“Go on,” she said.
“‘I’m still trying to win battles, even if since day before yesterday you ain’t,’ I said. ‘I’ll send you down to Johnston at Jackson,’ I said. ‘He’ll put you inside Vicksburg, where you can lead private charges day and night too if you want.’ ‘Like hell you will,’ he said. And I said — excuse me— ‘Like hell I won’t.’” And Granny didn’t say anything. It was like day before yesterday with Ab Snopes: not like she hadn’t heard but as if right now it didn’t matter, that this was no time either to bother with such.
“And did you?” she said.
“I can’t. He knows it. You can’t punish a man for routing an enemy four times his weight. What would I say back there in Tennessee, where we both live, let alone that uncle of his, the one they licked for Governor six years ago, on Bragg’s personal staff now, with his face over Bragg’s shoulder every time Bragg opens a dispatch or picks up a pen. And I’m still trying to win battles. But I can’t. Because of a girl, one single lone young female girl that ain’t got anything under the sun against him except that, since it was his misfortune to save her from a passel of raiding enemy in a situation that everybody but her is trying to forget, she can’t seem to bear to hear his last name. Yet because of that, every battle I plan from now on will be at the mercy of a twenty-two-year-old shavetail — excuse me again — who might decide to lead a private charge any time he can holler at least two men in gray coats into moving in the same direction.” He stopped. He looked at Granny. “Well?” he said.
“So now you’ve got to it,” Granny said. “Well what, Mr. Forrest?”
“Why, just have done with this foolishness. I told you I’ve got that boy, in close arrest, with a guard with a bayonet. But there won’t be any trouble there. I figured even yesterday morning that he had already lost his mind. But I reckon he’s recovered enough of it since the Provost took him last night to comprehend that I still consider myself his commander even if he don’t. So all necessary now is for you to put your foot down. Put it down hard. Now. You’re her grandma. She lives in your home. And it looks like she is going to live in it a good while yet before she gets back to Memphis to that uncle or whoever it is that calls himself her guardian. So just put your foot down. Make her. Mr. Millard would have already done that if he had been here. And I know when. It would have been two days ago by now.”
Granny waited until he got done. She stood with her arms crossed, holding each elbow in the other. “Is that all I’m to do?” she said.
“Yes,” General Forrest said. “If she don’t want to listen to you right at first, maybe as his commander—”
Granny didn’t even say “Hah.” She didn’t even send me. She didn’t even stop in the hall and call. She went upstairs herself and we stood there and I thought maybe she was going to bring the dulcimer too and I thought how if I was General Forrest I would go back and get Cousin Philip and make him sit in the library until about supper-time while Cousin Melisandre played the dulcimer and sang. Then he could take Cousin Philip on back and then he could finish the war without worrying.
She didn’t have the dulcimer. She just had Cousin Melisandre. They came in and Granny stood to one side again with her arms crossed, holding her elbows. “Here she is,” she said. “Say it — This is Mr. Bedford Forrest,” she told Cousin Melisandre. “Say it,” she told General Forrest.
He didn’t have time. When Cousin Melisandre first came, she tried to read aloud to Ringo and me. It wasn’t much. That is, what she insisted on reading to us wasn’t so bad, even if it was mostly about ladies looking out windows and playing on something (maybe they were dulcimers too) while somebody else was off somewhere fighting. It was the way she read it. When Granny said this is Mister Forrest, Cousin Melisandre’s face looked exactly like her voice would sound when she read to us. She took two steps into the library and curtsied, spreading her hoops back, and stood up. “General Forrest,” she said. “I am acquainted with an associate of his. Will the General please give him the sincerest wishes for triumph in war and success in love, from one who will never see him again?” Then she curtsied again and spread her hoops backward and stood up and took two steps backward and turned and went out.
After a while Granny said, “Well, Mr. Forrest?”
General Forrest began to cough. He lifted his coattail with one hand and reached the other into his hip pocket like he was going to pull at least a musket out of it and got his handkerchief and coughed into it a while. It wasn’t very clean. It looked about like the one Cousin Philip was trying to wipe his coat off with in the summer house day before yesterday. Then he put the handkerchief back. He didn’t say “Hah” either. “Can I reach the Holly Branch road without having to go through Jefferson?” he said.
Then Granny moved. “Open the desk,” she said. “Lay out a sheet of note-paper.” I did. And I remember how I stood at one side of the desk and General Forrest at the other, and watched Granny’s hand move the pen steady and not very slow and not very long across the paper because it never did take her very long to say anything, no matter what it was, whether she was talking it or writing it. Though I didn’t see it then, but only later, when it hung framed under glass above Cousin Melisandre’s and Cousin Philip’s mantel: the fine steady slant of Granny’s hand and General Forrest’s sprawling signatures below it that looked itself a good deal like a charge of massed cavalry:
Lieutenant P. S. Backhouse, Company D, Tennessee Cavalry, was this day raised to the honorary rank of Brevet Major General & killed while engaging the enemy. Vice whom Philip St-Just Backus is hereby appointed Lieutenant, Company D, Tennessee Cavalry.
N. B. Forrest Genl
I didn’t see it then. General Forrest picked it up. “Now I’ve got to have a battle,” he said. “Another sheet, son.” I laid that one out on the desk.
“A battle?” Granny said.
“To give Johnston,” he said. “Confound it, Miss Rosie, can’t you understand either that I’m just a fallible mortal man trying to run a military command according to certain fixed and inviolable rules, no matter how foolish the business looks to superior outside folks?”
“All right,” Granny said. “You had one. I was looking at it.”
“So I did,” General Forrest said. “Hah,” he said. “The battle of Sartoris.”
“No,” Granny said. “Not at my house.”
“They did all the shooting down at the creek,” I said.
“What creek?” he said.
So I told him. It ran through the pasture. Its name was Hurricane Creek but not even the white people called it hurricane except Granny. General Forrest didn’t either when he sat down at the desk and wrote the report to General Johnston at Jackson:
A unit of my command on detached duty engaged a body of the enemy & drove him from the field & dispersed him this day 28th ult. April 1862 at Harry kin Creek. With loss of one man.
N. B. Forrest Genl
I saw that. I watched him write it. Then he got up and folded the sheets into his pocket and was already going toward the table where his hat was.
“Wait,” Granny said. “Lay out another sheet,” she said. “Come back here.”
General Forrest stopped and turned. “Another one?”
“Yes!” Granny said. “A furlough, pass — whatever you busy military establishments call them! So John Sartoris can come home long enough to—” and she said it herself, she looked straight at me and even backed up and said some of it over as though to make sure there wouldn’t be any mistake: “ — can come back home and give away that damn bride!”
IV
And that was all. The day came and Granny waked Ringo and me before sunup and we ate what breakfast we had from two plates on the back steps. And we dug up the trunk and brought it into the house and polished the silver and Ringo and I brought dogwood and redbud branches from the pasture and Granny cut the flowers, all of them, cutting them herself with Cousin Melisandre and Philadelphia just carrying the baskets; so many of them unt
il the house was so full that Ringo and I would believe we smelled them even across the pasture each time we came up. Though of course we could, it was just the food — the last ham from the smokehouse and the chickens and the flour which Granny had been saving and the last of the sugar which she had been saving along with the bottle of champagne for the day when the North surrendered — which Louvinia had been cooking for two days now, to remind us each time we approached the house of what was going on and that the flowers were there. As if we could have forgotten about the food. And they dressed Cousin Melisandre and, Ringo in his new blue pants and I in my gray ones which were not so new, we stood in the late afternoon on the gallery — Granny and Cousin Melisandre and Louvinia and Philadelphia and Ringo and I — and watched them enter the gate. General Forrest was not one. Ringo and I had thought maybe he might be, if only to bring Cousin Philip. Then we thought that maybe, since Father was coming anyway, General Forrest would let Father bring him, with Cousin Philip maybe handcuffed to Father and the soldier with the bayonet following, or maybe still just handcuffed to the soldier until he and Cousin Melisandre were married and Father unlocked him.
But General Forrest wasn’t one, and Cousin Philip wasn’t handcuffed to anybody and there was no bayonet and not even a soldier because these were all officers too. And we stood in the parlor while the home-made candles burnt in the last of sunset in the bright candlesticks which Philadelphia and Ringo and I had polished with the rest of the silver because Granny and Louvinia were both busy cooking and even Cousin Melisandre polished a little of it although Louvinia could pick out the ones she polished without hardly looking and hand them to Philadelphia to polish again: — Cousin Melisandre in the dress which hadn’t needed to be altered for her at all because Mother wasn’t much older than Cousin Melisandre even when she died, and which would still button on Granny too just like it did the day she married in it, and the chaplain and Father and Cousin Philip and the four others in their gray and braid and sabres and Cousin Melisandre’s face was all right now and Cousin Philip’s was too because it just had the beautiful-girl look on it and none of us had ever seen him look any other way. Then we ate, and Ringo and I anyway had been waiting on that for three days and then we did it and then it was over too, fading just a little each day until the palate no longer remembered and only our mouths would run a little water as we would name the dishes aloud to one another, until even the water would run less and less and less and it would take something we just hoped to eat some day if they ever got done fighting, to make it run at all.
And that was all. The last sound of wheel and hoof died away, Philadelphia came in from the parlor carrying the candlesticks and blowing out the candles as she came, and Louvinia set the kitchen clock on the table and gathered the last of soiled silver from supper into the dishpan and it might never have even been. “Well,” Granny said. She didn’t move, leaning her forearms on the table a little and we had never seen that before. She spoke to Ringo without turning her head: “Go call Joby and Lucius.” And even when we brought the trunk in and set it against the wall and opened back the lid, she didn’t move. She didn’t even look at Louvinia either. “Put the clock in too,” she said. “I don’t think we’ll bother to time ourselves tonight.”
Golden Land
IF HE HAD been thirty, he would not have needed the two aspirin tablets and the half glass of raw gin before he could bear the shower’s needling on his body and steady his hands to shave. But then when he had been thirty neither could he have afforded to drink as much each evening as he now drank; certainly he would not have done it in the company of the men and the women in which, at forty-eight, he did each evening, even though knowing during the very final hours filled with the breaking of glass and the shrill cries of drunken women above the drums and saxophones — the hours during which he carried a little better than his weight both in the amount of liquor consumed and in the number and sum of checks paid — that six or eight hours later he would rouse from what had not been sleep at all but instead that dreamless stupefaction of alcohol out of which last night’s turgid and licensed uproar would die, as though without any interval for rest or recuperation, into the familiar shape of his bedroom — the bed’s foot silhouetted by the morning light which entered the bougainvillaea-bound windows beyond which his painful and almost unbearable eyes could see the view which might be called the monument to almost twenty-five years of industry and desire, of shrewdness and luck and even fortitude — the opposite canyonflank dotted with the white villas halfhidden in imported olive groves or friezed by the sombre spaced columns of cypress like the façades of eastern temples, whose owners’ names and faces and even voices were glib and familiar in back corners of the United States and of America and of the world where those of Einstein and Rousseau and Esculapius had never sounded.
He didn’t waken sick. He never wakened ill nor became ill from drinking, not only because he had drunk too long and too steadily for that, but because he was too tough even after the thirty soft years; he came from too tough stock on that day thirty-four years ago when at fourteen he had fled, on the brakebeam of a westbound freight, the little lost Nebraska town named for, permeated with, his father’s history and existence — a town to be sure, but only in the sense that any shadow is larger than the object which casts it. It was still frontier even as he remembered it at five and six — the projected and increased shadow of a small outpost of sodroofed dugouts on the immense desolation of the plains where his father, Ira Ewing too, had been first to essay to wring wheat during the six days between those when, outdoors in spring and summer and in the fetid half dark of a snowbound dugout in the winter and fall, he preached. The second Ira Ewing had come a long way since then, from that barren and treeless village which he had fled by a night freight to where he now lay in a hundred-thousand-dollar house, waiting until he knew that he could rise and go to the bath and put the two aspirin tablets into his mouth. They — his mother and father — had tried to explain it to him — something about fortitude, the will to endure. At fourteen he could neither answer them with logic and reason nor explain what he wanted: he could only flee. Nor was he fleeing his father’s harshness and wrath. He was fleeing the scene itself — the treeless immensity in the lost center of which he seemed to see the sum of his father’s and mother’s dead youth and bartered lives as a tiny forlorn spot which nature permitted to green into brief and niggard wheat for a season’s moment before blotting it all with the primal and invincible snow as though (not even promise, not even threat) in grim and almost playful augury of the final doom of all life. And it was not even this that he was fleeing because he was not fleeing: it was only that absence, removal, was the only argument which fourteen knew how to employ against adults with any hope of success. He spent the next ten years half tramp half casual laborer as he drifted down the Pacific Coast to Los Angeles; at thirty he was married, to a Los Angeles girl, daughter of a carpenter, and father of a son and a daughter and with a foothold in real estate; at forty-eight he spent fifty thousand dollars a year, owning a business which he had built up unaided and preserved intact through nineteen-twenty-nine; he had given to his children luxuries and advantages which his own father not only could not have conceived in fact but would have condemned completely in theory — as it proved, as the paper which the Filipino chauffeur, who each morning carried him into the house and undressed him and put him to bed, had removed from the pocket of his topcoat and laid on the reading table proved, with reason. On the death of his father twenty years ago he had returned to Nebraska, for the first time, and fetched his mother back with him, and she was now established in a home of her own only the less sumptuous because she refused (with a kind of abashed and thoughtful unshakability which he did not remark) anything finer or more elaborate. It was the house in which they had all lived at first, though he and his wife and children had moved within the year. Three years ago they had moved again, into the house where he now waked in a select residential section of Beverley Hill
s, but not once in the nineteen years had he failed to stop (not even during the last five, when to move at all in the mornings required a terrific drain on that character or strength which the elder Ira had bequeathed him, which had enabled the other Ira to pause on the Nebraska plain and dig a hole for his wife to bear children in while he planted wheat) on his way to the office (twenty miles out of his way to the office) and spend ten minutes with her. She lived in as complete physical ease and peace as he could devise. He had arranged her affairs so that she did not even need to bother with money, cash, in order to live; he had arranged credit for her with a neighboring market and butcher so that the Japanese gardener who came each day to water and tend the flowers could do her shopping for her; she never even saw the bills. And the only reason she had no servant was that even at seventy she apparently clung stubbornly to the old habit of doing her own cooking and housework. So it would seem that he had been right. Perhaps there were times when, lying in bed like this and waiting for the will to rise and take the aspirin and the gin (mornings perhaps following evenings when he had drunk more than ordinarily and when even the six or seven hours of oblivion had not been sufficient to enable him to distinguish between reality and illusion) something of the old strong harsh Campbellite blood which the elder Ira must have bequeathed him might have caused him to see or feel or imagine his father looking down from somewhere upon him, the prodigal, and what he had accomplished. If this were so, then surely the elder Ira, looking down for the last two mornings upon the two tabloid papers which the Filipino removed from his master’s topcoat and laid on the reading table, might have taken advantage of that old blood and taken his revenge, not just for that afternoon thirty-four years ago but for the entire thirty-four years.
Complete Works of William Faulkner Page 656
