Unvanquished

THE UNVANQUISHED

nobody knows just how far some of them have come. They just pass here without food or anything, exactly as they rose up from whatever they were doing when the spirit or the voice or whatever it was told them to go. They stop during the day and rest in the woods; then, at night, they move again. We will hear them later—I'll wake you —marching on up the road until the cavalry stops them. There was an officer, a major, who finally took time to see I wasn't one of his men; he said, 'Can't you do anything with them? Promise them anything to go back home?' But it was like they couldn't see me or hear me speaking; it was only that water and that bank on the other side. But you will see for yourself tomor­row, when we go back.'

'Drusilla,' Aunt Louise said, 'you're not going back tomorrow or any other time.'

'They are going to mine the bridge and blow it up when the army has crossed,' Cousin Drusilla said. 'No­body knows what they will do then.'

'But we cannot be responsible,' Aunt Louise said. 'The Yankees brought it on themselves; let them pay

the price.'

'Those Negroes are not Yankees, Mother,' Cousin Drusilla said. 'At least there will be one person there who is not a Yankee either.' She looked at Granny. 'Four, counting Bayard and Ringo.'

Aunt Louise looked at Granny. 'Rosa, you shan't go. I forbid it. Brother John will thank me to do so.'

'I reckon I will,' Granny said. 'I've got to get the silver anyway.'

'And the mules,' Ringo said; 'don't forget them. And don't yawl worry about Granny. She 'cide what she want and then she kneel down about ten seconds and tell God what she aim to do, and then she git up and do hit. And them that don't like hit can git outen the way or git trompled. But that railroad------'

'And now I reckon we better go to bed,' Granny said. But we didn't go to bed then. I had to hear about the railroad too; possibly it was more the need to keep even with Ringo (or even ahead of him, since I had seen the railroad when it was a railroad, which he had not) than a boy's affinity for smoke and fury and thunder and

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speed. We sat there in that slave cabin partitioned, like Louvinia's cabin at home, into two rooms by that sus­ pended quilt beyond which Aunt Louisa and Granny were already in bed and where Cousin Denny should have been too except for the evening's dispensation he had received, listening too who did not need to hear it again since he had been there to see it when it happened; ------we sat there, Ringo and I, listening to Cousin Dru­silla and staring at each other with the same amazed and incredulous question: Where could we have been at that moment? What could we have been doing, even a hun­dred miles away, not to have sensed, felt this, paused to look at one another, aghast and uplifted, while it was happening? Because this, to us, was it. Ringo and I had seen Yankees; we had shot at one; we had crouched like two rats and heard Granny, unarmed and not even rising from her chair, rout a whole regiment of them from the library. And we had heard about battles and fighting and seen those who had taken part in them, not only in the person of Father when once or twice each year and without warning he would appear on the strong gaunt horse, arrived from beyond that cloudbank region which Ringo believed was Tennessee, but in the persons of other men who returned home with actual arms and legs missing. But that was it: men had lost arms and legs in sawmills; old men had been telling young men and boys about wars and fighting before they discovered how to write it down: and what petty precisian to quibble about locations in space or in chronology, who to care or insist Now come, old man, tell the truth: did you see this? were you really there? Because wars are wars: the same exploding powder when there was powder, the same thrust and parry of iron when there was not—one tale, one telling, the same as the next or the one before. So we knew a war existed; we had to believe that, just as we had to believe that the name for the sort of life we had led for the last three years was hardship and suffering. Yet we had no proof of it. In fact, we had even less than no proof; we had had thrust into our faces the very shabby and unavoidable obverse of proof, who had seen Father (and the other men too) return home, afoot like tramps or on crow-

78

THE UNVANQUISHED

bait horses, in faded and patched (and at times obviously stolen) clothing, preceded by no flags nor drums and followed not even by two men to keep step with one another, in coats bearing no glitter of golden braid and with scabbards hi which no sword reposed, actually al­most sneaking home to spend two or three or seven days performing actions not only without glory (plow­ing land, repairing fences, killing meat for the smoke­house) and in which they had no skill but the very neces­sity for which was the fruit of the absent occupations from which, returning, they bore no proof—actions in the very clumsy performance of which Father's whole presence seemed (to us, Ringo and me) to emanate a kind of humility and apology, as if he were saying, 'Be­lieve me, boys; take my word for it: there's more to it than this, no matter what it looks like. I can't prove it, so you'll just have to believe me.' And then to have it happen, where we could have been there to see it, and were not: and this no poste and riposte of sweat-reeking cavalry which all war-telling is full of, no gallop­ing thunder of guns to wheel up and unlimber and crash and crash into the lurid grime-glare of their own demon-served inferno which even children would rec­ognise, no ragged lines of gaunt and shrill-yelling infan­try beneath a tattered flag which is a very part of that child's make-believe. Because this was it: an interval, a space, in which the toad-squatting guns, the panting men and the trembling horses paused, amphitheatric about the embattled land, beneath the fading fury of the smoke and the puny yelling, and permitted the sorry business which had dragged on for three years now to be congealed into an irrevocable instant and put to an irrev­ocable gambit, not by two regiments or two batteries or even two generals, but by two locomotives.

Cousin Brasilia told it while we sat there in the cabin which smelled of new whitewash and even (still faintly) of Negroes. She probably told us the reason for it (she must have known)—what point of strategy, what des­perate gamble not for preservation, since hope of that was gone, but at least for prolongation, which it served. But that meant nothing to us. We didn't hear, we didn't even listen; we sat there in that cabin and waited and

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watched that railroad which no longer existed, which was now a few piles of charred ties among which green grass was already growing, a few threads of steel knotted and twisted about the trunks of trees and already annealing into the living bark, becoming one and indistinguishable with the jungle growth which had now accepted it, but which for us ran still pristine and intact and straight and narrow as the path to glory itself, as it ran for all of them who were there and saw when Ringo and I were not. Dru-silla told about that too; 'Atlanta' and 'Chattanooga' were in it—the names, the beginning and the end—but they meant no more to us than they did to the other watchers—the black and the white, the old men, the chil­dren, the women who would not know for months yet if they were widows or childless or not—gathered, warned by grapevine, to see the momentary flash and glare of in­ domitable spirit starved by three years free of the imped­ing flesh. She told it (and now Ringo and I began to see it; we were there too)—the roundhouse in Atlanta where the engine waited; we were there, we were of them who