“Nome,” Isom said. “Setting yonder by the window, in the dark. She say she don’t want no supper.”
Elnora looked at Saddie. “What was they doing last time you went to the library?”
“Her and Miss Narcissa talking.”
“They was still talking when I went to ’nounce supper,” Isom said. “I tole you that.”
“I know,” Elnora said. Her voice was not sharp. Neither was it gentle. It was just peremptory, soft, cold. “What were they talking about?”
“I don’t know’m,” Isom said. “You the one taught me not to listen to white folks.”
“What were they talking about, Isom?” Elnora said. She was looking at him, grave, intent, commanding.
“ ’Bout somebody getting married. Miss Jenny say ‘I tole you long time ago I ain’t blame you. A young woman like you. I want you to marry. Not do like I done,’ what she say.”
“I bet she fixing to marry, too,” Saddie said.
“Who marry?” Elnora said. “Her marry? What for? Give up what she got here? That ain’t what it is. I wished I knowed what been going on here this last week.…” Her voice ceased; she turned her head toward the door as though she were listening for something. From the dining-room came the sound of the young woman’s voice. But Elnora appeared to listen to something beyond this. Then she left the room. She did not go hurriedly, yet her long silent stride carried her from sight with an abruptness like that of an inanimate figure drawn on wheels, off a stage.
She went quietly up the dark hall, passing the dining-room door unremarked by the two people at the table. They sat close. The woman was talking, leaning toward the boy. Elnora went on without a sound: a converging of shadows upon which her lighter face seemed to float without body, her eyeballs faintly white. Then she stopped suddenly. She had not reached the library door, yet she stopped, invisible, soundless, her eyes suddenly quite luminous in her almost-vanished face, and she began to chant in faint sing-song: “Oh, Lawd; oh, Lawd,” not loud. Then she moved, went swiftly on to the library door and looked into the room where beside the dead window the old woman sat motionless, indicated only by that faint single gleam of white hair, as though for ninety years life had died slowly up her spare, erect frame, to linger for a twilit instant about her head before going out, though life itself had ceased. Elnora looked for only an instant into the room. Then she turned and retraced her swift and silent steps to the dining-room door. The woman still leaned toward the boy, talking. They did not remark Elnora at once. She stood in the doorway, tall, not touching the jamb on either side. Her face was blank; she did not appear to be looking at, speaking to, any one.
“You better come quick, I reckon,” she said in that soft, cold, peremptory voice.
Mountain Victory
THROUGH THE CABIN WINDOW the five people watched the cavalcade toil up the muddy trail and halt at the gate. First came a man on foot, leading a horse. He wore a broad hat low on his face, his body shapeless in a weathered gray cloak from which his left hand emerged, holding the reins. The bridle was silvermounted, the horse a gaunt, mudsplashed, thoroughbred bay, wearing in place of saddle a navy blue army blanket bound on it by a piece of rope. The second horse was a shortbodied, bigheaded, scrub sorrel, also mudsplashed. It wore a bridle contrived of rope and wire, and an army saddle in which, perched high above the dangling stirrups, crouched a shapeless something larger than a child, which at that distance appeared to wear no garment or garments known to man.
One of the three men at the cabin window left it quickly. The others, without turning, heard him cross the room swiftly and then return, carrying a long rifle.
“No, you don’t,” the older man said.
“Don’t you see that cloak?” the younger said. “That rebel cloak?”
“I wont have it,” the other said. “They have surrendered. They have said they are whipped.”
Through the window they watched the horses stop at the gate. The gate was of sagging hickory, in a rock fence which straggled down a gaunt slope sharp in relief against the valley and a still further range of mountains dissolving into the low, dissolving sky.
They watched the creature on the second horse descend and hand his reins also into the same left hand of the man in gray that held the reins of the thoroughbred. They watched the creature enter the gate and mount the path and disappear beyond the angle of the window. Then they heard it cross the porch and knock at the door. They stood there and heard it knock again.
After a while the older man said, without turning his head, “Go and see.”
One of the women, the older one, turned from the window, her feet making no sound on the floor, since they were bare. She went to the front door and opened it. The chill, wet light of the dying April afternoon fell in upon her—upon a small woman with a gnarled expressionless face, in a gray shapeless garment. Facing her across the sill was a creature a little larger than a large monkey, dressed in a voluminous blue overcoat of a private in the Federal army, with, tied tentlike over his head and falling about his shoulders, a piece of oilcloth which might have been cut square from the hood of a sutler’s wagon; within the orifice the woman could see nothing whatever save the whites of two eyes, momentary and phantomlike, as with a single glance the Negro examined the woman standing barefoot in her faded calico garment, and took in the bleak and barren interior of the cabin hall.
“Marster Major Soshay Weddel send he compliments en say he wishful fo sleeping room fo heself en boy en two hawses,” he said in a pompous, parrot-like voice. The woman looked at him. Her face was like a spent mask. “We been up yonder a ways, fighting dem Yankees,” the Negro said “Done quit now. Gwine back home.”
The woman seemed to speak from somewhere behind her face, as though behind an effigy or a painted screen: “I’ll ask him.”
“We ghy pay you,” the Negro said.
“Pay?” Pausing, she seemed to muse upon him. “Hit aint near a ho-tel on the mou-tin.”
The Negro made a large gesture. “Don’t make no diffunce. We done stayed de night in worse places den whut dis is. You just tell um it Marse Soshay Weddel.” Then he saw that the woman was looking past him. He turned and saw the man in the worn gray cloak already halfway up the path from the gate. He came on and mounted the porch, removing with his left hand the broad slouched hat bearing the tarnished wreath of a Confederate field officer. He had a dark face, with dark eyes and black hair, his face at once thick yet gaunt, and arrogant. He was not tall, yet he topped the Negro by five or six inches. The cloak was weathered, faded about the shoulders where the light fell strongest. The skirts were bedraggled, frayed, mudsplashed: the garment had been patched again and again, and brushed again and again; the nap was completely gone.
“Goodday, madam,” he said. “Have you stableroom for my horses and shelter for myself and my boy for the night?”
The woman looked at him with a static, musing quality, as though she had seen without alarm an apparition.
“I’ll have to see,” she said.
“I shall pay,” the man said. “I know the times.”
“I’ll have to ask him,” the woman said. She turned, then stopped. The older man entered the hall behind her. He was big, in jean clothes, with a shock of iron-gray hair and pale eyes.
“I am Saucier Weddel,” the man in gray said. “I am on my way home to Mississippi from Virginia. I am in Tennessee now?”
“You are in Tennessee,” the other said. “Come in.”
Weddel turned to the Negro. “Take the horses on to the stable,” he said.
The Negro returned to the gate, shapeless in the oilcloth cape and the big overcoat, with that swaggering arrogance which he had assumed as soon as he saw the woman’s bare feet and the meagre, barren interior of the cabin. He took up the two bridle reins and began to shout at the horses with needless and officious vociferation, to which the two horses paid no heed, as though they were long accustomed to him. It was as if the Negro himself paid no attention to his cries, as though the shouting w
ere merely concomitant to the action of leading the horses out of sight of the door, like an effluvium by both horses and Negro accepted and relegated in the same instant.
II
THROUGH THE KITCHEN WALL the girl could hear the voices of the men in the room from which her father had driven her when the stranger approached the house. She was about twenty: a big girl with smooth, simple hair and big, smooth hands, standing barefoot in a single garment made out of flour sacks. She stood close to the wall, motionless, her head bent a little, her eyes wide and still and empty like a sleepwalker’s, listening to her father and the guest enter the room beyond it.
The kitchen was a plank leanto built against the log wall of the cabin proper. From between the logs beside her the clay chinking, dried to chalk by the heat of the stove, had fallen away in places. Stooping, the movement slow and lush and soundless as the whispering of her bare feet on the floor, she leaned her eye to one of these cracks. She could see a bare table on which sat an earthenware jug and a box of musket cartridges stenciled U. S. Army. At the table her two brothers sat in splint chairs, though it was only the younger one, the boy, who looked toward the door, though she knew, could hear now, that the stranger was in the room. The older brother was taking the cartridges one by one from the box and crimping them and setting them upright at his hand like a mimic parade of troops, his back to the door where she knew the stranger was now standing. She breathed quietly. “Vatch would have shot him,” she said, breathed, to herself, stooping. “I reckon he will yet.”
Then she heard feet again and her mother came toward the door to the kitchen, crossing and for a moment blotting the orifice. Yet she did not move, not even when her mother entered the kitchen. She stooped to the crack, her breathing regular and placid, hearing her mother clattering the stovelids behind her. Then she saw the stranger for the first time and then she was holding her breath quietly, not even aware that she had ceased to breathe. She saw him standing beside the table in his shabby cloak, with his hat in his left hand. Vatch did not look up.
“My name is Saucier Weddel,” the stranger said.
“Soshay Weddel,” the girl breathed into the dry chinking, the crumbled and powdery wall. She could see him at full length, in his stained and patched and brushed cloak, with his head lifted a little and his face worn, almost gaunt, stamped with a kind of indomitable weariness and yet arrogant too, like a creature from another world with other air to breathe and another kind of blood to warm the veins. “Soshay Weddel,” she breathed.
“Take some whiskey,” Vatch said without moving.
Then suddenly, as it had been with the suspended breathing, she was not listening to the words at all, as though it were no longer necessary for her to hear, as though curiosity too had no place in the atmosphere in which the stranger dwelled and in which she too dwelled for the moment as she watched the stranger standing beside the table, looking at Vatch, and Vatch now turned in his chair, a cartridge in his hand, looking up at the stranger. She breathed quietly into the crack through which the voices came now without heat or significance out of that dark and smoldering and violent and childlike vanity of men:
“I reckon you know these when you see them, then?”
“Why not? We used them too. We never always had the time nor the powder to stop and make our own. So we had to use yours now and then. Especially during the last.”
“Maybe you would know them better if one exploded in your face.”
“Vatch.” She now looked at her father, because he had spoken. Her younger brother was raised a little in his chair, leaning a little forward, his mouth open a little. He was seventeen. Yet still the stranger stood looking quietly down at Vatch, his hat clutched against his worn cloak, with on his face that expression arrogant and weary and a little quizzical.
“You can show your other hand too,” Vatch said. “Don’t be afraid to leave your pistol go.”
“No,” the stranger said. “I am not afraid to show it.”
“Take some whiskey, then,” Vatch said, pushing the jug forward with a motion slighting and contemptuous.
“I am obliged infinitely,” the stranger said. “It’s my stomach. For three years of war I have had to apologize to my stomach; now, with peace, I must apologize for it. But if I might have a glass for my boy? Even after four years, he cannot stand cold.”
“Soshay Weddel,” the girl breathed into the crumbled dust beyond which the voices came, not yet raised yet forever irreconcilable and already doomed, the one blind victim, the other blind executioner:
“Or maybe behind your back you would know it better.”
“You. Vatch.”
“Stop, sir. If he was in the army for as long as one year, he has run too, once. Perhaps oftener, if he faced the Army of Northern Virginia.”
“Soshay Weddel,” the girl breathed, stooping. Now she saw Weddel, walking apparently straight toward her, a thick tumbler in his left hand and his hat crumpled beneath the same arm.
“Not that way,” Vatch said. The stranger paused and looked back at Vatch. “Where are you aiming to go?”
“To take this out to my boy,” the stranger said. “Out to the stable. I thought perhaps this door—” His face was in profile now, worn, haughty, wasted, the eyebrows lifted with quizzical and arrogant interrogation. Without rising Vatch jerked his head back and aside. “Come away from that door.” But the stranger did not stir. Only his head moved a little, as though he had merely changed the direction of his eyes.
“He’s looking at paw,” the girl breathed. “He’s waiting for paw to tell him. He aint skeered of Vatch. I knowed it.”
“Come away from that door,” Vatch said. “You damn nigra.”
“So it’s my face and not my uniform,” the stranger said. “And you fought four years to free us, I understand.”
Then she heard her father speak again. “Go out the front way and around the house, stranger,” he said.
“Soshay Weddel,” the girl said. Behind her her mother clattered at the stove. “Soshay Weddel,” she said. She did not say it aloud. She breathed again, deep and quiet and without haste. “It’s like a music. It’s like a singing.”
III
THE NEGRO was squatting in the hallway of the barn, the sagging and broken stalls of which were empty save for the two horses. Beside him was a worn rucksack, open. He was engaged in polishing a pair of thin dancing slippers with a cloth and a tin of paste, empty save for a thin rim of polish about the circumference of the tin. Beside him on a piece of plank sat one finished shoe. The upper was cracked; it had a crude sole nailed recently and crudely on by a clumsy hand.
“Thank de Lawd folks cant see de bottoms of yo feets,” the Negro said. “Thank de Lawd it’s just dese hyer mountain trash. I’d even hate fo Yankees to see yo feets in dese things.” He rubbed the shoe, squinted at it, breathed upon it, rubbed it again upon his squatting flank.
“Here,” Weddel said, extending the tumbler. It contained a liquid as colorless as water.
The Negro stopped, the shoe and the cloth suspended “Which?” he said. He looked at the glass. “Whut’s dat?”
“Drink it,” Weddel said.
“Dat’s water. Whut you bringing me water fer?”
“Take it,” Weddel said. “It’s not water.”
The Negro took the glass gingerly. He held it as if it contained nitroglycerin. He looked at it, blinking, bringing the glass slowly under his nose. He blinked. “Where’d you git dis hyer?” Weddel didn’t answer. He had taken up the finished slipper, looking at it. The Negro held the glass under his nose. “It smell kind of like it ought to,” he said. “But I be dawg ef it look like anything. Dese folks fixing to pizen you.” He tipped the glass and sipped gingerly, and lowered the glass, blinking.
“I didn’t drink any of it,” Weddel said. He set the slipper down.
“You better hadn’t,” the Negro said. “When here I done been fo years trying to take care of you en git you back home like whut Mistis tole me to do, and
here you sleeping in folks’ barns at night like a tramp, like a pater-roller nigger—” He put the glass to his lips, tilting it and his head in a single jerk. He lowered the glass, empty; his eyes were closed; he said, “Whuf!” shaking his head with a violent, shuddering motion. “It smells right, and it act right. But I be dawg ef it look right. I reckon you better let it alone, like you started out. When dey try to make you drink it you send um to me. I done already stood so much I reckon I can stand a little mo fer Mistis’ sake.”
He took up the shoe and the cloth again. Weddel stooped above the rucksack. “I want my pistol,” he said.
Again the Negro ceased, the shoe and the cloth poised. “Whut fer?” He leaned and looked up the muddy slope toward the cabin. “Is dese folks Yankees?” he said in a whisper.
“No,” Weddel said, digging in the rucksack with his left hand. The Negro did not seem to hear him.
“In Tennessee? You tole me we was in Tennessee, where Memphis is, even if you never tole me it was all disyer up-and-down land in de Memphis country. I know I never seed none of um when I went to Memphis wid yo paw dat time. But you says so. And now you telling me dem Memphis folks is Yankees?”
“Where is the pistol?” Weddel said.
“I done tole you,” the Negro said. “Acting like you does. Letting dese folks see you come walking up de road, leading Caesar caze you think he tired; making me ride whilst you walks when I can outwalk you any day you ever lived and you knows it, even if I is fawty en you twenty-eight. I ghy tell yo maw. I ghy tell um.”
Weddel rose, in his hand a heavy cap-and-ball revolver. He chuckled it in his single hand, drawing the hammer back, letting it down again. The Negro watched him, crouched like an ape in the blue Union army overcoat. “You put dat thing back,” he said. “De war done wid now. Dey tole us back dar at Ferginny it was done wid. You dont need no pistol now. You pat it back, you hear me?”
“I’m going to bathe,” Weddel said. “Is my shirt—”
Collected Stories Page 68