Ringo and I had seen Yankees; we had shot at one; we had crouched like two rats and heard Granny, unarmed and not even rising from her chair, rout a whole regiment of them from the library. And we had heard about battles and fighting and seen those who had taken part in them, not only in the person of Father when once or twice each year and without warning he would appear on the strong gaunt horse, arrived from beyond that cloudbank region which Ringo believed was Tennessee, but in the persons of other men who returned home with actual arms and legs missing.
But that was it: men had lost arms and legs in sawmills; old men had been telling young men and boys about wars and fighting before they discovered how to write it down: and what petty precisian to quibble about locations in space or in chronology, who to care or insist Now come, old man, tell the truth: did you see this? were you really there? Because wars are wars: the same exploding powder when there was powder, the same thrust and parry of iron when there was not — one tale, one telling, the same as the next or the one before.
So we knew a war existed; we had to believe that, just as we had to believe that the name for the sort of life we had led for the last three years was hardship and suffering. Yet we had no proof of it. In fact, we had even less than no proof; we had had thrust into our faces the very shabby and unavoidable obverse of proof, who had seen Father (and the other men too) return home, afoot like tramps or on crowbait horses, in faded and patched (and at times obviously stolen) clothing, preceded by no flags nor drums and followed not even by two men to keep step with one another, in coats bearing no glitter of golden braid and with scabbards in which no sword reposed, actually almost sneaking home to spend two or three or seven days performing actions not only without glory (plowing land, repairing fences, killing meat for the smoke house) and in which they had no skill but the very necessity for which was the fruit of the absent occupations from which, returning, they bore no proof — actions in the very clumsy performance of which Father’s whole presence seemed (to us, Ringo and me) to emanate a kind of humility and apology, as if he were saying, “Believe me, boys; take my word for it: there’s more to it than this, no matter what it looks like.
I can’t prove it, so you’ll just have to believe me.” And then to have it happen, where we could have been there to see it, and were not: and this no poste and riposte of sweat-reeking cavalry which all war-telling is full of, no galloping thunder of guns to wheel up and unlimber and crash and crash into the lurid grime-glare of their own demon-served inferno which even children would recognise, no ragged lines of gaunt and shrill-yelling infantry beneath a tattered flag which is a very part of that child’s make-believe.
Because this was it: an interval, a space, in which the toad-squatting guns, the panting men and the trembling horses paused, amphitheatric about the embattled land, beneath the fading fury of the smoke and the puny yelling, and permitted the sorry business which had dragged on for three years now to be congealed into an irrevocable instant and put to an irrevocable gambit, not by two regiments or two batteries or even two generals, but by two locomotives.
Cousin Drusilla told it while we sat there in the cabin which smelled of new whitewash and even (still faintly) of Negroes. She probably told us the reason for it (she must have known) — what point of strategy, what desperate gamble not for preservation, since hope of that was gone, but at least for prolongation, which it served. But that meant nothing to us. We didn’t hear, we didn’t even listen; we sat there in that cabin and waited and watched that railroad which no longer existed, which was now a few piles of charred ties among which green grass was already growing, a few threads of steel knotted and twisted about the trunks of trees and already annealing into the living bark, becoming one and indistinguishable with the jungle growth which had now accepted it, but which for us ran still pristine and intact and straight and narrow as the path to glory itself, as it ran for all of them who were there and saw when Ringo and I were not.
Drusilla told about that too; ‘Atlanta’ and ‘Chattanooga’ were in it — the names, the beginning and the end — but they meant no more to us than they did to the other watchers — the black and the white, the old men, the children, the women who would not know for months yet if they were widows or childless or not — gathered, warned by grapevine, to see the momentary flash and glare of indomitable spirit starved by three years free of the impeding flesh.
She told it (and now Ringo and I began to see it; we were there too) — the roundhouse in Atlanta where the engine waited; we were there, we were of them who (they must have) would slip into the roundhouse in the dark, to caress the wheels and pistons and iron flanks, to whisper to it in the darkness like lover to mistress or rider to horse, cajoling ruthlessly of her or it one supreme effort in return for making which she or it would receive annihilation (and who would not pay that price), cajoling, whispering, caressing her or it toward the one moment; we were of them — the old men, the children, the women — gathered to watch, drawn and warned by that grapevine of the oppressed, deprived of everything now save the will and the ability to deceive, turning inscrutable and impassive secret faces to the blue enemies who lived among them.
Because they knew it was going to happen; Drusilla told that too: how they seemed to know somehow the very moment when the engine left Atlanta; it was as if the gray generals themselves had sent the word, had told them, “You have suffered for three years; now we will give to you and your children a glimpse of that for which you have suffered and been denied.” Because that’s all it was.
I know that now. Even the successful passage of a hundred engines with trains of cars could not have changed the situation or its outcome; certainly not two free engines shrieking along a hundred yards apart up that drowsing solitude of track which had seen no smoke and heard no bell in more than a year. I don’t think it was intended to do that. It was like a meeting between two iron knights of the old time, not for material gain but for principle — honor denied with honor, courage denied with courage — the deed done not for the end but for the sake of the doing — put to the ultimate test and proving nothing save the finality of death and the vanity of all endeavor.
We saw it, we were there, as if Drusilla’s voice had transported us to the wandering light-ray in space in which was still held the furious shadow — the brief section of track which existed inside the scope of a single pair of eyes and nowhere else, coming from nowhere and having, needing, no destination, the engine not coming into view but arrested in human sight in thunderous yet dreamy fury, lonely, inviolate and forlorn, wailing through its whistle precious steam which could have meant seconds at the instant of passing and miles at the end of its journey (and cheap at ten times this price) — the flaring and streaming smoke stack, the tossing bell, the starred Saint Andrew’s cross nailed to the cab roof, the wheels and the flashing driving rods on which the brass fittings glinted like the golden spurs themselves — then gone, vanished. Only not gone or vanished either, so long as there should be defeated or the descendants of defeated to tell it or listen to the telling.
“The other one, the Yankee one, was right behind it,” Drusilla said. “But they never caught it. Then the next day they came and tore the track up. They tore the track up so we couldn’t do it again; they could tear the track up but they couldn’t take back the fact that we had done it. They couldn’t take that from us.”
We — Ringo and I — knew what she meant; we stood together just outside the door before Ringo went on to Missy Lena’s cabin, where he was to sleep. “I know what you thinking,” Ringo said. Father was right; he was smarter than me. “But I heard good as you did. I heard every word you heard.”
“Only I saw the track before they tore it up. I saw where it was going to happen.”
“But you didn’t know hit was fixing to happen when you seed the track. So nemmine
