Then, with Granny in front and still carrying the lantern and with Ringo and I both helping to carry it, we returned toward the house. Before we reached the house Joby began to bear away toward where the loaded wagon stood.
“Take it into the house,” Granny said.
“We’ll just load hit now and save having to handle hit again in the morning,” Joby said. “Come on here, nigger,” he said to Loosh.
“Take it into the house,” Granny said. So, after a while, Joby moved on toward the house. We could hear him breathing now, saying “Hah!” every few steps. Inside the kitchen he let his end down, hard.
“Hah!” he said. “That’s done, thank God.”
“Take it upstairs,” Granny said.
Joby turned and looked at her. He hadn’t straightened up yet; he turned, half stooping, and looked at her. “Which?” he said.
“Take it upstairs,” Granny said. “I want it in my room.”
“You mean you gonter tote this thing all the way upstairs and then tote it back down tomorrow?”
“Somebody is,” Granny said. “Are you going to help or are me and Bayard going to do it alone?”
Then Louvinia came in. She had already undressed. She looked tall as a ghost, in one dimension like a bolster case, taller than a bolster case in her nightgown; silent as a ghost on her bare feet which were the same color as the shadow in which she stood so that she seemed to have no feet, the twin rows of her toenails lying weightless and faint and still as two rows of faintly soiled feathers on the floor about a foot below the hem of her nightgown as if they were not connected with her.
She came and shoved Joby aside and stooped to lift the trunk. “Git away, nigger,” she said. Joby groaned, then he shoved Louvinia aside.
“Git away, woman,” he said. He lifted his end of the trunk, then he looked back at Loosh, who had never let his end down. “If you gonter ride on hit, pick up your feet,” he said. We carried the trunk up to Granny’s room, and Joby was setting it down again, until Granny made him and Loosh pull the bed out from the wall and slide the trunk in behind it; Ringo and I helped again. I don’t believe it lacked much of weighing a thousand pounds.
“Now I want everybody to go right to bed, so we can get an early start tomorrow,” Granny said.
“That’s you,” Joby said. “Git everybody up at crack of day and it be noon ‘fore we get started.”
“Nummine about that,” Louvinia said. “You do like Miss Rosa tell you.” We went out; we left Granny there beside her bed now well away from the wall and in such an ungainly position that anyone would have known at once that something was concealed, even if the trunk which Ringo and I as well as Joby believed now to weigh at least a thousand pounds, could have been hidden.
As it was, the bed merely underlined it. Then Granny shut the door behind us and then Ringo and I stopped dead in the hall and looked at one another. Since I could remember, there had never been a key to any door, inside or outside, about the house. Yet we had heard a key turn in the lock.
“I didn’t know there was ere a key would fit hit,” Ringo said, “let alone turn.”
“And that’s some more of yawls’ and Joby’s business,” Louvinia said. She had not stopped; she was already reclining on her cot and as we looked toward her she was already in the act of drawing the quilt up over her face and head. “Yawl get on to bed.”
We went on to our room and began to undress. The lamp was lighted and there was already laid out across two chairs our Sunday clothes which we too would put on tomorrow to go to Memphis in. “Which un you reckin she dremp about?” Ringo said. But I didn’t answer that; I knew that Ringo knew I didn’t need to.
2
We put on our Sunday clothes by lamplight, we ate breakfast by it and listened to Louvinia above stairs as she removed from Granny’s and my beds the linen we had slept under last night and rolled up Ringo’s pallet and carried them downstairs; in the first beginning of day we went out to where Loosh and Joby had already put the mules into the wagon and where Joby stood in what he called his Sunday clothes too — the old frock coat, the napless beaver hat, of Father’s.
When Granny came out (still in the black silk and the bonnet as if she had slept in them, passed the night standing rigidly erect with her hand on the key which she had produced from we knew not where and locked her door for the first time Ringo and I knew of) with her shawl over her shoulders and carrying her parasol and the musket from the pegs over the mantel. She held out the musket to Joby. “Here,” she said. Joby looked at it.
“We won’t need hit,” he said.
“Put it in the wagon,” Granny said.
“Nome. We won’t need nothing like that. We be in Memphis so quick won’t nobody even have time to hear we on the road. I speck Marse John got the Yankees pretty well cleant out between here and Memphis anyway.”
This time Granny didn’t say anything at all. She just stood there holding out the musket until after a while Joby took it and put it into the wagon. “Now go get the trunk,” Granny said. Joby was still putting the musket into the wagon; he stopped, his head turned a little.
“Which?” he said. He turned a little more, still not looking at Granny standing on the steps and looking at him; he was not looking at any of us, not speaking to any of us in particular. “Ain’t I tole you?” he said.
“If anything ever came into your mind that you didn’t tell to somebody inside of ten minutes, I don’t remember it,” Granny said. “But just what do you refer to now?”
“Nummine that,” Joby said. “Come on here, Loosh. Bring that boy with you.” They passed Granny and went on. She didn’t look at them; it was as if they had walked not only out of her sight but out of her mind. Evidently Joby thought they had.
He and Granny were like that; they were like a man and a mare, a blooded mare, which takes just exactly so much from the man and the man knows the mare will take just so much and the man knows that when that point is reached, just what is going to happen.
Then it does happen: the mare kicks him, not viciously but just enough, and the man knows it was going to happen and so he is glad then, it is over then, or he thinks it is over, so he lies or sits on the ground and cusses the mare a little because he thinks it is over, finished, and then the mare turns her head and nips him. That’s how Joby and Granny were and Granny always beat him, not bad: just exactly enough, like now; he and Loosh were just about to go in the door and Granny still not even looking after them, when Joby said, “I done tole um.
And I reckin even you can’t dispute hit.” Then Granny, without moving anything but her lips, still looking out beyond the waiting wagon as if we were not going anywhere and Joby didn’t even exist, said,
“And put the bed back against the wall.” This time Joby didn’t answer.
He just stopped perfectly still, not even looking back at Granny, until Loosh said quietly,
“Gawn, pappy. Get on.” They went on; Granny and I stood at the end of the gallery and heard them drag the trunk out, then shove the bed back where it had been yesterday; we heard them on the stairs with the trunk — the slow, clumsy, coffinsounding thumps. Then they came out onto the gallery.
“Go and help them,” Granny said without looking back. “Remember, Joby is getting old.” We put the trunk into the wagon, along with the musket and the basket of food and the bedclothing, and got in ourselves — Granny on the seat beside Joby, the bonnet on the exact top of her head and the parasol raised even before the dew had begun to fall — and we drove away. Loosh had already disappeared, but Louvinia still stood at the end of the gallery with Father’s old hat on top of her head rag.
Then I stopped looking back, though I could feel Ringo beside me on the trunk turning every few yards, even after we were outside the gate and in the road to town. Then we came to the curve where we had seen the Yankee sergeant on the bright horse last summer.
“Hit gone now,” Ringo said. “Goodbye, Sartoris; Memphis, how-dy-do!”
The sun was just rising when we came in sight of Jefferson; we passed a company of troops bivouacked in a pasture beside the road, eating breakfast. Their
