The Unvanquished Read Free Page A

Manassas (retreating, he said).
    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 Mississippifrom Carolina with Father and he had been Father’s body servant all the time that he was raising and training Simon, Ringo’s father, to take over when he (Joby) 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. We 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 cant. 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 in the River? With Ginrul 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 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 believedI saw or I dreamed that I did see the lantern in the orchard, under the apple trees. But I dont know whether I saw it or not, because then it was morning and it was raining and Father was gone.
3.
    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