Uncollected Stories of William Faulkner (18 page)

They left us early the next morning. Uncle Buck was sick by then; we offered to ride back home with him, or to let Ringo ride back with him, and I would keep Ab Snopes with me, but Uncle Buck wouldn’t have it.

“Grumby might capture him again and tie him to another sapling in the road, and you would lose time burying him,” Uncle Buck said. “You boys go on. It ain’t going to be long now. And catch them!” He begun to holler, with his face flushed and his eyes bright, taking the pistol from around his neck and giving it to me, “Catch them! Catch them!”

So Ringo and I went on. It rained all that day; now it began to rain all the time. We had the two mules apiece; we went fast. It rained; sometimes we had no fire at all; that was when we lost count of time, because one morning we came to a fire still burning and a hog they had not even had time to butcher; and sometimes we would ride all night, swapping mules when we had guessed that it had been two hours; and so, sometimes it would be night when we slept and sometimes it would be daylight, and we knew that they must have watched us from somewhere every day and that now that Uncle Buck was not with us, they didn’t even dare to stop and try to hide.

Then one afternoon—the rain had stopped but the clouds had not broken and it was turning cold again—it was about dusk and we were galloping along an old road in the river bottom; it was dim
and narrow under the trees and we were galloping when my mule shied and swerved and stopped, and I just did catch myself before I went over his head; and then we saw the thing hanging over the middle of the road from a limb. It was an old Negro man, with a rim of white hair and with his bare toes pointing down and his head on one side like he was thinking about something quiet. The note was pinned to him, but we couldn’t read it until we rode on into a clearing. It was a scrap of dirty paper with big crude printed letters, like a child might have made them:

And something else written beneath it in a hand neat and small and prettier than Granny’s, only you knew that a man had written it; and while I looked at the dirty paper I could see him again, with his neat little feet and his little black-haired hands and his fine soiled shirt and his fine muddy coat, across the fire from us that night.

Ringo and I looked at each other. There had been a house here once, but it was gone now. Beyond the clearing the road went on again into the thick trees in the gray twilight. “Maybe it will be tomorrow,” Ringo said.

It was tomorrow; we slept that night in a haystack, but we were riding again by daylight, following the dim road along the river bottom. This time it was Ringo’s mule that shied; the man had stepped out of the bushes that quick, with his fine muddy boots and coat and the pistol in his little black-haired hand, and only his eyes and his nose showing between his hat and his beard.

“Stay where you are,” he said. “I will still be watching you.”

We didn’t move. We watched him step back into the bushes, then the three of them came out—the bearded man and another
man walking abreast and leading two saddled horses, and the third man walking just in front of them with his hands behind him—a thick-built man with a reddish stubble and pale eyes, in a faded Confederate uniform coat and Yankee boots, bareheaded, with a long smear of dried blood on his cheek and one side of his coat caked with dried mud and that sleeve ripped away at the shoulder, but we didn’t realize at once that what made his shoulders look so thick was that his arms were tied tight behind him. And then all of a sudden we knew that at last we were looking at Grumby. We knew it long before the bearded man said, “You want Grumby. Here he is.”

We just sat there. Because from then on, the other two men did not even look at us again. “I’ll take him now,” the bearded man said. “Get on your horse.” The other man got on one of the horses. We could see the pistol in his hand then, pointed at Grumby’s back. “Hand me your knife,” the bearded man said.

Without moving the pistol, the other man passed his knife to the bearded man. Then Grumby spoke; he had not moved until now; he just stood there with his shoulders hunched and his little pale eyes blinking at me and Ringo.

“Boys,” he said, “boys—”

“Shut your mouth,” the bearded man said, in a cold, quiet, almost pleasant voice. “You’ve already talked too much. If you had done what I wanted done that night in December, you wouldn’t be where you are now.” We saw his hand with the knife; I reckon maybe for a minute Ringo and I and Grumby, too, all thought the same thing. But he just cut Grumby’s hands loose and stepped back quick. But when Grumby turned, he turned right into the pistol in the bearded man’s hand.

“Steady,” the bearded man said. “Have you got him, Bridger?”

“Yes,” the other man said. The bearded man backed to the other horse and got on it without lowering his pistol or ceasing to watch Grumby. Then he sat there, too, looking down at Grumby, with his little hooked nose and his eyes alone showing between the hat and the ink-colored beard. Grumby began to move his head from side to side.

“Boys,” he said, “boys, you ain’t going to do this to me.”

“We’re not going to do anything to you,” the bearded man said. “I can’t speak for these boys there. But since you are so delicate
about children, maybe they will be delicate with you. But we’ll give you a chance though.” His other hand went inside his coat too fast to watch; it had hardly disappeared before the other pistol flicked out and turned once and fell at Grumby’s feet; again Grumby moved, but the pistols stopped him. The bearded man sat easy on the horse, looking down at Grumby, talking in that cold, still, vicious voice that wasn’t even mad:

“We had a good thing in this country. We would have it yet, if it hadn’t been for you. And now we’ve got to pull out. Got to leave it because you lost your nerve and killed an old woman and then lost your nerve again and refused to cover the first mistake. Scruples,” he said. “Scruples. So afraid of raising the country that there ain’t a man, woman or child, black or white, in it that ain’t on the watch for us. And all because you got scared and killed an old woman you never saw before. Not to get anything; not for one single Confed bank note. But because you got scared of a piece of paper on which someone had signed Bedford Forrest’s name. And you with one exactly like it in your pocket now.”

He didn’t look at the other man, Bridger; he just said, “All right. Ease off. But watch him. He’s too tenderhearted to turn your back on.”

They backed the horses away, side by side, the two pistols trained on Grumby’s belly, until they reached the underbrush. “We’re going to Texas. If you should leave this place, I would advise you to go at least that far also. But just remember that Texas is a wide place, and use that knowledge. Ride!” he shouted.

He whirled the mare. Bridger whirled too. As they did so, Grumby leaped and caught the pistol from the ground and ran forward, crouching and shouting into the bushes, cursing. He shot three times toward the fading sound of the horses, then he whirled back to face us. Ringo and I were on the ground, too; I don’t remember when we got down nor why, but we were down, and I remember how I looked once at Ringo’s face and then how I stood there with Uncle Buck’s pistol feeling heavy as a firedog in my hand. Then I saw that he had quit whirling; that he was standing there with the pistol hanging against his right leg and that he was looking at me; and then all of a sudden he was smiling.

“Well, boys,” he said, “it looks like you have got me. Durn my
hide for letting Matt Bowden fool me into emptying my pistol at him.”

And I could hear my voice; it sounded faint and far away, like the woman’s in Alabama that day, so that I wondered if he could hear me: “You shot three times. You have got two more shots in it.”

His face didn’t change, or I couldn’t see it change. It just lowered, looking down, but the smile was gone from it. “In this pistol?” he said. It was like he was examining a pistol for the first time, so slow and careful it was that he passed it from his right to his left hand and let it hang again, pointing down again. “Well, well, well. Sholy I ain’t forgot how to count as well as how to shoot.” There was a bird somewhere—a yellowhammer—I had been hearing it all the time; even the three shots hadn’t frightened it. And I could hear Ringo, too, making a kind of whimpering sound when he breathed, and it was like I wasn’t trying to watch Grumby so much as to keep from looking at Ringo. “Well, she’s safe enough now, since it don’t look like I can even shoot with my right hand.”

Then it happened. I know what did happen, but even now I don’t know how, in what order. Because he was big and squat, like a bear. But when we had first seen him he was a captive, and so, even now he seemed more like a stump than even an animal, even though we had watched him leap and catch up the pistol and run firing after the other two. All I know is, one second he was standing there in his muddy Confederate coat, smiling at us, with his ragged teeth showing a little in his red stubble, with the thin sunlight on the stubble and on his shoulders and cuffs, on the dark marks where the braid had been ripped away; and the next second there were two bright orange splashes, one after the other, against the middle of the gray coat and the coat itself swelling slow down on me like when Granny told us about the balloon she saw in St. Louis and we would dream about it.

I reckon I heard the sound, and I reckon I must have heard the bullets, and I reckon I felt him when he hit me, but I don’t remember it. I just remember the two bright flashes and the gray coat rushing down, and then the ground hitting me. But I could smell him—the smell of man sweat, and the gray coat grinding into my face and smelling of horse sweat and wood smoke and grease—and
I could hear him, and then I could hear my arm socket, and I thought “In a minute I will hear my fingers breaking, but I have got to hold onto it” and then—I don’t know whether it was under or over his arm or his leg—I saw Ringo, in the air, looking exactly like a frog, even to the eyes, with his mouth open, too, and his open pocketknife in his hand.

Then I was free. I saw Ringo straddle of Grumby’s back, and Grumby getting up from his hands and knees, and I tried to raise the pistol, only my arm wouldn’t move.

Then Grumby bucked Ringo off like a steer would and whirled again, looking at us, crouched, with his mouth open, too; and then my arm began to come up with the pistol, and he turned and ran. He shouldn’t have tried to run from us in boots.

   It took us the rest of that day and part of the night to reach the old compress. But it didn’t take very long to ride home, because we had the two mules apiece to change onto now. [It would have taken less time than it did, only we found an old iron pot that we could use and so we stopped and built the fire there. There was a piece of machinery at the compress that we could have used. But we didn’t stay there that long. There used to be a book at home about Borneo, that told how headhunters did it. But the book was burned up now, even if we had waited until we got home, and all I could remember was something about tree gum. So we got some pine resin, and we had a lot of salt that we wouldn’t need now, and Ringo thought about making some lye ashes and we did it. And then we went on.]

It was almost dark when we rode through Jefferson, and it was raining again when we rode past the brick piles and the sooty walls that hadn’t fallen down yet, and went on through what used to be the square. We hitched the mules in the cedars, and Ringo was just starting off to find a board when we saw that somebody had already put one up—Mrs. Compson, I reckon, or maybe Uncle Buck, when he got back home.

The earth had sunk too, now, after two months; it was almost level now, like at first Granny had not wanted to be dead either, but now she had begun to be reconciled. We fixed it on the headstone with a piece of wire and stood back.

“Now she can lay good and quiet,” Ringo said.

“Yes,” I said. And then we both began to cry. We stood there in the slow rain, crying quiet. We were tired; we had ridden a lot, and during the last week we hadn’t slept much and we hadn’t always had anything to eat.

“It wasn’t him or Ab Snopes either that kilt her,” Ringo said. “It was them mules. That first batch of mules we got for nothing.”

“Yes,” I said. “Let’s go home. I reckon Louvinia is worried about us.”

So it was good and dark when we came to the cabin. And then we saw that it was lighted like for Christmas; we could see the big fire and the lamp, clean and bright, when Louvinia opened the door long before we had got to it and ran out into the rain and began to paw at me, crying and hollering.

“What?” I said. “Father? Father’s home? Father?”

“And Miss Drusilla!” Louvinia hollered, crying and praying and pawing at me, and hollering and scolding at Ringo all at once. “Home! Hit done finished! All but the surrendering. And now Marse John done home.” She finally told us how father and Drusilla had come home about a week ago and Uncle Buck told father where Ringo and I were, and how father had tried to make Drusilla wait at home, but she refused, and how they were looking for us, with Uncle Buck to show the way.

So we went to bed. We couldn’t even stay awake to eat the supper Louvinia cooked for us; Ringo and I went to bed in our clothes on the pallet, and went to sleep all in one motion, with Louvinia’s face hanging over us and still scolding, and Joby in the chimney corner where Louvinia had made him get up out of Granny’s chair. And then somebody was pulling at me, and I thought I was fighting Ab Snopes again, and then it was the rain in father’s beard and clothes that I smelled. But Uncle Buck was still hollering, and father holding me, and Ringo and I held to him, and then it was Drusilla kneeling and holding me and Ringo, and we could smell the rain in her hair, too, while she was hollering at Uncle Buck to hush. Father’s hand was hard; I could see his face beyond Drusilla and I was trying to say, “Father, father,” while she was holding me and Ringo with the rain smell of her hair all around us, and Uncle Buck hollering and Joby looking at Uncle Buck with his mouth open and his eyes round.