“What else can I do?” the lieutenant said. He looked like he was fixing to cry. “It’s the general’s own signature!”
So then we had enough stock for all of them to ride except about fifteen or twenty. We went on. The soldiers stood under a tree by the road, with their saddles and bridles on the ground beside them—all but the lieutenant. When we started again, he ran along by the wagon; he looked like he was going to cry, trotting along by the wagon with his hat in his hand, looking at Granny.
“You’ll meet some troops somewhere,” he said. “I know you will. Will you tell them where we are and to send for us? You won’t forget?”
“They’s some of yawl about twenty or thirty miles back that claim to have three extry mules,” Ringo said. “But when we sees any more of um, we’ll tell um about yawl.”
We went on. We came in sight of a town, but we went around it; Ringo didn’t even want to stop and send the message in, but Granny made him stop and we sent the message in by one of the niggers.
“That’s one more mouth to feed we got shed of,” Ringo said.
We went on. We went fast now, changing the mules every few miles; a woman told us we were in Mississippi again, and then, in the afternoon, we came over the hill, and there our chimneys were, standing up into the sunlight, and the cabin behind them and Louvinia bending over a washtub and the clothes on the line, flapping bright and peaceful.
“Stop the wagon,” Granny said.
We stopped—the wagon, the hundred and twenty-two mules and horses, and the niggers we never had had time to count.
Granny got out slow and turned to Ringo. “Get out,” she said; then she looked at me. “You too,” she said. “Because you said nothing at all.” We got out of the wagon. She looked at us. “We have lied,” she said.
“Hit was the paper that lied; hit wasn’t us,” Ringo said.
“The paper said a hundred and ten. We have a hundred and twenty-two,” Granny said. “Kneel down.”
“But they stole them ’fore we did,” Ringo said.
“But we lied,” Granny said. “Kneel down.” She knelt first. Then we all three knelt by the road while she prayed. The washing blew soft and peaceful and bright on the clothesline. And then Louvinia saw us; she was already running across the pasture while Granny was praying.
Skirmish at Sartoris
I
When I think of that day, of Father’s old troop on their horses drawn up facing the house, and Father and Drusilla standing on the ground with that Carpet Bagger voting box in front of them, and opposite them the ladies on the porch and the two sets of them, the men and the ladies, facing one another like they were both waiting for the sound to charge, I think I know the reason. I think it was because Father’s troop (like all the other Southern soldiers too), even though they had surrendered and said that they were whipped, were still soldiers. Maybe from the old habit of doing everything as one man; maybe when you have lived for four years in a world ordered completely by men’s doings, even when it is danger and fighting, you don’t want to quit that world: maybe the danger and the fighting are the reasons, because men have been pacifists for every reason under the sun except to avoid danger and fighting. And so now Father’s troop and all the other men in Jefferson, and Aunt Louisa and Mrs. Habersham and all the ladies in Jefferson were actually enemies for the reason that the men had given in and admitted that they belonged to the United States but the ladies had never surrendered.
I remember the night we got the letter and found out at last where Drusilla was. It was just before Christmas in 1864, after the Yankees had burned Jefferson and gone away, and we didn’t even know for sure if the war was still going on or not. All we knew was that for three years the country had been full of Yankees, and then all of a sudden they were gone and there were no men there at all any more. We hadn’t even heard from Father since July, from Carolina, so that now we lived in a world of burned towns and houses and ruined plantations and fields inhabited only by women. Ringo and I were fifteen; we felt almost exactly like we had to eat and sleep and change our clothes in a hotel built only for ladies and children.
The envelope was worn and dirty and it had been opened once and then glued back, but Ringo and I could still make out Hawkhurst, Gihon County, Alabama, on it even though we didn’t recognize Aunt Louisa’s hand at first. It was addressed to Granny, and that showed how long ago it had been written because Aunt Louisa didn’t even know that Granny was dead now. It was six pages cut with scissors from wallpaper and written on both sides with pokeberry juice, and I thought about the time two years ago when Granny and Ringo and I went to Hawkhurst on the way to catch the Yankee army that stole our silver and we found how the Yankees had come and burned Hawkhurst too after Uncle Dennison and Gavin Breckbridge were killed at Shiloh, and Aunt Louisa and Drusilla and Denny were living in a Negro cabin just like we did at Sartoris in Mississippi. And Drusilla had cut her hair off short like mine almost and she wore a shirt and jeans pants just like Ringo and me and her hands were rough from working too, and Aunt Louisa began to cry and tell us how Drusilla had cut her hair and put on man’s clothes the day the news came that Gavin Breckbridge was dead too. But Drusilla didn’t cry; it was just that night we were there; the Negroes were still passing in the road all night long, and she waked me and we went down to the road and listened to them passing in the darkness, singing, trying to catch the Yankee army and get free. Then they were gone and Drusilla told me to go on back to bed and I asked her if she wasn’t going to bed too and she said she didn’t sleep any more, that she had to stay up and keep a dog quiet; it wasn’t a bad dog only she just had to get up now and then and show it the stick and then it would be quiet, and I said, “What dog? I haven’t seen any dog.” And then she turned and put her hand on my shoulder (I was already taller than she was) and said:
“Listen. When you see Cousin Johnny again, ask him to let me ride in his troop with him. Tell him I can ride and maybe I can learn to shoot and that I won’t be afraid. Will you tell him?” But I didn’t tell Father. Maybe I forgot it. Then the Yankees went away, and Father and his troop went away too. Then, six months later, we had a letter from him about how they were fighting in Carolina, and a month after that we had one from Aunt Louisa that Drusilla was gone too, a short letter on the wallpaper that you could see where Aunt Louisa had cried in the pokeberry juice about how she did not know where Drusilla was but that she had expected the worst ever since Drusilla had deliberately tried to unsex herself by refusing to feel any natural grief at the death not only of her affianced husband but of her own father and that she took it for granted that Drusilla was with us and though she did not expect Drusilla to take any steps herself to relieve a mother’s anxiety, she hoped that Granny would. But we didn’t know where Drusilla was either. She had just vanished. It was like the Yankees in just passing through the South had not only taken along with them all living men blue and gray and white and black, but even one young girl who had happened to try to look and act like a man after her sweetheart was killed.
So then the next letter came. Only Granny wasn’t there to read it, and so for a while Ringo and I couldn’t make out what Aunt Louisa was trying to tell us. This one was on the same wallpaper too, six pages this time, only Aunt Louisa hadn’t cried in the pokeberry juice this time: Ringo said because she must have been writing too fast:
DEAR SISTER:
I think this will be news to you as it was to me though I both hope and pray it will not be the heart-rending shock to you it was to me as naturally it cannot since you are only an aunt while I am the mother. But it is not myself I am thinking of since I am a woman, a mother, a Southern woman, and it has been our lot during the last four years to learn to bear anything. But when I think of my husband who laid down his life to protect a heritage of courageous men and spotless women looking down from heaven upon a daughter who had deliberately cast away that for which he died, and when I think of my half-orphan son who will one day ask of me why his martyred father’s sacrifice was
not enough to preserve his sister’s good name.…
That’s how it sounded. Ringo was holding a pineknot for me to read by, but after a while he had to light another pineknot and all the far we had got was how when Gavin Breckbridge was killed at Shiloh before he and Drusilla had had time to marry, there had been reserved for Drusilla the highest destiny of a Southern woman—to be the bride-widow of a lost cause—and how Drusilla had not only thrown that away, she had not only become a lost woman and a shame to her father’s memory but she was now living in a word that Aunt Louisa would not even repeat but that Granny knew what it was, though at least thank God that Father and Drusilla were not actually any blood kin, it being Father’s wife who was Drusilla’s cousin by blood and not Father himself. So then Ringo lit the other pineknot and then we put the sheets of wallpaper down on the floor and then we found out what it was: how Drusilla had been gone for six months and no word from her except she was alive, and then one night she walked into the cabin where Aunt Louisa and Denny were (and now it had a line drawn under it, like this:) in the garments not alone of a man but of a common private soldier and told them how she had been a member of Father’s troop for six months, bivouacking at night surrounded by sleeping men and not even bothering to put up the tent for her and Father except when the weather was bad, and how Drusilla not only showed neither shame nor remorse but actually pretended she did not even know what Aunt Louisa was talking about; how when Aunt Louisa told her that she and Father must marry at once, Drusilla said, “Can’t you understand that I am tired of burying husbands in this war? That I am riding in Cousin John’s troop not to find a man but to hurt Yankees?” and how Aunt Louisa said:
“At least don’t call him Cousin John where strangers can hear you.”
The third letter did not come to us at all. It came to Mrs. Compson. Drusilla and Father were home then. It was in the spring and the war was over now, and we were busy getting the cypress and oak out of the bottom to build the house and Drusilla working with Joby and Ringo and Father and me like another man, with her hair shorter than it had been at Hawkhurst and her face sunburned from riding in the weather and her body thin from living like soldiers lived. After Granny died Ringo and Louvinia and I all slept in the cabin, but after Father came Ringo and Louvinia moved back to the other cabin with Joby and now Father and I slept on Ringo’s and my pallet and Drusilla slept in the bed behind the quilt curtain where Granny used to sleep. And so one night I remembered Aunt Louisa’s letter and I showed it to Drusilla and Father, and Father found out that Drusilla had not written to tell Aunt Louisa where she was and Father said she must, and so one day Mrs. Compson came out with the third letter. Drusilla and Ringo and Louvinia too were down in the bottom at the sawmill and I saw that one too, on the wallpaper with the pokeberry juice and the juice not cried on this time either, and this the first time Mrs. Compson had come out since Granny died and not even getting out of her surrey but sitting there holding to her parasol with one hand and her shawl with the other and looking around like when Drusilla would come out of the house or from around the corner it would not be just a thin sunburned girl in a man’s shirt and pants but maybe something like a tame panther or bear. This one sounded just like the others: about how Aunt Louisa was addressing a stranger to herself but not a stranger to Granny and that there were times when the good name of one family was the good name of all and that she naturally did not expect Mrs. Compson to move out and live with Father and Drusilla because even that would be too late now to preserve the appearance of that which had never existed anyway. But that Mrs. Compson was a woman too, Aunt Louisa believed, a Southern woman too, and had suffered too, Aunt Louisa didn’t doubt, only she did hope and pray that Mrs. Compson had been spared the sight of her own daughter if Mrs. Compson had one flouting and outraging all Southern principles of purity and womanhood that our husbands had died for, though Aunt Louisa hoped again that Mrs. Compson’s husband (Mrs. Compson was older than Granny and the only husband she had ever had had been locked up for crazy a long time ago because in the slack part of the afternoons he would gather up eight or ten little niggers from the quarters and line them up across the creek from him with sweet potatoes on their heads and he would shoot the potatoes off with a rifle; he would tell them he might miss a potato but he wasn’t going to miss a nigger, and so they would stand mighty still) had not made one of the number. So I couldn’t make any sense out of that one too and I still didn’t know what Aunt Louisa was talking about and I didn’t believe that Mrs. Compson knew either.
Because it was not her: it was Mrs. Habersham, that never had been out here before and that Granny never had been to see that I knew of. Because Mrs. Compson didn’t stay, she didn’t even get out of the surrey, sitting there kind of drawn up under the shawl and looking at me and then at the cabin like she didn’t know just what might come out of it or out from behind it. Then she begun to tap the nigger driver on his head with the parasol and they went away, the two old horses going pretty fast back down the drive and back down the road to town. And the next afternoon when I came out of the bottom to go to the spring with the water bucket there were five surreys and buggies in front of the cabin and inside the cabin there were fourteen of them that had come the four miles out from Jefferson, in the Sunday clothes that the Yankees and the war had left them, that had husbands dead in the war or alive back in Jefferson helping Father with what he was doing, because they were strange times then. Only like I said, maybe times are never strange to women: that it is just one continuous monotonous thing full of the repeated follies of their menfolks. Mrs. Compson was sitting in Granny’s chair, still holding the parasol and drawn up under her shawl and looking like she had finally seen whatever it was she had expected to see, and it had been the panther. It was Mrs. Habersham who was holding back the quilt for the others to go in and look at the bed where Drusilla slept and then showing them the pallet where Father and I slept. Then she saw me and said, “And who is this?”
“That’s Bayard,” Mrs. Compson said.
“You poor child,” Mrs. Habersham said. So I didn’t stop. But I couldn’t help but hear them. It sounded like a ladies’ club meeting with Mrs. Habersham running it, because every now and then Mrs. Habersham would forget to whisper: “—Mother should come, be sent for at once. But lacking her presence … we, the ladies of the community, mothers ourselves … child probably taken advantage of by gallant romantic … before realizing the price she must—” and Mrs. Compson said, “Hush! Hush!” and then somebody else said, “Do you really suppose—” and then Mrs. Habersham forgot to whisper good: “What else? What other reason can you name why she should choose to conceal herself down there in the woods all day long, lifting heavy weights like logs and—”
Then I went away. I filled the bucket at the spring and went back to the log-yard where Drusilla and Ringo and Joby were feeding the bandsaw and the blindfolded mule going round and round in the sawdust. And then Joby kind of made a sound and we all stopped and looked and there was Mrs. Habersham, with three of the others kind of peeping out from behind her with their eyes round and bright, looking at Drusilla standing there in the sawdust and shavings, in her dirty sweated overalls and shirt and brogans, with her face sweat-streaked with sawdust and her short hair yellow with it. “I am Martha Habersham,” Mrs. Habersham said. “I am a neighbor and I hope to be a friend.” And then she said, “You poor child.”
We just looked at her; when Drusilla finally spoke, she sounded like Ringo and I would when Father would say something to us in Latin for a joke. “Ma’am?” Drusilla said. Because I was just fifteen; I still didn’t know what it was all about; I just stood there and listened without even thinking much, like when they had been talking in the cabin. “My condition?” Drusilla said. “My—”
“Yes,” Mrs. Habersham said. “No mother, no woman to … forced to these straits—” kind of waving her hand at the mules that hadn’t stopped and at Joby and Ringo goggling at her and the three others still peeping around her
at Drusilla. “—to offer you not only our help, but our sympathy.”
“My condition,” Drusilla said. “My con … Help and sym—” Then she began to say, “Oh. Oh. Oh.” standing there, and then she was running. She began to run like a deer, that starts to run and then decides where it wants to go; she turned right in the air and came toward me, running light over the logs and planks, with her mouth open, saying “John, John” not loud; for a minute it was like she thought I was Father until she waked up and found I was not; she stopped without even ceasing to run, like a bird stops in the air, motionless yet still furious with movement. “Is that what you think too?” she said. Then she was gone. Every now and then I could see her footprints, spaced and fast, just inside the woods, but when I came out of the bottom, I couldn’t see her. But the surreys and buggies were still in front of the cabin and I could see Mrs. Compson and the other ladies on the porch, looking out across the pasture toward the bottom, so I did not go there. But before I came to the other cabin, where Louvinia and Joby and Ringo lived, I saw Louvinia come up the hill from the spring, carrying her cedar water bucket and singing. Then she went into the cabin and the singing stopped short off and so I knew where Drusilla was. But I didn’t hide. I went to the window and looked in and saw Drusilla just turning from where she had been leaning her head in her arms on the mantel when Louvinia came in with the water bucket and a gum twig in her mouth and Father’s old hat on top of her headrag. Drusilla was crying. “That’s what it is, then,” she said. “Coming down there to the mill and telling me that in my condition—sympathy and help—Strangers; I never saw any of them before and I don’t care a damn what they—But you and Bayard. Is that what you believe? that John and I—that we—” Then Louvinia moved. Her hand came out quicker than Drusilla could jerk back and lay flat on the belly of Drusilla’s overalls, then Louvinia was holding Drusilla in her arms like she used to hold me and Drusilla was crying hard. “That John and I—that we—And Gavin dead at Shiloh and John’s home burned and his plantation ruined, that he and I—We went to the war to hurt Yankees, not hunting women!”