Which is just as well. Because if it were your weapon — which it is not — and you had two grandsons, or say a grandson and a Negro playfellow — which you have not — and if this were the first time — which it is not — someone next time might be seriously hurt. But what am I doing?
Trying your patience by keeping you in that uncomfortable chair while I waste my time delivering a homily suitable only for a lady with grandchildren — or one grandchild and a Negro companion.” Now he was about to go, too; we could tell it even beneath the skirt; this time it was Granny herself:
“There is little of refreshment I can offer you, sir. But if a glass of cool milk after your ride—”
Only, for a long time he didn’t answer at all; Louvinia said how he just looked at Granny with his hard bright eyes and that hard bright silence full of laughing. “No, no,” he said. “I thank you. You are taxing yourself beyond mere politeness and into sheer bravado.”
“Louvinia,” Granny said, “conduct the gentleman to the dining room and serve him with what we have.”
He was out of the room now, because Granny began to tremble now, trembling and trembling, but not relaxing yet; we could hear her panting now. And we breathed, too, now, looking at each other. “We never killed him!” I whispered. “We haven’t killed anybody at all!” So it was Granny’s body that told us again; only this time I could almost feel him looking at Granny’s spread skirt where we crouched while he thanked her for the milk and told her his name and regiment.
“Perhaps it is just as well that you have no grandchildren,” he said. “Since, doubtless, you wish to live in peace. I have three boys myself, you see. And I have not even had time to become a grandparent.”
And now there wasn’t any laughing behind his voice, and Louvinia said he was standing there in the door, with the brass bright on his dark blue and his hat in his hand and his bright beard and hair, looking at Granny without the laughing now: “I won’t apologise; fools cry out at wind or fire.
But permit me to say and hope that you will never have anything worse than this to remember us by.” Then he was gone. We heard his spurs in the hall and on the porch, then the horse, dying away, ceasing, and then Granny let go.
She went back into the chair with her hand at her breast and her eyes closed and the sweat on her face in big drops; all of a sudden I began to holler, “Louvinia! Louvinia!” But she opened her eyes then and looked at me; they were looking at me when they opened. Then she looked at Ringo for a moment, but she looked back at me, panting.
“Bayard,” she said, “what was that word you used?”
“Word?” I said. “When, Granny?” Then I remembered; I didn’t look at her, and she lying back in the chair, looking at me and panting.
“Don’t repeat it. You cursed. You used obscene language, Bayard.”
I didn’t look at her. I could see Ringo’s feet too. “Ringo did too,” I said. She didn’t answer, but I could feel her looking at me; I said suddenly: “And you told a lie. You said we were not here.”
“I know it,” she said. She moved. “Help me up.” She got out of the chair, holding to us. We didn’t know what she was trying to do. We just stood there while she held to us and to the chair and let herself down to her knees beside it. It was Ringo that knelt first. Then I knelt, too, while she asked the Lord to forgive her for telling the lie. Then she rose; we didn’t have time to help her. “Go to the kitchen and get a pan of water and the soap,” she said. “Get the new soap.”
5
It was late, as if time had slipped up on us while we were still caught, enmeshed by the sound of the musket and were too busy to notice it; the sun shone almost level into our faces while we stood at the edge of the back gallery, spitting, rinsing the soap from our mouths turn and turn about from the gourd dipper, spitting straight into the sun. For a while, just by breathing we could blow soap bubbles, but soon it was just the taste of the spitting.
Then even that began to go away although the impulse to spit did not, while away to the north we could see the cloudbank, faint and blue and faraway at the base and touched with copper sun along the crest. When Father came home in the spring, we tried to understand about mountains. At last he pointed out the cloud bank to tell us what mountains looked like. So ever since then Ringo believed that the cloudbank was Tennessee.
“Yonder they,” he said, spitting. “Yonder hit. Tennessee, where Marse John use to fight um at. Looking mighty far, too.”
“Too far to go just to fight Yankees,” I said, spitting too. But it was gone now — the suds, the glassy weightless iridescent bubbles; even the taste of it.
RETREAT
1
IN THE AFTERNOON Loosh drove the wagon up beside the back gallery and took the mules out; by suppertime we had everything loaded into the wagon but the bedclothes we would sleep under that night. Then Granny went up stairs and when she came back down she had on her Sunday black silk and her hat, and there was color in her face now and her eyes were bright.
“Is we gonter leave tonight?” Ringo said. “I thought we wasn’t going to start until in the morning.”
“We’re not,” Granny said. “But it’s been three years now since I have started anywhere; I reckon the Lord will forgive me for getting ready one day ahead of time.” She turned (we were in the diningroom then, the table set with supper) to Louvinia. “Tell Joby and Loosh to be ready with the lantern and the shovels as soon as they have finished eating.”
Louvinia had set the cornbread on the table and was going out when she stopped and looked at Granny. “You mean you gonter take that heavy trunk all the way to Memphis with you? You gonter dig hit up from where hit been hid safe since last summer, and take hit all the way to Memphis?”
“Yes,” Granny said. “I am following Colonel Sartoris’ instructions as I believe he meant them.” She was eating; she didn’t even look at Louvinia. Louvinia stood there in the pantry door, looking at the back of Granny’s head.
“Whyn’t you leave hit here where hit hid good and I can take care of hit? Who gonter find hit, even if they was to come here again? Hit’s Marse John they done called the reward on; hit ain’t no trunk full of—”
“I have my reasons,” Granny said. “You do what I told you.”
“All right. But how come you wanter dig hit up tonight when you ain’t leaving until tomor—”
“You do what I said,” Granny said.
“Yessum,” Louvinia said. She went out. I looked at Granny eating, with her hat sitting on the exact top of her head, and Ringo looking at me across the back of Granny’s chair with his eyes rolling a little.
“Why not leave it hid?” I said. “It’ll be just that much more load on the wagon. Joby says that trunk will weigh a thousand pounds.”
“A thousand fiddlesticks!” Granny said. “I don’t care if it weighed ten thousand—” Louvinia came in.
“They be ready,” she said. “I wish you’d tell me why you got to dig hit up tonight.”
Granny looked at her. “I had a dream about it last night.”
“Oh,” Louvinia said. She and Ringo looked exactly alike, except that Louvinia’s eyes were not rolling so much as his.
“I dreamed I was looking out my window, and a man walked into the orchard and went to where it is and stood there pointing at it,” Granny said. She looked at Louvinia. “A black man.”
“A nigger?” Louvinia said.
“Yes.”
For a while Louvinia didn’t say anything. Then she said. “Did you know him?”
“Yes,” Granny said.
“Is you going to tell who hit was?”
“No,” Granny said.
Louvinia turned to Ringo. “Gawn tell your pappy and Loosh to get the lantern and the shovels and come on up here.”
Joby and Loosh were in the kitchen. Joby was sitting behind the stove with a plate on his knees, eating. Loosh was sitting on the wood box, still, with the two shovels between his knees, but I didn’t see him at first because of Ringo’s shadow. The lamp was on the table, and I could see the shadow of Ringo’s head bent over and his arm working back and forth, and Louvinia standing between us and the lamp, her hands on her hips and her elbows spread and her shadow filling the room. “Clean that chimney good,” she said.
Joby carried the lantern, with Granny behind him, and then Loosh; I could see her bonnet and Loosh’s head and the two shovel blades over his shoulder. Ringo was breathing behind me. “Which un you reckon she drempt about?” he said.
“Why don’t you ask her?” I said. We were in the orchard now.
“Hoo,” Ringo said. “Me ask her? I bet if she stayed here wouldn’t no Yankee nor nothing else bother that trunk, nor Marse John neither, if he knowed hit.”
Then they stopped
