Unvanquished

the sow; we put up the last panel by feel, and went back

to the house. It was full dark now, even in the pasture;

we could see the lamp in the kitchen and the shadow of

• someone moving across the window. When Ringo and I

m AMBUSCADE

21

came in, Louvinia was just closing one of the big trunks from the attic, which hadn't been down stairs since the Christmas four years ago which we spent at Hawk-hurst, when there wasn't any war and Uncle Dennison was still alive. It was a big trunk and heavy even when empty; it had not been hi the kitchen when we left to build the pen so it had been fetched down some time during the afternoon, while Joby and Loosh were in the bottom and nobody there to carry it down but Granny and Louvinia, and then Father later, after we came back to the house on the mule, so that was a part of the need and urgency too; maybe it was Father who carried the trunk down from the attic too. And when I went in to supper, the table was set with the kitchen knives and forks in place of the silver ones, and the sideboard (on which the silver service had been sitting when I began to remember and where it had been sitting ever since except on each Tuesday1 afternoon, when Granny and Louvinia and Philadelphy would pol­ ish it, why, nobody except Granny maybe knew, since it was never used) was bare*.

It didn't take us long to eat. Father had already eaten once early in the afternoon, and besides that was what Ringo and I were waiting for: for after supper, the hour of laxed muscles and full entrails, the talking. In the spring when he came home that time, we waited as we did now, until he was* sitting in his old chair with the hickory logs popping and snapping on the hearth and Ringo and I squatting on either side of the hearth, be­neath the mantel above which the captured musket which he had brought home from Virginia two years ago rested on two pegs, loaded and oiled for service. Then we listened. We heard: the names—Forrest and Morgan and Barksdale and Van Dorn; the words like Gap and Run which we didn't have in Mississippi even though we did own Barksdale, and Van Dorn until somebody's husband killed him, and one day General Forrest rode down South Street in Oxford where there watched him through a window pane a young girl who scratched her name on it with a diamond ring: Celia Cook.

But we were just twelve; we didn't listen to that What Ringo and I heard was the cannon and the flags

22

THE UNVANQUISHED

and the anonymous yelling. That's what we intended to hear tonight. Ringo was waiting for me in the hall; we waited until Father was settled hi his chair in the room which he and the Negroes called the Office—Father be­ cause his desk was here in which he kept the seed cot­ton and corn and hi this room he would remove his muddy boots and sit hi his stocking feet while the boots dried on the hearth and where the dogs could come and go with impunity, to lie on the rug before the fire or even to sleep there on the cold nights—these whether Mother, who died when I was born, gave him this dispen­sation before she died or whether Granny carried it on afterward or whether Granny gave him the dispensation herself because Mother died I don't know: and the Ne­groes called the Office because into this room they would be fetched to face the Patroller (sitting hi one of the straight hard chairs and smoking one of Father's cigars too but with his hat off) and swear that they could not possibly have been either whom or where he (the Pa­troller) said they were—and which Granny called the library because there was one bookcase hi it containing a Coke upon Littleton, a Josephus, a Koran, a volume of Mississippi Reports dated 1848, a Jeremy Taylor, a Napoleon's Maxims, a thousand and ninety-eight page treatise on astrology, a History of Werewolf Men in England, Ireland and Scotland and Including Wales by the Reverend Ptolemy Thorndyke, M.A. (Edinburgh), F.R.S.S., a complete Walter Scott, a complete Fenimore Cooper, a paper-bound Dumas complete, too, save for the volume which Father lost from his pocket at Ma-nassas (retreating, he said).

So Ringo and I squatted again and waited quietly while Granny sewed beside the lamp on the table and Father sat in his old chair in its old place, his muddy boots crossed and lifted into the old heel-marks beside the cold and empty fireplace, chewing the tobacco which Joby had loaned him. Joby was a good deal older than Father. He was too old to have been caught short of tobacco just by a war. He had come to Missis­sippi from Carolina with Father and he had been Father's body servant all the time that he was raising and tram-ing Simon, Ringo's father, to take over when he (Joby)

23

got too old, which was to have been some years yet ex­cept for the War. So Simon went with Father; he was still in Tennessee with the army. Vve waited for Father to begin; we waited so long that we could tell from the sounds that Louvinia was almost through in the kitchen: so that I decided Father was waiting for Louvinia to finish and come in to hear too, so I said, 'How can you fight in mountains, Father?'

And that's what he was waiting for, though not in the way Ringo and I thought, because he said, 'You can't. You just have to. Now you boys run on to bed.' We went up the stairs. But not all the way; we stopped and sat on the top step, just out of the light from the hall lamp, watching the door to the Office, lis­tening; after a while Louvinia crossed the hall without looking up and entered the Office; we could hear Father and her:

'Is the trunk ready?' 'Yes sir. Hit's ready.'

'Then tell Loosh to get the lantern and the shovels and wait in the kitchen for me.'

'Yes sir,' Louvinia said. She came out; she crossed the hall again without even looking up the stairs, who used to follow us up and stand in the bedroom door and scold at us until we were in bed—I in the bed itself, Ringo on the pallet beside it. But this time she not only didn't wonder where we were, she didn't even think about where we might not be.

'I knows what's in that trunk,' Ringo whispered.

'Hit's the silver. What you reckon------'

'Shhhh,' I said. We could hear Father's voice, talking to Granny. After a while Louvinia came back and crossed the hall again. We sat on the top step, listening to Father's voice telling Granny and Louvinia both.

'Vicksburg?' Ringo whispered. We were in the shadow; I couldn't see anything but his eyeballs. 'Vicks­burg fell? Do he mean hit fell off hi the River? With Gin-rul Pemberton in hit too?'

'Shhhhh!' I said. We sat close together in the shadow, listening to Father. Perhaps it was the dark or perhaps we were the two moths, the two feathers again or perhaps there is a point at which credulity firmly

24