Uncollected Stories of William Faulkner (8 page)

“What’s them?” he hollered. “What’s them?”

“That’s what it runs on!” Cousin Denny hollered.

“You mean hit have to come in here and run up and down around these here trees like a squirrel?” Ringo hollered. Then we all heard the horse at once; we just had time to look when Bobolink came up the road out of the trees and went across the railroad and into the trees again like a bird, with Cousin Drusilla riding astride like a man and sitting straight and light as a willow branch in the wind. They said she was the best woman rider in the country.

“There’s Dru!” Cousin Denny hollered. “Come on! She’s been up to the river to see them niggers! Come on!” He and Ringo ran again. When I passed the chimneys, they were just running into the stable. Cousin Drusilla had already unsaddled Bobolink, and she was rubbing him down with a croker sack when I came in. Cousin Denny was still hollering, “What did you see? What are they doing?”

“I’ll tell about it at the house,” Cousin Drusilla said. Then she saw me. She was not tall; it was the way she stood and walked. She
had on pants, like a man. She was the best woman rider in the country. When Granny and I were here that summer before the war and Gavin Breckbridge had just given Bobolink to her, they looked fine together; it didn’t need Jingus to say that they were the finest-looking couple in Alabama or Mississippi either. But Gavin was killed at Shiloh and so they didn’t marry. She came and put her hand on my shoulder.

“Hello,” she said. “Hello, John Sartoris.” She looked at Ringo. “Is this Ringo?” she said.

“That’s what they tells me,” Ringo said.

“How are you?” Cousin Drusilla said.

“I manages to stand hit,” Ringo said.

“I’ll finish Bobolink for you,” I said.

“Will you?” she said. She went to Bobolink’s head. “Will you stand for Cousin Bayard, lad?” she said. “I’ll see you-all at the house, then,” she said. She went out.

“Yawl sho must ’a’ had this horse hid good when the Yankees come,” Ringo said.

“This horse?” Cousin Denny said. “Ain’t no damn Yankee going to fool with Dru’s horse no more.” He didn’t holler now, but pretty soon he began again: “When they come to burn the house, Dru grabbed the pistol and run out here—she had on her Sunday dress—and them right behind her. She run in here and she jumped on Bobolink bareback, without even waiting for the bridle, and one of them right there in the door hollering, ‘Stop,’ and Dru said, ‘Get away, or I’ll ride you down,’ and him hollering, ‘Stop! Stop!’ with his pistol out too”—Cousin Denny was hollering good now—“and Dru leaned down to Bobolink’s ear and said, ‘Kill him, Bob,’ and the Yankee jumped back just in time. The lot was full of them, too, and Dru stopped Bobolink and jumped down in her Sunday dress and put the pistol to Bobolink’s ear and said, ‘I can’t shoot you all, because I haven’t enough bullets, and it wouldn’t do any good anyway; but I won’t need but one shot for the horse, and which shall it be?’ So they burned the house and went away!” He was hollering good now, with Ringo staring at him so you could have raked Ringo’s eyes off his face with a stick. “Come on!” Cousin Denny hollered. “Le’s go hear about them niggers at the river!”

Cousin Drusilla was already talking, telling Granny mostly. Her hair was cut short; it looked like father’s would when he would tell
Granny about him and the men cutting each other’s hair with a bayonet. She was sunburned and her hands were hard and scratched like a man’s that works. She was telling Granny mostly: “They began to pass in the road yonder while the house was still burning. We couldn’t count them; men and women carrying children who couldn’t walk and carrying old men and women who should have been at home waiting to die. They were singing, walking along the road singing, not even looking to either side. The dust didn’t even settle for two days, because all that night they still passed; we sat up listening to them, and the next morning every few yards along the road would be the old ones who couldn’t keep up any more, sitting or lying down and even crawling along, calling to the others to help them; and the others—the young strong ones—not stopping, not even looking at them. I don’t think they even heard or saw them. ‘Going to Jordan,’ they told me. ‘Going to cross Jordan.’ ”

“That was what Loosh said,” Granny said. “That General Sherman was leading them all to Jordan.”

“Yes,” Cousin Drusilla said. “The river. They have stopped there; it’s like a river itself, dammed up. The Yankees have thrown out a brigade of cavalry to hold them back while they build the bridge to cross the infantry and artillery; they are all right until they get up there and see or smell the water. That’s when they go mad. Not fighting; it’s like they can’t even see the horses shoving them back and the scabbards beating them; it’s like they can’t see anything but the water and the other bank. They aren’t angry, aren’t fighting; just men, women and children singing and chanting and trying to get to that unfinished bridge or even down into the water itself, and the cavalry beating them back with sword scabbards. I don’t know when they have eaten; nobody knows just how far some of them have come. They just pass here without food or anything, exactly as they rose up from whatever they were doing when the spirit or the voice or whatever it was told them to go. They stop during the day and rest in the woods; then, at night, they move again. We will hear them later—I’ll wake you—marching on up the road until the cavalry stops them. There was an officer, a major, who finally took time to see I wasn’t one of his men; he said, ‘Can’t you do anything with them? Promise them anything to go back home?’ But it was like they couldn’t see me or hear me
speaking; it was only that water and that bank on the other side. But you will see for yourself tomorrow, when we go back.”

“Drusilla,” Aunt Louise said, “you’re not going back tomorrow or any other time.”

“They are going to mine the bridge and blow it up when the army has crossed,” Cousin Drusilla said. “Nobody knows what they will do then.”

“But we cannot be responsible,” Aunt Louise said. “The Yankees brought it on themselves; let them pay the price.”

“Those Negroes are not Yankees, mother,” Cousin Drusilla said. “At least there will be one person there who is not a Yankee either.” She looked at Granny. “Four, counting Bayard and Ringo.”

Aunt Louise looked at Granny. “Rosa, you shan’t go. I forbid it. Brother John will thank me to do so.”

“I reckon I will,” Granny said. “I’ve got to get the silver anyway.”

“And the mules,” Ringo said; “don’t forget them. And don’t yawl worry about Granny. She ’cide what she want and then she kneel down about ten seconds and tell God what she aim to do, and then she git up and do hit. And them that don’t like hit can git outen the way or git trompled.”

“And now I reckon we’d better go to bed,” Granny said.

We went to bed. And this time I don’t know how late it was either, except that it was late. It was Cousin Denny shaking me. “Dru says to come on out if you want to hear them passing,” he whispered.

She was outside the cabin; she hadn’t undressed even. I could see her in the starlight—her short jagged hair and the man’s shirt and pants. “Hear them?” she said. We could hear it again, like we had in the wagon—the hurrying feet, the sound like they were singing in panting whispers, hurrying on past the gate and dying away up the road. “That’s the third tonight,” Cousin Drusilla said. “Two passed while I was down at the gate. You were tired, and so I didn’t wake you before.”

“I thought it was late,” I said. “You haven’t been to bed even. Have you?”

“No,” she said. “I’ve quit sleeping.”

“Quit sleeping?” I said. “Why?”

She looked at me. I was as tall as she was; we couldn’t see each other’s faces; it was just her head with the short jagged hair like she had cut it herself without bothering about a mirror, and her neck that had got thin and hard like her hands since Granny and I were here before. “I’m keeping a dog quiet,” she said.

“A dog?” I said. “I haven’t seen any dog.”

“No. It’s quiet now,” she said. “It doesn’t bother anybody any more now. I just have to show it the stick now and then.” She was looking at me. “Why not stay awake now? Who wants to sleep now, with so much happening, so much to see? Living used to be dull, you see. Stupid. You lived in the same house your father was born in, and your father’s sons and daughters had the sons and daughters of the same Negro slaves to nurse and coddle; and then you grew up and you fell in love with your acceptable young man, and in time you would marry him, in your mother’s wedding gown, perhaps, and with the same silver for presents she had received; and then you settled down forevermore while you got children to feed and bathe and dress until they grew up, too; and then you and your husband died quietly and were buried together maybe on a summer afternoon just before suppertime. Stupid, you see. But now you can see for yourself how it is; it’s fine now; you don’t have to worry now about the house and the silver, because they get burned up and carried away; and you don’t have to worry about the Negroes, because they tramp the roads all night waiting for a chance to drown in homemade Jordan; and you don’t have to worry about getting children to bathe and feed and change, because the young men can ride away and get killed in the fine battles; and you don’t even have to sleep alone, you don’t even have to sleep at all; and so, all you have to do is show the stick to the dog now and then and say, ‘Thank God for nothing.’ You see? … There. They’ve gone now. And you’d better get back to bed, so we can get an early start in the morning. It will take a long time to get through them.”

“You’re not coming in now?” I said.

“Not yet,” she said. But we didn’t move. And then she put her hand on my shoulder. “Listen,” she said. “When you go back home and see Uncle John, ask him to let me come there and ride with his troop. Tell him I can ride, and maybe I can learn to shoot. Will you?”

“Yes,” I said. “I’ll tell him you are not afraid too.”

“Aren’t I?” she said. “I hadn’t thought about it. It doesn’t matter anyway. Just tell him I can ride and that I don’t get tired.” Her hand was on my shoulder; it felt thin and hard. “Will you do that for me? Ask him to let me come, Bayard.”

“All right,” I said. Then I said, “I hope he will let you.”

“So do I,” she said. “Now you go back to bed. Good night.”

I went back to bed. After a while I was asleep.

And by sunup we were on the road again, with Cousin Drusilla on Bobolink beside the wagon.

It took us all that day to get through them, like Cousin Drusilla said. We began to see the dust almost at once, and then I began to smell them, and then we were in the middle of them—men carrying babies, and women dragging children by the hand, and women carrying babies, and old ones kind of pulling themselves along with sticks or sitting beside the road and holding up their hands and even calling to us when we passed, and one old woman even running along holding to the wagon and hollering at Granny to at least let her see the water before she died.

But mostly they didn’t even look at us. We didn’t try to ask them to let us through; it was like we could look at their faces and know that they couldn’t have heard us. They were not singing yet; they were just hurrying, with our horses pushing slow through them, and their blank eyes not looking at anything out of faces caked with dust and sweat, and our horses and Bobolink shoving slow through them like trying to ride up a creek full of floating logs, and the dust everywhere, and Ringo holding the parasol over Granny and his eyes getting whiter and whiter, and Granny with Mrs. Compson’s hat on, and the smell of them, and Granny looking sicker and sicker. Then it was afternoon. I had forgot about time. All of a sudden we began to hear them where the cavalry was holding them back from the bridge.

It was just a sound at first, like wind, like it might be in the dust itself, and Cousin Drusilla hollering, “Look out, Aunt Rosa! Oh, look out!”

It was like we all heard it at the same time—us in the wagon and on the horse—and the faces all around us under the sweat-caked dust. They made a kind of long wailing sound, and then I could feel the whole wagon rise up and begin to run forward. I saw our old rib-gaunted horses standing on their hind feet one minute and
then turned sideways in the traces the next, and Cousin Drusilla leaning forward a little and holding Bobolink, and I saw men and women and children going down under the horses, and we could feel the wagon going over them and we could hear them screaming. And we couldn’t stop any more than if the earth had tilted up and was sliding us all down toward the river.

It went fast, like that, like it did every time; it was like the Yankees were a kind of gully, and every time Granny and Ringo and I got close to them, we would go rushing down into the gully like three rocks. Because all of a sudden it was sunset; there was a high, bright, rosy glow quiet behind the trees and shining on the river, and we saw the bridge full of Yankee soldiers running across to the other bank. I remember watching horses’ and mules’ heads mixed up with the bayonets, and then the barrels of cannon tilted up and kind of rushing slow across the high air, like split-cane clothespins being jerked along the clothesline, and the singing everywhere up and down the river bank, with the voices of the women coming out of it high, and then hollering “Glory!” and “Jesus!”

They were fighting now. There was a cleared space between the end of the bridge and the backs of the cavalry. I was watching the horses rearing and shoving against them, and the men beating at them with their scabbards, and the last of the infantry running onto the bridge, and all of a sudden there was an officer holding his scabbarded sword by the little end like a stick and hanging onto the wagon and hollering at us. I could see his little white face with a stubble of beard on it and a long streak of blood, and bareheaded, and with his mouth open.

“Get back!” he hollered. “Get back! We’re going to blow the bridge!” and Granny hollering back at him, with Mrs. Compson’s hat knocked to one side of her head, and hers and the Yankee’s faces not a yard apart:

“I want my silver! I’m John Sartoris’ mother-in-law! Send Colonel Dick to me!” Then the Yankee officer was gone, right in the middle of hollering and still beating at the nigger heads with his saber, and with his little hollering face and all. I don’t know what became of him; he just vanished holding onto the wagon and flailing about him with the sword, and then Cousin Drusilla was there, on Bobolink; she had our nigh horse by the bridle and she
was trying to turn the wagon sideways. I started to jump down. “Stay in the wagon,” she said. She didn’t holler; she just said it. “Take the lines and turn them.” When we got the wagon turned sideways, we stopped. And then for a minute I thought we were going backward, until I saw that it was the niggers. Then I saw that the cavalry had broken; I saw the whole mob of it—horses and men and sabers and niggers—kind of rolling toward the end of the bridge, like when a dam breaks, for about ten clear seconds behind the last of the infantry. And then the bridge vanished. I was looking right at it; I could see the clear gap between the infantry and the wave of niggers and cavalry, with the little empty thread of bridge joining them together in the air above the water, and then there was a bright glare, and then I felt my insides suck, and then a clap of wind hit me on the back of the head. I didn’t hear anything at all. I just sat there in the wagon with a funny buzzing in my ears and a funny taste in my mouth, and watched little toy men and horses and pieces of plank floating along over the water. But I couldn’t hear anything at all; I couldn’t even hear Cousin Drusilla. She was right beside the wagon now, leaning toward us, hollering something.