the spectacles up her nose until she could look at me through them. Then she even pushed the spectacles up into her front hair and looked at me. “That’s the first sensible thing I’ve heard said on this place since eleven o’clock this morning,” she said.
“It’s so sensible and simple that I reckon only a child could have thought of it.” She looked at him. “Why don’t you?” He laughed some more. That is, his face did the same way and he made the same sound again. “My grandfather was at King’s Mountain, with Marion all through Carolina. My uncle was defeated for Governor of Tennessee by a corrupt and traitorous cabal of tavern-keepers and Republican Abolitionists, and my father died at Chapultepec. After that, the name they bore is not mine to change. Even my life is not mine so long as my country lies bleeding and ravished beneath an invader’s iron heel.” Then he stopped laughing, or whatever it was. Then his face looked surprised. Then it quit looking surprised, the surprise fading out of it steady at first and gradually faster but not very much faster like the heat fades out of a piece of iron on a blacksmith’s anvil until his face just looked amazed and quiet and almost peaceful. “Unless I lose it in battle,” he said.
“You can’t very well do that sitting here,” Granny said.
“No,” he said. But I don’t think he even heard her except with his ears. He stood up. Even Ab Snopes was watching him now, his knife stopped halfway to his mouth with a wad of greens on the end of the blade. “Yes,” Cousin Philip said.
His face even had the beautiful-girl look on it again. “Yes,” he said. He thanked Granny for his dinner. That is, I reckon that’s what he had told his mouth to say. It didn’t make much sense to us, but I don’t think he was paying any attention to it at all. He bowed. He wasn’t looking at Granny nor at anything else. He said “Yes,” again. Then he went out. Ringo and I followed to the front door and watched him mount his horse and sit there for a minute, bare-headed, looking up at the upstairs windows. It was Granny’s room he was looking at, with mine and Ringo’s room next to it. But Cousin Melisandre couldn’t have seen him even if she had been in either one of them, since she was in bed on the other side of the house with Philadelphia probably still wringing the cloths out in cold water to lay on her head. He sat the horse well. He rode it well too: light and easy and back in the saddle and toes in and perpendicular from ankle to knee as Father had taught me. It was a good horse too.
“It’s a damn good horse,” I said.
“Git the soap,” Ringo said.
But even then I looked quick back down the hall, even if I could hear Granny talking to Ab Snopes in the diningroom. “She’s still in there,” I said.
“Hah,” Ringo said. “I done tasted soap in my mouth for a cuss I thought was a heap further off than that.”
Then Cousin Philip spurred the horse and was gone. Or so Ringo and I thouglit. Two hours ago none of us had ever even heard of him; Cousin Melisandre had seen him twice and sat with her eyes shut screaming both times. But after we were older, Ringo and I realized that Cousin Philip was probably the only one in the whole lot of us that really believed even for one moment that he had said goodbye forever, that not only Granny and Louvinia knew better but Cousin Melisandre did too, no matter what his last name had the bad luck to be.
We went back to the dining-room. Then I realized that Ab Snopes had been waiting for us to come back. Then we both knew he was going to ask Granny something because nobody wanted to be alone when they had to ask Granny something even when they didn’t know they were going to have trouble with it. We had known Ab for over a year now. I should have known what it was like. Granny already did. He stood up. “Well, Miz Millard,” he said. “I figger you’ll be safe all right from now on, with Bed Forrest and his boys right there in Jefferson. But until things quiet down a mite more, I’ll just leave the horses in your lot for a day or two.”
“What horses?” Granny said. She and Ab didn’t just look at one another. They watched one another.
“Them fresh-captured horses from this morning,” Ab said.
“What horses?” Granny said. Then Ab said it.
“My horses.” Ab watched her.
“Why?” Granny said. But Ab knew what she meant.
“I’m the only grown man here,” he said. Then he said, “I seen them first. They were chasing me before…” Then he said, talking fast now; his eyes had gone kind of glazed for a second but now they were bright again, looking in the stubbly dirt-colored fuzz on his face like two chips of broken plate in a worn-out door-mat: “Spoils of war! I brought them here! I tolled them in here: a military and-bush! And as the only and ranking Confedrit military soldier present…”
“You ain’t a soldier,” Granny said. “You stipulated that to Colonel Sartoris yourself while I was listening. You told him yourself you would be his independent horse-captain but nothing more.”
“Ain’t that just exactly what I am trying to be?” he said.
“Didn’t I bring all six of them horses in here in my own possession, the same as if I was leading them on a rope?”
“Hah,” Granny said. “A spoil of war or any other kind of spoil don’t belong to a man or a woman either until they can take it home and put it down and turn their back on it. You never had time to get home with even the one you were riding. You ran in the first open gate you came to, no matter whose gate it was.”
“Except it was the wrong one,” he said. His eyes quit looking like china. They didn’t look like anything. But I reckon his face would still look like an old door-mat even after he had turned all the way white. “So I reckon I got to even walk back to town,” he said. “The woman that would…” His voice stopped. He and Granny looked at one another.
“Don’t you say it,” Granny said.
“Nome,” he said. He didn’t say it. “… a man of seven horses ain’t likely to lend him a mule.”
“No,” Granny said. “But you won’t have to walk.”
We all went out to the lot. I don’t reckon that even Ab knew until then that Granny had already found where he thought he had hidden the first horse and had it brought up to the lot with the other six. But at least he already had his saddle and bridle with him. But it was too late. Six of the horses moved about loose in the lot. The seventh one was tied just inside the gate with a piece of plow-line. It wasn’t the horse Ab had come on because that horse had a blaze. Ab had known Granny long enough too. He should have known.
Maybe he did. But at least he tried. He opened the gate.
“Well,” he said, “it ain’t getting no earlier. I reckon I better…”
“Wait,” Granny said. Then we looked at the horse which was tied to the fence. At first glance it looked the best one of the seven. You had to see it just right to tell its near leg was sprung a little, maybe from being worked too hard too young under too much weight. “Take that one,” Granny said.
“That ain’t mine,” Ab said. “That’s one of yourn. I’ll just…”
“Take that one,” Granny said. Ab looked at her. You could have counted at least ten.
“Hell fire, Miz Millard,” he said.
“I’ve told you before about cursing on this place,” Granny said.
“Yessum,” Ab said. Then he said it again: “Hell fire.” He went into the lot and rammed the bit into the tied horse’s mouth and clapped the saddle on and snatched the piece of plow-line off and threw it over the fence and got up and Granny stood there until he had ridden out of the lot and Ringo closed the gate and that was the first time I noticed the chain and padlock from the smokehouse door and Ringo locked it and handed Granny the key and Ab sat for a minute, looking down at her. “Well, good-day,” he said. “I just hope for the sake of the Confedricy that Bed Forrest don’t never tangle with you with all the horses he’s got.” Then he said it again, maybe worse this time because now he was already on a horse pointed toward the gate: “Or you’ll damn shore leave him just one more passel of infantry before he can spit twice.”
Then he was gone too. Except for hearing Cousin Melisandre now and then, and those six horses with U. S. branded on their hips standing in the lot, it might never have happened. At least Ringo and I thought that was all of it. Every now and then Philadelphia would come downstairs with the pitcher and draw some more cold water for Cousin Melisandre’s cloths but we thought that after a while even that would just wear out and quit. Then Philadelphia came down again and came in to where Granny was cutting down a pair of Yankee pants that Father had worn home last time so they would fit Ringo. She didn’t say anything. She just stood in the door until Granny said. “All right. What now?”
“She want the banjo,” Philadelphia said.
“What?” Granny said. “My dulcimer? She can’t play it. Go back upstairs.”
But Philadelphia didn’t move. “Could I ax Mammy to come help me?”
