“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 town every Saturday to see it, and sometimes Mother would go too, to sit there in the dark while the pistols popped and snapped and the horses galloped and each time it would look like they were going to catch him but you knew they wouldn’t quite, that there would be some more of it next Saturday and the one after that and the one after that, and always the week in between for me and Pete to talk about the villain’s pearlhandled pistol that Pete wished was his and the hero’s spotted horse that I wished was mine. Then one Saturday Mother decided to take Grandpap.
He sat between her and me, already asleep again, so old now that he didn’t even have to snore, until the time came that you could have set a watch by every Saturday afternoon: when the horses all came plunging down the cliff and whirled around and came boiling up the gully until in just one more jump they would come clean out of the screen and go galloping among the little faces turned up to them like corn shucks scattered across a lot. Then Grandpap waked up. For about five seconds he sat perfectly still.
I could even feel him sitting still, he sat so still so hard. Then he said, “Cavalry!” Then he was on his feet. “Forrest!” he said. “Bedford Forrest! Get out of here! Get out of the way!” clawing and scrabbling from one seat to the next one whether there was anybody in them or not, into the aisle with us trying to follow and catch him, and up the aisle toward the door still hollering, “Forrest! Forrest! Here he comes!
Get out of the way!” and outside at last, with half the show behind us and Grandpap blinking and trembling at the light and Pete propped against the wall by his arms like he was being sick, laughing, and father shaking Grandpap’s arm and saying, “You old fool! You old fool!” until Mother made him stop. And we half carried him around to the alley where the wagon was hitched and helped him in and Mother got in and sat by him, holding his hand until he could begin to stop shaking. “Go get him a bottle of beer,” she said.
“He don’t deserve any beer,” Father said. “The old fool, having the whole town laughing. . . .”
“Go get him some beer!” Mother said. “He’s going to sit right here in his own wagon and drink it. Go on!” And Father did, and Mother held the bottle until Grandpap got a good hold on it, and she sat holding his hand until he got a good swallow down him. Then he begun to stop shaking.
He said, “Ah-h-h,” and took another swallow and said, “Ah-h-h,” again and then he even drew his other hand out of Mother’s and he wasn’t trembling now but just a little, taking little darting sips at the bottle and saying “Hah!” and taking another sip and saying “Hah!” again, and not just looking at the bottle now but looking all around, and his eyes snapping a little when he blinked.
“Fools yourselves!” Mother cried at Father and Pete and me. “He wasn’t running from anybody! He was running in front of them, hollering at all clods to look out because better men than they were coming, even seventy-five years afterwards, still powerful, still dangerous, still coming!”
And I knew them too. I had seen them too, who had never been further from Frenchman’s Bend than I could return by night to sleep. It was
