Uncollected Stories of William Faulkner (16 page)

They all came in again when we buried Granny; Brother Fortinbride and all of them—the old men and the women and the children and the niggers—the twelve that used to come when Ab Snopes would get back from Memphis, and I reckon a hundred more besides, coming in from the hills in the rain. Only there were no Yankees in Jefferson now, and so they didn’t have to walk in; I could look across the grave and beyond the other headstones and monuments, and see the dripping cedar grove full of mules with the long black smears on their hips where Granny and Ringo had burned out the U.S. brand.

Most of the Jefferson people were there, too, and there was another preacher—a big preacher refugeeing from Memphis or somewhere—and I found out how Mrs. Compson and some of them had arranged for him to preach the funeral. But Brother Fortinbride didn’t let him. He didn’t tell him not to; he didn’t say anything to him at all; he just acted like a grown person coming in where the children are getting ready to play a game and telling the children that the game is all right, but that the grown folks need the room and the furniture for a minute. He came walking fast up from the grove, where he had hitched his mule with the others, with his gaunted face and his frock coat with the horse-hide and the Yankee-tent patches, and into where the town people were standing around under umbrellas with Granny in the middle, and the big refugeeing preacher with his book already open, and a town nigger holding an umbrella over him, and the rain splashing slow and cold and gray on the umbrella and splashing slow on the
yellow boards where Granny was, and into the dark-red dirt beside the red grave without splashing at all. Brother Fortinbride just walked in and looked at the umbrellas and then at the hill people in cotton bagging and flour-sack clothes that didn’t have umbrellas, and went to Granny and said, “Come, you men.”

The town men would have moved. Some of them did. Uncle Buck McCaslin was the first man there of all of them, town and hill. By Christmas his rheumatism would be so bad that he couldn’t hardly move his hand, but he was there with his peeled-hickory walking stick, shoving up through the hill men with crokersacks tied over their heads and town men with umbrellas getting out of his way; and then Ringo and I stood there and watched Granny going down into the earth with the quiet rain splashing on the yellow boards until they quit looking like boards and began to look like water with thin sunlight reflected in it, sinking away into the ground. Then the wet red dirt began to flow into the grave, with the shovels darting and flicking slow and steady and the hill men waiting to take turns with the shovels because Uncle Buck would not let anyone spell him with his.

It didn’t take long, and I reckon the refugeeing preacher would have tried again even then, but Brother Fortinbride didn’t give him a chance. Brother Fortinbride didn’t even put down his shovel; he stood there leaning on it like he was in the field, and he sounded just like he used to in the church when Ab Snopes would be home from Memphis again—strong and quiet and not loud:

“I don’t reckon that Rosa Millard or anybody that ever knew her has to be told where she has gone. And I don’t reckon that anybody that ever knew her would want to insult her by telling her to rest anywhere in peace. And I reckon that God has already seen to it that there are men, women and children, black, white, yellow or red, waiting for her to tend and worry over. And so you folks go home. Some of you ain’t come far, and you came that distance in carriages with tops. But most of you didn’t, and it’s by the grace of Rosa Millard that you didn’t come on foot. I’m talking to you. You have wood to cut and split, at least. And what do you reckon Rosa Millard would say about you all standing around here, keeping old folks and children out here in the rain?”

Mrs. Compson asked me and Ringo to come home and live with her until father came back, and some others did—I don’t remember
who—and then, when I thought they had all gone, I looked around, and there was Uncle Buck. He came up to us with one elbow jammed into his side and his beard drawn over to one side like it was another arm, and his eyes red and mad like he hadn’t slept much, and holding his stick like he was fixing to hit somebody with it and he didn’t much care who.

“What you boys going to do now?” he said.

The earth was loose and soft now, dark and red with rain, so that the rain didn’t splash on Granny at all; it just dissolved slow and gray into the dark-red mound, so that after a while the mound began to dissolve, too, without changing shape, like the soft yellow color of the boards had dissolved and stained up through the earth, and mound and boards and rain were all melting into one vague quiet reddish gray.

“I want to borrow a pistol,” I said.

He begun to holler then, but quiet. Because he was older than us; it was like it had been at the old compress that night with Granny. “Need me or not,” he hollered, “by Godfrey, I’m going! You can’t stop me! You mean to tell me you don’t want me to go with you?”

“I don’t care,” I said. “I just want a pistol. Or a gun. Ours got burned up with the house.”

“All right!” he hollered. “Me and the pistol, or you and this nigger horse thief and a fence rail. You ain’t even got a poker at home, have you?”

“We got the bar’l of the musket yet,” Ringo said. “I reckon that’s all we’ll need for Ab Snopes.”

“Ab Snopes?” Uncle Buck hollered. “Do you think it’s Ab Snopes this boy is thinking about? … Hey?” he hollered, hollering at me now. “Hey, boy?” It was changing all the time, with the slow gray rain lancing slow and gray and cold into the red earth, yet it did not change. It would be some time yet; it would be days and weeks and then months before it would be smooth and quiet and level with the other earth. Now Uncle Buck was talking at Ringo, and not hollering now. “Catch my mule,” he said. “I got the pistol in my britches.”

Ab Snopes lived back in the hills too. Uncle Buck knew where; it was midafternoon by then and we were riding up a long red hill between pines when Uncle Buck stopped. He and Ringo had crokersacks
tied over their heads. Uncle Buck’s hand-worn stick stuck out from under his sack with the rain shining on it like a long wax candle.

“Wait,” he said. “I got a idea.” We turned from the road and came to a creek bottom; there was a faint path. It was dark under the trees and the rain didn’t fall on us now; it was like the bare trees themselves were dissolving slow and steady and cold into the end of the December day. We rode in single file, in our wet clothes and in the wet ammonia steam of the mules.

The pen was just like the one Ringo and Yance and I had built at home, only smaller and better hidden; I reckon he had got the idea from ours. We stopped at the wet rails; they were still new enough for the split sides to be still yellow with sap, and on the far side of the pen there was something that looked like a yellow cloud in the twilight, until it moved. And then we saw that it was a claybank stallion and three mares.

“I thought so,” Uncle Buck said.

Because I was mixed up. Maybe it was because Ringo and I were tired and we hadn’t slept much lately. Because the days were mixed up with the nights, all the while we had been riding I would keep on thinking how Ringo and I would catch it from Granny when we got back home, for going off in the rain without telling her. Because for a minute I sat there and looked at the horses and I thought that Ab Snopes was Grumby. But Uncle Buck begun to holler again.

“Him, Grumby?” he hollered. “Ab Snopes? Ab Snopes? By Godfrey, if he was Grumby, if it was Ab Snopes that shot your grandmaw, I’d be ashamed to have it known. I’d be ashamed to be caught catching him. No, sir. He ain’t Grumby; he’s better than that.” He sat sideways on his mule with the sack over his head and his beard jerking and wagging out of it while he talked. “He’s the one that’s going to show us where Grumby is. They just hid them horses here because they thought this would be the last place you boys would think to look for them. And now Ab Snopes has went off with Grumby to get some more, since your grandmaw has gone out of business, as far as he is concerned. And thank Godfrey for that. It won’t be a house or a cabin they will ever pass as long as Ab Snopes is with them, that he won’t leave a indelible signature, even if it ain’t nothing to capture but a chicken or a kitchen clock.
By Godfrey, the one thing we don’t want is to catch Ab Snopes.”

And we didn’t catch him that night. We went back to the road and went on, and then we came in sight of the house. I rode up to Uncle Buck. “Give me the pistol,” I said.

“We ain’t going to need a pistol,” Uncle Buck said. “He ain’t even here, I tell you. You and that nigger stay back and let me do this. I’m going to find out which a way to start hunting. Get back, now.”

“No,” I said, “I want—”

He looked at me from under the crokersack. “You want what? You want to lay your two hands on the man that shot Rosa Millard, don’t you?” He looked at me. I sat there on the mule in the slow gray cold rain, in the dying daylight. Maybe it was the cold. I didn’t feel cold, but I could feel my bones jerking and shaking. “And then what you going to do with him?” Uncle Buck said. He was almost whispering now. “Hey? Hey?”

“Yes,” I said. “Yes.”

“Yes. That’s what. Now you and Ringo stay back. I’ll do this.”

It was just a cabin. I reckon there were a thousand of them just like it about our hills, with the same canted plow lying under a tree and the same bedraggled chickens roosting on the plow and the same gray twilight dissolving onto the gray shingles of the roof. Then we saw a faint crack of fire and a woman’s face looking at us around the crack of the door.

“Mr. Snopes ain’t here, if that’s what you want,” she said. “He’s done gone to Alabama on a visit.”

“Sho, now,” Uncle Buck said. “To Alabama. Did he leave any word when to expect him home?”

“No,” the woman said.

“Sho, now,” Uncle Buck said. “Then I reckon we better get on back home and out of the rain.”

“I reckon you had,” the woman said. Then the door closed.

We rode away. We rode back toward home. It was like it had been while we waited at the old compress; it hadn’t got darker exactly, the twilight had just thickened.

“Well, well, well,” Uncle Buck said. “They ain’t in Alabama, because she told us so. And they ain’t toward Memphis, because there are still Yankees there yet. So I reckon we better try down toward Grenada first. By Godfrey, I’ll bet this mule against that
nigger’s pocketknife that we won’t ride two days before we come on a mad woman hollering down the road with a handful of chicken feathers in her hand.”

We didn’t get Ab Snopes that day. It was February before we got him, because we had been seeing ducks and geese going north for more than a week, but we had lost count of days a long while back. At first Ringo had a pine stick, and each night he would cut a notch in it. There was a big one for Christmas and New Year’s, and he had a special one for Sundays. But one night when the stick had almost forty notches in it, we stopped in the rain to make camp without any roof to get under and we had to use the stick to start a fire, because of Uncle Buck’s arm. And so, when we came to where we could get another pine stick, we couldn’t remember whether it had been five or six or ten days, and so Ringo didn’t start another. Because he said he would fix the stick up the day we got Grumby and that it wouldn’t need but two notches on it—one for the day we got him and one for the day Granny died.

We had two mules apiece, to swap onto at noon each day. We got the mules back from the hill people; we could have got a cavalry regiment if we had wanted it—of old men and women and children, too—with cotton bagging and flour sacking for uniforms and hoes and axes for arms, on the Yankee mules that Granny had loaned to them. But Uncle Buck told them that we didn’t need any help; that three was enough to catch Grumby.

They were not hard to follow. One day we had about twenty notches on the stick and we came onto a house where the ashes were still smoking and a boy almost as big as Ringo and me still unconscious in the stable with even his shirt cut to pieces like they had had a wire snapper on the whip, and a woman with a little thread of blood still running out of her mouth and her voice sounding light and far away like a locust from across the pasture, telling us how many there were and which way they would likely go, saying, “Kill them. Kill them.”

It was a long way, but it wasn’t far. You could have put a silver dollar down on the geography page with the center of it at Jefferson and we would have never ridden out from under it. And we were closer behind them than we knew, because one night we had ridden late without coming to a house or a shed to camp in, and so we stopped and Ringo said he would scout around a little, because all
we had left to eat was the bone of a ham; only it was more likely Ringo was trying to dodge helping to get in the firewood. So Uncle Buck and I were spreading down pine branches to sleep on when we heard a shot and then a sound like a brick chimney falling onto a rotten shingle roof, and then the horses, starting fast and dying away, and then I could hear Ringo yelling. He had come onto a house; he thought it was deserted, and then he said it looked too dark, too quiet. So he climbed onto a shed against the back wall, and he said he saw the crack of light and he was trying to pull the shutter open careful, but it came loose with a sound like a shot, and he was looking into a room with a candle stuck into a bottle and either three or thirteen men looking right at him; and how somebody hollered, “There they are!” and another man jerked out a pistol and one of the others grabbed his arm as it went off, and then the whole shed gave way under him, and he said how he lay there hollering and trying to get untangled from the broken planks and heard them ride away.

“So he didn’t shoot at you,” Uncle Buck said.

“Hit warn’t none of his fault if he never,” Ringo said.

“But he didn’t,” Uncle Buck said. But he wouldn’t let us go on that night. “We won’t lose any distance,” he said. “They are flesh and blood, the same as we are. And we ain’t scared.”

So we went on at daylight, following the hoofprints now. Then we had three more notches in the stick; that night Ringo put the last notch in it that he was going to, but we didn’t know it. We were sitting in front of a cotton pen where we were going to sleep, eating a shote that Ringo had found, when we heard the horse. Then the man begun to holler, “Hello! Hello!” and then we watched him ride up on a good short-coupled sorrel mare, with his neat little fine made boots, and his linen shirt without any collar, and a coat that had been good, too, once, and a broad hat pulled down so that all we could see was his eyes and nose between the hat and his black beard.