The Unvanquished (16 page)

But we didn’t quit trying; all that day (Ab Snopes had located them; it was an abandoned cotton compress on Tallahatchie River, sixty miles away) while we rode in the rain in the wagon Ab Snopes got for us to use, we
tried. But Granny just sat there on the seat between us, with the order signed by Ringo for General Forrest in the tin can under her dress and her feet on some hot bricks in a croker sack that we would stop every ten miles and build a fire in the rain and heat again, until we came to the crossroads, where Ab Snopes told us to leave the wagon and walk. And then she would not let me and Ringo go with her. “You and Ringo look like men,” she said. “They wont hurt a woman.” It had rained all day; it had fallen gray and steady and slow and cold on us all day long, and now it was like twilight had thickened it without being able to make it any grayer or colder. The crossroad was not a road anymore; it was no more than a faint gash turning off at right angles into the bottom, so that it looked like a cave. We could see the hoof marks in it.

“Then you shant go,” I said. “I’m stronger than you are; I’ll hold you.” I held her; her arm felt little and light and dry as a stick. But it wasn’t that: her size and appearance had no more to do with it than it had in her dealings with the Yankees; she just turned and looked at me and then I began to cry. I would be sixteen years old before another year was out, yet I sat there in the wagon, crying. I didn’t even know when she freed her arm. And then she was out of the wagon, standing there looking at me in the gray rain and the gray darkening light.

“It’s for all of us,” she said—“for John, and you, and Ringo and Joby and Louvinia. So we will have something when John comes back home. You never
cried when you knew he was going into a battle, did you? And now I am taking no risk: I am a woman. Even Yankees do not harm old women. You and Ringo stay here until I call you.”

We tried. I keep on saying that because I know now that I didn’t. I could have held her, turned the wagon, driven away, holding her in it. I was just fifteen, and for most of my life her face had been the first thing I saw in the morning and the last thing I saw at night, but I could have stopped her and I didn’t. I sat there in the wagon in the cold rain and let her walk on into the wet twilight and never come out of it again. How many of them there were in the old compress, I dont know and when and why they took fright and left, I dont know. We just sat there in the wagon in that cold dissolving December twilight until at last I couldn’t bear it any longer. Then Ringo and I were both running, trying to run, in the ankle deep mud of that old road pocked with the prints of ingoing hooves but of no wheel, knowing that we had waited too long either to help her or to share in her defeat. Because there was no sound nor sign of life at all; just the huge rotting building with the gray afternoon dying wetly upon it, and then at the end of the hall a faint crack of light beneath a door.

I dont remember touching the door at all, because the room was a floor raised about two feet from the earth, so that I ran into the step and fell forward into and then through the door, onto my hands and knees in the room, looking at Granny. There was a tallow dip
still burning on a wooden box, but it was the powder I smelled, stronger even than the tallow. I couldn’t seem to breathe for the smell of the powder, looking at Granny. She had looked little alive, but now she looked like she had collapsed, like she had been made out of a lot of little thin dry light sticks notched together and braced with cord, and now the cord had broken and all the little sticks had collapsed in a quiet heap on the floor, and somebody had spread a clean and faded calico dress over them.

T
hey all came in again when we buried Granny, Brother Fortinbride and all of them—the old men and the women and the children, and the niggers—the twelve who used to come in when word would spread that Ab Snopes was back from Memphis, and the hundred more who had returned to the county since, who had followed the Yankees away and then returned, to find their families and owners gone, to scatter into the hills and live in caves and hollow trees like animals I suppose, not only with no one to depend on but with no one depending on them, caring whether they returned or not or lived or died or not: and that I suppose is the
sum, the sharp serpent’s fang, of bereavement and loss—all coming in from the hills in the rain. Only there were no Yankees in Jefferson now so they didn’t have to walk in; I could look across the grave and beyond the other headstones and monuments and see the dripping cedar grove full of mules with long black smears on their hips where Granny and Ringo had burned out the U.S. brand.

Most of the Jefferson people were there too, and there was another preacher—a big preacher refugeeing from Memphis or somewhere—and I found out how Mrs Compson and some of them had arranged for him to preach the funeral. But Brother Fortinbride didn’t let him. He didn’t tell him not to; he just didn’t say anything to him at all, he just acted like a grown person coming in where the children are getting ready to play a game and telling the children that the game is all right but that the grown folks need the room and the furniture for a while. He came walking fast up from the grove where he had hitched his mule with the others, with his gaunted face and his frock coat with the horsehide and the Yankee-tent patches, into where the town people were standing around under umbrellas with Granny in the middle and the big refugeeing preacher with his book already open and one of the Compson niggers holding an umbrella over him and the rain splashing slow and cold and gray on the umbrella and splashing slow on the yellow boards where Granny was and into the dark red dirt beside the red grave without splashing at all. Brother Fortinbride just walked in and
looked at the umbrellas and then at the hill people in cotton bagging and split flour-sack clothes that didn’t have umbrellas, and went to Granny and said, “Come, you men.”

The town men would have moved. Some of them did. Uncle Buck McCaslin was the first man of them all, town and hill, to come forward. By Christmas his rheumatism would be so bad that he couldn’t hardly lift his hand, but he was there now, with his peeled hickory stick, shoving up through the hill men with croker sacks tied over their heads and the town men with umbrellas getting out of his way; then Ringo and I stood there and watched Granny going down into the earth with the quiet rain splashing on the yellow boards until they quit looking like boards and began to look like water with thin sunlight reflected in it, sinking away into the ground. Then the wet red dirt began to flow into the grave, with the shovels darting and flicking slow and steady and the hill men waiting to take turns with the shovels because Uncle Buck would not let anyone spell him with his.

It didn’t take long, and I reckon the refugeeing preacher would have tried again even then, but Brother Fortinbride didn’t give him a chance. Brother Fortinbride didn’t even put down his shovel; he stood there leaning on it like he was in the field and he sounded just like he used to in the church when Ab Snopes would be home from Memphis again: strong and quiet and not loud: “I dont reckon that Rosa Millard or anybody that ever knew her has to be told where she has gone. And I
dont reckon that anybody that ever knew her would want to insult her by telling her to rest anywhere in peace. And I reckon that God has already seen to it that there are men women and children, black white yellow or red, waiting for her to tend and worry over. And so you folks go home. Some of you aint come far and you came that distance in carriages with tops. But most of you didn’t, and it’s by the grace of Rosa Millard that you didn’t come on foot. I’m talking to you. You have wood to cut and split, at least. And what do you reckon Rosa Millard would say about you all standing around here, keeping old folks and children out here in the rain?”

Mrs Compson asked me and Ringo to come home and live with her until Father came back, and some others did: I dont remember who; and then when I thought they had all gone I looked around and there was Uncle Buck. He came up to us, with one elbow jammed into his side and his beard drawn over to one side like it was another arm, and his eyes red and mad like he hadn’t slept much, and holding his stick like he was fixing to hit somebody with it and he didn’t much care who. “What you boys going to do now?” he said.

The earth was loose and soft now, dark and red with rain, so that the rain didn’t splash on Granny at all: it just dissolved slow and gray into the dark red mound, so that after a while the mound began to dissolve too without changing shape, like the soft yellow color of the boards had dissolved and stained up through the earth
and mound and boards and rain were all melting into one vague quiet reddish gray. “I want to borrow a pistol,” I said.

He begun to holler then, but quiet. Because he was older than us; it was like it had been at the old compress that night with Granny. “Need me or not,” he hollered, “by Godfrey, I’m going. You cant stop me. You mean to tell me you dont
want
me to go with you?”

“I dont care,” I said. “I just want a pistol. Or a gun. Ours got burned up with the house.”

“All right,” he hollered. “Me and the pistol, or you and this damn nigger horse thief and a fence rail; you aint even got a poker at home. Have you?”

“We got the barl of the musket yet,” Ringo said. “I reckon that’s all we’ll need for Ab Snopes.”

“Ab Snopes?” Uncle Buck hollered. “Do you think it’s Ab Snopes this boy is thinking about? Hey?” he hollered, hollering at me now. “Hey, boy?” It was changing all the time, with the slow gray rain lancing slow and gray and cold into the red earth, yet it did not change. It would be some time yet, it would be days and weeks and then months before it would be smooth and quiet and level with the other earth. Now Uncle Buck was talking at Ringo, and not hollering now. “Catch my mule,” he said. “I got the pistol in my britches.”

Ab Snopes lived back in the hills too. Uncle Buck knew where; it was midafternoon by then and we were riding up a long red hill between pines when Uncle Buck stopped. He and Ringo had croker sacks tied over
their heads. Uncle Buck’s handworn stick stuck out from under his sack, with the rain shining on it like a long wax candle. “Wait,” he said. “I got a idea.” We turned from the road and came to a creek bottom; there was a faint path. It was dark under the trees and the rain didn’t fall on us now: it was like the bare trees themselves were dissolving slow and steady and cold into the end of the December day. We rode in single file, in our wet clothes and in the wet ammonia steam of the mules.

The pen was just like the one he and Ringo and Joby and I had built at home, only smaller and better hidden; I reckon he had got the idea from ours. We stopped at the wet rails; they were still new enough for the split sides to be still yellow with sap, and on the far side of the pen there was something that looked like a yellow cloud in the twilight until it moved. And then we saw that it was a claybank stallion and three mares. “I thought so,” Uncle Buck said.

Because I was mixed up. Maybe it was because Ringo and I were tired and we hadn’t slept much lately. Because the days were mixed up with the nights: all the while we had been riding I would keep on thinking how Ringo and I would catch it from Granny when we got back home for going off in the rain without telling her. Because for a minute I sat there and looked at the horses and I believed that Ab Snopes was Grumby. But Uncle Buck begun to holler again.

“Him, Grumby?” he hollered. “Ab Snopes? Ab Snopes? By Godfrey, if he was Grumby, if it was Ab Snopes that shot your grandmaw, I’d be ashamed to
have it known. I’d be ashamed to be caught catching him. No, sir. He aint Grumby: he’s better than that.” He sat sideways on his mule with the sack over his head and his beard jerking and wagging out of it while he talked. “He’s the one that’s going to show us where Grumby is. They just hid them horses here because they thought this would be the last place you boys would think to look for them. And now Ab Snopes has went off with Grumby to get some more, since your grandmaw has gone out of business as far as he is concerned. And thank Godfrey for that: it wont be a house or a cabin they will ever pass as long as Ab Snopes is with them that he wont leave a indelible signature, even if it aint nothing to capture but a chicken or a kitchen clock. By Godfrey, the one thing we dont want is to catch Ab Snopes.”