“Fools, I say!” he shouted. “I don’t care if some of you folks here do still claim kin with men that elected him colonel and followed him and Stonewall Jackson right up to spitting distance of Washington without hardly losing a man, and then next year turned around and voted him down to major and elected in his stead a damn feller that never even knowed which end of a gun done the shooting until John Sartoris showed him.”
He quit shouting just as easy as he started but the shouting was right there, waiting to start again as soon as he found something else to shout about. “I won’t say God take care of you and your grandma on the road, boy, because by Godfrey you don’t need God’s nor nobody else’s help; all you got to say is ‘I’m John Sartoris’ boy; rabbits, hunt the canebrake’ and then watch the blue-bellied sons of bitches fly.”
“Are they leaving, going away?” the captain said.
Then Uncle Buck begun to shout again, going into the shouting easy, without even having to draw a breath: “Leaving? Hell’s skillet, who’s going to take care of them around here? John Sartoris is a damn fool; they voted him out of his own private regiment in kindness, so he could come home and take care of his family, knowing that if he didn’t wouldn’t nobody around here be likely to.
But that don’t suit John Sartoris because John Sartoris is a damned confounded selfish coward, askeered to stay at home where the Yankees might get him. Yes, sir. So skeered that he has to raise him up another batch of men to protect him every time he gets within a hundred foot of a Yankee brigade. Scouring all up and down the country, finding Yankees to dodge; only if it had been me I would have took back to Ferginny and I’d have showed that new colonel what fighting looked like. But not John Sartoris. He’s a coward and a fool.
The best he can do is dodge and run away from Yankees until they have to put a price on his head, and now he’s got to send his family out of the country; to Memphis where maybe the Union Army will take care of them, since it don’t look like his own government and fellow citizens are going to.” He ran out of breath then, or out of words anyway, standing there with his tobacco-stained beard trembling and more tobacco running onto it out of his mouth, and shaking his stick at me. So I lifted the reins; only the captain spoke; he was still watching me.
“How many men has your father got in his regiment?” he said.
“It’s not a regiment, sir,” I said. “He’s got about fifty, I reckon.”
“Fifty?” the captain said. “Fifty? We had a prisoner last week who said he had more than a thousand. He said that Colonel Sartoris didn’t fight; he just stole horses.”
Uncle Buck had enough wind to laugh though. He sounded just like a hen, slapping his leg and holding to the wagon wheel like he was about to fall. “That’s it! That’s John Sartoris! He gets the horses; any fool can step out and get a Yankee. These two damn boys here did that last summer — stepped down to the gate and brought back a whole regiment, and them just — How old are you, boy?”
“Fourteen,” I said.
“We ain’t fourteen yit,” Ringo said. “But we will be in September, if we live and nothing happens. . . . I reckon Granny waiting on us, Bayard.”
Uncle Buck quit laughing. He stepped back. “Git on,” he said. “You got a long road.” I turned the wagon. “You take care of your grandma, boy, or John Sartoris will skin you alive. And if he don’t, I will!” When the wagon straightened out, he began to hobble along beside it. “And when you see him, tell him I said to leave the horses go for a while and kill the blue-bellied sons of bitches. Kill them!”
“Yes, sir,” I said. We went on.
“Good thing for his mouth Granny ain’t here,” Ringo said. She and Joby were waiting for us at the Compsons’ gate. Joby had another basket with a napkin over it and a bottle neck sticking out and some rose cuttings. Then Ringo and I sat behind again, and Ringo turning to look back every few feet and saying, “Goodbye, Jefferson.
Memphis, how-de-do!” And then we came to the top of the first hill and he looked back, quiet this time, and said, “Suppose they don’t never get done fighting.”
“All right,” I said. “Suppose it.” I didn’t look back.
At noon we stopped by a spring and Granny opened the basket, and she took out the rose cuttings and handed them to Ringo.
“Dip the roots into the spring after you drink,” she said. They had earth still on the roots, in a cloth; when Ringo stooped down to the water, I watched him pinch off a little of the dirt and start to put it into his pocket. Then he looked up and saw me watching him, and he made like he was going to throw it away. But he didn’t.
“I reckon I can save dirt if I want to,” he said.
“It’s not Sartoris dirt though,” I said.
“I know hit,” he said. “Hit’s closer than Memphis dirt though. Closer than what you got.”
“What’ll you bet?” I said. He looked at me. “What’ll you swap?” I said. He looked at me.
“What you swap?” he said.
“You know,” I said. He reached into his pocket and brought out the buckle we had shot off the Yankee saddle when we shot the horse last summer. “Gimmit here,” he said.
So I took the snuff box from my pocket and emptied half the soil (it was more than Sartoris earth; it was Vicksburg too: the yelling was in it, the embattled, the iron-worn, the supremely invincible) into his hand. “I know hit,” he said. “Hit come from ‘hind the smokehouse. You brung a lot of hit.”
“Yes,” I said. “I brought enough to last.”
We soaked the cuttings every time we stopped and opened the basket, and there was some of the food left on the fourth day because at least once a day we stopped at houses on the road and ate with them, and on the second night we had supper and breakfast at the same house.
But even then Granny would not come inside to sleep. She made her bed down in the wagon by the chest and Joby slept under the wagon with the gun beside him like when we camped on the road.
Only it would not be exactly on the road but back in the woods a way; on the third night Granny was in the wagon and Joby and Ringo and I were under the wagon and some cavalry rode up and Granny said, “Joby! the gun!” and somebody got down and took the gun away from Joby and they lit a pine knot and we saw the gray.
“Memphis?” the officer said. “You can’t get to Memphis. There was a fight at Cockrum yesterday and the roads ahead are full of Yankee patrols. How in hell — Excuse me, ma’am (behind me Ringo said, “Git the soap”) — you ever got this far I don’t see. If I were you, I wouldn’t even try to go back, I’d stop at the first house I came to and stay there.”
“I reckon we’ll go on,” Granny said, “like John — Colonel Sartoris told us to. My sister lives in Memphis; we are going there.”
“Colonel Sartoris?” the officer said. “Colonel Sartoris told you?”
“I’m his mother-in-law,” Granny said. “This is his son.”
“Good Lord, ma’am! You can’t go a step farther. Don’t you know that if they captured you and this boy, they could almost force him to come in and surrender?”
Granny looked at him; she was sitting up in the wagon and her hat was on. “My experience with Yankees has evidently been different from yours. I have no reason to believe that their officers — I suppose they still have officers among them — will bother a woman and two children. I thank you, but my son has directed us to go to Memphis. If there is any information about the roads which my driver should know, I will be obliged if you will instruct him.”
“Then let me give you an escort. Or better still, there is a house about a mile back; return there and wait. Colonel Sartoris was at Cockrum yesterday; by tomorrow night I believe I can find him and bring him to you.”
“Thank you,” Granny said. “Wherever Colonel Sartoris is, he is doubtless busy with his own affairs. I think we will continue to Memphis as he instructed us.”
So they rode away and Joby came back under the wagon and put the musket between us; only, every time I turned over I rolled on it, so I made him move it and he tried to put it in the wagon with Granny, and she wouldn’t let him, so he leaned it against a
