To Make My Bread (27 page)

The man in Confederate gray kept on watching. Granpap let go of John's hand and touched the man. “Can ye tell me,” he asked, “where the re-union headquarters are?”

The Confederate looked at Granpap and then he looked down at John.

“Are you a veteran?” he asked of Granpap.

“Yes, I'm a veteran.”

The man pointed down the street to a big sign that hung over the front of a building.

“Go right in there,” he said.

In the office they asked Granpap some questions—what camp did he belong to? Where had he fought? When it came out that he had walked fifty miles to the reunion, the man behind the desk was very kind. He arranged for them to stay at a certain place. They were sent to this house in an automobile. John and Granpap together rode through the streets in the automobile that took them smoothly up to a fine white house that sat back on a big plot of grass. A woman dressed in the finest silk met them at the door and led them upstairs to a room.

The room was as large as a house in the village, and in it was a bed big enough to get lost in. A door at one side led into a small room where they found water. Granpap walked around on tiptoe, and even then he left a track from the mud that had dried on his boots. It was a good thing John had had some experience in the station, and that Granpap knew something of what people did in cities. Yet Granpap was not at ease. “It would have been better for us to sleep out,” he kept saying. John did not entirely agree. He wondered if Basil had seen such houses, and if that was why he had said in such a scornful way, “Kirk hadn't any ambition.” Was it ambition to want and get a house like this and fine food and clothing and perhaps an automobile? For the first time John thought of Basil with respect, as a person who had found something that none of them knew about, a secret of living that not even Kirk had known.

A Negro girl dressed in black with a white apron came up and said, “Supper is ready.”

Granpap let John go first. As he walked down John saw the woman who had let them in talking to a young man in the hall below.

She said, “You must take them.” As if the young man had been saying he didn't wish to do what she wanted. Then the woman added, “We'll send them to one of the barracks tomorrow.”

The young man looked up and saw John leaning over the banisters.

“All right,” he said, “but I don't promise to bring them back.”

The woman met Granpap and John at the foot of the stairs. “We have supper made for you alone,” she said, “because we thought you would like to get to the meeting early.”

“Hit's mighty clever of you,” Granpap said, “to take us in.”

“Why, I'm glad and proud to honor our veterans,” she said very graciously. “Especially one who has walked fifty miles to attend a reunion.”

After supper eaten by themselves in the huge dining-room, Granpap and John were taken by the young man to a great hall on the main street. He put them in some seats halfway in the middle of the hall, and stopped long enough to tell Granpap the name of the street and the number of his house. Granpap repeated both of them after the young man.

John was already looking around, making himself familiar with everything in the hall. It was early and there were few people in the place. The seats went up from a platform in the center until they reached far up the sides of the building at the back.

“Hit feels like we're sitting all alone on the side of a mountain,” Granpap said. And it was something like a mountain covered with many flowers in the spring, for the whole place above and around was hung with red and white, and there were flags everywhere, crossed and single and in bunches.

“What was the name of that street now?” Granpap asked John.

“I don't know the name.” John tried to remember, but he had not been listening.

“I do remember the number was Nine O Nine, but the name of the street don't come to me.” Granpap felt around in his mind. The excitement had made him a little scatterbrained. If he could get hold of a drink it would clear up his head, and bring the scattered brains together.

“Nine O Nine,” he whispered to himself, and repeated it, trying to make the name come and join itself up to the number.

“I'll think of hit later,” he said at last out loud to John. “Hit just escaped me. But I'll think of hit later.”

“What?” John looked at Granpap. He had already forgotten about the missing name. There were so many other things to see and think about. People were coming in now. All through the middle of the building there were veterans with gray uniforms. Toward the back, if John strained his neck he could see light dresses of women and the dark clothes of men who were not veterans. But all around him and Granpap, in seat after seat stretching in a wide circle, one above the other were veterans in gray uniforms or veterans with white beards in regular suits or in jeans, but mostly they had the gray uniform so that all that lower part of the hall was made up of rows of gray uniforms and gray beards with some gold braid glistening in the lights that shone down from above. And the sound of talk was over the whole place, a great buzzing like a thousand mosquitoes; and to John the talk had a tune, though it was a tune all on one note or perhaps two, and it was not irritating like the tune of a mosquito, but friendly and natural.

The platform had been quite empty except for many chairs that sat in rows waiting for people to come and take them. It seemed that these people were waiting purposely until the last. For the place was completely filled when the band that Granpap had pointed out down in front of the platform began to play some music. From the sides of the platform, from behind curtains, came the people meant to sit in the chairs. And they came all at once, as if they had been waiting for the music.

“Hit's Dixie,” Granpap said and pulled John to his feet.

The people who came out on the platform were a fine sight. There were men in gray uniforms with enough gold braid to make a harness and young women dressed in white with wide red ribbons running catacornered across their waists in front. They trailed out and stood together on one side, while the men in gray went to another side.

As the band finished playing a preacher came out to the front of the platform and everyone bent his head while he blessed them. Then with a great swish, a sound like many skirts being drawn aside, the people sat down.

A man on the stage who was not a veteran, for he was dressed in dark clothes and had no beard, got up and made a short speech. When he had finished people clapped their hands together. The clapping sounded like rain dropping on a roof.

One of the veterans in gold braid got up and said he wished to introduce the sponsors and maids of honor. He spoke names and as he spoke them two young women would get up and come to the front of the stage and bow. Then people clapped again, and John felt the chill run over him that always meant rain was coming down outside, for the clapping made him feel he was back in the cabin with rain pouring on the roof.

Next the veteran got up and said the speaker who was coming was one whom they all knew: Congressman Heilman. Granpap leaned down to John. “He's the same that Hal Swain knows,” he said. “He helped get me out of jail that time.”

Granpap clapped his hands together when the man came out to the front of the stage. The Congressman was a tall man with gray-black hair brushed back from his face in a pompadour. This made him look taller. He stood waiting for the applause to stop, and there was plenty of it, so he had to wait a long time.

“My friends,” he began and spoke to the great crowd warmly and confidentially. At one minute he made them laugh, and at another he forced them to silence by his loud whispers. Only toward the back where the other people sat there were some voices that said, “It is shameful!” at some of his words.

There were times when John could receive the words of another person so that they were carved into his mind as a boy might carve a rabbit or some other figure on a piece of pine bark. Now he leaned forward along with the veterans and received the words of Mister Hellman. He could not understand them all, but what he did not understand he left until another time, as he had left the word ambition that Basil had given him until a time when he could fit it into a place where it belonged.

The Congressman said, “I have a rough outside, my friends. God did not make me of silken material to bamboozle men, but my heart beats warm for the people.” He said the majority of veterans in the hall were of the people, the farmers and factory workers, and it was to them he wished to speak.

“He means us,” Granpap whispered, but John scarcely heard. He was listening to the other words that came from the platform.

Mister Heilman continued, “I am for Race Domination. The Creator in his wisdom made the Caucasian race of finer clay than he made any of the colored people.”

“Hit's why I told ye,” Granpap whispered again, “not to mix with the niggers.” It was very irritating to have Granpap whisper like that, while the man on the stage was saying such fine words.

The speaker went smoothly from one sentence to another. The words spilled from his mouth and sometimes his voice was loud and sometimes it was low and solemn.

Promoted by enterprising Southerners and friendly industrialists of the North, he said, the mills had come to the South. Not the blue-bellied abolitionists, but the industrialists were friends of the poor whites. The Congressman read from a paper something about the industrialists: “With a shrewdness that will command the admiration of every practical business man, the industrialist engages in nothing that will not swell the dimensions of his own purse, yet he is always solicitous to invest his capital in a manner calculated to promote the interests of those around him.” “And he does promote your interests,” the Congressman cried out to them. “The Northern industrialist has come to us on a mission of peace and promise. The Southern industrialist and Northern together have bought the cotton of the poor farmer and put it to work in the mills. Here in the mills they have given employment to the free white and paid him well for that labor.

“And this recompense is your due,” the Congressman went on. He came close to the edge of the stage and spoke confidentially to the veterans before him.

“Who,” he asked, “saved the South during Reconstruction? It was you, the men, the rank and file, the common people. Before the Civil War members of the aristocratic oligarchy rode in their carriages, and lived like kings, while you, whose boots they were not fit to lick, were crawling in the mire, seeking dishonored graves.

“During Reconstruction you proclaimed the triumph of Democracy and white supremacy over mongrelism and anarchy. Now you have made a New South, a South of prosperous farms, of smooth-running factories, a South in whose bosom you rest, where your children receive free education, are taught the beauties of religion, where you possess peaceful homes, and the freedom to work.”

As he sat down, mopping his face because of the great heat in the building, the band began to play so that the sound of music went up with the sound of clapping. Two men on the platform went over to Mister Heilman and shook his hand, then three others followed them. But the white haired old general, and the others near him, sat quite still.

When there was quiet again the general came forward and spoke. “We have with us,” he said, “a girl who is the daughter of one of our veterans. She is here to speak for the women of the South.”

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somewhere at the back came a young girl. She must have been younger than Sally, perhaps about Bonnie's age. John looked at her in surprise. Here was a young girl trying to speak to this big congregation. How would she do it? Then she began and he saw that she could, that somehow her voice could be heard clear through the great hall, for people sat forward and listened, and there was not a murmur. Only he could hear her voice, and along with it the heavy breathing of the old men. They leaned forward toward her, and seemed to swallow what she said with their open mouths, and at times when she spoke more fervently tears rolled down their cheeks.

She told them her father was a veteran and she had come to speak to them because she had been taught to love them from the time she could understand. She had been taught, along with her prayers, to love the South, and the men who had bled and died for the South.

“Upon your breast,” she said, “you wear a little iron cross. It is not the ruby-gemmed cross of the Czar of the Russias, nor the Emerald Cross of Britain's King. It is not these, but it is greater than all of these. It is made of a brave man's blood and a brave woman's tears, fused and welded in the red furnace of four years of want and grief and battles and graves, and from that union of blood and tears the South we know and love was made.”

She stood on the stage by herself, that girl, and moved from one side to another as if she was at home there. She held out her arms, and talked to the veterans before her, and they listened as if they could not bear to miss a word she said. She told them of her love for them, and they loved her for saying it.

She said, “There are those who say you thought you were right. I say you knew you were right, and through the long years the truth shall be written and shall remain where it belongs. You call your scars ugly? They are not ugly. They are symbols of beauty whose meaning will be enrolled with the years, and that wooden leg is as holy timber as the cedar built temples of old.”

And at the end she said some poetry like a song.

“There he stands like a hero, see!” She said this and pointed with one hand into the mass of gray uniforms . . . .