The Unvanquished (14 page)

That’s what we did this time, only this time it happened. We couldn’t even see our own team, when we heard them coming, the galloping hooves. They came up fast and mad; Granny jerked up quick and straight, holding Mrs Compson’s parasol. “Damn that Ringo!” she said. “I had my doubts about this time all the while.” Then they were all around us, like the dark itself had fallen down on us full of horses and mad men shouting “Halt! Halt! If they try to escape, shoot the damn horses.” with me and Granny sitting in the wagon and men jerking the team back and the team jerking and clashing in the traces and some of them hollering, “Where are the mules? The mules are gone!” and the
officer cursing and shouting of course they are gone and cursing Granny and the darkness and the men and the mules. Then somebody struck a light and we saw the officer sitting his horse beside the wagon while one of the soldiers lit one lightwood splinter from another.

“Where are the mules?” the officer shouted.

“What mules?” Granny said.

“Dont lie to me!” the officer shouted. “The mules you just left camp with on that forged order. By God, we’ve got you this time. We knew you’d turn up again. Orders went out to the whole department to watch for you a month ago! That damn Newberry had his copy in his pocket while you were talking to him.” He cursed Colonel Newberry now. “By God, they ought to let you go free and courtmartial him. Where’s the nigger boy and the mules, Mrs Plurella Harris?”

“I dont know what you are talking about,” Granny said. “I have no mules except this team I am driving. And my name is Rosa Millard; I am on my way home, beyond Jefferson.”

The officer began to laugh; he sat on the horse, laughing. “So that’s your real name, hey? Well, well, well. So you have begun to tell the truth at last. Come now, tell me where those mules are, and tell me where the others you have stolen from us are hid——”

Then Ringo hollered. He and Ab Snopes and the mules had turned off into the woods on the right side of the road, but when he hollered now he was on the left side. “Heyo the road!” he hollered. “One busted loose! head um off the road!”

And that was all of that. The soldier dropped the lightwood splinter and the officer whirled his horse, already spurring him, hollering, “Two men stay here.” Maybe they all thought he meant two others, because there was just a big noise of bushes and trees like a cyclone was going through them, and then Granny and I were sitting in the wagon like before we had even heard the hooves. “Come on,” Granny said. She was already getting out of the wagon.

“Are we going to leave the team and wagon,” I said.

“Yes,” Granny said. “I misdoubted this all the time.”

We could not see at all in the woods; we felt our way, and me helping Granny along and her arm didn’t feel any bigger than a pencil almost, but it wasn’t trembling. “This is far enough,” she said. I found a log and we sat down. Beyond the road we could hear them thrashing around, shouting and cursing. It sounded far away now. “And the team too,” Granny said.

“But we have nineteen new ones,” I said. “That makes two hundred and forty-eight.”

It seemed like a long time, sitting there on the log in the dark. After a while they came back; we could hear the officer cursing and the horses crashing and thumping back into the road. And then he found the wagon empty and he cursed sure enough—Granny and me and the two men he had told to stay there. He was still cursing while they turned the wagon around. Then they went
away. After a while we couldn’t hear them. Granny got up and we felt our way back to the road and we went on too, toward home. After a while I persuaded her to stop and rest and while we were sitting beside the road we heard the buggy coming. We stood up and Ringo saw us and stopped the buggy.

“Did I holler loud enough?” he said.

“Yes,” Granny said. Then she said, “Well?”

“All right,” Ringo said. “I told Ab Snopes to hide out with them in Hickahala bottom until tomorrow night. All cep these two.”

“Mister Snopes,” Granny said.

“All right,” Ringo said. “Git in and les go home.”

Granny didn’t move; I knew why even before she spoke: “Where did you get this buggy?”

“I borrowed hit,” Ringo said. “Twarn’t no Yankees handy, so I never needed no paper.”

We got in. The buggy went on. It seemed to me like it had already been all night, but it wasn’t midnight yet: I could tell by the stars; we would be home by midnight almost. We went on. “I reckon you went and told um who we is now,” Ringo said.

“Yes,” Granny said.

“Well I reckon that completes that,” Ringo said. “Anyway, we handled two hundred and forty-eight head while the business lasted.”

“Two hundred and forty-six,” Granny said. “We have lost the team.”

It was after midnight when we reached home; it was already Sunday and when we reached the church that morning there was the biggest crowd waiting there had ever been, though Ab Snopes would not get back with the new mules until tomorrow. So I believed that somehow they had heard about last night and they knew too, like Ringo, that this was the end and that now the books would have to be balanced and closed. We were late, because Granny made Ringo get up at sunup and take the buggy back where he had got it. So when we reached the church they were already inside, waiting. Brother Fortinbride met us at the door, and they all turned in the pews and watched Granny—the old men and the women and the children and the maybe a dozen niggers that didn’t have any white people now; they looked at her exactly like Father’s fox hounds would look at him when he would go into the dogrun while we went up the aisle to our pew. Ringo had the book; he went up to the gallery; I looked back and saw him leaning his arms on the book on the balustrade. We sat down in our pew, like before there was a war only for Father: Granny still and straight in her Sunday calico dress and the shawl and the hat Mrs Compson had loaned her a year ago, straight and quiet with her hands holding her prayer book in her lap like always, though there hadn’t been an Episcopal service in the church in almost three years now. Brother Fortinbride was a Methodist, and I dont know what the people were. Last
summer when we got back with the first batch of mules from Alabama, Granny sent for them, sent out word back into the hills where they lived in dirt-floored cabins, on the little poor farms without slaves. It took three or four times to get them to come in, but at last they all came—men and women and children and the dozen niggers that had got free by accident and didn’t know what to do about it—I reckon this was the first church with a slave gallery some of them had ever seen, with Ringo and the other twelve sitting up there in the high shadows where there was room enough for two hundred; and I could remember back when Father would be in the pew with us and the grove outside would be full of carriages from the other plantations, and Doctor Worsham in his stole beneath the altar and for each white person in the auditorium there would be ten niggers in the gallery. And I reckon that on that first Sunday when Granny knelt down in public, it was the first time they had ever seen anyone kneel in a church.

Brother Fortinbride wasn’t a minister either. He was a private in Father’s regiment and he got hurt bad in the first battle the regiment was in; they thought that he was dead but he said that Jesus came to him and told him to rise up and live and Father sent him back home to die only he didn’t die; but they said that he didn’t have any stomach left at all and everybody thought that the food we had to eat in 1862 and 63 would finish killing him, even if he had eaten it with women to cook it instead of gathering weeds from ditch banks and cooking them
himself. But it didn’t kill him and so maybe it was Jesus after all like he said. And so when we came back with the first batch of mules and the silver and the food, and Granny sent word out for all that needed, it was like Brother Fortinbride sprang right up out of the ground with the names and histories of all the hill folks at his tongue’s end, like maybe what he claimed was true, that the Lord had both him and Granny in mind when He created the other. So he would stand there where Doctor Worsham used to stand, and talk quiet for a little while about God, with his hair showing where he cut it himself and the bones looking like they were coming right out through his face, in a frock coat that had turned green a long time ago and with patches on it that he had sewed on himself, one of them was green horsehide and the other was a piece of tent canvas with the U.S.A. stencil still showing a little on it. He never talked long. There wasn’t much anybody could say about Confederate armies now; I reckon there is a time when even preachers quit believing that God is going to change His plan and give victory where there is nothing left to hang victory on; he just said how victory without God is mockery and delusion, but that defeat with God is not defeat. Then he quit talking, and he stood there with the old men, and the women and children and the eleven or twelve niggers lost in freedom, in clothes made out of cotton bagging and flour sacks, still watching Granny. Only now it was not like the hounds used to look at Father; but like they would watch the food in Loosh’s hands when he would go in to feed them, and
then he said, “Brethren and sisters, Sister Millard wishes to bear public witness.”

Granny stood up. She would not go to the altar. She just stood there, in our pew with her face straight ahead, in the shawl and Mrs Compson’s hat and the dress that Louvinia washed and ironed every Saturday, holding the prayer book. It used to have her name on it in gold letters, but now the only way you could read them was to run your finger over them; she said quiet too, quiet as Brother Fortinbride: “I have sinned. I want you all to pray for me.”

She knelt down in the pew; she looked littler than Cousin Denny; it was only Mrs Compson’s hat above the pew back they had to look at now. I dont know if she prayed herself or not. And Brother Fortinbride didn’t pray either, not aloud anyway. Ringo and I were just past fifteen then, but I could imagine what Doctor Worsham would have thought up to say, about all soldiers did not carry arms, and about they also serve and how one child saved from hunger and cold is better in heaven’s sight than a thousand slain enemies. But Brother Fortinbride didn’t say it. I reckon he thought of that; he always had plenty of words when he wanted to. It was like he said to himself, “Words are fine in peacetime, when everybody is comfortable and easy. But now I think that we can be excused.” He just stood there where Doctor Worsham used to stand and where the bishop would stand, too, with his ring looking big as a pistol target. Then Granny rose up; I didn’t have time to help her; she stood up and then the long sound
went through the church, a sound kind of like a sigh that Ringo said was the sound of the cotton bagging and the flour sacking when they breathed again, and Granny turned and looked back toward the gallery; only Ringo was already moving. “Bring the book,” she said.

It was a big blank account book; it weighed almost fifteen pounds; they opened it on the reading desk, Granny and Ringo side by side, while Granny drew the tin can out of her dress and spread the money on the book. But nobody moved until she began to call out the names. Then they came up one at a time, while Ringo read the names off the book, and the date, and the amount they had received before. Each time Granny would make them tell what they intended to do with the money; and now she would make them tell her how they had spent it, and she would look at the book to see whether they had lied or not. And the ones that she had loaned the brand blotted mules that Ab Snopes was afraid to try to sell would have to tell her how the mule was getting along and how much work it had done; and now and then she would take the mule away from one man or woman and give it to another, tearing up the old receipt and making the man or the woman sign the new one, telling them on what day to go and get the mule.

So it was afternoon when Ringo closed the book and got the new receipts together, and Granny stopped putting the rest of the money back into the can and she and Brother Fortinbride did what they did each time. “I’m
making out fine with the mule,” he said. “I dont need any money.”

“Fiddlesticks,” Granny said. “You’ll never grow enough food out of the ground to feed a bird the longest day you live. You take this money.”

“No,” Brother Fortinbride said. “I’m making out fine.”

We walked back home, Ringo carrying the book. “You done receipted out four mules you aint hardly laid eyes on yet,” he said. “What you gonter do about that?”

“They will be here tomorrow morning, I reckon,” Granny said. They were; Ab Snopes came in while we were eating breakfast; he leaned in the door with his eyes a little red from lack of sleep and looked at Granny.

“Yes, ma’am,” he said. “I dont never want to be rich; I just want to be lucky. Do you know what you done?” Only nobody asked him what, so he told us anyway: “Hit was taking place all day yestiddy; I reckon by now there aint a Yankee regiment left in Mississippi. You might say that this here war has turned around at last and went back North. Yes, sir. That regiment you requisitioned on Sattidy never even stayed long enough to warm the ground. You managed to requisition the last batch of Yankee live stock, at the last possible moment hit could have been done by living man. You made just one mistake: you drawed them last nineteen mules just too late to have anybody to sell them back to.”

It was a bright warm day; we saw the guns and the bits shining a long way down the road, but this time Ringo didn’t even move. He just quit drawing and looked up from the paper and said, “So Ab Snopes was lying. Gret God, aint we gonter never get shet of them?”

It was just a lieutenant; by this time Ringo and I could tell the different officers’ ranks better than we could tell Confederate ranks because one day we counted up and the only Confederate officers we had ever seen were Father and the captain that talked to us with Uncle Buck McCaslin that day in Jefferson before Grant burned it. And this was to be the last time we would see any uniforms at all except as the walking symbols of defeated men’s pride and indomitable unregret, but we didn’t know that now. So it was just a lieutenant. He looked about forty and kind of mad and gleeful both at the same time; Ringo didn’t recognise him because he had not been in the wagon with us, but I did: from the way he sat the horse, or maybe from the way he looked mad and happy both, like he had been mad for several days, thinking about how much he was going to enjoy being mad when the right time came. And he recognised me too; he looked at me once and said, “Hah!” with his teeth showing and pushed his horse up and looked at Ringo’s picture. There were maybe a dozen cavalry behind him; we never noticed especially. “Hah,” he said again, then he said, “What’s that?”