Authors: Shelby Foote
That began about eight months ago. One day even I realized that something had happened to Lucius. Then I knew that Ringo had already seen it and that he knew what it was, so that when at last Louvinia came and told Granny, it was not as if Lucius had dared his mother to tell her but as if he had actually forced somebody, he didn’t care who, to tell her. He had said it more than once, in the cabin one night probably for the first time, then after that in other places and to other people, to Negroes from other plantations even. Memphis was already gone then, and New Orleans, and all we had left of the River was Vicksburg and although we didn’t believe it then, we wouldn’t have that long. Then one morning Louvinia came in where Granny was cutting down the worn-out uniform pants Father had worn home from Virginia so they would fit me, and told Granny how Lucius was saying that soon the Yankees would have all of Mississippi and Yoknapatawpha County too and all the niggers would be free and that when that happened, he was going to be long gone. Lucius was working in the garden that morning. Granny went out to the back gallery, still carrying the pants and the needle. She didn’t even push her spectacles up. She said, “You, Lucius,” just once, and Lucius came out of the garden with the hoe and Granny stood looking down at him over the spectacles as she looked over them at everything she did, from reading or sewing to
watching the clock-face until the instant came to start burying the silver.
“You can go now,” she said. “You needn’t wait on the Yankees.”
“Go?” Lucius said. “I ain’t free.”
“You’ve been free for almost three minutes,” Granny said. “Go on.”
Lucius blinked his eyes while you could have counted about ten. “Go where?” he said.
“I can’t tell you,” Granny said. “I ain’t free. I would imagine you will have all Yankeedom to move around in.”
Lucius blinked his eyes. He didn’t look at Granny now. “Was that all you wanted?” he said.
“Yes,” Granny said. So he went back to the garden. And that was the last we heard about being free from him. That is, it quit showing in the way he acted, and if he talked any more of it, even Louvinia never thought it was worth bothering Granny with. It was Granny who would do the reminding of it, especially to Philadelphia, especially on the nights when we would stand like racehorses at the barrier, watching Granny’s hands until they clapped together.
Each one of us knew exactly what he was to do. I would go upstairs for Granny’s gold hatpin and her silver-headed umbrella and her plumed Sunday hat because she had already sent her ear-rings and brooch to Richmond a long time ago, and to Father’s room for his silver-backed brushes and to Cousin Melisandre’s room after she came to live with us for her things because the one time Granny let Cousin Melisandre try to help too, Cousin Melisandre brought all her dresses down. Ringo would go to the parlor for the candlesticks and Granny’s dulcimer and the medallion of Father’s mother back in Carolina. And we would run back to the
dining-room where Louvinia and Lucius would have the side-board almost cleared, and Granny still standing there and watching the clock-face and the trunk both now with her hands ready to pop again and they would pop and Ringo and I would stop at the cellar door just long enough to snatch up the shovels and run on to the orchard and snatch the brush and grass and the criss-crossed sticks away and have the pit open and ready by the time we saw them coming: first Louvinia with the lantern, then Joby and Lucius with the trunk and Granny walking beside it and Cousin Melisandre and Philadelphia (and on that one time Father, walking along and laughing) following behind. And on that first night, the kitchen clock wasn’t in the trunk. Granny was carrying it, while Louvinia held the lantern so that Granny could watch the hand, Granny made us put the trunk into the pit and grass back over it again and then dig up the trunk and carry it back to the house. And one night, it seemed like we had been bringing the trunk down from the attic and putting the silver into it and carrying it out to the pit and uncovering the pit and then covering the pit again and turning around and carrying the trunk back to the house and taking the silver out and putting it back where we got it from all winter and all summer, too;—that night, and I don’t know who thought of it first, maybe it was all of us at once. But anyway the clock-hand had passed four hour-marks before Granny’s hands even popped for Ringo and me to run and open the pit. And they came with the trunk and Ringo and I hadn’t even put down the last armful of brush and sticks, to save having to stoop to pick it up again, and Lucius hadn’t even put down his end of the trunk for the same reason and I reckon Louvinia was the only one that knew what was coming next because Ringo and I didn’t know that the kitchen clock was still
sitting on the dining-room table. Then Granny spoke. It was the first time we had ever heard her speak between when she would tell Ringo, “Go call Joby and Lucius,” and then tell us both about thirty minutes later: “Wash your feet and go to bed.” It was not loud and not long, just two words: “Bury it.” And we lowered the trunk into the pit and Joby and Lucius threw the dirt back in and even then Ringo and I didn’t move with the brush until Granny spoke again, not loud this time either: “Go on. Hide the pit.” And we put the brush back and Granny said, “Dig it up.” And we dug up the trunk and carried it back into the house and put the things back where we got them from and that was when I saw the kitchen clock still sitting on the dining-room table. And we all stood there watching Granny’s hands until they popped together and that time we filled the trunk and carried it out to the orchard and lowered it into the pit quicker than we had ever done before.
And then when the time came to really bury the silver, it was too late. After it was all over and Cousin Melisandre and Cousin Philip were finally married and Father had got done laughing, Father said that always happened when a heterogeneous collection of people who were cohered simply by an uncomplex will for freedom engaged with a tyrannous machine. He said they would always lose the first battles, and if they were outnumbered and outweighed enough, it would seem to an outsider that they were going to lose them all. But they would not. They could not be defeated; if they just willed that freedom strongly and completely enough to sacrifice all else for it—ease and comfort and fatness of spirit and all, until whatever it was they had left would
be enough, no matter how little it was—that very freedom itself would finally conquer the machine as a negative force like drouth or flood could strangle it. And later still, after two more years and we knew we were going to lose the war, he was still saying that. He said, “I won’t see it but you will. You will see it in the next war, and in all the wars Americans will have to fight from then on. There will be men from the South in the forefront of all the battles, even leading some of them, helping those who conquered us defend that same freedom which they believed they had taken from us.” And that happened: thirty years later, and General Wheeler, whom Father would have called apostate, commanding in Cuba, and whom old General Early did call apostate and matricide too in the office of the Richmond editor when he said: “I would like to have lived so that when my time comes, I will see Robert Lee again. But since I haven’t, I’m certainly going to enjoy watching the devil burn that blue coat off Joe Wheeler.”
We didn’t have time. We didn’t even know there were any Yankees in Jefferson, let alone within a mile of Sartoris. There never had been many. There was no railroad then and no river big enough for big boats and nothing in Jefferson they would have wanted even if they had come, since this was before Father had had time to worry them enough for General Grant to issue a general order with a reward for his capture. So we had got used to the war. We thought of it as being definitely fixed and established as a railroad or a river is, moving east along the railroad from Memphis and south along the River toward Vicksburg. We had heard tales of Yankee pillage and most of the people around Jefferson stayed ready to bury their silver fast too, though I don’t reckon any of them practiced doing it like we did. But nobody we knew was even kin to anyone who had been
pillaged, and so I don’t think that even Lucius really expected any Yankees until that morning.
It was about eleven o’clock. The table was already set for dinner and everybody was beginning to kind of ease up so we would be sure to hear when Louvinia went out to the back gallery and rang the bell, when Ab Snopes came in at a dead run, on a strange horse as usual. He was a member of Father’s troop. Not a fighting member; he called himself father’s horse-captain, whatever he meant by it, though we had a pretty good idea, and none of us at least knew what he was doing in Jefferson when the troop was supposed to be up in Tennessee with General Bragg, and probably nobody anywhere knew the actual truth about how he got the horse, galloping across the yard and right through one of Granny’s flower beds because I reckon he figures that carrying a message he could risk it, and on around to the back because he knew that, message or no message, he better not come to Granny’s front door hollering that way, sitting that strange blown horse with a U. S. army brand on it you could read three hundred yards and yelling up at Granny that General Forrest was in Jefferson but there was a whole regiment of Yankee cavalry not a half a mile down the road.
So we never had time. Afterward Father admitted that Granny’s error was not in strategy nor tactics either, even though she had copied from someone else. Because he said it had been a long time now since originality had been a component of military success. It just happened too fast. I went for Joby and Lucius and Philadelphia because Granny had already sent Ringo down to the road with a cup towel to wave when they came in sight. Then she sent me to the front window where I could watch Ringo. When Ab Snopes came back from hiding his new Yankee horse, he offered to go upstairs
to get the things there. Granny had told us a long time ago never to let Ab Snopes go anywhere about the house unless somebody was with him. She said she would rather have Yankees in the house any day because at least Yankees would have more delicacy, even if it wasn’t anything but good sense, than to steal a spoon or candlestick and then try to sell it to one of her own neighbors, as Ab Snopes would probably do. She didn’t even answer him. She just said, “Stand over there by that door and be quiet.” So Cousin Melisandre went upstairs after all and Granny and Philadelphia went to the parlor for the candlesticks and the medallion and the dulcimer, Philadelphia not only helping this time, free or not, but Granny wasn’t even using the clock.
It just all happened at once. One second Ringo was sitting on the gate-post, looking up the road. The next second he was standing on it and waving the cup towel and then I was running and hollering, back to the dining-room, and I remember the whites of Joby’s and Lucius’s and Philadelphia’s eyes and I remember Cousin Melisandre’s eyes where she leaned against the side-board with the back of her hand against her mouth, and Granny and Louvinia and Ab Snopes glaring at one another across the trunk and I could hear Louvinia’s voice even louder than mine:
“Miz Cawmpson! Miz Cawmpson!”
“What?” Granny cried. “What? Mrs. Compson?” Then we all remembered. It was when the first Yankee scouting patrol entered Jefferson over a year ago. The war was new then and I suppose General Compson was the only Jefferson soldier they had heard of yet. Anyway, the officer asked someone in the Square where General Compson lived and old Doctor Holston sent his Negro boy by back alleys and across lots to warn Mrs. Compson in time, and the story was how the Yankee
officer sent some of his men through the empty house and himself rode around to the back where old Aunt Roxanne was standing in front of the outhouse behind the closed door of which Mrs. Compson was sitting, fully dressed even to her hat and parasol, on the wicker hamper containing her plate and silver. “Miss in dar,” Roxanne said. “Stop where you is.” And the story told how the Yankee officer said, “Excuse me,” and raised his hat and even backed the horse a few steps before he turned and called his men and rode away. “The privy!” Granny cried.
“Hell fire, Miz Millard!” Ab Snopes said. And Granny never said anything. It wasn’t like she didn’t hear, because she was looking right at him. It was like she didn’t care; that she might have even said it herself. And that shows how things were then: we just never had time for anything. “Hell fire,” Ab Snopes said, “all north Missippi has done heard about that! There ain’t a white lady between here and Memphis that ain’t setting in the back house on a grip full of silver right this minute.”
“Then we’re already late,” Granny said. “Hurry.”
“Wait!” Ab Snopes said. “Wait! Even the Yankees have done caught on to that by now!”
“Then let’s hope these are different Yankees,” Granny said. “Hurry.”
“But Miz Millard!” Ab Snopes cried. “Wait! Wait!”
But then we could hear Ringo yelling down at the gate and I remember Joby and Lucius and Philadelphia and Louvinia and the balloon-like swaying of Cousin Melisandre’s skirts as they ran across the back yard, the trunk somewhere among them; I remember how Joby and Lucius tumbled the trunk into the little tall narrow flimsy sentry-box and Louvinia thrust Cousin Melisandre in and slammed the door and we could hear Ringo
yelling good now, almost to the house, and then I was back at the front window and I saw them just as they swept around the house in a kind of straggling-clump—six men in blue, riding fast yet with something curious in the action of the horses, as if they were not only yoked together in spans but were hitched to a single wagon-tongue, then Ringo on foot running and not yelling now, and last of all the seventh rider, bareheaded and standing in his stirrups and with a sabre over his head. Then I was on the back gallery again, standing beside Granny above that moil of horses and men in the yard, and she was wrong. It was as if these were not only the same ones who had been at Mrs. Compson’s last year, but somebody had even told them exactly where our outhouse was. The horses were yoked in pairs, but it was not a wagon-tongue, it was a pole, almost a log, twenty feet long, slung from saddle to saddle between the three span; and I remember the faces, unshaven and wan and not so much peering as frantically gleeful, glaring up at us for an instant before the men leaped down and unslung the pole and jerked the horses aside and picked up the pole, three to a side, and began to run across the yard with it as the last rider came around the house, in gray (an officer: it was Cousin Philip, though of course we didn’t know that then, and there was going to be a considerable more uproar and confusion before he finally became Cousin Philip and of course we didn’t know that either), the sabre still lifted and not only standing in the stirrups but almost lying down along the horse’s neck. The six Yankees never saw him. And we used to watch Father drilling his troop in the pasture, changing them from column to troop front at full gallop, and you could hear his voice even above the sound of the galloping hooves but it wasn’t a bit louder than Granny’s. “There’s a lady
in there!” she said. But the Yankees never heard her any more than they had seen Cousin Philip yet, the whole mass of them, the six men running with the pole and Cousin Philip on the horse, leaning out above them with a lifted sabre, rushing on across the yard until the end of the pole struck the outhouse door. It didn’t just overturn, it exploded. One second it stood there, tall and narrow and flimsy; the next second it was gone and there was a boil of yelling men in blue coats darting and dodging around under Cousin Philip’s horse and the flashing sabre until they could find a chance to turn and run. Then there was a scatter of planks and shingles and Cousin Melisandre sitting beside the trunk in the middle of it, in the spread of her hoops, her eyes shut and her mouth open, still screaming, and after a while a feeble popping of pistol-shots from down along the creek that didn’t sound any more like war than a boy with firecrackers.