The Unvanquished (10 page)

“There’s Dru!” Cousin Denny hollered. “Come on. She’s been up to the river to see them niggers! Come on!” He and Ringo ran again. When I passed the chimneys they were just running into the stable. Cousin Drusilla had already unsaddled Bobolink and she was rubbing him down with a croker sack when I came in. Cousin Denny was still hollering, “What did you see? What are they doing?”

“I’ll tell about it at the house,” Cousin Drusilla said. Then she saw me. She was not tall, it was the way she stood and walked. She had on pants, like a man. She was the best woman rider in the country; when Granny and I were here that Christmas before the War and Gavin Breckbridge had just given Bobolink to her, they looked fine together; it didn’t need Jingus to say that they were the finest looking couple in Alabama or Mississippi either. But Gavin was killed at Shiloh and so they didn’t marry. She came and put her hand on my shoulder. “Hello,” she said. “Hello, John Sartoris.” She looked at Ringo. “Is this Ringo?” she said.

“That’s what they tells me,” Ringo said. “What about that railroad?”

“How are you?” Cousin Drusilla said.

“I manages to stand hit,” Ringo said. “What about that railroad?”

“I’ll tell you about that tonight too,” Drusilla said.

“I’ll finish Bobolink for you,” I said.

“Will you?” she said. She went to Bobolink’s head. “Will you stand for Cousin Bayard, lad?” she said. “I’ll see you all at the house, then,” she said. She went out.

“Yawl sho must a had this horse hid good when the Yankees come,” Ringo said.

“This horse?” Cousin Denny said. “Aint no damn Yankee going to fool with Dru’s horse no more.” He didn’t holler now, but pretty soon he began again. “When They come to burn the house Dru grabbed the pistol and run out here, she had on her Sunday dress and Them right behind her, she run in here and she jumped on Bobolink bareback without even waiting for the bridle and one of Them right there in the door hollering Stop and Dru said Get away or I’ll ride you down and Him hollering Stop Stop with his pistol out too——” Cousin Denny was hollering good now: “——and Dru leaned down to Bobolink’s ear and said Kill him Bob and the Yankee jumped back just in time; the lot was full of Them too and Dru stopped Bobolink and jumped down in her Sunday dress and put the pistol to Bobolink’s ear and said I cant shoot you all because I haven’t enough bullets and it wouldn’t do any good anyway but I wont need but one shot for the horse and which shall it be? So They burned the house and went away——” He was hollering good now, with Ringo staring at him so you could have raked Ringo’s eyes off his face with a stick. “Come on,” Cousin Denny hollered. “Les go hear about them niggers at the river!”

“I been having to hear about niggers all my life,” Ringo said. “I got to hear about that railroad.”

When we reached the house Cousin Drusilla was already talking, telling Granny mostly, though it was not about the railroad. Her hair was cut short; it looked like Father’s would when he would tell Granny about him and the men cutting each other’s hair with a bayonet. She was sunburned and her hands were hard and scratched like a man’s that works. She was telling Granny mostly: “They began to pass in the road yonder while the house was still burning. We couldn’t count them: men and women carrying children who couldn’t walk and carrying old men and women who should have been at home waiting to die. They were singing, walking along the road singing, not even looking to either side; the dust didn’t even settle for two days because all that night they still passed; we sat up listening to them, and the next morning every few yards along the road would be the old ones who couldn’t keep up anymore, sitting or lying down and even crawling along, calling to the others to help them, and the others, the young strong ones, not stopping, not even looking at them; I dont think they even heard or saw them. Going to Jordan, they told me. Going to cross Jordan——”

“That was what Loosh said,” Granny said. “That General Sherman was leading them all to Jordan.”

“Yes,” Cousin Drusilla said. “The river. They have stopped there; it’s like a river itself dammed up. The Yankees have thrown out a brigade of cavalry to hold
them back while they build the bridge to cross the infantry and artillery; they are all right until they get up there and see or smell the water. That’s when they go mad. Not fighting; it’s like they cant even see the horses shoving them back and the scabbards beating them, it’s like they cant see anything but the water and the other bank. They aren’t angry, aren’t fighting: just men women and children singing and chanting and trying to get to that unfinished bridge or even down into the water itself and the cavalry beating them back with sword scabbards. I dont know when they have eaten, nobody knows just how far some of them have come, they just pass here without food or anything, exactly as they rose up from whatever they were doing when the spirit or the voice or whatever it was told them to go. They stop during the day and rest in the woods, then at night they move again; we will hear them later: I’ll wake you, marching on up the road until the cavalry stops them; there was an officer, a major, who finally took time to see I wasn’t one of his men; he said, ‘Cant you do anything with them? Promise them anything to go back home?’ But it was like they couldn’t see me or hear me speaking; it was only that water and that bank on the other side. But you will see for yourself tomorrow when we go back.”

“Drusilla,” Aunt Louisa said, “you’re not going back tomorrow or any other time.”

“They are going to mine the bridge and blow it up when the army has crossed,” Cousin Drusilla said. “Nobody knows what they will do then.”

“But we cannot be responsible,” Aunt Louisa said.
“The Yankees brought it on themselves; let them pay the price.”

“Those negroes are not Yankees, Mother,” Cousin Drusilla said. “At least there will be one person there who is not a Yankee either.” She looked at Granny. “Four, counting Bayard and Ringo.”

Aunt Louisa looked at Granny. “Rosa, you shant go. I forbid it. Brother John will thank me to do so.”

“I reckon I will,” Granny said. “I’ve got to get the silver anyway.”

“And the mules,” Ringo said; “dont forget them. And dont yawl worry about Granny. She cide what she want and then she kneel down about ten seconds and tell God what she aim to do and then she git up and do hit. And them that dont like hit can git outen the way or git trompled. But that railroad—”

“And now I reckon we better go to bed,” Granny said. But we didn’t go to bed then. I had to hear about the railroad too; possibly it was more the need to keep even with Ringo (or even ahead of him, since I had seen the railroad when it was a railroad, which he had not) than a boy’s affinity for smoke and fury and thunder and speed. We sat there in that slave cabin partitioned, like Louvinia’s cabin at home, into two rooms by that suspended quilt beyond which Aunt Louisa and Granny were already in bed and where Cousin Denny should have been too except for the evening’s dispensation he had received, listening too who did not need to hear it again since he had been there to see it when it happened;—we sat there, Ringo and I, listening to Cousin
Drusilla and staring at each other with the same amazed and incredulous question:
Where could we have been at that moment? What could we have been doing, even a hundred miles away, not to have sensed, felt this, paused to look at one another, aghast and uplifted, while it was happening?
Because this, to us, was it. Ringo and I had seen Yankees; we had shot at one; we had crouched like two rats and heard Granny, unarmed and not even rising from her chair, rout a whole regiment of them from the library. And we had heard about battles and fighting and seen those who had taken part in them, not only in the person of Father when once or twice each year and without warning he would appear on the strong gaunt horse, arrived from beyond that cloudbank region which Ringo believed was Tennessee, but in the persons of other men who returned home with actual arms and legs missing. But that was it: men had lost arms and legs in sawmills; old men had been telling young men and boys about wars and fighting before they discovered how to write it down: and what petty precisian to quibble about locations in space or in chronology, who to care or insist
Now come, old man, tell the truth: did you see this? were you really there?
Because wars are wars: the same exploding powder when there was powder, the same thrust and parry of iron when there was not—one tale, one telling, the same as the next or the one before. So we knew a war existed; we had to believe that, just as we had to believe that the name for the sort of life we had led for the last three years was hardship and suffering. Yet we had no proof of it. In fact, we had even less than no
proof; we had had thrust into our faces the very shabby and unavoidable obverse of proof, who had seen Father (and the other men too) return home, afoot like tramps or on crowbait horses, in faded and patched (and at times obviously stolen) clothing, preceded by no flags nor drums and followed not even by two men to keep step with one another, in coats bearing no glitter of golden braid and with scabbards in which no sword reposed, actually almost sneaking home to spend two or three or seven days performing actions not only without glory (plowing land, repairing fences, killing meat for the smoke house) and in which they had no skill but the very necessity for which was the fruit of the absent occupations from which, returning, they bore no proof—actions in the very clumsy performance of which Father’s whole presence seemed (to us, Ringo and me) to emanate a kind of humility and apology, as if he were saying, “Believe me, boys; take my word for it: there’s more to it than this, no matter what it looks like. I cant prove it, so you’ll just have to believe me.” And then to have it happen, where we could have been there to see it, and were not: and this no poste and riposte of sweat-reeking cavalry which all war-telling is full of, no galloping thunder of guns to wheel up and unlimber and crash and crash into the lurid grime-glare of their own demon-served inferno which even children would recognise, no ragged lines of gaunt and shrill-yelling infantry beneath a tattered flag which is a very part of that child’s make-believe. Because this was it: an interval, a space, in which the toad-squatting guns, the panting
men and the trembling horses paused, amphitheatric about the embattled land, beneath the fading fury of the smoke and the puny yelling, and permitted the sorry business which had dragged on for three years now to be congealed into an irrevocable instant and put to an irrevocable gambit, not by two regiments or two batteries or even two generals, but by two locomotives.

Cousin Drusilla told it while we sat there in the cabin which smelled of new white wash and even (still faintly) of negroes. She probably told us the reason for it (she must have known)—what point of strategy, what desperate gamble not for preservation, since hope of that was gone, but at least for prolongation, which it served. But that meant nothing to us. We didn’t hear, we didn’t even listen; we sat there in that cabin and waited and watched that railroad which no longer existed, which was now a few piles of charred ties among which green grass was already growing, a few threads of steel knotted and twisted about the trunks of trees and already annealing into the living bark, becoming one and indistinguishable with the jungle growth which had now accepted it, but which for us ran still pristine and intact and straight and narrow as the path to glory itself, as it ran for all of them who were there and saw when Ringo and I were not. Drusilla told about that too; ‘Atlanta’ and ‘Chattanooga’ were in it—the names, the beginning and the end—but they meant no more to us than they did to the other watchers—the black and the white, the old men, the children, the women who would not know for months yet if they were widows or
childless or not—gathered, warned by grapevine, to see the momentary flash and glare of indomitable spirit starved by three years free of the impeding flesh. She told it (and now Ringo and I began to see it; we were there too)—the roundhouse in Atlanta where the engine waited; we were there, we were of them who (they must have) would slip into the roundhouse in the dark, to caress the wheels and pistons and iron flanks, to whisper to it in the darkness like lover to mistress or rider to horse, cajoling ruthlessly of her or it one supreme effort in return for making which she or it would receive annihilation (and who would not pay that price), cajoling, whispering, caressing her or it toward the one moment; we were of them—the old men, the children, the women—gathered to watch, drawn and warned by that grapevine of the oppressed, deprived of everything now save the will and the ability to deceive, turning inscrutable and impassive secret faces to the blue enemies who lived among them. Because they knew it was going to happen; Drusilla told that too: how they seemed to know somehow the very moment when the engine left Atlanta; it was as if the gray generals themselves had sent the word, had told them, “You have suffered for three years; now we will give to you and your children a glimpse of that for which you have suffered and been denied.” Because that’s all it was. I know that now. Even the successful passage of a hundred engines with trains of cars could not have changed the situation or its outcome; certainly not two free engines shrieking along a hundred yards apart up that drowsing solitude of track
which had seen no smoke and heard no bell in more than a year. I dont think it was intended to do that. It was like a meeting between two iron knights of the old time, not for material gain but for principle—honor denied with honor, courage denied with courage—the deed done not for the end but for the sake of the doing, put to the ultimate test and proving nothing save the finality of death and the vanity of all endeavor. We saw it, we were there, as if Drusilla’s voice had transported us to the wandering light-ray in space in which was still held the furious shadow—the brief section of track which existed inside the scope of a single pair of eyes and nowhere else, coming from nowhere and having, needing, no destination, the engine not coming into view but arrested in human sight in thunderous yet dreamy fury, lonely, inviolate and forlorn, wailing through its whistle precious steam which could have meant seconds at the instant of passing and miles at the end of its journey (and cheap at ten times this price)—the flaring and streaming smoke stack, the tossing bell, the starred Saint Andrew’s cross nailed to the cab roof, the wheels and the flashing driving rods on which the brass fittings glinted like the golden spurs themselves—then gone, vanished. Only not gone or vanished either, so long as there should be defeated or the descendants of defeated to tell it or listen to the telling.