Unvanquished

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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—Joby and Granny, and while Granny held the lantern at arm's length, Joby and Loosh dug the trunk up from where they had buried it that night last summer while Father was at home, while Louvinia stood in the door of the bedroom without even lighting the lamp while Ringo and I went to bed and later I either looked out or dreamed I looked out the window and saw (or dreamed I saw) the lantern. 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

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THE UNVANQUISHED

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

RETREAT

41

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 re­ clining 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.

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 hi 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

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