The Unvanquished (6 page)

There was more to Uncle Buck and Buddy than just that. Father said they were ahead of their time; he said they not only possessed, but put into practice, ideas about social relationship that maybe fifty years after they were both dead people would have a name for. These ideas were about land. They believed that land did not belong to people but that people belonged to land and that the earth would permit them to live on and out of it and use it only so long as they behaved and that if they did not behave right, it would shake them off just like a dog getting rid of fleas. They had some kind of a system of book-keeping which must have been even more involved than their betting score against one another, by which all their niggers were to be freed, not given freedom, but earning it, buying it not in money from Uncle Buck and Buddy, but in work from the plantation. Only there were others besides niggers, and this was the reason why Uncle Buck came hobbling across the square, shaking his stick at me and hollering, or at least why it was Uncle Buck who was hobbling and hollering and shaking the stick. One day Father said how they suddenly realised that if the county ever split up into private feuds either with votes or weapons, no family could contend with the McCaslins because all the other families would have only their cousins and kin to recruit from, while Uncle Buck and Buddy would already have an army. These were the dirt farmers, the people whom
the niggers called ‘white trash’—men who had owned no slaves and some of whom even lived worse than the slaves on big plantations. It was another side of Uncle Buck’s and Buddy’s ideas about men and land, which Father said people didn’t have a name for yet, by which Uncle Buck and Buddy had persuaded the white men to pool their little patches of poor hill land along with the niggers and the McCaslin plantation, promising them in return nobody knew exactly what, except that their women and children did have shoes, which not all of them had had before, and a lot of them even went to school. Anyway, they (the white men, the trash) looked on Uncle Buck and Buddy like Deity Himself, so that when Father began to raise his first regiment to take to Virginia and Uncle Buck and Buddy came to town to enlist and the others decided they were too old (they were past seventy), it looked for a while as if Father’s regiment would have to fight its first engagement right there in our pasture. At first Uncle Buck and Buddy said they would form a company of their own men in opposition to Father’s. Then they realised that this wouldn’t stop Father, since he didn’t care whom the men fought under just so they fought, so then Uncle Buck and Buddy put the thumbscrews on Father sure enough. They told Father that if he did not let them go, the solid bloc of private soldier white trash votes which they controlled would not only force Father to call a special election of officers before the regiment left the pasture, it would also demote Father from colonel to major or maybe only a company commander. Father
didn’t mind what they called him; colonel or corporal, it would have been all the same to him, as long as they let him tell them what to do, and he probably wouldn’t have minded being demoted even to private by God Himself; it was the idea that there could be latent within the men he led the power, let alone the desire, to so affront him. So they compromised; they agreed at last that one of the McCaslins should be allowed to go. Father and Uncle Buck and Buddy shook hands on it and they stuck to it; the following summer after Second Manassas when the men did demote Father, it was the McCaslin votes who stuck with and resigned from the regiment along with Father and returned to Mississippi with him and formed his irregular cavalry. So one of them was to go, and they decided themselves which one it would be; they decided in the one possible manner in which the victor could know that he had earned his right, the loser that he had been conquered by a better man; Uncle Buddy looked at Uncle Buck and said, “All right, ’Philus, you old butter-fingered son of a bitch. Get out the cards.”

Father said it was fine, that there were people there who had never seen anything like it for cold and ruthless artistry. They played three hands of draw poker, the first two hands dealt in turn, the winner of the second hand to deal the third; they sat there (somebody had spread a blanket and the whole regiment watched) facing each other with the two old faces that did not look exactly alike so much as they looked exactly like something which after a while you remembered—the portrait
of someone who had been dead a long time and that you knew just by looking at him he had been a preacher in some place like Massachusetts a hundred years ago; they sat there and called those face-down cards correctly without even looking at the backs of them apparently, so that it took sometimes eight and ten deals before the referees could be certain that neither of them knew exactly what was in the other’s hand. And Uncle Buck lost: so that now Uncle Buddy was a sergeant in Tennant’s brigade in Virginia and Uncle Buck was hobbling across the square, shaking his stick at me and hollering:

“By Godfrey, there he is! There’s John Sartoris’ boy!”

The captain came up and looked at me. “I’ve heard of your father,” he said.

“Heard of him?” Uncle Buck shouted. By now people had begun to stop along the walk and listen to him, like they always did, not smiling so he could see it. “Who aint heard about him in this country? Get the Yankees to tell you about him sometime. By Godfrey, he raised the first damn regiment in Mississippi out of his own pocket, and took em to Ferginny and whipped Yankees right and left with em before he found out that what he had bought and paid for wasn’t a regiment of soldiers but a congress of politicians and fools. Fools I say!” he shouted, shaking the stick at me and glaring with his watery fierce eyes like the eyes of an old hawk, with the people along the street listening to him and smiling where he couldn’t see it and the strange captain
looking at him a little funny because he hadn’t heard Uncle Buck before; and I kept on thinking about Louvinia standing there on the porch with Father’s old hat on, and wishing that Uncle Buck would get through or hush so we could go on.

“Fools, I say!” he shouted. “I dont care if some of you folks here do still claim kin with men that elected him colonel and followed him and Stonewall Jackson right up to spitting distance of Washington without hardly losing a man, and then next year turned around and voted him down to major and elected in his stead a damn feller that never even knowed which end of a gun done the shooting until John Sartoris showed him.” He quit shouting just as easy as he started but the shouting was right there, waiting to start again as soon as he found something else to shout about. “I wont say God take care of you and your grandma on the road, boy, because by Godfrey you dont need God’s nor nobody else’s help; all you got to say is ‘I’m John Sartoris’ boy; rabbits, hunt the canebrake’ and then watch the blue bellied sons of bitches fly.”

“Are they leaving, going away?” the captain said.

Then Uncle Buck begun to shout again, going into the shouting easy, without even having to draw a breath: “Leaving? Hell’s skillet, who’s going to take care of them around here? John Sartoris is a damn fool; they voted him out of his own private regiment in kindness, so he could come home and take care of his family, knowing that if he didn’t wouldn’t nobody around here be likely to. But that dont suit John Sartoris because
John Sartoris is a damned confounded selfish coward, askeered to stay at home where the Yankees might get him. Yes sir. So skeered that he has to raise him up another batch of men to protect him every time he gets within a hundred foot of a Yankee brigade. Scouring all up and down the country, finding Yankees to dodge; only if it had been me I would have took back to Ferginny and I’d have showed that new colonel what fighting looked like. But not John Sartoris. He’s a coward and a fool. The best he can do is dodge and run away from Yankees until they have to put a price on his head, and now he’s got to send his family out of the country; to Memphis where maybe the Union Army will take care of them, since it dont look like his own government and fellow citizens are going to.” He ran out of breath then, or out of words anyway, standing there with his tobacco-stained beard trembling and more tobacco running onto it out of his mouth, and shaking his stick at me. So I lifted the reins; only the captain spoke; he was still watching me.

“How many men has your father got in his regiment?” he said.

“It’s not a regiment, sir,” I said. “He’s got about fifty, I reckon.”

“Fifty?” the captain said. “Fifty? We had a prisoner last week who said he had more than a thousand. He said that Colonel Sartoris didn’t fight, he just stole horses.”

Uncle Buck had enough wind to laugh though. He sounded just like a hen, slapping his leg and holding to
the wagon wheel like he was about to fall. “That’s it! That’s John Sartoris! He gets the horses; any fool can step out and get a Yankee. These two damn boys here did that last summer: stepped down to the gate and brought back a whole regiment and them just——How old are you, boy?”

“Fourteen,” I said.

“We aint fourteen yit,” Ringo said. “But we will be in September if we live and nothing happens. I reckon Granny waiting on us, Bayard.”

Uncle Buck quit laughing. He stepped back. “Git on,” he said. “You got a long road.” I turned the wagon. “You take care of your grandma, boy, or John Sartoris will skin you alive. And if he dont, I will!” When the wagon straightened out he began to hobble along beside it. “And when you see him, tell him I said to leave the horses go for a while and kill the bluebellied sons of bitches. Kill them!”

“Yes, sir,” I said. We went on.

“Good thing for his mouth Granny aint here,” Ringo said. She and Joby were waiting for us at the Compsons’ gate. Joby had another basket with a napkin over it and a bottleneck sticking out and some rose cuttings. Then Ringo and I sat behind again and Ringo turning to look back every few feet and saying, “Goodbye, Jefferson. Memphis, how-dy-do!” And then we came to the top of the first hill and he looked back quiet this time and said, “Suppose they dont never get done fighting.”

“All right,” I said. “Suppose it.” I didn’t look back.
At noon we stopped by a spring and Granny opened the basket and she took out the rose cuttings and handed them to Ringo.

“Dip the roots into the spring after you drink,” she said. They had earth still on the roots, in a cloth; when Ringo stooped down to the water I watched him pinch off a little of the dirt and start to put it into his pocket. Then he looked up and saw me watching him and he made like he was going to throw it away. But he didn’t.

“I reckon I can save dirt if I want to,” he said.

“It’s not Sartoris dirt, though,” I said.

“I know hit,” he said. “Hit’s closer than Memphis dirt though. Closer than what you got.”

“What’ll you bet?” I said. He looked at me. “What’ll you swap?” I said. He looked at me.

“What you swap?” he said.

“You know,” I said. He reached into his pocket and brought out the buckle we had shot off the Yankee saddle when we shot the horse last summer. “Gimmit here,” he said. So I took the snuff box from my pocket and emptied half the soil (it was more than Sartoris earth; it was Vicksburg too: the yelling was in it, the embattled, the iron-worn, the supremely invincible) into his hand. “I know hit,” he said. “Hit come from hind the smokehouse. You brung a lot of hit.”

“Yes,” I said. “I brought enough to last.”

We soaked the cuttings every time we stopped and opened the basket, and there was some of the food left on the fourth day because at least once a day we stopped at houses on the road and ate with them, and on the
second night we had supper and breakfast at the same house. But even then Granny would not come inside to sleep. She made her bed down in the wagon by the chest and Joby slept under the wagon with the gun beside him like when we camped on the road. Only it would not be exactly on the road but back in the woods a way; on the third night Granny was in the wagon and Joby and Ringo and I were under the wagon and some cavalry rode up and Granny said, “Joby! the gun!” and somebody got down and took the gun away from Joby and they lit a pine knot and we saw the gray.

“Memphis?” the officer said. “You cant get to Memphis. There was a fight at Cockrum yesterday and the roads ahead are full of Yankee patrols. How in hell—Excuse me, ma’am” (behind me Ringo said, “Git the soap”) “—you ever got this far I dont see. If I were you, I wouldn’t even try to go back, I’d stop at the first house I came to and stay there.”

“I reckon we’ll go on,” Granny said, “like John—Colonel Sartoris told us to. My sister lives in Memphis; we are going there.”

“Colonel Sartoris?” the officer said. “Colonel Sartoris told you?”

“I’m his mother-in-law,” Granny said. “This is his son.”

“Good Lord, ma’am! You cant go a step further. Dont you know that if They captured you and this boy, They could almost force him to come in and surrender?”

Granny looked at him, she was sitting up in the
wagon and her hat was on. “My experience with Yankees has evidently been different from yours. I have no reason to believe that their officers—I suppose they still have officers among them—will bother a woman and two children. I thank you, but my son has directed us to go to Memphis. If there is any information about the roads which my driver should know, I will be obliged if you will instruct him.”

“Then let me give you an escort.—Or better still, there is a house about a mile back; return there and wait. Colonel Sartoris was at Cockrum yesterday, by tomorrow night I believe I can find him and bring him to you.”

“Thank you,” Granny said. “Wherever Colonel Sartoris is, he is doubtless busy with his own affairs. I think we will continue to Memphis as he instructed us.”

So they rode away and Joby came back under the wagon and put the musket between us only every time I turned over I rolled on it so I made him move it and he tried to put it in the wagon with Granny and she wouldn’t let him so he leaned it against a tree and we slept and ate breakfast and went on, with Ringo and Joby looking behind every tree we passed. “You aint going to find them behind a tree we have already passed,” I said. We didn’t. We had passed where a house had burned and then we were passing another house with an old white horse looking at us out of the stable door behind it and then I saw six men running in the next field and then we saw a dustcloud coming fast out of a lane that crossed the road; Joby said, “Them folks
look like they trying to make the Yankees take they stock, running hit up and down the big road in broad daylight like that.” They rode right out of the dustcloud without seeing us at all, crossing the road and the first ten or twelve had already jumped the ditch with pistols in their hands like when you run with a stick of stove wood balanced on your palm, and the last ones came out of the dust with five men running and holding to stirrups and us sitting there in the wagon with Joby holding the mules like they were sitting down on the whiffletrees and his mouth hanging open and his eyes like two eggs, and I had forgotten what the blue coats looked like. It was fast, like that: all sweating horses with wild eyes and men with wild faces full of yelling and then Granny standing up in the wagon and beating the five men about their heads and shoulders with the umbrella while they unfastened the traces and cut the harness off the mules with pocket knives. They didn’t say a word, they didn’t even look at Granny while she was hitting them, they just took the mules out of the wagon and then the two mules and the five men disappeared together in another cloud of dust and the mules came out of the dust soaring like hawks with two men on them and two more just falling backward over the mules’ tails and the fifth man already running too and the two that were on their backs in the road getting up with little scraps of cut leather sticking to them like a kind of black shavings in a sawmill; the three of them went off across the field after the mules and then we heard the pistols away off like striking a handful of
matches at one time and Joby still sitting on the seat with his mouth still open and the ends of the cut reins in his hands and Granny still standing in the wagon with the bent umbrella lifted and hollering at Ringo and me while we jumped out of the wagon and ran across the road.