Unvanquished

and talked about that was all she had to do; to look at what she had

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made out of the Yankees, enemies, and that these were Southern men and, therefore, there would not even be any risk to this, because Southern men would not harm a woman, even if the letter failed to work.

Oh, he did it well. I can see now that Ringo and I had no chance against him—about how the business with the Yankees had stopped without warning, before she had made what she had counted on, and how she had given most of that away under, the belief that she would be able to replace that and more, but as it was now, she had made independent and secure almost everyone in the county save herself and her own blood; that soon Father would return home to his ruined plantation and most of his slaves vanished; and how it would be if, when he came home and looked about at his desolate future, she could take fifteen hundred dol­lars in cash out of her pocket and say, 'Here. Start over with this'—fifteen hundred dollars more than she had hoped to have. He would take one of the mares for; his commission and he would guarantee her fifteen hun­dred dollars for the other three.

Oh, we had no chance against him. We begged her to let us ask advice from Uncle Buck McCaslin, any­one, any man. But she just sat there with that expression on her face, saying that the horses did not belong to him, that they had been stolen, and that all she had to do was to frighten them with the order,, and even Ringo and I knowing at fifteen that Grumby, or whoever he was, was a coward and that you might frighten a brave man, but that nobody dared frighten a coward; and Granny, sitting there without moving at all and saying, 'But the horses do not belong to them because they are stolen property,' and we said, 'Then no more will they belong to us,' and Granny said, 'But they do not belong to them.'

But we didn't quit trying; all that day—Ab Snopes had located them; it was an abandoned cotton compress on Tallahatchie River, sixty miles away—while we rode hi the rain hi the wagon Ab Snopes got for us to use, we tried. But Granny just sat there on the seat be­tween us, with the order signed by Ringo for General Forrest in the tin can under her dress and her feet on

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119

some hot bricks hi a crokersack that we would stop every ten miles and build a fire in the ram and heat again, until we came to the crossroads, where Ab Snopes told us to leave the wagon and walk. And then she would not let me and Ringo go with her. 'You and Ringo look like men,' she said. 'They won't hurt a woman.' It had rained all day; it had fallen gray and steady and slow and cold on us all day long, and now it was like twilight had thickened it without being able to make it any grayer or colder. The crossroad was not a road any more; it was no more than a faint gash turn­ing off at right angles into the bottom, so that it looked like a cave. We could see the hoof marks in it.

'Then you shan't go,' I said. 'I'm stronger than you are; I'll hold you.' I held her; her arm felt little and light and dry as a stick. But it wasn't that; her size and appearance had no more to do with it than it had in her dealings with the Yankees; she just turned and looked at me, and then I began to cry. I would be six­teen years old before another year was out, yet I sat there in the wagon, crying. I didn't even know when she freed her arm. And then she was out of the wagon, standing there looking at me in the gray rain and the gray darkening light.

'It's for all of us,' she said. 'For John and you and Ringo and Joby and Louvinia. So we will have some­thing when John comes back home. You never cried when you knew he was going into a battle, did you? And now I am taking no risk; I am a woman. Even Yankees do not harm old women. You and Ringo stay here until I call you.'

We tried. I keep on saying that because I know now that I didn't. I could have held her, turned the wagon, driven away, holding her in it. I was just fifteen, and for most of my life her face had been the first thing I saw in the morning and the last thing I saw at night, but I could have stopped her, and I didn't. I sat there hi the wagon hi the cold rain and let her walk on into the wet twilight and never come out of it again. How many of them there were hi the cold compress, I don't know, and when and why they took fright and left, I don't know.

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We just sat there in the wagon in that cold dissolving December twilight until at last I couldn't bear it any longer. Then Ringo and I were both running, trying to run, hi the ankle-deep mud of that old road pocked with the prints of ingoing hoofs, but of no wheel, know­ing that we had waited too long either to help her or to share in her defeat. Because there was no sound nor sign of life at all; just the huge rotting building with the gray afternoon dying wetly upon it, and then at the end of the hall a faint crack of light beneath a door.

I don't remember touching the door at all, because the room was a floor raised about two feet from the earth, so that I ran into the step and fell forward into and then through the door, onto my hands and knees in the room, looking at Granny. There was a tallow dip still burning on a wooden box, but it was the pow­der I smelled, stronger even than the tallow. I couldn't seem to breathe for the smell of the powder, looking at Granny. She had looked little alive, but now she looked like she had collapsed, like she had been made out of a lot of little thin dry light sticks notched together and braced with cord, and now the cord had broken and all the little sticks had collapsed in a quiet heap on the floor, and somebody had spread a clean and faded calico dress over them.

VENDEE

^{rK^}

jlhey all came in again when we buried Granny,

Brother Fortinbride and all of them—the old men and the women and the children, and the niggers—the twelve who used to come hi when word would spread that Ab Snopes was back from Memphis, and the hun­dred more who had returned to the county since, who had followed the Yankees away and then returned, to find their families and owners gone, to scatter into the hills and live in caves and hollow trees like animals I suppose, not only with no one to depend on but with no one depending on them, caring whether they returned or not or lived or died or not: and that I suppose is the sum, the sharp serpent's fang, of bereavement and loss—all coming in from the hills in the rain. Only there were no Yankees hi Jefferson now so they didn't have to walk in; I could look across the grave and beyond the other headstones and monuments and see the dripping cedar, grove full of mules with long black smears on their hips where Granny and Ringo had burned out the U. S. brand.

Most of the Jefferson people were there too, and there was another preacher—a big preacher refugeeing from Memphis or somewhere—and I found out how Mrs. Compson and some of them had arranged for him to

121

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preach the funeral. But Brother Fortinbride didn't let him. He didn't tell him not to; he just didn't say any­thing