The Unvanquished (11 page)

“The other one, the Yankee one, was right behind it,” Drusilla said. “But they never caught it. Then the next day they came and tore the track up. They tore the track up so we couldn’t do it again; they could
tear the track up but they couldn’t take back the fact that we had done it. They couldn’t take that from us.”

We—Ringo and I—knew what she meant; we stood together just outside the door before Ringo went on to Missy Lena’s cabin, where he was to sleep. “I know what you thinking,” Ringo said. Father was right; he was smarter than me. “But I heard good as you did. I heard every word you heard.”

“Only I saw the track before they tore it up. I saw where it was going to happen.”

“But you didn’t know hit was fixing to happen when you seed the track. So nemmine that. I heard. And I reckon they aint gonter git that away from me, neither.”

He went on, then I went back into the house and behind the quilt where Denny was already asleep on the pallet. Drusilla was not there only I didn’t have time to wonder where she was because I was thinking how I probably wouldn’t be able to go to sleep at all now though it was late. Then it was later still and Denny was shaking me and I remember how I thought then that he did not seem to need sleep either, that just by having been exposed for three or four seconds to war he had even at just ten acquired that quality which Father and the other men brought back from the front—the power to do without sleep and food both, needing only the opportunity to endure. “Dru says to come on out doors if you want to hear them passing,” he whispered.

She was outside the cabin; she hadn’t undressed even. I could see her in the starlight: her short jagged
hair and the man’s shirt and pants. “Hear them?” she said. We could hear it again, like we had in the wagon—the hurrying feet, the sound like they were singing in panting whispers, hurrying on past the gate and dying away up the road. “That’s the third tonight,” Cousin Drusilla said. “Two passed while I was down at the gate. You were tired and so I didn’t wake you before.”

“I thought it was late,” I said. “You haven’t been to bed even. Have you?”

“No,” she said. “I’ve quit sleeping.”

“Quit sleeping?” I said. “Why?”

She looked at me. I was as tall as she was; we couldn’t see one another’s face: it was just her head with the short jagged hair like she had cut it herself without bothering about a mirror, and her neck that had got thin and hard like her hands since Granny and I were here before. “I’m keeping a dog quiet,” she said.

“A dog?” I said. “I haven’t seen any dog.”

“No. It’s quiet now,” she said. “It doesn’t bother anybody anymore now. I just have to show it the stick now and then.” She was looking at me. “Why not stay awake now? Who wants to sleep now, with so much happening, so much to see? Living used to be dull, you see. Stupid. You lived in the same house your father was born in and your father’s sons and daughters had the sons and daughters of the same negro slaves to nurse and coddle, and then you grew up and you fell in love with your acceptable young man and in time you would marry him, in your mother’s wedding gown perhaps and with the same silver for presents she had received,
and then you settled down forever more while your husband got children on your body for you to feed and bathe and dress until they grew up too; and then you and your husband died quietly and were buried together maybe on a summer afternoon just before suppertime. Stupid, you see. But now you can see for yourself how it is, it’s fine now; you dont have to worry now about the house and the silver because they get burned up and carried away, and you dont have to worry about the negroes because they tramp the roads all night waiting for a chance to drown in homemade Jordan, and you dont have to worry about getting children on your body to bathe and feed and change because the young men can ride away and get killed in the fine battles and you dont even have to sleep alone, you dont even have to sleep at all and so all you have to do is show the stick to the dog now and then and say Thank God for nothing. You see? ….… There. They’ve gone now. And you’d better get back to bed so we can get an early start in the morning. It will take a long time to get through them.”

“You’re not coming in now?” I said.

“Not yet,” she said. But we didn’t move. And then she put her hand on my shoulder. “Listen,” she said. “When you go back home and see Uncle John, ask him to let me come there and ride with his troop. Tell him I can ride, and maybe I can learn to shoot. Will you?”

“Yes,” I said. “I’ll tell him you are not afraid too.”

“Aren’t I?” she said. “I hadn’t thought about it. It
doesn’t matter, anyway. Just tell him I can ride and that I dont get tired.” Her hand was on my shoulder; it felt thin and hard. “Will you do that for me? Ask him to let me come, Bayard.”

“All right,” I said. Then I said, “I hope he will let you.”

“So do I,” she said. “Now you go back to bed. Goodnight.”

I went back to the pallet and then to sleep; again it was Denny shaking me awake; by sunup we were on the road again, Drusilla on Bobolink riding beside the wagon. But not for long.

We began to see the dust almost at once and I even believed that I could already smell them though the distance between us did not appreciably decrease, since they were travelling almost as fast as we were. We never did overtake them, just as you do not overtake a tide. You just keep moving, then suddenly you know that the set is about you, beneath you, overtaking you, as if the slow and ruthless power, become aware of your presence at last, had dropped back a tentacle, a feeler, to gather you in and sweep you remorselessly on. Singly, in couples, in groups and families they began to appear from the woods, ahead of us, alongside of us and behind; they covered and hid from sight the road exactly as an infiltration of flood water would have, hiding the road from sight and then the very wheels of the wagon in which we rode, our two horses as well as Bobolink breasting slowly on, enclosed by a mass of heads and shoulders—men and women carrying babies and dragging
older children by the hand, old men and women on improvised sticks and crutches, and very old ones sitting beside the road and even calling to us when we passed; there was one old woman who even walked along beside the wagon, holding to the bed and begging Granny to at least let her see the river before she died.

But mostly they did not look at us. We might not have even been there. We did not even ask them to let us through because we could look at their faces and know they couldn’t have heard us. They were not singing yet, they were just hurrying, while our horses pushed slow through them, among the blank eyes not looking at anything out of faces caked with dust and sweat, breasting slowly and terrifically through them as if we were driving in midstream up a creek full of floating logs and the dust and the smell of them everywhere and Granny in Mrs Compson’s hat sitting bolt upright under the parasol which Ringo held and looking sicker and sicker, and it already afternoon though we didn’t know it anymore than we knew how many miles we had come. Then all of a sudden we reached the river, where the cavalry was holding them back from the bridge. It was just a sound at first, like wind, like it might be in the dust itself. We didn’t even know what it was until we saw Drusilla holding Bobolink reined back, her face turned toward us wan and small above the dust and her mouth open and crying thinly: “Look out, Aunt Rosa! Oh, look out!”

It was like we all heard it at the same time—we in the wagon and on the horse, they all around us in the
sweat-caking dust. They made a kind of long wailing sound, and then I felt the whole wagon lift clear of the ground and begin to rush forward. I saw our old rib-gaunted horses standing on their hind feet one minute and then turned sideways in the traces the next, and Drusilla leaning forward a little and taut as a pistol hammer holding Bobolink, and I saw men and women and children going down under the horses and we could feel the wagon going over them and we could hear them screaming. And we couldn’t stop anymore than if the earth had tilted up and was sliding us all down toward the river.

It went fast, like that, like it did every time anybody named Sartoris or Millard came within sight hearing or smell of Yankees, as if Yankees were not a people nor a belief nor even a form of behavior, but instead were a kind of gully, precipice, into which Granny and Ringo and I were sucked pell-mell every time we got close to them. It was sunset; now there was a high bright rosy glow quiet beyond the trees and shining on the river, and now we could see it plain—the tide of niggers dammed back from the entrance to the bridge by a detachment of cavalry, the river like a sheet of rosy glass beneath the delicate arch of the bridge which the tail of the Yankee column was just crossing. They were in silhouette, running tiny and high above the placid water; I remember the horses’ and mules’ heads all mixed up among the bayonets, and the barrels of cannon tilted up and kind of rushing slow across the high peaceful rosy air like split-cane clothespins being jerked along a
clothesline, and the singing everywhere up and down the river bank, with the voices of the women coming out of it thin and high: “Glory! Glory! Hallelujah!”

They were fighting now, the horses rearing and shoving against them, the troopers beating at them with their scabbards, holding them clear of the bridge while the last of the infantry began to cross; all of a sudden there was an officer beside the wagon, holding his scabbarded sword by the little end like a stick and hanging onto the wagon and screaming at us. I dont know where he came from, how he ever got to us, but there he was with his little white face with a stubble of beard and a long streak of blood on it, bareheaded and with his mouth open. “Get back!” he shrieked. “Get back! We’re going to blow the bridge!” screaming right into Granny’s face while she shouted back at him with Mrs Compson’s hat knocked to one side of her head and hers and the Yankee’s faces not a yard apart:

“I want my silver! I’m John Sartoris’ mother-in-law! Send Colonel Dick to me!” Then the Yankee officer was gone, right in the middle of shouting and beating at the nigger heads with his sabre, with his little bloody shrieking face and all. I dont know where he went anymore than I know where he came from; he just vanished still holding onto the wagon and flailing about him with the sabre, and then Cousin Drusilla was there on Bobolink; she had our nigh horse by the head-stall and was trying to turn the wagon sideways. I started to jump down to help. “Stay in the wagon,” she said. She didn’t shout; she just said it. “Take the lines and turn them.”
When we got the wagon turned sideways we stopped. And then for a minute I thought we were going backward, until I saw it was the niggers. Then I saw that the cavalry had broken; I saw the whole mob of it—horses and men and sabres and niggers—rolling on toward the end of the bridge like when a dam breaks, for about ten clear seconds behind the last of the infantry. And then the bridge vanished. I was looking right at it; I could see the clear gap between the infantry and the wave of niggers and cavalry, with a little empty thread of bridge joining them together in the air above the water, and then there was a bright glare and I felt my insides suck and a clap of wind hit me on the back of the head. I didn’t hear anything at all. I just sat there in the wagon with a funny buzzing in my ears and a funny taste in my mouth, and watched little toy men and horses and pieces of plank floating along in the air above the water. But I didn’t hear anything at all; I couldn’t even hear Cousin Drusilla. She was right beside the wagon now, leaning toward us, her mouth urgent and wide and no sound coming out of it at all.

“What?” I said.

“Stay in the wagon!”

“I cant hear you!” I said. That’s what I said, that’s what I was thinking; I didn’t realise even then that the wagon was moving again. But then I did; it was like the whole long bank of the river had turned and risen under us and was rushing us down toward the water, we sitting in the wagon and rushing down toward the water
on another river of faces that couldn’t see or hear either. Cousin Drusilla had the nigh horse by the bridle again and I dragged at them too and Granny was standing up in the wagon and beating at the faces with Mrs Compson’s parasol, and then the whole rotten bridle came off in Cousin Drusilla’s hand. “Get away!” I said. “The wagon will float!”

“Yes,” she said, “it will float. Just stay in it. Watch Aunt Rosa and Ringo.”

“Yes,” I said. Then she was gone, we passed her, turned and holding Bobolink like a rock again and leaning down talking to him and patting his cheek; she was gone. Then maybe the bank did cave, I dont know. I didn’t even know we were in the river, it was just like the earth had fallen out from under the wagon and the faces and all and we all rushed down slow, with the faces looking up and their eyes blind and their mouths open and their arms held up; high up in the air across the river I saw a cliff and a big fire on it running fast sideways and then all of a sudden the wagon was moving fast sideways and then a dead horse came shining up from out of the yelling faces and went down slow again exactly like a fish feeding, with hanging over his rump by one stirrup a man in a black uniform and then I realised that the uniform was blue, only it was wet. They were screaming then and now I could feel the wagon bed tilt and slide as they caught at it. Granny was kneeling beside me now, hitting at the screaming faces with Mrs Compson’s parasol. Behind us they were
still marching down the bank and into the river, singing.

A Yankee patrol helped Ringo and me cut the drowned horses out of the harness and drag the wagon ashore. We sprinkled water on Granny until she came to and they rigged harness with ropes and hitched up two of their horses. There was a road on top of the bluff and then we could see the fires along the bank. They were still singing on the other side of the river but it was quieter now. But there were patrols still riding up and down the cliff on this side, and squads of infantry down at the water where the fires were. Then we began to pass between rows of tents, with Granny lying against me and I could see her face then, it was white and still and her eyes were shut. She looked old and tired, I hadn’t realised how old and little she was. Then we began to pass big fires, with niggers in wet clothes crouching around them and soldiers going among them passing out food, then we came to a broad street and stopped before a tent with a sentry at the door and a light inside. The soldiers looked at Granny. “We better take her to the hospital,” one of them said.