“Loosh,” Granny said, “are you going too?”
“Yes,” Loosh said, “I going. I done been freed; God’s own angel proclamated me free and gonter general me to Jordan. I don’t belong to John Sartoris now; I belongs to me and God.”
“But the silver belongs to John Sartoris,” Granny said. “Who are you to give it away?”
“You ax me that?” Loosh said. “Where John Sartoris? Whyn’t he come and ax me that? Let God ax John Sartoris who the man name that give me to him. Let the man that buried me in the black dark ax that of the man what dug me free.” He wasn’t looking at us; I don’t think he could even see us. He went on.
“‘Fore God, Miss Rosa,” Philadelphy said, “I tried to stop him. I done tried.”
“Don’t go, Philadelphy,” Granny said. “Don’t you know he’s leading you into misery and starvation?”
Philadelphy began to cry. “I knows hit. I knows whut they tole him can’t be true. But he my husband. I reckon I got to go with him.”
They went on. Louvinia had come back; she and Ringo were behind us. The smoke boiled up, yellow and slow, and turning copper-colored in the sunset like dust; it was like dust from a road above the feet that made it, and then went on, boiling up slow and hanging and waiting to die away.
“The bastuds, Granny!” I said. “The bastuds!”
Then we were all three saying it — Granny and me and Ringo, saying it together: “The bastuds!” we cried. “The bastuds! The bastuds!”
RAID
1
GRANNY WROTE THE note with pokeberry juice. “Take it straight to Mrs. Compson and come straight back,” she said. “Don’t you-all stop anywhere.”
“You mean we got to walk?” Ringo said. “You gonter make us walk all them four miles to Jefferson and back, with them two horses standing in the lot doing nothing?”
“They are borrowed horses,” Granny said. “I’m going to take care of them until I can return them.”
“I reckon you calls starting out to be gone you don’t know where and you don’t know how long taking care of—” Ringo said.
“Do you want me to whup you?” Louvinia said.
“Nome,” Ringo said.
We walked to Jefferson and gave Mrs. Compson the note, and got the hat and the parasol and the hand mirror, and walked back home. That afternoon we greased the wagon, and that night after supper Granny got the pokeberry juice again and wrote on a scrap of paper, “Colonel Nathaniel G. Dick, — th Ohio Cavalry,” and folded it and pinned it inside her dress. “Now I won’t forget it,” she said.
“If you was to, I reckon these hellion boys can remind you,” Louvinia said. “I reckon they ain’t forgot him. Walking in that door just in time to keep them others from snatching them out from under your dress and nailing them to the barn door like two coon hides.”
“Yes,” Granny said. “Now we’ll go to bed.”
We lived in Joby’s cabin then, with a red quilt nailed by one edge to a rafter and hanging down to make two rooms. Joby was waiting with the wagon when Granny came out with Mrs. Compson’s hat on, and got into the wagon and told Ringo to open the parasol and took up the reins. Then we all stopped and watched Joby stick something into the wagon beneath the quilts; it was the barrel and the iron parts of the musket that Ringo and I found in the ashes of the house.
“What’s that?” Granny said. Joby didn’t look at her.
“Maybe if they just seed the end of hit they mought think hit was the whole gun,” he said.
“Then what?” Granny said. Joby didn’t look at anybody now.
“I was just doing what I could to help git the silver and the mules back,” he said.
Louvinia didn’t say anything either. She and Granny just looked at Joby. After a while he took the musket barrel out of the wagon. Granny gathered up the reins.
“Take him with you,” Louvinia said. “Leastways he can tend the horses.”
“No,” Granny said. “Don’t you see I have got about all I can look after now?”
“Then you stay here and lemme go,” Louvinia said. “I’ll git um back.”
“No,” Granny said. “I’ll be all right. I shall inquire until I find Colonel Dick, and then we will load the chest in the wagon and Loosh can lead the mules and we will come back home.”
Then Louvinia began to act just like Uncle Buck McCaslin did the morning we started to Memphis.
She stood there holding to the wagon wheel and looked at Granny from under Father’s old hat, and began to holler. “Don’t you waste no time on colonels or nothing!” she hollered. “You tell them niggers to send Loosh to you, and you tell him to get that chest and them mules, and then you whup him!”
The wagon was moving now; she had turned loose the wheel, and she walked along beside it, hollering at Granny: “Take that pairsawl and wear hit out on him!”
“All right,” Granny said. The wagon went on; we passed the ash pile and the chimneys standing up out of it; Ringo and I found the insides of the big clock too. The sun was just coming up, shining back on the chimneys; I could still see Louvinia between them, standing in front of the cabin, shading her eyes with her hand to watch us. Joby was still standing behind her, holding the musket barrel. They had broken the gates clean off; and then we were in the road.
“Don’t you want me to drive?” I said.
“I’ll drive,” Granny said. “These are borrowed horses.”
“Case even Yankee could look at um and tell they couldn’t keep up with even a walking army,” Ringo said. “And I like to know how anybody can hurt this team lessen he ain’t got strength enough to keep um from laying down in the road and getting run over with they own wagon.”
We drove until dark, and camped. By sunup we were on the road again. “You better let me drive a while,” I said.
“I’ll drive,” Granny said. “I was the one who borrowed them.”
“You can tote this pairsawl a while, if you want something to do,” Ringo said. “And give my arm a rest.” I took the parasol and he laid down in the wagon and put his hat over his eyes. “Call me when we gitting nigh to Hawkhurst,” he said, “so I can commence to look out for that railroad you tells about.”
That was how he travelled for the next six days — lying on his back in the wagon bed with his hat over his eyes, sleeping, or taking his turn holding the parasol over Granny and keeping me awake by talking of the railroad which he had never seen though I had seen it that Christmas we spent at Hawkhurst. That’s how Ringo and I were.
We were almost the same age, and Father always said that Ringo was a little smarter than I was, but that didn’t count with us, anymore than the difference in the color of our skins counted. What counted was, what one of us had done or seen that the other had not, and ever since that Christmas I had been ahead of Ringo because I had seen a railroad, a locomotive.
Only I know now it was more than that with Ringo, though neither of us were to see the proof of my belief for some time yet and we were not to recognise it as such even then. It was as if Ringo felt it too and that the railroad, the rushing locomotive which he hoped to see symbolised it — the motion, the impulse to move which had already seethed to a head among his people, darker than themselves, reasonless, following and seeking a delusion, a dream, a bright shape which they could not know since there was nothing in their heritage, nothing in the memory even of the old men to tell the others, ‘This is what we will find’; he nor they could not have known what it was yet it was there — one of those impulses inexplicable yet invincible which appear among races of people at intervals and drive them to pick up and leave all security and familiarity of earth and home and start out, they don’t know where, emptyhanded, blind to everything but a hope and a doom.
We went on; we didn’t go fast. Or maybe it seemed slow because we had got into a country where nobody seemed to live at all; all that day we didn’t even see a house. I didn’t ask and Granny didn’t say; she just sat there under the parasol with Mrs. Compson’s hat on and the horses walking and even our own dust moving ahead of us; after a while even Ringo sat up and looked around.
“We on the wrong road,” he said. “Ain’t even nobody live here, let alone pass here.”
But after a while the hills stopped, the road ran out flat and straight; and all of a sudden Ringo hollered, “Look out! Here they come again to git these uns!” We saw it, too, then — a cloud of dust away to the west, moving slow — too slow for men riding — and then the road we were on ran square into a big broad one running straight on into the east, as the railroad at Hawkhurst did when Granny and I were there that Christmas before the war; all of
