The Unvanquished (15 page)

“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?”

“I dont know,” Granny said.

“You dont know,” the lieutenant said. He didn’t start to shout now, he just stood there, breathing slow and hard, looking at Granny; he talked now with a kind of furious patience, as if she were an idiot or an Indian: “Listen. I know you dont have to tell me, and you know I cant make you. I ask it only out of pure respect. Respect? Envy. Wont you tell me?”

“I dont know,” Granny said.

“You dont know,” the lieutenant said. “You mean, you——” He talked quiet now. “I see. You really dont know. You were too busy running the reaper to count the——” We didn’t move: Granny wasn’t even looking at him; it was Ringo and me that watched him fold the letters that Granny and Ringo had written and put them carefully into his pocket. He still talked quiet, like he was tired: “All right, boys. Rope them together and haze them out of there.”

“The gate is a quarter of a mile from here,” a soldier said.

“Throw down some fence,” the lieutenant said. They began to throw down the fence that Joby and I had worked two months on. The lieutenant took a pad from his pocket and he went to the fence and laid the pad on the rail and took out a pencil. Then he looked back at Granny; he still talked quiet: “I believe you said the name now is Rosa Millard?”

“Yes,” Granny said.

The lieutenant wrote on the pad and tore the sheet out and came back to Granny. He still talked quiet, like when somebody is sick in a room: “We are under orders to pay for all property damaged in the process of evacuation,” he said. “This is a voucher on the quartermaster at Memphis for ten dollars. For the fence.” He didn’t give the paper to her at once; he just stood there, looking at her. “Confound it, I dont mean promise. If I just knew what you believed in, held——” He cursed again, not loud and not at anybody or anything. “Listen. I dont say promise; I never mentioned the word. But I
have a family; I am a poor man; I have no grandmother. And if in about four months the auditor should find a warrant in the records for a thousand dollars to Mrs Rosa Millard, I would have to make it good. Do you see?”

“Yes,” Granny said. “You need not worry.”

Then they were gone. Granny and Ringo and Joby and I stood there and watched them drive the mules up across the pasture and out of sight. We had forgot about Ab Snopes until he said, “Well, hit looks like that’s all they are to hit. But you still got that ere hundred-odd that are out on receipt, provided them hill folks dont take a example from them Yankees. I reckon you can still be grateful for that much anyway. So I’ll bid you one and all good day and get on home and rest a spell. If I can help you again, just send for me.” He went on too. After a while Granny said, “Joby, put those rails back up.” I reckon Ringo and I were both waiting for her to tell us to help Joby, but she didn’t. She just said, “Come” and turned and went on, not toward the cabin, but across the pasture toward the road. We didn’t know where we were going until we reached the church. She went straight up the aisle to the chancel and stood there until we came up. “Kneel down,” she said.

We knelt in the empty church. She was small between us, little; she talked quiet, not loud, not fast and not slow; her voice sounded quiet and still, but strong and clear: “I have sinned. I have stolen and I have borne false witness against my neighbor, though that neighbor was an enemy of my country. And more than that, I
have caused these children to sin. I hereby take their sin upon my conscience.” It was one of those bright, soft days. It was cool in the church, the floor was cold to my knees. There was a hickory branch just outside the window, turning yellow; when the sun touched it, the leaves looked like gold. “But I did not sin for gain or for greed,” Granny said. “I did not sin for revenge; I defy You or anyone to say I did. I sinned first for justice. And after that first time, I sinned for more than justice: I sinned for the sake of food and clothes for Your own creatures who could not help themselves; for children who had given their fathers, for wives who had given their husbands, for old people who had given their sons, to a holy cause, even though You have seen fit to make it a lost cause. What I gained, I shared with them. It is true that I kept some of it back, but I am the best judge of that because I, too, have dependents who may be orphans, too, at this moment for all I know. And if this be sin in Your sight, I take this on my conscience too. Amen.”

She rose up. She got up easy, like she had no weight to herself. It was warm outside; it was the finest October that I could remember. Or maybe it was because you are not conscious of weather until you are fifteen. We walked slow back home, though Granny said she wasn’t tired. “I just wish I knew how they found out about that pen,” she said.

“Dont you know?” Ringo said. Granny looked at him. “Ab Snopes told them.”

This time she didn’t even say, “Mister Snopes.” She
just stopped dead still and looked at Ringo. “Ab Snopes?”

“Do you reckon he was going to be satisfied until he had sold them last nineteen mules to somebody?” Ringo said.

“Ab Snopes,” Granny said. “Well.” Then she walked on; we walked on. “Ab Snopes,” she said. “I reckon he beat me, after all. But it cant be helped now. And anyway, we did pretty well, taken by and large.”

“We done damn well—” Ringo said. He caught himself, but it was already too late. Granny didn’t even stop.

“Go on home and get the soap,” she said.

He went on. We could watch him cross the pasture and go into the cabin, and then come out and go down the hill toward the spring. We were close now; when I left Granny and went down to the spring, he was just rinsing his mouth, the can of soap in one hand and the gourd dipper in the other. He spit and rinsed his mouth and spit again; there was a long smear of suds up his cheek; a light froth of colored bubbles flicking away while I watched them, without any sound at all. “I still says we done damn well,” he said.

We tried to keep her from doing it, we both tried: Ringo had told her about Ab Snopes and after that we both knew it: it was like all three of us should have known it all the time, only I dont believe now that he meant to happen what did happen. But I believe that if
he had known what was going to happen, he would still have egged her on to do it. And Ringo and I tried, we tried, but Granny just sat there before the fire (it was cold in the cabin now) with her arms folded in the shawl and with that look on her face when she had quit either arguing or listening to you at all, saying just this one time more and that even a rogue will be honest for enough pay. It was Christmas: we had just heard from Aunt Louisa at Hawkhurst and found out where Drusilla was: she had been missing from home for almost a year now and at last Aunt Louisa found out that she was with Father away in Carolina like she had told me, riding with the troop like she was a man; Ringo and I had just got back from Jefferson with the letter, and Ab Snopes was in the cabin, telling Granny about it, and Granny listening and believing him because she still believed that what side of a war a man fought on made him what he is. And she knew better with her own ears, she must have known; everybody knew about them and were either mad if they were men or terrified if they were women. There was one negro in the county that everybody knew that they had murdered and burned him up in his cabin. They called themselves Grumby’s Independents—about fifty or sixty of them that wore no uniform and came from nobody knew where as soon as the last Yankee regiment was out of the country, raiding smoke houses and stables, and houses where they were sure there were no men, tearing up beds and floors and walls, frightening white women and torturing negroes to find where money or silver was
hidden; they were caught once and the one that said he was Grumby produced a tattered raiding commission actually signed by General Forrest, though you couldn’t tell if the original name was Grumby or not. But it got them off, because it was just some old men that captured them, and now women who had lived alone for three years surrounded by invading armies were afraid to stay in the houses at night, and the negroes who had lost their white people lived hidden in caves back in the hills like animals. That’s who Ab Snopes was talking about, with his hat on the floor and his hands flapping and his hair bent up across the back of his head where he had slept on it. The band had a thoroughbred stallion and three mares, how Ab Snopes knew it he didn’t say, that they had stolen; and how he knew they were stolen he didn’t say. But all Granny had to do was to write out one of the orders and sign Forrest’s name to it; he, Ab, would guarantee to get two thousand dollars for the horses. He swore to that, and Granny sitting there with her arms rolled into the shawl and that expression on her face, and Ab Snopes’ shadow leaping and jerking up the wall while he waved his arms and talked about that was all she had to do: to look at what she had made out of the Yankees, enemies, and that these were Southern men and, therefore, there would not even be any risk to this, because Southern men would not harm a woman, even if the letter failed to work. Oh, he did it well: I can see now that Ringo and I had no chance against him: about how the business with the Yankees had stopped without warning, before she had made what she had
counted on, and how she had given most of that away under the belief that she would be able to replace that and more, but as it was now, she had made independent and secure almost everyone in the county save herself and her own blood; that soon Father would return home to his ruined plantation and most of his slaves vanished; and how it would be if, when he came home and looked about at his desolate future, she could take fifteen hundred dollars in cash out of her pocket and say, “Here. Start over with this”—fifteen hundred dollars more than she had hoped to have. He would take one of the mares for his commission and he would guarantee her fifteen hundred dollars for the other three. Oh, we had no chance against him. We begged her to let us ask advice from Uncle Buck McCaslin, anyone, any man. But she just sat there with that expression on her face, saying that the horses did not belong to him, that they had been stolen, and that all she had to do was to frighten them with the order, and even Ringo and I knowing at fifteen that Grumby, or whoever he was, was a coward and that you might frighten a brave man, but that nobody dared frighten a coward; and Granny, sitting there without moving at all and saying, “But the horses do not belong to them because they are stolen property,” and we said, “Then no more will they belong to us,” and Granny said, “But they do not belong to them.”