Then I was on the back gallery again, standing beside Granny above that moil of horses and men in the yard, and she was wrong. It was as if these were not only the same ones who had been at Mrs. Compson’s last year, but somebody had even told them exactly where our outhouse was. The horses were yoked in pairs, but it was not a wagon-tongue, it was a pole, almost a log, twenty feet long, slung from saddle to saddle between the three span; and I remember the faces, unshaven and wan and not so much peering as frantically gleeful, glaring up at us for an instant before the men leaped down and unslung the pole and jerked the horses aside and picked up the pole, three to a side, and began to run across the yard with it as the last rider came around the house, in gray (an officer: it was Cousin Philip, though of course we didn’t know that then, and there was going to be a considerable more uproar and confusion before he finally became Cousin Philip and of course we didn’t know that either), the sabre still lifted and not only standing in the stirrups but almost lying down along the horse’s neck. The six Yankees never saw him.
And we used to watch Father drilling his troop in the pasture, changing them from column to troop front at full gallop, and you could hear his voice even above the sound of the galloping hooves but it wasn’t a bit louder than Granny’s. “There’s a lady in there!” she said. But the Yankees never heard her any more than they had seen Cousin Philip yet, the whole mass of them, the six men running with the pole and Cousin Philip on the horse, leaning out above them with a lifted sabre, rushing on across the yard until the end of the pole struck the outhouse door. It didn’t just overturn, it exploded.
One second it stood there, tall and narrow and flimsy; the next second it was gone and there was a boil of yelling men in blue coats darting and dodging around under Cousin Philip’s horse and the flashing sabre until they could find a chance to turn and run. Then there was a scatter of planks and shingles and Cousin Melisandre sitting beside the trunk in the middle of it, in the spread of her hoops, her eyes shut and her mouth open, still screaming, and after a while a feeble popping of pistol-shots from down along the creek that didn’t sound any more like war than a boy with firecrackers.
“I tried to tell you to wait!” Ab Snopes said behind us, “I tried to tell you them Yankees had done caught on!”
After Joby and Lucius and Ringo and I finished burying the trunk in the pit and hiding the shovel-marks, I found Cousin Philip in the summer house. His sabre and belt were propped against the wall but I don’t reckon even he knew what had become of his hat. He had his coat off too and was wiping it with his handkerchief and watching the house with one eye around the edge of the door. When I came in he straightened up and I thought at first he was looking at me. Then I don’t know what he was looking at. “That beautiful girl,” he said. “Fetch me a comb.”
“They’re waiting for you in the house,” I said. “Granny wants to know what’s the matter.” Cousin Melisandre was all right now. It took Louvinia and Philadelphia both and finally Granny to get her into the house but Louvinia brought the elder-flower wine before Granny had time to send her after it and now Cousin Melisandre and Granny were waiting in the parlor.
“Your sister,” Cousin Philip said. “And a hand-mirror.”
“No, Sir,” I said. “She’s just our cousin. From Memphis. Granny says—” Because he didn’t know Granny. It was pretty good for her to wait any time for anybody. But he didn’t even let me finish.
“That beautiful, tender girl,” he said. “And send a nigger with a basin of water and a towel.” I went back toward the house. This time when I looked back I couldn’t see his eye around the door-edge. “And a clothes brush,” he said.
Granny wasn’t waiting very much. She was at the front door. “Now what?” she said. I told her. “Does the man think we are giving a ball here in the middle of the day? Tell him I said to come on in and wash on the back gallery like we do. Louvinia’s putting dinner on, and we’re already late.” But Granny didn’t know Cousin Philip either. I told her again. She looked at me. “What did he say?” she said.
“He didn’t say anything,” I said. “Just that beautiful girl.”
“That’s all he said to me too,” Ringo said. I hadn’t heard him come in. “‘Sides the soap and water. Just that beautiful girl.”
“Was he looking at you either when he said it?” I said.
“No,” Ringo said. “I just thought for a minute he was.”
Now Granny looked at Ringo and me both. “Hah,” she said, and afterward when I was older I found out that Granny already knew Cousin Philip too, that she could look at one of them and know all the other Cousin Melisandres and Cousin Philips both without having to see them. “I sometimes think that bullets are just about the least fatal things that fly, especially in war. — All right,” she said. “Take him his soap and water. But hurry.”
We did. This time he didn’t say “that beautiful girl.” He said it twice. He took off his coat and handed it to Ringo. “Brush it good,” he said. “Your sister, I heard you say.”
“No, you didn’t,” I said.
“No matter,” he said. “I want a nosegay. To carry in my hand.”
“Those flowers are Granny’s,” I said.
“No matter,” he said. He rolled up his sleeves and began to wash. “A small one. About a dozen blooms. Get something pink.”
I went and got the flowers. I don’t know whether Granny was still at the front door or not. Maybe she wasn’t. At least she never said anything. So I picked the ones Ab Snope’s new Yankee horse had already trampled down and wiped the dirt off of them and straightened them out and went back to the summer house where Ringo was holding the hand-glass while Cousin Philip combed his hair. Then he put on his coat and buckled on his sabre again and held his feet out one at a time for Ringo to wipe his boots off with the towel, and Ringo saw it. I wouldn’t have spoken at all because we were already later for dinner than ever now, even if there hadn’t never been a Yankee on the place. “You tore your britches on them Yankees,” Ringo said.
So I went back to the house. Granny was standing in the hall. This time she just said, “Yes?” It was almost quiet.
“He tore his britches,” I said. And she knew more about Cousin Philip than even Ringo could find out by looking at him. She had the needle already threaded in the bosom of her dress.
And I went back to the summer house and then we came back to the house and up to the front door and I waited for him to go into the hall but he didn’t, he just stood there holding the nosegay in one hand and his hat in the other, not very old, looking at that moment anyway not very much older than Ringo and me for all his braid and sash and sabre and boots and spurs, and even after just two years looking like all our soldiers and most of the other people too did: as if it had been so long now since he had had all he wanted to eat at one time that even his memory and palate had forgotten it and only his body remembered, standing there with his nosegay and that beautiful-girl look in his face like he couldn’t have seen anything even if he had been looking at it.
“No,” he said. “Announce me. It should be your nigger. But no matter.” He said his full name, all three of them, twice, as if he thought I might forget them before I could reach the parlor.
“Go on in,” I said. “They’re waiting for you. They had already been waiting for you even before you found your pants were torn.”
“Announce me,” he said. He said his name again. “Of Tennessee. Lieutenant, Savage’s Battalion, Forrest’s Command, Provisional Army, Department of the West.”
So I did. We crossed the hall to the parlor, where Granny stood between Cousin Melisandre’s chair and the table where the decanter of elder-flower wine and three fresh glasses and even a plate of the tea cakes Louvinia had learned to make from cornmeal
