Uncollected Stories of William Faulkner Read Free Page B

occur afterward tried to rush into the sound of it all at once. I could still hear it, my ears were still ringing, so that Granny and Ringo and I all seemed to be talking far away. Then she said, “Quick! Here!” and then Ringo and I were squatting with our knees under our chins, on either side of her against her legs, with the hard points of the chair rockers jammed into our backs and her skirts spread over us like a tent, and the heavy feet comingin and—Louvinia told us afterward—the Yankee sergeant shaking the musket at Granny and saying:
    “Come on, grandma! Where are they? We saw them run in here!”
    We couldn’t see; we just squatted in a kind of faint gray light and that smell of Granny that her clothes and bed and room all had, and Ringo’s eyes looking like two plates of chocolate pudding and maybe both of us thinking how Granny had never whipped us for anything in our lives except lying, and that even when it wasn’t even a told lie, but just keeping quiet, how she would whip us first and then make us kneel down and kneel down with us herself to ask the Lord to forgive us.
    “You are mistaken,” she said. “There are no children in this house nor on this place. There is no one here at all except my servant and myself and the people in the quarters.”
    “You mean you deny ever having seen this gun before?”
    “I do.” It was that quiet; she didn’t move at all, sitting bolt upright and right on the edge of the chair, to keep her skirts spread over us. “If you doubt me, you may search the house.”
    “Don’t you worry about that; I’m going to.… Send some of the boys upstairs,” he said. “If you find any locked doors, you know what to do. And tell them fellows out back to comb the barn and the cabins too.”
    “You won’t find any locked doors,” Granny said. “At least, let me ask you—”
    “Don’t you ask anything, grandma. You set still. Better for you if you had done a little asking before you sent them little devils out with this gun.”
    “Was there—” We could hear her voice die away and then speak again, like she was behind it with a switch, making it talk. “Is he—it—the one who—”
    “Dead? Hell, yes! Broke his back and we had to shoot him!”
    “Had to—you had—shoot—” I didn’t know horrified astonishment either, but Ringo and Granny and I were all three it.
    “Yes, by God! Had to shoot him! The best horse in the whole army! The whole regiment betting on him for next Sunday—” He said some more, but we were not listening. We were not breathing either, glaring at each other in the gray gloom, and I was almost shouting, too, until Granny said it:
    “Didn’t—they didn’t—Oh, thank God! Thank God!”
    “We didn’t—” Ringo said.
    “Hush!” I said. Because we didn’t have to say it, it was like we had had to hold our breaths for a long time without knowing it, and that now we could let go and breathe again. Maybe that was why we never heard the other man, when he came in, at all; it was Louvinia that saw that, too—a colonel, with a bright short beard and hard bright gray eyes, who looked at Granny sitting in the chair with her hand at her breast, and took off his hat. Only he was talking to the sergeant.
    “What’s this?” he said. “What’s going on here, Harrison?”
    “This is where they run to,” the sergeant said. “I’m searching the house.”
    “Ah,” the colonel said. He didn’t sound mad at all. He just sounded cold and short and pleasant. “By whose authority?”
    “Well, somebody here fired on United States troops. I guess this is authority enough.” We could just hear the sound; it was Louvinia that told us how he shook the musket and banged the butt on the floor.
    “And killed one horse,” the colonel said.
    “It was a United States horse. I heard the general say myself that if he had enough horses, he wouldn’t always care whether there was anybody to ride them or not. And so here we are, riding