Or maybe you don’t consider me a shrewd enough trader in human meat?’ ‘I can’t say,’ he said. ‘Since day before yesterday I ain’t thought very much about how you or anybody else runs this war.’ ‘And just what were you doing day before yesterday that changed your ideas and habits?’ I said. ‘Fighting some of it,’ he said. ‘Dispersing the enemy.’
‘Where?’ I said. ‘At a lady’s house a few miles from Jefferson,’ he said. ‘One of the niggers called her Granny like the white boy did. The others called her Miss Rosie.’” This time Granny didn’t say anything. She just waited.
“Go on,” she said.
“‘I’m still trying to win battles, even if since day before yesterday you ain’t,’ I said. ‘I’ll send you down to Johnston at Jackson,’ I said. ‘He’ll put you inside Vicksburg, where you can lead private charges day and night too if you want.’ ‘Like hell you will,’ he said. And I said — excuse me— ‘Like hell I won’t.’” And Granny didn’t say anything. It was like day before yesterday with Ab Snopes: not like she hadn’t heard but as if right now it didn’t matter, that this was no time either to bother with such.
“And did you?” she said.
“I can’t. He knows it. You can’t punish a man for routing an enemy four times his weight. What would I say back there in Tennessee, where we both live, let alone that uncle of his, the one they licked for Governor six years ago, on Bragg’s personal staff now, with his face over Bragg’s shoulder every time Bragg opens a dispatch or picks up a pen. And I’m still trying to win battles. But I can’t.
Because of a girl, one single lone young female girl that ain’t got anything under the sun against him except that, since it was his misfortune to save her from a passel of raiding enemy in a situation that everybody but her is trying to forget, she can’t seem to bear to hear his last name. Yet because of that, every battle I plan from now on will be at the mercy of a twenty-two-year-old shavetail — excuse me again — who might decide to lead a private charge any time he can holler at least two men in gray coats into moving in the same direction.” He stopped. He looked at Granny. “Well?” he said.
“So now you’ve got to it,” Granny said. “Well what, Mr. Forrest?”
“Why, just have done with this foolishness. I told you I’ve got that boy, in close arrest, with a guard with a bayonet. But there won’t be any trouble there. I figured even yesterday morning that he had already lost his mind. But I reckon he’s recovered enough of it since the Provost took him last night to comprehend that I still consider myself his commander even if he don’t. So all necessary now is for you to put your foot down. Put it down hard. Now. You’re her grandma. She lives in your home.
And it looks like she is going to live in it a good while yet before she gets back to Memphis to that uncle or whoever it is that calls himself her guardian. So just put your foot down. Make her. Mr. Millard would have already done that if he had been here. And I know when. It would have been two days ago by now.”
Granny waited until he got done. She stood with her arms crossed, holding each elbow in the other. “Is that all I’m to do?” she said.
“Yes,” General Forrest said. “If she don’t want to listen to you right at first, maybe as his commander—”
Granny didn’t even say “Hah.” She didn’t even send me. She didn’t even stop in the hall and call. She went upstairs herself and we stood there and I thought maybe she was going to bring the dulcimer too and I thought how if I was General Forrest I would go back and get Cousin Philip and make him sit in the library until about supper-time while Cousin Melisandre played the dulcimer and sang. Then he could take Cousin Philip on back and then he could finish the war without worrying.
She didn’t have the dulcimer. She just had Cousin Melisandre. They came in and Granny stood to one side again with her arms crossed, holding her elbows. “Here she is,” she said. “Say it — This is Mr. Bedford Forrest,” she told Cousin Melisandre. “Say it,” she told General Forrest.
He didn’t have time. When Cousin Melisandre first came, she tried to read aloud to Ringo and me. It wasn’t much. That is, what she insisted on reading to us wasn’t so bad, even if it was mostly about ladies looking out windows and playing on something (maybe they were dulcimers too) while somebody else was off somewhere fighting. It was the way she read it. When Granny said this is Mister Forrest, Cousin Melisandre’s face looked exactly like her voice would sound when she read to us.
She took two steps into the library and curtsied, spreading her hoops back, and stood up. “General Forrest,” she said. “I am acquainted with an associate of his. Will the General please give him the sincerest wishes for triumph in war and success in love, from one who will never see him again?” Then she curtsied again and spread her hoops backward and stood up and took two steps backward and turned and went out.
After a while Granny said, “Well, Mr. Forrest?”
General Forrest began to cough. He lifted his coattail with one hand and reached the other into his hip pocket like he was going to pull at least a musket out of it and got his handkerchief and coughed into it a while. It wasn’t very clean. It looked about like the one Cousin Philip was trying to wipe his coat off with in the summer house day before yesterday. Then he put the handkerchief back. He didn’t say “Hah” either. “Can I reach the Holly Branch road without having to go through Jefferson?” he said.
Then Granny moved. “Open the desk,” she said. “Lay out a sheet of note-paper.” I did. And I remember how I stood at one side of the desk and General Forrest at the other, and watched Granny’s hand move the pen steady and not very slow and not very long across the paper because it never did take her very long to say anything, no matter what it was, whether she was talking it or writing it.
Though I didn’t see it then, but only later, when it hung framed under glass above Cousin Melisandre’s and Cousin Philip’s mantel: the fine steady slant of Granny’s hand and General Forrest’s sprawling signatures below it that looked itself a good deal like a charge of massed cavalry:
Lieutenant P. S. Backhouse, Company D, Tennessee Cavalry, was this day raised to the honorary rank of Brevet Major General & killed while engaging the enemy. Vice whom Philip St-Just Backus is hereby appointed Lieutenant, Company D, Tennessee Cavalry.
N. B. Forrest Genl
I didn’t see it then. General Forrest picked it up. “Now I’ve got to have a battle,” he said. “Another sheet, son.” I laid that one out on the desk.
“A battle?” Granny said.
“To give Johnston,” he said. “Confound it, Miss Rosie, can’t you understand either that I’m just a fallible mortal man trying to run a military command according to certain fixed and inviolable rules, no matter how foolish the business looks to superior outside folks?”
“All right,” Granny said. “You had one. I was looking at it.”
“So I did,” General Forrest said. “Hah,” he said. “The battle of Sartoris.”
“No,” Granny said. “Not at my house.”
“They did all the shooting down at the creek,” I said.
“What creek?” he said.
So I told him. It ran through the pasture. Its name was Hurricane Creek but not even the white people called it hurricane except Granny. General Forrest didn’t either when he sat down at the desk and wrote the report to General Johnston at Jackson:
A unit of my command on detached duty engaged a body of the enemy & drove him from the field & dispersed him this day 28th ult. April 1862 at Harry kin Creek. With loss of one man.
N. B. Forrest Genl
I saw that. I watched him write it. Then he got up and folded the sheets into his pocket and was already going toward the table where his hat was.
“Wait,” Granny said. “Lay out another sheet,” she said. “Come back here.”
General Forrest stopped and turned. “Another one?”
“Yes!” Granny said. “A furlough, pass — whatever you busy military establishments call them! So John Sartoris can come home long enough to—” and she said it herself, she looked straight at me and even backed up and said some of it over as though to make sure there wouldn’t be any mistake: “ — can come back home and give away that damn bride!”
IV
And that was all. The day came and Granny waked Ringo and me before sunup and we ate what breakfast we had from two plates on the back steps. And we dug up the trunk and brought it into the house and polished the silver and Ringo and I brought dogwood and redbud branches from the pasture and Granny cut the flowers, all of them, cutting them herself with Cousin Melisandre and Philadelphia just carrying the baskets; so many of them until the house was so full that Ringo and I would believe we smelled them even across the pasture each time we came up.
Though
