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THE UNVANQUISHED V
too big; you won't believe it.' So you didn't believe it and so it wasn't. He came toward the steps and began to mount, the sabre heavy and flat at his side. Then I began to smell it again, like each time he returned, like the day back in the spring when I rode up the drive standing in one of his stirrups—that odor in his clothes and beard and flesh too which I believed was the smell of powder and glory, the elected victorious but know better now: know now to have been only the will to endure, a sardonic and even humorous declining of self-delusion which is not even kin to that optimism which believes that that which is about to happen to us can possibly be the worst which we can suffer. He mounted four of the steps, the sabre (that's how tall he actually was) striking against each one on the steps as he mounted, then he stopped and removed his hat. And that's what I mean: about his doing bigger things than he was. He could have stood on the same level with Granny and he would have only needed to bend his head a little for her to kiss him. But he didn't. He stopped two steps below her, with his head bared and his forehead held for her to touch her lips to, and the fact that Granny had to stoop a little now took nothing from the illusion of height and size which he wore for us at least.
"I've been expecting you," Granny said.
"Ah," Father said. Then he looked at me, who was still looking at him, as Ringo at the foot of the steps beneath still was.
"You rode hard from Tennessee," I said.
"Ah," Father said again.
"Tennessee sho gaunted you," Ringo said. "What does they eat up there, Marse John? Does they eat the same things that folks eat?"
Then I said it, looking him in the face while he looked at me: "Loosh says you haven't been at Tennessee."
"Loosh?" Father said. "Loosh?"
"Come in," Granny said. "Louvinia is putting your dinner on the table. You will just have time to wash."
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that afternoon we built the stock pen. We built it deep in the creek bottom, where you could not have found it unless you had known where to look, and you could not have seen it until you came to the new sap-sweating, axe-ended rails woven through and into the jungle growth itself. We were all there—Father and Joby and Ringo and Loosh and me—Father in the boots still but with his coat off now, so that we saw for the first time that his trousers were not Confederate ones but were Yankee ones, of new strong blue cloth, which they (he and his troop) had captured, and without the sabre now too. We worked fast, felling the saplings—the willow and pin oak, the swamp maple and chinkapin— and, without even waiting hardly to trim them, dragging them behind the mules and by hand too, through the mud and the briers to where Father waited. And that was it too; Father was everywhere, with a sapling under each arm going through ' the brush and briers almost faster than the mules; racking the rails into place while Joby^and Loosh were still arguing about which end of the rail went where. That was it: not that Father worked faster and harder than anyone else, even though you do look bigger (to twelve, at least, to me and Ringo at twelve, at least) standing still and saying, 'Do this or that' to the ones who are doing; it was the way he did it. When he sat at his old place at the table in the dining room and finished the side meat and greens and the cornbread and milk which Louvinia brought him (and we watching and waiting, Ringo and I at least, waiting for night and the talking, the telling) and wiped his beard and said, "Now we're going to build a new pen. We'll have to cut the rails, too"; when he said that, Ringo and I probably had exactly the same vision. There would be all of us there—Joby and Loosh and Ringo and me on the edge of the bottom and drawn up into a kind of order—an order partaking not of any lusting and sweating for assault or even victory, but rather of that passive yet dynamic affirmation which Napoleon's troops must have felt—and facing us, be-
20 THEUNVANQUISHED
tween us and the bottom, between us and the waiting sap-running boles which were about to be transposed into dead rails, Father. He was on Jupiter now; he wore the frogged gray field-officer's tunic; and while we watched he drew the sabre. Giving us a last embracing and comprehensive glance he drew it, already pivoting Jupiter on the tight snaffle; his hair tossed beneath the cocked hat, the sabre flashed and glinted; he cried, not loud yet stentorian: "Trot! Canter! Charge!" Then, without even having to move, we could both watch and follow him—the little man (who in conjunction with the horse looked exactly the right size because that was as big as he needed to look and—to twelve years old— bigger than most folks could hope to look) standing in the stirrups above the smoke-colored diminishing thunderbolt, beneath the arcy and myriad glitter of the sabre from which the chosen saplings, sheared trimmed and lopped, sprang into neat and waiting windrows, requiring only the carrying and the placing to' become a fence. The sun had gone out of the bottom when we finished the fence, that is, left Joby and Loosh with the last three panels to put up, but it was still shining up the slope of the pasture when we rode across it, I behind Father on one of the mules and Ringo on the other one. But it was gone even from the-pasture by the time I had* left Father at the house and returned to the stable, where Ringo already had a lead rope on the cow. So we went back to the new pen, with the talf following nuzzling and prodding at the cow every time she stopped to snatch a mouthful of grass, and the sow trotting on ahead. She (the sow) was the one who moved slow. She seemed to be moving slower than the cow even while the cow was stopped with Ringo leaned to the taut jerk of the rope and hollering at the cow, so it was dark sure enough when we reached the new pen. But there was still plenty of gap left to drive the stock through. But then, we never had worried about that.
We drove them in—the two mules, the cow and calf,
the sow; we put up the last panel by feel, and went back
to the house. It was full dark now, even in the pasture;
we could see the lamp in the kitchen and the shadow of
• someone moving across the window. When Ringo and I
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came in, Louvinia was just closing one of the big trunks from the attic, which hadn't been down stairs since the Christmas four years ago which we spent at Hawk-hurst, when there wasn't any war and Uncle Dennison was still alive. It was a big trunk and heavy even when empty; it had not been hi the kitchen when we left to build the pen so it had been fetched down some time during the afternoon, while Joby and Loosh were in the bottom and nobody there to carry it down but Granny and Louvinia, and then Father later, after we came back to the house on the mule, so that was a part of the need and urgency too; maybe it was Father who carried the trunk down from the attic too. And when I went in to supper, the table was set with the kitchen knives and forks in place of the silver ones, and the sideboard (on which the silver service had been sitting when I began to remember and where it had been sitting ever since except on each Tuesday1 afternoon, when Granny and Louvinia and Philadelphy would polish it, why, nobody except Granny maybe knew, since it was never used) was bare*.