“Well, boys,” he said, “it looks like you have got me. Durn my hide for letting Matt Bowden fool me into emptying my pistol at him.”
And I could hear my voice; it sounded faint and far away, like the woman’s in Alabama that day, so that I wondered if he could hear me: “You shot three times. You have got two more shots in it.”
His face didn’t change, or I couldn’t see it change. It just lowered, looking down, but the smile was gone from it. “In this pistol?” he said. It was like he was examining a pistol for the first time, so slow and careful it was that he passed it from his right to his left hand and let it hang again, pointing down again.
“Well, well, well. Sholy I ain’t forgot how to count as well as how to shoot.” There was a bird somewhere — a yellowhammer — I had been hearing it all the time; even the three shots hadn’t frightened it. And I could hear Ringo, too, making a kind of whimpering sound when he breathed, and it was like I wasn’t trying to watch Grumby so much as to keep from looking at Ringo. “Well, she’s safe enough now, since it don’t look like I can even shoot with my right hand.”
Then it happened. I know what did happen, but even now I don’t know how, in what order. Because he was big and squat, like a bear. But when we had first seen him he was a captive, and so, even now he seemed more like a stump than even an animal, even though we had watched him leap and catch up the pistol and run firing after the other two.
All I know is, one second he was standing there in his muddy Confederate coat, smiling at us, with his ragged teeth showing a little in his red stubble, with the thin sunlight on the stubble and on his shoulders and cuffs, on the dark marks where the braid had been ripped away; and the next second there were two bright orange splashes, one after the other, against the middle of the gray coat and the coat itself swelling slow down on me like when Granny told us about the balloon she saw in St. Louis and we would dream about it.
I reckon I heard the sound, and I reckon I must have heard the bullets, and I reckon I felt him when he hit me, but I don’t remember it. I just remember the two bright flashes and the gray coat rushing down, and then the ground hitting me.
But I could smell him — the smell of man sweat, and the gray coat grinding into my face and smelling of horse sweat and wood smoke and grease — and I could hear him, and then I could hear my arm socket, and I thought “In a minute I will hear my fingers breaking, but I have got to hold onto it” and then — I don’t know whether it was under or over his arm or his leg — I saw Ringo, in the air, looking exactly like a frog, even to the eyes, with his mouth open too and his open pocket knife in his hand.
Then I was free. I saw Ringo straddle of Grumby’s back and Grumby getting up from his hands and knees and I tried to raise the pistol only my arm wouldn’t move. Then Grumby bucked Ringo off just like a steer would and whirled again, looking at us, crouched, with his mouth open too; and then my arm began to come up with the pistol and he turned and ran.
He shouldn’t have tried to run from us in boots. Or maybe that made no difference either, because now my arm had come up and now I could see Grumby’s back (he didn’t scream, he never made a sound) and the pistol both at the same time and the pistol was level and steady as a rock.
4
It took us the rest of that day and part of the night to reach the old compress. But it didn’t take very long to ride home because we went fast with the two mounts apiece to change to, and what we had to carry now, wrapped in a piece of the skirt of Grumby’s coat, didn’t weigh anything.
It was almost dark when we rode through Jefferson; it was raining again when we rode past the brick piles and the sooty walls that hadn’t fallen down yet, and went on through what used to be the square. We hitched the mules in the cedars and Ringo was just starting off to find a board when we saw that somebody had already put one up — Mrs. Compson, I reckon, or maybe Uncle Buck when he got back home. We already had the piece of wire.
The earth had sunk too now, after two months; it was almost level now, like at first Granny had not wanted to be dead either but now she had begun to be reconciled. We unwrapped it from the jagged square of stained faded gray cloth and fastened it to the board. “Now she can lay good and quiet,” Ringo said.
“Yes,” I said. And then we both began to cry. We stood there in the slow rain, crying. We had ridden a lot, and during the last week we hadn’t slept much and we hadn’t always had anything to eat.
“It wasn’t him or Ab Snopes either that kilt her,” Ringo said. “It was them mules. That first batch of mules we got for nothing.”
“Yes,” I said. “Let’s go home. I reckon Louvinia is worried about us.”
So it was good and dark when we came to the cabin. And then we saw that it was lighted like for Christmas; we could see the big fire and the lamp, clean and bright, when Louvinia opened the door long before we had got to it and ran out into the rain and began to paw at me, crying and hollering.
“What?” I said. “Father? Father’s home? Father?”
“And Miss Drusilla!” Louvinia hollered, crying and praying and pawing at me, and hollering and scolding at Ringo all at once. “Home! Hit done finished! All but the surrendering. And now Marse John done home.” She finally told us how Father and Drusilla had come home about a week ago and Uncle Buck told Father where Ringo and I were, and how Father had tried to make Drusilla wait at home, but she refused, and how they were looking for us, with Uncle Buck to show the way.
So we went to bed. We couldn’t even stay awake to eat the supper Louvinia cooked for us; Ringo and I went to bed in our clothes on the pallet, and went to sleep all in one motion, with Louvinia’s face hanging over us and still scolding, and Joby in the chimney corner where Louvinia had made him get up out of Granny’s chair.
And then somebody was pulling at me, and I thought I was fighting Ab Snopes again, and then it was the rain in Father’s beard and clothes that I smelled. But Uncle Buck was still hollering, and Father holding me, and Ringo and I held to him, and then it was Drusilla kneeling and holding me and Ringo, and we could smell the rain in her hair, too, while she was hollering at Uncle Buck to hush.
Father’s hand was hard; I could see his face beyond Drusilla and I was trying to say, “Father, Father,” while she was holding me and Ringo with the rain smell of her hair all around us, and Uncle Buck hollering and Joby looking at Uncle Buck with his mouth open and his eyes round.
“Yes, by Godfrey! Not only tracked him down and caught him but brought back the actual proof of it to where Rosa Millard could rest quiet.”
“The which?” Joby hollered. “Fotch back the which?”
“Hush! Hush!” Drusilla said. “That’s all done, all finished. You, Uncle Buck!”
“The proof and the expiation!” Uncle Buck hollered. “When me and John Sartoris and Drusilla rode up to that old compress, the first thing we see was that murdering scoundrel pegged out on the door to it like a coon hide, all except the right hand. ‘And if anybody wants to see that, too,’ I told John Sartoris, ‘just let them ride into Jefferson and look on Rosa Millard’s grave!’ Ain’t I told you he is John Sartoris’ boy? Hey? Ain’t I told you?”
SKIRMISH AT SARTORIS
1
WHEN I THINK of that day, of Father’s old troop on their horses drawn up facing the house, and Father and Drusilla on the ground with that Carpet Bagger voting box in front of them, and opposite them the women — Aunt Louisa, Mrs. Habersham and all the others — on the porch and the two sets of them, the men and the women, facing one another like they were both waiting for a bugle to sound the charge, I think I know the reason.
I think it was because Father’s troop (like all the other Southern soldiers too), even though they had surrendered and said that they were whipped, were still soldiers. Maybe from the old habit of doing everything as one man; maybe when you have lived for four years in a world ordered completely by men’s doings, even when it is danger and fighting, you don’t want to quit that world: maybe the danger and the fighting
