But I reckon that’s too much to hope, and you’ll just have to chance where they send you. But it likely won’t matter, once you are in. The Government done right by me in my day, and it will do right by you. You just enlist wherever they want to send you, need you, and obey your sergeants and officers until you find out how to be soldiers. Obey them, but remember your name and don’t take nothing from no man. You can go now.”
“Wait!” the investigator cried again; again he started, moved forward into the center of the room. “I protest this! I’m sorry about Mr. McCallum’s accident. I’m sorry about the whole business. But it’s out of my hands and out of his hands now. This charge, failure to register according to law, has been made and the warrant issued. It cannot be evaded this way. The course of the action must be completed before any other step can be taken.
They should have thought of this when these boys failed to register. If Mr. Gombault refuses to serve this warrant, I will serve it myself and take these men back to Jefferson with me to answer this charge as made. And I must warn Mr. Gombault that he will be cited for contempt!”
The old marshal turned, his shaggy eyebrows beetling again, speaking down to the investigator as if he were a child, “Ain’t you found out yet that me or you neither ain’t going nowhere for a while?”
“What?” the investigator cried. He looked about at the grave faces once more contemplating him with that remote and speculative regard. “Am I being threatened?” he cried.
“Ain’t anybody paying any attention to you at all,” the marshal said. “Now you just be quiet for a while, and you will be all right, and after a while we can go back to town.”
So he stopped again and stood while the grave, contemplative faces freed him once more of that impersonal and unbearable regard, and saw the two youths approach the bed and bend down in turn and kiss their father on the mouth, and then turn as one and leave the room, passing him without even looking at him.
And sitting in the lamplit hall beside the old marshal, the bedroom door closed now, he heard the truck start up and back and turn and go down the road, the sound of it dying away, ceasing, leaving the still, hot night — the Mississippi Indian summer, which had already outlasted half of November — filled with the loud last shrilling of the summer’s cicadas, as though they, too, were aware of the imminent season of cold weather and of death.
“I remember old Anse,” the marshal said pleasantly, chattily, in that tone in which an adult addresses a strange child. “He’s been dead fifteen-sixteen years now. He was about sixteen when the old war broke out, and he walked all the way to Virginia to get into it.
He could have enlisted and fought right here at home, but his ma was a Carter, so wouldn’t nothing do him but to go all the way back to Virginia to do his fighting, even though he hadn’t never seen Virginia before himself; walked all the way back to a land he hadn’t never even seen before and enlisted in Stonewall Jackson’s army and stayed in it all through the Valley, and right up to Chancellorsville, where them Carolina boys shot Jackson by mistake, and right on up to that morning in ‘Sixty-five when Sheridan’s cavalry blocked the road from Appomattox to the Valley, where they might have got away again.
And he walked back to Mississippi with just about what he had carried away with him when he left, and he got married and built the first story of this house — this here log story we’re in right now — and started getting them boys boys — Jackson and Stuart and Raphael and Lee and Buddy.
“Buddy come along late, late enough to be in the other war, in France in it. You heard him in there. He brought back two medals, an American medal and a French one, and no man knows till yet how he got them, just what he done.
I don’t believe he even told Jackson and Stuart and them. He hadn’t hardly got back home, with them numbers on his uniform and the wound stripes and them two medals, before he had found him a girl, found her right off, and a year later them twin boys was born, the livin’, spittin’ image of old Anse McCallum. If old Anse had just been about seventy-five years younger, the three of them might have been thriblets.
I remember them — two little critters exactly alike, and wild as spikehorn bucks, running around here day and night both with a pack of coon dogs until they got big enough to help Buddy and Stuart and Lee with the farm and the gin, and Rafe with the horses and mules, when he would breed and raise and train them and take them to Memphis to sell, right on up to three, four years back, when they went to the agricultural college for a year to learn more about whiteface cattle.
“That was after Buddy and them had quit raising cotton. I remember that too. It was when the Government first begun to interfere with how a man farmed his own land, raised his cotton.
Stabilizing the price, using up the surplus, they called it, giving a man advice and help, whether he wanted it or not. You may have noticed them boys in yonder tonight; curious folks almost, you might call them.
That first year, when county agents was trying to explain the new system to farmers, the agent come out here and tried to explain it to Buddy and Lee and Stuart, explaining how they would cut down the crop, but that the Government would pay farmers the difference, and so they would actually be better off than trying to farm by themselves.
“‘Why, we’re much obliged,’ Buddy says. ‘But we don’t need no help. We’ll just make the cotton like we always done; if we can’t make a crop of it, that will just be our lookout and our loss, and we’ll try again.’
“So they wouldn’t sign no papers nor no cards nor nothing. They just went on and made the cotton like old Anse had taught them to; it was like they just couldn’t believe that the Government aimed to help a man whether he wanted help or not, aimed to interfere with how much of anything he could make by hard work on his own land, making the crop and ginning it right here in their own gin, like they had always done, and hauling it to town to sell, hauling it all the way into Jefferson before they found out they couldn’t sell it because, in the first place, they had made too much of it and, in the second place, they never had no card to sell what they would have been allowed.
So they hauled it back. The gin wouldn’t hold all of it, so they put some of it under Rafe’s mule shed and they put the rest of it right here in the hall where we are setting now, where they would have to walk around it all winter and keep themselves reminded to be sho and fill out that card next time.
“Only next year they didn’t fill out no papers neither. It was like they still couldn’t believe it, still believed in the freedom and liberty to make or break according to a man’s fitness and will to work, guaranteed by the Government that old Anse had tried to tear in two once and failed, and admitted in good faith he had failed and taken the consequences, and that had give Buddy a medal and taken care of him when he was far away from home in a strange land and hurt.
“So they made that second crop. And they couldn’t sell it to nobody neither because they never had no cards. This time they built a special shed to put it under, and I remember how in that second winter Buddy come to town one day to see Lawyer Gavin Stevens. Not for legal advice how to sue the Government or somebody into buying the cotton, even if they never had no card for it, but just to find out why. ‘I was for going ahead and signing up for it,’ Buddy says.
‘If that’s going to be the new rule. But we talked it over, and Jackson ain’t no farmer, but he knowed father longer than the rest of us, and he said father would have said no, and I reckon now he would have been right.’
“So they didn’t raise any more cotton; they had a plenty of it to last a while — twenty-two bales, I think it was. That was when they went into whiteface cattle, putting old Anse’s cotton land into pasture, because that’s what he would have wanted them to do if the only way they could raise cotton was by the Government telling them how much they could raise and how much they could sell it for, and where, and when, and then pay them for not doing the work
