The Unvanquished Read online

  “How many men has your father got in his regiment?” he said.

  “It’s not a regiment, sir,” I said. “He’s got about fifty, I reckon.”

  “Fifty?” the captain said. “Fifty? We had a prisoner last week who said he had more than a thousand. He said that Colonel Sartoris didn’t fight, he just stole horses.”

  Uncle Buck had enough wind to laugh though. He sounded just like a hen, slapping his leg and holding to the wagon wheel like he was about to fall. “That’s it! That’s John Sartoris! He gets the horses; any fool can step out and get a Yankee. These two damn boys here did that last summer: stepped down to the gate and brought back a whole regiment and them just——How old are you, boy?”

  “Fourteen,” I said.

  “We aint fourteen yit,” Ringo said. “But we will be in September if we live and nothing happens. I reckon Granny waiting on us, Bayard.”

  Uncle Buck quit laughing. He stepped back. “Git on,” he said. “You got a long road.” I turned the wagon. “You take care of your grandma, boy, or John Sartoris will skin you alive. And if he dont, I will!” When the wagon straightened out he began to hobble along beside it. “And when you see him, tell him I said to leave the horses go for a while and kill the bluebellied sons of bitches. Kill them!”

  “Yes, sir,” I said. We went on.

  “Good thing for his mouth Granny aint here,” Ringo said. She and Joby were waiting for us at the Compsons’ gate. Joby had another basket with a napkin over it and a bottleneck sticking out and some rose cuttings. Then Ringo and I sat behind again and Ringo turning to look back every few feet and saying, “Goodbye, Jefferson. Memphis, how-dy-do!” And then we came to the top of the first hill and he looked back quiet this time and said, “Suppose they dont never get done fighting.”

  “All right,” I said. “Suppose it.” I didn’t look back. At noon we stopped by a spring and Granny opened the basket and she took out the rose cuttings and handed them to Ringo.

  “Dip the roots into the spring after you drink,” she said. They had earth still on the roots, in a cloth; when Ringo stooped down to the water I watched him pinch off a little of the dirt and start to put it into his pocket. Then he looked up and saw me watching him and he made like he was going to throw it away. But he didn’t.

  “I reckon I can save dirt if I want to,” he said.

  “It’s not Sartoris dirt, though,” I said.

  “I know hit,” he said. “Hit’s closer than Memphis dirt though. Closer than what you got.”

  “What’ll you bet?” I said. He looked at me. “What’ll you swap?” I said. He looked at me.

  “What you swap?” he said.

  “You know,” I said. He reached into his pocket and brought out the buckle we had shot off the Yankee saddle when we shot the horse last summer. “Gimmit here,” he said. So I took the snuff box from my pocket and emptied half the soil (it was more than Sartoris earth; it was Vicksburg too: the yelling was in it, the embattled, the iron-worn, the supremely invincible) into his hand. “I know hit,” he said. “Hit come from hind the smokehouse. You brung a lot of hit.”

  “Yes,” I said. “I brought enough to last.”

  We soaked the cuttings every time we stopped and opened the basket, and there was some of the food left on the fourth day because at least once a day we stopped at houses on the road and ate with them, and on the second night we had supper and breakfast at the same house. But even then Granny would not come inside to sleep. She made her bed down in the wagon by the chest and Joby slept under the wagon with the gun beside him like when we camped on the road. Only it would not be exactly on the road but back in the woods a way; on the third night Granny was in the wagon and Joby and Ringo and I were under the wagon and some cavalry rode up and Granny said, “Joby! the gun!” and somebody got down and took the gun away from Joby and they lit a pine knot and we saw the gray.

  “Memphis?” the officer said. “You cant get to Memphis. There was a fight at Cockrum yesterday and the roads ahead are full of Yankee patrols. How in hell—Excuse me, ma’am” (behind me Ringo said, “Git the soap”) “—you ever got this far I dont see. If I were you, I wouldn’t even try to go back, I’d stop at the first house I came to and stay there.”

  “I reckon we’ll go on,” Granny said, “like John—Colonel Sartoris told us to. My sister lives in Memphis; we are going there.”

  “Colonel Sartoris?” the officer said. “Colonel Sartoris told you?”

  “I’m his mother-in-law,” Granny said. “This is his son.”

  “Good Lord, ma’am! You cant go a step further. Dont you know that if They captured you and this boy, They could almost force him to come in and surrender?”

  Granny looked at him, she was sitting up in the wagon and her hat was on. “My experience with Yankees has evidently been different from yours. I have no reason to believe that their officers—I suppose they still have officers among them—will bother a woman and two children. I thank you, but my son has directed us to go to Memphis. If there is any information about the roads which my driver should know, I will be obliged if you will instruct him.”

  “Then let me give you an escort.—Or better still, there is a house about a mile back; return there and wait. Colonel Sartoris was at Cockrum yesterday, by tomorrow night I believe I can find him and bring him to you.”

  “Thank you,” Granny said. “Wherever Colonel Sartoris is, he is doubtless busy with his own affairs. I think we will continue to Memphis as he instructed us.”

  So they rode away and Joby came back under the wagon and put the musket between us only every time I turned over I rolled on it so I made him move it and he tried to put it in the wagon with Granny and she wouldn’t let him so he leaned it against a tree and we slept and ate breakfast and went on, with Ringo and Joby looking behind every tree we passed. “You aint going to find them behind a tree we have already passed,” I said. We didn’t. We had passed where a house had burned and then we were passing another house with an old white horse looking at us out of the stable door behind it and then I saw six men running in the next field and then we saw a dustcloud coming fast out of a lane that crossed the road; Joby said, “Them folks look like they trying to make the Yankees take they stock, running hit up and down the big road in broad daylight like that.” They rode right out of the dustcloud without seeing us at all, crossing the road and the first ten or twelve had already jumped the ditch with pistols in their hands like when you run with a stick of stove wood balanced on your palm, and the last ones came out of the dust with five men running and holding to stirrups and us sitting there in the wagon with Joby holding the mules like they were sitting down on the whiffletrees and his mouth hanging open and his eyes like two eggs, and I had forgotten what the blue coats looked like. It was fast, like that: all sweating horses with wild eyes and men with wild faces full of yelling and then Granny standing up in the wagon and beating the five men about their heads and shoulders with the umbrella while they unfastened the traces and cut the harness off the mules with pocket knives. They didn’t say a word, they didn’t even look at Granny while she was hitting them, they just took the mules out of the wagon and then the two mules and the five men disappeared together in another cloud of dust and the mules came out of the dust soaring like hawks with two men on them and two more just falling backward over the mules’ tails and the fifth man already running too and the two that were on their backs in the road getting up with little scraps of cut leather sticking to them like a kind of black shavings in a sawmill; the three of them went off across the field after the mules and then we heard the pistols away off like striking a handful of matches at one time and Joby still sitting on the seat with his mouth still open and the ends of the cut reins in his hands and Granny still standing in the wagon with the bent umbrella lifted and hollering at Ringo and me while we jumped out of the wagon and ran across the road.

  “The stable,” I said. “The stable!” While we were running up the hill toward the house we cou
ld see our mules still galloping in the field and we could see the three men running too. When we ran around the house we could see the wagon too in the road, with Joby on the seat above the wagon tongue sticking straight out ahead and Granny standing up and shaking the umbrella toward us and even though I couldn’t hear her I knew she was still shouting. Our mules had run into the woods but the three men were still in the field and the old white horse was watching them too in the barn door; he never saw us until he snorted and jerked back and kicked over something behind him. It was a homemade shoeing box and he was tied by a rope halter to the ladder to the loft and there was even a pipe still burning on the ground.

  We climbed onto the ladder and got on him and when we came out of the barn we could still see the three men but we had to stop while Ringo got down and opened the lot gate and got back on again and so they were gone too by then. When we reached the woods there was no sign of them and we couldn’t hear anything either but the old horse’s insides. We went on slower then because the old horse wouldn’t go fast again anyway and so we tried to listen and so it was almost sunset when we came out into a road. “Here where they went,” Ringo said. They were mule tracks. “Tinney and Old Hundred’s tracks bofe,” Ringo said. “I know um anywhere. They done throwed them Yankees and heading back home.”

  “Are you sure?” I said.

  “Is I sure? You reckon I aint followed them mules all my life and cant tell they tracks when I see um? Git up there, horse!”

  We went on, but the old horse could not go very fast. After a while the moon came up, but Ringo still said he could see the tracks of our mules. So we went on, only now the old horse went even slower than ever because presently I caught Ringo and held him as he slipped off and then a little later Ringo caught and held me from slipping before I even knew that I had been asleep. We didn’t know what time it was, we didn’t care; we only heard after a time the slow hollow repercussion of wood beneath the horse’s feet and we turned from the road and hitched the bridle to a sapling; we probably both crawled beneath the bridge already asleep; still sleeping, we doubtless continued to crawl. Because if we had not moved, they would not have found us. I waked, still believing I dreamed of thunder. It was light; even beneath the close weed-choked bridge Ringo and I could sense the sun though not at once; for the time we just sat there beneath the loud drumming, while the loose planks of the bridge floor clattered and danced to the hooves; we sat there for a moment staring at one another in the pale jonquil-colored light almost before we were awake. Perhaps that was it, perhaps we were still asleep, were taken so suddenly in slumber that we had not time to think of Yankees or anything else; we were out from beneath the bridge and already running before we remembered having begun to move; I looked back one time and (the road, the bridge, was five or six feet higher than the earth beside it) it looked as if the whole rim of the world was full of horses running along the sky. Then everything ran together again as it had yesterday; even while our legs still continued to run Ringo and I had dived like two rabbits into a brier patch, feeling no thorn, and lay on our faces in it while men shouted and horses crashed around us, then hard hands dragged us, clawing and kicking and quite blind, out of the thicket and onto our feet. Then sight returned—a vacuum, an interval, of amazing and dewy-breathed peace and quiet while Ringo and I stood in a circle of mounted and dismounted men and horses. Then I recognised Jupiter standing big and motionless and pale in the dawn as a mesmerised flame, then Father was shaking me and shouting, “Where’s your grandmother? Where’s Miss Rosa?” and then Ringo, in a tone of complete amazement: “We done fergot Granny!”

  “Forgot her?” Father shouted. “You mean you ran away and left her sitting there in that wagon in the middle of the road?”

  “Lord, Marse John,” Ringo said. “You know hit aint no Yankee gonter bother her if he know hit.”

  Father swore. “How far back did you leave her?”

  “It was about three oclock yesterday,” I said. “We rode some last night.”

  Father turned to the others. “Two of you boys take them up behind you; we’ll lead that horse.” Then he stopped and turned back to us. “Have you all had anything to eat?”

  “Eat?” Ringo said. “My stomach think my throat been cut.”

  Father took a pone of bread from his saddle bags and broke it and gave it to us. “Where did you get that horse?” he said.

  After a while I said, “We borrowed it.”

  “Who from?” Father said.

  After a while Ringo said, “We aint know. The man wasn’t there.” One of the men laughed. Father looked at him quick and he hushed. But just for a minute, because all of a sudden they all began to whoop and holler, and Father looking around at them and his face getting redder and redder.

  “Dont you say a word, Colonel,” one of them said. “Hooraw for Sartoris!”

  We galloped back; it was not far; we came to the field where the men had run, and the house with the barn, and in the road we could still see the scraps of harness where they had cut it. But the wagon was gone. Father led the old horse up to the house himself and knocked on the porch floor with his pistol and the door of the house was still open but nobody came. We put the old horse back into the barn, the pipe was still on the ground by the overturned shoeing box. We came back to the road and Father sat Jupiter in the middle of the litter of harness scraps. “You damn boys,” he said. “You damn boys.”

  When we went on now we went slower, there were three men riding on ahead out of sight. In the afternoon one of them came galloping back and Father left Ringo and me three others and he and the rest rode on; it was almost sunset when they came back with their horses sweated a little and leading two new horses with blue blankets under the saddles and U.S. burned on the horses’ hips.

  “I tole you they wasn’t no Yankees gonter stop Granny,” Ringo said. “I bet she in Memphis right now.”

  “I hope for your sake she is,” Father said. He jerked his hand at the new horses. “You and Bayard get on them.” Ringo went to one of the new horses. “Wait,” Father said, “the other one is yours.”

  “You mean hit belong to me?” Ringo said.

  “No,” Father said. “You borrowed it.” Then we all stopped and watched Ringo trying to get on his horse. The horse would stand perfectly still until he would feel Ringo’s weight on the stirrup, then he would whirl completely around until his off side faced Ringo; the first time Ringo wound up lying on his back in the road. “Get on him from that side,” Father said laughing.

  Ringo looked at the horse and then at Father. “Git up from the wrong side?” Ringo said. “I knowed Yankees wasn’t folks but I never knowed before they horses aint horses.”

  “Get on up,” Father said. “He’s blind in his near eye.”

  It got dark while we were still riding and after a while I waked up with somebody holding me in the saddle and we were stopped in some trees and there was a fire but Ringo and I didn’t even stay awake to eat, and then it was morning again and all of them were gone but Father and eleven more, but we didn’t start off even then, we stayed there in the trees all day. “What are we going to do now?” I said.

  “I’m going to take you damn boys home and then I’ve got to go to Memphis and find your grandmother,” Father said.

  Just before dark we started, we watched Ringo trying to get on his horse from the nigh side for a while and then we went on. We rode until dawn and stopped again. This time we didn’t build a fire, we didn’t even unsaddle right away; we lay hidden in the woods and then Father was waking me with his hand, it was after sunup and we lay there and listened to a column of Yankee infantry pass in the road and then I slept again. It was noon when I waked. There was a fire now and a shoat cooking over it and we ate. “We’ll be home by midnight,” Father said.

  Jupiter was rested. He didn’t want the bridle for a while and then he didn’t want Father to get on him and even after we were started he still wanted to go; Father had to hold him back between Ringo and
me. Ringo was on his right. “You and Bayard better swap sides,” Father told Ringo. “So your horse can see what’s beside him.”

  “He going all right,” Ringo said. “He like hit this way. Maybe because he can smell Jupiter another horse and know Jupiter aint fixing to git on him and ride.”

  “All right,” Father said. “Watch him, though.” We went on. Mine and Ringo’s horses could go pretty well too; when I looked back the others were a good piece behind, out of our dust. It wasn’t far to sundown.

  “I wish I knew your grandmother was all right,” Father said.

  “Lord, Marse John,” Ringo said, “is you still worrying about Granny? I been knowed her all my life; I aint worried about her.”

  Jupiter was fine to watch, with his head up and watching my horse and Ringo’s and boring a little and just beginning to drive a little. “I’m going to let him go a little,” Father said. “You and Ringo watch yourselves.” I thought Jupiter was gone then. He went out like a rocket, flattening a little. But I should have known that Father still held him because I should have seen that he was still boring, but there was a snake fence along the road and all of a sudden it began to blur and then I realised that Father and Jupiter had not moved up at all, that it was all three of us flattening out up toward the crest of the hill where the road dipped like three swallows and I was thinking We’re holding Jupiter. We’re holding Jupiter when Father looked back and I saw his eyes and his teeth in his beard and I knew he still had Jupiter on the bit; he said, “Watch out, now,” and then Jupiter shot out from between us; he went out exactly like I have seen a hawk come out of a sage field and rise over a fence; when they reached the crest of the hill I could see sky under them and the tops of the trees beyond the hill like they were flying, sailing out into the air to drop down beyond the hill like the hawk; only they didn’t. It was like Father stopped Jupiter in midair on top of the hill; I could see him standing in the stirrups and his arm up with his hat in it and then Ringo and I were on them before we could even begin to think to pull, and Jupiter reined back onto his haunches and then Father hit Ringo’s horse across his blind eye with the hat and I saw Ringo’s horse swerve and jump clean over the snake fence and I heard Ringo hollering as I went on over the crest of the hill with Father just behind me shooting his pistol and shouting, “Surround them, boys! Dont let a man escape!”