Then they would bring up the mules, tied together. Granny and Ringo could guess to the second now; it would be just enough light left to tell that they were mules, and Granny would get into the wagon and Ringo would hang his legs over the tail gate, holding the lead rope, and we would go on, not fast, so that when we came back to where Ab Snopes and his men waited in the woods you could not even tell that they were mules. Then Ringo would get onto the lead mule and they would turn off into the woods and Granny and I would go on home.
That’s what we did this time; only this time it happened. We couldn’t even see our own team when we heard them coming, the galloping hoofs. They came up fast and mad; Granny jerked up quick and straight, holding Mrs. Compson’s parasol.
“Damn that Ringo!” she said. “I had my doubts about this time all the while.”
Then they were all around us, like the dark itself had fallen down on us, full of horses and mad men shouting “Halt! Halt! If they try to escape, shoot the team!” with me and Granny sitting in the wagon and men jerking the team back and the team jerking and clashing in the traces, and some of them hollering “Where are the mules? The mules are gone!” and the officer cursing and shouting “Of course they are gone!” and cursing Granny and the darkness and the men and mules. Then somebody struck a light and we saw the officer sitting his horse beside the wagon while one of the soldiers lit one light-wood splinter from another.
“Where are the mules?” the officer shouted.
“What mules?” Granny said.
“Don’t lie to me!” the officer shouted. “The mules you just left camp with on that forged order! We have got you this time! We knew you’d turn up again. Orders went out to the whole department to watch for you a month ago! That damn Newberry had his copy in his pocket while you were talking to him.” He cursed Colonel Newberry now. “They ought to let you go free and court-martial him! Where’s the nigger boy and the mules, Mrs. Plurella Harris?”
“I don’t know what you are talking about,” Granny said. “I have no mules except this team I am driving. And my name is Rosa Millard. I am on my way home beyond Jefferson.”
The officer began to laugh; he sat on the horse, laughing. “So that’s your real name, hey? Well, well, well. So you have begun to tell the truth at last. Come now, tell me where those mules are, and tell me where the others you have stolen from us are hid.”
Then Ringo hollered. He and Ab Snopes and the mules had turned off into the woods on the right side of the road, but when he hollered now he was on the left side. “Heyo the road!” he hollered. “One busted loose! Head um off the road!”
And that was all of that. The soldier dropped the light-wood splinter and the officer whirled his horse, already spurring him, hollering, “Two men stay here.” Maybe they all thought he meant two others, because there was just a big noise of bushes and trees like a cyclone was going through them, and then Granny and I were sitting in the wagon like before we had even heard the hoofs.
“Come on,” Granny said. She was already getting out of the wagon.
“Are we going to leave the team and wagon?” I said.
“Yes,” Granny said. “I misdoubted this all the time.”
We could not see at all in the woods; we felt our way, and me helping Granny along and her arm didn’t feel any bigger than a pencil almost, but it wasn’t trembling. “This is far enough,” she said. I found a log and we sat down. Beyond the road we could hear them, thrashing around, shouting and cursing. It sounded far away now. “And the team too,” Granny said.
“But we have nineteen new ones,” I said. “That makes two hundred and forty-eight.” It seemed like a long time, sitting there on the log in the dark. After a while they came back, we could hear the officer cursing and the horses crashing and thumping back into the road.
And then he found the wagon was empty and he cursed sure enough — Granny and me, and the two men he had told to stay there. He was still cursing while they turned the wagon around. Then they went away. After a while we couldn’t hear them. Granny got up and we felt our way back to the road, and we went on, too, toward home.
After a while I persuaded her to stop and rest, and while we were sitting beside the road we heard the buggy coming. We stood up, and Ringo saw us and stopped the buggy.
“Did I holler loud enough?” he said.
“Yes,” Granny said. Then she said, “Well?”
“All right,” Ringo said. “I told Ab Snopes to hide out with them in Hickahala bottom until tomorrow night. All ‘cep’ these two.”
“Mister Snopes,” Granny said.
“All right,” Ringo said. “Get in and le’s go home.”
Granny didn’t move; I knew why, even before she spoke. “Where did you get this buggy?”
“I borrowed hit,” Ringo said. “‘Twarn’t no Yankees handy, so I never needed no paper.”
We got in. The buggy went on. It seemed to me like it had already been all night, but it wasn’t midnight yet — I could tell by the stars — we would be home by midnight almost. We went on. “I reckon you went and told um who we is now,” Ringo said.
“Yes,” Granny said.
“Well, I reckon that completes that,” Ringo said. “Anyway, we handled two hundred and forty-eight head while the business lasted.”
“Two hundred and forty-six,” Granny said. “We have lost the team.”
2
It was after midnight when we reached home; it was already Sunday and when we reached the church that morning there was the biggest crowd waiting there had ever been, though Ab Snopes would not get back with the new mules until tomorrow. So I believed that somehow they had heard about last night and they knew too, like Ringo, that this was the end and that now the books would have to be balanced and closed.
We were late, because Granny made Ringo get up at sunup and take the buggy back where he had got it. So when we reached the church they were already inside, waiting. Brother Fortinbride met us at the door, and they all turned in the pews and watched Granny — the old men and the women and the children and the maybe a dozen niggers that didn’t have any white people now — they looked at her exactly like Father’s fox hounds would look at him when he would go into the dog run, while we went up the aisle to our pew. Ringo had the book; he went up to the gallery; I looked back and saw him leaning his arms on the book on the balustrade.
We sat down in our pew, like before there was a war, only for Father — Granny still and straight in her Sunday calico dress and the shawl and the hat Mrs. Compson had loaned her a year ago; straight and quiet, with her hands holding her prayer book in her lap like always, though there hadn’t been an Episcopal service in the church in almost three years now. Brother Fortinbride was a Methodist, and I don’t know what the people were.
Last summer when we got back with the first batch of mules from Alabama, Granny sent for them, sent out word back into the hills where they lived in dirt-floored cabins, on the little poor farms without slaves. It took three or four times to get them to come in, but at last they all came — men and women and children and the dozen niggers that had got free by accident and didn’t know what to do about it.
I reckon this was the first church with a slave gallery some of them had ever seen, with Ringo and the other twelve sitting up there in the high shadows where there was room enough for two hundred; and I could remember back when Father would be in the pew with us and the grove outside would be full of carriages from the other plantations, and Doctor Worsham in his stole beneath the altar, and for each white person in the auditorium there would be ten niggers in the gallery. And I reckon that on that first Sunday when Granny knelt down in public, it was the first time they had ever seen anyone kneel in a church.
Brother Fortinbride wasn’t a minister either. He was a private in Father’s regiment, and he got hurt bad in the first battle the regiment was in; they thought that he was dead, but he said that Jesus came to him and told him to rise up and live, and Father sent him back home to die, only
