“What you boys going to do now?” he said.
The earth was loose and soft now, dark and red with rain, so that the rain didn’t splash on Granny at all; it just dissolved slow and gray into the dark-red mound, so that after a while the mound began to dissolve, too, without changing shape, like the soft yellow color of the boards had dissolved and stained up through the earth, and mound and boards and rain were all melting into one vague quiet reddish gray.
“I want to borrow a pistol,” I said.
He begun to holler then, but quiet. Because he was older than us; it was like it had been at the old compress that night with Granny. “Need me or not,” he hollered, “by Godfrey, I’m going! You can’t stop me! You mean to tell me you don’t want me to go with you?”
“I don’t care,” I said. “I just want a pistol. Or a gun. Ours got burned up with the house.”
“All right!” he hollered. “Me and the pistol, or you and this nigger horse thief and a fence rail. You ain’t even got a poker at home, have you?”
“We got the bar’l of the musket yet,” Ringo said. “I reckon that’s all we’ll need for Ab Snopes.”
“Ab Snopes?” Uncle Buck hollered. “Do you think it’s Ab Snopes this boy is thinking about? … Hey?” he hollered, hollering at me now. “Hey, boy?” It was changing all the time, with the slow gray rain lancing slow and gray and cold into the red earth, yet it did not change. It would be some time yet; it would be days and weeks and then months before it would be smooth and quiet and level with the other earth. Now Uncle Buck was talking at Ringo, and not hollering now. “Catch my mule,” he said. “I got the pistol in my britches.”
Ab Snopes lived back in the hills too. Uncle Buck knew where; it was midafternoon by then and we were riding up a long red hill between pines when Uncle Buck stopped. He and Ringo had crokersacks tied over their heads. Uncle Buck’s hand-worn stick stuck out from under his sack with the rain shining on it like a long wax candle.
“Wait,” he said. “I got a idea.” We turned from the road and came to a creek bottom; there was a faint path. It was dark under the trees and the rain didn’t fall on us now; it was like the bare trees themselves were dissolving slow and steady and cold into the end of the December day. We rode in single file, in our wet clothes and in the wet ammonia steam of the mules.
The pen was just like the one Ringo and Yance and I had built at home, only smaller and better hidden; I reckon he had got the idea from ours. We stopped at the wet rails; they were still new enough for the split sides to be still yellow with sap, and on the far side of the pen there was something that looked like a yellow cloud in the twilight, until it moved. And then we saw that it was a claybank stallion and three mares.
“I thought so,” Uncle Buck said.
Because I was mixed up. Maybe it was because Ringo and I were tired and we hadn’t slept much lately. Because the days were mixed up with the nights, all the while we had been riding I would keep on thinking how Ringo and I would catch it from Granny when we got back home, for going off in the rain without telling her. Because for a minute I sat there and looked at the horses and I thought that Ab Snopes was Grumby. But Uncle Buck begun to holler again.
“Him, Grumby?” he hollered. “Ab Snopes? Ab Snopes? By Godfrey, if he was Grumby, if it was Ab Snopes that shot your grandmaw, I’d be ashamed to have it known. I’d be ashamed to be caught catching him. No, sir. He ain’t Grumby; he’s better than that.” He sat sideways on his mule with the sack over his head and his beard jerking and wagging out of it while he talked. “He’s the one that’s going to show us where Grumby is. They just hid them horses here because they thought this would be the last place you boys would think to look for them. And now Ab Snopes has went off with Grumby to get some more, since your grandmaw has gone out of business, as far as he is concerned. And thank Godfrey for that. It won’t be a house or a cabin they will ever pass as long as Ab Snopes is with them, that he won’t leave a indelible signature, even if it ain’t nothing to capture but a chicken or a kitchen clock. By Godfrey, the one thing we don’t want is to catch Ab Snopes.”
And we didn’t catch him that night. We went back to the road and went on, and then we came in sight of the house. I rode up to Uncle Buck. “Give me the pistol,” I said.
“We ain’t going to need a pistol,” Uncle Buck said. “He ain’t even here, I tell you. You and that nigger stay back and let me do this. I’m going to find out which a way to start hunting. Get back, now.”
“No,” I said, “I want—”
He looked at me from under the crokersack. “You want what? You want to lay your two hands on the man that shot Rosa Millard, don’t you?” He looked at me. I sat there on the mule in the slow gray cold rain, in the dying daylight. Maybe it was the cold. I didn’t feel cold, but I could feel my bones jerking and shaking. “And then what you going to do with him?” Uncle Buck said. He was almost whispering now. “Hey? Hey?”
“Yes,” I said. “Yes.”
“Yes. That’s what. Now you and Ringo stay back. I’ll do this.”
It was just a cabin. I reckon there were a thousand of them just like it about our hills, with the same canted plow lying under a tree and the same bedraggled chickens roosting on the plow and the same gray twilight dissolving onto the gray shingles of the roof. Then we saw a faint crack of fire and a woman’s face looking at us around the crack of the door.
“Mr. Snopes ain’t here, if that’s what you want,” she said. “He’s done gone to Alabama on a visit.”
“Sho, now,” Uncle Buck said. “To Alabama. Did he leave any word when to expect him home?”
“No,” the woman said.
“Sho, now,” Uncle Buck said. “Then I reckon we better get on back home and out of the rain.”
“I reckon you had,” the woman said. Then the door closed.
We rode away. We rode back toward home. It was like it had been while we waited at the old compress; it hadn’t got darker exactly, the twilight had just thickened.
“Well, well, well,” Uncle Buck said. “They ain’t in Alabama, because she told us so. And they ain’t toward Memphis, because there are still Yankees there yet. So I reckon we better try down toward Grenada first. By Godfrey, I’ll bet this mule against that nigger’s pocketknife that we won’t ride two days before we come on a mad woman hollering down the road with a handful of chicken feathers in her hand.”
We didn’t get Ab Snopes that day. It was February before we got him, because we had been seeing ducks and geese going north for more than a week, but we had lost count of days a long while back. At first Ringo had a pine stick, and each night he would cut a notch in it. There was a big one for Christmas and New Year’s, and he had a special one for Sundays. But one night when the stick had almost forty notches in it, we stopped in the rain to make camp without any roof to get under and we had to use the stick to start a fire, because of Uncle Buck’s arm. And so, when we came to where we could get another pine stick, we couldn’t remember whether it had been five or six or ten days, and so Ringo didn’t start another. Because he said he would fix the stick up the day we got Grumby and that it wouldn’t need but two notches on it—one for the day we got him and one for the day Granny died.
We had two mules apiece, to swap onto at noon each day. We got the mules back from the hill people; we could have got a cavalry regiment if we had wanted it—of old men and women and children, too—with cotton bagging and flour sacking for uniforms and hoes and axes for arms, on the Yankee mules that Granny had loaned to them. But Uncle Buck told them that we didn’t need any help; that three was enough to catch Grumby.
They were not hard to follow. One day we had about twenty notches on the stick and we came onto a house where the ashes were still smoking and a boy almost as big as Ringo and me still unconscious in the stable with even his shirt cut to pieces like they had had a wire snapper on the whip, and a woman with a little thread of blood still running out of her mouth and her voice sounding light and far away li
ke a locust from across the pasture, telling us how many there were and which way they would likely go, saying, “Kill them. Kill them.”
It was a long way, but it wasn’t far. You could have put a silver dollar down on the geography page with the center of it at Jefferson and we would have never ridden out from under it. And we were closer behind them than we knew, because one night we had ridden late without coming to a house or a shed to camp in, and so we stopped and Ringo said he would scout around a little, because all we had left to eat was the bone of a ham; only it was more likely Ringo was trying to dodge helping to get in the firewood. So Uncle Buck and I were spreading down pine branches to sleep on when we heard a shot and then a sound like a brick chimney falling onto a rotten shingle roof, and then the horses, starting fast and dying away, and then I could hear Ringo yelling. He had come onto a house; he thought it was deserted, and then he said it looked too dark, too quiet. So he climbed onto a shed against the back wall, and he said he saw the crack of light and he was trying to pull the shutter open careful, but it came loose with a sound like a shot, and he was looking into a room with a candle stuck into a bottle and either three or thirteen men looking right at him; and how somebody hollered, “There they are!” and another man jerked out a pistol and one of the others grabbed his arm as it went off, and then the whole shed gave way under him, and he said how he lay there hollering and trying to get untangled from the broken planks and heard them ride away.
“So he didn’t shoot at you,” Uncle Buck said.
“Hit warn’t none of his fault if he never,” Ringo said.
“But he didn’t,” Uncle Buck said. But he wouldn’t let us go on that night. “We won’t lose any distance,” he said. “They are flesh and blood, the same as we are. And we ain’t scared.”
So we went on at daylight, following the hoofprints now. Then we had three more notches in the stick; that night Ringo put the last notch in it that he was going to, but we didn’t know it. We were sitting in front of a cotton pen where we were going to sleep, eating a shote that Ringo had found, when we heard the horse. Then the man begun to holler, “Hello! Hello!” and then we watched him ride up on a good short-coupled sorrel mare, with his neat little fine made boots, and his linen shirt without any collar, and a coat that had been good, too, once, and a broad hat pulled down so that all we could see was his eyes and nose between the hat and his black beard.
“Howdy, men,” he said.
“Howdy,” Uncle Buck said. He was eating a sparerib; he sat now with the rib in his left hand and his right hand lying on his lap just inside his coat; he wore the pistol on a loop of lace leather around his neck and stuck into his pants like a lady’s watch. But the stranger wasn’t looking at him; he just looked at each of us once and then sat there on the mare, with both his hands on the pommel in front of him.
“Mind if I light and warm?” he said.
“Light,” Uncle Buck said.
He got off. But he didn’t hitch the mare. He led her up and he sat down opposite us with the reins in his hand. “Give the stranger some meat, Ringo,” Uncle Buck said. But he didn’t take it. He didn’t move. He just said that he had eaten, sitting there on the log with his little feet side by side and his elbows out a little and his two hands on his knees as small as a woman’s hands and covered with a light mat of fine black hair right down to the finger nails, and not looking at any of us now. I don’t know what he was looking at now.
“I have just ridden out from Memphis,” he said. “How far do you call it to Alabama?”
Uncle Buck told him, not moving either, with the sparerib still raised in his left hand and the other hand lying just inside his coat. “You going to Alabama, hey?”
“Yes,” the stranger said. “I’m looking for a man.” And now I saw that he was looking at me from under his hat. “A man named Grumby. You people in these parts may have heard of him too.”
“Yes,” Uncle Buck said, “we have heard of him.”
“Ah,” the stranger said. He smiled; for a second his teeth looked white as rice inside his ink-colored beard. “Then what I am doing does not have to be secret.” He looked at Uncle Buck now. “I live up in Tennessee. Grumby and his gang killed one of my niggers and ran my horses off. I’m going to get the horses back. If I have to take Grumby in the bargain, that will suit me too.”
“Sho, now,” Uncle Buck said. “So you look to find him in Alabama?”
“Yes. I happen to know that he is now headed there. I almost caught him yesterday; I did get one of his men, though the others escaped me. They passed you all sometime last night, if you were in this neighborhood then. You would have heard them, because when I last saw them, they were not wasting any time. I managed to persuade the man I caught to tell me where they are to rondyvoo.”
“Alabama?” Ringo said. “You mean they headed back toward Alabama?”
“Correct,” the stranger said. He looked at Ringo now. “Did Grumby steal your hog, too, boy?”
“Hawg,” Ringo said. “Hawg?”
“Put some wood on the fire,” Uncle Buck told Ringo. “Save your breath to snore with tonight.”
Ringo hushed, but he didn’t move; he sat there staring back at the stranger, with his eyes looking a little red in the firelight.
“So you folks are out to catch a man, too, are you?” the stranger said.
“Two is correct,” Ringo said. “I reckon Ab Snopes can pass for a man.”
So then it was too late; we just sat there, with the stranger facing us across the fire with the mare’s reins in his little still hand, looking at the three of us from between his hat and his beard. “Ab Snopes,” he said. “I don’t believe I am acquainted with Ab Snopes. But I know Grumby. And you want Grumby too.” He was looking at all of us now. “You want to catch Grumby. Don’t you think that’s dangerous?”
“Not exactly,” Uncle Buck said. “You see, we done got a little Alabama Grumby evidence ourselves. That something or somebody has give Grumby a change of heart about killing women and children.” He and the stranger looked at each other. “Maybe it’s the wrong season for women and children. Or maybe it’s public opinion, now that Grumby is what you might call a public character. Folks hereabouts is got used to having their menfolks killed and even shot from behind. But even the Yankees never got them used to the other. And evidently somebody has done reminded Grumby of this. Ain’t that correct?”
They looked at each other; they didn’t move. “But you are neither a woman nor a child, old man,” the stranger said. He stood up, easy; his eyes glinted in the firelight as he turned and put the reins over the mare’s head. “I reckon I’ll get along,” he said. We watched him get into the saddle and sit there again, with his little black-haired hands lying on the pommel, looking down at us—at me and Ringo now. “So you want Ab Snopes,” he said. “Take a stranger’s advice and stick to him.”
He turned the mare. I was watching him, then I was thinking “I wonder if he knows that her off back shoe is gone,” when Ringo hollered, “Look out!” and then it seemed to me that I saw the spurred mare jump before I saw the pistol flash; and then the mare was galloping and Uncle Buck was lying on the ground cussing and yelling and dragging at his pistol, and then all three of us were dragging and fighting over it, but the front sight was caught in his suspenders, and the three of us fighting over it, and Uncle Buck panting and cussing, and the sound of the galloping mare dying away.
The bullet went through the flesh of the inner side of the arm that had the rheumatism; that was why Uncle Buck cussed so bad; he said the rheumatism was bad enough, and the bullet was bad enough, but to have them both at once was too much for any man. And then, when Ringo told him he ought to be thankful, that suppose the bullet had hit his good arm and then he wouldn’t even be able to feed himself, he reached back and, still lying down, he caught up a stick of firewood and tried to hit Ringo with it. We cut his sleeve away and stopped the blood, and he made me cut a strip off his shirt tail, and Ringo handed him his stick
and he sat there cussing us while we soaked the strip in hot salt water, and he held the arm himself with his good hand, cussing a steady streak, and made us run the strip back and forth through the hole the bullet had made. He cussed then sure enough, looking a little like Granny looked, like all old people look when they have been hurt, with his beard jerking and his eyes snapping and his heels and the stick jabbing into the ground like the stick had been with him so long that it felt the rag and the salt too.
And at first I thought that the black man was Grumby, like I had thought that maybe Ab Snopes was. But Uncle Buck said not. It was the next morning; we hadn’t slept much because Uncle Buck wouldn’t go to sleep; only we didn’t know then that it was his arm, because he wouldn’t even let us talk about taking him back home. And now we tried again, after we had finished breakfast, but he wouldn’t listen, already on his mule with his left arm tied across his chest and the pistol stuck between the arm and his chest, where he could get to it quick, saying, “Wait. Wait,” and his eyes hard and snapping with thinking. “It’s something I ain’t quite got yet,” he said. “Something he was telling us last night without aiming to have us know yet that he had told us. Something that we are going to find out today.”
“Likely a bullet that’s fixing to hit you halfway betwixt both arms stid of halfway betwixt one,” Ringo said.
Uncle Buck rode fast; we could watch his stick rising and falling against the mule’s flank, not hard, just steady and fast, like a crippled man in a hurry that has used the stick so long he don’t even know it any more. Because we didn’t know that his arm was making him sick yet; he hadn’t given us time to realize it. So we hurried on, riding along beside a slough, and then Ringo saw the snake. It had been warm for a week, until last night. But last night it made ice, and now we saw the moccasin where it had crawled out and was trying to get back into the water when the cold got it, so that it lay with its body on the land and its head fixed in the skim ice like it was set into a mirror, and Uncle Buck turned sideways on his mule, hollering at us: “There it is, by Godfrey! There’s the sign! Didn’t I tell you we would—”