The Unvanquished Read online

  There is a limit to what a child can accept, assimilate; not to what it can believe because a child can believe anything, given time, but to what it can accept, a limit in time, in the very time which nourishes the believing of the incredible. And I was still a child at that moment when Father’s and my horses came over the hill and seemed to cease galloping and to float, hang suspended rather in a dimension without time in it while Father held my horse reined back with one hand and I heard Ringo’s half blind beast crashing and blundering among the trees to our right and Ringo yelling, and looked quietly down at the scene beneath rather than before us—the dusk, the fire, the creek running quiet and peaceful beneath a bridge, the muskets all stacked carefully and neatly and nobody within fifty feet of them; and the men, the faces, the blue Yankee coats and pants and boots, squatting about the fire with cups in their hands and looking toward the crest of the hill with the same peaceful expression on all their faces like so many dolls. Father’s hat was flung onto his head now, his teeth were showing and his eyes were bright as a cat’s.

  “Lieutenant,” he said, loud, jerking my horse around, “ride back up the hill and close in with your troop on their right. Git!” he whispered, slapping my horse across the rump with his hand. “Make a fuss! Holler! See if you can keep up with Ringo.—Boys,” he said, while they still looked up at him; they hadn’t even put the cups down: “Boys, I’m John Sartoris, and I reckon I’ve got you.”

  Ringo was the only difficult one to capture. The rest of Father’s men came piling over the hill, reining back, and I reckon that for a minute their faces looked about like the Yankees’ faces did, and now and then I would quit thrashing the bushes and I could hear Ringo on his side hollering and moaning and hollering again, “Marse John! You Marse John! You come here quick!” and hollering for me, calling Bayard and Colonel and Marse John and Granny until it did sound like a company at least, and then hollering at his horse again and it running back and forth; I reckon he had forgotten again and was trying to get up on the nigh side again, until at last Father said, “All right, boys. You can come on in.”

  It was almost dark then. They had built up the fire and the Yankees still sitting around it and Father and the others standing over them with their pistols while two of them were taking the Yankees’ pants and boots off. Ringo was still hollering off in the trees. “I reckon you better go and extricate Lieutenant Marengo,” Father said. Only about that time Ringo’s horse came bursting out with his blind eye looking big as a plate and still trotting in a circle with his knees up to his chin and then Ringo came out; he looked wilder than the horse, he was already talking, he was saying, “I’m gonter tell Granny on you, making my horse run—” when he saw the Yankees. His mouth was already open and he kind of squatted for a second, looking at them. Then he hollered, “Look out! Ketch um! Ketch um, Marse John! They stole Old Hundred and Tinney!”

  We all ate supper together: Father and us and the Yankees in their underclothes. The officer talked to Father. He said, “Colonel, by God I believe you have fooled us. I dont believe there’s another man of you but what I see.”

  “You might try to depart, and prove your point,” Father said.

  “Depart? Like this? And have every darky and old woman between here and Memphis shooting at us for ghosts?.… I suppose we can have our blankets to sleep in, cant we?”

  “Certainly, Captain,” Father said. “And with your permission I shall now retire and leave you to set about that business.”

  We went back into the darkness. We could see them about the fire, spreading their blankets on the ground. “What in the tarnation do you want with sixty prisoners, John?” one of Father’s men said.

  “I dont,” Father said. He looked at me and Ringo. “You boys captured them; what do you want to do with them?”

  “Shoot em,” Ringo said. “This aint the first time me and Bayard ever shot Yankees.”

  “No,” Father said. “I have a better plan than that. One that Joe Johnston will thank us for.” He turned to the others behind him. “Have you got the muskets and ammunition?”

  “Yes, Colonel,” somebody said.

  “Grub, boots, clothes?”

  “Everything but the blankets, Colonel.”

  “We’ll pick them up in the morning,” Father said. “Now wait.”

  We sat there in the dark. The Yankees were going to bed. One of them went to the fire and picked up a stick. Then he stopped. He didn’t turn his head and we didn’t hear anything or see anybody move. Then he put the stick down again and came back to his blanket. “Wait,” Father whispered. After a while the fire had died down. “Now listen,” Father whispered. So we sat there in the dark and listened to the Yankees sneaking off into the bushes in their underclothes. Once we heard a splash and somebody cursing and then a sound like somebody had shut his hand over his mouth. Father didn’t laugh out loud; he just sat there shaking. “Look out for moccasins,” one of the others whispered behind us.

  It must have taken them two hours to get done sneaking off into the bushes. Then Father said, “Everybody get a blanket and let’s go to bed.”

  3.

  The sun was high when he waked us. “Home for dinner,” he said. And so after a while we came to the creek; we passed the hole where Ringo and I learned to swim and we began to pass the fields too and we came to where Ringo and I hid last summer and saw the first Yankee we ever saw and then we could see the house too and Ringo said, “Sartoris, here we is; let them that want Memphis take hit and keep hit bofe.” Because we were looking at the house, it was like that day when we ran across the pasture and the house would not seem to get any nearer at all, we never saw the wagon at all, it was Father that saw it; it was coming up the road from Jefferson with Granny sitting thin and straight on the seat with Mrs Compson’s rose cuttings wrapped in a new piece of paper in her hand, and Joby yelling and lashing the strange horses and Father stopping us at the gate with his hat raised while the wagon went in first. Granny didn’t say a word. She just looked at Ringo and me and went on with us coming behind and she didn’t stop at the house. The wagon went on into the orchard and stopped by the hole where we had dug the trunk up and still Granny didn’t say a word, it was Father that got down and got into the wagon and took up one end of the trunk and said over his shoulder, “Jump up here, boys.”

  We buried the trunk again and we walked behind the wagon to the house. We went into the back parlor and Father put the musket back onto the pegs over the mantel and Granny put down Mrs Compson’s rose cuttings and took off her hat and looked at Ringo and me. “Get the soap,” she said.

  “We haven’t cussed any,” I said. “Ask Father.”

  “They behaved all right, Miss Rosa,” Father said.

  Granny looked at us. Then she came and put her hand on me and then on Ringo. “Go up stairs—” she said.

  “How did you and Joby manage to get those horses?” Father said.

  Granny was looking at us. “I borrowed them,” she said. “—upstairs and take off your——”

  “Who from?” Father said.

  Granny looked at Father for a second, then back at us. “I dont know. There was nobody there.—take off your Sunday clothes,” she said.

  It was hot the next day, so we only worked on the new pen until dinner and quit. It was even too hot for Ringo and me to ride our horses. Even at six oclock it was still hot, the resin was still cooking out of the front steps at six oclock. Father was sitting in his shirt sleeves and his stockings, with his feet on the porch railing and Ringo and I were sitting on the steps waiting for it to get cool enough to ride, when we saw them coming into the gate, about fifty of them, coming fast, and I remember how hot the blue coats looked. “Father,” I said; “Father!”

  “Dont run,” Father said. “Ringo, you go around the house and catch Jupiter; Bayard you go through the house and tell Louvinia to have my boots and pistols at the back door, then you go and help Ringo. Dont run, now: walk.”

  Louvinia was shelling peas
in the kitchen. When she stood up the bowl broke on the floor. “Oh Lord,” she said. “Oh Lord. Again?”

  I ran then. Ringo was just coming around the corner of the house; we both ran. Jupiter was in his stall, eating; he slashed out at us, his feet banged against the wall right by my head twice like pistols before Ringo jumped down from the hayrack onto his head. We got the bridle on him but he wouldn’t take the saddle. “Get your horse and shove his blind side up——” I was hollering at Ringo when Father came in running, with his boots in his hand and we looked up the hill toward the house and saw one of them riding around the corner with a short carbine, carrying it in one hand like a lamp. “Get away,” Father said. He went up onto Jupiter’s bare back like a bird, holding him for a moment and looking down at us. He didn’t speak loud at all; he didn’t even sound in a hurry. “Take care of Granny,” he said. “All right, Jupe. Let’s go.” Jupiter’s head was pointing down the hallway toward the lattice half doors at the back; he went out again, out from between me and Ringo like he did yesterday, with Father already lifting him and I thinking, He cant jump through that little hole. Jupiter took the doors on his chest only they seemed to burst before he even touched them and I saw him and Father again like they were flying in the air, with broken planks whirling and spinning around them when they went out of sight. And then the Yankee rode into the barn and saw us and threw down with the carbine and shot at us point blank with one hand, like it was a pistol, and said, “Where’d he go, the rebel goddamn son of a bitch!”

  Louvinia kept on trying to tell us about it while we were running and looking back at the smoke beginning to come out of the downstairs windows: “Marse John setting on the porch and them Yankees riding through the flowerbeds and say, ‘Brother, we wanter know where the rebel John Sartoris live’ and Marse John say ‘Hey?’ with his hand to his ear and his face look like he born loony like Unc Few Mitchell and Yankee say ‘Sartoris. John Sartoris’ and Marse John say ‘Which? Say which?’ until he know Yankee stood about all he going to and Marse John say ‘Oh, John Sartoris; whyn’t you say so in the first place’ and Yankee cussing him for idiot fool and Marse John say ‘Hey? How’s that?’ and Yankee say ‘Nothing! Nothing! Show me where John Sartoris is fore I put rope round your neck too’ and Marse John say ‘Lemme git my shoes and I show you’ and come into house limping and then run down the hall at me and say ‘Boots and pistols, Louvinia. Take care of Miss Rosa and the chillen’ and I go to the door but I just a nigger; Yankee say ‘That woman’s lying. I believe that man was Sartoris himself. Go look in the barn quick and see if that claybank stallion there’——” until Granny stopped and began to shake her.

  “Hush!” Granny said. “Hush! Cant you understand that Loosh has shown them where the silver is buried? Call Joby. Hurry!” She turned Louvinia toward the cabins and hit her exactly like Father turned my horse and hit him when we rode down the hill and into the Yankees, and then Granny turned to run back toward the house, only now it was Louvinia holding her and Granny trying to get away.

  “Dont you go back there, Miss Rosa!” Louvinia said. “Bayard, hold her; help me, Bayard! They’ll kill her!”

  “Let me go!” Granny said. “Call Joby! Loosh has shown them where the silver is buried!” But we held her; she was strong and thin and light as a cat, but we held her. The smoke was boiling up now and we could hear it or them, something: maybe all of them making one sound, the Yankees and the fire. And then I saw Loosh. He was coming up from his cabin, with a bundle on his shoulder tied up in a bandanna and Philadelphy behind him, and his face looked like it had that night last summer when Ringo and I looked into the window and saw him after he came back from seeing the Yankees. Granny stopped fighting. She said, “Loosh.”

  He stopped and looked at her; he looked like he was asleep, like he didn’t even see us or was seeing something we couldn’t. But Philadelphy saw us; she cringed back behind him, looking at Granny. “I tried to stop him, Miss Rosa,” she said. “Fore God I tried.”

  “Loosh,” Granny said. “Are you going too?”

  “Yes,” Loosh said. “I going. I done been freed; God’s own angel proclamated me free and gonter general me to Jordan. I dont belong to John Sartoris now; I belongs to me and God.”

  “But the silver belongs to John Sartoris,” Granny said. “Who are you to give it away?”

  “You ax me that?” Loosh said. “Where John Sartoris? Whyn’t he come and ax me that? Let God ax John Sartoris who the man name that give me to him. Let the man that buried me in the black dark ax that of the man what dug me free.” He wasn’t looking at us; I dont think he could even see us. He went on.

  “Fore God, Miss Rosa,” Philadelphy said. “I tried to stop him. I done tried.”

  “Dont you go, Philadelphy,” Granny said. “Dont you know he’s leading you into misery and starvation?”

  Philadelphy began to cry. “I knows hit. I knows whut they tole him cant be true. But he my husband. I reckon I got to go with him.”

  They went on. Louvinia had come back; she and Ringo were behind us. The smoke boiled up, yellow and slow and turning coppercolored in the sunset like dust; it was like dust from a road above the feet that made it and then went on, boiling up slow and hanging and waiting to die away. “The bastuds, Granny!” I said. “The bastuds!” Then we were all three saying it, Granny and me and Ringo, saying it together: “The bastuds!” we cried. “The bastuds! The bastuds!”

  Raid

  1.

  Granny wrote the note with pokeberry juice. “Take it straight to Mrs Compson and come straight back,” she said. “Dont you all stop anywhere.”

  “You mean we got to walk?” Ringo said. “You gonter make us walk all them four miles to Jefferson and back, with them two horses standing in the lot doing nothing?”

  “They are borrowed horses,” Granny said. “I’m going to take care of them until I can return them.”

  “I reckon you calls starting out to be gone you dont know where and you dont know how long taking care of——” Ringo said.

  “Do you want me to whup you?” Louvinia said.

  “Nome,” Ringo said.

  We walked to Jefferson and gave Mrs Compson the note and got the hat and the parasol and the hand mirror and walked back home. That afternoon we greased the wagon and that night after supper Granny got the pokeberry juice again and wrote on a scrap of paper Colonel Nathaniel G. Dick. —th Ohio Cavalry and folded it and pinned it inside her dress. “Now I wont forget it,” she said.

  “If you was to, I reckon these hellion boys can remind you,” Louvinia said. “I reckon they aint forgot him. Walking in that door just in time to keep them others from snatching them out from under your dress and nailing them to the barn door like two coon hides.”

  “Yes,” Granny said. “Now we’ll go to bed.”

  We lived in Joby’s cabin then, with a red quilt nailed by one edge to a rafter and hanging down to make two rooms. Joby was waiting with the wagon when Granny came out with Mrs Compson’s hat on and got into the wagon and told Ringo to open the parasol and took up the reins. Then we all stopped and watched Joby stick something into the wagon, beneath the quilts; it was the barrel and the iron parts of the musket after Ringo and I found it in the ashes of the house. “What’s that?” Granny said. Joby didn’t look at her.

  “Maybe if They just seed the end of hit They mought think hit was the whole gun,” he said.

  “Then what?” Granny said. Joby didn’t look at anybody now.

  “I was just doing what I could to help git the silver and the mules back,” he said. Louvinia didn’t say anything either. She and Granny just looked at Joby. After a while he took the musket barrel out of the wagon. Granny gathered up the reins.

  “Take him with you,” Louvinia said. “Leastways he can tend the horses.”

  “No,” Granny said. “Dont you see I have got about all I can look after now?”

  “Then you stay here and lemme go,” Louvinia said. “I’ll git um back.”

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p; “No,” Granny said. “I’ll be all right. I shall inquire until I find Colonel Dick and then we will load the chest in the wagon and Loosh can lead the mules and we will come back home.”

  Then Louvinia began to act just like Uncle Buck McCaslin did the morning we started to Memphis. She stood there holding to the wagon wheel and looked at Granny from under Father’s old hat and began to holler. “Dont you waste no time on colonels or nothing!” she hollered. “You tell them niggers to send Loosh to you and you tell him to get that chest and them mules and then you whup him!” The wagon was moving now, she had turned loose the wheel and she walked along beside it, hollering at Granny. “Take that pairsawl and wear hit out on him!”

  “All right,” Granny said. The wagon went on; we passed the ash pile and the chimneys standing up out of it: Ringo and I found the insides of the big clock too. The sun was just coming up, shining back on the chimneys; I could still see Louvinia between them, standing in front of the cabin, shading her eyes with her hand to watch us. Joby was still standing behind her, holding the musket barrel. They had broken the gates clean off and then we were in the road.