The Unvanquished (7 page)

“The stable,” I said. “The stable!” While we were running up the hill toward the house we could see our mules still galloping in the field and we could see the three men running too. When we ran around the house we could see the wagon too in the road, with Joby on the seat above the wagon tongue sticking straight out ahead and Granny standing up and shaking the umbrella toward us and even though I couldn’t hear her I knew she was still shouting. Our mules had run into the woods but the three men were still in the field and the old white horse was watching them too in the barn door; he never saw us until he snorted and jerked back and kicked over something behind him. It was a homemade shoeing box and he was tied by a rope halter to the ladder to the loft and there was even a pipe still burning on the ground.

We climbed onto the ladder and got on him and when we came out of the barn we could still see the three men but we had to stop while Ringo got down and opened the lot gate and got back on again and so they were gone too by then. When we reached the woods there was no sign of them and we couldn’t hear anything either but the old horse’s insides. We went on slower then because the old horse wouldn’t go fast again
anyway and so we tried to listen and so it was almost sunset when we came out into a road. “Here where they went,” Ringo said. They were mule tracks. “Tinney and Old Hundred’s tracks bofe,” Ringo said. “I know um anywhere. They done throwed them Yankees and heading back home.”

“Are you sure?” I said.

“Is I sure? You reckon I aint followed them mules all my life and cant tell they tracks when I see um? Git up there, horse!”

We went on, but the old horse could not go very fast. After a while the moon came up, but Ringo still said he could see the tracks of our mules. So we went on, only now the old horse went even slower than ever because presently I caught Ringo and held him as he slipped off and then a little later Ringo caught and held me from slipping before I even knew that I had been asleep. We didn’t know what time it was, we didn’t care; we only heard after a time the slow hollow repercussion of wood beneath the horse’s feet and we turned from the road and hitched the bridle to a sapling; we probably both crawled beneath the bridge already asleep; still sleeping, we doubtless continued to crawl. Because if we had not moved, they would not have found us. I waked, still believing I dreamed of thunder. It was light; even beneath the close weed-choked bridge Ringo and I could sense the sun though not at once; for the time we just sat there beneath the loud drumming, while the loose planks of the bridge floor clattered and danced to the hooves; we sat there for a moment staring
at one another in the pale jonquil-colored light almost before we were awake. Perhaps that was it, perhaps we were still asleep, were taken so suddenly in slumber that we had not time to think of Yankees or anything else; we were out from beneath the bridge and already running before we remembered having begun to move; I looked back one time and (the road, the bridge, was five or six feet higher than the earth beside it) it looked as if the whole rim of the world was full of horses running along the sky. Then everything ran together again as it had yesterday; even while our legs still continued to run Ringo and I had dived like two rabbits into a brier patch, feeling no thorn, and lay on our faces in it while men shouted and horses crashed around us, then hard hands dragged us, clawing and kicking and quite blind, out of the thicket and onto our feet. Then sight returned—a vacuum, an interval, of amazing and dewy-breathed peace and quiet while Ringo and I stood in a circle of mounted and dismounted men and horses. Then I recognised Jupiter standing big and motionless and pale in the dawn as a mesmerised flame, then Father was shaking me and shouting, “Where’s your grandmother? Where’s Miss Rosa?” and then Ringo, in a tone of complete amazement: “We done fergot Granny!”

“Forgot her?” Father shouted. “You mean you ran away and left her sitting there in that wagon in the middle of the road?”

“Lord, Marse John,” Ringo said. “You know hit aint no Yankee gonter bother her if he know hit.”

Father swore. “How far back did you leave her?”

“It was about three oclock yesterday,” I said. “We rode some last night.”

Father turned to the others. “Two of you boys take them up behind you; we’ll lead that horse.” Then he stopped and turned back to us. “Have you all had anything to eat?”

“Eat?” Ringo said. “My stomach think my throat been cut.”

Father took a pone of bread from his saddle bags and broke it and gave it to us. “Where did you get that horse?” he said.

After a while I said, “We borrowed it.”

“Who from?” Father said.

After a while Ringo said, “We aint know. The man wasn’t there.” One of the men laughed. Father looked at him quick and he hushed. But just for a minute, because all of a sudden they all began to whoop and holler, and Father looking around at them and his face getting redder and redder.

“Dont you say a word, Colonel,” one of them said. “Hooraw for Sartoris!”

We galloped back; it was not far; we came to the field where the men had run, and the house with the barn, and in the road we could still see the scraps of harness where they had cut it. But the wagon was gone. Father led the old horse up to the house himself and knocked on the porch floor with his pistol and the door of the house was still open but nobody came. We put the old horse back into the barn, the pipe was still on the ground by the overturned shoeing box. We came back
to the road and Father sat Jupiter in the middle of the litter of harness scraps. “You damn boys,” he said. “You damn boys.”

When we went on now we went slower, there were three men riding on ahead out of sight. In the afternoon one of them came galloping back and Father left Ringo and me three others and he and the rest rode on; it was almost sunset when they came back with their horses sweated a little and leading two new horses with blue blankets under the saddles and U.S. burned on the horses’ hips.

“I tole you they wasn’t no Yankees gonter stop Granny,” Ringo said. “I bet she in Memphis right now.”

“I hope for your sake she is,” Father said. He jerked his hand at the new horses. “You and Bayard get on them.” Ringo went to one of the new horses. “Wait,” Father said, “the other one is yours.”

“You mean hit belong to me?” Ringo said.

“No,” Father said. “You borrowed it.” Then we all stopped and watched Ringo trying to get on his horse. The horse would stand perfectly still until he would feel Ringo’s weight on the stirrup, then he would whirl completely around until his off side faced Ringo; the first time Ringo wound up lying on his back in the road. “Get on him from that side,” Father said laughing.

Ringo looked at the horse and then at Father. “Git up from the wrong side?” Ringo said. “I knowed Yankees wasn’t folks but I never knowed before they horses aint horses.”

“Get on up,” Father said. “He’s blind in his near eye.”

It got dark while we were still riding and after a while I waked up with somebody holding me in the saddle and we were stopped in some trees and there was a fire but Ringo and I didn’t even stay awake to eat, and then it was morning again and all of them were gone but Father and eleven more, but we didn’t start off even then, we stayed there in the trees all day. “What are we going to do now?” I said.

“I’m going to take you damn boys home and then I’ve got to go to Memphis and find your grandmother,” Father said.

Just before dark we started, we watched Ringo trying to get on his horse from the nigh side for a while and then we went on. We rode until dawn and stopped again. This time we didn’t build a fire, we didn’t even unsaddle right away; we lay hidden in the woods and then Father was waking me with his hand, it was after sunup and we lay there and listened to a column of Yankee infantry pass in the road and then I slept again. It was noon when I waked. There was a fire now and a shoat cooking over it and we ate. “We’ll be home by midnight,” Father said.

Jupiter was rested. He didn’t want the bridle for a while and then he didn’t want Father to get on him and even after we were started he still wanted to go; Father had to hold him back between Ringo and me. Ringo was on his right. “You and Bayard better swap sides,”
Father told Ringo. “So your horse can see what’s beside him.”

“He going all right,” Ringo said. “He like hit this way. Maybe because he can smell Jupiter another horse and know Jupiter aint fixing to git on him and ride.”

“All right,” Father said. “Watch him, though.” We went on. Mine and Ringo’s horses could go pretty well too; when I looked back the others were a good piece behind, out of our dust. It wasn’t far to sundown.

“I wish I knew your grandmother was all right,” Father said.

“Lord, Marse John,” Ringo said, “is you still worrying about Granny? I been knowed her all my life; I aint worried about her.”

Jupiter was fine to watch, with his head up and watching my horse and Ringo’s and boring a little and just beginning to drive a little. “I’m going to let him go a little,” Father said. “You and Ringo watch yourselves.” I thought Jupiter was gone then. He went out like a rocket, flattening a little. But I should have known that Father still held him because I should have seen that he was still boring, but there was a snake fence along the road and all of a sudden it began to blur and then I realised that Father and Jupiter had not moved up at all, that it was all three of us flattening out up toward the crest of the hill where the road dipped like three swallows and I was thinking
We’re holding Jupiter. We’re holding Jupiter
when Father looked back and I saw his eyes and his teeth in his beard and I knew he still had Jupiter on the
bit; he said, “Watch out, now,” and then Jupiter shot out from between us; he went out exactly like I have seen a hawk come out of a sage field and rise over a fence; when they reached the crest of the hill I could see sky under them and the tops of the trees beyond the hill like they were flying, sailing out into the air to drop down beyond the hill like the hawk; only they didn’t. It was like Father stopped Jupiter in midair on top of the hill; I could see him standing in the stirrups and his arm up with his hat in it and then Ringo and I were on them before we could even begin to think to pull, and Jupiter reined back onto his haunches and then Father hit Ringo’s horse across his blind eye with the hat and I saw Ringo’s horse swerve and jump clean over the snake fence and I heard Ringo hollering as I went on over the crest of the hill with Father just behind me shooting his pistol and shouting, “Surround them, boys! Dont let a man escape!”

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.”