The Unvanquished (20 page)

The third letter did not come to us at all. It came to Mrs Compson. Drusilla and Father were home then. It was in the spring and the War was over now, and we were busy getting the cypress and oak out of the bottom to build the house and Drusilla working with Joby and Ringo and Father and me like another man, with her hair shorter than it had been at Hawkhurst and her face sunburned from riding in the weather and her body thin from living like soldiers lived. After Granny died Ringo and Louvinia and I all slept in the cabin, but after Father came Ringo and Louvinia moved back to the other cabin with Joby and now Father and I slept on Ringo’s and my pallet and Drusilla slept in the bed behind the quilt curtain where Granny used to sleep. And so one night I remembered Aunt Louisa’s letter and I showed it to Drusilla and Father, and Father found out that Drusilla had not written to tell Aunt Louisa where she was and Father said she must, and so one day Mrs Compson came out with the third letter. Drusilla and Ringo and Louvinia too were down in the bottom at the sawmill and I saw that one too, on the wallpaper with the pokeberry juice and the juice not cried on this time either, and this the first time Mrs Compson had come out since Granny died and not even getting out of her surrey but sitting there holding to her parasol with one hand and her shawl with the other and looking around like
when Drusilla would come out of the house or from around the corner it would not be just a thin sunburned girl in a man’s shirt and pants but maybe something like a tame panther or bear. This one sounded just like the others: about how Aunt Louisa was addressing a stranger to herself but not a stranger to Granny and that there were times when the good name of one family was the good name of all and that she naturally did not expect Mrs Compson to move out and live with Father and Drusilla because even that would be too late now to preserve the appearance of that which had never existed anyway. But that Mrs Compson was a woman too, Aunt Louisa believed, a Southern woman too, and had suffered too, Aunt Louisa didn’t doubt, only she did hope and pray that Mrs Compson had been spared the sight of her own daughter if Mrs Compson had one flouting and outraging all Southern principles of purity and womanhood that our husbands had died for, though Aunt Louisa hoped again that Mrs Compson’s husband (Mrs Compson was a good deal older than Granny and the only husband she had ever had had been locked up for crazy a long time ago because in the slack part of the afternoons he would gather up eight or ten little niggers from the quarters and line them up across the creek from him with sweet potatoes on their heads and he would shoot the potatoes off with a rifle; he would tell them he might miss a potato but he wasn’t going to miss a nigger, and so they would stand mighty still) had not made one of the number. So I couldn’t make any sense out of that one too and I still didn’t know what
Aunt Louisa was talking about and I didn’t believe that Mrs Compson knew either.

Because it was not her: it was Mrs Habersham, that never had been out here before and that Granny never had been to see that I knew of. Because Mrs Compson didn’t stay, she didn’t even get out of the surrey, sitting there kind of drawn up under the shawl and looking at me and then at the cabin like she didn’t know just what might come out of it or out from behind it. Then she began to tap the nigger driver on his head with the parasol and they went away, the two old horses going pretty fast back down the drive and back down the road to town. And the next afternoon when I came out of the bottom to go to the spring with the water bucket there were five surreys and buggies in front of the cabin and inside the cabin there were fourteen of them that had come the four miles out from Jefferson, in the Sunday clothes that the Yankees and the War had left them, that had husbands dead in the War or alive back in Jefferson helping Father with what he was doing, because they were strange times then. Only like I said, maybe times are never strange to women: that it is just one continuous monotonous thing full of the repeated follies of their menfolks. Mrs Compson was sitting in Granny’s chair, still holding the parasol and drawn up under her shawl and looking like she had finally seen whatever it was she had expected to see, and it had been the panther. It was Mrs Habersham who was holding back the quilt for the others to go in and look at the bed where Drusilla slept
and then showing them the pallet where Father and I slept. Then she saw me and said, “And who is this?”

“That’s Bayard,” Mrs Compson said.

“You poor child,” Mrs Habersham said. So I didn’t stop. But I couldn’t help but hear them. It sounded like a ladies’ club meeting with Mrs Habersham running it, because every now and then Mrs Habersham would forget to whisper: “——mother should come, be sent for at once. But lacking her presence.…… we, the ladies of the community, mothers ourselves.…… child probably taken advantage of by gallant romantic.…… before realising the price she must——” and Mrs Compson said, “Hush! Hush!” and then somebody else said, “Do you really suppose——” and then Mrs Habersham forgot to whisper good: “What else? What other reason can you name why she should choose to conceal herself down there in the woods all day long, lifting heavy weights like logs and——”

Then I went away. I filled the bucket at the spring and went back to the log-yard where Drusilla and Ringo and Joby were feeding the bandsaw and the blindfolded mule going round and round in the sawdust. And then Joby kind of made a sound and we all stopped and looked and there was Mrs Habersham, with three of the others kind of peeping out from behind her with their eyes round and bright, looking at Drusilla standing there in the sawdust and shavings, in her dirty sweated overalls and shirt and brogans, with her face sweat-streaked
with sawdust and her short hair yellow with it. “I am Martha Habersham,” Mrs Habersham said. “I am a neighbor and I hope to be a friend.” And then she said, “You poor child.”

We just looked at her; when Drusilla finally spoke, she sounded like Ringo and I would when Father would say something to us in Latin for a joke. “Ma’am?” Drusilla said. Because I was just fifteen; I still didn’t know what it was all about; I just stood there and listened without even thinking much, like when they had been talking in the cabin. “My condition?” Drusilla said. “My—–”

“Yes,” Mrs Habersham said. “No mother, no woman to.…… forced to these straits——” kind of waving her hand at the mules that hadn’t stopped and at Joby and Ringo goggling at her and the three others still peeping around her at Drusilla. “…  to offer you not only our help, but our sympathy.”

“My condition,” Drusilla said. “My con—— Help and sym——” Then she began to say, “Oh. Oh. Oh.” standing there, and then she was running. She began to run like a deer, that starts to run and then decides where it wants to go: she turned right in the air and came toward me, running light over the logs and planks, with her mouth open, saying “John. John.” not loud; for a minute it was like she thought I was Father until she waked up and found I was not; she stopped without even ceasing to run, like a bird stops in the air, motionless yet still furious with movement. “Is that what you think too?” she said. Then she was gone. Every now
and then I could see her footprints, spaced and fast, just inside the woods, but when I came out of the bottom, I couldn’t see her. But the surreys and buggies were still in front of the cabin and I could see Mrs Compson and the other ladies on the porch, looking out across the pasture toward the bottom, so I did not go there. But before I came to the other cabin, where Louvinia and Joby and Ringo lived, I saw Louvinia come up the hill from the spring, carrying her cedar water bucket and singing. Then she went into the cabin and the singing stopped short off and so I knew where Drusilla was. But I didn’t hide. I went to the window and looked in and saw Drusilla just turning from where she had been leaning her head in her arms on the mantel when Louvinia came in with the water bucket and a gum twig in her mouth and Father’s old hat on top of her headrag. Drusilla was crying. “That’s what it is, then,” she said. “Coming down there to the mill and telling me that in my condition—sympathy and help—— Strangers; I never saw any of them before and I dont care a damn what they—— But you and Bayard. Is that what you believe? that John and I—that we——” Then Louvinia moved. Her hand came out quicker than Drusilla could jerk back and lay flat on the belly of Drusilla’s overalls, then Louvinia was holding Drusilla in her arms like she used to hold me and Drusilla was crying hard. “That John and I—that we— And Gavin dead at Shiloh and John’s home burned and his plantation ruined, that he and I—— We went to the War to hurt Yankees, not hunting women!”

“I knows you aint,” Louvinia said. “Hush now. Hush.”

And that’s about all. It didn’t take them long. I dont know whether Mrs Habersham made Mrs Compson send for Aunt Louisa or whether Aunt Louisa just gave them a deadline and then came herself. Because we were busy, Drusilla and Joby and Ringo and me at the mill, and Father in town; we wouldn’t see him from the time he would ride away in the morning until when he would get back, sometimes late, at night. Because they were strange times then. For four years we had lived for just one thing, even the women and children who could not fight: to get Yankee troops out of the country; we thought that when that happened, it would be all over. And now that had happened, and then before the summer began I heard Father say to Drusilla, “We were promised Federal troops; Lincoln himself promised to send us troops. Then things will be all right.” That, from a man who had commanded a regiment for four years with the avowed purpose of driving Federal troops from the country. Now it was as though we had not surrendered at all, we had joined forces with the men who had been our enemies against a new foe whose means we could not always fathom but whose aim we could always dread. So he was busy in town all day long. They were building Jefferson back, the courthouse and the stores, but it was more than that which Father and the other men were doing; it was something which he would not let Drusilla or me or Ringo go into town to see. Then one day Ringo slipped off and went to
town and came back and he looked at me with his eyes rolling a little.

“Do you know what I aint?” he said.

“What?” I said.

“I aint a nigger anymore. I done been abolished.” Then I asked him what he was, if he wasn’t a nigger anymore and he showed me what he had in his hand. It was a new scrip dollar; it was drawn on the United States Resident Treasurer, Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, and signed “Cassius Q. Benbow, Acting Marshal” in a neat clerk’s hand, with a big sprawling X under it.

“Cassius Q. Benbow?” I said.

“Co-rect,” Ringo said. “Uncle Cash that druv the Benbow carriage twell he run off with the Yankees two years ago. He back now and he gonter be elected Marshal of Jefferson. That’s what Marse John and the other white folks is so busy about.”

“A nigger?” I said. “A nigger?”

“No,” Ringo said. “They aint no more niggers, in Jefferson nor nowhere else.” Then he told me about the two Burdens from Missouri, with a patent from Washington to organise the niggers into Republicans, and how Father and the other men were trying to prevent it. “Naw, suh,” he said. “This War aint over. Hit just started good. Used to be when you seed a Yankee you knowed him because he never had nothing but a gun or a mule halter or a handful of hen feathers. Now you dont even know him and stid of the gun he got a clutch of this stuff in one hand and a clutch of nigger voting
tickets in the yuther.” So we were busy; we just saw Father at night and sometimes then Ringo and I and even Drusilla would take one look at him and we wouldn’t ask him any questions. So it didn’t take them long, because Drusilla was already beaten; she was just marking time without knowing it from that afternoon when the fourteen ladies got into the surreys and buggies and went back to town until one afternoon about two months later when we heard Denny hollering even before the wagon came in the gates, and Aunt Louisa sitting on one of the trunks (that’s what beat Drusilla: the trunks. They had her dresses in them that she hadn’t worn in three years; Ringo never had seen her in a dress until Aunt Louisa came) in mourning even to the crepe bow on her umbrella handle, that hadn’t worn mourning when we were at Hawkhurst two years ago though Uncle Dennison was just as dead then as he was now. She came to the cabin and got out of the wagon, already crying and talking just like the letters sounded, like even when you listened to her you had to skip around fast to make any sense:

“I have come to appeal to them once more with a mother’s tears though I dont think it will do any good though I had prayed until the very last that this boy’s innocence might be spared and preserved but what must be must be and at least we can all three bear our burden together”; sitting in Granny’s chair in the middle of the room, without even laying down the umbrella or taking her bonnet off, looking at the pallet where Father and I slept and then at the quilt nailed to the rafter to make a
room for Drusilla, dabbing at her mouth with a handkerchief that made the whole cabin smell like dead roses. And then Drusilla came in from the mill, in the muddy brogans and the sweaty shirt and overalls and her hair sunburned and full of sawdust, and Aunt Louisa looked at her once and began to cry again, saying, “Lost, lost. Thank God in His mercy that Dennison Hawk was taken before he lived to see what I see.”

She was already beaten. Aunt Louisa made her put on a dress that night; we watched her run out of the cabin in it and run down the hill toward the spring while we were waiting for Father. And he came and walked into the cabin where Aunt Louisa was still sitting in Granny’s chair with the handkerchief before her mouth. “This is a pleasant surprise, Miss Louisa,” Father said.

“It is not pleasant to me, Colonel Sartoris,” Aunt Louisa said. “And after a year, I suppose I cannot call it surprise. But it is still a shock.” So Father came out too and we went down to the spring and found Drusilla hiding behind the big beech, crouched down like she was trying to hide the skirt from Father even while he raised her up. “What’s a dress?” he said. “It dont matter. Come. Get up, soldier.”