“Yes. That’s it.”
“Of Vatch?”
“Not Vatch. I’m just afraid. I think my luck has given out. I know that it has lasted too long; I am afraid that I shall find that I have forgot how to be afraid. So I cant risk it. I cant risk finding that I have lost touch with truth. Not like Jubal here. He believes that I still belong to him; he will not believe that I have been freed. He wont even let me tell him so. He does not need to bother about truth, you see.”
“We would work. She might not look like the Miss’ippi women that wear shoes all the time. But we would learn. We would not shame you before them.”
“No,” Weddel said. “I cannot.”
“Then you go away. Now.”
“How can I? You see that he cannot ride, cannot stay on a horse.” The boy did not answer at once; an instant later Weddel could almost feel the tenseness, the utter immobility, though he himself had heard no sound; he knew that the boy, crouching, not breathing, was looking toward the ladder. “Which one is it?” Weddel whispered.
“It’s paw.”
“I’ll go down. You stay here. You keep my pistol for me.”
X
The dark air was high, chill, cold. In the vast invisible darkness the valley lay, the opposite cold and invisible range black on the black sky. Clutching the stub of his missing arm across his chest, he shivered slowly and steadily.
“Go,” the father said.
“The war is over,” Weddel said. “Vatch’s victory is not my trouble.”
“Take your horses and nigra, and ride on.”
“If you mean your daughter, I never saw her but once and I never expect to see her again.”
“Ride on,” the father said. “Take what is yours, and ride on.”
“I cannot.” They faced one another in the darkness. “After four years I have bought immunity from running.”
“You have till daylight.”
“I have had less than that in Virginia for four years. And this is just Tennessee.” But the other had turned; he dissolved into the black slope. Weddel entered the stable and mounted the ladder. Motionless above the snoring Negro the boy squatted.
“Leave him here,” the boy said. “He aint nothing but a nigra. Leave him, and go.”
“No,” Weddel said.
The boy squatted above the snoring Negro. He was not looking at Weddel, yet there was between them, quiet and soundless, the copse, the sharp dry report, the abrupt wild thunder of upreared horse, the wisping smoke. “I can show you a short cut down to the valley. You will be out of the mountains in two hours. By daybreak you will be ten miles away.”
“I cant. He wants to go home too. I must get him home too.” He stooped; with his single hand he spread the cloak awkwardly, covering the Negro closer with it. He heard the boy creep away, but he did not look. After a while he shook the Negro. “Jubal,” he said.
The Negro groaned; he turned heavily, sleeping again. Weddel squatted above him as the boy had done. “I thought that I had lost it for good,” he said. “ — The peace and the quiet; the power to be afraid again.”
XI
The cabin was gaunt and bleak in the thick cold dawn when the two horses passed out the sagging gate and into the churned road, the Negro on the Thoroughbred, Weddel on the sorrel. The Negro was shivering. He sat hunched and high, with updrawn knees, his face almost invisible in the oilcloth hood.
“I tole you dey wuz fixing to pizen us wid dat stuff,” he said. “I tole you. Hillbilly rednecks. En you not only let um pizen me, you fotch me de pizen wid yo own hand. O Lawd, O Lawd! If we ever does git home.”
Weddel looked back at the cabin, at the weathered, blank house where there was no sign of any life, not even smoke. “She has a young man, I suppose — a beau.” He spoke aloud, musing, quizzical. “And that boy. Hule.
He said to come within sight of a laurel copse where the road disappears, and take a path to the left. He said we must not pass that copse.”
“Who says which?” the Negro said. “I aint going nowhere. I going back to dat loft en lay down.”
“All right,” Weddel said. “Get down.”
“Git down?”
“I’ll need both horses. You can walk on when you are through sleeping.”
“I ghy tell yo maw,” the Negro said. “I ghy tell um. Ghy tell how after four years you aint got no more sense than to not know a Yankee when you seed um. To stay de night wid Yankees en let um pizen one of Mistis’ niggers. I ghy tell um.”
“I thought you were going to stay here,” Weddel said. He was shivering too. “Yet I am not cold,” he said. “I am not cold.”
“Stay here? Me? How in de world you ever git home widout me? Whut I tell Mistis when I come in widout you en she ax me whar you is?”
“Come,” Weddel said. He lifted the sorrel into motion. He looked quietly back at the house, then rode on. Behind him on the Thoroughbred the Negro muttered and mumbled to himself in woebegone singsong. The road, the long hill which yesterday they had toiled up, descended now. It was muddy, rockchurned, scarred across the barren and rocky land beneath the dissolving sky, jolting downward to where the pines and laurel began. After a while the cabin had disappeared.
“And so I am running away,” Weddel said. “When I get home I shall not be very proud of this. Yes, I will. It means that I am still alive. Still alive, since I still know fear and desire. Since life is an affirmation of the past and a promise to the future. So I am still alive — Ah.” It was the laurel copse.
About three hundred yards ahead it seemed to have sprung motionless and darkly secret in the air which of itself was mostly water. He drew rein sharply, the Negro, hunched, moaning, his face completely hidden, overriding him unawares until the Thoroughbred stopped of its own accord.
“But I dont see any path—” Weddel said; then a figure emerged from the copse, running toward them. Weddel thrust the reins beneath his groin and withdrew his hand inside his cloak. Then he saw that it was the boy. He came up trotting. His face was white, strained, his eyes quite grave.
“It’s right yonder,” he said.
“Thank you,” Weddel said. “It was kind of you to come and show us, though we could have found it, I imagine.”
“Yes,” the boy said as though he had not heard. He had already taken the sorrel’s bridle. “Right tother of the brush. You cant see hit until you are in hit.”
“In whut?” the Negro said. “I ghy tell um. After four years you aint got no more sense. . . .”
“Hush,” Weddel said. He said to the boy, “I am obliged to you. You’ll have to take that in lieu of anything better. And now you get on back home. We can find the path. We will be all right now.”
“They know the path too,” the boy said. He drew the sorrel forward. “Come on.”
“Wait,” Weddel said, drawing the sorrel up. The boy still tugged at the bridle, looking on ahead toward the copse. “So we have one guess and they have one guess. Is that it?”
“Damn you to hell, come on!” the boy said, in a kind of thin frenzy. “I am sick of hit. Sick of hit.”
“Well,” Weddel said. He looked about, quizzical, sardonic, with his gaunt, weary, wasted face. “But I must move. I cant stay here, not even if I had a house, a roof to live under. So I have to choose between three things. That’s what throws a man off — that extra alternative. Just when he has come to realize that living consists in choosing wrongly between two alternatives, to have to choose among three. You go back home.”
The boy turned and looked up at him. “We’d work. We could go back to the house now, since paw and Vatch are . . . We could ride down the mou-tin, two on one horse and two on tother. We could go back to the valley and get married at Mayesfield. We would not shame you.”
“But she has a young man, hasn’t she? Somebody that waits for her at church on Sunday and walks home and takes Sunday dinner, and maybe fights the other young men because of her?”
“You wont take us, then?”
“No. You go back home.”
For a while the boy stood, holding the bridle, his face lowered. Then he turned; he said quietly: “Come on, then. We got to hurry.”
“Wait,” Weddel said; “what are you going to do?”
“I’m going a piece with you. Come on.” He dragged the sorrel forward, toward the roadside.
“Here,” Weddel said, “you go on back home. The war is over now. Vatch knows that.”
The boy did not answer. He led the sorrel into the underbrush. The Thoroughbred hung back. “Whoa, you Caesar!” the Negro said. “Wait, Marse Soshay. I aint gwine ride down no. . . .”
The boy looked over his shoulder without stopping. “You keep back there,” he said. “You keep where you are.”
The path was a faint scar, doubling and twisting among the brush. “I see it now,” Weddel said. “You go back.”
“I’ll go a piece with you,” the boy said; so quietly that Weddel discovered that he had been holding his breath, in a taut, strained alertness. He breathed again, while the sorrel jolted stiffly downward beneath him. “Nonsense,” he thought. “He will have
