“I don’t care,” I said. “I just want a pistol. Or a gun. Ours got burned up with the house.”
“All right!” he hollered. “Me and the pistol, or you and this nigger horse thief and a fence rail. You ain’t even got a poker at home, have you?”
“We got the bar’l of the musket yet,” Ringo said. “I reckon that’s all we’ll need for Ab Snopes.”
“Ab Snopes?” Uncle Buck hollered. “Do you think it’s Ab Snopes this boy is thinking about? . . . Hey?” he hollered, hollering at me now. “Hey, boy?” It was changing all the time, with the slow gray rain lancing slow and gray and cold into the red earth, yet it did not change.
It would be some time yet; it would be days and weeks and then months before it would be smooth and quiet and level with the other earth. Now Uncle Buck was talking at Ringo, and not hollering now. “Catch my mule,” he said. “I got the pistol in my britches.”
Ab Snopes lived back in the hills too. Uncle Buck knew where; it was midafternoon by then and we were riding up a long red hill between pines when Uncle Buck stopped. He and Ringo had crokersacks tied over their heads. Uncle Buck’s hand-worn stick stuck out from under his sack with the rain shining on it like a long wax candle.
“Wait,” he said. “I got a idea.” We turned from the road and came to a creek bottom; there was a faint path. It was dark under the trees and the rain didn’t fall on us now; it was like the bare trees themselves were dissolving slow and steady and cold into the end of the December day.
We rode in single file, in our wet clothes and in the wet ammonia steam of the mules.
The pen was just like the one he and Ringo and Joby and I had built at home, only smaller and better hidden; I reckon he had got the idea from ours. We stopped at the wet rails; they were still new enough for the split sides to be still yellow with sap, and on the far side of the pen there was something that looked like a yellow cloud in the twilight, until it moved. And then we saw that it was a claybank stallion and three mares.
“I thought so,” Uncle Buck said.
Because I was mixed up. Maybe it was because Ringo and I were tired and we hadn’t slept much lately. Because the days were mixed up with the nights, all the while we had been riding I would keep on thinking how Ringo and I would catch it from Granny when we got back home, for going off in the rain without telling her. Because for a minute I sat there and looked at the horses and I believed that Ab Snopes was Grumby. But Uncle Buck begun to holler again.
“Him, Grumby?” he hollered. “Ab Snopes? Ab Snopes? By Godfrey, if he was Grumby, if it was Ab Snopes that shot your grandmaw, I’d be ashamed to have it known. I’d be ashamed to be caught catching him. No, sir. He ain’t Grumby; he’s better than that.”
He sat sideways on his mule with the sack over his head and his beard jerking and wagging out of it while he talked. “He’s the one that’s going to show us where Grumby is. They just hid them horses here because they thought this would be the last place you boys would think to look for them.
And now Ab Snopes has went off with Grumby to get some more, since your grandmaw has gone out of business, as far as he is concerned. And thank Godfrey for that. It won’t be a house or a cabin they will ever pass as long as Ab Snopes is with them, that he won’t leave an indelible signature, even if it ain’t nothing to capture but a chicken or a kitchen clock. By Godfrey, the one thing we don’t want is to catch Ab Snopes.”
And we didn’t catch him that night. We went back to the road and went on, and then we came in sight of the house. I rode up to Uncle Buck. “Give me the pistol,” I said.
“We ain’t going to need a pistol,” Uncle Buck said. “He ain’t even here, I tell you. You and that nigger stay back and let me do this. I’m going to find out which a way to start hunting. Get back, now.”
“No,” I said, “I want—”
He looked at me from under the crokersack. “You want what? You want to lay your two hands on the man that shot Rosa Millard, don’t you?” He looked at me. I sat there on the mule in the slow gray cold rain, in the dying daylight. Maybe it was the cold. I didn’t feel cold, but I could feel my bones jerking and shaking. “And then what you going to do with him?” Uncle Buck said. He was almost whispering now. “Hey? Hey?”
“Yes,” I said. “Yes.”
“Yes. That’s what. Now you and Ringo stay back. I’ll do this.”
It was just a cabin. I reckon there were a thousand of them just like it about our hills, with the same canted plow lying under a tree and the same bedraggled chickens roosting on the plow and the same gray twilight dissolving onto the gray shingles of the roof. Then we saw a faint crack of fire and a woman’s face looking at us around the crack of the door.
“Mr. Snopes ain’t here, if that’s what you want,” she said. “He’s done gone to Alabama on a visit.”
“Sho, now,” Uncle Buck said. “To Alabama. Did he leave any word when to expect him home?”
“No,” the woman said.
“Sho, now,” Uncle Buck said. “Then I reckon we better get on back home and out of the rain.”
“I reckon you had,” the woman said. Then the door closed.
We rode away. We rode back toward home. It was like it had been while we waited at the old compress; it hadn’t got darker exactly, the twilight had just thickened.
“Well, well, well,” Uncle Buck said. “They ain’t in Alabama, because she told us so. And they ain’t toward Memphis, because there are still Yankees there yet. So I reckon we better try down toward Grenada first. By Godfrey, I’ll bet this mule against that nigger’s pocket knife that we won’t ride two days before we come on a mad woman hollering down the road with a handful of chicken feathers in her hand. You come on here and listen to me. By Godfrey, we’re going to do this thing but by Godfrey we’re going to do it right.”
2
So we didn’t get Ab Snopes that day. We didn’t get him for a lot of days, and nights too — days in which we rode, the three of us, on relays of Granny’s and Ringo’s Yankee mules along the known roads and the unknown (and sometimes unmarked) trails and paths, in the wet and the iron frost, and nights when we slept in the same wet and the same freeze and (once) in the snow, beneath whatever shelter we found when night found us.
They had neither name nor number. They lasted from that December afternoon until late February, until one night we realised that we had been hearing geese and ducks going north for some time. At first Ringo kept a pine stick and each night he would cut a notch in it, with a big one for Sunday and two long ones which meant Christmas and New Year’s.
But one night when the stick had almost forty notches in it, we stopped in the rain to make camp without any roof to get under and we had to use the stick to start a fire, because of Uncle Buck’s arm.
And so, when we came to where we could get another pine stick, we couldn’t remember whether it had been five or six or ten days, and so Ringo didn’t start another. Because he said he would fix the stick up the day we got Grumby and that it wouldn’t need but two notches on it — one for the day we got him and one for the day Granny died.
We had two mules apiece, to swap onto at noon each day. We got the mules back from the hill people; we could have got a cavalry regiment if we had wanted it — of old men and women and children, too — with cotton bagging and flour sacking for uniforms and hoes and axes for arms, on the Yankee mules that Granny had loaned to them. But Uncle Buck told them that we didn’t need any help; that three was enough to catch Grumby.
They were not hard to follow. One day we had about twenty notches on the stick and we came onto a house where the ashes were still smoking and a boy almost as big as Ringo and me still unconscious in the stable with even his shirt cut to pieces like they had had a wire snapper on the whip, and a woman with a little thread of blood still running out of her mouth and her voice sounding light and far away like a locust from across the pasture, telling us how many there were and which way they would likely go saying, “Kill them. Kill them.”
It was
