Unvanquished

to him at all, he just acted like a grown person coming in where the children are getting ready to play a game and telling the children that the game is all right but that the grown folks need the room and the furniture for a while. He came walking fast up from the grove where he had hitched his mule with the others, with his gaunted face and his frock coat with the horse-hide and the Yankee-tent patches, into where the town people were standing around under umbrellas with Granny in the middle and the big refugeeing preacher with his book already open and one of the Compson niggers holding an umbrella over him and the rain splashing slow and cold and gray on the umbrella and splashing slow on the yellow boards where Granny was and into the dark red dirt beside the red grave without splashing at all. Brother Fortinbride just walked in and looked at the umbrellas and then at the hill people in cotton bagging and split floursack clothes that didn't have umbrellas, and went to Granny and said, 'Come, you men.'

The town men would have moved. Some of them did. Uncle Buck McCaslin was the first man of them all, town and hill, to come forward. By Christmas his rheu­matism would be so bad that he couldn't hardly lift his hand, but he was there now, with his peeled hickory stick, shoving up through the hill men with crokersacks tied over their heads and the town men with umbrellas getting out of his way; then Ringo and I stood there and watched Granny going down into the earth with the quiet rain splashing on the yellow boards until they quit look­ing like boards and began to look like water with thin sunlight reflected in it, sinking away into the ground. Then the wet red dirt began to flow into the grave, with the shovels darting and flicking slow and steady and the hill men waiting to take turns with the shovels because Uncle Buck would not let anyone spell him with his.

It didn't take long, and I reckon the refugeeing preacher would have tried again even then, but Brother For­ tinbride didn't give him a chance. Brother Fortinbride didn't even put down his shovel; he stood there leaning

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on it like he was in the field, and he sounded just like he used to in the church when Ab Snopes would be home from Memphis again—strong and quiet and not loud:

'I don't reckon that Rosa Millard or anybody that ever knew her has to be told where she has gone. And I don't reckon that anybody that ever knew her would want to insult her by telling her to rest anywhere in peace. And I reckon that God has already seen to it that there are men, women and children, black, white, yellow or red, waiting for her, to tend and worry over. And so you folks go home. Some of you ain't come far, and you came that distance in carriages with tops. But most of you didn't, and it's by the grace of Rosa Millard that you didn't come on foot. I'm talking to you. You have wood to cut and split, at least. And what do you reckon Rosa Millard would say about you all standing around here, keeping old folks and children out here in the rain?'

Mrs. Compson asked me and Ringo to come home and live with her until Father came back, and some others did—I don't remember who—and then, when I thought they had all gone, I looked around, and there was Uncle Buck. He came up to us with one elbow jammed into his side and his beard drawn over to one side like it was another arm, and his eyes red and mad like he hadn't slept much, and holding his stick like he was fix­ing to hit somebody with it and he didn't much care who.

'What you boys going to do now?' he said.

The earth was loose and soft now, dark and red with rain, so that the rain didn't splash on Granny at all; it just dissolved slow and gray into the dark-red mound, so that after a while the mound began to dissolve, too, without changing shape, like the soft yellow color of the boards had dissolved and stained up through the earth, and mound and boards and rain were all melting into one vague quiet reddish gray.

'I want to borrow a pistol,' I said.

He began to holler then, but quiet. Because he was older than us; it was like it had been at the old com­press that night with Granny. 'Need me or not,' he hollered, 'by Godfrey, I'm going! You can't stop me!

124

THE UNVANQUISHED

You mean to tell me you don't want me to go with you?'

'I don't care,' I said. 'I just want a pistol. Or a gun. Ours got burned up with the house.'

'All right!' he hollered. 'Me and the pistol, or you and this nigger horse thief and a fence rail. You ain't even got a poker at home, have you?'

'We got the bar'l of the musket yet,' Ringo said. 'I reckon that's all we'll need for Ab Snopes.'

'Ab Snopes?' Uncle Buck hollered. 'Do you think it's Ab Snopes this boy is thinking about? . . . Hey?' he hollered, hollering at me now. 'Hey, boy?' It was changing all the time, with the slow gray rain lancing slow and gray and cold into the red earth, yet it did not change. It would be some time yet; it would be days and weeks and then months before it would be smooth and quiet and level with the other earth. Now Uncle Buck was talking at Ringo, and not hollering now. 'Catch my mule,' he said. 'I got the pistol in my britches.'

Ab Snopes lived back in the hills too. Uncle Buck knew where; it was midafternoon by then and we were riding up a long red hill between pines when Uncle Buck stopped. He and Ringo had crokersacks tied over their heads. Uncle Buck's hand-worn stick stuck out from under his sack with the rain shining on it like a long wax candle.

'Wait,' he said. 'I got a idea.' We turned from the road and came to a creek bottom; there was a faint path. It was dark under the trees and the rain didn't fall on us now; it was like the bare trees themselves were dissolving slow and steady and cold into the end of the December day. We rode hi single file, hi our wet clothes and in the wet ammonia steam of the mules.

The pen was just like the one he and Ringo and Joby and I had built at home, only smaller and better hid­den; I reckon he had got the idea from ours. We stopped at the wet rails; they were still new enough for the split sides to be still yellow with sap, and on the far side of the pen there was something that looked like a yellow cloud hi the twilight, until it moved. And

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then we saw that it was a claybank stallion and three mares.

'I thought so,' Uncle Buck said.

Because I was mixed up. Maybe it was because Ringo and I were tired and we hadn't slept much lately. Be­ cause the days were mixed up with the nights, all the while we had been riding I would keep on thinking how Ringo and I would catch it from Granny when we got back home, for going off hi the rain without telling her. Because for a minute I sat there and looked at the horses and I believed that Ab Snopes was Grumby. But Uncle Buck begun to