Chickamauga and Other Civil War Stories

  “I tried to tell you to wait!” Ab Snopes said behind us, “I tried to tell you them Yankees had done caught on!”

  After Joby and Lucius and Ringo and I finished burying the trunk in the pit and hiding the shovel-marks, I found Cousin Philip in the summer house. His sabre and belt were propped against the wall but I don’t reckon even he knew what had become of his hat. He had his coat off too and was wiping it with his handkerchief and watching the house with one eye around the edge of the door. When I came in he straightened up and I thought at first he was looking at me. Then I don’t know what he was looking at. “That beautiful girl,” he said. “Fetch me a comb.”

  “They’re waiting for you in the house,” I said. “Granny wants to know what’s the matter.” Cousin Melisandre was all right now. It took Louvinia and Philadelphia both and finally Granny to get her into the house but Louvinia brought the elder-flower wine before Granny had time to send her after it and now Cousin Melisandre and Granny were waiting in the parlor.

  “Your sister,” Cousin Philip said. “And a hand-mirror.”

  “No, Sir,” I said. “She’s just our cousin. From Memphis. Granny says—” Because he didn’t know Granny. It was pretty good for her to wait any time for anybody. But he didn’t even let me finish.

  “That beautiful, tender girl,” he said. “And send a nigger with a basin of water and a towel.” I went back toward the house. This time when I looked back I couldn’t see his eye around the door-edge. “And a clothes brush,” he said.

  Granny wasn’t waiting very much. She was at the front door. “Now what?” she said. I told her. “Does the man think we are giving a ball here in the middle of the day? Tell him I said to come on in and wash on the back gallery like we do. Louvinia’s putting dinner on, and we’re already late.” But Granny didn’t know Cousin Philip either. I told her again. She looked at me. “What did he say?” she said.

  “He didn’t say anything,” I said. “Just that beautiful girl.”

  “That’s all he said to me too,” Ringo said. I hadn’t heard him come in. “Sides the soap and water. Just that beautiful girl.”

  “Was he looking at you either when he said it?” I said.

  “No,” Ringo said. “I just thought for a minute he was.”

  Now Granny looked at Ringo and me both. “Hah,” she said, and afterward when I was older I found out that Granny already knew Cousin Philip too, that she could look at one of them and know all the other Cousin Melisandres and Cousin Philips both without having to see them. “I sometimes think that bullets are just about the least fatal things that fly, especially in war.—All right,” she said. “Take him his soap and water. But hurry.”

  We did. This time he didn’t say “that beautiful girl.” He said it twice. He took off his coat and handed it to Ringo. “Brush it good,” he said. “Your sister, I heard you say.”

  “No, you didn’t” I said.

  “No matter,” he said. “I want a nosegay. To carry in my hand.”

  “Those flowers are Granny’s,” I said.

  “No matter,” he said. He rolled up his sleeves and began to wash. “A small one. About a dozen blooms. Get something pink.”

  I went and got the flowers. I don’t know whether Granny was still at the front door or not. Maybe she wasn’t. At least she never said anything. So I picked the ones Ab Snopes’ new Yankee horse had already trampled down and wiped the dirt off of them and straightened them out and went back to the summer house where Ringo was holding the hand-glass while Cousin Philip combed his hair. Then he put on his coat and buckled on his sabre again and held his feet out one at a time for Ringo to wipe his boots off with the towel, and Ringo saw it. I wouldn’t have spoken at all because we were already later for dinner than ever now, even if there hadn’t never been a Yankee on the place. “You tore your britches on them Yankees,” Ringo said.

  So I went back to the house. Granny was standing in the hall. This time she just said, “Yes?” It was almost quiet.

  “He tore his britches,” I said. And she knew more about Cousin Philip than even Ringo could find out by looking at him. She had the needle already threaded in the bosom of her dress. And I went back to the summer house and then we came back to the house and up to the front door and I waited for him to go into the hall but he didn’t, he just stood there holding the nosegay in one hand and his hat in the other, not very old, looking at that moment anyway not very much older than Ringo and me for all his braid and sash and sabre and boots and spurs, and even after just two years looking like all our soldiers and most of the other people too did: as if it had been so long now since he had had all he wanted to eat at one time that even his memory and palate had forgotten it and only his body remembered, standing there with his nosegay and that beautiful-girl look in his face like he couldn’t have seen anything even if he had been looking at it.

  “No,” he said. “Announce me. It should be your nigger. But no matter.” He said his full name, all three of them, twice, as if he thought I might forget them before I could reach the parlor.

  “Go on in,” I said. “They’re waiting for you. They had already been waiting for you even before you found your pants were torn.”

  “Announce me,” he said. He said his name again. “Of Tennessee. Lieutenant, Savage’s Battalion, Forrest’s Command, Provisional Army, Department of the West.”

  So I did. We crossed the hall to the parlor, where Granny stood between Cousin Melisandre’s chair and the table where the decanter of elder-flower wine and three fresh glasses and even a plate of the tea cakes Louvinia had learned to make from cornmeal and molasses were sitting, and he stopped again at that door too and I know he couldn’t even see Cousin Melisandre for a minute, even though he never had looked at anything else but her. “Lieutenant Philip St-Just Back-house,” I said. I said it loud, because he had repeated it to me three times so I would be sure to get it right and I wanted to say it to suit him too since even if he had made us a good hour late for dinner, at least he had saved the silver. “Of Tennessee,” I said. “Savage’s Battalion, Forrest’s Command, Provisional Army, Department of the West.”

  While you could count maybe five, there wasn’t anything at all. Then Cousin Melisandre screamed. She sat bolt upright on the chair like she had sat beside the trunk in the litter of planks and shingles in the back yard this morning, with her eyes shut and her mouth open again, screaming.

  3

  So we were still another half an hour late for dinner. Though this time it never needed anybody but Cousin Philip to get Cousin Melisandre upstairs. All he needed to do was try to speak to her again. Then Granny came back down and said, “Well, if we don’t want to just quit and start calling it supper, we’d better walk in and eat it within the next hour and a half at least.” So we walked in. Ab Snopes was already waiting in the dining-room. I reckon he had been waiting longer than anybody, because after all Cousin Melisandre wasn’t any kin to him. Ringo drew Granny’s chair and we sat down. Some of it was cold. The rest of it had been on the stove so long now that when you ate it it didn’t matter whether it was cold or not. But Cousin Philip didn’t seem to mind. And maybe it didn’t take his memory very long to remember again what it was like to have all he wanted to eat, but I don’t think his palate ever tasted any of it. He would sit there eating like he hadn’t seen any food of any kind in at least a week, and like he was expecting what was even already on his fork to vanish before he could get it into his mouth. Then he would stop with the fork halfway to his mouth and sit there looking at Cousin Melisandre’s empty place, laughing. That is, I don’t know what else to call it but laughing. Until at last I said,

  “Why don’t you change your name?”

  Then Granny quit eating too. She looked at me over her spectacles. Then she took both hands and lifted the spectacles up her nose until she could look at me through them. Then she even pushed the spectacles up into her front hair and looked at me. “That’s the first sensible thing I’ve heard said on this place sinc
e eleven o’clock this morning,” she said. “It’s so sensible and simple that I reckon only a child could have thought of it.” She looked at him. “Why don’t you?”

  He laughed some more. That is, his face did the same way and he made the same sound again. “My grandfather was at King’s Mountain, with Marion all through Carolina. My uncle was defeated for Governor of Tennessee by a corrupt and traitorous cabal of tavern-keepers and Republican Abolitionists, and my father died at Chapultepec. After that, the name they bore is not mine to change. Even my life is not mine so long as my country lies bleeding and ravished beneath an invader’s iron heel.” Then he stopped laughing, or whatever it was. Then his face looked surprised. Then it quit looking surprised, the surprise fading out of it steady at first and gradually faster but not very much faster like the heat fades out of a piece of iron on a blacksmith’s anvil until his face just looked amazed and quiet and almost peaceful. “Unless I lose it in battle,” he said.

  “You can’t very well do that sitting here,” Granny said.

  “No,” he said. But I don’t think he even heard her except with his ears. He stood up. Even Ab Snopes was watching him now, his knife stopped halfway to his mouth with a wad of greens on the end of the blade. “Yes,” Cousin Philip said. His face even had the beautiful-girl look on it again. “Yes,” he said. He thanked Granny for his dinner. That is, I reckon that’s what he had told his mouth to say. It didn’t make much sense to us, but I don’t think he was paying any attention to it at all. He bowed. He wasn’t looking at Granny nor at anything else. He said “Yes” again. Then he went out. Ringo and I followed to the front door and watched him mount his horse and sit there for a minute, bareheaded, looking up at the upstairs windows. It was Granny’s room he was looking at, with mine and Ringo’s room next to it. But Cousin Melisandre couldn’t have seen him even if she had been in either one of them, since she was in bed on the other side of the house with Philadelphia probably still wringing the cloths out in cold water to lay on her head. He sat the horse well. He rode it well, too: light and easy and back in the saddle and toes in perpendicular from ankle to knee as Father had taught me. It was a good horse too.

  “It’s a damn good horse,” I said.

  “Git the soap,” Ringo said.

  But even then I looked quick back down the hall, even if I could hear Granny talking to Ab Snopes in the dining-room. “She’s still in there,” I said.

  “Hah,” Ringo said. “I done tasted soap in my mouth for a cuss I thought was a heap further off than that.”

  Then Cousin Philip spurred the horse and was gone. Or so Ringo and I thought. Two hours ago none of us had ever even heard of him; Cousin Melisandre had seen him twice and sat with her eyes shut screaming both times. But after we were older, Ringo and I realized that Cousin Philip was probably the only one in the whole lot of us that really believed even for one moment that he had said goodbye forever, that not only Granny and Louvinia knew better but Cousin Melisandre did too, no matter what his last name had the bad luck to be.

  We went back to the dining-room. Then I realized that Ab Snopes had been waiting for us to come back. Then we both knew he was going to ask Granny something because nobody wanted to be alone when they had to ask Granny something even when they didn’t know they were going to have trouble with it. We had known Ab for over a year now. I should have known what it was like Granny already did. He stood up. “Well, Miz Millard,” he said. “I figger you’ll be safe all right from now on, with Bed Forrest and his boys right there in Jefferson. But until things quiet down a mite more, I’ll just leave the horses in your lot for a day or two.”

  “What horses?” Granny said. She and Ab didn’t just look at one another. They watched one another.

  “Them fresh-captured horses from this morning,” Ab said.

  “What horses?” Granny said. Then Ab said it.

  “My horses.” Ab watched her.

  “Why?” Granny said. But Ab knew what she meant.

  “I’m the only grown man here,” he said. Then he said, “I seen them first. They were chasing me before—” Then he said, talking fast now; his eyes had gone kind of glazed for a second but now they were bright again, looking in the stubbly dirty-colored fuzz on his face like two chips of broken plate in a worn-out door-mat: “Spoils of war! I brought them here! I tolled them in here: a military and-bush! And as the only and ranking Confedrit military soldier present—”

  “You ain’t a soldier,” Granny said. “You stipulated that to Colonel Sartoris yourself while I was listening. You told him yourself you would be his independent horse-captain but nothing more.”

  “Ain’t that just exactly what I am trying to be?” he said. “Didn’t I bring all six of them horses in here in my own possession, the same as if I was leading them on a rope?”

  “Hah,” Granny said. “A spoil of war or any other kind of spoil don’t belong to a man or a woman either until they can take it home and put it down and turn their back on it. You never had time to get home with even the one you were riding. You ran in the first open gate you came to, no matter whose gate it was.”

  “Except it was the wrong one,” he said. His eyes quit looking like china. They didn’t look like anything. But I reckon his face would still look like an old door-mat even after he had turned all the way white. “So I reckon I got to even walk back to town,” he said. “The woman that would …” His voice stopped. He and Granny looked at one another.

  “Don’t you say it,” Granny said.

  “Nome,” he said. He didn’t say it. “… a man of seven horses ain’t likely to lend him a mule.”

  We all went out to the lot. I don’t reckon that even Ab knew until then that Granny had already found where he thought he had hidden the first horse and had it brought up to the lot with the other six. But at least he already had his saddle and bridle with him. But it was too late. Six of the horses moved about loose in the lot. The seventh one was tied just inside the gate with a piece of plow-line. It wasn’t the horse Ab had come on because that horse had a blaze. Ab had known Granny long enough too. He should have known. Maybe he did. But at least he tried. He opened the gate.

  “Well,” he said, “it ain’t getting no earlier. I reckon I better—”

  “Wait,” Granny said. Then we looked at the horse which was tied to the fence. At first glance it looked the best one of the seven. You had to see it just right to tell its near leg was sprung a little, maybe from being worked too hard too young under too much weight. “Take that one,” Granny said.

  “That ain’t mine,” Ab said. “That’s one of yourn. I’ll just—”

  “Take that one,” Granny said. Ab looked at her. You could have counted at least ten.

  “Hell fire, Miz Millard,” he said.

  “I’ve told you before about cursing on this place,” Granny said.

  “Yessum,” Ab said. Then he said it again: “Hell fire.” He went into the lot and rammed the bit into the tied horse’s mouth and clapped the saddle on and snatched the piece of plow-line off and threw it over the fence and got up and Granny stood there until he had ridden out of the lot and Ringo closed the gate and that was the first time I noticed the chain and padlock from the smokehouse door and Ringo locked it and handed Granny the key and Ab sat for a minute, looking down at her. “Well, good-day,” he said. “I just hope for the sake of the Confedricy that Bed Forrest don’t never tangle with you with all the horses he’s got.” Then he said it again, maybe worse this time because now he was already on a horse pointed toward the gate: “Or you’ll damn shore leave him just one more passel of infantry before he can spit twice.”