the shawl and the hat Mrs Compson had loaned her a year ago, straight and quiet with her hands holding her prayer book in her lap like always, though there hadn’t been an Episcopal service in the church in almost three years now. Brother Fortinbride was a Methodist, and I dont know what the people were. Last summer when we got back with the first batch of mules from Alabama, Granny sent for them, sent out word back into the hills where they lived in dirt-floored cabins, on the little poor farms without slaves. It took three or four times to get them to come in, but at last they all came—men and women and children and the dozen niggers that had got free by accident and didn’t know what to do about it—I reckon this was the first church with a slave gallery some of them had ever seen, with Ringo and the other twelve sitting up there in the high shadows where there was room enough for two hundred; and I could remember back when Father would be in the pew with us and the grove outside would be full of carriages from the other plantations, and Doctor Worsham in his stole beneath the altar and for each white person in the auditorium there would be ten niggers in the gallery. And I reckon that on that first Sunday when Granny knelt down in public, it was the first time they had ever seen anyone kneel in a church.

  Brother Fortinbride wasn’t a minister either. He was a private in Father’s regiment and he got hurt bad in the first battle the regiment was in; they thought that he was dead but he said that Jesus came to him and told him to rise up and live and Father sent him back home to die only he didn’t die; but they said that he didn’t have any stomach left at all and everybody thought that the food we had to eat in 1862 and 63 would finish killing him, even if he had eaten it with women to cook it instead of gathering weeds from ditch banks and cooking them himself. But it didn’t kill him and so maybe it was Jesus after all like he said. And so when we came back with the first batch of mules and the silver and the food, and Granny sent word out for all that needed, it was like Brother Fortinbride sprang right up out of the ground with the names and histories of all the hill folks at his tongue’s end, like maybe what he claimed was true, that the Lord had both him and Granny in mind when He created the other. So he would stand there where Doctor Worsham used to stand, and talk quiet for a little while about God, with his hair showing where he cut it himself and the bones looking like they were coming right out through his face, in a frock coat that had turned green a long time ago and with patches on it that he had sewed on himself, one of them was green horsehide and the other was a piece of tent canvas with the U.S.A. stencil still showing a little on it. He never talked long. There wasn’t much anybody could say about Confederate armies now; I reckon there is a time when even preachers quit believing that God is going to change His plan and give victory where there is nothing left to hang victory on; he just said how victory without God is mockery and delusion, but that defeat with God is not defeat. Then he quit talking, and he stood there with the old men, and the women and children and the eleven or twelve niggers lost in freedom, in clothes made out of cotton bagging and flour sacks, still watching Granny. Only now it was not like the hounds used to look at Father; but like they would watch the food in Loosh’s hands when he would go in to feed them, and then he said, “Brethren and sisters, Sister Millard wishes to bear public witness.”

  Granny stood up. She would not go to the altar. She just stood there, in our pew with her face straight ahead, in the shawl and Mrs Compson’s hat and the dress that Louvinia washed and ironed every Saturday, holding the prayer book. It used to have her name on it in gold letters, but now the only way you could read them was to run your finger over them; she said quiet too, quiet as Brother Fortinbride: “I have sinned. I want you all to pray for me.”

  She knelt down in the pew; she looked littler than C
ousin Denny; it was only Mrs Compson’s hat above the pew back they had to look at now. I dont know if she prayed herself or not. And Brother Fortinbride didn’t pray either, not aloud anyway. Ringo and I were just past fifteen then, but I could imagine what Doctor Worsham would have thought up to say, about all soldiers did not carry arms, and about they also serve and how one child saved from hunger and cold is better in heaven’s sight than a thousand slain enemies. But Brother Fortinbride didn’t say it. I reckon he thought of that; he always had plenty of words when he wanted to. It was like he said to himself, “Words are fine in peacetime, when everybody is comfortable and easy. But now I think that we can be excused.” He just stood there where Doctor Worsham used to stand and where the bishop would stand, too, with his ring looking big as a pistol target. Then Granny rose up; I didn’t have time to help her; she stood up and then the long sound went through the church, a sound kind of like a sigh that Ringo said was the sound of the cotton bagging and the flour sacking when they breathed again, and Granny turned and looked back toward the gallery; only Ringo was already moving. “Bring the book,” she said.

  It was a big blank account book; it weighed almost fifteen pounds; they opened it on the reading desk, Granny and Ringo side by side, while Granny drew the tin can out of her dress and spread the money on the book. But nobody moved until she began to call out the names. Then they came up one at a time, while Ringo read the names off the book, and the date, and the amount they had received before. Each time Granny would make them tell what they intended to do with the money; and now she would make them tell her how they had spent it, and she would look at the book to see whether they had lied or not. And the ones that she had loaned the brand blotted mules that Ab Snopes was afraid to try to sell would have to tell her how the mule was getting along and how much work it had done; and now and then she would take the mule away from one man or woman and give it to another, tearing up the old receipt and making the man or the woman sign the new one, telling them on what day to go and get the mule.

  So it was afternoon when Ringo closed the book and got the new receipts together, and Granny stopped putting the rest of the money back into the can and she and Brother Fortinbride did what they did each time. “I’m making out fine with the mule,” he said. “I dont need any money.”

  “Fiddlesticks,” Granny said. “You’ll never grow enough food out of the ground to feed a bird the longest day you live. You take this money.”

  “No,” Brother Fortinbride said. “I’m making out fine.”

  We walked back home, Ringo carrying the book. “You done receipted out four mules you aint hardly laid eyes on yet,” he said. “What you gonter do about that?”

  “They will be here tomorrow morning, I reckon,” Granny said. They were; Ab Snopes came in while we were eating breakfast; he leaned in the door with his eyes a little red from lack of sleep and looked at Granny.

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said. “I dont never want to be rich; I just want to be lucky. Do you know what you done?” Only nobody asked him what, so he told us anyway: “Hit was taking place all day yestiddy; I reckon by now there aint a Yankee regiment left in Mississippi. You might say that this here war has turned around at last and went back North. Yes, sir. That regiment you requisitioned on Sattidy never even stayed long enough to warm the ground. You managed to requisition the last batch of Yankee live stock, at the last possible moment hit could have been done by living man. You made just one mistake: you drawed them last nineteen mules just too late to have anybody to sell them back to.”

  3.

  It was a bright warm day; we saw the guns and the bits shining a long way down the road, but this time Ringo didn’t even move. He just quit drawing and looked up from the paper and said, “So Ab Snopes was lying. Gret God, aint we gonter never get shet of them?”

  It was just a lieutenant; by this time Ringo and I could tell the different officers’ ranks better than we could tell Confederate ranks because one day we counted up and the only Confederate officers we had ever seen were Father and the captain that talked to us with Uncle Buck McCaslin that day in Jefferson before Grant burned it. And this was to be the last time we would see any uniforms at all except as the walking symbols of defeated men’s pride and indomitable unregret, but we didn’t know that now. So it was just a lieutenant. He looked about forty and kind of mad and gleeful both at the same time; Ringo didn’t recognise him because he had not been in the wagon with us, but I did: from the way he sat the horse, or maybe from the way he looked mad and happy both, like he had been mad for several days, thinking about how much he was going to enjoy being mad when the right time came. And he recognised me too; he looked at me once and said, “Hah!” with his teeth showing and pushed his horse up and looked at Ringo’s picture. There were maybe a dozen cavalry behind him; we never noticed especially. “Hah,” he said again, then he said, “What’s that?”

  “A house,” Ringo said. Ringo had never even looked at him good yet. He had seen even more of them than I had. “Look at it.”

  The lieutenant looked at me and said “Hah” again behind his teeth; every now and then while he was talking to Ringo he would do that. He looked at Ringo’s picture. Then he looked up the grove to where the chimneys rose out of the pile of rubble and ashes. Grass and weeds had come up out of the ashes now and unless you knew better, all you saw was the four chimneys. Some of the golden rod was still in bloom. “Oh,” the officer said. “I see. You’re drawing it like it used to be.”

  “Co-rect,” Ringo said. “What I wanter draw hit like hit is now for? I can walk down here ten times a day and look at hit like hit is now. I can even ride in that gate on a horse and do that.”

  The lieutenant didn’t say “Hah!” this time. He didn’t do anything yet; I reckon he was still enjoying waiting a little longer to get good and mad. He just kind of grunted. “When you get done here, you can move into town and keep busy all winter, cant you?” he said. Then he sat back in the saddle. He didn’t say “Hah” now either; it was his eyes that said it, looking at me; they were a kind of thin milk color, like the chine knuckle bone in a ham. “All right,” he said. “Who lives up there now? What’s her name today, hey?”

  Ringo was watching him now, though I dont think he suspected yet who he was. “Dont nobody,” he said. “The roof leaks.” One of the men made a kind of sound; maybe it was laughing. The lieutenant started to whirl around and then he started not to; then he sat there glaring down at Ringo with his mouth beginning to open. “Oh,” Ringo said. “You mean way back yonder in the quarters. I thought you was still worrying about them chimneys.”

  This time the soldier did laugh, and this time the lieutenant did whirl around, cursing at the soldier; I would have known him now even if I hadn’t before; he cursed at them all now, sitting there with his face swelling up. “Blank blank blank,” he shouted. “Get to hell on out of here. He said that pen is down there in the creek bottom beyond the pasture. If you meet man woman or child and they so much as smile at you, shoot them. Get!” The soldiers went on, galloping up the drive; we watched them scatter out across the pasture. The lieutenant looked at me and Ringo; he said “Hah” again, glaring at us. “You boys come with me. Jump!”

  He didn’t wait for us; he galloped, too, up the drive. We ran; Ringo looked at me. “He said the pen was in the creek bottom,” Ringo said. “Who you reckon he is?”

  “I dont know,” I said.

  “Well, I reckon I know,” Ringo said. But we didn’t talk anymore. We ran on up the drive. The lieutenant had reached the cabin now, and Granny came out the door; I reckon she had seen him too because she already had her sunbonnet on. They looked at us once, then Granny went on, too, walking straight, not fast, down the path toward the lot, with the lieutenant behind her on the horse. We could see his shoulders and his head, and now and then his hand and arm, but we couldn’t hear what he was saying. “I reckon this does complete hit,” Ringo said.

  But we could hear him before we reached the new fence.
Then we could see them standing at the fence that Joby and I had just finished: Granny straight and still, with her sunbonnet on and the shawl drawn tight over her shoulders where she had her arms folded in it so that she looked littler than anybody I could remember, like during the four years she hadn’t got any older or weaker, but just littler and littler and straighter and straighter and more and more indomitable, and the lieutenant beside her with one hand on his hip and waving a whole handful of letters at Granny’s face with the other. “Look like he got all we ever wrote there,” Ringo said. The soldiers’ horses were all tied along the fence; they were inside the pen now, and they and Joby and Ab Snopes had the forty-odd old mules and the nineteen new ones hemmed into the corner. The mules were still trying to break out, only it didn’t look like that: it looked like every one of them was trying to keep the big burned smear where Granny and Ringo had blotted the U.S. brand turned so that the lieutenant would have to look at it.

  “And I guess you will call those scars left handed trace galls!” the lieutenant said. “You have been using castoff bandsaw bands for traces, hey? By God, I’d rather engage Forrest’s whole brigade every morning for six months than spend that same length of time trying to protect United States property from defenseless Southern women and niggers and children. Defenseless!” he shouted: “Defenseless! God help the North if Davis and Lee had ever thought of the idea of forming a brigade of grandmothers and nigger orphans and invading us with it.” He hollered, shaking the letters at Granny. In the pen the mules huddled and surged, with Ab Snopes waving his arms at them now and then. Then the lieutenant quit shouting: he even quit shaking the letters at Granny.

  “Listen,” he said. “We are on evacuation orders now. Likely I am the last Federal soldier you will have to look at. And I’m not going to harm you; orders to that effect too. All I’m going to do is take back this stolen property. And now I want you to tell me, as enemy to enemy, or even man to man, if you like. I know from these forged orders how many head of stock you have taken from us, and I know from the records how many times you have sold a few of them back to us. I even know what we paid you. But how many of them did you actually sell back to us more than one time?”