“No,” the doctor said. “He’s had too much already.”
“Pour me some whisky, Jackson,” the man on the bed said. He puffed steadily at the pipe, looking at the investigator. “You come from the Government?” he said.
“Yes,” the investigator said. “They should have registered. That’s all required of them yet. They did not…” His voice ceased, while the seven pairs of eyes contemplated him, and the man on the bed puffed steadily.
“We would have still been here,” the man on the bed said. “We wasn’t going to run.” He turned his head. The two youths were standing side by side at the foot of the bed.
“Anse, Lucius,” he said.
To the investigator it sounded as if they answered as one, “Yes, father.”
“This gentleman has come all the way from Jackson to say the Government is ready for you. I reckon the quickest place to enlist will be Memphis. Go upstairs and pack.”
The investigator started, moved forward. “Wait!” he cried.
But Jackson, the eldest, had forestalled him. He said, “Wait,” also, and now they were not looking at the investigator. They were looking at the doctor.
“What about his leg?” Jackson said.
“Look at it,” the doctor said. “He almost amputated it himself. It won’t wait. And he can’t be moved now. I’ll need my nurse to help me, and some ether, provided he hasn’t had too much whisky to stand the anesthetic too. One of you can drive to town in my car. I’ll telephone ”
“Ether?” the man on the bed said. “What for? You just said yourself it’s pretty near off now. I could whet up one of Jackson’s butcher knives and finish it myself, with another drink or two. Go on. Finish it.”
“You couldn’t stand any more shock,” the doctor said.
“This is whisky talking now.”
“Shucks,” the other said. “One day in France we was running through a wheat field and I saw the machine gun, coming across the wheat, and I tried to jump it like you would jump a fence rail somebody was swinging at your middle, only I never made it. And I was on the ground then, and along toward dark that begun to hurt, only about that time something went whang on the back of my helmet, like when you hit a anvil, so I never knowed nothing else until I woke up. There was a heap of us racked up along a bank outside a field dressing station, only it took a long time for the doctor to get around to all of us, and by that time it was hurting bad. This here ain’t hurt none to speak of since I got a-holt of this johnny-jug. You go on and finish it. If it’s help you need, Stuart and Rafe will help you… Pour me a drink, Jackson.”
This time the doctor raised the demijohn and examined the level of the liquor. “There’s a good quart gone,” he said. “If you’ve drunk a quart of whisky since four o’clock, I doubt if you could stand the anesthetic. Do you think you could stand it if I finished it now?”
“Yes, finish it. I’ve ruined it; I want to get shut of it.”
The doctor looked about at the others, at the still, identical faces watching him. “If I had him in town, in the hospital, with a nurse to watch him, I’d probably wait until he got over this first shock and got the whisky out of his system. But he can’t be moved now, and I can’t stop the bleeding like this, and even if I had ether or a local anesthetic…”
“Shucks,” the man on the bed said. “God never made no better local nor general comfort or anesthetic neither than what’s in this johnny-jug. And this ain’t Jackson’s leg nor Stuart’s nor Rafe’s nor Lee’s. It’s mine. I done started it; I reckon I can finish cutting it off any way I want to.”
But the doctor was still looking at Jackson. “Well, Mr. McCallum?” he said. “You’re the oldest.”
But it was Stuart who answered. “Yes,” he said. “Finish it. What do you want? Hot water, I reckon.”
“Yes,” the doctor said. “Some clean sheets. Have you got a big table you can move in here?”
“The kitchen table,” the man who had met them at the door said. “Me and the boys…”
“Wait,” the man on the bed said. “The boys won’t have time to help you.” He looked at them again. “Anse, Lucius,” he said.
Again it seemed to the investigator that they answered as one, “Yes, father.”
“This gentleman yonder is beginning to look impatient. You better start. Come to think of it, you won’t need to pack. You will have uniforms in a day or two. Take the truck. There won’t be nobody to drive you to Memphis and bring the truck back, so you can leave it at the Gayoso Feed Company until we can send for it. I’d like for you to enlist into the old Sixth Infantry, where I used to be. But I reckon that’s too much to hope, and you’ll just have to chance where they send you. But it likely won’t matter, once you are in. The Government done right by me in my day, and it will do right by you. You just enlist wherever they want to send you, need you, and obey your sergeants and officers until you find out how to be soldiers. Obey them, but remember your name and don’t take nothing from no man. You can go now.”
“Wait!” the investigator cried again; again he started, moved forward into the center of the room. “I protest this! I’m sorry about Mr. McCallum’s accident. I’m sorry about the whole business. But it’s out of my hands and out of his hands now. This charge, failure to register according to law, has been made and the warrant issued. It cannot be evaded this way. The course of the action must be completed before any other step can be taken. They should have thought of this when these boys failed to register. If Mr. Gombault refuses to serve this warrant, I will serve it myself and take these men back to Jefferson with me to answer this charge as made. And I must warn Mr. Gombault that he will be cited for contempt!”
The old marshal turned, his shaggy eyebrows beetling again, speaking down to the investigator as if he were a child, “Ain’t you found out yet that me or you neither ain’t going nowhere for a while?”
“What?” the investigator cried. He looked about at the grave faces once more contemplating him with that remote and speculative regard. “Am I being threatened?” he cried.
“Ain’t anybody paying any attention to you at all,” the marshal said. “Now you just be quiet for a while, and you will be all right, and after a while we can go back to town.”
So he stopped again and stood while the grave, contemplative faces freed him once more of that impersonal and unbearable regard, and saw the two youths approach the bed and bend down in turn and kiss their father on the mouth, and then turn as one and leave the room, passing him without even looking at him. And sitting in the lamplit hall beside the old marshal, the bedroom door closed now, he heard the truck start up and back and turn and go down the road, the sound of it dying away, ceasing, leaving the still, hot night, the Mississippi Indian summer, which had already outlasted half of November filled with the loud last shrilling of the summer’s cicadas, as though they, too, were aware of the imminent season of cold weather and of death.
“I remember old Anse,” the marshal said pleasantly, chattily, in that tone in which an adult addresses a strange child.
“He’s been dead fifteen-sixteen years now. He was about sixteen when the old war broke out, and he walked all the way to Virginia to get into it. He could have enlisted and fought right here at home, but his ma was a Carter, so wouldn’t nothing do him but to go all the way back to Virginia to do his fighting, even though he hadn’t never seen Virginia before himself; walked all the way back to a land he hadn’t never even seen before and enlisted in Stonewall Jackson’s army and stayed in it all through the Valley, and right up to Chancellorsville, where them Carolina boys shot Jackson by mistake, and right on up to that morning in ‘Sixty-five when Sheridan’s cavalry blocked the road from Appomattox to the Valley, where they might have got away again. And he walked back to Mississippi with just about what he had carried away with him when he left, and he got married and built the first story of this house this here log story we’re in right now and started getting them boys Jackson and Stuart and Raphael and Lee and Buddy. Buddy come along late, late enough to be in the other war, in France in it. You heard him in there. He brought back two medals, an American medal and a French one, and no man knows till yet how he got them, just what he done. I don’t believe he even told Jackson and Stuart and them. He hadn’t hardly got back home, with them numbers on his uniform and the wound stripes and them two medals, before he had found him a girl, found her right off, and a year later them twin boys was born, the livin’, spittin’ image of old Anse McCallum. If old Anse had just been about seventy-five years younger, the three of them might have been thriblets. I remember them two little critters exactly alike, and wild as spikehorn bucks, running around here day and night both with a pack of coon dogs until they got big enough to help Buddy and Stuart and Lee with the farm and the gin, and Rafe with the horses and mules, when he would breed and raise and train them and take them to Memphis to sell, right on up to three, four years back, when they went to the agricultural college for a year to learn more about whiteface cattle.
“That was after Buddy and them had quit raising cotton. I remember that too. It was when the Government
