The Unvanquished Page 4

  “Take it into the house,” Granny said.

  “We’ll just load hit now and save having to handle hit again in the morning,” Joby said. “Come on here, nigger,” he said to Loosh.

  “Take it into the house,” Granny said. So after a while Joby moved on toward the house. We could hear him breathing now, saying “Hah!” every few steps. Inside the kitchen he let his end down, hard.

  “Hah!” he said. “That’s done, thank God.”

  “Take it upstairs,” Granny said.

  Joby turned and looked at her. He hadn’t straightened up yet, he turned half stooping and looked at her. “Which?” he said.

  “Take it upstairs,” Granny said. “I want it in my room.”

  “You mean you gonter tote this thing all the way upstairs and then tote it back down tomorrow?”

  “Somebody is,” Granny said. “Are you going to help or are me and Bayard going to do it alone?”

  Then Louvinia came in. She had already undressed. She looked tall as a ghost, in one dimension like a bolster case, taller than a bolster case in her nightgown; silent as a ghost on her bare feet which were the same color as the shadow in which she stood so that she seemed to have no feet, the twin rows of her toenails lying weightless and faint and still as two rows of faintly soiled feathers on the floor about a foot below the hem of her nightgown as if they were not connected with her. She came and shoved Joby aside and stooped to lift the trunk. “Git away, nigger,” she said. Joby groaned, then he shoved Louvinia aside.

  “Git away, woman,” he said. He lifted his end of the trunk, then he looked back at Loosh who had never let his end down. “If you gonter ride on hit, pick up your feet,” he said. We carried the trunk up to Granny’s room and Joby was setting it down again until Granny made him and Loosh pull the bed out from the wall and slide the trunk in behind it; Ringo and I helped again. I dont believe it lacked much of weighing a thousand pounds.

  “Now I want everybody to go right to bed so we can get an early start tomorrow,” Granny said.

  “That’s you,” Joby said. “Git everybody up at crack of day and it be noon fore we get started.”

  “Nummine about that,” Louvinia said. “You do like Miss Rosa tell you.” We went out; we left Granny there beside her bed now well away from the wall and in such an ungainly position that anyone would have known at once that something was concealed, even if the trunk which Ringo and I as well as Joby believed now to weigh at least a thousand pounds, could have been hidden. As it was, the bed merely underlined it. Then Granny shut the door behind us and then Ringo and I stopped dead in the hall and looked at one another. Since I could remember, there had never been a key to any door, inside or outside, about the house. Yet we had heard a key turn in the lock.

  “I didn’t know there was ere a key would fit hit,” Ringo said, “let alone turn.”

  “And that’s some more of yawl’s and Joby’s business,” Louvinia said. She had not stopped; she was already reclining on her cot and as we looked toward her she was already in the act of drawing the quilt up over her face and head. “Yawl get on to bed.”

  We went on to our room and began to undress. The lamp was lighted and there was already laid out across two chairs our Sunday clothes which we too would put on tomorrow to go to Memphis in. “Which un you reckin she dremp about?” Ringo said. But I didn’t answer that; I knew that Ringo knew I didn’t need to.

  2.

  We put on our Sunday clothes by lamplight, we ate breakfast by it and listened to Louvinia above stairs as she removed from Granny’s and my beds the linen we had slept under last night and rolled up Ringo’s pallet and carried them downstairs; in the first beginning of day we went out to where Loosh and Joby had already put the mules into the wagon and where Joby stood in what he called his Sunday clothes too—the old frock coat, the napless beaver hat, of Father’s. Then Granny came out (still in the black silk and the bonnet as if she had slept in them, passed the night standing rigidly erect with her hand on the key which she had produced from we knew not where and locked her door for the first time Ringo and I knew of) with her shawl over her shoulders and carrying her parasol and the musket from the pegs over the mantel. She held out the musket to Joby. “Here,” she said. Joby looked at it.

  “We wont need hit,” he said.

  “Put it in the wagon,” Granny said.

  “Nome. We wont need nothing like that. We be in Memphis so quick wont nobody even have time to hear we on the road. I speck Marse John got the Yankees pretty well cleant out between here and Memphis anyway.”

  This time Granny didn’t say anything at all. She just stood there holding out the musket until after a while Joby took it and put it into the wagon. “Now go get the trunk,” Granny said. Joby was still putting the musket into the wagon; he stopped, his head turned a little.

  “Which?” he said. He turned a little more, still not looking at Granny standing on the steps and looking at him; he was not looking at any of us, not speaking to any of us in particular. “Aint I tole you?” he said.

  “If anything ever came into your mind that you didn’t tell to somebody inside of ten minutes, I dont remember it,” Granny said. “But just what do you refer to now?”

  “Nummine that,” Joby said. “Come on here, Loosh. Bring that boy with you.” They passed Granny and went on. She didn’t look at them; it was as if they had walked not only out of her sight but out of her mind. Evidently Joby thought they had. He and Granny were like that; they were like a man and a mare, a blooded mare, which takes just exactly so much from the man and the man knows the mare will take just so much and the man knows that when that point is reached, just what is going to happen. Then it does happen: the mare kicks him, not viciously but just enough, and the man knows it was going to happen and so he is glad then, it is over then, or he thinks it is over, so he lies or sits on the ground and cusses the mare a little because he thinks it is over, finished, and then the mare turns her head and nips him. That’s how Joby and Granny were and Granny always beat him, not bad: just exactly enough, like now; he and Loosh were just about to go in the door and Granny still not even looking after them, when Joby said, “I done tole um. And I reckin even you cant dispute hit.” Then Granny, without moving anything but her lips, still looking out beyond the waiting wagon as if we were not going anywhere and Joby didn’t even exist, said,

  “And put the bed back against the wall.” This time Joby didn’t answer. He just stopped perfectly still, not even looking back at Granny, until Loosh said quietly,

  “Gawn, pappy. Get on.” They went on; Granny and I stood at the end of the gallery and heard them drag the trunk out, then shove the bed back where it had been yesterday; we heard them on the stairs with the trunk—the slow, clumsy, coffinsounding thumps. Then they came out onto the gallery.

  “Go and help them,” Granny said without looking back. “Remember, Joby is getting old.” We put the trunk into the wagon, along with the musket and the basket of food and the bedclothing, and got in ourselves—Granny on the seat beside Joby, the bonnet on the exact top of her head and the parasol raised even before the dew had begun to fall—and we drove away. Loosh had already disappeared, but Louvinia still stood at the end of the gallery with Father’s old hat on top of her headrag. Then I stopped looking back, though I could feel Ringo beside me on the trunk turning every few yards, even after we were outside the gate and in the road to town. Then we came to the curve where we had seen the Yankee sergeant on the bright horse last summer.

  “Hit gone now,” Ringo said. “Goodbye, Sartoris; Memphis, how-dy-do!”

  The sun was just rising when we came in sight of Jefferson; we passed a company of troops bivouacked in a pasture beside the road, eating breakfast. Their uniforms were not gray anymore now; they were almost the color of dead leaves and some of them didn’t even have uniforms and one man waved a skillet at us and he had on a pair of blue Yankee pants with a yellow cavalry stripe like Father wore home last summer. “Hey, Missippi!” he s
houted. “Hooraw for Arkansaw!”

  We left Granny at Mrs Compson’s, to tell Mrs Compson goodbye and to ask her to drive out home now and then and look after the flowers. Then Ringo and I drove the wagon on to the store and we were just coming out with the sack of salt when Uncle Buck McCaslin came hobbling across the square, waving his stick and hollering, and behind him the captain of the company we had passed eating breakfast in the pasture. There were two of them; I mean, there were two McCaslins, Amodeus and Theophilus, twins, only everybody called them Buck and Buddy except themselves. They were bachelors, they had a big bottom-land plantation about fifteen miles from town. It had a big colonial house on it which their father had built and which people said was still one of the finest houses in the country when they inherited it. But it wasn’t now, because Uncle Buck and Buddy didn’t live in it. They never had lived in it since their father died. They lived in a two-room log house with about a dozen dogs, and they kept their niggers in the manor house. It didn’t have any windows now and a child with a hairpin could unlock any lock in it, but every night when the niggers came up from the fields Uncle Buck or Uncle Buddy would drive them into the house and lock the door with a key almost as big as a horse pistol; probably they would still be locking the front door long after the last nigger had escaped out the back. And folks said that Uncle Buck and Uncle Buddy knew this and that the niggers knew they knew it, only it was like a game with rules—neither one of Uncle Buck or Uncle Buddy to peep around the corner of the house while the other was locking the door, none of the niggers to escape in such a way as to be seen even by unavoidable accident, nor to escape at any other time; they even said that the ones who couldn’t get out while the door was being locked voluntarily considered themselves interdict until the next evening. Then they would hang the key on a nail beside the door and go back to their own little house full of dogs and eat supper and play head-and-head poker; and they said how no man in the state or on the River either would have dared to play with them even if they did not cheat, but that in the game as they played it between themselves, betting niggers and wagon-loads of cotton with one another on the turn of a single card, the Lord Himself might have held His own with one of them at a time, but that with both of them even He would have lost His shirt.

  There was more to Uncle Buck and Buddy than just that. Father said they were ahead of their time; he said they not only possessed, but put into practice, ideas about social relationship that maybe fifty years after they were both dead people would have a name for. These ideas were about land. They believed that land did not belong to people but that people belonged to land and that the earth would permit them to live on and out of it and use it only so long as they behaved and that if they did not behave right, it would shake them off just like a dog getting rid of fleas. They had some kind of a system of book-keeping which must have been even more involved than their betting score against one another, by which all their niggers were to be freed, not given freedom, but earning it, buying it not in money from Uncle Buck and Buddy, but in work from the plantation. Only there were others besides niggers, and this was the reason why Uncle Buck came hobbling across the square, shaking his stick at me and hollering, or at least why it was Uncle Buck who was hobbling and hollering and shaking the stick. One day Father said how they suddenly realised that if the county ever split up into private feuds either with votes or weapons, no family could contend with the McCaslins because all the other families would have only their cousins and kin to recruit from, while Uncle Buck and Buddy would already have an army. These were the dirt farmers, the people whom the niggers called ‘white trash’—men who had owned no slaves and some of whom even lived worse than the slaves on big plantations. It was another side of Uncle Buck’s and Buddy’s ideas about men and land, which Father said people didn’t have a name for yet, by which Uncle Buck and Buddy had persuaded the white men to pool their little patches of poor hill land along with the niggers and the McCaslin plantation, promising them in return nobody knew exactly what, except that their women and children did have shoes, which not all of them had had before, and a lot of them even went to school. Anyway, they (the white men, the trash) looked on Uncle Buck and Buddy like Deity Himself, so that when Father began to raise his first regiment to take to Virginia and Uncle Buck and Buddy came to town to enlist and the others decided they were too old (they were past seventy), it looked for a while as if Father’s regiment would have to fight its first engagement right there in our pasture. At first Uncle Buck and Buddy said they would form a company of their own men in opposition to Father’s. Then they realised that this wouldn’t stop Father, since he didn’t care whom the men fought under just so they fought, so then Uncle Buck and Buddy put the thumbscrews on Father sure enough. They told Father that if he did not let them go, the solid bloc of private soldier white trash votes which they controlled would not only force Father to call a special election of officers before the regiment left the pasture, it would also demote Father from colonel to major or maybe only a company commander. Father didn’t mind what they called him; colonel or corporal, it would have been all the same to him, as long as they let him tell them what to do, and he probably wouldn’t have minded being demoted even to private by God Himself; it was the idea that there could be latent within the men he led the power, let alone the desire, to so affront him. So they compromised; they agreed at last that one of the McCaslins should be allowed to go. Father and Uncle Buck and Buddy shook hands on it and they stuck to it; the following summer after Second Manassas when the men did demote Father, it was the McCaslin votes who stuck with and resigned from the regiment along with Father and returned to Mississippi with him and formed his irregular cavalry. So one of them was to go, and they decided themselves which one it would be; they decided in the one possible manner in which the victor could know that he had earned his right, the loser that he had been conquered by a better man; Uncle Buddy looked at Uncle Buck and said, “All right, ’Philus, you old butter-fingered son of a bitch. Get out the cards.”

  Father said it was fine, that there were people there who had never seen anything like it for cold and ruthless artistry. They played three hands of draw poker, the first two hands dealt in turn, the winner of the second hand to deal the third; they sat there (somebody had spread a blanket and the whole regiment watched) facing each other with the two old faces that did not look exactly alike so much as they looked exactly like something which after a while you remembered—the portrait of someone who had been dead a long time and that you knew just by looking at him he had been a preacher in some place like Massachusetts a hundred years ago; they sat there and called those face-down cards correctly without even looking at the backs of them apparently, so that it took sometimes eight and ten deals before the referees could be certain that neither of them knew exactly what was in the other’s hand. And Uncle Buck lost: so that now Uncle Buddy was a sergeant in Tennant’s brigade in Virginia and Uncle Buck was hobbling across the square, shaking his stick at me and hollering:

  “By Godfrey, there he is! There’s John Sartoris’ boy!”

  The captain came up and looked at me. “I’ve heard of your father,” he said.

  “Heard of him?” Uncle Buck shouted. By now people had begun to stop along the walk and listen to him, like they always did, not smiling so he could see it. “Who aint heard about him in this country? Get the Yankees to tell you about him sometime. By Godfrey, he raised the first damn regiment in Mississippi out of his own pocket, and took em to Ferginny and whipped Yankees right and left with em before he found out that what he had bought and paid for wasn’t a regiment of soldiers but a congress of politicians and fools. Fools I say!” he shouted, shaking the stick at me and glaring with his watery fierce eyes like the eyes of an old hawk, with the people along the street listening to him and smiling where he couldn’t see it and the strange captain looking at him a little funny because he hadn’t heard Uncle Buck before; and I kept on thinking about Louvinia standing there on the porch wi
th Father’s old hat on, and wishing that Uncle Buck would get through or hush so we could go on.

  “Fools, I say!” he shouted. “I dont care if some of you folks here do still claim kin with men that elected him colonel and followed him and Stonewall Jackson right up to spitting distance of Washington without hardly losing a man, and then next year turned around and voted him down to major and elected in his stead a damn feller that never even knowed which end of a gun done the shooting until John Sartoris showed him.” He quit shouting just as easy as he started but the shouting was right there, waiting to start again as soon as he found something else to shout about. “I wont say God take care of you and your grandma on the road, boy, because by Godfrey you dont need God’s nor nobody else’s help; all you got to say is ‘I’m John Sartoris’ boy; rabbits, hunt the canebrake’ and then watch the blue bellied sons of bitches fly.”

  “Are they leaving, going away?” the captain said.

  Then Uncle Buck begun to shout again, going into the shouting easy, without even having to draw a breath: “Leaving? Hell’s skillet, who’s going to take care of them around here? John Sartoris is a damn fool; they voted him out of his own private regiment in kindness, so he could come home and take care of his family, knowing that if he didn’t wouldn’t nobody around here be likely to. But that dont suit John Sartoris because John Sartoris is a damned confounded selfish coward, askeered to stay at home where the Yankees might get him. Yes sir. So skeered that he has to raise him up another batch of men to protect him every time he gets within a hundred foot of a Yankee brigade. Scouring all up and down the country, finding Yankees to dodge; only if it had been me I would have took back to Ferginny and I’d have showed that new colonel what fighting looked like. But not John Sartoris. He’s a coward and a fool. The best he can do is dodge and run away from Yankees until they have to put a price on his head, and now he’s got to send his family out of the country; to Memphis where maybe the Union Army will take care of them, since it dont look like his own government and fellow citizens are going to.” He ran out of breath then, or out of words anyway, standing there with his tobacco-stained beard trembling and more tobacco running onto it out of his mouth, and shaking his stick at me. So I lifted the reins; only the captain spoke; he was still watching me.