The Unvanquished (19 page)

“Well, boys,” he said, “it looks like you have got me. Durn my hide for letting Matt Bowden fool me into emptying my pistol at him.”

And I could hear my voice; it sounded faint and far away, like the woman’s in Alabama that day, so that I wondered if he could hear me: “You shot three times. You have got two more shots in it.”

His face didn’t change, or I couldn’t see it change. It just lowered, looking down, but the smile was gone from it. “In this pistol?” he said. It was like he was examining a pistol for the first time, so slow and careful it
was that he passed it from his right to his left hand and let it hang again, pointing down again. “Well, well, well. Sholy I aint forgot how to count as well as how to shoot.” There was a bird somewhere—a yellowhammer—I had been hearing it all the time; even the three shots hadn’t frightened it. And I could hear Ringo, too, making a kind of whimpering sound when he breathed, and it was like I wasn’t trying to watch Grumby so much as to keep from looking at Ringo. “Well, she’s safe enough now, since it dont look like I can even shoot with my right hand.”

Then it happened. I know what did happen, but even now I dont know how, in what order. Because he was big and squat, like a bear. But when we had first seen him he was a captive, and so, even now he seemed more like a stump than even an animal, even though we had watched him leap and catch up the pistol and run firing after the other two. All I know is, one second he was standing there in his muddy Confederate coat, smiling at us, with his ragged teeth showing a little in his red stubble, with the thin sunlight on the stubble and on his shoulders and cuffs, on the dark marks where the braid had been ripped away; and the next second there were two bright orange splashes, one after the other, against the middle of the gray coat and the coat itself swelling slow down on me like when Granny told us about the balloon she saw in St Louis and we would dream about it.

I reckon I heard the sound, and I reckon I must have heard the bullets, and I reckon I felt him when he hit
me, but I dont remember it. I just remember the two bright flashes and the gray coat rushing down, and then the ground hitting me. But I could smell him—the smell of man sweat, and the gray coat grinding into my face and smelling of horse sweat and wood smoke and grease—and I could hear him, and then I could hear my arm socket, and I thought
In a minute I will hear my fingers breaking, but I have got to hold onto it
and then—I dont know whether it was under or over his arm or his leg—I saw Ringo, in the air, looking exactly like a frog, even to the eyes, with his mouth open too and his open pocket knife in his hand.

Then I was free. I saw Ringo straddle of Grumby’s back and Grumby getting up from his hands and knees and I tried to raise the pistol only my arm wouldn’t move. Then Grumby bucked Ringo off just like a steer would and whirled again, looking at us, crouched, with his mouth open too; and then my arm began to come up with the pistol and he turned and ran. He shouldn’t have tried to run from us in boots. Or maybe that made no difference either, because now my arm had come up and now I could see Grumby’s back (he didn’t scream, he never made a sound) and the pistol both at the same time and the pistol was level and steady as a rock.

It took us the rest of that day and part of the night to reach the old compress. But it didn’t take very long to ride home because we went fast with the two mounts apiece to change to, and what we had to carry now,
wrapped in a piece of the skirt of Grumby’s coat, didn’t weigh anything.

It was almost dark when we rode through Jefferson; it was raining again when we rode past the brick piles and the sooty walls that hadn’t fallen down yet, and went on through what used to be the square. We hitched the mules in the cedars and Ringo was just starting off to find a board when we saw that somebody had already put one up—Mrs Compson, I reckon, or maybe Uncle Buck when he got back home. We already had the piece of wire.

The earth had sunk too now, after two months; it was almost level now, like at first Granny had not wanted to be dead either but now she had begun to be reconciled. We unwrapped it from the jagged square of stained faded gray cloth and fastened it to the board. “Now she can lay good and quiet,” Ringo said.

“Yes,” I said. And then we both began to cry. We stood there in the slow rain, crying. We had ridden a lot, and during the last week we hadn’t slept much and we hadn’t always had anything to eat.

“It wasn’t him or Ab Snopes either that kilt her,” Ringo said. “It was them mules. That first batch of mules we got for nothing.”

“Yes,” I said. “Let’s go home. I reckon Louvinia is worried about us.”

So it was good and dark when we came to the cabin. And then we saw that it was lighted like for Christmas; we could see the big fire and the lamp clean and bright when Louvinia opened the door long before we had got
to it and ran out into the rain and began to paw at me, crying and hollering.

“What?” I said. “Father? Father’s home?
Father?
”

“And Miss Drusilla!” Louvinia hollered, crying and praying and pawing at me and hollering and scolding at Ringo all at once. “Home! Hit done finished! All but the surrendering. And now Marse John done home.” She finally told us, how Father and Drusilla had come home about a week ago and Uncle Buck told Father where Ringo and I were, and how Father had tried to make Drusilla wait at home but she refused, and how they were looking for us with Uncle Buck to show the way.

So we went to bed. We couldn’t even stay awake to eat the supper Louvinia cooked for us; Ringo and I went to bed in our clothes on the pallet and went to sleep all in one motion, with Louvinia’s face hanging over us and still scolding and Joby in the chimney corner where Louvinia had made him get up out of Granny’s chair. And then somebody was pulling at me and I thought I was fighting Ab Snopes again and then it was the rain in Father’s beard and clothes that I smelled. But Uncle Buck was still hollering, and Father holding me and Ringo and I held to him and then it was Drusilla kneeling and holding me and Ringo and we could smell the rain in her hair too while she was hollering at Uncle Buck to hush. Father’s hand was hard; I could see his face beyond Drusilla and I was trying to say “Father. Father” while she was holding me and Ringo with the rain smell of her hair all around us and Uncle Buck hollering
and Joby looking at Uncle Buck with his mouth open and his eyes round:

“Yes, by Godfrey! Not only tracked him down and caught him, but brought back the actual proof of it to where Rosa Millard could rest quiet.”

“The which?” Joby hollered. “Fotch back the which?”

“Hush! Hush!” Drusilla said. “That’s all done, all finished. You, Uncle Buck!”

“The proof and the expiation!” Uncle Buck hollered. “When me and John Sartoris and Drusilla rode up to that old compress, the first thing we see was that murdering scoundrel pegged out on the door to it like a coon hide, all except the right hand. ‘And if anybody wants to see that too,’ I told John Sartoris, ‘just let them ride into Jefferson and look on Rosa Millard’s grave!’ Aint I told you he is John Sartoris’ boy? Hey? Aint I told you?”

W
hen I think of that day, of Father’s old troop on their horses drawn up facing the house, and Father and Drusilla on the ground with that carpet bagger voting box in front of them, and opposite them the women—Aunt Louisa, Mrs Habersham and all the others—on the porch and the two sets of them, the men and the women, facing one another like they were both waiting for a bugle to sound the charge, I think I know the reason. I think it was because Father’s troop (like all the other Southern soldiers too), even though they had surrendered and said that they were whipped, were still soldiers. Maybe from the old habit of doing everything
as one man; maybe when you have lived for four years in a world ordered completely by men’s doings, even when it is danger and fighting, you dont want to quit that world: maybe the danger and the fighting are the reasons, because men have been pacifists for every reason under the sun except to avoid danger and fighting. And so now Father’s troop and all the other men in Jefferson, and Aunt Louisa and Mrs Habersham and all the women in Jefferson were actually enemies for the reason that the men had given in and admitted that they belonged to the United States but the women had never surrendered.

I remember the night we got the letter and found out at last where Drusilla was. It was just before Christmas in 1864, after the Yankees had burned Jefferson and gone away, and we didn’t even know for sure if the War was still going on or not. All we knew was that for three years the country had been full of Yankees, and then all of a sudden they were gone and there were no men there at all anymore. We hadn’t even heard from Father since July, from Carolina, so that now we lived in a world of burned towns and houses and ruined plantations and fields inhabited only by women. Ringo and I were fifteen then; we felt almost exactly like we had to eat and sleep and change our clothes in a hotel built only for ladies and children.

The envelope was worn and dirty and it had been opened once and then glued back, but we could still make out
Hawkhurst, Gihon County, Alabama
on it even though we did not recognise Aunt Louisa’s hand at first.
It was addressed to Granny; it was six pages cut with scissors from wallpaper and written on both sides with pokeberry juice and I thought of that night eighteen months ago when Drusilla and I stood outside the cabin at Hawkhurst and listened to the niggers passing in the road, the night when she told me about the dog, about keeping the dog quiet, and then asked me to ask Father to let her join his troop and ride with him. But I didn’t tell Father. Maybe I forgot it. Then the Yankees went away, and Father and his troop went away too. Then, six months later, we had a letter from him about how they were fighting in Carolina, and a month after that we had one from Aunt Louisa that Drusilla was gone too, a short letter on the wallpaper that you could see where Aunt Louisa had cried in the pokeberry juice about how she did not know where Drusilla was but that she had expected the worst ever since Drusilla had deliberately tried to unsex herself by refusing to feel any natural grief at the death in battle not only of her affianced husband but of her own father and that she took it for granted that Drusilla was with us and though she did not expect Drusilla to take any steps herself to relieve a mother’s anxiety, she hoped that Granny would. But we didn’t know where Drusilla was either. She had just vanished. It was like the Yankees in just passing through the South had not only taken along with them all living men blue and gray and white and black, but even one young girl who had happened to try to look and act like a man after her sweetheart was killed.

So then the next letter came. Only Granny wasn’t there to read it because she was dead then (it was the time when Grumby doubled back past Jefferson and so Ringo and I spent one night at home and found the letter when Mrs Compson had sent it out) and so for a while Ringo and I couldn’t make out what Aunt Louisa was trying to tell us. This one was on the same wallpaper too, six pages this time, only Aunt Louisa hadn’t cried in the pokeberry juice this time: Ringo said because she must have been writing too fast:

That’s how it sounded. Ringo was holding a pineknot for me to read by, but after a while he had to light another pineknot and all the farther we had got was how
when Gavin Breckbridge was killed at Shiloh before he and Drusilla had had time to marry, there had been reserved for Drusilla the highest destiny of a Southern woman—to be the bride-widow of a lost cause—and how Drusilla had not only thrown that away, she had not only become a lost woman and a shame to her father’s memory but she was now living in a word that Aunt Louisa would not even repeat but that Granny knew what it was, though at least thank God that Father and Drusilla were not actually any blood kin, it being Father’s wife who was Drusilla’s cousin by blood and not Father himself. So then Ringo lit the other pineknot and then we put the sheets of wallpaper down on the floor and then we found out what it was: how Drusilla had been gone for six months and no word from her except she was alive, and then one night she walked into the cabin where Aunt Louisa and Denny were (and now it had a line drawn under it, like this:)
in the garments not alone of a man but of a common private soldier
and told them how she had been a member of Father’s troop for six months, bivouacking at night surrounded by sleeping men and not even bothering to put up the tent for her and Father except when the weather was bad, and how Drusilla not only showed neither shame nor remorse but actually pretended she did not even know what Aunt Louisa was talking about; how when Aunt Louisa told her that she and Father must marry at once Drusilla said Cant you understand that I am tired of burying husbands in this war? that I am riding in Cousin John’s troop not to find a man but to hurt Yankees? and
how Aunt Louisa said At least dont call him
Cousin
John where strangers can hear you.