“For his country! He had no country: this one I too repudiate. His country and mine both was ravaged and polluted and destroyed eighty years ago, before even I was born. His forefathers fought and died for it then, even though what they fought and lost for was a dream. He didn’t even have a dream. He died for an illusion. In the interests of usury, by the folly and rapacity of politicians, for the glory and aggrandisement of organized labor!”
“Yes,” Mother said. “Weep.”
“The fear of elective servants for their incumbencies! The subservience of misled workingmen for the demagogues who misled them! Shame? Grief? How can poltroonery and rapacity and voluntary thralldom know shame or grief?”
“All men are capable of shame,” Mother said. “Just as all men are capable of courage and honor and sacrifice. And grief too. It will take time, but they will learn it. It will take more grief than yours and mine, and there will be more. But it will be enough.”
“When? When all the young men are dead? What will there be left then worth the saving?”
“I know,” Mother said. “I know. Our Pete was too young too to have to die.” Then I realized that their hands were no longer locked, that he was erect again and that the pistol was hanging slack in Mother’s hand against her side, and for a minute I thought she was going to unzip the satchel and take the towel out of it.
But she just laid the pistol back on the table and stepped up to him and took the handkerchief from his breast pocket and put it into his hand and stepped back. “That’s right,” she said. “Weep. Not for him: for us, the old, who don’t know why. What is your Negro’s name?”
But he didn’t answer. He didn’t even raise the handkerchief to his face. He just stood there holding it, like he hadn’t discovered yet that it was in his hand, or perhaps even what it was Mother had put there. “For us, the old,” he said. “You believe. You have had three months to learn again, to find out why; mine happened yesterday. Tell me.”
“I don’t know,” Mother said. “Maybe women are not supposed to know why their sons must die in battle; maybe all they are supposed to do is just to grieve for them. But my son knew why And my brother went to the war when I was a girl, and our mother didn’t know why either, but he did.
And my grandfather was in that old one there too, and I reckon his mother didn’t know why either, but I reckon he did. And my son knew why he had to go to this one, and he knew I knew he did even though I didn’t, just as he knew that this child here and I both knew he would not come back. But he knew why, even if I didn’t, couldn’t, never can. So it must be all right, even if I couldn’t understand it. Because there is nothing in him that I or his father didn’t put there. What is your Negro’s name?”
He called the name then. And the nigger wasn’t so far away after all, though when he entered Major de Spain had already turned so that his back was toward the door. He didn’t look around. He just pointed toward the table with the hand Mother had put the handkerchief into, and the nigger went to the table without looking at anybody and without making any more noise on the floor than a cat and he didn’t stop at all; it looked to me like he had already turned and started back before he even reached the table: one flick of the black hand and the white sleeve and the pistol vanished without me even seeing him touch it and when he passed me again going out, I couldn’t see what he had done with it. So Mother had to speak twice before I knew she was talking to me.
“Come,” she said.
“Wait,” said Major de Spain. He had turned again, facing us. “What you and his father gave him. You must know what that was.”
“I know it came a long way,” Mother said. “So it must have been strong to have lasted through all of us. It must have been all right for him to be willing to die for it after that long time and coming that far. Come,” she said again.
“Wait,” he said. “Wait. Where did you come from?”
Mother stopped. “I told you: Frenchman’s Bend.”
“I know. How? By wagon? You have no car.”
“Oh,” Mother said. “We came in Mr. Quick’s bus. He comes in every Saturday.”
“And waits until night to go back. I’ll send you back in my car.” He called the nigger’s name again. But Mother stopped him. “Thank you,” she said. “We have already paid Mr. Quick. He owes us the ride back home.”
There was an old lady born and raised in Jefferson who died rich somewhere in the North and left some money to the town to build a museum with. It was a house like a church, built for nothing else except to hold the pictures she picked out to put in it — pictures from all over the United States, painted by people who loved what they had seen or where they had been born or lived enough to want to paint pictures of it so that other people could see it too; pictures of men and women and children, and the houses and streets and cities and the woods and fields and streams where they worked or lived or pleasured, so that all the people who wanted to, people like us from Frenchman’s Bend or from littler places even than Frenchman’s Bend in our county or beyond our state too, could come without charge into the cool and the quiet and look without let at the pictures of men and women and children who were the same people that we were even if their houses and barns were different and their fields worked different, with different things growing in them.
So it was already late when we left the museum, and later still when we got back to where the bus waited, and later still more before we got started, although at least we could get into the bus and take our shoes and stockings back off.
Because Mrs. Quick hadn’t come yet and so Solon had to wait for her, not because she was his wife but because he made her pay a quarter out of her egg-money to ride to town and back on Saturday, and he wouldn’t go off and leave anybody who had paid him.
And so, even though the bus ran fast again, when the road finally straightened out into the long Valley stretch, there was only the last sunset spoking out across the sky, stretching all the way across America from the Pacific ocean, touching all the places that the men and women in the museum whose names we didn’t even know had loved enough to paint pictures of them, like a big soft fading wheel.
And I remembered how Father used to always prove any point he wanted to make to Pete and me, by Grandfather. It didn’t matter whether it was something he thought we ought to have done and hadn’t, or something he would have stopped us from doing if he had just known about it in time. “Now, take your Grandpap,” he would say. I could remember him too: Father’s grandfather even, old, so old you just wouldn’t believe it, so old that it would seem to me he must have gone clean back to the old fathers in Genesis and Exodus that talked face to face with God, and Grandpap outlived them all except him.
It seemed to me he must have been too old even to have actually fought in the old Confederate war, although that was about all he talked about, not only when we thought that maybe he was awake but even when we knew he must be asleep, until after a while we had to admit that we never knew which one he really was. He would sit in his chair under the mulberry in the yard or on the sunny end of the front gallery or in his corner by the hearth; he would start up out of the chair and we still wouldn’t know which one he was, whether he never had been asleep or whether he hadn’t ever waked even when he jumped up, hollering, “Look out! Look out!
Here they come!” He wouldn’t even always holler the same name; they wouldn’t even always be on the same side or even soldiers: Forrest, or Morgan, or Abe Lincoln, or Van Dorn, or Grant or Colonel Sartoris himself, whose people still lived in our county, or Mrs. Rosa Millard, Colonel Sartoris’s mother-in-law who stood off the Yankees and carpetbaggers too for the whole four years of the war until Colonel Sartoris could get back home. Pete thought it was just funny. Father and I were ashamed. We didn’t know what Mother thought nor even what it was, until the afternoon at the picture show.
It was a continued picture, a Western; it seemed to me that it had been running every Saturday afternoon for years. Pete and Father and I would go in to
