"Now I want everybody to go right to bed, so we can get an early start tomorrow," Granny said.
"That's you," Joby said. "Git everybody up at crack of day and it be noon 'fore we get started."
"Nummine about that," Louvinia said. "You do like Miss Rosa tell you." We went out; we left Granny there beside her bed now well away from the wall and in such an ungainly position that anyone would have
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known at once that something was concealed, even if the trunk which Ringo and I as well as Joby believed now to weigh/ at least a thousand pounds, could have been hidden. As it was, the bed merely underlined it. Then Granny shut the door behind us and then Ringo and I stopped dead in the hall and looked at one another. Since I could remember, there had never been a key to any door, inside or outside, about the house. Yet we had heard a key turn in the lock.
"I didn't know there was ere a key would fit hit," Ringo said, "let alone turn."
"And that's some more of yawls' and Joby's business," Louvinia said. She had not stopped; she was already reclining on her cot and as we looked toward her she was already in the act of drawing the quilt up over her face and head. "Yawl get on to bed."
We went on to our room and began to undress. The lamp was lighted and there was already laid out across two chairs our Sunday clothes which we too would put on tomorrow to go to Memphis in. "Which un you reckin she dremp about?" Ringo said. But I didn't answer that; I knew that Ringo knew I didn't need to.
we put on our Sunday clothes by lamplight, we ate breakfast by it and listened to Louvinia above stairs as she removed from Granny's and my beds the linen we had slept under last night and rolled up Ringo's pallet and carried them downstairs; in the first beginning of day we went out to where Loosh and Joby had already put the mules into the wagon and where Joby stood in what he called his Sunday clothes too—the old frock coat, the napless beaver hat, of Father's. When Granny came out (still in the black silk and the bonnet as if she had slept hi them, passed the night standing rigidly erect with her hand on the key which she had produced from we knew not where and locked her door for the first time Ringo and I knew of) with her shawl over her shoulders and carrying her parasol and the musket from the pegs over the mantel, She held
42
THE UNVANQUISHED
out the musket to Joby. "Here," she said. Joby looked at it.
"We won't need hit," he said.
"Put it in the wagon," Granny said.
"Nome. We won't need nothing like that. We be in Memphis so quick won't nobody even have time to hear we on the road. I speck Marse John got the Yankees pretty well cleant out between here and Memphis anyway."
This time Granny didn't say anything at all. She just stood there holding out the musket until after a while Joby took it and put it into the wagon. "Now go get the trunk," Granny said. Joby was still putting the musket into the wagon; he stopped, his head turned a little.
"Which?" he said. He turned a little more, still not looking at Granny standing on the steps and looking at him; he was not looking at any of us, not speaking to any of us in particular. "Ain't I tole you?" he said.
"If anything ever came into your mind that you didn't tell to somebody inside of ten minutes, I don't remember it," Granny said. "But just what do you refer to now?"
"Nummine that," Joby said. "Come on here, Loosh. Bring that boy with you." They passed Granny and went on. She didn't look at them; it was as if they had walked not only out of her sight but out of her mind. Evidently Joby thought they had. He and Granny were like that; they were like a man and a mare, a blooded mare, which takes just exactly so much from the man and the man knows the mare will take just so much and the man knows that when that point is reached, just what is going to happen. Then it does happen: the mare kicks him, not viciously but just enough, and the man knows it was going to happen and so he is glad then, it is over then, or he thinks it is over, so he lies or sits on the ground and cusses the mare a little because he thinks it is over, finished, and then the mare turns her head and nips him. That's how Joby and Granny were and Granny always beat him, not bad: just exactly enough, like now; he and Loosh were just about to go in the door and Granny still not even looking after them,
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when Joby said, "I done tole um. And I reckin even you can't dispute hit." Then Granny, without moving anything but her lips, still looking out beyond the waiting wagon as if we were not going anywhere and Joby didn't even exist, said,
"And put the bed back against the wall." This tune Joby didn't answer. He just stopped perfectly still, not even looking back at Granny, until Loosh said quietly,
"Gawn, pappy. Get on." They went on; Granny and I stood at the end of the gallery and heard them drag the trunk out, then shove the bed back where it had been yesterday; we heard them on the stairs with the trunk—the slow, clumsy, coffinsounding thumps. Then they came out onto the gallery.
"Go and help them," Granny said without looking back. "Remember, Joby is getting old." We put the trunk into the wagon, along with the musket and the basket of food and the bedclothing, and got in ourselves— Granny on the seat beside Joby, the bonnet on the exact top of her head and the parasol raised even before the dew had begun to fall—and we drove away. Loosh had already disappeared, but Louvinia still stood at the end of the gallery with Father's old hat on top of her head rag. Then I stopped looking back, though I could feel Ringo beside me on the trunk turning every few yards, even after we were outside the gate and in the road to town. Then we came to the curve where we had seen the Yankee sergeant on the bright horse last summer.
"Hit gone now," Ringo said. "Goodbye, Sartoris; Memphis, how-dy-do!"
The sun was just rising when we came in sight of Jefferson; we passed a company of troops bivouacked in a pasture beside the road, eating breakfast. Their uniforms were not gray anymore now; they were almost the color of dead leaves and some of them didn't even have uniforms and one man waved a skillet at us and he had on a pair of blue Yankee pants with a yellow cavalry stripe like Father wore home last summer. "Hey, Miss-ippi!" he shouted. "Hooraw for Arkansaw!"
We left Granny at Mrs. Compson's, to tell Mrs. Compson goodbye and to ask her to drive out home now and then and look after the flowers. Then Ringo and
44
THE UNVANQUISHED
I drove the wagon on to the store and we were just coming out with the sack of salt when Uncle Buck McCaslin came hobbling across the square, waving his stick and hollering, and behind him the captain of the company we had passed eating breakfast in the pasture. There were two of them; I mean, there were two Mc-Caslins, Amodeus and Theophilus, twins, only everybody called them Buck and Buddy except themselves. They were bachelors, they had a big bottom-land plantation about fifteen miles from town. It had a big colonial house on it which their father had built and which people said was still one of the finest houses in the country when they inherited it. But it wasn't now, because Uncle Buck and Buddy didn't live hi it. They never had lived in it since their father died. They lived in a two-room log house with about a dozen dogs, and they kept their niggers in the manor house. It didn't have any windows now and a child with a hairpin could unlock any lock hi it, but every night when the niggers came up from the fields Uncle Buck or Uncle Buddy would drive them into the house and lock the door with a key almost as big as a horse pistol; probably they would still be locking the front door long after the last nigger had escaped out the back. And folks said that Uncle Buck and Uncle Buddy knew this and that the niggers knew they knew it, only it was like a game with rules— neither one of Uncle Buck or Uncle Buddy to peep around the corner of the house while the other was locking the door, none of the niggers to escape in such a way as to be seen even by unavoidable accident, nor to escape at any other tune; they even said that the ones who couldn't get out while the door was being locked voluntarily considered themselves interdict until the next evening. Then they would hang the key on a nail beside the door and go back to their own little house full of dogs and eat supper and play head-and-head poker; and they said how no man in the state or on the River either would have dared to play with them even if they did not cheat, but that in the game as they played it between themselves, betting niggers and wagon-loads of cotton with one another on the turn of a single card, the Lord Himself might have held His own with one of