“I don’t know,” Granny said.
“You don’t know,” the lieutenant said. He started to holler, then he didn’t. He looked at Granny; he talked now with a kind of furious patience, like Granny was an Indian: “Listen. I know you don’t have to tell me, and you know I can’t make you. I ask it only out of pure respect. Respect? Envy. Won’t you tell me?”
“I don’t know,” Granny said.
“You don’t know,” the lieutenant said. “You mean, you—” He talked quiet now. “I see. You really don’t know. You were too busy running the reaper to count the—” We didn’t move. Granny wasn’t even looking at him; it was Ringo and me that watched him fold the letters that Granny and Ringo had written and put them carefully into his pocket. He still talked quiet, like he was tired: “All right, boys. Rope them together and haze them out of there.”
“The gate is a quarter of a mile from here,” a soldier said.
“Throw down some fence,” the lieutenant said. They began to throw down the fence that Joby and I had worked two months on. The lieutenant took a pad from his pocket, and he went to the fence and laid the pad on the rail and took out a pencil. Then he looked back at Granny; he still talked quiet: “I believe you said the name now is Rosa Millard?”
“Yes,” Granny said.
The lieutenant wrote on the pad and tore the sheet out and came back to Granny. He still talked quiet, like when somebody is sick in a room. “We are under orders to pay for all property damaged in the process of evacuation,” he said. “This is a voucher on the quartermaster at Memphis for ten dollars. For the fence.” He didn’t give the paper to her at once; he just stood there, looking at her. “Confound it, I don’t mean promise. If I just knew what you believed in, held—” He cursed again, not loud and not at anybody or anything. “Listen. I don’t say promise; I never mentioned the word. But I have a family; I am a poor man; I have no grandmother. And if in about four months the auditor should find a warrant in the records for a thousand dollars to Mrs. Rosa Millard, I would have to make it good. Do you see?”
“Yes,” Granny said. “You need not worry.”
Then they were gone. Granny and Ringo and Joby and I stood there and watched them drive the mules up across the pasture and out of sight. We had forgot about Ab Snopes until he said, “Well, hit looks like that’s all they are to hit. But you still got that ere hundred-odd that are out on receipt, provided them hill folks don’t take a example from them Yankees. I reckon you can still be grateful for that much anyway. So I’ll bid you, one and all, good day and get on home and rest a spell. If I can help you again, just send for me.” He went on too.
After a while Granny said:
“Joby, put those rails back up.” I reckon Ringo and I were both waiting for her to tell us to help Joby, but she didn’t. She just said “Come,” and turned and went on, not toward the cabin but across the pasture toward the road. We didn’t know where we were going until we reached the church. She went straight up the aisle to the chancel and stood there until we came up. “Kneel down,” she said.
We knelt in the empty church. She was small between us, little; she talked quiet, not loud, not fast and not slow; her voice sounded quiet and still, but strong and clear: “I have sinned. I have stolen, and I have borne false witness against my neighbor, though that neighbor was an enemy of my country. And more than that, I have caused these children to sin. I hereby take their sins upon my conscience.” It was one of those bright soft days. It was cool in the church; the floor was cold to my knees. There was a hickory branch just outside the window, turning yellow; when the sun touched it, the leaves looked like gold. “But I did not sin for gain or for greed,” Granny said. “I did not sin for revenge. I defy You or anyone to say I did. I sinned first for justice. And after that first time, I sinned for more than justice; I sinned for the sake of food and clothes for Your own creatures who could not help themselves—for children who had given their fathers, for wives who had given their husbands, for old people who had given their sons to a holy cause, even though You have seen fit to make it a lost cause. What I gained, I shared with them. It is true that I kept some of it back, but I am the best judge of that because I, too, have dependents who may be orphans, too, at this moment, for all I know. And if this be sin in Your sight, I take this on my conscience too. Amen.”
She rose up. She got up easy, like she had no weight to herself. It was warm outside; it was the finest October that I could remember. Or maybe it was because you are not conscious of weather until you are fifteen. We walked slow back home, though Granny said she wasn’t tired. “I just wish I knew how they found out about that pen,” she said.
“Don’t you know?” Ringo said. Granny looked at him. “Ab Snopes told them.”
This time she didn’t even say, “Mister Snopes.” She just stopped dead still and looked at Ringo. “Ab Snopes?”
“Do you reckon he was going to be satisfied until he had sold them last nineteen mules to somebody?” Ringo said.
“Ab Snopes,” Granny said. “Well.” Then she walked on; we walked on. “Ab Snopes,” she said. “I reckon he beat me, after all. But it can’t be helped now. And anyway, we did pretty well, taken by and large.”
“We done damn well,” Ringo said. He caught himself, but it was already too late. Granny didn’t even stop.
“Go on home and get the soap,” she said.
He went on. We could watch him cross the pasture and go into the cabin, and then come out and go down the hill toward the spring. We were close now; when I left Granny and went down to the spring, he was just rinsing his mouth, the can of soap in one hand and the gourd dipper in the other. He spit and rinsed his mouth and spit again; there was a long smear of suds up his cheek; a light froth of colored bubbles flicking away while I watched them, without any sound at all. “I still says we done damn well,” he said.
We tried to keep her from doing it—we both tried. Ringo had told her about Ab Snopes, and after that we both knew it. It was like all three of us should have known it all the time. Only I don’t believe now that he meant to happen what did happen. But I believe that if he had known what was going to happen, he would still have egged her on to do it. And Ringo and I tried—we tried—but Granny just sat there before the fire—it was cold in the cabin now—with her arms folded in the shawl and with that look on her face when she had quit either arguing or listening to you at all, saying just this one time more and that even a rogue will be honest for enough pay. It was Christmas; we had just heard from Aunt Louisa at Hawkhurst and found out where Drusilla was; she had been missing from home for almost a year now, and at last Aunt Louisa found out that she was with father away in Carolina, like she had told me, riding with the troop like she was a man.
Ringo and I had just got back from Jefferson with the letter, and Ab Snopes was in the cabin, telling Granny about it, and Granny listening and believing him because she still believed that what side of a war a man fought on made him what he is. And she knew better with her own ears; she must have known; everybody knew about them and were either mad if they were men or terrified if they were women. There was one Negro in the county that everybody knew that they had murdered and burned him up in his cabin. They called themselves Grumby’s Independents—about fifty or sixty of them that wore no uniform and came from nobody knew where as soon as the last Yankee regiment was out of the country, raiding smokehouses and stables, and houses where they were sure there were no men, tearing up beds and floors and walls, frightening white women and torturing Negroes to find where money or silver was hidden.
They were caught once, and the one that said he was Grumby produced a tattered raiding commission actually signed by General Forrest; though you couldn’t tell if the original name was Grumby or not. But it got them off, because it was just some old men that captured them; and now women who had lived alone for three years surrounded by invading armies were afraid to stay in the houses at night, and the Negroes who had lost their white people lived hidden in
caves back in the hills like animals.
That’s who Ab Snopes was talking about, with his hat on the floor and his hands flapping and his hair bent up across the back of his head where he had slept on it. The band had a thoroughbred stallion and three mares—how Ab Snopes knew it he didn’t say—that they had stolen; and how he knew they were stolen, he didn’t say. But all Granny had to do was to write out one of the orders and sign Forrest’s name to it; he, Ab, would guarantee to get two thousand dollars for the horses. He swore to that, and Granny, sitting there with her arms rolled into the shawl and that expression on her face, and Ab Snopes’ shadow leaping and jerking up the wall while he waved his arms and talked about that was all she had to do; to look at what she had made out of the Yankees, enemies, and that these were Southern men and, therefore, there would not even be any risk to this, because Southern men would not harm a woman, even if the letter failed to work.
Oh, he did it well. I can see now that Ringo and I had no chance against him—about how the business with the Yankees had stopped without warning, before she had made what she had counted on, and how she had given most of that away under the belief that she would be able to replace that and more, but as it was now, she had fixed up most everyone in the county save herself; that soon father would return home to a ruined plantation and some of his slaves gone; and how it would be if, when he came home and looked about at his desolate future, she could take fifteen hundred dollars in cash out of her pocket and say, “Here. Start over with this”—fifteen hundred dollars more than she had hoped to have. He would take one of the mares for his commission and he would guarantee her fifteen hundred dollars for the other three.
Oh, we had no chance against him. We begged her to let us ask advice from Uncle Buck McCaslin, anyone, any man. But she just sat there with that expression on her face, saying that the horses did not belong to him, that they had been stolen, and that all she had to do was to frighten them with the order, and even Ringo and I knowing at fifteen that Grumby, or whoever he was, was a coward and that you might frighten a brave man, but that nobody dared frighten a coward; and Granny, sitting there without moving at all and saying, “But the horses do not belong to them because they are stolen property,” and we said, “Then no more will they belong to us,” and Granny said, “But they do not belong to them.”
But we didn’t quit trying; all that day—Ab Snopes had located them; it was an abandoned cotton compress on Tallahatchie River, sixty miles away—while we rode in the rain in the wagon Ab Snopes got for us to use, we tried. But Granny just sat there on the seat between us, with the order signed by Ringo for General Forrest in the tin can under her dress and her feet on some hot bricks in a crokersack that we would stop every ten miles and build a fire in the rain and heat again, until we came to the crossroads, where Ab Snopes told us to leave the wagon and walk. And then she would not let me and Ringo go with her. “You and Ringo look like men,” she said. “They won’t hurt a woman.” It had rained all day; it had fallen gray and steady and slow and cold on us all day long, and now it was like twilight had thickened it without being able to make it any grayer or colder. The crossroad was not a road any more; it was no more than a faint gash turning off at right angles into the bottom, so that it looked like a cave. We could see the hoof marks in it.
“Then you shan’t go,” I said. “I’m stronger than you are; I’ll hold you.” I held her; her arm felt little and light and dry as a stick. But it wasn’t that; her size had no more to do with it than it had with the Yankees; she just turned and looked at me, and then I began to cry. I would be sixteen years old before another year was out, yet I sat there in the wagon, crying. I didn’t even know when she freed her arm. And then she was out of the wagon, standing there looking at me in the gray rain and the gray darkening light.
“It’s for all of us,” she said. “For John and you and Ringo and Joby and Louvinia. So we will have something when John comes back home. You never cried when you knew he was going into a battle, did you? And now I am taking no risk; I am a woman. Even Yankees do not harm old women. You and Ringo stay here until I call you.”
We tried. I keep on saying that because I know now that I didn’t. I could have held her, turned the wagon, driven away, holding her in it. I was just fifteen, and for most of my life her face had been the first thing I saw in the morning and the last thing I saw at night, but I could have stopped her, and I didn’t. I sat there in the wagon in the cold rain and let her walk on into the wet twilight and never come out of it again. How many of them there were in the old compress, I don’t know, and when and why they took fright and left, I don’t know.
We just sat there in the wagon in that cold dissolving December twilight until at last I couldn’t bear it any longer. Then Ringo and I were both running, trying to run, in the ankle-deep mud of that old road pocked with the prints of ingoing hoofs, but of no wheel, knowing that we had waited too long either to help her or to share in her defeat. Because there was no sound nor sign of life at all; just the huge rotting building with the gray afternoon dying wetly upon it, and then at the end of the hall a faint crack of light beneath a door.
I don’t remember touching the door at all, because the room was a floor raised about two feet from the earth, so that I ran into the step and fell forward into and then through the door, onto my hands and knees in the room, looking at Granny. There was a tallow dip still burning on a wooden box, but it was the powder I smelled, stronger even than the tallow. I couldn’t seem to breathe for the smell of the powder, looking at Granny. She had looked little alive, but now she looked like she had collapsed, like she had been made out of a lot of little thin dry light sticks notched together and braced with cord, and now the cord had broken and all the little sticks had collapsed in a quiet heap on the floor, and somebody had spread a clean and faded calico dress over them.
Vendée
They all came in again when we buried Granny; Brother Fortinbride and all of them—the old men and the women and the children and the niggers—the twelve that used to come when Ab Snopes would get back from Memphis, and I reckon a hundred more besides, coming in from the hills in the rain. Only there were no Yankees in Jefferson now, and so they didn’t have to walk in; I could look across the grave and beyond the other headstones and monuments, and see the dripping cedar grove full of mules with the long black smears on their hips where Granny and Ringo had burned out the U.S. brand.
Most of the Jefferson people were there, too, and there was another preacher—a big preacher refugeeing from Memphis or somewhere—and I found out how Mrs. Compson and some of them had arranged for him to preach the funeral. But Brother Fortinbride didn’t let him. He didn’t tell him not to; he didn’t say anything 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 minute. 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, and 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 a town nigger 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 flour-sack 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 there of all of them, town and hill. By Christmas his rheumatism would be so bad that he couldn’t hardly move his hand, but he was there with his peeled-hickory walking stick, shoving up through the hill men with crokersacks tied over their heads and town men with umbrellas getting out of his way; and 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 Fortinbride didn’t give him a chance. Brother Fortinbride didn’t even put down his shovel; he stood there leaning 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.