Unvanquished. Part 6

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 (and she never put it back under the loose board beneath her bed while Ab was about the place). She sat there looking at the fire, with the can in her hands and the string which suspended it looping down from around her neck. She didn't look any thinner or any older. She didn't look sick either.

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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 n.i.g.g.e.r burned out the U. S. brand are trace galls. By G.o.dfrey, 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 Motts-town. 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 h.e.l.ls 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 T".98.

for her to answer; he told her himself: "For six thousand 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 tune 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 hi 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 1 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 hi 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 hi my pallet. The quilts were cold, but when the sound came RIPOSTEINTERTIO 99.

I had been there long enough for them to begin to get warm.

Ab Snopes came and helped me and Joby with the new fence the next day, so we finished it early in the afternoon and I went back to the cabin. I was almost there when I saw Ringo on the mule turning hi at the gates. Granny had seen him, too, because when I went inside the quilt, she was kneeling in the corner, taking the window shade from under the loose floor board. While she was unrolling the shade on the bed we heard Ringo getting off the mule, hollering at it while he hitched it to Louvinia's clothesline.

Then Granny stood up and looked at the quilt until Ringo pushed it aside and came in. And then they sounded like two people playing a guessing game hi code.

"------th Illinois Infantry," Ringo said. He came on toward the map on the bed. "Col. G. W. Newberry. Eight days out of Memphis."

Granny watched him while he came toward the bed. "How many?" she said.

"Nineteen head," Ringo said. "Four with; fifteen without." Granny just watched him; she didn't have to speak at all for the next one. "Twelve," Ringo said. "Out of that Oxford batch."

Granny looked at the map; they both looked at it. "July the twenty-second," Granny said.

"Yessum," Ringo said. Granny sat down on the saw chunk before the map. It was the only window shade Louvinia had; Ringo had drawn it (Father was right; he was smarter than me; he had even learned to draw, who had declined even to try to learn to print his name when Loosh was teaching me; who had learned to draw immediately by merely taking up the pen, who had no affinity for it and never denied he had not but who learned to draw simply because somebody had to.) with Granny showing him where to draw in the towns. But it was Granny who had done the writing, in her, neat spidery hand like she wrote in the cookbook with, written on the map by each town: Colonel or Major or Captain So-and-So, Such-and-Such Regiment or Troop. Then, under that: 12 or 9 or 21 mules. And around four of them, town and writing and all, hi purple I.100.

pokeberry juice instead of ink, a circle with a date in it, and in big neat letters Complete.

They looked at the map, Granny's head white and still where the light came through the window on it, and Ringo leaning over her. He had got taller during the summer; he was taller than me now, maybe from the exercise of riding around the country, listening out for fresh regiments with mules, and he had got to treating me like Granny did-like he and Granny were the same age instead of him and me.

"We just sold that twelve in July," Granny said. "That leaves only seven. And you say that four of them are branded."

"That was back in July," Ringo said. "It's October now. They done forgot about hit. 'Sides, look here"-he put his finger on the map. "We captived these here fourteen at Madison on the twelf of April, sont um to Memphis and sold um, and had all fourteen back and three more besides, here at Caledonia on the third of May."

"But that was four, counties apart," Granny said. "Oxford and Mottstown are only a few miles apart."

"Phut," Ringo said, "These folks is too busy keeping us conquered to recognise no little ten or twelve head of stock. 'Sides, if they does recognise um in Memphis, that's Ab Snope's trouble, not ourn."

"Mister Snopes," Granny said.

"All right," Ringo said. He looked at the map. "Nineteen head, and not two days away. Jest forty-eight hours to have um in the pen."

Granny looked at the map. "I don't think we ought to risk it. We have been successful so far. Too successful perhaps."

"Nineteen head," Ringo said. "Four to keep and fifteen to sell back to um. That will make a even two hundred and forty-eight head of Confed'rit mules we done recovered and collected interest on, let alone the money."

"I don't know what to do," Granny said. "I want to think about it."

"All right," Ringo said. Granny sat still beside the map. Ringo didn't seem patient or impatient either; he RIPOSTE IN TERTIO.

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just stood there, thin and taller than me against the light from the window, scratching himself. Then he began to dig with his right-hand little fingernail between his front teeth; he looked at his fingernail and spat something, and then he said, "Must been five minutes now." He turned his head a little toward me without moving. "Get the pen and ink," he said.

They kept the paper under the same floor board with the map and the tin can. I don't know how or where Ringo got it. He just came back one night with about a hundred sheets of it, stamped with the official letterhead: UNITED STATES FORCES DEPARTMENT OF TENNESSEE. He had got the pen and the ink at the same time, too; he took them from me, and now it was Ringo sitting on the saw chunk and Granny leaning over him. Granny still had the first letter-the order that Colonel d.i.c.k had given us in Alabama last year-she kept it in the can, too, and by now Ringo had learned to copy it so that I don't believe that Colonel d.i.c.k himself could have told the difference. All they had to do was to put in the right regiment and whatever number of mules Ringo had examined and approved, and sign the right general's name to it. At first Ringo had wanted to sign Grant's name every time, and when Granny said that would not do anymore, Lincoln's. At last Granny found out that Ringo objected to having the Yankees think that Father's folks would have any dealings with anybody under the General-in-Chief. But at last he realised that Granny was right, that they would have to be careful about what general's name was on the letter, as well as what mules they requisitioned. They were using General Smith now; he and Forrest were righting every day up and down the road to Memphis, and Ringo always remembered to put in rope.

He wrote the date and the town, the headquarters; he wrote in Colonel Newberry's name and the first line. Then he stopped; he didn't lift the pen.

"What name you want this time?" he said.

"I'm worried about this," Granny said. "We ought not to risk it."

"We was on 'F last time," Ringo said. "It's 'H' now. Think of a name in 'H.'"

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"Mrs. Mary Harris," Granny said. "We done used Mary before," Ringo said. "How about Plurella Harris?"

"I'm worried about this time," Granny said. "Miz Plurella Harris," Ringo said, writing. "Now we done used up 'P' too. 'Member that, now. I reckon when we run out of letters, maybe we can start in on numbers. We will have nine hundred and ninety-nine before we have to worry, then." He finished the order and signed "General Smith" to it; it looked exactly like the man who had signed the one Colonel d.i.c.k gave us was named General Smith, except for the number of mules. Then Granny turned and looked at me. "Tell Mr. Snopes to be ready at sunup," she said. We went in the wagon, with Ab Snopes and his two men following on two of the mules. We went just fast enough so that we would reach the bivouac at supper-time, because Granny and Ringo had found out that that was the best tune-that the stock would all be handy, and the men would be too hungry or sleepy or something to think very quick in case they happened to think, and we would just have time to get the mules and get out of sight before dark came. Then, if they should decide to chase us, by the time they found us in the dark, there wouldn't be anything but the wagon with me and Granny in it to capture.

So we did; only this time it was a good thing we did. We left Ab Snopes and his men in the woods beyond the bivouac, and Granny and Ringo and I drove up to Colonel Newberry's tent at exactly the right tune, and Granny pa.s.sed the sentry and went into the tent, walking thin and straight, with the shawl over her shoulders and Mrs. Compson's hat on her head and the parasol in one hand and hers and Ringo's General Smith order in the other, and Ringo and I sat in the wagon and looked at the cook fires about the grove and smelled the coffee and the meat. It was always the same. Granny would disappear into the tent or the house, and then, hi about a minute, somebody would holler inside the tent or the house, and then the sentry at the door would holler, and then a sergeant, or even sometimes an officer, only it would be a lieutenant, would hurry into the tent or RIPOSTE IN TERTIO.

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the house, and then Ringo and I would hear somebody cursing, and then they would all come out, Granny walking straight and stiff and not looking much bigger than Cousin Denny at Hawkhurst, and three or four mad Yankee officers behind her, and getting madder all the time. Then they would bring up the mules, tied together. Granny and Ringo could guess to the second now; it would be just enough light left to tell that they were mules, and Granny would get into the wagon and Ringo would hang his legs over the tail gate, holding the lead rope, and we would go on, not fast, so that when we came back to where Ab Snopes and his men waited in the woods you could not even tell that they were mules. Then Ringo would get onto the lead mule and they would turn off into the woods and Granny and I would go on home.

That's what we did this tune; only this time it happened. We couldn't even see our own team when we heard them coming, the galloping hoofs. They came up fast and mad; Granny jerked up quick and straight, holding Mrs. Compson's parasol.

"d.a.m.n that Ringo!" she said. "I had my doubts about this time all the while."

Then they were all around us, like the dark itself had fallen down on us, full of horses and mad men shouting "Halt! Halt! If they try to escape, shoot the team!" with me and Granny sitting in the wagon and men jerking the team back and the team jerking and clas.h.i.+ng in the traces, and some of them hollering "Where are the mules? The mules are gone!" and the officer cursing and shouting "Of course they are gone!" and cursing Granny and the darkness and the men and mules. Then somebody struck a light and we saw the officer sitting his horse beside the wagon while one of the soldiers lit one light-wood splinter from another.

"Where are the mules?" the officer shouted.

"What mules?" Granny said.

"Don't lie to me!" the officer shouted. "The mules you just left camp with on that forged order! We have got you this tune! We knew you'd turn up again. Orders went out to the whole department to watch for you a month ago! That d.a.m.n Newberry had his copy in his 104.

pocket while you were talking to him." He cursed Colonel Newberry now. "They ought to let you go free and court-martial him! Where's the n.i.g.g.e.r boy and the mules, Mrs. Plurella Harris?"

"I don't know what you are talking about," Granny said. "I have no mules except this team I am driving. And my name is Rosa Millard. I am on my way home beyond Jefferson."

The officer began to laugh; he sat on the horse, laughing. "So that's your real name, hey? Well, well, well. So you have begun to tell the truth at last. Come now, tell me where those mules are, and tell me where the others you have stolen from us are hid."

Then Ringo hollered. He and Ab Snopes and the mules had turned off into the woods on the right side of the road, but when he hollered now he was on the left side. "Heyo the road!" he hollered. "One busted loose! Head um off the road!"

And that was all of that. The soldier dropped the light-wood splinter and the officer whirled his horse, already spurring him, hollering, "Two men stay here." Maybe they all thought he meant two others, because there was just a big noise of bushes and trees like a cyclone was going through them, and then Granny and ,1 were sitting in the wagon like before we had even heard the hoofs.

"Come on," Granny said. She was already getting out of the wagon.

"Are we going to leave the team and wagon?" I said. "Yes," Granny said. "I mis...o...b..ed this all the tune." We could not see at all in the woods; we felt our way, and me helping Granny along and her arm didn't feel any bigger than a pencil almost, but it wasn't trembling. "This is far enough," she said. I found a log and we sat down. Beyond the road we could hear them thras.h.i.+ng around, shouting and cursing. It sounded far away now. "And the team too," Granny said.

"But we have nineteen new ones," I said. "That makes two hundred and forty-eight." It seemed like a long time, sitting there on the log in the dark. After a while they came back, we could hear the officer cursing and the horses cras.h.i.+ng and thumping back into the

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road. And then he found the wagon was empty and he cursed sure enough-Granny and me, and the two men he had told to stay there. He was still cursing while they turned the wagon around. Then they went away. After a while we couldn't hear them. Granny got up and we felt our way back to the road, and we went on, too, toward home. After a while I persuaded her to stop and rest, and while we were sitting beside the road we heard the buggy coming. We stood up, and Ringo saw us and stopped the buggy.

"Did I holler loud enough?" he said "Yes," Granny said. Then she said, "Well?"

"All right," Ringo said. "I told Ab Snopes to hide out with them in Hickahala bottom until tomorrow night. All 'cep' these two."

"Mister Snopes," Granny said.

"All right," Ringo said. "Get in and le's go home."

Granny didn't move; I knew why, even before she spoke. "Where did you get this buggy?"

"I borrowed hit," Ringo said. " 'Twarn't no Yankees handy, so I never needed no paper."

We got in. The buggy went on. It seemed to me like it had already been all night, but it wasn't midnight yet -I could tell by the stars-we would be home by midnight almost. We went on. "I reckon you went and told um who we is now," Ringo said.

"Yes," Granny said.

"Well, I reckon that completes that," Ringo said. "Anyway, we handled two hundred and forty-eight head while the business lasted."

"Two hundred and forty-six," Granny said. "We have lost the team."

IT WAS after midnight when we reached home; it was already Sunday and when we reached the church that morning there was the biggest crowd waiting there had ever been, though Ab Snopes would not get back with the new mules until tomorrow. So I believed that somehow they had heard about last night and they knew too, like Ringo, that this was the end and that now the 106.

books would have to be balanced and closed. We were late, because Granny made Ringo get up at sunup and take the buggy back where he had got it. So when we reached the church they were already inside, waiting. Brother Fortinbride met us at the door, and they all turned in the pews and watched Granny-the old men and the women and the children and the maybe a dozen n.i.g.g.e.rs that didn't have any white people now-they looked at her exactly like Father's fox hounds would look at him when he would go into the dog run, while we went up the aisle to our pew. Ringo had the book; he went up to the gallery, I looked back and saw him leaning his arms on the book on the bal.u.s.trade.

We sat down in our pew, like before there was a war, only for Father-Granny still and straight in her Sunday calico dress and the shawl and the hat Mrs. Compson had loaned her a year ago; straight and quiet, with her hands holding her prayer book in her lap like always, though there hadn't been an Episcopal service in the church in almost three years now. Brother Fortinbride was a Methodist, and I don't know what the people were. Last summer when we got back with the first batch of mules from Alabama, Granny sent for them, sent out word back into the hills where they lived in "dirt-floored cabins, on the little poor farms without slaves. It took three or four times to get them to come in, but at last they all came-men and women and children and the dozen n.i.g.g.e.rs that had got free by accident and didn't know what to do about it. I reckon this was the first church with a slave gallery some of them had ever seen, with Ringo and the other twelve sitting up there in the high shadows where there was room enough for two hundred; and I could remember back when Father would be hi the pew with us and the grove outside would be full of carriages from the other plantations, and Doctor Worsham in his stole beneath the altar, and for each white person in the auditorium there would be ten n.i.g.g.e.rs in the gallery. And I reckon that on that first Sunday when Granny knelt down in public, it was the first time they had ever seen anyone kneel in a church. Brother Fortinbride wasn't a minister either. He was a private in Father's regiment, and he got hurt bad in RIPOSTE IN TERTIO.

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the first battle the regiment was in; they thought that he was dead, but he said that Jesus came to him and told him to rise up and live, and Father sent him back home to die, only he didn't die. But they said that he didn't have any stomach left at all, and everybody thought that the food we had to eat in 1862 and '63 would finish killing him, even if he had eaten it with women to cook it instead of gathering weeds from ditch banks and cooking them himself. But it didn't kill him, and so maybe it was Jesus, after all, like he said. And so, when we came back with the first batch of mules and the silver and the food, and Granny sent word out for all that needed, it was like Brother Fortinbride sprang right up out of the ground with the names and histories of all the hill folks at his tongue's end, like maybe what he claimed was true-that the Lord had both him and Granny in mind when He created the other. So he would stand there where Doctor Worsham used to stand, and talk quiet for a little while about G.o.d, with his hair showing where he cut it himself and the bones looking like they were coming right out through his face, in a frock coat that had turned green a long tune ago and with patches on it that he had sewed on himself-one of them was green horsehide and the other was a piece of tent canvas with the U. S. A. stencil still showing a little on it. He never talked long; there wasn't much anybody could say about Confederate armies now. I reckon there is a time when even preachers quit believing that G.o.d is going to change His plan and give victory where there is nothing left to hang victory on. He just said how victory without G.o.d is mockery and delusion, but that defeat with G.o.d is not defeat. Then he quit talking, and he stood there with the old men and the women and children and the eleven or twelve n.i.g.g.e.rs lost in freedom, hi clothes made out of cotton bagging and floursacks, still watching Granny-only now it was not like the hounds used to look at Father, but like they would watch the food in Loosh's hands when he would go in to feed them-and then he said: "Brethren and sisters, Sister Millard wishes to bear public witness."

Granny stood up. She would not go to the altar; 108.

she just stood there in our pew with her face straight ahead, in the shawl and Mrs. Compson's hat and the dress that Louvinia washed and ironed every Sat.u.r.day, holding the prayer book. It used to have her name on it in gold letters, but now the only way you could read them was to run your finger over them; she said quiet, too- quiet as Brother Fortinbride-"I have sinned. I want you all to pray for me."

She knelt down hi the pew; she looked littler than Cousin Denny; it was only Mrs. Compson's hat above the pew back they had to look at now. I don't know if she prayed herself or not. And Brother Fortinbride didn't pray either-not aloud anyway. Ringo and I were just past fifteen then, but I could imagine what Doctor Worsham would have thought up to say-about all soldiers did not carry arms, and about they also serve, and how one child saved from hunger and cold is better in heaven's sight than a thousand slain enemies. But Brother Fortinbride didn't say it. I reckon he thought of that; he always had plenty of words when he wanted to. It was like he said to himself, "Words are fine in peacetime, when everybody is comfortable and easy. But now I think that we can be excused." He just stood there where Doctor Worsham used to stand and where tne bishop would stand, too, with his ring looking big as a pistol target. Then Granny rose up; I didn't have time to help her; she stood up, and then the long sound went through the church, a sound kind of like a sigh that Ringo said was the sound of the cotton bagging and the floursacking when they breathed again, and Granny turned and looked back toward the gallery; only Ringo was already moving.

"Bring the book," she said.

It was a big blank account book; it weighed almost fifteen pounds. They opened it on the reading desk, Granny and Ringo side by side, while Granny drew the tin can out of her dress and spread the money on the book. But n.o.body moved until she began to call out the names. Then they came up one at a tune, while Ringo read the names off the book, and the date, and the amount they had received before. Each time Granny would make them tell what they intended to do with the RIPOSTE IN TERTIO.

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money, and now she would make them tell her how they had spent it, and she would look at the book to see whether they had lied or not. And the ones that she had loaned the brand-blotted mules that Ab Snopes was afraid to try to sell would have to tell her how the mule was getting along and how much work it had done, and now and then she would take the mule away from one man or woman and give it to another, tearing up the old receipt and making the man or the woman sign the new one, telling them on what day to go and get the mule.

So it was afternoon when Ringo closed the book and got the new receipts together, and Granny stopped putting the rest of the money back into the can and she and Brother Fortinbride did what they did each time. "I'm making out fine with the mule," he said. "I don't need any money."

"Fiddlesticks," Granny said. "You'll never grow enough food out of the ground to feed a bird the longest day you live. You take this money."

"No," Brother Fortinbride said. "I'm making out fine."

We walked back home, Ringo carrying the book. "You done receipted out four mules you ain't hardly laid eyes on yet," he said. "What you gonter do about that?"