Uncollected Stories of William Faulkner (6 page)

“All right,” father said. “Watch him though.” We went on. Mine and Ringo’s horses could go pretty well, too; when I looked back, the others were a good piece behind, out of our dust. It wasn’t far to sundown.

“I wish I knew your grandmother was all right,” father said.

“Lord, Marse John,” Ringo said, “is you still worrying about Granny? I been knowed her all my life; I ain’t worried about her.”

Jupiter was fine to watch, with his head up and watching my horse and Ringo’s, and boring a little and just beginning to drive a little. “I’m going to let him go a little,” father said. “You and Ringo watch yourselves.” I thought Jupiter was gone then. He went out like a rocket, flattening a little. But I should have known that father still held him, because I should have seen that he was still boring, but there was a snake fence along the road, and all of a sudden it began to blur, and then I realized that father and Jupiter had not moved up at all, that it was all three of us flattening out up toward the crest of the hill where the road dipped like three swallows, and I was thinking, “We’re holding Jupiter. We’re holding Jupiter,” when father looked back, and I saw his eyes and his teeth in his beard, and I knew he still had Jupiter on the bit.

He said, “Watch out, now,” and then Jupiter shot out from between us; he went out exactly like I have seen a hawk come out of a sage field and rise over a fence.

When they reached the crest of the hill, I could see sky under them and the tops of the trees beyond the hill like they were flying, sailing out into the air to drop down beyond the hill like the hawk; only they didn’t. It was like father stopped Jupiter in mid-air on
top of the hill; I could see him standing in the stirrups and his arm up with his hat in it, and then Ringo and I were on them before we could even begin to think to pull, and Jupiter reined back onto his haunches, and then father hit Ringo’s horse across his blind eye with the hat and I saw Ringo’s horse swerve and jump clean over the snake fence, and I heard Ringo hollering as I went on over the crest of the hill, with father just behind me shooting his pistol and hollering, “Surround them, boys! Don’t let a man escape!”

I didn’t know how many there were; it was the fire I saw first in the dusk, and then I sort of saw it all at once: The creek running along quiet under the bridge and the muskets all stacked careful and neat, and nobody within fifty feet of them, and the men, the faces, squatting about the fire with cups in their hands and watching the crest of the hill with exactly the same expression, like dolls, and father and me coming down the hill and father jerking my bridle up, and off to the right in the trees Ringo’s horse crashing and blundering and Ringo yelling. Father’s hat was flung onto his head and his teeth were showing and his eyes were bright as a cat’s.

“Lieutenant,” he said, loud, “ride back up the hill and close in with your troop on the left! Git!” he said, jerking my horse around and slapping him across the rump with his hand. “Make a fuss, holler! See if you can keep up with Ringo!… Boys,” he said, and they looking up at him; they hadn’t even put down the cups. “Boys, I’m John Sartoris and I’ve got you.”

Ringo was the one that was hard to capture. The others came piling over the hill, reining back, and I reckon for a minute their faces looked about like the Yankees’ faces did, and now and then I would quit thrashing the bushes and I could hear Ringo on his side hollering and moaning and hollering again, “Marse John! You, Marse John! You come here quick!” and hollering for me, calling Bayard and Colonel and Marse John and Granny until it did sound like a company at least, and then hollering at his horse again, and it running back and forth. I reckon he had forgotten again and was trying to get up on the nigh side again, until at last father said, “All right, boys. You can come on in.”

It was almost dark then. They had built up the fire, and the Yankees still sitting around it and father and the others standing over them with their pistols while two of them were taking the Yankees’ pants and boots off. Ringo was still hollering off in the
trees. “I reckon you better go and extricate Lieutenant Marengo,” father said. Only about that time Ringo’s horse came bursting out with his blind eye looking big as a plate and still trotting in a circle with his knees up to his chin, and then Ringo came out. He looked wilder than the horse; he was already talking, he was saying, “I’m gonter tell Granny on you, making my horse run—” when he saw the Yankees. His mouth was already open, and he kind of squatted for a second, looking at them. Then he hollered, “Look out! Ketch um! Ketch um, Marse John! They stole Old Hundred and Tinney!”

We all ate supper together—father and us and the Yankees in their underclothes.

The officer talked to father. He said, “Colonel, I believe you have fooled us. I don’t believe there’s another man of you but what I see.”

“You might try to depart, and prove your point,” father said.

“Depart? Like this? And have every darky and old woman between here and Memphis shooting at us for ghosts? … I suppose we can have our blankets to sleep in, can’t we?”

“Certainly, captain,” father said. “And with your permission, I shall now retire and leave you to set about that business.”

We went back into the darkness. We could see them about the fire, spreading their blankets on the ground. “What in the tarnation do you want with sixty prisoners, John?” one of father’s men said.

“I don’t,” father said. He looked at me and Ringo. “You boys captured them. What do you want to do with them?”

“Shoot ’em,” Ringo said. “This ain’t the first time me and Bayard ever shot Yankees.”

“No,” father said. “I have a better plan than that. One that Joe Johnston will thank us for.” He turned to the others behind him. “Have you got the muskets and ammunition?”

“Yes, colonel,” somebody said.

“Grub, boots, clothes?”

“Everything but the blankets, colonel.”

“We’ll pick them up in the morning,” father said. “Now wait.”

We sat there in the dark. The Yankees were going to bed. One of them went to the fire and picked up a stick. Then he stopped. He didn’t turn his head and we didn’t hear anything or see anybody move. Then he put the stick down again and came back to his blanket. “Wait,” father whispered. After a while the fire had died
down. “Now listen,” father whispered. So we sat there in the dark and listened to the Yankees sneaking off into the bushes in their underclothes. Once we heard a splash and somebody cursing, and then a sound like somebody had shut his hand over his mouth. Father didn’t laugh out loud; he just sat there shaking.

“Look out for moccasins,” one of the others whispered behind us.

It must have taken them two hours to get done sneaking off into the bushes. Then father said, “Everybody get a blanket and let’s go to bed.”

The sun was high when he waked us. “Home for dinner,” he said. And so, after a while, we came to the creek; we passed the hole where Ringo and I learned to swim and we began to pass the fields, too, and we came to where Ringo and I hid last summer and saw the first Yankee we ever saw, and then we could see the house, too, and Ringo said, “Sartoris, here we is; let them that want Memphis take hit and keep hit bofe.” Because we were looking at the house, it was like that day when we ran across the pasture and the house would not seem to get any nearer at all. We never saw the wagon at all; it was father that saw it; it was coming up the road from Jefferson, with Granny sitting thin and straight on the seat with Mrs. Compson’s rose cuttings wrapped in a new piece of paper in her hand, and Joby yelling and lashing the strange horses, and father stopping us at the gate with his hat raised while the wagon went in first. Granny didn’t say a word. She just looked at Ringo and me, and went on, with us coming behind, and she didn’t stop at the house. The wagon went on into the orchard and stopped by the hole where we had dug the trunk up, and still Granny didn’t say a word; it was father that got down and got into the wagon and took up one end of the trunk and said over his shoulder, “Jump up here, boys.”

We buried the trunk again, and we walked behind the wagon to the house. We went into the back parlor, and father put the musket back onto the pegs over the mantel, and Granny put down Mrs. Compson’s rose cuttings and took off her hat and looked at Ringo and me.

“Get the soap,” she said.

“We haven’t cussed any,” I said. “Ask father.”

“They behaved all right, Miss Rosa,” father said.

Granny looked at us. Then she came and put her hand on me and then on Ringo. “Go upstairs—” she said.

“How did you and Joby manage to get those horses?” father said.

Granny was looking at us. “I borrowed them,” she said.… “Upstairs and take off your—”

“Who from?” father said.

Granny looked at father for a second, then back at us. “I don’t know. There was nobody there.… Take off your Sunday clothes,” she said.

It was hot the next day, so we only worked on the new pen until dinner and quit. It was even too hot for Ringo and me to ride our horses. Even at six o’clock it was still hot; the rosin was still cooking out of the front steps at six o’clock. Father was sitting in his shirt sleeves and his stockings, with his feet on the porch railing, and Ringo and I were sitting on the steps waiting for it to get cool enough to ride, when we saw them coming into the gate—about fifty of them, coming fast, and I remember how hot the blue coats looked. “Father,” I said. “Father!”

“Don’t run,” father said.… “Ringo, you go around the house and catch Jupiter.… Bayard, you go through the house and tell Louvinia to have my boots and pistols at the back door; then you go and help Ringo. Don’t run, now; walk.”

Louvinia was shelling peas in the kitchen. When she stood up, the bowl broke on the floor. “Oh Lord,” she said. “Oh Lord. Again?”

I ran then. Ringo was just coming around the corner of the house; we both ran. Jupiter was in his stall, eating; he slashed out at us, his feet banged against the wall right by my head twice, like pistols, before Ringo jumped down from the hayrack onto his head. We got the bridle on him, but he wouldn’t take the saddle. “Get your horse and shove his blind side up!” I was hollering at Ringo when father came in, running, with his boots in his hand, and we looked up the hill toward the house and saw one of them riding around the corner with a short carbine, carrying it in one hand like a lamp.

“Get away,” father said. He went up onto Jupiter’s bare back like a bird, holding him for a moment and looking down at us. He didn’t speak loud at all; he didn’t even sound in a hurry.
“Take care of Granny,” he said.… “All right, Jupe. Let’s go.”

Jupiter’s head was pointing down the hallway toward the lattice half doors at the back; he went out again, out from between me and Ringo like he did yesterday, with father already lifting him and I thinking, “He can’t jump through that little hole.” Jupiter took the doors on his chest, only they seemed to burst before he even touched them, and I saw him and father again like they were flying in the air, with broken planks whirling and spinning around them when they went out of sight. And then the Yankee rode into the barn and saw us, and threw down with the carbine and shot at us pointblank with one hand, like it was a pistol, and said, “Where’d he go, the rebel son?”

Louvinia kept on trying to tell us about it while we were running and looking back at the smoke beginning to come out of the downstairs windows: “Marse John setting on the porch and them Yankees riding through the flower beds and say, ‘Brother, we wanter know where the rebel John Sartoris live,’ and Marse John say, ‘Hey?’ with his hand to his ear and his face look like he born loony like Unc Few Mitchell, and Yankee say, ‘Sartoris. John Sartoris,’ and Marse John say, ‘Which? Say which?’ until he know Yankee stood about all he going to, and Marse John say, ‘Oh, John Sartoris. Whyn’t you say so in the first place?’ and Yankee cussing him for idiot fool, and Marse John say, ‘Hey? How’s that?’ and Yankee say, ‘Nothing! Nothing! Show me where John Sartoris is ’fore I put rope round your neck too!’ and Marse John say, ‘Lemme git my shoes and I show you,’ and come into house limping, and then run down the hall at me and say, ‘Boots and pistols, Louvinia. Take care of Miss Rosa and the chillen,’ and I go to the door, but I just a nigger. Yankee say, ‘That woman’s lying. I believe that man was Sartoris himself. Go look in the barn quick and see if that claybank stallion there’ ”—until Granny stopped and began to shake her.

“Hush!” Granny said. “Hush! Can’t you understand that Loosh has shown them where the silver is buried? Call Joby. Hurry!” She turned Louvinia toward the cabins and hit her exactly like father turned my horse and hit him when we rode down the hill and into the Yankees, and then Granny turned to run back toward the house; only now it was Louvinia holding her and Granny trying to get away.

“Don’t you go back there, Miss Rosa!” Louvinia said.…
“Bayard, hold her; help me, Bayard! They’ll kill her!”

“Let me go!” Granny said. “Call Joby! Loosh has shown them where the silver is buried!” But we held her; she was strong and thin and light as a cat, but we held her. The smoke was boiling up now, and we could hear it or them—something—maybe all of them making one sound—the Yankees and the fire. And then I saw Loosh. He was coming up from his cabin with a bundle on his shoulder tied up in a bandanna and Philadelphy behind him, and his face looked like it had that night last summer when Ringo and I looked into the window and saw him after he came back from seeing the Yankees. Granny stopped fighting. She said, “Loosh.”

He stopped and looked at her; he looked like he was asleep, like he didn’t even see us or was seeing something we couldn’t. But Philadelphy saw us; she cringed back behind him, looking at Granny. “I tried to stop him, Miss Rosa,” she said. “ ’Fore God I tried.”

“Loosh,” Granny said, “are you going too?”

“Yes,” Loosh said, “I going. I done been freed; God’s own angel proclamated me free and gonter general me to Jordan. I don’t belong to John Sartoris now; I belongs to me and God.”

“But the silver belongs to John Sartoris,” Granny said. “Who are you to give it away?”

“You ax me that?” Loosh said. “Where John Sartoris? Whyn’t he come and ax me that? Let God ax John Sartoris who the man name that give me to him. Let the man that buried me in the black dark ax that of the man what dug me free.” He wasn’t looking at us; I don’t think he could even see us. He went on.