The Unvanquished (9 page)

“Take him with you,” Louvinia said. “Leastways he can tend the horses.”

“No,” Granny said. “Dont you see I have got about all I can look after now?”

“Then you stay here and lemme go,” Louvinia said. “I’ll git um back.”

“No,” Granny said. “I’ll be all right. I shall inquire until I find Colonel Dick and then we will load the chest in the wagon and Loosh can lead the mules and we will come back home.”

Then Louvinia began to act just like Uncle Buck McCaslin did the morning we started to Memphis. She stood there holding to the wagon wheel and looked at Granny from under Father’s old hat and began to holler. “Dont you waste no time on colonels or nothing!” she hollered. “You tell them niggers to send Loosh to you and you tell him to get that chest and them mules and then you whup him!” The wagon was moving now, she had turned loose the wheel and she walked along beside it, hollering at Granny. “Take that pairsawl and wear hit out on him!”

“All right,” Granny said. The wagon went on; we passed the ash pile and the chimneys standing up out of it: Ringo and I found the insides of the big clock too. The sun was just coming up, shining back on the chimneys;
I could still see Louvinia between them, standing in front of the cabin, shading her eyes with her hand to watch us. Joby was still standing behind her, holding the musket barrel. They had broken the gates clean off and then we were in the road.

“Dont you want me to drive?” I said.

“I’ll drive,” Granny said. “These are borrowed horses.”

“Case even Yankee could look at um and tell they couldn’t keep up with even a walking army,” Ringo said. “And I like to know how anybody can hurt this team lessen he aint got strength enough to keep um from laying down in the road and getting run over with they own wagon.”

We drove until dark, and camped. By sunup we were on the road again. “You better let me drive a while,” I said.

“I’ll drive,” Granny said. “I was the one who borrowed them.”

“You can tote this pairsawl a while, if you want something to do,” Ringo said. “And give my arm a rest.” I took the parasol and he laid down in the wagon and put his hat over his eyes. “Call me when we gitting nigh to Hawkhurst,” he said, “so I can commence to look out for that railroad you tells about.”

That was how he travelled for the next six days—lying on his back in the wagon bed with his hat over his eyes, sleeping, or taking his turn holding the parasol over Granny and keeping me awake by talking of the railroad which he had never seen though which I had
seen that Christmas we spent at Hawkhurst. That’s how Ringo and I were. We were almost the same age, and Father always said that Ringo was a little smarter than I was, but that didn’t count with us, anymore than the difference in the color of our skins counted. What counted was, what one of us had done or seen that the other had not, and ever since that Christmas I had been ahead of Ringo because I had seen a railroad, a locomotive. Only I know now it was more than that with Ringo, though neither of us was to see the proof of my belief for some time yet and we were not to recognise it as such even then. It was as if Ringo felt it too and that the railroad, the rushing locomotive which he hoped to see symbolised it—the motion, the impulse to move which had already seethed to a head among his people, darker than themselves, reasonless, following and seeking a delusion, a dream, a bright shape which they could not know since there was nothing in their heritage, nothing in the memory even of the old men to tell the others, ‘This is what we will find’; he nor they could not have known what it was yet it was there—one of those impulses inexplicable yet invincible which appear among races of people at intervals and drive them to pick up and leave all security and familiarity of earth and home and start out, they dont know where, empty handed, blind to everything but a hope and a doom.

We went on; we didn’t go fast. Or maybe it seemed slow because we had got into a country where nobody seemed to live at all; all that day we didn’t even see a house. I didn’t ask and Granny didn’t say; she just sat
there under the parasol with Mrs Compson’s hat on and the horses walking and even our own dust moving ahead of us; after a while even Ringo sat up and looked around. “We on the wrong road,” he said. “Aint even nobody live here, let alone pass here.”

But after a while the hills stopped, the road ran out flat and straight and all of a sudden Ringo hollered, “Look out! Here they come again to git these uns!” We saw it too then, a cloud of dust away to the west, moving slow, too slow for men riding, and then the road we were on ran square into a big broad one running straight on into the east as the railroad at Hawkhurst did when Granny and I were there that Christmas before the War; all of a sudden I remembered it.

“This is the road to Hawkhurst,” I said. But Ringo was not listening; he was looking at the dust, and the wagon stopped now in the road with the horses’ heads hanging and our dust overtaking us again and the big dustcloud coming slow up in the west.

“Cant you see um coming?” Ringo hollered. “Git on away from here!”

“They aint Yankees,” Granny said. “The Yankees have already been here.” Then we saw it too: a burned house like ours; three chimneys standing above a mound of ashes and then we saw a white woman and a child looking at us from a cabin behind them. Granny looked at the dustcloud, then she looked at the empty broad road going on into the east. “This is the way,” she said.

We went on. It seemed like we went slower than ever now, with the dustcloud behind us and the burned
houses and gins and thrown down fences on either side and the white women and children—we never saw a nigger at all—watching us from the nigger cabins where they lived now like we lived at home; we didn’t stop. “Poor folks,” Granny said. “I wish we had enough to share with them.”

At sunset we drew off the road and camped; Ringo was looking back. “Whatever hit is, we done went off and left hit,” he said. “I dont see no dust.” We slept in the wagon this time, all three of us; I dont know what time it was, only that all of a sudden I was awake. Granny was already sitting up in the wagon, I could see her head against the branches and the stars; all of a sudden all three of us were sitting up in the wagon, listening. They were coming up the road. It sounded like about fifty of them; we could hear the feet hurrying, and a kind of panting murmur. It was not singing exactly, it was not that loud; it was just a sound, a breathing, a kind of gasping murmuring chant and the feet whispering fast in the deep dust. I could hear women too and then all of a sudden I began to smell them. “Niggers,” I whispered.

“Shhhhhh,” I whispered. We couldn’t see them and they did not see us; maybe they didn’t even look, just walking fast in the dark with that panting hurrying murmuring, going on. And then the sun rose and we went on too, along that big broad empty road between the burned houses and gins and fences. Before it had been like passing through a country where nobody had ever lived; now it was like passing through one where
everybody had died at the same moment. That night we waked up three times and sat up in the wagon in the dark and heard niggers pass in the road. The last time it was after dawn and we had already fed the horses. It was a big crowd of them this time and they sounded like they were running, like they had to run to keep ahead of daylight. Then they were gone. Ringo and I had taken up the harness again when Granny said, “Wait. Hush.” It was just one; we could hear her panting and sobbing, and then we heard another sound. Granny began to get down from the wagon. “She fell,” she said. “You all hitch up and come on.”

When we turned into the road the woman was kind of crouched beside it, holding something in her arms and Granny standing beside her. It was a baby, a few months old; she held it like she thought maybe Granny was going to take it away from her. “I been sick and I couldn’t keep up,” she said. “They went off and left me.”

“Is your husband with them?” Granny said.

“Yessum,” the woman said. “They’s all there.”

“Who do you belong to?” Granny said. Then she didn’t answer. She squatted there in the dust, crouched over the baby. “If I give you something to eat, will you turn around and go back home?” Granny said. Still she didn’t answer. She just squatted there. “You see you cant keep up with them and that they aint going to wait for you,” Granny said. “Do you want to die here in the road for buzzards to eat?” But she didn’t even look at Granny, she just squatted there.

“Hit’s Jordan we coming to,” she said. “Jesus gonter see me that far.”

“Get in the wagon,” Granny said. She got in, she squatted again just like she had in the road, holding the baby and not looking at anything, just hunkered down and swaying on her hams as the wagon rocked and jolted. The sun was up, we went down a long hill and began to cross a creek bottom.

“I’ll get out here,” she said. Granny stopped the wagon and she got out. There was nothing at all but the thick gum and cypress and thick underbrush still full of shadow.

“You go back home, girl,” Granny said. She just stood there. “Hand me the basket,” Granny said. I handed it to her and she opened it and gave the woman a piece of bread and meat. We went on; we began to mount the hill. When I looked back she was still standing there, holding the baby and the bread and meat Granny had given her. She was not looking at us. “Were the others there in that bottom?” Granny asked Ringo.

“Yessum,” Ringo said. “She done found um. Reckon she gonter lose um again tonight though.”

We went on; we mounted the hill and crossed the crest of it. When I looked back this time the road was empty. That was the morning of the sixth day.

Late that afternoon we were descending again; we came around a curve in the late level shadows and our
own quiet dust and I saw the graveyard on the knoll and the marble shaft at Uncle Dennison’s grave; there was a dove somewhere in the cedars. Ringo was asleep again under his hat in the wagon bed but he waked as soon as I spoke, even though I didn’t speak loud and didn’t speak to him. “There’s Hawkhurst,” I said.

“Hawkhurst?” he said, sitting up. “Where’s that railroad?” on his knees now and looking for something which he would have to find in order to catch up with me and which he would have to recognise only through hearsay when he saw it: “Where is it? Where?”

“You’ll have to wait for it,” I said.

“Seem like I been waiting on hit all my life,” he said. “I reckon you’ll tell me next the Yankees done moved hit too.”

The sun was going down. Because suddenly I saw it shining level across the place where the house should have been and there was no house there. And I was not surprised; I remember that; I was just feeling sorry for Ringo, since (I was just fourteen then) if the house was gone, they would have taken the railroad too, since anybody would rather have a railroad than a house. We didn’t stop; we just looked quietly at the same mound of ashes, the same four chimneys standing gaunt and blackened in the sun like the chimneys at home. When we reached the gate Cousin Denny was running down the drive toward us. He was ten; he ran up to the wagon with his eyes round and his mouth already open for hollering. “Denny,” Granny said. “Do you know us?”

“Yessum,” Cousin Denny said. He looked at me, hollering. “Great God, come——”

“Where’s your mother?” Granny said.

“In Jingus’ cabin,” Cousin Denny said; he didn’t even look at Granny. “They burnt the house.—Great God,” he hollered, “come see what They done to the railroad!”

We ran, all three of us. Granny hollered something and I turned and put the parasol back into the wagon and hollered Yessum back at her and ran on and caught up with Cousin Denny and Ringo in the road and we ran on over the hill and then it came in sight. When Granny and I were here before Cousin Denny showed me the railroad but he was so little then that Jingus had to carry him. It was the straightest thing I ever saw, running straight and empty and quiet through a long empty gash cut through the trees and the ground too and full of sunlight like water in a river only straighter than any river, with the crossties cut off even and smooth and neat and the light shining on the rails like on two spider threads running straight on to where you couldn’t even see that far. It looked clean and neat, like the yard behind Louvinia’s cabin after she had swept it on Saturday morning, with those two little threads that didn’t look strong enough for anything to run on, running straight and fast and light like they were getting up speed to jump clean off the world. Jingus knew when the train would come, he held my hand and carried Cousin Denny and we stood between the rails and he showed us where it would come from, and then he
showed us where the shadow of a dead pine would come to a stob he had driven in the ground and then you would hear the whistle. And we got back and watched the shadow and then we heard it; it whistled and then it got louder and louder fast and Jingus went to the track and took his hat off and held it out with his face turned back toward us and his mouth hollering “Watch now! Watch!” even after we couldn’t hear him for the train; and then it passed. It came roaring up and went past; the river they had cut through the trees was all full of smoke and noise and sparks and jumping brass and then empty again and just Jingus’ old hat bouncing and jumping along the empty track behind it like the hat was alive. But this time what I saw was something that looked like piles of black straws heaped up every few yards and we ran into the cut and we could see where they had dug the ties up and piled them and set them on fire. But Cousin Denny was still hollering. “Come see what They done to the rails,” he said. They were back in the trees; it looked like four or five men had taken each rail and tied it around a tree like you knot a green cornstalk around a wagon stake, and Ringo was hollering too now.

“What’s them?” he hollered. “What’s them?”

“That’s what it runs on!” Cousin Denny hollered.

“You mean hit have to come in here and run up and down around these here trees like a squirrel?” Ringo hollered. Then we all heard the horse at once; we just had time to look when Bobolink came up the road out of the trees and went across the railroad and into the
trees again like a bird, with Cousin Drusilla riding astride like a man and sitting straight and light as a willow branch in the wind. They said she was the best woman rider in the country.