“Oh,” the girl said. “You mean corn.” She went to a corner and lifted a loose plank in the floor, the Negro watching her, and drew forth another earthen jug. She filled another thick tumbler and gave it to the Negro and watched him jerk it down his throat, his eyes closed. Again he said, “Whuf!” and drew his back hand across his mouth.
“Whut wuz dat you axed me?” he said.
“Do the girls down there at Countymaison wear shoes?”
“De ladies does. If dey didn’t have none, Marse Soshay could sell a hun’ed niggers en buy um some… Which un is it say Marse Soshay a nigger?”
The girl watched him. “Is he married?”
“Who married? Marse Soshay?” The girl watched him.
“How he have time to git married, wid us fighting de Yankees for fo years? Ain’t been home in fo years now where no ladies to marry is.” He looked at the girl, his eye-whites a little bloodshot, his skin shining in faint and steady highlights. Thawing, he seemed to have increased in size a little too. “Whut’s it ter you, if he married or no?”
They looked at each other. The Negro could hear her breathing. Then she was not looking at him at all, though she had not yet even blinked nor turned her head. “I don’t reckon he’d have any time for a girl that didn’t have any shoes.” she said. She went to the wall and stooped again to the crack. The Negro watched her. The older woman entered and took another dish from the stove and departed without having looked at either of them.
V
THE FOUR MEN, the three men and the boy, sat about the supper table. The broken meal lay on thick plates. The knives and forks were iron. On the table the jug still sat. Weddel was now cloakless. He was shaven, his still damp hair combed back. Upon his bosom the ruffles of the shirt frothed in the lamplight, the right sleeve, empty, pinned across his breast with a thin gold pin. Under the table the frail and mended dancing slippers rested among the brogans of the two men and the bare splayed feet of the boy.
“Vatch says you are a nigra,” the father said.
Weddel was leaning a little back in his chair. “So that explains it,” he said. “I was thinking that he was just congenitally ill-tempered. And having to be a victor, too.”
“Are you a nigra?” the father said.
“No,” Weddel said. He was looking at the boy, his weathered and wasted face a little quizzical. Across the back of his neck his hair, long, had been cut roughly as though with a knife or perhaps a bayonet. The boy watched him in complete and rapt immobility. As if I might be an apparition he thought. A hant. Maybe I am. “No,” he said. “I am not a Negro.”
“Who are you?” the father said.
Weddel sat a little sideways in his chair, his hand lying on the table. “Do you ask guests who they are in Tennessee?” he said. Vatch was filling a tumbler from the jug. His face was lowered, his hands big and hard. His face was hard.
Weddel looked at him. “I think I know how you feel,” he said. “I expect I felt that way once. But it’s hard to keep on feeling any way for four years. Even feeling at all.”
Vatch said something, sudden and harsh. He clapped the tumbler on to the table, splashing some of the liquor out. It looked like water, with a violent, dynamic odor. It seemed to possess an inherent volatility which carried a splash of it across the table and on to the foam of frayed yet immaculate linen on Weddel’s breast, striking sudden and chill through the cloth against his flesh.
“Vatch!” the father said.
Weddel did not move; his expression arrogant, quizzical, and weary, did not change. “He did not mean to do that,” he said.
“When I do,” Vatch said, “it will not look like an accident.”
Weddel was looking at Vatch. “I think I told you once,” he said. “My name is Saucier Weddel. I am a Mississippian. I live at a place named Countymaison. My father built it and named it. He was a Choctaw chief named Francis Weddel, of whom you have probably not heard. He was the son of a Choctaw woman and a French emigre of New Orleans, a general of Napoleon’s and a knight of the Legion of Honor. His name was Francois Vidal. My father drove to Washington once in his carriage to remonstrate with President Jackson about the Government’s treatment of his people, sending on ahead a wagon of provender and gifts and also fresh horses for the carriage, in charge of the man, the native overseer, who was a full blood Choctaw and my father’s cousin. In the old days The Man was the hereditary title of the head of our clan; but after we became Europeanised like the white people, we lost the title to the branch which refused to become polluted, though we kept the slaves and the land. The Man now lives in a house a little larger than the cabins of the Negroes, an upper servant. It was in Washington that my father met and married my mother. He was killed in the Mexican War. My mother died two years ago, in ’63, of a complication of pneumonia acquired while superintending the burying of some silver on a wet night when Federal troops entered the county, and of unsuitable food; though my boy refuses to believe that she is dead. He refuses to believe that the country would have permitted the North to deprive her of the imported Martinique coffee and the beaten biscuit which she had each Sunday noon and Wednesday night. He believes that the country would have risen in arms first. But then, he is only a Negro, member of an oppressed race burdened with freedom. He has a daily list of my misdoings which he is going to tell her on me when we reach home. I went to school in France, but not very hard. Until two weeks ago I was a major of Mississippi infantry in the corps of a man named Longstreet, of whom you may have heard.”
“So you were a major,” Vatch said.
“That appears to be my indictment; yes.”
“I have seen a rebel major before,” Vatch said. “Do you want me to tell you where I saw him?”
“Tell me,” Weddel said.
“He was lying by a tree. We had to stop there and lie down, and he was lying by the tree, asking for water. ‘Have you any water, friend?’ he said. ‘Yes. I have water,’ I said. ‘I have plenty of water.’ I had to crawl; I couldn’t stand up. I crawled over to him and I lifted him so that his head would be propped against the tree. I fixed his face to the front.”
“Didn’t you have a bayonet?” Weddel said. “But I forgot; you couldn’t stand up.”
“Then I crawled back. I had to crawl back a hundred yards, where…”
“Back?”
“It was too close. Who can do decent shooting that close? I had to crawl back, and then the damned musket…”
“Damn musket?” Weddel sat a little sideways in his chair, his hand on the table, his face quizzical and sardonic, contained.
“I missed, the first shot. I had his face propped up and turned, and his eyes open watching me, and then I missed. I hit him in the throat and I had to shoot again because of the damned musket.”
“Vatch,” the father said.
Vatch’s hands were on the table. His head, his face, were like his father’s, though without the father’s deliberation. His face was furious, still, unpredictable. “It was that damn musket. I had to shoot three times. Then he had three eyes, in a row across his face propped against the tree, all three of them open, like he was watching me with three eyes. I gave him another eye, to see better with. But I had to shoot twice because of the damn musket.”
“You, Vatch,” the father said. He stood now, his hands on the table, propping his gaunt body. “Don’t you mind Vatch, stranger. The War is over now.”
“I don’t mind him,” Weddel said. His hands went to his bosom, disappearing into the foam of linen while he watched Vatch steadily with his alert, quizzical, sardonic gaze. “I have seen too many of him for too long a time to mind one of him any more.”
“Take some whiskey,” Vatch said.
