While you could count about five, Granny didn’t say anything. Then she said, “What?”
“He say ‘whut boy’,” Lucius said.
Then you could have counted ten. All we could hear was Lucius breathing. Then Granny said: “Did you wipe the mule down?”
“Yessum,” Lucius said.
“Did you turn her back into the pasture?”
“Yessum,” Lucius said.
“Then go to bed,” Granny said. “And you too,” she said.
General Forrest found out what boy. This time we didn’t know we had been asleep either, and it was no one mule now. The sun was just rising. When we heard Granny and scrambled to the window, yesterday wasn’t a patch on it. There were at least fifty of them now, in gray; the whole outdoors was full of men on horses, with Cousin Philip out in front of them, sitting his horse in almost exactly the same spot where he had been yesterday, looking up at Granny’s window and not seeing it or anything else this time either. He had a hat now. He was holding it clamped over his heart and he hadn’t shaved and yesterday he had looked younger than Ringo because Ringo always had looked about ten years older than me. But now, with the first sun-ray making a little soft fuzz in the gold-colored stubble on his face, he looked even younger than I did, and gaunt and worn in the face like he hadn’t slept any last night and something else in his face too: like he not only hadn’t slept last night but by godfrey he wasn’t going to sleep tonight either as long as he had anything to do with it. “Goodbye,” he said. “Goodbye,” and whirled his horse, spurring, and raised the new hat over his head like he had carried the sabre yesterday and the whole mass of them went piling back across flower beds and lawns and all and back down the drive toward the gate while Granny still stood at her window in her nightgown, her voice louder than any man’s anywhere, I don’t care who he is or what he would be doing: “Backhouse! Backhouse! You, Backhouse!”
So we ate breakfast early. Granny sent Ringo in his nightshirt to wake Louvinia and Lucius both. So Lucius had the mule saddled before Louvinia even got the fire lit. This time Granny didn’t write a note. “Go to Tallahatchie Crossing,” she told Lucius. “Sit there and wait for him if necessary.”
“Suppose they done already started the battle?” Lucius said.
“Suppose they have?” Granny said. “What business is that of yours or mine either? You find Bedford Forrest. Tell him this is important; it won’t take long. But don’t you show your face here again without him.”
Lucius rode away. He was gone four days. He didn’t even get back in time for the wedding, coming back up the drive about sundown on the fourth day with two soldiers in one of General Forrest’s forage wagons with the mule tied to the tailgate. He didn’t know where he had been and he never did catch up with the battle. “I never even heard it,” he told Joby and Lucius and Louvinia and Philadelphia and Ringo and me. “If wars always moves that far and that fast, I don’t see how they ever have time to fight.”
But it was all over then. It was the second day, the day after Lucius left. It was just after dinner this time and by now we were used to soldiers. But these were different, just five of them, and we never had seen just that few of them before and we had come to think of soldiers as either jumping on and off horses in the yard or going back and forth through Granny’s flower beds at full gallop. These were all officers and I reckon maybe I hadn’t seen so many soldiers after all because I never saw this much braid before. They came up the drive at a trot, like people just taking a ride, and stopped without trompling even one flower bed and General Forrest got down and came up the walk toward where Granny waited on the front gallery—a big, dusty man with a big beard so black it looked almost blue and eyes like a sleepy owl, already taking off his hat. “Well, Miss Rosie,” he said.
“Don’t call me Rosie,” Granny said. “Come in. Ask your gentlemen to alight and come in.”
“They’ll wait there,” General Forrest said. “We are a little rushed. My plans have.…” Then we were in the library. He wouldn’t sit down. He looked tired all right, but there was something else a good deal livelier than just tired. “Well, Miss Rosie,” he said. “I——”
“Don’t call me Rosie,” Granny said. “Can’t you even say Rosa?”
“Yessum,” he said. But he couldn’t. At least, he never did. “I reckon we both have had about enough of this. That boy——”
“Hah,” Granny said. “Night before last you were saying what boy. Where is he? I sent you word to bring him with you.”
“Under arrest,” General Forrest said. It was a considerable more than just tired. “I spent four days getting Smith just where I wanted him. After that, this boy here could have fought the battle.” He said ‘fit’ for fought just as he said ‘druv’ for drove and ‘drug’ for dragged. But maybe when you fought battles like he did, even Granny didn’t mind how you talked. “I won’t bother you with details. He didn’t know them either. All he had to do was exactly what I told him. I did everything but draw a diagram on his coat-tail of exactly what he was to do, no more and no less, from the time he left me until he saw me again: which was to make contact and then fall back. I gave him just exactly the right number of men so that he couldn’t do anything else but that. I told him exactly how fast to fall back and how much racket to make doing it and even how to make the racket. But what do you think he did?”
“I can tell you,” Granny said. “He sat on his horse at five o’clock yesterday morning, with my whole yard full of men behind him, yelling goodbye at my window.”
“He divided his men and sent half of them into the bushes to make a noise and took the other half who were the nearest to complete fools and led a sabre charge on that outpost. He didn’t fire a shot. He drove it clean back with sabres onto Smith’s main body and scared Smith so that he threw out all his cavalry and pulled out behind it and now I don’t know whether I’m about to catch him or he’s about to catch me. My provost finally caught the boy last night. He had come back and got the other thirty men of his company and was twenty miles ahead again, trying to find something to lead another charge against. ‘Do you want to be killed?’ I said. ‘Not especially,’ he said. ‘That is, I don’t especially care one way or the other.’ ‘Then neither do I,’ I said. ‘But you risked a whole company of my men.’ ‘Ain’t that what they enlisted for?’ he said. ‘They enlisted into a military establishment the purpose of which is to expend each man only at a profit. Or maybe you don’t consider me a shrewd enough trader in human meat?’ ‘I can’t say,’ he said. ‘Since day before yesterday I ain’t thought very much about how you or anybody else runs this war.’ ‘And just what were you doing day before yesterday that changed your ideas and habits?’ I said. ‘Fighting some of it,’ he said. ‘Dispersing the enemy.’ ‘Where?’ I said. ‘At a lady’s house a few miles from Jefferson,’ he said. ‘One of the niggers called her Granny like the white boy did. The others called her Miss Rosie.’ ” This time Granny didn’t say anything. She just waited.
“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 Harrykin 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 until 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 ba
yonet 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 ot 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.”