This was after bitter news had come down from the Tennessee mountains and from Vicksburg, and Sherman had passed through the plantation, and most of the Negroes had followed him.
Almost everything else had gone with the Federal troops, and Mrs. Sutpen had sent word to Wash that he could have the scuppernongs ripening in the arbor in the back yard. This time it was a house servant, one of the few Negroes who remained; this time the Negress had to retreat up the kitchen steps, where she turned. “Stop right dar, white man. Stop right whar you is. You ain’t never crossed dese steps whilst Cunnel here, and you ain’t ghy’ do hit now.”
This was true. But there was this of a kind of pride: he had never tried to enter the big house, even though he believed that if he had, Sutpen would have received him, permitted him. “But I ain’t going to give no black nigger the chance to tell me I can’t go nowhere,” he said to himself.
“I ain’t even going to give Kernel the chance to have to cuss a nigger on my account.” This, though he and Sutpen had spent more than one afternoon together on those rare Sundays when there would be no company in the house. Perhaps his mind knew that it was because Sutpen had nothing else to do, being a man who could not bear his own company.
Yet the fact remained that the two of them would spend whole afternoons in the scuppernong arbor, Sutpen in the hammock and Wash squatting against a post, a pail of cistern water between them, taking drink for drink from the same demijohn.
Meanwhile on weekdays he would see the fine figure of the man — they were the same age almost to a day, though neither of them (perhaps because Wash had a grandchild while Sutpen’s son was a youth in school) ever thought of himself as being so — on the fine figure of the black stallion, galloping about the plantation. For that moment his heart would be quiet and proud.
It would seem to him that that world in which Negroes, whom the Bible told him had been created and cursed by God to be brute and vassal to all men of white skin, were better found and housed and even clothed than he and his; that world in which he sensed always about him mocking echoes of black laughter was but a dream and an illusion, and that the actual world was this one across which his own lonely apotheosis seemed to gallop on the black thoroughbred, thinking how the Book said also that all men were created in the image of God and hence all men made the same image in God’s eyes at least; so that he could say, as though speaking of himself, “A fine proud man. If God Himself was to come down and ride the natural earth, that’s what He would aim to look like.”
Sutpen returned in 1865, on the black stallion. He seemed to have aged ten years. His son had been killed in action the same winter in which his wife had died. He returned with his citation for gallantry from the hand of General Lee to a ruined plantation, where for a year now his daughter had subsisted partially on the meager bounty of the man to whom fifteen years ago he had granted permission to live in that tumbledown fishing camp whose very existence he had at the time forgotten. Wash was there to meet him, unchanged: still gaunt, still ageless, with his pale, questioning gaze, his air diffident, a little servile, a little familiar. “Well, Kernel,” Wash said, “they kilt us but they ain’t whupped us yit, air they?”
That was the tenor of their conversation for the next five years. It was inferior whisky which they drank now together from a stoneware jug, and it was not in the scuppernong arbor. It was in the rear of the little store which Sutpen managed to set up on the highroad: a frame shelved room where, with Wash for clerk and porter, he dispensed kerosene and staple foodstuffs and stale gaudy candy and cheap beads and ribbons to Negroes or poor whites of Wash’s own kind, who came afoot or on gaunt mules to haggle tediously for dimes and quarters with a man who at one time could gallop (the black stallion was still alive; the stable in which his jealous get lived was in better repair than the house where the master himself lived) for ten miles across his own fertile land and who had led troops gallantly in battle; until Sutpen in fury would empty the store, close and lock the doors from the inside. Then he and Wash would repair to the rear and the jug.
But the talk would not be quiet now, as when Sutpen lay in the hammock, delivering an arrogant monologue while Wash squatted guffawing against his post. They both sat now, though Sutpen had the single chair while Wash used whatever box or keg was handy, and even this for just a little while, because soon Sutpen would reach that stage of impotent and furious undefeat in which he would rise, swaying and plunging, and declare again that he would take his pistol and the black stallion and ride single-handed into Washington and kill Lincoln, dead now, and Sherman, now a private citizen. “Kill them!” he would shout. “Shoot them down like the dogs they are—”
“Sho, Kernel; sho, Kernel,” Wash would say, catching Sutpen as he fell. Then he would commandeer the first passing wagon or, lacking that, he would walk the mile to the nearest neighbor and borrow one and return and carry Sutpen home. He entered the house now.
He had been doing so for a long time, taking Sutpen home in whatever borrowed wagon might be, talking him into locomotion with cajoling murmurs as though he were a horse, a stallion himself. The daughter would meet them and hold open the door without a word.
He would carry his burden through the once white formal entrance, surmounted by a fanlight imported piece by piece from Europe and with a board now nailed over a missing pane, across a velvet carpet from which all nap was now gone, and up a formal stairs, now but a fading ghost of bare boards between two strips of fading paint, and into the bedroom. It would be dusk by now, and he would let his burden sprawl onto the bed and undress it and then he would sit quietly in a chair beside. After a time the daughter would come to the door. “We’re all right now,” he would tell her. “Don’t you worry none, Miss Judith.”
Then it would become dark, and after a while he would lie down on the floor beside the bed, though not to sleep, because after a time — sometimes before midnight — the man on the bed would stir and groan and then speak. “Wash?”
“Hyer I am, Kernel. You go back to sleep. We ain’t whupped yit, air we? Me and you kin do hit.”
Even then he had already seen the ribbon about his granddaughter’s waist. She was now fifteen, already mature, after the early way of her kind. He knew where the ribbon came from; he had been seeing it and its kind daily for three years, even if she had lied about where she got it, which she did not, at once bold, sullen, and fearful. “Sho now,” he said. “Ef Kernel wants to give hit to you, I hope you minded to thank him.”
His heart was quiet, even when he saw the dress, watching her secret, defiant, frightened face when she told him that Miss Judith, the daughter, had helped her to make it. But he was quite grave when he approached Sutpen after they closed the store that afternoon, following the other to the rear.
“Get the jug,” Sutpen directed.
“Wait,” Wash said. “Not yit for a minute.”
Neither did Sutpen deny the dress. “What about it?” he said.
But Wash met his arrogant stare; he spoke quietly. “I’ve knowed you for going on twenty years. I ain’t never yit denied to do what you told me to do. And I’m a man nigh sixty. And she ain’t nothing but a fifteen-year-old gal.”
“Meaning that I’d harm a girl? I, a man as old as you are?”
“If you was ara other man, I’d say you was as old as me. And old or no old, I wouldn’t let her keep that dress nor nothing else that come from your hand. But you are different.”
“How different?” But Wash merely looked at him with his pale, questioning, sober eyes. “So that’s why you are afraid of me?”
Now Wash’s gaze no longer questioned. It was tranquil, serene. “I ain’t afraid. Because you air brave. It ain’t that you were a brave man at one minute or day of your life and got a paper to show hit from General Lee. But you air brave, the same as you air alive and breathing. That’s where hit’s different. Hit don’t need no ticket from nobody to tell me that. And I know that whatever you handle or tech, whether hit’s a regiment of men or a ignorant gal or just a hound dog, that you will make
