It came roaring up and went past; the river they had cut through the trees was all full of smoke and noise and sparks and jumping brass, and then empty again, and just Jingus’ old hat bouncing and jumping along the empty track behind it like the hat was alive.
But this time what I saw was something that looked like piles of black straws heaped up every few yards, and we ran into the cut and we could see where they had dug the ties up and piled them and set them on fire. But Cousin Denny was still hollering, “Come see what they done to the rails!” he said.
They were back in the trees; it looked like four or five men had taken each rail and tied it around a tree like you knot a green cornstalk around a wagon stake, and Ringo was hollering, too, now.
“What’s them?” he hollered. “What’s them?”
“That’s what it runs on!” Cousin Denny hollered.
“You mean hit have to come in here and run up and down around these here trees like a squirrel?” Ringo hollered. Then we all heard the horse at once; we just had time to look when Bobolink came up the road out of the trees and went across the railroad and into the trees again like a bird, with Cousin Drusilla riding astride like a man and sitting straight and light as a willow branch in the wind. They said she was the best woman rider in the country.
“There’s Dru!” Cousin Denny hollered. “Come on! She’s been up to the river to see them niggers! Come on!” He and Ringo ran again. When I passed the chimneys, they were just running into the stable. Cousin Drusilla had already unsaddled Bobolink, and she was rubbing him down with a crokersack when I came in. Cousin Denny was still hollering, “What did you see? What are they doing?”
“I’ll tell about it at the house,” Cousin Drusilla said. Then she saw me. She was not tall; it was the way she stood and walked. She had on pants, like a man. She was the best woman rider in the country. When Granny and I were here that Christmas before the war and Gavin Breckbridge had just given Bobolink to her, they looked fine together; it didn’t need Jingus to say that they were the finest-looking couple in Alabama or Mississippi either. But Gavin was killed at Shiloh and so they didn’t marry. She came and put her hand on my shoulder.
“Hello,” she said. “Hello, John Sartoris.” She looked at Ringo. “Is this Ringo?” she said.
“That’s what they tells me,” Ringo said. “What about that railroad?”
“How are you?” Cousin Drusilla said.
“I manages to stand hit,” Ringo said. “What about that railroad?”
“I’ll tell you about that tonight too,” Drusilla said.
“I’ll finish Bobolink for you,” I said.
“Will you?” she said. She went to Bobolink’s head. “Will you stand for Cousin Bayard, lad?” she said. “I’ll see you-all at the house, then,” she said. She went out.
“Yawl sho must ‘a’ had this horse hid good when the Yankees come,” Ringo said.
“This horse?” Cousin Denny said. “Ain’t no damn Yankee going to fool with Dru’s horse no more.” He didn’t holler now, but pretty soon he began again: “When they come to burn the house, Dru grabbed the pistol and run out here — she had on her Sunday dress — and them right behind her.
She run in here and she jumped on Bobolink bareback, without even waiting for the bridle, and one of them right there in the door hollering, ‘Stop,’ and Dru said, ‘Get away, or I’ll ride you down,’ and him hollering, ‘Stop! Stop!’ with his pistol out too” — Cousin Denny was hollering good now— “and Dru leaned down to Bobolink’s ear and said, ‘Kill him, Bob,’ and the Yankee jumped back just in time.
The lot was full of them, too, and Dru stopped Bobolink and jumped down in her Sunday dress and put the pistol to Bobolink’s ear and said, ‘I can’t shoot you all, because I haven’t enough bullets, and it wouldn’t do any good anyway; but I won’t need but one shot for the horse, and which shall it be?’ So they burned the house and went away!” He was hollering good now, with Ringo staring at him so you could have raked Ringo’s eyes off his face with a stick. “Come on!” Cousin Denny hollered. “Le’s go hear about them niggers at the river!”
“I been having to hear about niggers all my life,” Ringo said. “I got to hear about that railroad.”
When we reached the house Cousin Drusilla was already talking, telling Granny mostly, though it was not about the railroad. Her hair was cut short; it looked like Father’s would when he would tell Granny about him and the men cutting each other’s hair with a bayonet.
She was sunburned and her hands were hard and scratched like a man’s that works. She was telling Granny mostly: “They began to pass in the road yonder while the house was still burning. We couldn’t count them; men and women carrying children who couldn’t walk and carrying old men and women who should have been at home waiting to die.
They were singing, walking along the road singing, not even looking to either side. The dust didn’t even settle for two days, because all that night they still passed; we sat up listening to them, and the next morning every few yards along the road would be the old ones who couldn’t keep up any more, sitting or lying down and even crawling along, calling to the others to help them; and the others — the young strong ones — not stopping, not even looking at them. I don’t think they even heard or saw them. ‘Going to Jordan,’ they told me. ‘Going to cross Jordan.’”
“That was what Loosh said,” Granny said. “That General Sherman was leading them all to Jordan.”
“Yes,” Cousin Drusilla said. “The river. They have stopped there; it’s like a river itself, dammed up. The Yankees have thrown out a brigade of cavalry to hold them back while they build the bridge to cross the infantry and artillery; they are all right until they get up there and see or smell the water.
That’s when they go mad. Not fighting; it’s like they can’t even see the horses shoving them back and the scabbards beating them; it’s like they can’t see anything but the water and the other bank.
They aren’t angry, aren’t fighting; just men, women and children singing and chanting and trying to get to that unfinished bridge or even down into the water itself, and the cavalry beating them back with sword scabbards. I don’t know when they have eaten; nobody knows just how far some of them have come.
They just pass here without food or anything, exactly as they rose up from whatever they were doing when the spirit or the voice or whatever it was told them to go. They stop during the day and rest in the woods; then, at night, they move again. We will hear them later — I’ll wake you — marching on up the road until the cavalry stops them.
There was an officer, a major, who finally took time to see I wasn’t one of his men; he said, ‘Can’t you do anything with them? Promise them anything to go back home?’ But it was like they couldn’t see me or hear me speaking; it was only that water and that bank on the other side. But you will see for yourself tomorrow, when we go back.”
“Drusilla,” Aunt Louise said, “you’re not going back tomorrow or any other time.”
“They are going to mine the bridge and blow it up when the army has crossed,” Cousin Drusilla said. “Nobody knows what they will do then.”
“But we cannot be responsible,” Aunt Louise said. “The Yankees brought it on themselves; let them pay the price.”
“Those Negroes are not Yankees, Mother,” Cousin Drusilla said. “At least there will be one person there who is not a Yankee either.” She looked at Granny. “Four, counting Bayard and Ringo.”
Aunt Louise looked at Granny. “Rosa, you shan’t go. I forbid it. Brother John will thank me to do so.”
“I reckon I will,” Granny said. “I’ve got to get the silver anyway.”
“And the mules,” Ringo said; “don’t forget them. And don’t yawl worry about Granny. She ‘cide what she want and then she kneel down about ten seconds and tell God what she aim to do, and then she git up and do hit. And them that don’t like hit can git outen the way or git trompled. But that railroad—”
“And now I reckon we better go to bed,” Granny said. But we didn’t go to bed then. I had to hear about the railroad too; possibly it was more the need to keep even with Ringo (or even ahead of him, since I had seen the railroad when it was a railroad, which he had not) than a boy’s affinity for smoke and fury and thunder and speed.
We sat there in that slave cabin partitioned, like Louvinia’s cabin at home, into two rooms by that suspended quilt beyond which Aunt Louisa and Granny were already in bed and where Cousin Denny should have been too except for the evening’s dispensation he had received, listening too who did not need to hear it again since he had been there to see it when it happened; — we sat there, Ringo and I, listening to Cousin Drusilla and staring at each
