The Unvanquished (3 page)

It didn’t take us long to eat. Father had already eaten once early in the afternoon, and besides that was what
Ringo and I were waiting for: for after supper, the hour of laxed muscles and full entrails, the talking. In the spring when he came home that time, we waited as we did now, until he was sitting in his old chair with the hickory logs popping and snapping on the hearth and Ringo and I squatting on either side of the hearth, beneath the mantel above which the captured musket which he had brought home from Virginia two years ago rested on two pegs, loaded and oiled for service. Then we listened. We heard: the names—Forrest and Morgan and Barksdale and Van Dorn; the words like Gap and Run which we didn’t have in Mississippi even though we did own Barksdale, and Van Dorn until somebody’s husband killed him, and one day General Forrest rode down South Street in Oxford where there watched him through a window pane a young girl who scratched her name on it with a diamond ring: Celia Cook.

But we were just twelve; we didn’t listen to that. What Ringo and I heard was the cannon and the flags and the anonymous yelling. That’s what we intended to hear tonight. Ringo was waiting for me in the hall; we waited until Father was settled in his chair in the room which he and the negroes called the Office—Father because his desk was here in which he kept the seed cotton and corn and in this room he would remove his muddy boots and sit in his stocking feet while the boots dried on the hearth and where the dogs could come and go with impunity, to lie on the rug before the fire or even to sleep there on the cold nights—these whether
Mother, who died when I was born, gave him this dispensation before she died or whether Granny carried it on afterward or whether Granny gave him the dispensation herself because Mother died I dont know: and the negroes called the Office because into this room they would be fetched to face the Patroller (sitting in one of the straight hard chairs and smoking one of Father’s cigars too but with his hat off) and swear that they could not possibly have been either who or where he (the Patroller) said they were—and which Granny called the library because there was one bookcase in it containing a Coke upon Littleton, a Josephus, a Koran, a volume of Mississippi Reports dated 1848, a Jeremy Taylor, a Napoleon’s Maxims, a thousand and ninety-eight page treatise on astrology, a History of Werewolf Men in England, Ireland and Scotland and Including Wales by the Reverend Ptolemy
Thorndyke, M.A. (Edinburgh), F.R.S.S., a complete Walter Scott, a complete Fenimore Cooper, a paper-bound Dumas complete, too, save for the volume which Father lost from his pocket at Manassas (retreating, he said).

So Ringo and I squatted again and waited quietly while Granny sewed beside the lamp on the table and Father sat in his old chair in its old place, his muddy boots crossed and lifted into the old heel-marks beside the cold and empty fireplace, chewing the tobacco which Joby had loaned him. Joby was a good deal older than Father. He was too old to have been caught short of tobacco just by a war. He had come to Mississippi
from Carolina with Father and he had been Father’s body servant all the time that he was raising and training Simon, Ringo’s father, to take over when he (Joby) got too old, which was to have been some years yet except for the War. So Simon went with Father; he was still in Tennessee with the army. We waited for Father to begin; we waited so long that we could tell from the sounds that Louvinia was almost through in the kitchen: so that I decided Father was waiting for Louvinia to finish and come in to hear too, so I said, “How can you fight in mountains, Father?”

And that’s what he was waiting for, though not in the way Ringo and I thought, because he said, “You cant. You just have to. Now you boys run on to bed.”

We went up the stairs. But not all the way; we stopped and sat on the top step, just out of the light from the hall lamp, watching the door to the Office, listening; after a while Louvinia crossed the hall without looking up and entered the Office; we could hear Father and her:

“Is the trunk ready?”

“Yes sir. Hit’s ready.”

“Then tell Loosh to get the lantern and the shovels and wait in the kitchen for me.”

“Yes sir,” Louvinia said. She came out; she crossed the hall again without even looking up the stairs, who used to follow us up and stand in the bedroom door and scold at us until we were in bed—I in the bed itself,
Ringo on the pallet beside it. But this time she not only didn’t wonder where we were, she didn’t even think about where we might not be.

“I knows what’s in that trunk,” Ringo whispered. “Hit’s the silver. What you reckon—”

“Shhhh,” I said. We could hear Father’s voice, talking to Granny. After a while Louvinia came back and crossed the hall again. We sat on the top step, listening to Father’s voice telling Granny and Louvinia both.

“Vicksburg?” Ringo whispered. We were in the shadow; I couldn’t see anything but his eyeballs. “Vicksburg
fell
? Do he mean hit fell off in the River? With Ginrul Pemberton in hit too?”

“Shhhhh!” I said. We sat close together in the shadow, listening to Father. Perhaps it was the dark or perhaps we were the two moths, the two feathers again or perhaps there is a point at which credulity firmly and calmly and irrevocably declines, because suddenly Louvinia was standing over us, shaking us awake. She didn’t even scold us. She followed us up stairs and stood in the door to the bedroom and she didn’t even light the lamp; she couldn’t have told whether or not we had undressed even if she had been paying enough attention to suspect that we had not. She may have been listening as Ringo and I were, to what we thought we heard, though I knew better, just as I knew that we had slept on the stairs for some time; I was telling myself, ‘They have already carried it out, they are in the orchard now, digging.’ Because there is that point at which credulity declines; somewhere between waking and sleeping I believed
I saw or I dreamed that I did see the lantern in the orchard, under the apple trees. But I dont know whether I saw it or not, because then it was morning and it was raining and Father was gone.

He must have ridden off in the rain, which was still falling at breakfast and then at dinnertime too, so that it looked as if we wouldn’t have to leave the house at all, until at last Granny put the sewing away and said, “Very well. Get the cook book, Marengo.” Ringo got the cook book from the kitchen and he and I lay on our stomachs on the floor while Granny opened the book. “What shall we read about today?” she said.

“Read about cake,” I said.

“Very well. What kind of cake?” Only she didn’t need to say that because Ringo was already answering that before she spoke:

“Cokynut cake, Granny.” He said coconut cake every time because we never had been able to decide whether Ringo had ever tasted coconut cake or not. We had had some that Christmas before it started and Ringo had tried to remember whether they had had any of it in the kitchen or not, but he couldn’t remember. Now and then I used to try to help him decide, get him to tell me how it tasted and what it looked like and sometimes he would almost decide to risk it before he would change his mind. Because he said that he would rather just maybe have tasted coconut cake without remembering it than to know for certain he had not; that if he were to
describe the wrong kind of cake, he would never taste coconut cake as long as he lived.

“I reckon a little more wont hurt us,” Granny said.

The rain stopped in the middle of the afternoon; the sun was shining when I stepped out onto the back gallery, with Ringo already saying, “Where we going?” behind me and still saying it after we passed the smokehouse where I could see the stable and the cabins: “Where we going now?” Before we reached the stable Joby and Loosh came into sight beyond the pasture fence, bringing the mules up from the new pen. “What we ghy do now?” Ringo said.

“Watch him,” I said.

“Watch him? Watch who?” I looked at Ringo. He was staring at me, his eyeballs white and quiet like last night. “You talking about Loosh. Who tole us to watch him?”

“Nobody. I just know.”

“Bayard, did you dream hit?”

“Yes. Last night. It was Father and Louvinia. Father said to watch Loosh, because he knows.”

“Knows?” Ringo said. “Knows what?” But he didn’t need to ask that either; in the next breath he answered it himself, staring at me with his round quiet eyes, blinking a little: “Yestiddy. Vicksburg. When he knocked hit over. He knowed it then, already. Like when he said Marse John wasn’t at no Tennessee and sho enough Marse John wasn’t. Go on; what else did the dream tole you?”

“That’s all. To watch him. That he would know before
we did. Father said that Louvinia would have to watch him too, that even if he was her son, she would have to be white a little while longer. Because if we watched him, we could tell by what he did when it was getting ready to happen.”

“When what was getting ready to happen?”

“I dont know.” Ringo breathed deep, once.

“Then hit’s so,” he said. “If somebody tole you, hit could be a lie. But if you dremp hit, hit cant be a lie case aint nobody there to tole hit to you. So we got to watch him.”

We followed them when they put the mules to the wagon and went down beyond the pasture to where they had been cutting wood. We watched them for two days, hidden. We realised then what a close watch Louvinia had kept on us all the time. Sometimes while we were hidden watching Loosh and Joby load the wagon we would hear her yelling at us and we would have to sneak away and then run to let Louvinia find us coming from the other direction. Sometimes she would even meet us before we had time to circle, and Ringo hiding behind me then while she scolded at us: “What devilment yawl into now? Yawl up to something. What is it?” But we didn’t tell her and we would follow her back to the kitchen while she scolded at us over her shoulder and when she was inside the house we would move quietly until we were out of sight again and then run back to hide and watch Loosh.

So we were outside of his and Philadelphy’s cabin that night when he came out. We followed him down to
the new pen and heard him catch the mule and ride away. We ran, but when we reached the road too we could only hear the mule loping, dying away. But we had come a good piece, because even Louvinia calling us sounded faint and small. We looked up the road in the starlight, after the mule. “That’s where Corinth is,” I said.

He didn’t get back until after dark the next day. We stayed close to the house and watched the road by turns, to get Louvinia calmed down in case it would be late before he got back. It was late; she had followed us up to bed and we had slipped out again; we were just passing Joby’s cabin when the door opened and Loosh kind of surged up out of the darkness right beside us. He was almost close enough for me to have touched him and he did not see us at all; all of a sudden he was just kind of hanging there against the lighted doorway like he had been cut out of tin in the act of running and was inside the cabin and the door shut black again almost before we knew what we had seen. And when we looked in the window he was standing in front of the fire, with his clothes torn and muddy where he had been hiding in swamps and bottoms from the Patrollers and with that look on his face again which resembled drunkenness but was not, as if he had not slept in a long time and did not want to sleep now, and Joby and Philadelphy leaning into the firelight and looking at him and Philadelphy’s mouth open too and the same look on her face. Then I saw Louvinia standing in the door. We had not heard her behind us yet there she was, with one hand on the
door jamb, looking at Loosh, and again she didn’t have on Father’s old hat.

“You mean they gwinter free us all?” Philadelphy said. “We gonter all be free?”

“Yes,” Loosh said, loud, with his head flung back; he didn’t even look at Joby when Joby said, “Hush up, Loosh!”—“Yes!” Loosh said. “Ginral Sherman gonter sweep the earth and the Race gonter all be free!”

Then Louvinia crossed the floor in two steps and hit Loosh across the head hard with her flat hand. “You black fool!” she said. “Do you think there’s enough Yankees in the whole world to whip the white folks?”

We ran to the house, we didn’t wait for Louvinia; again we didn’t know that she was behind us. We ran into the room where Granny was sitting beside the lamp with the bible open on her lap and her neck arched to look at us across her spectacles. “They’re coming here!” I said. “They’re coming to set us free!”

“What?” she said.

“Loosh saw them! They’re just down the road. It’s General Sherman and he’s going to make us all free!” And we watching her, waiting to see who she would send for to take down the musket: whether it would be Joby because he was the oldest, or Loosh because he had seen them and would know what to shoot at. Then she shouted too, and her voice was strong and loud as Louvinia’s:

“You, Bayard Sartoris! Aint you in bed yet? Louvinia!” she shouted. Louvinia came in. “Take these children up to bed and if you hear another sound out of
them tonight you have my permission and my insistence too to whip them both.”

It didn’t take us long to get to bed. But we couldn’t talk even then, because Louvinia was going to bed on the cot in the hall. And Ringo was afraid to come up in the bed with me, so I got down on the pallet with him. “We’ll have to watch the road,” I said. Ringo whimpered.

“Look like hit haf to be us,” he said.

“Are you scared?”

“I aint very,” he said. “I just wish Marse John was here.”

“Well he’s not,” I said. “It’ll have to be us.”

We watched the road for two days, lying in the cedar copse. Now and then Louvinia hollered at us but we told her where we were and that we were making another map, and besides she could see the cedar copse from the kitchen. It was cool and shady there, and quiet, and Ringo slept most of the time and I slept some too. I was dreaming, it was like I was looking at our place and suddenly the house and stable and cabins and trees and all were gone and I was looking at a place flat and empty as the sideboard and it was growing darker and darker and then all of a sudden I wasn’t looking at it, I was there: a sort of frightened drove of little tiny figures moving on it, they were Father and Granny and Joby and Louvinia and Loosh and Philadelphy and Ringo and me and we were wandering around on it lost and it getting darker and darker and we forever
more without any home to go to because we were forever free; that’s what it was and then Ringo made a choked sound and I was looking at the road and there in the middle of it, sitting on a bright bay horse and looking at the house through a field glass, was a Yankee. For a long time we just lay there looking at him. I dont know what we had expected to see but we knew what he was at once; I remember thinking
He looks just like a man
and then Ringo and I were glaring at one another and then we were crawling backward down the hill without remembering when we started to crawl and then we were running across the pasture toward the house without remembering when we got to our feet. We seemed to run forever, with our heads back and our fists clenched before we reached the fence and fell over it and ran on into the house. Granny’s chair was empty beside the table where her sewing lay. “Quick!” I said. “Shove it up here!” But Ringo didn’t move; his eyes looked like door knobs while I dragged the chair up and climbed onto it and began to lift down the musket. It weighed about fifteen pounds, though it was not the weight so much as the length; when it came free it and the chair and all went down with a tremendous clatter; we heard Granny sit up in her bed upstairs and then we heard her voice: