Uncollected Stories of William Faulkner Read Free

muddy from where he had been hiding in swamps and bottoms from the patter rollers, and with that look on his face again, like he had not slept in a long time and he didn’t want to sleep, and Joby and Philadelphy leaning into the firelight and looking at him, with Philadelphy’s mouth open and the look on her face too. And then I saw Louvinia standing in the door. We had not heard her pass us, but there she was, with her hand on the jamb, looking at Loosh, and again she didn’t have on father’s old hat.
    “You mean they gwinter free us all?” Philadelphy said.
    “Yes,” Loosh said, loud, with his head flung back; he didn’t even look at Joby when Joby said, “Hush up, Loosh!” “Yes!” Loosh said. “Gin’ral Sherman gonter sweep the earth and the race gonter all be free!”
    Then Louvinia crossed the floor in two steps and hit Loosh across the head hard with her flat hand. “You black fool!” she said. “Do you think there’s enough Yankees in the whole world to whip the white folks?”
    We ran to the house, we didn’t wait for Louvinia; again we didn’t know that she was behind us. We ran into the room where Granny was sitting beside the lamp with the Bible open on her lap and her neck arched to look at us across her spectacles. “They’re coming here!” I said. “They’re coming to set us free!”
    “What?” she said.
    “Loosh saw them! They’re just down the road. It’s General Sherman and he’s going to make us all free!” And we watching her, waiting to see who she would send for to take down the musket—whether it would be Joby, because he was the oldest, or Loosh, because he had seen them and would know what to shoot at. Then she shouted, too, and her voice was strong and loud as Louvinia’s:
    “You Bayard Sartoris! Ain’t you in bed yet? … Louvinia!” she shouted. Louvinia came in. “Take these children up to bed, and if you hear another sound out of them tonight, you have my permission and my insistence, too, to whip them both.”
    It didn’t take us long to get to bed. But we couldn’t talk, because Louvinia was going to bed on the cot in the hall. And Ringo was afraid to come up in the bed with me, so I got down on the pallet with him. “We’ll have to watch the road,” I said. Ringo whimpered.
    “Look like hit haf to be us,” he said.
    “Are you scared?”
    “I ain’t very,” he said. “I just wish Marse John was here.”
    “Well, he’s not,” I said. “It’ll have to be us.”
    We watched the road for two days, lying in the cedar copse. Now and then Louvinia hollered at us, but we told her where we were and that we were making another map, and besides, she could see the cedar copse from the kitchen. It was cool and shady there, and quiet, and Ringo slept most of the time, and I slept some too. I was dreaming—it was like I was looking at our place and suddenly the house and stable and cabins and trees and all were gone and I was looking at a place flat and empty as the sideboard, and it was growing darker and darker, and then all of a sudden I wasn’t looking at it; I was there—a sort of frightened drove of little tiny figures moving on it; they were father and Granny and Joby and Louvinia and Loosh and Philadelphy and Ringo and me [and we were wandering around on it lost and it getting darker and darker and we forever more without any home to go to because we were forever free; that’s what it was]—and then Ringo made a choked sound and I was looking at the road, and there in the middle of it, sitting on a bright bay horse and looking at the house through a field glass, was a Yankee.
    For a long time we just lay there looking at him. I don’t know what we had expected to see, but we knew what he was at once;I remember thinking, “He looks just like a man,” and then Ringo and I were glaring at each other, and then we were crawling backward down the hill without remembering when we started to crawl, and then we were running across the pasture