The lieutenant didn’t say “Hah!” this time.
He didn’t do anything yet; I reckon he was still enjoying waiting a little longer to get good and mad. He just kind of grunted. “When you get done here, you can move into town and keep busy all winter, can’t you?” he said. Then he sat back in the saddle. He didn’t say “Hah!” now either; it was his eyes that said it, looking at me.
They were a kind of thin milk color, like the chine knucklebone in a ham. “All right,” he said. “Who lives up there now? What’s her name today, hey?”
Ringo was watching him now, though I don’t think he suspected yet who he was. “Don’t nobody,” he said. “The roof leaks.” One of the men made a kind of sound; maybe it was laughing. The lieutenant started to whirl around, and then he started not to; then he sat there glaring down at Ringo with his mouth beginning to open. “Oh,” Ringo said, “you mean way back yonder in the quarters. I thought you was still worrying about them chimneys.”
This time the soldier did laugh, and this time the lieutenant did whirl around, cursing at the soldier; I would have known him now even if I hadn’t before. He cursed at them all now, sitting there with his face swelling up. “Blank-blank-blank!” he shouted.
“Get to hell on out of here! He said that pen is down there in the creek bottom beyond the pasture. If you meet man, woman or child and they so much as smile at you, shoot them! Get!” The soldiers went on, galloping up the drive; we watched them scatter out across the pasture. The lieutenant looked at me and Ringo; he said “Hah!” again, glaring at us. “You boys come with me. Jump!”
He didn’t wait for us; he galloped, too, up the drive. We ran; Ringo looked at me. “‘He’ said the pen was in the creek bottom,” Ringo said. “Who you reckon ‘he’ is?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Well, I reckon I know,” Ringo said. But we didn’t talk any more. We ran on up the drive. The lieutenant had reached the cabin now, and Granny came out the door. I reckon she had seen him, too, because she already had her sunbonnet on. They looked at us once, then Granny went on, too, walking straight, not fast, down the path toward the lot, with the lieutenant behind her on the horse. We could see his shoulders and his head, and now and then his hand and arm, but we couldn’t hear what he was saying. “I reckon this does complete hit,” Ringo said.
But we could hear him before we reached the new fence. Then we could see them standing at the fence that Joby and I had just finished — Ganny straight and still, with her sunbonnet on and the shawl drawn tight over her shoulders where she had her arms folded in it so that she looked littler than anybody I could remember, like during the four years she hadn’t got any older or weaker, but just littler and littler and straighter and straighter and more and more indomitable; and the lieutenant beside her with one hand on his hip and waving a whole handful of letters at Granny’s face with the other.
“Look like he got all we ever wrote there,” Ringo said. The soldiers’ horses were all tied along the fence; they were inside the pen now, and they and Joby and Ab Snopes had the forty-odd old mules and the nineteen new ones hemmed into the corner. The mules were still trying to break out, only it didn’t look like that. It looked like every one of them was trying to keep the big burned smear where Granny and Ringo had blotted the U. S. brand turned so that the lieutenant would have to look at it.
“And I guess you will call those scars left-handed trace galls!” the lieutenant said. “You have been using cast-off band-saw bands for traces, hey? I’d rather engage Forrest’s whole brigade every morning for six months than spend that same length of time trying to protect United States property from defenseless Southern women and niggers and children. Defenseless!” he shouted. “Defenseless! God help the North if Davis and Lee had ever thought of the idea of forming a brigade of grandmothers and nigger orphans, and invading us with it!” he hollered, shaking the letters at Granny.
In the pen the mules huddled and surged, with Ab Snopes waving his arms at them now and then. Then the lieutenant quit shouting; he even quit shaking the letters at Granny.
“Listen,” he said. “We are on evacuation orders now. Likely I am the last Federal soldier you will have to look at. And I’m not going to harm you — orders to that effect too. All I’m going to do is take back this stolen property. And now I want you to tell me, as enemy to enemy, or even man to man, if you like. I know from these forged orders how many head of stock you have taken from us, and I know from the records how many times you have sold a few of them back to us; I even know what we paid you. But how many of them did you actually sell back to us more than one time?”
“I don’t know,” Granny said.
“You don’t know,” the lieutenant said. He didn’t start to shout now, he just stood there, breathing slow and hard, looking at Granny; he talked now with a kind of furious patience, as if she were an idiot or an Indian: “Listen. I know you don’t have to tell me, and you know I can’t make you. I ask it only out of pure respect. Respect? Envy. Won’t you tell me?”
“I don’t know,” Granny said.
“You don’t know,” the lieutenant said. “You mean, you—” He talked quiet now. “I see. You really don’t know. You were too busy running the reaper to count the—” We didn’t move. Granny wasn’t even looking at him; it was Ringo and me that watched him fold the letters that Granny and Ringo had written and put them carefully into his pocket. He still talked quiet, like he was tired: “All right, boys. Rope them together and haze them out of there.”
“The gate is a quarter of a mile from here,” a soldier said.
“Throw down some fence,” the lieutenant said. They began to throw down the fence that Joby and I had worked two months on. The lieutenant took a pad from his pocket, and he went to the fence and laid the pad on the rail and took out a pencil. Then he looked back at Granny; he still talked quiet: “I believe you said the name now is Rosa Millard?”
“Yes,” Granny said.
The lieutenant wrote on the pad and tore the sheet out and came back to Granny. He still talked quiet, like when somebody is sick in a room. “We are under orders to pay for all property damaged in the process of evacuation,” he said. “This is a voucher on the quartermaster at Memphis for ten dollars.
For the fence.” He didn’t give the paper to her at once; he just stood there, looking at her. “Confound it, I don’t mean promise. If I just knew what you believed in, held—” He cursed again, not loud and not at anybody or anything. “Listen. I don’t say promise; I never mentioned the word.
But I have a family; I am a poor man; I have no grandmother. And if in about four months the auditor should find a warrant in the records for a thousand dollars to Mrs. Rosa Millard, I would have to make it good. Do you see?”
“Yes,” Granny said. “You need not worry.”
Then they were gone. Granny and Ringo and Joby and I stood there and watched them drive the mules up across the pasture and out of sight. We had forgot about Ab Snopes until he said, “Well, hit looks like that’s all they are to hit. But you still got that ere hundred-odd that are out on receipt, provided them hill folks don’t take a example from them Yankees.
I reckon you can still be grateful for that much anyway. So I’ll bid you, one and all, good day and get on home and rest a spell. If I can help you again, just send for me.” He went on too.
After a while Granny said:
“Joby, put those rails back up.” I reckon Ringo and I were both waiting for her to tell us to help Joby, but she didn’t. She just said “Come,” and turned and went on, not toward the cabin but across the pasture toward the road. We didn’t know where we were going until we reached the church.
She went straight up the aisle to the chancel and stood there until we came up. “Kneel down,” she said.
We knelt in the empty church. She was small between us, little; she talked quiet, not loud, not fast and not slow; her voice sounded quiet and still, but strong and clear: “I have sinned. I have stolen, and I have borne false witness against my neighbor, though that neighbor was an enemy of my country. And more than that, I have caused these children to sin.
I hereby take their sins upon my conscience.” It was one of those bright soft days. It was cool in the church; the floor was cold
