Unvanquished. Part 1

Unvanquished.

Faulkner, William.

FOREWORD.

The Unvanquished is the story of Bayard's victory. William Faulkner's most romantic novel, it is clear and fast-moving. But when it first appeared, in 1938, its critical reception demonstrated the prevailing confusion about Faulkner's fiction. The range of opinions in the book reviews of the time proved the truth of the statement Robert Perm Warren later made: "The study of Faulkner is the most challenging single task in contemporary American literature for criticism to undertake."

Kay Boyle, always perceptive, was ahead of her time in her review of the novel when she credited Faulkner with "the strength and the vulnerability which belong only to the greatest artists: the incalculable emotional wealth, the racy comic sense, the fury to reproduce exactly not the recognizable picture but the unmistakable experience." She accorded The Unvanquished "that fabulous, that wondrous, fluxing power which nothing Faulkner touches is ever without." She went on to express an opinion less widely held then than today: that Faulkner is "the most absorbing writer of our time."

But s.ome of the other reviewers of this novel, just over twenty years ago, demonstrated the misunderstanding and hostility which dogged Faulkner until after the Second World War and his winning of the n.o.bel Prize, when his reputation rose to a level with that of the foremost writers America has produced. On rereading those reviewers one puzzles why they applied to The Unvanquished their standard charges against Faulkner; for the central idea of the novel is explicit, its style relatively simple, and its demonstration of Faulkner's phenomenal storytelling power quite obvious.

One problem worrying some of the reviewers was whether The Unvanquished is actually a novel. Because six of the seven chapters appeared originally as stories in The Sat.u.r.day Evening Post and Scribner's Magazine between 1934 and 1936, some critics said that Faulkner had not made a novel by revising and a.s.sembling those six parts and adding the previously unpublished final chapter. A similar charge has since appeared against Faulkner's The Hamlet, and is equally false. Just as The Hamlet is unified by the steady, monstrous rise of Ab Snopes's son to corrupt power, so The Unvanquished, in much happier vein, is unified by Bayard Sartoris' rise to maturity and true courage.

Skillfully interwoven with Bayard's development are other themes which enrich the novel, among them the baleful influence of the "poor white" Ab Snopes, as well as slavery with its aftereffects, the evil of which Faulkner clearly presents, and which he finally points up by showing Ringo's ultimate lack of opportunity. The Unvanquished relates- to other Faulkner works by its themes and by many of its people, chiefly the Sartoris family, Ab Snopes, and the McCaslin twins. But we need no longer follow the critical opinion that Faulkner's major contribution to our literature is the fact that most of his books form a loosely interlocked series about his imaginary Yoknapatawpha County. Readers increasingly see that Faulkner has created several works of art, each having a unity of its own and giving readers pleasure apart from its presumed position in his "saga."

Though a number of Faulkner's other novels have more scope and depth, The Unvanquished is attractive for its moving presentation of Bayard's growth. In Chapter I, "Ambuscade," we see him, twelve, childishly committing the violence of firing at the Union soldier and hiding from punishment behind Granny Millard's skirts. Succeeding chapters show him growing older surrounded still by the violence and chaos of war. In "Vendee," only fifteen, he follows the code in full revenge. In "Skirmish at Sartoris" he experiences one more episode in his family's record of violence. It is in the final chapter of the book that Bayard, at the age of twenty-four, comes to a greater test than his pursuit of Grumby nine years before. After Redmond shoots Colonel Sartoris, who purposely went unarmed in repudiation of violence, when Drusilla, Ringo, and the people of the town expect Bayard to perpetuate the code of revenge, he grows up completely: facing Redmond he breaks the chain of violence. This hopefulness at the conclusion of the novel increases when not only the town recognizes the maturity of Bayard's action but Drusilla, herself grown up, awards him the verbena.

Bayard accomplishes his triumph of character in part because Granny Millard, even when involved in what she considered sin, set him an ethical example from his earliest days. But the triumph is not alone Bayard's aided by Granny's teaching; Colonel John Sartoris shares it too. That this is so is well stated by James B. Meriwether hi an excellent, unpublished dissertation to which I am indebted: "Father and son both faced Redmond unarmed; had it not been for the example of his father, perhaps Bayard could not have so faced Redmond; had it not been for the memory of the father, perhaps Redmond would have aimed at the son."

In writing a novel about this hopeful development, Faulkner drew much from the history of his own family, chiefly of his great-grandfather, Colonel William C. Falkner, who closely resembled Bayard's father. Both the real Colonel Falkner and the fictional Colonel Sartoris formed their own troops for the Civil War and won colonelcy by election. After both later lost re-election for leaders.h.i.+p of their regiments, they returned home and formed partisan cavalry units.

Colonel Falkner was almost as das.h.i.+ng as his fictional counterpart, for in the words of Andrew Brown, who is a fine student of Mississippi history, Colonel Falkner, shortly after he organized his regiment, "decided on a move that ill.u.s.trates his self-confidence and his rashness." At the head of his one regiment of raw recruits, who were "armed mostly with shotguns," he a.s.saulted Rienzi "which was gar- risoned by three veteran regiments under the command of hard-bitten Sheridan," and led his men "in a thundering charge down the main road into the town."

Like Colonel Sartoris in the novel, Colonel Falkner went on to become locally well known in combat. Mrs. Virginia Bardsley's excellent, unpublished biography of Colonel Falkner, which she has kindly lent me, reproduces an official letter praising his courage at First Mana.s.sas. According to local legend, Colonel Falkner, wearing a large feather in his hat, so distinguished himself in the battle that General Beauregard reputedly told nearby soldiers to follow "the knight with the black plume." Later Jeb Stuart-and who could better judge?-complimented Falkner's regiment for its gallantry in that action.

Early in the War, Colonel FaJkner, in an episode on which his great-grandson may have drawn for Colonel Sartor/s' d'ramatic escape in Chapter II of The Unvcmquished, barely got away when Union troops surrounded his home town of Ripley, Mississippi. After the war, still the model for Sartoris, Colonel Falkner became a community leader and devoted himself to building a railroad.

Both the fictional and real men were involved in violence more personal than war. Colonel Falkner killed two men in Ripley, for which the courts acquitted him on grounds of self-defense. Finally he modeled for the fictional Sartoris even m the manner and violence of his own death. His former partner in the railroad, a man named Thurmond, fell out with him as Redmond did with Colonel Sartoris in The Unvanquished. Though Colonel Falkner knew Thurmond was threatening to kill him, like Sartoris in the novel he went unarmed. According to two Ripley residents interviewed by Mrs. Bardsley some years ago, he was as conscious of what he was doing as Colonel Sartoris, for he said "that he had killed his share of men and hoped never to shed another drop of blood, so that if anyone shot, it would be Thurmond and not he." And it was Thurmond- who shot him dead in the public square.

In The Unvanquished William Faulkner drew on his family's history for more than events. That it gave him real understanding of how Bayard felt when he became "the" Sartoris at the death of his father is suggested by a statement Faulkner made in 1955 while visiting j.a.pan. To a question about family responsibility in Mississippi he replied, "We have to be clannish just like the people in the Scottish highlands, each springing to defend his own blood whether it be right or wrong." He went on to say that a family usually has an hereditary head, "the oldest son of the oldest son and each looked upon as chief by his own particular clan." He concluded that this is "because only & comparatively short time ago we were invaded by our own people-speaking in our own language, which is always a pretty savage sort of warfare."

Having chosen that warfare as the exciting backdrop for The Unvanquished, Faulkner writes of it well. By the time of the fall of Vicksburg, when the novel begins, the Confederate defeats at Shuoh and Corinth had opened northern Mississippi to the Federal armies. The confusion which permitted Granny Millard, Ringo, Bayard, and Ab Snopes to carry on their fantastic "mule business" was real enough; for the border region of north Mississippi, as Brown puts it, was "overrun by both the Union and Confederate armies but controlled by neither."

For artistic purposes Faulkner somewhat alters the timing of the events of the War, and in Chapter VI he places Reconstruction much closer to the surrender at Appomattox than it was in reality. But he catches the essence of the confused conflict over north Mississippi in addition to presenting the collapse of the Confederate hope for victory. As Meriwether has pointed out while noting its historical discrepancies, The Unvanquished is not primarily about the Civil War; so objection to the s.p.a.cing of the military events in the novel serves little purpose, especially when the s.p.a.cing gives shape and force to the drama of Bayard's growth to real manhood.

The day is past when readers considered it Faulkner's chief function to explain his section of the South and the detail of its history. They now recognize him to be artist instead of sociologist or regional historian. By setting not only The Unvanquished but many of his other works in the part of our country which he knows best, he is not so much recording the life of that particular region as making it a base from which he examines, in book after book, significant aspects of man's life in general.

Faulkner's feeling about man's endurance and courage, virtues he implicitly gave to the young Southerner Bayard Sartoris in The Unvanquished, appears explicitly in the address he wrote 'To the Youth of j.a.pan," when they-half a world away from Yoknapatawpha-were suffering the aftermath of another war, another defeat. Having mentioned the people of the South in the Civil War and then' particular troubles during Reconstruction, William Faulkner went on to speak of man in general and to add that in his opinion art has one high purpose-which surely we may conclude that The Unvanquished serves: "I believe our country is even stronger because of that old anguish since that very anguish taught us compa.s.sion for other peoples whom war has injured. I mention it only to explain and show that Americans from my part of America at least can understand the feeling of the j.a.panese young people of today that the future oilers . . . nothing but hopelessness, with nothing ... to hold to or believe in. Because the young people of my country during those ten years must have said in their turn: 'What shall we do now? . . .'

"I would like to think that there was someone there at that time too ... to rea.s.sure them that man is tough, that nothing, nothing-war, grief, hopelessness, despair-can last as long as man himself can last; that man himself will prevail over all his anguishes, provided he will make the effort to ... to seek not for a mere crutch to lean on, but to stand erect on his own feet by believing in hope and in his own toughness and endurance.

"I believe that is the only reason for art. . . . That art is the strongest and most durable force man has invented or discovered with which to record the history of his invincible durability and courage beneath disaster, and to postulate the validity of his hope."

-CARVEL COLLINS Ma.s.sachusetts Inst.i.tute of Technology AMBUSCADE.

M*EHIND the smokehouse that summer, Ringo and I had a living map. Although Vicksburg was just a handful of chips from the woodpile and the River a -trench sc.r.a.ped into the packed earth with the point of a hoe, it (river, city, and terrain) lived, possessing even, in miniature that ponderable though pa.s.sive recalci-, trance of topography which outweighs artillery, against which the most brilliant of victories and the most tragic of defeats are but the loud noises of a moment. To Ringo and me it lived, if only because of the fact that the sunimpacted ground drank water faster than we could fetch it from the well, the very setting of the stage for conflict a prolonged and wellnigh hopeless ordeal in which we ran, panting and interminable, with the leaking bucket between wellhouse and battlefield, the two of us needing first to join forces and spend ourselves against a common enemy, time, before we could engender between us and hold intact the pattern of re-capitulant mimic furious victory like a cloth, a s.h.i.+eld between ourselves and reality, between us and fact and doom. This afternoon it seemed as if we would never get it filled, wet enough, since there had not even been dew in three weeks. But at last it was damp enough, damp-colored enough at least, and we could begin. We were just about to begin. Then suddenly Loosh was standing there, watching us. He was Joby's son and Ringo's uncle; he stood there (we did not know where he had come from; we had not seen him appear, emerge) in the fierce dull early afternoon sunlight, bareheaded, his head slanted a little, tilted a little yet firm and not askew, like a cannonball (which it resembled) bedded hurriedly and carelessly in concrete, his eyes a little red at the inner corners as Negroes' eyes get when they have been drinking, looking down at what Ringo and I called Vicksburg. Then I saw Philadelphy, his wife, over at the woodpile, stooped, with an armful of wood already gathered into the crook of her elbow, watching Loosh's back.

"What's that?" Loosh said.

"Vicksburg," I said.

Loosh laughed. He stood there laughing, not loud, looking at the chips.

"Come on here, Loosh," Philadelphy said from the woodpile. There was something curious in her voice too -urgent, perhaps frightened. "If you wants any supper, you better tote me some wood." But I didn't know which, urgency or fright; I didn't have time to wonder or speculate, because suddenly Loosh stooped before Ringo or I could have moved, and with his hand he swept the chips flat.

"There's your Vicksburg," he said.

"Loos.h.!.+" Philadelphy said. But Loosh squatted, looking at me with that expression on his face. I was just twelve then; I didn't know triumph; I didn't even know the word.

"And I tell you nother un you ain't know," he said. "Corinth."

"Corinth?" I said. Philadelphy had dropped the wood and she was coming fast toward us. "That's in Mississippi too. That's not far. I've been there."

"Far don't matter," Loosh said. Now he sounded as if he were about to chant, to sing; squatting there with the fierce dull sun on his iron skull and the flattening slant of his nose, he was not looking at me or Ringo either; it was as if his red-cornered eyes had reversed in his skull and it was the blank flat obverses of the AMBUSCADE y;> b.a.l.l.s which we saw. "Far don't matter. Case hit's on the way!"

"On the way? On the way to what?" "Ask your paw. Ask Ma.r.s.e John." "He's at Tennessee, fighting. I can't ask him." "You think he at Tennessee? Ain't no need for him at Tennessee now." Then Philadelphy grabbed him by the arm.

"Hush your mouth, n.i.g.g.e.r!" she cried, in that tense desperate voice. "Come on here and get me some wood!"

Then they were gone. Ringo and I didn't watch them go. We stood there above our ruined Vicksburg, our tedious hoe-scratch not even damp-colored now, looking at one another quietly. "What?" Ringo said. "What he mean?"

"Nothing," I said. I stooped and set Vicksburg up again. "There it is."

But Ringo didn't move, he just looked at me. "Loosh laughed. He say Corinth too. He laughed at Corinth too. What you reckon he know that we ain't?"

"Nothing!" I said. "Do you reckon Loosh knows anything that Father don't know?"

"Ma.r.s.e John at Tennessee. Maybe he ain't know Either."

"Do you reckon he'd be away off at Tennessee if there were Yankees at Corinth? Do you reckon that if there were Yankees at Corinth, Father and General Van Dorn and General Pemberton all three wouldn't be there too?" But I was just talking too, I knew that, because n.i.g.g.e.rs know, they know things; it would have to,.be something louder, much louder, than words to do any good. So I stooped and caught both hands full of dust and rose: and Ringo still standing there, not moving, just looking at me even as I flung the dust. "I'm General Pemberton!" I cried. "Yaaay! Yaay!" stooping and catching up more dust and flinging that too. Still Ringo didn't move. "All right!" I cried. "I'll be Grant this time, then. You can be General Pemberton." Because it was that urgent, since Negroes knew. The arrangement was that I would be General Pemberton twice in succession and Ringo would be Grant, then I would have to be Grant once so Ringo could be General Pemberton or he wouldn't play anymore. But now it was that urgent even though Ringo was a n.i.g.g.e.r too, because Ringo and I had been born in the same month and had both fed at the same breast and had slept together and eaten together for so long that Ringo called Granny 'Granny' just like I did, until maybe he wasn't a n.i.g.g.e.r anymore or maybe I wasn't a white boy anymore, the two of us neither, not even people any longer: the two supreme undefeated like two moths, two feathers riding above a hurricane. So we were both at it; we didn't see Louvinia, Joby's wife and Ringo's grandmother, at all. We were facing one another at scarcely arms' length, to the other each invisible in the furious slow jerking of the flung dust, yelling "Kill the bastuds! Kill them! Kill them!" when her voice seemed to descend upon us like an enormous hand, flattening the very dust which we had raised, leaving us now visible to one another, dust-colored ourselves to the eyes and still in the act of throwing: "You, Bayard! You, Ringo!" She stood about ten feet away, her mouth still open with shouting. I noticed that she did not now have on the old hat of Father's which she wore on top of her head rag even when she just stepped out of the kitchen for wood. "What was that word?" she said. "What did I hear you say?" Only she didn't wait to be answered, and then I saw that she had been running too. "Look who coming up the big road!" she said.

We-Ringo and I-ran as one, in midstride out of frozen immobility, across the back yard and around the house, where Granny was standing at the top of the front steps and where Loosh had just come around the house from the other side and stopped, looking down the drive toward the gate. In the spring, when Father came home that time, Ringo and I ran down the drive to meet him and return, I standing in one stirrup with Father's arm around me, and Ringo holding to the other stirrup and running beside the horse. But this time we didn't. I mounted the steps and stood beside Granny, and with Ringo and Loosh on the ground below the gallery we watched the claybank stallion enter the gate which was never closed now, and come up the drive. We watched them-the big gaunt horse almost the color of smoke, lighter in color than the dust which had gathered and caked on his wet hide where they had crossed at the ford three miles away, coming up the drive at a steady gait which was not a walk and not a run, as if he had held it all the way from Tennessee because there was a need to encompa.s.s earth which abrogated sleep or rest and relegated to some insulated bourne of perennial and pointless holiday so trivial a thing as galloping; and Father damp too from the ford, his boots dark and dustcaked too, the skirts of his weathered gray coat shades darker than the breast and back and sleeves where the tarnished b.u.t.tons and the frayed braid of his field officer's rank glinted dully, the sabre hanging loose yet rigid at his side as if it were too heavy to jounce or perhaps were attached to the living thigh itself and took no more motion from the horse than he did. He stopped; he looked at Granny and me on the porch and at Ringo and Loosh on the ground. "Well, Miss Rosa," he said. "Well, boys." "Well, John," Granny said. Loosh came and took Jupiter's head; Father dismounted stiffly, the sabre clas.h.i.+ng dully and heavily against his wet boot and leg. "Curry him," Father said. "Give him a good feed, but don't turn him into the pasture. Let him stay in the lot. ... Go with Loosh," he said, as if Jupiter were a child, slapping him on the flank as Loosh led him on. Then we could see him good. I mean, Father. He was not big; it was just the things he did, that we knew he was doing, had been doing in Virginia and Tennessee, that made-him seem big to us. There were others besides him that were doing the things, the same things, but maybe it was because he was the only one we knew, had ever heard snoring at night in a quiet house, had watched eating, had heard when he talked, knew how he liked to sleep and what he liked to eat and how he liked to talk. He was not big, yet somehow he looked even smaller on the horse than off of him, because Jupiter was big and when you thought of Father you thought of him as being big too and so when you thought of Father being on Jupiter it was as if you said. 'Together they will be too big; you won't believe it.' So you didn't believe it and so it wasn't. He came toward the steps and began to mount, the sabre heavy and flat at his side. Then I began to smell it again, like each time he returned, like the day back in the spring when I rode up the drive standing in one of his stirrups-that odor in his clothes and beard and flesh too which I believed was the smell of powder and glory, the elected victorious but know better now: know now to have been only the will to endure, a sardonic and even humorous declining of self-delusion which is not even kin to that optimism which believes that that which is about to happen to us can possibly be the worst which we can suffer. He mounted four of the steps, the sabre (that's how tall he actually was) striking against each one on the steps as he mounted, then he stopped and removed his hat. And that's what I mean: about his doing bigger things than he was. He could have stood on the same level with Granny and he would have only needed to bend his head a little for her to kiss him. But he didn't. He stopped two steps below her, with his head bared and his forehead held for her to touch her lips to, and the fact that Granny had to stoop a little now took nothing from the illusion of height and size which he wore for us at least.

"I've been expecting you," Granny said.

"Ah," Father said. Then he looked at me, who was still looking at him, as Ringo at the foot of the steps beneath still was.

"You rode hard from Tennessee," I said.

"Ah," Father said again.

"Tennessee sho gaunted you," Ringo said. "What does they eat up there, Ma.r.s.e John? Does they eat the same things that folks eat?"

Then I said it, looking him in the face while he looked at me: "Loosh says you haven't been at Tennessee."

"Loosh?" Father said. "Loosh?"

"Come in," Granny said. "Louvinia is putting your dinner on the table. You will just have time to wash."

THAT afternoon we built the stock pen. We built it deep in the creek bottom, where you could not have found it unless you had known where to look, and you could not have seen it until you came to the new sap-sweating, axe-ended rails woven through and into the jungle growth itself. We were all there-Father and Joby and Ringo and Loosh and me-Father in the boots still but with his coat off now, so that we saw for the first time that his trousers were not Confederate ones but were Yankee ones, of new strong blue cloth, which they (he and his troop) had captured, and without the sabre now too. We worked fast, felling the saplings-the willow and pin oak, the swamp maple and c.h.i.n.kapin- and, without even waiting hardly to trim them, dragging them behind the mules and by hand too, through the mud and the briers to where Father waited. And that was it too; Father was everywhere, with a sapling under each arm going through ' the brush and briers almost faster than the mules; racking the rails into place while Joby^and Loosh were still arguing about which end of the rail went where. That was it: not that Father worked faster and harder than anyone else, even though you do look bigger (to twelve, at least, to me and Ringo at twelve, at least) standing still and saying, 'Do this or that' to the ones who are doing; it was the way he did it. When he sat at his old place at the table in the dining room and finished the side meat and greens and the cornbread and milk which Louvinia brought him (and we watching and waiting, Ringo and I at least, waiting for night and the talking, the telling) and wiped his beard and said, "Now we're going to build a new pen. We'll have to cut the rails, too"; when he said that, Ringo and I probably had exactly the same vision. There would be all of us there-Joby and Loosh and Ringo and me on the edge of the bottom and drawn up into a kind of order-an order partaking not of any l.u.s.ting and sweating for a.s.sault or even victory, but rather of that pa.s.sive yet dynamic affirmation which Napoleon's troops must have felt-and facing us, be- 20 THEUNVANQUISHED.

tween us and the bottom, between us and the waiting sap-running boles which were about to be transposed into dead rails, Father. He was on Jupiter now; he wore the frogged gray field-officer's tunic; and while we watched he drew the sabre. Giving us a last embracing and comprehensive glance he drew it, already pivoting Jupiter on the tight snaffle; his hair tossed beneath the c.o.c.ked hat, the sabre flashed and glinted; he cried, not loud yet stentorian: "Trot! Canter! Charge!" Then, without even having to move, we could both watch and follow him-the little man (who in conjunction with the horse looked exactly the right size because that was as big as he needed to look and-to twelve years old- bigger than most folks could hope to look) standing in the stirrups above the smoke-colored diminis.h.i.+ng thunderbolt, beneath the arcy and myriad glitter of the sabre from which the chosen saplings, sheared trimmed and lopped, sprang into neat and waiting windrows, requiring only the carrying and the placing to' become a fence. The sun had gone out of the bottom when we finished the fence, that is, left Joby and Loosh with the last three panels to put up, but it was still s.h.i.+ning up the slope of the pasture when we rode across it, I behind Father on one of the mules and Ringo on the other one. But it was gone even from the-pasture by the time I had* left Father at the house and returned to the stable, where Ringo already had a lead rope on the cow. So we went back to the new pen, with the talf following nuzzling and prodding at the cow every time she stopped to s.n.a.t.c.h a mouthful of gra.s.s, and the sow trotting on ahead. She (the sow) was the one who moved slow. She seemed to be moving slower than the cow even while the cow was stopped with Ringo leaned to the taut jerk of the rope and hollering at the cow, so it was dark sure enough when we reached the new pen. But there was still plenty of gap left to drive the stock through. But then, we never had worried about that.

We drove them in-the two mules, the cow and calf, the sow; we put up the last panel by feel, and went back to the house. It was full dark now, even in the pasture; we could see the lamp in the kitchen and the shadow of * someone moving across the window. When Ringo and I came in, Louvinia was just closing one of the big trunks from the attic, which hadn't been down stairs since the Christmas four years ago which we spent at Hawk-hurst, when there wasn't any war and Uncle Dennison was still alive. It was a big trunk and heavy even when empty; it had not been hi the kitchen when we left to build the pen so it had been fetched down some time during the afternoon, while Joby and Loosh were in the bottom and n.o.body there to carry it down but Granny and Louvinia, and then Father later, after we came back to the house on the mule, so that was a part of the need and urgency too; maybe it was Father who carried the trunk down from the attic too. And when I went in to supper, the table was set with the kitchen knives and forks in place of the silver ones, and the sideboard (on which the silver service had been sitting when I began to remember and where it had been sitting ever since except on each Tuesday1 afternoon, when Granny and Louvinia and Philadelphy would polish it, why, n.o.body except Granny maybe knew, since it was never used) was bare*.

It didn't take us long to eat. Father had already eaten once early in the afternoon, and besides that was what Ringo and I were waiting for: for after supper, the hour of laxed muscles and full entrails, the talking. In the spring when he came home that time, we waited as we did now, until he was* sitting in his old chair with the hickory logs popping and snapping on the hearth and Ringo and I squatting on either side of the hearth, beneath the mantel above which the captured musket which he had brought home from Virginia two years ago rested on two pegs, loaded and oiled for service. Then we listened. We heard: the names-Forrest and Morgan and Barksdale and Van Dorn; the words like Gap and Run which we didn't have in Mississippi even though we did own Barksdale, and Van Dorn until somebody's husband killed him, and one day General Forrest rode down South Street in Oxford where there watched him through a window pane a young girl who scratched her name on it with a diamond ring: Celia Cook.

But we were just twelve; we didn't listen to that What Ringo and I heard was the cannon and the flags and the anonymous yelling. That's what we intended to hear tonight. Ringo was waiting for me in the hall; we waited until Father was settled hi his chair in the room which he and the Negroes called the Office-Father because his desk was here in which he kept the seed cotton and corn and hi this room he would remove his muddy boots and sit hi his stocking feet while the boots dried on the hearth and where the dogs could come and go with impunity, to lie on the rug before the fire or even to sleep there on the cold nights-these whether Mother, who died when I was born, gave him this dispensation before she died or whether Granny carried it on afterward or whether Granny gave him the dispensation herself because Mother died I don't know: and the Negroes called the Office because into this room they would be fetched to face the Patroller (sitting hi one of the straight hard chairs and smoking one of Father's cigars too but with his hat off) and swear that they could not possibly have been either whom or where he (the Patroller) said they were-and which Granny called the library because there was one bookcase hi it containing a c.o.ke upon Littleton, a Josephus, a Koran, a volume of Mississippi Reports dated 1848, a Jeremy Taylor, a Napoleon's Maxims, a thousand and ninety-eight page treatise on astrology, a History of Werewolf Men in England, Ireland and Scotland and Including Wales by the Reverend Ptolemy Thornd.y.k.e, M.A. (Edinburgh), F.R.S.S., a complete Walter Scott, a complete Fenimore Cooper, a paper-bound Dumas complete, too, save for the volume which Father lost from his pocket at Ma-na.s.sas (retreating, he said).

So Ringo and I squatted again and waited quietly while Granny sewed beside the lamp on the table and Father sat in his old chair in its old place, his muddy boots crossed and lifted into the old heel-marks beside the cold and empty fireplace, chewing the tobacco which Joby had loaned him. Joby was a good deal older than Father. He was too old to have been caught short of tobacco just by a war. He had come to Mississippi from Carolina with Father and he had been Father's body servant all the time that he was raising and tram-ing Simon, Ringo's father, to take over when he (Joby) got too old, which was to have been some years yet except for the War. So Simon went with Father; he was still in Tennessee with the army. Vve waited for Father to begin; we waited so long that we could tell from the sounds that Louvinia was almost through in the kitchen: so that I decided Father was waiting for Louvinia to finish and come in to hear too, so I said, "How can you fight in mountains, Father?"

And that's what he was waiting for, though not in the way Ringo and I thought, because he said, "You can't. You just have to. Now you boys run on to bed." We went up the stairs. But not all the way; we stopped and sat on the top step, just out of the light from the hall lamp, watching the door to the Office, listening; after a while Louvinia crossed the hall without looking up and entered the Office; we could hear Father and her: "Is the trunk ready?" "Yes sir. Hit's ready."

"Then tell Loosh to get the lantern and the shovels and wait in the kitchen for me."

"Yes sir," Louvinia said. She came out; she crossed the hall again without even looking up the stairs, who used to follow us up and stand in the bedroom door and scold at us until we were in bed-I in the bed itself, Ringo on the pallet beside it. But this time she not only didn't wonder where we were, she didn't even think about where we might not be.

"I knows what's in that trunk," Ringo whispered.

"Hit's the silver. What you reckon------"

"Shhhh," I said. We could hear Father's voice, talking to Granny. After a while Louvinia came back and crossed the hall again. We sat on the top step, listening to Father's voice telling Granny and Louvinia both.

"Vicksburg?" Ringo whispered. We were in the shadow; I couldn't see anything but his eyeb.a.l.l.s. "Vicksburg fell? Do he mean hit fell off hi the River? With Gin-rul Pemberton in hit too?"

"Shhhhh!" I said. We sat close together in the shadow, listening to Father. Perhaps it was the dark or perhaps we were the two moths, the two feathers again or perhaps there is a point at which credulity firmly 24 THEUNVANQUISHEP.

and calmly and irrevocably declines, because suddenly Louvinia was standing over us, shaking us awake. She didn't even scold us. She followed us up stairs and stood in the door to the bedroom and she didn't even light the lamp; she couldn't have told whether or not we had undressed even if she had been paying enough attention to suspect that we had not. She may have been listening as Ringo and I were, to what we thought we heard, though I knew better, just as I knew that we had slept on the stairs for some time; I was telling myself, 'They have already carried it out, they are in the orchard now, digging.' Because there is that point at which credulity declines; somewhere between waking and sleeping I believed I saw or I dreamed that I did see the lantern in the orchard, under the apple trees. But I don't know whether I saw it or not, because then it was morning and it was raining and Father was gone.

3.

HE MUST have ridden off in the rain, which was still falling at breakfast and then at dinnertime too, so that it looked as if we wouldn't have to leave the house at all, until at last Granny put the sewing away and said, "Very well. Get the cook book, Marengo." Ringo got the cook book from the kitchen and he and I lay on our stomachs on the floor while Granny opened the book. "What shall we read about today?" she said.

"Read about cake," I said.

"Very well. What kind of cake?" Only she didn't need to say that because Ringo was already answering that before she spoke: "c.o.kynut cake, Granny." He said coconut cake every time because we never had been able to decide whether Ringo had ever tasted coconut cake or not. We had had some that Christmas before it started and Ringo had tried to remember whether they had had any of it in the kitchen or not, but he couldn't remember. Now and then I used to try to help him decide, get him to tell me how it tasted and what it looked like and sometimes he would almost decide to risk it before he would change his mind. Because he said that he would rather just maybe have tasted coconut cake without remembering it than to know for certain he had not; that if he were to describe the wrong kind of cake, he would never taste coconut cake as long as he lived.

"I reckon a little more won't hurt us," Granny said.

The rain stopped in the middle of the afternoon; the sun was s.h.i.+ning when I stepped out onto the back gallery, with Ringo already saying, "Where we going?" behind me and still saying it after we pa.s.sed the smokehouse where I could see the stable and the cabins: "Where we going now?" Before we reached the stable Joby and Loosh came into sight beyond the pasture fence, bringing the mules up from the new pen. "What we ghy do now?" Ringo said.

"Watch him," I said.

"Watch him? Watch who?" I looked at Ringo. He was staring at me, his eyeb.a.l.l.s white and quiet like last night. "You talking about Loosh. Who tole us to watch him?"

"n.o.body. I just know."

"Bayard, did you dream hit?"

"Yes. Last night. It was Father and Louvinia. Father said to watch Loosh, because he knows."

"Knows?" Ringo said. "Knows what?" But he didn't need to ask that either; in the next breath he answered it himself, staring at me with his round quiet eyes, blinking a little: "Yestiddy. Vicksburg. When he knocked it over. He knowed it then, already. Like when he said Ma.r.s.e John wasn't at no Tennessee and sho enough Ma.r.s.e John wasn't. Go on; what else did the dream tole you?"

"That's all. To watch him. That he would know before we did. Father said that Louvinia would have to watch him too, that even if he was her son, she would have to be white a little while longer. Because if we watched him, we could tell by what he did when it was getting ready to happen."

"When what was getting ready to happen?"

"1 don't know." Ringo 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 n.o.body 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 realised 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; we were just pa.s.sing Joby's cabin when the door opened and Loosh kind of surged up out of the darkness right beside us. He was almost close enough for me to have touched him and he did not see us at all; all of a sudden he was just kind of hanging there against the lighted doorway like he had been cut out of tin in the act of running and was inside the cabin and the door shut black again almost before we knew what we had seen. And when we looked in the window he was standing in front of the fire, with his clothes torn and muddy where he had been hiding in swamps and bottoms from the Patrollers and with that look on his face again which resembled drunkenness but was not, as if he had not slept in a long time and did not want to sleep now, and Joby and Philadelphy leaning into the firelight and looking at him and Philadelphy's mouth open too and the same look on her face. Then I saw Louvinia standing in the door. We had not heard her behind us yet there she was, with one hand on the door 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, Loos.h.!.+" "Yes!" Loosh said, "Gin'ral Sherman gonter sweep the earth and the race gonter all be free!"

Then Louvinia crossed the floor hi 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. "T just wish Ma.r.s.e 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 tune, 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 Phila-delphy and Ringo and me-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 gla.s.s, 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 k.n.o.bs 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?"