“Is the trunk ready?” father said.
“Yes, sir. Hit ready,” Louvinia said.
“Then tell Joby to get the lantern and the shovels, and wait in the kitchen for me.”
“Yes, sir,” Louvinia said. She crossed the hall again without even looking at the stairs.
“I seed in that trunk,” Ringo whispered. “Hit’s the silver. What you reckon—”
“Sh-h-h-h,” I said. We could hear father’s voice. After a while Louvinia came back. We sat on the top step, in the shadow, listening.
“Vicksburg?” Ringo whispered. I couldn’t see anything but his eyes. “Fell? Do he mean hit fell off into the river?”
“Sh-h-h-h,” I said. We sat close together in the dark, listening to them talking. Maybe it was because of the dark, the quiet, because suddenly Louvinia was standing over us, shaking us awake. She stood in the door, but she did not light the lamp and she did not even make us undress. Maybe she forgot about it; maybe she was listening to them carrying the trunk out of the kitchen, as we were. And I thought for a minute that I saw the lantern in the orchard, and then it was morning and father was gone.
He must have ridden off in the rain, because it was still raining at breakfast, and at dinner, too, until at last Granny put the sewing away and said, “Very well. Marengo, get the cookbook.” Ringo got the book and we lay on the floor beside the hearth, with the loaded musket on the pegs above the mantel. “What shall we read about today?” she said.
“Read about cake,” I said.
“Very well. What kind of cake?” Only she didn’t have to ask that, because Ringo said, almost before she finished speaking, like he did every time:
“Cokynut cake, Granny.”
“I reckon a little more won’t hurt us,” Granny said.
The rain stopped in the middle of the afternoon. We went out the back. I went on past the smokehouse. “Where we going?” Ringo said. Before we reached the barn, Joby and Loosh came into sight across the pasture, bringing in the mules from the new pen. “What we ghy do now?” Ringo said.
I didn’t look at him. “We’ve got to watch him.”
“Watch who?”
“Loosh.” Then I looked at Ringo. His eyes were white and quiet, like last night.
“Loosh? Why Loosh? Who tole you to watch him?”
“Nobody told me. I just know it.”
“Bayard, did you dream hit?”
“Yes. Last night. It was father and Louvinia. Father said, ‘Watch Loosh because he knows.’ He will know before we know. He said Louvinia must watch him too. He said Loosh is Louvinia’s son, but she will have to be white a little while longer. And Louvinia said for father not to worry about Granny and us.”
Ringo looked at me. Then he breathed deep, once. “Then hit’s so,” he said. “If somebody tole you, hit could be a lie. But if you dremp hit, hit can’t be a lie case ain’t nobody there to tole hit to you. So we got to watch him.”
We followed them when they put the mules to the wagon and went down beyond the pasture to where they had been cutting wood. We watched them for two days, hidden. We realized then what a close watch Louvinia had kept on us all the time. Sometimes while we were hidden watching Loosh and Joby load the wagon, we would hear her yelling at us, and we would have to sneak away and then run to let Louvinia find us coming from the other direction. Sometimes she would even meet us before we had time to circle, and Ringo hiding behind me then while she scolded at us: “What devilment yawl into now? Yawl up to something. What is it?” But we didn’t tell her, and we would follow her back to the kitchen while she scolded at us over her shoulder, and when she was inside the house we would move quietly until we were out of sight again, and then run back to hide and watch Loosh.
So we were outside of his and Philadelphy’s cabin that night when he came out. We followed him down to the new pen and heard him catch the mule and ride away. We ran, but when we reached the road, too, we could only hear the mule loping, dying away. But we had come a good piece, because even Louvinia calling us sounded faint and small. We looked up the road in the starlight, after the mule. “That’s where Corinth is,” I said.
He didn’t get back until after dark the next day. We stayed close to the house and watched the road by turns, to get Louvinia calmed down in case it would be late before he got back. It was late; she had followed us up to bed and we had slipped out again, and we were passing Joby’s cabin when suddenly Loosh kind of surged out of the darkness and into the door. When we climbed up to the window, he was standing in front of the fire, with his clothes muddy from where he had been hiding in swamps and bottoms from the patter rollers, and with that look on his face again, like he had not slept in a long time and he didn’t want to sleep, and Joby and Philadelphy leaning into the firelight and looking at him, with Philadelphy’s mouth open and the look on her face too. And then I saw Louvinia standing in the door. We had not heard her pass us, but there she was, with her hand on the jamb, looking at Loosh, and again she didn’t have on father’s old hat.
“You mean they gwinter free us all?” Philadelphy said.
“Yes,” Loosh said, loud, with his head flung back; he didn’t even look at Joby when Joby said, “Hush up, Loosh!” “Yes!” Loosh said. “Gin’ral Sherman gonter sweep the earth and the race gonter all be free!”
Then Louvinia crossed the floor in two steps and hit Loosh across the head hard with her flat hand. “You black fool!” she said. “Do you think there’s enough Yankees in the whole world to whip the white folks?”
We ran to the house, we didn’t wait for Louvinia; again we didn’t know that she was behind us. We ran into the room where Granny was sitting beside the lamp with the Bible open on her lap and her neck arched to look at us across her spectacles. “They’re coming here!” I said. “They’re coming to set us free!”
“What?” she said.
“Loosh saw them! They’re just down the road. It’s General Sherman and he’s going to make us all free!” And we watching her, waiting to see who she would send for to take down the musket—whether it would be Joby, because he was the oldest, or Loosh, because he had seen them and would know what to shoot at. Then she shouted, too, and her voice was strong and loud as Louvinia’s:
“You Bayard Sartoris! Ain’t you in bed yet? … Louvinia!” she shouted. Louvinia came in. “Take these children up to bed, and if you hear another sound out of them tonight, you have my permission and my insistence, too, to whip them both.”
It didn’t take us long to get to bed. But we couldn’t talk, because Louvinia was going to bed on the cot in the hall. And Ringo was afraid to come up in the bed with me, so I got down on the pallet with him. “We’ll have to watch the road,” I said. Ringo whimpered.
“Look like hit haf to be us,” he said.
“Are you scared?”
“I ain’t very,” he said. “I just wish Marse John was here.”
“Well, he’s not,” I said. “It’ll have to be us.”
We watched the road for two days, lying in the cedar copse. Now and then Louvinia hollered at us, but we told her where we were and that we were making another map, and besides, she could see the cedar copse from the kitchen. It was cool and shady there, and quiet, and Ringo slept most of the time, and I slept some too. I was dreaming—it was like I was looking at our place and suddenly the house and stable and cabins and trees and all were gone and I was looking at a place flat and empty as the sideboard, and it was growing darker and darker, and then all of a sudden I wasn’t looking at it; I was there—a sort of frightened drove of little tiny figures moving on it; they were father and Granny and Joby and Louvinia and Loosh and Philadelphy and Ringo and me [and we were wandering around on it lost and it getting darker and darker and we forever more without any home to go to because we were forever free; that’s what it was]—and then Ringo made a choked sound and I was looking at the road, and there in the middle of it, sitting on a bright bay horse and looking at the house through a field glass, was a Yankee.
For a long time we just lay there looking at him. I don’t know what we had expected to see, but we knew what he was at once; I remember thinking, “He looks just like a man,” and then Ringo and I were glaring at each other, and then we were crawling backward down the hill without remembering when we started to crawl, and then we were running across the pasture toward the house without remembering when we got to our feet. We seemed to run forever, with our heads back and our fists clenched, before we reached the fence and fell over it and ran on into the house. Granny’s chair was empty beside the table where her sewing lay.
“Quick!” I said. “Shove it up here!” But Ringo didn’t move; his eyes looked like door knobs while I dragged the chair up and climbed onto it and began to lift down the musket. It weighed about fifteen pounds, though it was not the weight so much as the length; when it came free, it and the chair and all went down with a tremendous clatter. We heard Granny sit up in her bed upstairs, and then we heard her voice: “Who is it?”
“Quick!” I said. “Hurry!”
“I’m scared,” Ringo said.
“You, Bayard!” Granny said.… “Louvinia!”
We held the musket between us like a log of wood. “Do you want to be free?” I said. “Do you want to be free?”
We carried it that way, like a log, one at each end, running. We ran through the grove toward the road and ducked down behind the honeysuckle just as the horse came around the curve. We didn’t hear anything else, maybe because of our own breathing or maybe because we were not expecting to hear anything else. We didn’t look again either; we were too busy cocking the musket. We had practiced before, once or twice when Granny was not there and Joby would come in to examine it and change the cap on the nipple. Ringo held it up and I took the barrel in both hands, high, and drew myself up and shut my legs about it and slid down over the hammer until it clicked. That’s what we were doing, we were too busy to look; the musket was already riding up across Ringo’s back as he stooped, his hands on his knees and panting, “Shoot the bastud! Shoot him!” and then the sights came level, and as I shut my eyes I saw the man and the bright horse vanish in smoke. It sounded like thunder and it made as much smoke as a brush fire, and I heard the horse scream, but I didn’t see anything else; it was Ringo wailing, “Great God, Bayard! Hit’s the whole army!”
The house didn’t seem to get any nearer; it just hung there in front of us, floating and increasing slowly in size, like something in a dream, and I could hear Ringo moaning behind me, and farther back still the shouts and the hoofs. But we reached the house at last; Louvinia was just inside the door, with father’s old hat on her head rag and her mouth open, but we didn’t stop. We ran on into the room where Granny was standing beside the righted chair, her hand at her chest.
“We shot him, Granny!” I cried. “We shot the bastud!”
“What?” She looked at me, her face the same color as her hair almost, her spectacles shining against her hair above her forehead. “Bayard Sartoris, what did you say?”
“We killed him, Granny! At the gate! Only there was the whole army, too, and we never saw them, and now they are coming.”
She sat down; she dropped into the chair, hard, her hand at her breast. But her voice was strong as ever:
“What’s this? You, Marengo! What have you done?”
“We shot the bastud, Granny!” Ringo said. “We kilt him!”
Then Louvinia was there, too, with her mouth still open, too, and her face like somebody had thrown ashes at her. Only it didn’t need her face; we heard the hoofs jerking and sliding in the dirt, and one of them hollering, “Get around to the back there, some of you!” and we looked up and saw them ride past the window—the blue coats and the guns. Then we heard the boots and spurs on the porch.
“Granny!” I said. “Granny!” But it seemed like none of us could move at all; we just had to stand there looking at Granny with her hand at her breast and her face looking like she had died and her voice like she had died too:
“Louvinia! What is this? What are they trying to tell me?” That’s how it happened—like when once the musket decided to go off, all that was to occur afterward tried to rush into the sound of it all at once. I could still hear it, my ears were still ringing, so that Granny and Ringo and I all seemed to be talking far away. Then she said, “Quick! Here!” and then Ringo and I were squatting with our knees under our chins, on either side of her against her legs, with the hard points of the chair rockers jammed into our backs and her skirts spread over us like a tent, and the heavy feet coming in and—Louvinia told us afterward—the Yankee sergeant shaking the musket at Granny and saying:
“Come on, grandma! Where are they? We saw them run in here!”
We couldn’t see; we just squatted in a kind of faint gray light and that smell of Granny that her clothes and bed and room all had, and Ringo’s eyes looking like two plates of chocolate pudding and maybe both of us thinking how Granny had never whipped us for anything in our lives except lying, and that even when it wasn’t even a told lie, but just keeping quiet, how she would whip us first and then make us kneel down and kneel down with us herself to ask the Lord to forgive us.
“You are mistaken,” she said. “There are no children in this house nor on this place. There is no one here at all except my servant and myself and the people in the quarters.”
“You mean you deny ever having seen this gun before?”
“I do.” It was that quiet; she didn’t move at all, sitting bolt upright and right on the edge of the chair, to keep her skirts spread over us. “If you doubt me, you may search the house.”
“Don’t you worry about that; I’m going to.… Send some of the boys upstairs,” he said. “If you find any locked doors, you know what to do. And tell them fellows out back to comb the barn and the cabins too.”
“You won’t find any locked doors,” Granny said. “At least, let me ask you—”
“Don’t you ask anything, grandma. You set still. Better for you if you had done a little asking before you sent them little devils out with this gun.”
“Was there—” We could hear her voice die away and then speak again, like she was behind it with a switch, making it talk. “Is he—it—the one who—”
“Dead? Hell, yes! Broke his back and we had to shoot him!”
“Had to—you had—shoot—” I didn’t know horrified astonishment either, but Ringo and Granny and I were all three it.
“Yes, by God! Had to shoot him! The best horse in the whole army! The whole regiment betting on him for next Sunday—” He said some more, but we were not listening. We were not breathing either, glaring at each other in the gray gloom, and I was almost shouting, too, until Granny said it:
“Didn’t—they didn’t—Oh, thank God! Thank God!”
“We didn’t—” Ringo said.
“Hush!” I said. Because we didn’t have to say it, it was like we had had to hold our breaths for a long time without knowing it, and that now we could let go and breathe again. Maybe that was why we never heard the other man, when he came in, at all; it was Louvinia that saw that, too—a colonel, with a bright short beard and hard bright gray eyes, who looked at Granny sitting in the chair with her hand at her breast, and took off his hat. Only he was talking to the sergeant.
“What’s this?” he said. “What’s going on here, Harrison?”
“This is where they run to,” the sergeant said. “I’m searching the house.”
“Ah,” the colonel said. He didn’t sound mad at all. He just sounded cold and short and pleasant. “By whose authority?”
“Well, somebody here fired on United States troops. I guess this is authority enough.” We could just hear the sound; it was Louvinia that told us how he shook the musket and banged the butt on the floor.
“And killed one horse,” the colonel said.
“It was a United States horse. I heard the general say myself that if he had enough horses, he wouldn’t always care whether there was anybod
y to ride them or not. And so here we are, riding peaceful along the road, not bothering nobody yet, and these two little devils—The best horse in the army; the whole regiment betting—”
“Ah,” the colonel said. “I see. Well? Have you found them?”
“We ain’t yet. But these rebels are like rats when it comes to hiding. She says that there ain’t even any children here.”
“Ah,” said the colonel. And Louvinia said how he looked at Granny now for the first time. She said how she could see his eyes going from Granny’s face down to where her skirt was spread, and looking at her skirt for a whole minute and then going back to her face. And that Granny gave him look for look while she lied. “Do I understand, madam, that there are no children in or about this house?”
“There are none, sir,” Granny said.
Louvinia said he looked back at the sergeant. “There are no children here, sergeant. Evidently the shot came from somewhere else. You may call the men in and mount them.”
“But, colonel, we saw them two kids run in here! All of us saw them!”
“Didn’t you just hear this lady say there are no children here? Where are your ears, sergeant? Or do you really want the artillery to overtake us, with a creek bottom not five miles away to be got over?”
“Well, sir, you’re colonel. But if it was me was colonel—”
“Then, doubtless, I should be Sergeant Harrison. In which case, I think I should be more concerned about getting another horse to protect my wager next Sunday than over a grandchildless old lady”—Louvinia said his eyes just kind of touched Granny now and flicked away—“alone in a house which, in all probability—and for her pleasure and satisfaction, I am ashamed to say, I hope—I shall never see again. Mount your men and get along.”
We squatted there, not breathing, and heard them leave the house; we heard the sergeant calling the men up from the barn and we heard them ride away. But we did not move yet, because Granny’s body had not relaxed at all, and so we knew that the colonel was still there, even before he spoke—the voice short, brisk, hard, with that something of laughing behind it: “So you have no grandchildren. What a pity in a place like this which two boys would enjoy—sports, fishing, game to shoot at, perhaps the most exciting game of all, and none the less so for being, possibly, a little rare this near the house. And with a gun—a very dependable weapon, I see.” Louvinia said how the sergeant had set the musket in the corner and how the colonel looked at it now, and now we didn’t breathe. “Though I understand that this weapon does not belong to you. Which is just as well. Because if it were your weapon—which it is not—and you had two grandsons, or say a grandson and a Negro playfellow—which you have not—and if this were the first time—which it is not—someone next time might be seriously hurt. But what am I doing? Trying your patience by keeping you in that uncomfortable chair while I waste my time delivering a homily suitable only for a lady with grandchildren—or one grandchild and a Negro companion.” Now he was about to go, too; we could tell it even beneath the skirt; this time it was Granny herself: