Uncollected Stories of William Faulkner (12 page)

“Who?” Aunt Louisa hollered. “Where have you been?”

“To town!” Denny hollered. “Them two Burdens! They kilt um!”

“Who killed them?” Aunt Louisa hollered.

“Drusilla and Cousin John!” Denny hollered. Then Louvinia said how Aunt Louisa hollered sure enough.

“Do you mean to tell me that Drusilla and that man are not married yet?”

Because we didn’t have time. Maybe Drusilla and Father would have, but when we came into the square we saw the crowd of niggers kind of huddled beyond the hotel door with six or eight strange white men herding them, and then all of a sudden I saw the Jefferson men, the men that I knew, that Father knew, running across the square toward the hotel with each one holding his hip pocket like a man runs with a pistol in his pocket. And then I saw the men who were Father’s troop lined up before the hotel door,
blocking it off. And then I was sliding off my horse too and watching Drusilla struggling with George Wyatt. But he didn’t have hold of her, he just had hold of the cloak, and then she was through the line of them and running toward the hotel with her wreath on one side of her head and the veil streaming behind. But George held me. He threw the cloak down and held me. “Let go,” I said. “Father.”

“Steady, now,” George said, holding me. “John’s just gone in to vote.”

“But there are two of them!” I said. “Let me go!”

“John’s got two shots in the derringer,” George said. “Steady, now.”

But they held me. And then we heard the three shots and we all turned and looked at the door. I don’t know how long it was. “The last two was that derringer,” George said. I don’t know how long it was. The old nigger that was Mrs. Holston’s porter, that was too old even to be free, stuck his head out once and said “Gret Gawd” and ducked back. Then Drusilla came out, carrying the ballot box, the wreath on one side of her head and the veil twisted about her arm, and then Father came out behind her, brushing his new beaver hat on his sleeve. And then it was loud; I could hear them when they drew in their breath like when the Yankees used to hear it begin:

“Yaaaaa—” But Father raised his hand and they stopped. Then you couldn’t hear anything.

“We heard a pistol too,” George said. “Did they touch you?”

“No,” Father said. “I let them fire first. You all heard. You boys can swear to my derringer.”

“Yes,” George said. “We all heard.” Now Father looked at all of them, at all the faces in sight, slow.

“Does any man here want a word with me about this?” he said. But you could not hear anything, not even moving. The herd of niggers stood like they had when I first saw them, with the Northern white men herding them together. Father put his hat on and took the ballot box from Drusilla and helped her back onto her horse and handed the ballot box up to her. Then he looked around again, at all of them. “This election will be held out at my home,” he said. “I hereby appoint Drusilla Hawk voting commissioner until the votes are cast and counted. Does any man here object?”
But he stopped them again with his hand before it had begun good. “Not now, boys,” he said. He turned to Drusilla. “Go home. I will go to the sheriff, and then I will follow you.”

“Like hell you will,” George Wyatt said. “Some of the boys will ride out with Drusilla. The rest of us will come with you.”

But Father would not let them. “Don’t you see we are working for peace through law and order?” he said. “I will make bond and then follow you. You do as I say.” So we went on; we turned in the gates with Drusilla in front, the ballot box on her pommel—us and Father’s men and about a hundred more, and rode on up to the cabin where the buggies and surreys were standing, and Drusilla passed the ballot box to me and got down and took the box again and was walking toward the cabin when she stopped dead still. I reckon she and I both remembered at the same time and I reckon that even the others, the men, knew all of a sudden that something was wrong. Because like Father said, I reckon women don’t ever surrender: not only victory, but not even defeat. Because that’s how we were stopped when Aunt Louisa and the other ladies came out on the porch, and then Father shoved past me and jumped down beside Drusilla. But Aunt Louisa never even looked at him.

“So you are not married,” she said.

“I forgot,” Drusilla said.

“You forgot?
You forgot?
”

“I …” Drusilla said. “We …”

Now Aunt Louisa looked at us; she looked along the line of us sitting there in our saddles; she looked at me too just like she did at the others, like she had never seen me before. “And who are these, pray? Your wedding train of forgetters? Your groomsmen of murder and robbery?”

“They came to vote,” Drusilla said.

“To vote,” Aunt Louisa said. “Ah. To vote. Since you have forced your mother and brother to live under a roof of license and adultery you think you can also force them to live in a polling booth refuge from violence and bloodshed, do you? Bring me that box.” But Drusilla didn’t move, standing there in her torn dress and the ruined veil and the twisted wreath hanging from her hair by a few pins. Aunt Louisa came down the steps; we didn’t know what she was going to do: we just sat there and watched her snatch
the polling box from Drusilla and fling it across the yard. “Come into the house,” she said.

“No,” Drusilla said.

“Come into the house. I will send for a minister myself.”

“No,” Drusilla said. “This is an election. Don’t you understand? I am voting commissioner.”

“So you refuse?”

“I have to. I must.” She sounded like a little girl that has been caught playing in the mud. “John said that I—”

Then Aunt Louisa began to cry. She stood there in the black dress, without the knitting and for the first time that I ever saw it, without even the handkerchief, crying, until Mrs. Habersham came and led her back into the house. Then they voted. That didn’t take long either. They set the box on the sawchunk where Louvinia washed, and Ringo got the pokeberry juice and an old piece of window shade, and they cut it into ballots. “Let all who want the Honorable Cassius Q. Benbow to be Marshal of Jefferson write Yes on his ballot; opposed, No,” Father said.

“And I’ll do the writing and save some more time,” George Wyatt said. So he made a pack of the ballots and wrote them against his saddle and fast as he would write them the men would take them and drop them into the box and Drusilla would call their names out. We could hear Aunt Louisa still crying inside the cabin and we could see the other ladies watching us through the window. It didn’t take long. “You needn’t bother to count them,” George said. “They all voted No.”

And that’s all. They rode back to town then, carrying the box, with Father and Drusilla in the torn wedding dress and the crooked wreath and veil standing beside the sawchunk, watching them. Only this time even Father could not have stopped them. It came back high and thin and ragged and fierce, like when the Yankees used to hear it out of the smoke and the galloping:

“Yaaaaay, Drusilla!” they hollered. “Yaaaaaay, John Sartoris! Yaaaaaaay!”

When Ab Snopes left for Memphis with a batch of mules, Ringo and Joby and I worked on a new fence. Then Ringo went off on his mule and there was just Joby and me. Once Granny came down and looked at the new section of rails; the pen would be almost two acres larger now. That was the second day after Ringo left. That night, while Granny and I were sitting before the fire, Ab Snopes came back. He said that he had got only four hundred and fifty dollars for the nine mules. That is, he took some money out of his pocket and gave it to Granny, and she counted it and said:

“That’s only fifty dollars apiece.”

“All right,” Ab said. “If you can do any better, you are welcome to take the next batch in yourself. I done already admitted I can’t hold a candle to you when it comes to getting mules; maybe I can’t even compete with you when it comes to selling them.” He chewed something—tobacco when he could get it, willow bark when he couldn’t—all the time, and he never wore a collar, and nobody ever admitted they ever saw him in a uniform, though when father was away, he would talk a lot now and then about when he was in father’s troop and about what he and father used to do. But when I asked father about it once, father said, “Who? Ab Snopes?” and then laughed. But it was father that told Ab to kind of look out for Granny while he was away; only he told me and Ringo to look out for Ab, too, that Ab was all right in his way, but he was like a mule: While you had him in the traces, you better watch him. But Ab and Granny got along all right though each time Ab took a batch of mules to Memphis and came back with the money, it
would be like this: “Yes, ma’am,” Ab said. “It’s easy to talk about hit, setting here without no risk. But I’m the one that has to dodge them durn critters nigh a hundred miles into Memphis, with Forrest and Smith fighting on ever side of me and me never knowing when I will run into a Confed’rit or Yankee patrol and have ever last one of them confiscated off of me right down to the durn halters. And then I got to take them into the very heart of the Yankee Army in Memphis and try to sell them to a e-quipment officer that’s liable at any minute to recognize them as the same mules he bought from me not two weeks ago. Yes. Hit’s easy enough for them to talk that sets here getting rich and takes no risk.”

“I suppose you consider getting them back for you to sell taking no risk,” Granny said.

“The risk of running out of them printed letterheads, sho,” Ab said. “If you ain’t satisfied with making just five or six hundred dollars at a time, why don’t you requisition for more mules at a time? Why don’t you write out a letter and have General Smith turn over his commissary train to you, with about four wagonloads of new shoes in hit? Or, better than that, pick out the day when the pay officer is coming around and draw for the whole pay wagon; then we wouldn’t even have to bother about finding somebody to buy hit.”

The money was in new bills. Granny folded them carefully and put them into the can, but she didn’t put the can back inside her dress right away. She sat there looking at the fire, with the can in her hands and the string looping down from around her neck. She didn’t look any thinner or any older. She didn’t look sick either. She just looked like somebody that has quit sleeping at night.

“We have more mules,” she said, “if you would just sell them. There are more than a hundred of them that you refuse—”

“Refuse is right,” Ab said; he began to holler now: “Yes, sir! I reckon I ain’t got much sense, or I wouldn’t be doing this a-tall. But I got better sense than to take them mules to a Yankee officer and tell him that them hip patches where you and that durn nigger burned out the U. S. brand are trace galls. By Godfrey, I—”

“That will do,” Granny said. “Have you had some supper?”

“I—” Ab said. Then he quit hollering. He chewed again. “Yessum,” he said. “I done et.”

“Then you had better go home and get some rest,” Granny said. “There is a new relief regiment at Mottstown. Ringo went down two days ago to see about it. So we may need that new fence soon.”

Ab stopped chewing. “Is, huh?” he said. “Out of Memphis, likely. Likely got them nine mules in it we just got shet of.”

Granny looked at him. “So you sold them further back than three days ago, then,” Granny said. Ab started to say something, but Granny didn’t give him time. “You go on home and rest up,” she said. “Ringo will probably be back tomorrow, and then you’ll have a chance to see if they are the same mules. I may even have a chance to find out what they say they paid you for them.”

Ab stood in the door and looked at Granny. “You’re a good un,” he said. “Yessum. You got my respect. John Sartoris, himself, can’t tech you. He hells all over the country day and night with a hundred armed men, and it’s all he can do to keep them in crowbait to ride on. And you set here in this cabin, without nothing but a handful of durn printed letterheads, and you got to build a bigger pen to hold the stock you ain’t got no market yet to sell. How many head of mules have you sold back to the Yankees?”

“A hundred and five,” Granny said.

“A hundred and five,” Ab said. “For how much active cash money, in round numbers?” Only he didn’t wait for her to answer; he told her himself: “For six thou-sand and seven hun-dred and twen-ty-two dollars and six-ty-five cents, lessen the dollar and thirty-five cents I spent for whisky that time the snake bit one of the mules.” It sounded round when he said it, like big sawn-oak wheels running in wet sand. “You started out a year ago with two. You got forty-odd in the pen and twice that many out on receipt. And I reckon you have sold about fifty-odd more back to the Yankees a hundred and five times, for a grand total of six thousand, seven hundred and twenty-two dollars and sixty-five cents, and in a day or so you are aiming to requisition a few of them back again, I understand.”

He looked at me. “Boy,” he said, “when you grow up and start out for yourself, don’t you waste your time learning to be a lawyer or nothing. You just save your money and buy you a handful of printed letterheads—it don’t matter much what’s on them, I reckon—and you hand them to your grandmaw here and just ask her to give you the job of counting the money when hit comes in.”

He looked at Granny again. “When Kernel Sartoris left here, he told me to look out for you against General Grant and them. What I wonder is, if somebody hadn’t better tell Abe Lincoln to look out for General Grant against Miz Rosa Millard. I bid you one and all good night.”

He went out. Granny looked at the fire, the tin can in her hand. But it didn’t have any six thousand dollars in it. It didn’t have a thousand dollars in it. Ab Snopes knew that, only I don’t suppose that it was possible for him to believe it. Then she got up; she looked at me, quiet. She didn’t look sick; that wasn’t it. “I reckon it’s bedtime,” she said. She went beyond the quilt; it came back and hung straight down from the rafter, and I heard the loose board when she put the can away under the floor, and then I heard the sound the bed made when she would hold to the post to kneel down. It would make another sound when she got up, but when it made that sound, I was already undressed and in my pallet. The quilts were cold, but when the sound came I had been there long enough for them to begin to get warm.