The Unvanquished Read Free

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 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 Hawkhurst, 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 in 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 Tuesday afternoon, when Granny and Louvinia and Philadelphy would polish it, why, nobody except Granny maybe knew, since it was never used) was bare.
    It didn’t take us long to eat. Father had already eaten once early in the afternoon, and besides that was whatRingo and I were waiting for: for after supper, the hour of laxed muscles and full entrails, the talking. In the spring when he came home that time, we waited as we did now, until he was sitting in his old chair with the hickory logs popping and snapping on the hearth and Ringo and I squatting on either side of the hearth, beneath the mantel above which the captured musket which he had brought home from Virginia two years ago rested on two pegs, loaded and oiled for service. Then we listened. We heard: the names—Forrest and Morgan and Barksdale and Van Dorn; the words like Gap and Run which we didn’t have in Mississippi even though we did own Barksdale, and Van Dorn until somebody’s husband killed him, and one day General Forrest rode down South Street in Oxford where there watched him through a window pane a young girl who scratched her name on it with a diamond ring: Celia Cook.
    But we were just twelve; we didn’t listen to that. What Ringo and I heard was the cannon and the flags and the anonymous yelling. That’s what we intended to hear tonight. Ringo was waiting for me in the hall; we waited until Father was settled in his chair in the room which he and the negroes called the Office—Father because his desk was here in which he kept the seed cotton and corn and in this room he would remove his muddy boots and sit in his stocking feet while the boots dried on the hearth and where the dogs could come and go with impunity, to lie on the rug before the fire or even to sleep there on the cold nights—these whetherMother, who died when I was born, gave him this dispensation before she died or whether Granny carried it on afterward or whether Granny gave him the dispensation herself because Mother died I dont know: and the negroes called the Office because into this room they would be fetched to face the Patroller (sitting in one of the straight hard chairs and smoking one of Father’s cigars too but with his hat off) and swear that they could not possibly have been either who or where he (the Patroller) said they were—and which Granny called the library because there was one bookcase in it containing a Coke upon Littleton, a Josephus, a Koran, a volume of Mississippi Reports dated 1848, a Jeremy Taylor, a Napoleon’s Maxims, a thousand and ninety-eight page treatise on astrology, a History of Werewolf Men in England, Ireland and Scotland and Including Wales by the Reverend PtolemyThorndyke, M.A. (Edinburgh), F.R.S.S., a complete Walter Scott, a complete Fenimore Cooper, a paper-bound Dumas complete, too, save for the volume which Father lost from his pocket at