William Faulkner - Unvanquished

So Ringo and I squatted again and waited quietly while Granny sewed beside the lamp on the table and Father sat in his old chair in its old place, his muddy boots crossed and lifted into the old heel-marks beside the cold and empty fireplace, chewing the tobacco which Joby had loaned him. Joby was a good deal older than Father. He was too old to have been caught short of tobacco just by a war. He had come to Missis­sippi from Carolina with Father and he had been Father's body servant all the time that he was raising and tram-ing Simon, Ringo's father, to take over when he (Joby)

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got too old, which was to have been some years yet ex­cept for the War. So Simon went with Father; he was still in Tennessee with the army. Vve waited for Father to begin; we waited so long that we could tell from the sounds that Louvinia was almost through in the kitchen: so that I decided Father was waiting for Louvinia to finish and come in to hear too, so I said, "How can you fight in mountains, Father?"

And that's what he was waiting for, though not in the way Ringo and I thought, because he said, "You can't. You just have to. Now you boys run on to bed." We went up the stairs. But not all the way; we stopped and sat on the top step, just out of the light from the hall lamp, watching the door to the Office, lis­tening; after a while Louvinia crossed the hall without looking up and entered the Office; we could hear Father and her:

"Is the trunk ready?" "Yes sir. Hit's ready."

"Then tell Loosh to get the lantern and the shovels and wait in the kitchen for me."

"Yes sir," Louvinia said. She came out; she crossed the hall again without even looking up the stairs, who used to follow us up and stand in the bedroom door and scold at us until we were in bed—I in the bed itself, Ringo on the pallet beside it. But this time she not only didn't wonder where we were, she didn't even think about where we might not be.

"I knows what's in that trunk," Ringo whispered.

"Hit's the silver. What you reckon------"

"Shhhh," I said. We could hear Father's voice, talking to Granny. After a while Louvinia came back and crossed the hall again. We sat on the top step, listening to Father's voice telling Granny and Louvinia both.

"Vicksburg?" Ringo whispered. We were in the shadow; I couldn't see anything but his eyeballs. "Vicks­burg fell? Do he mean hit fell off hi the River? With Gin-rul Pemberton in hit too?"

"Shhhhh!" I said. We sat close together in the shadow, listening to Father. Perhaps it was the dark or perhaps we were the two moths, the two feathers again or perhaps there is a point at which credulity firmly

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and calmly and irrevocably declines, because suddenly Louvinia was standing over us, shaking us awake. She didn't even scold us. She followed us up stairs and stood in the door to the bedroom and she didn't even light the lamp; she couldn't have told whether or not we had undressed even if she had been paying enough atten­tion to suspect that we had not. She may have been listening as Ringo and I were, to what we thought we heard, though I knew better, just as I knew that we had slept on the stairs for some time; I was telling myself, 'They have already carried it out, they are in the orchard now, digging.' Because there is that point at which credulity declines; somewhere between waking and sleeping I believed I saw or I dreamed that I did see the lantern in the orchard, under the apple trees. But I don't know whether I saw it or not, because then it was morning and it was raining and Father was gone.

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he must have ridden off in the rain, which was still falling at breakfast and then at dinnertime too, so that it looked as if we wouldn't have to leave the house at all, until at last Granny put the sewing away and said, "Very well. Get the cook book, Marengo." Ringo got the cook book from the kitchen and he and I lay on our stomachs on the floor while Granny opened the book. "What shall we read about today?" she said.

"Read about cake," I said.

"Very well. What kind of cake?" Only she didn't need to say that because Ringo was already answering that before she spoke:

"Cokynut cake, Granny." He said coconut cake every time because we never had been able to decide whether Ringo had ever tasted coconut cake or not. We had had some that Christmas before it started and Ringo had tried to remember whether they had had any of it in the kitchen or not, but he couldn't remember. Now and then I used to try to help him decide, get him to tell me how it tasted and what it looked like and sometimes he would almost decide to risk it before he would change his mind. Because he said that he would rather

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just maybe have tasted coconut cake without remem­bering it than to know for certain he had not; that if he were to describe the wrong kind of cake, he would never taste coconut cake as long as he lived.

"I reckon a little more won't hurt us," Granny said.

The rain stopped in the middle of the afternoon; the sun was shining when I stepped out onto the back gal­lery, with Ringo already saying, "Where we going?" be­hind me and still saying it after we passed the smoke­house where I could see the stable and the cabins: "Where we going now?" Before we reached the stable Joby and Loosh came into sight beyond the pasture fence, bringing the mules up from the new pen. "What we ghy do now?" Ringo said.

"Watch him," I said.

"Watch him? Watch who?" I looked at Ringo. He was staring at me, his eyeballs white and quiet like last night. "You talking about Loosh. Who tole us to watch him?"

"Nobody. I just know."

"Bayard, did you dream hit?"

"Yes. Last night. It was Father and Louvinia. Father said to watch Loosh, because he knows."

"Knows?" Ringo said. "Knows what?" But he didn't need to ask that either; in the next breath he answered it himself, staring at me with his round quiet eyes, blink­ing a little: "Yestiddy. Vicksburg. When he knocked it over. He knowed it then, already. Like when he said Marse John wasn't at no Tennessee and sho enough Marse John wasn't. Go on; what else did the dream tole you?"

"That's all. To watch him. That he would know before we did. Father said that Louvinia would have to watch him too, that even if he was her son, she would have to be white a little while longer. Because if we watched him, we could tell by what he did when it was getting ready to happen."

"When what was getting ready to happen?"

"1 don't know." Ringo breathed deep, once.

"Then hit's so," he said. "If somebody tole you, hit could be a lie. But if you dremp hit, hit can't be a lie

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THE UNVANQUISHED

case ain't nobody there to tole hit to you. So we got to watch him."

We followed them when they put the mules to the wagon and went down beyond the pasture to where they had been cutting wood. We watched them for two days, hidden. We realised then what a close watch Louvinia had kept on us all the time. Sometimes while we were hidden watching Loosh and Joby load the wagon, we would hear her yelling at us, and we would have to sneak away and then run to let Louvinia find us coming from the other direction. Sometimes she would even meet us before we had time to circle, and Ringo hiding behind me then while she scolded at us: "What devil­ment yawl into now? Yawl up to something. What is it?" But we didn't tell her, and we would follow her back to the kitchen while she scolded at us over her shoulder, and when she was inside the house we would move quietly until we were out of sight again, and then run back to hide and watch Loosh.

So we were outside of his and Philadelphy's cabin that night when he came out. We followed him down to the new pen and heard him catch the mule and ride away. We ran, but when we reached the road, too, we could only hear the mule loping, dying away. But we had come a good piece, because even Louvinia calling us sounded faint and small. We looked up the road in the starlight, after the mule. "That's where Corinth is," I said.