Unvanquished

by William Faulkner

  Then Drusilla broke; they beat her. Because she was strong; she wasn't much older than I was, but she had let Aunt Louisa and Mrs. Habersham choose the game and she had beat them both until that night when Aunt Louisa went behind her back and chose a game she couldn't beat. I was coming up to supper; I heard them inside the cabin before I could stop: "Can't you believe me?" Drusilla said. "Can't you understand that in the troop I was just another man and not much of one at that, and since we came home here I am just another mouth for John to feed, just a cousin of John's wife and not much older than his own son?" And I could almost see Aunt Louisa sitting there with that knitting that never progressed:

  "You wish to tell me that you, a young woman, as­sociated with him, a still young man, day and night for a year, running about the country with no guard nor check of any sort upon— Do you take me for a com­plete fool?" So that night Aunt Louisa beat her; we had just sat down to supper when Aunt Louisa looked at me like she had been waiting for the noise of the bench to stop: "Bayard, I do not ask your forgiveness for this because it is your burden too; you are an innocent vic­tim as well as Dennison and I------" Then she looked

  at Father, thrust back in Granny's chair (the only chair we had) in her black dress, the black wad of knitting be­side her plate. "Colonel Sartoris," she said, "I am a woman; I must request that the husband whom I have lost and the man son which I have not would demand, perhaps at the point of a pistol.—Will you marry my daughter?"

  I got out. I moved fast; I heard the light sharp sound when Drusilla's head went down between her flungout arms on the table, and the sound the bench made when

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  Father got up too; I passed him standing beside Brasilia with his hand on her head. "They have beat you, Dru-silla," he said.

  mrs. habersham got there before we had finished break­fast the next morning. I don't know how Aunt Louisa got word in to her so quick. But there she was, and she and Aunt Louisa set the wedding for the day after to­morrow. I don't reckon they even knew that that was the day Father had told the Burdens Cash Benbow would never be elected Marshal in Jefferson. I don't reckon they paid any more attention to it than if all the men had decided that day after tomorrow all the clocks in Jeffer­son were to be set back or up an hour. Maybe they didn't even know there was to be an election, that all the , men in the county would be riding toward Jefferson to­morrow with pistols in their pockets, and that the Bur­dens already had their nigger voters camped in a cotton gin on the edge of town under guard. I don't reckon they even cared. Because like Father said, women cannot be­lieve that anything can be right or wrong or even be very important that can be decided by a lot of little scraps of scribbled paper dropped into a box.

  It was to be a big wedding; all Jefferson was to be invited and Mrs. Habersham planning to bring the three bottles of Madeira she had been saving for five years now when Aunt Louisa began to cry again. But they caught on quick now; now all of them were patting Aunt Louisa's hands and giving her vinegar to smell and Mrs. Habersham saying, "Of course. You poor thing. A public wedding now, after a year, would be a public notice of the ..." So they decided it would be a recep­tion, because Mrs. Habersham said how a reception could be held for a bridal couple at any time, even ten years later. So Brasilia was to ride into town, meet Father and be married as quick and quiet as possible, with just me and one other for witnesses to make it legal; none of the ladies themselves would even be present. Then they would come back home and we would have the recep­tion.

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  So they began to arrive early the next morning, with baskets of food and tablecloths and silver like for a church supper. Mrs. Habersham brought a veil and a wreath and they all helped Brasilia to dress, only Aunt Louisa made Brasilia put on Father's big riding cloak over the veil and wreath too, and Ringo brought the horses up, all curried and brushed, and I helped Bra­silia on with Aunt Louisa and the others all watching from the porch. But I didn't know that Ringo was miss­ing when we started, not even when I heard Aunt Louisa hollering for Benny while we rode down the drive. It was Louvinia that told about it, about how after we left the ladies set and decorated the table and spread the wed­ding breakfast and how they were all watching the gate and Aunt Louisa still hollering for Benny now and then when they saw Ringo and Benny come up the drive rid­ing double on one of the mules at a gallop, with Benny's eyes round as^ doorknobs and already hollering. "They kilt um! They kilt um!"

  "Who?" Aunt Louisa hoUered. "Where have you been?"

  "To town!" Benny hollered. "Them two Burdens! They kilt um!"

  "Who killed them?" Aunt Louisa hollered.

  "Brasilia and Cousin John!" Benny hollered. Then Louvinia said how Aunt Louisa hollered sure enough.

  "Bo you mean to tell me that Brasilia and that man are not married yet?"

  Because we didn't have time. Maybe Brasilia and Father would have, but when we came into the square we saw the crowd of niggers kind of huddled beyond the hotel door with six or eight strange white men herd­ing them, and then all of a sudden I saw the Jefferson men, the men that I knew, that Father knew, running across the square toward the hotel with each one hold­ing his hip like a man runs with a pistol hi his pocket. And then I saw the men who were Father's troop lined up before the hotel door, blocking it off. And then I was sliding off my horse too and watching Brasilia struggling with George Wyatt. But he didn't have hold of her, he just had hold of the cloak, and then she was through the line of them and running toward the hotel with her

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  wreath on one side of her head and the veil streaming behind. But George held me. He threw the cloak down and held me. "Let go," I said. "Father."

  "Steady, now," George said, holding me. "John's just gone in to vote."

  "But there are two of them!" I said. "Let me go!" "John's got two shots in the derringer," George said. "Steady, now."

  But they held me. And then we heard the three shots and we all turned and looked at the door. I don't know how long it was. "The last two was that derringer," George said. I don't know how long it was. The old nigger that was Mrs. Holston's porter, that was too old even to be free, stuck his head out once and said "Gret Gawd" and ducked back. Then Drusilla came out, carrying the ballot box, the wreath on one side of her head and the veil twisted about her arm, and then Father came out behind her, brushing his new beaver hat on his sleeve. And then it was loud; I could hear them when they drew in their breath like when the Yankees used to hear it begin:

  "Yaaaaa—" But Father raised his hand and they stopped. Then you couldn't hear anything.

  "We heard a pistol too," George said. "Did they touch you?"

  "No," Father said. "I let them fire first. You all heard. You boys can swear to my derringer."

  "Yes," George said. "We all heard." Now Father looked at all of them, at all the faces in sight, slow.

  "Does any man here want a word with me about this?" he said. But you could not hear anything, not even moving. The herd of niggers stood like they had when I first saw them, with the Northern white men herding them together. Father put his hat on and took the ballot box from Drusilla and helped her back onto her horse and handed the ballot box up to her. Then he looked around again,' at all of them. "This election will be held out at my home," he said. "I hereby appoint Drusilla Hawk voting commissioner until the votes are cast and counted. Does any man here object?" But he stopped them again with his hand before it had begun good. "Not now,

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  boys," he said. He turned to Drusilla. "Go home, I will go to the sheriff, and then I will follow you."

  "Like hell you will," George Wyatt said. "Some of the boys will ride out with Drusilla. The rest of us will come with you."

  But Father would not let them. "Don't you see we are working for peace through law and order?" he said. "I will make bond and then follow you. You do as I say." So we
went on; we turned in the gates with Drusilla in front, the ballot box on her pommel—us and Father's men and about a hundred more, and rode on up to the cabin where the buggies and surreys were standing, and Drusilla passed the ballot box to me and got down and took the box again and was walking toward the cabin when she stopped dead still. I reckon she and I both re­membered at the same time and I reckon that even the others, the men, knew all of a sudden that something was wrong. Because like Father said, I reckon women don't ever surrender: not only victory, but not even de­feat. Because that's how we were stopped when Aunt Louisa and the other ladies came out on the porch, and then Father shoved past me and jumped down beside Drusilla. But Aunt Louisa never even looked at him.

  "So you are not married," she said.

  "I forgot," Drusilla said.

  "You forgot? You forgot?"

  "I . . ." Drusilla said. "We . . ."

  Now Aunt Louisa looked at us; she looked along the line of us sitting there in our saddles; she looked at me too just like she did at the others, like she had never seen me before. "And who are these, pray? Your wed­ding train of forgetters? Your groomsmen of murder and robbery?"

  "They came to vote," Drusilla said.

  "To vote," Aunt Louisa said. "Ah. To vote. Since you have forced your mother and brother to live under a roof of license and adultery you think you can also force them-to live in a polling booth refuge from vio­lence and bloodshed, do you? Bring me that box." But Drusilla didn't move, standing there in her torn dress and the ruined veil and the twisted wreath hanging from her hair by a few pins. Aunt Louisa came down the

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  steps; we didn't know what she was going to do: we just sat there and watched her snatch the polling box from Drusilla and fling it across the yard. "Come into the house," she said. "No," Drusilla said.

  "Come into the house. I will send for a minister my­self."

  "No," Drusilla said. "This is an election. Don't you understand? I am voting commissioner." "So you refuse?"

  "I have to. I must." She sounded like a little girl that has been caught playing in the mud. "John said that

  I------"

  Then Aunt Louisa began to cry. She stood there in the black dress, without the knitting and for the first time that I ever saw it, without even the handkerchief, crying, until Mrs. Habersham came and led her back into the house. Then they voted. That didn't take long either. They set the box on the sawchunk where Louvinia washed, and Ringo got the pokeberry juice and an old piece of window shade, and they cut it into ballots. "Let all who want the Honorable Cassius Q. Benbow to be Marshal of Jefferson write Yes on his ballot; op­posed, No," Father said.

  "And I'll do the writing and save some more time," George Wyatt said. So he made a pack of the ballots and wrote them against his saddle and fast as he would write them the men would take them and drop them into the box and Drusilla would call their names out. We could hear Aunt Louisa still crying inside the cabin and we could see the other ladies watching us through the window. It didn't take long. "You needn't bother to count them," George said. "They all voted No."

  And that's all. They rode back to town then, carrying the box, with Father and Drusilla in the torn wedding dress and the crooked wreath and veil standing beside the sawchunk, watching them. Only this time even Father could not have stopped them. It came back high and thin and ragged and fierce, like when the Yankees used to hear it out of the smoke and the galloping: "Yaaaaay, Drusilla!" they hollered. "Yaaaaaay, John Sartoris! Yaaaaaaay!"

  AY ODOR OF VERBENA

  mt was just after supper. I had just opened my Coke on the table beneath the lamp; I heard Pro­fessor Wilkins' feet in the hall and then the instant of silence as he put his hand to the door knob, and I should have known. People talk glibly of presentiment, but I had none. I heard his feet on the stairs and then in the hall approaching and there was nothing in the feet because although I had lived in his house for three col­lege years now and although both he and Mrs. Wilkins called me Bayard in the house, he would no more have entered my room without knocking than I would have entered his—or hers. Then he flung the door violently in­ward against the doorstop with one of those gestures with or by which an almost painfully unflagging pre-ceptory of youth ultimately aberrates, and stood there saying, "Bayard. Bayard, my son, my dear son."

  I should have known; I should have been prepared. Or maybe I was prepared because I remember how I closed the book carefully, even marking the place, be­fore I rose. He (Professor Wilkins) was doing some­thing, bustling at something; it was my hat and cloak which he handed me and which I took although I would not need the cloak, unless even then I was thinking (although it was October, the equinox had not occurred)

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  that the rains and the cool weather would arrive before I should see this room again and so I would need the cloak anyway to return to it if I returned, thinking 'God, if he had only done this last night, flung that door crash­ing and bouncing against the stop last night without knocking so I could have gotten there before it happened, been there when it did, beside him on what­ever spot, wherever it was that he would have to fall and lie hi the dust and dirt.'

  "Your boy is downstairs in the kitchen," he said. It was not until years later that he told me (someone did; it must have been Judge Wilkins) how Ringo had ap­parently flung the cook aside and come on into the house and into the library where he and Mrs. Wilkins were sitting and said without preamble and already turning to withdraw: "They shot Colonel Sartoris this morning. Tell him I be waiting in the kitchen" and was gone before either of them could move. "He has ridden forty miles yet he refuses to eat anything." We were moving toward the door now—the door on my side of which I had lived for three years now with what I knew, what I knew now I must have believed and expected, yet beyond which I had heard the approaching feet yet heard nothing in the feet. "If there was just anything I could do."

  "Yes, sir," I said. "A fresh horse for my boy. He will want to go back with me."

  "By all means take mine—Mrs. Wilkins'," he cried. His tone was no different yet he did cry it and I suppose that at the same moment we both realised that was funny—a short-legged deep-barrelled mare who looked exactly like a spinster music teacher, which Mrs. Wilkins drove to a basket phaeton—which was good for me, like being doused with a pail of cold water would have been good for me.

  "Thank you, sir," I said. "We won't need it. I will get a fresh horse for him at the livery stable when I get my mare." Good for me, because even before I finished speaking I knew that would not be necessary either, that Ringo would have stopped at the livery stable before he came out to the college and attended to that and that the fresh horse for him and my mare both would be

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  saddled and waiting now at the side fence and we would not have to go through Oxford at all. Loosh would not have thought of that if he had come for me, he would have come straight to the college, to Professor Wilkins', and told his news and then sat down and let me take charge from then on. But not Ringo.

  He followed me from the room. From now until Ringo and I rode away into the hot thick dusty darkness quick and strained for the overdue equinox like a laboring de­layed woman, he would be somewhere either just be­side me or just behind me and I never to know ex­actly nor care which. He was trying to find the words with which to offer me his pistol too. I could almost hear him: "Ah, this unhappy land; not ten years re­covered from the fever yet still men must kill one an­other, still we must pay Cain's price in his own coin." But he did not actually say it. He just followed me, somewhere beside or behind me as we descended the stairs toward where Mrs. Wilkins waited in the hall be­neath the chandelier—a thin gray woman who reminded me of Granny, not that she looked like Granny prob­ably but because she had known Granny—a lifted anx­ious still face which was thinking Who lives by th
e sword shall die by it just as Granny would have thought, toward which I walked, had to walk not because I was Granny's grandson and had lived in her house for three college years and was about the age of her son when he was killed in almost the last battle nine years ago, but because I was now The Sartoris (The Sartoris: that had been one of the concomitant flashes, along with the at last it has happened when Professor Wilkins opened my door.) She didn't offer me a horse and pistol, not be­cause she liked me any less than Professor Wilkins but because she was a woman and so wiser than any man, else the men would not have gone on with the War for two years after they knew they were whipped. She just put her hands (a small woman, no bigger than Granny had been) on my shoulders and said, "Give my love to Drusilla and your Aunt Jenny. And come back when you can."

  "Only I don't know when that will be," I said. "I don't know how many things I will have to attend to."

  •*•

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  Yes, I lied even to her; it had not been but a minute yet since he had flung that door bouncing into the stop yet already I was beginning to realise, to become aware of that which I still had no yardstick to measure save that one consisting of what, despite myself, despite my raising and background (or maybe because of them) I had for some time known I was becoming and had feared the test of it; I remember how I thought while her hands still rested on my shoulders: At least this will be my chance to find out if I am what I think I am or if I just hope; if I am going to do what I have taught myself is right or if I am just going to wish I were.

  We went on to the kitchen, Professor Wilkins still somewhere beside or behind me and still offering me the pistol and horse in a dozen different ways. Ringo was waiting; I remember how I thought then that no matter what might happen to either of us, I would never be The Sartoris to him. He was twenty-four too, but in a way he had changed even less than I had since that day when we had nailed Grumby's body to the door of the old compress. Maybe it was because he had outgrown me, had changed so much that summer while he and Granny traded mules with the Yankees that since then I had had to do most of the changing just to catch up with him. He was sitting quietly in a chair beside the cold stove, spent-looking too who had ridden forty miles (at one time, either in Jefferson or when he was alone at last on the road somewhere, he had cried; dust was now caked and dried in the tear-channels on his face) and would ride forty more yet would not eat, looking up at me a little red-eyed with weariness (or maybe it was more than just weariness and so I would never catch up with him) then rising without a word and going on toward the door and I following and Professor Wilkins still offering the horse and the pistol without speaking the words and still thinking (I could feel that too) Dies by the sword. Dies by the sword.