Unvanquished

'Mister Snopes,' Granny said.

'All right,' Ringo said. 'Get in and le's go home.'

Granny didn't move; I knew why, even before she spoke. 'Where did you get this buggy?'

'I borrowed hit,' Ringo said. ' 'Twarn't no Yankees handy, so I never needed no paper.'

We got in. The buggy went on. It seemed to me like it had already been all night, but it wasn't midnight yet —I could tell by the stars—we would be home by mid­night almost. We went on. 'I reckon you went and told um who we is now,' Ringo said.

'Yes,' Granny said.

'Well, I reckon that completes that,' Ringo said. 'Anyway, we handled two hundred and forty-eight head while the business lasted.'

'Two hundred and forty-six,' Granny said. 'We have lost the team.'

it was after midnight when we reached home; it was already Sunday and when we reached the church that morning there was the biggest crowd waiting there had ever been, though Ab Snopes would not get back with the new mules until tomorrow. So I believed that some­how they had heard about last night and they knew too, like Ringo, that this was the end and that now the

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books would have to be balanced and closed. We were late, because Granny made Ringo get up at sunup and take the buggy back where he had got it. So when we reached the church they were already inside, waiting. Brother Fortinbride met us at the door, and they all turned in the pews and watched Granny—the old men and the women and the children and the maybe a dozen niggers that didn't have any white people now—they looked at her exactly like Father's fox hounds would look at him when he would go into the dog run, while we went up the aisle to our pew. Ringo had the book; he went up to the gallery, I looked back and saw him lean­ing his arms on the book on the balustrade.

We sat down in our pew, like before there was a war, only for Father—Granny still and straight in her Sunday calico dress and the shawl and the hat Mrs. Compson had loaned her a year ago; straight and quiet, with her hands holding her prayer book in her lap like always, though there hadn't been an Episcopal service in the church in almost three years now. Brother Fortinbride was a Methodist, and I don't know what the people were. Last summer when we got back with the first batch of mules from Alabama, Granny sent for them, sent out word back into the hills where they lived in 'dirt-floored cabins, on the little poor farms without slaves. It took three or four times to get them to come in, but at last they all came—men and women and chil­dren and the dozen niggers that had got free by ac­cident and didn't know what to do about it. I reckon this was the first church with a slave gallery some of them had ever seen, with Ringo and the other twelve sitting up there in the high shadows where there was room enough for two hundred; and I could remember back when Father would be hi the pew with us and the grove outside would be full of carriages from the other planta­tions, and Doctor Worsham in his stole beneath the altar, and for each white person in the auditorium there would be ten niggers in the gallery. And I reckon that on that first Sunday when Granny knelt down in public, it was the first time they had ever seen anyone kneel in a church. Brother Fortinbride wasn't a minister either. He was a private in Father's regiment, and he got hurt bad in

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the first battle the regiment was in; they thought that he was dead, but he said that Jesus came to him and told him to rise up and live, and Father sent him back home to die, only he didn't die. But they said that he didn't have any stomach left at all, and everybody thought that the food we had to eat in 1862 and '63 would finish killing him, even if he had eaten it with women to cook it instead of gathering weeds from ditch banks and cook­ing them himself. But it didn't kill him, and so maybe it was Jesus, after all, like he said. And so, when we came back with the first batch of mules and the silver and the food, and Granny sent word out for all that needed, it was like Brother Fortinbride sprang right up out of the ground with the names and histories of all the hill folks at his tongue's end, like maybe what he claimed was true—that the Lord had both him and Granny in mind when He created the other. So he would stand there where Doctor Worsham used to stand, and talk quiet for a little while about God, with his hair showing where he cut it himself and the bones looking like they were coming right out through his face, in a frock coat that had turned green a long tune ago and with patches on it that he had sewed on himself— one of them was green horsehide and the other was a piece of tent canvas with the U. S. A. stencil still showing a little on it. He never talked long; there wasn't much anybody could say about Confederate armies now. I reckon there is a time when even preachers quit believ­ing that God is going to change His plan and give victory where there is nothing left to hang victory on. He just said how victory without God is mockery and delusion, but that defeat with God is not defeat. Then he quit talk­ing, and he stood there with the old men and the women and children and the eleven or twelve niggers lost in freedom, hi clothes made out of cotton bagging and floursacks, still watching Granny—only now it was not like the hounds used to look at Father, but like they would watch the food in Loosh's hands when he would go in to feed them—and then he said:

'Brethren and sisters, Sister Millard wishes to bear public witness.'

Granny stood up. She would not go to the altar;

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she just stood there in our pew with her face straight ahead, in the shawl and Mrs. Compson's hat and the dress that Louvinia washed and ironed every Saturday, holding the prayer book. It used to have her name on it in gold letters, but now the only way you could read them was to run your finger over them; she said quiet, too— quiet as Brother Fortinbride—'I have sinned. I want you all to pray for me.'

She knelt down hi the pew; she looked littler than Cousin Denny; it was only Mrs. Compson's hat above the pew back they had to look at now. I don't know if she prayed herself or not. And Brother Fortinbride didn't pray either—not aloud anyway. Ringo and I were just past fifteen then, but I could imagine what Doctor Worsham would have thought up to say—about all soldiers did not carry arms, and about they also serve, and how one child saved from hunger and cold is better in heaven's sight than a thousand slain enemies. But Brother Fortinbride didn't say it. I reckon he thought of that; he always had plenty of words when he wanted to. It was like he said to himself, 'Words are fine in peacetime, when everybody is comfortable and easy. But now I think that we can be excused.' He just stood there where Doctor Worsham used to stand and where tne bishop would stand, too, with his ring looking big as a pistol target. Then Granny rose up; I didn't have time to help her; she stood up, and then the long sound went through the church, a sound kind of like a sigh that Ringo said was the sound of the cotton bagging and the floursacking when they breathed again, and Granny turned and looked back toward the gallery; only Ringo was already moving.

'Bring the book,' she said.