“Careful now. Dont you fall in too. It’s my leg. I cant move.” The daughter could see a little now, as if the driving rain particles were faintly incandescent, holding in each drop something of the departed day and disseminating it—the heavy trunk which the older woman had got there single-handed from the house, how, the daughter never knew, the pit which she had dug and into which she had fallen.
“How long have you been there?” the daughter cried, already turning back toward the house, running, the older woman calling after her in that same cold sharp voice, forbidding her to call the negroes, repeating “the silver. The silver”, the daughter calling toward the house, still not loud, just peremptory and urgent. Presently the nurse came with two negro men. They lifted the older woman from the pit.
“Joanna can help me into the house,” she said. “You stay and see that Will and Awce bury the trunk.” But the two men had to carry her, though it was not until the next morning that they found for certain the hip was broken. And though a doctor came that day the mother died three nights later from pneumonia, not telling even then how she had got the heavy trunk out there nor how long she had lain in the pit slowly filling with rain. So they buried her, and they concealed carefully the marks of digging above the buried trunk; and now in the buckboard again, the child wrapped in a blanket beside her, the daughter watched the building of a hidden pen for the hogs deep in the river bottom and the gathering and cribbing of the corn. They would have food but little else, since the cotton, the money crop, had vanished. In a row of heterogeneous and carefully labelled bottles and phials in her father’s desk were the seeds hoarded in the summer from the kitchen garden; in the next spring she watched the planting of them, and in the man’s shoes and now in a pair of her father’s trousers, in the buckboard with the child beside her (he was to be weaned, he was to learn to walk and talk in that buckboard; he ate and slept in it across his mother’s lap, feeling against his side the hard shape of the derringer in her pocket) she saw the corn planted and then gathered again. During that year she received two letters. The first one was in the shaky script of an old man (she did not even recognise it to be her father’s hand at first) on soiled cheap paper in a soiled envelope, addressed to her mother from Rock Island Prison. The second she did know. It was the same bold dashing sprawl she had fetched back from Nashville on the fly-specked bill-of-fare. He had been wounded, not bad; the paragraph devoted to his stay in the Richmond hospital had an almost Lucullan tone. He had been transferred to the Department of the West, he was now having a single day with his parents, following which he would join Van Dorn’s cavalry corps on an expedition (destination unstated) the conclusion of which would leave him within a day’s ride of that son whom he had never seen and to whom he sent his duty. But he never reached home. One night he rode howling into Holly Springs behind Van Dorn’s long floating hair and the next day his body was identified from one of his wife’s letters by an old man who had shot him from his kitchen door, apparently in the act of breaking into the chicken-roost.
II
All this the listener—the man of sixty-nine, the banker trusted shrewd and successful, who had been that boy of four and five and six wearing out the last of the garments his mother had cut down to fit him out of the clothes his grandfather had left in the house (there was an old setter dog which had grown from puppyhood on a rug beside the grandfather’s bed, which, blind now, followed the boy through the monotonous days of his solitary childhood in which he was not lonely simply because he had never learned what the obverse of loneliness might be, following the clothes)—remembered. But it was not from his mother that he had learned it, it was from the three negroes who remained out of the more than forty, and even at six this fact did not surprise him who had learned already without being aware of it that people dont talk about what they really suffer, they dont have to; that he who talks about suffering has not suffered yet, who talks about pride is not proud. So it seemed to him that to his mother the whole debacle, the catastrophe in which her life had collapsed about her head as the big square house was gradually doing, had been summed up forever in the figure of that young man leaning in the crimson sash on the sabre beneath the martial glare of unshaded lights on that December night in 1861, whom she would take off to the life—a thin woman (a shape too, a vessel filled with the distillation of all its thoughts and actions—the lust and folly, the courage, the cowardice, the vanity and pride and shame) middleaged before her time, in a faded calico dress and sunbonnet, leaning on the Yankee musket barrel in the barren kitchen of the ruined house, saying, “Who wants to spit into the Potomac River before Easter Sunday?”
He remembered it, sitting in his office (the private one, the cubbyhole he insisted upon keeping at the very top of the bank building, which he would retire to in the slack end of afternoon and sit smoking and watching the sun set across the River) and remembering things which had happened before remembering began and which he knew were not memory but hearsay yet heard and reheard so often and so much that he had long since given over trying to say where listening stopped and remembering started. He had a listener himself now, a man half his age who had burst unannounced into the little remote bare room ten or twelve years ago, saying, “You are her son. You are Lewis Randolph’s son.”—a sick intelligent face which at once gave Gordon the impression of possessing no other life, of existing nowhere else, of being as much a part of the dying and peaceful end of an old man’s afternoons as the bare desk, the two chairs, the slow familiar mutations of seasonal shadows of the rounding zodiac, solstice and equinox—a sick face which seemed to be not the framework for sight nor mask for thought but merely the container of a voracious listening, employing the organ of speech only to repeat “Again. Tell it again. What did she look like? What did she do? What did she say?” And he—Gordon—could not tell him. He could not even describe her. She had been too constant; he had known nothing else, he saw her only in terms of himself and when he tried to tell it he told it only in terms of himself: of lying wrapped in the quilt, then sitting alone on the seat of the buckboard, then playing about on the earth beside it while his mother in the calico dress whose pocket sagged with the weight of the derringer which next to her breasts was one of the first objects of his remembering, the nerve-ends of his flesh as constantly aware of the hard compact shape as his infant stomach was of the breast beneath the calico, stood with her arms folded on the top rail, watching the negro plowing beyond the fence. “And he plowed fast too,” he said. “While she was there.” And of the derringer itself: and he did not remember this even though he was there, in the kitchen, at first asleep in the crib contrived of a wooden box beside the stove, then sitting up in it, awake yet making no sound, watching with the round eyes of infancy the scene before him—the woman in the faded calico turning at the stove, the man in blue entering, the blue crash and jangle of carbines and bayonets and sabres; he could not even know, remember, if he actually heard the derringer explode or not, all he believed he remembered was that the kitchen was empty again and suddenly he was clutched against his mother’s knees, her hands hard upon him and perhaps the reek of powder in the air and perhaps not and maybe one of the negresses screaming, since all he did believe he remembered was the face beneath the faded sunbonnet and even that merely the same face which watched the negro plowing or leaned above the propped musket barrel, so that all he knew for certain was that after that day the derringer was gone, he never again felt the shape of it against his flesh when she held him: and the listener: “They came there and found her alone? What did she do? Try to remember.”
“I dont know. I dont think they did anything. We didn’t have anything to steal, and they didn’t burn the house. I suppose they didn’t do anything.”
“But she. What did she do?”
“I dont know. Not even the niggers would tell me what happened. Maybe they didn’t know either. ‘Ask her to tell you herself, when you man enough to hear it,’ they told me.”
“But you were not t
hat man,” the listener said, cried, with a sort of joy, exultation. “Even if you were born of her.”
“Maybe not,” Gordon said.
“Yes,” the listener said, quietly now, the sick intelligent face blank now even of listening: “She killed him. She buried him, hid the body. She did it alone. She didn’t want help. Burying one Yankee would have been no feat for the daughter of the woman who dug a pit to hide a trunk of silver alone in the dark. Yes, she wouldn’t tell even you. And you were not man enough to ask, even if you were her son.”
He didn’t ask and time passed and one day he entered remembering; he knew this, saw it; he was there, a year after the Surrender when his grandfather came home, from the Rock Island Prison. He came on foot, in rags. He had neither hair nor teeth, and he would not talk at all. He would not eat at the table but would take his plate of food from the kitchen and hide with it like a beast; he would not remove his clothes to go to bed and he would not sleep in the bed in his room but on the floor beneath it as the old dog had done, and the daughter and the negroes would have to clean the floor behind him of gnawed bones and filth as if he were a dog or an infant. He never spoke of the prison; they did not even know if he knew the war was over or not—thus, until the negress Joanna came to the daughter in the kitchen one morning and said, “Marster’s gone.”
“Gone?” the daughter said. “You mean—”
“Nome. Not dead. Just gone. Awce been hunting him since daylight. But ain’t nobody seen him.” They never saw him again. They dragged cisterns and old wells and even the river. They searched and asked through the country. But he was gone, leaving no trace save yesterday’s bones even in the room that was his, even the clothes which had hung in the closet long since worn out by the child, even the old blind setter long since dead.
So he didn’t ask about the Yankee, and to the boy of five the advent and departure of the ragged and speechless old man was the coming and going of a stranger, something actually less than human, making no mark and leaving no trace; although for some time now he had come into his heritage and been bondsman to memory, he could not even remember if he ever asked even the negress what had become of the old man who lived in the house for that short summer month. That was the last of invasions; the next would be exodus and he would lead it. For he was growing now, not fast but steadily. He would never be as tall as his father, this due not to his mother’s smallness but to the paucity of food during his nursing time which caused her milk to lack the quality to make him the large bones which would have been his right. But after that time he suffered nothing from malnutrition; the two women, the white one and the black, found food for him somehow, so that he gave promise of being, even though short of stature, sound and well enough—a stocky strong boy who at twelve chopped cotton as well as the negroes and who at fifteen spelled the negro man at the plow, who was old too, a contemporary of his grandfather. Letters came and went again now and in the summer of his grandfather’s disappearance they had the first one from his father’s parents in Memphis. They were written invariably by the grandmother, a delicate spidery script on faded fine note paper smelling even yet of the lavender of the drawer in which they had been hidden doubtless since 1862, beginning ‘Mr. Gordon says’ or ‘Mr. Gordon asked me to write’. Yet they were not cold, they were just baffled, still uncomprehending—they still referred to the boy as ‘little Charles’—written in another age and time, venturing timidly forth: ‘We would like to see him, see you both. But as Mr. Gordon and I are old and don’t travel … since it seems to be safe to go back and forth now … hoping you would come and see us, come and live with us.…’ His mother may have answered them, he did not know. He was too busy. At eight and nine he could milk, squatting on a miniature of his mother’s stool in the cowshed (she would milk, she would fork hay and clean stables like a man, but she would neither cook nor sweep) and at twelve and fourteen he was fitting wagon spokes and shoeing horses, then in the evening they would sit on either side of a kitchen hearth, the boy with a smooth white-oak chip and a sharpened charred stick, the thin woman in faded calico who had not changed one iota, holding the worn speller or the table of figures and watching him across them exactly as she would watch the negro plowing across the fence. So, until the letter came for him in his sixteenth year, the grandparents in Memphis were even less to him than that other one whom at least he could follow silently up the stairs and peer through the door and watch crouched facing into the corner of the room over his plate of food like a beast—nothing, less than nothing; a semi-yearly appearance of delicate faded envelopes bearing the spidery superscription which looked not as if it had been lightly and tremblingly traced but as though it had faded in some prolonged transition into the ruined Mississippi house, had arrived there almost by accident like the almost unremarked fall of the ultimate last leaf of a dying year. Then the envelope came addressed to him. His mother handed it to him without a word. He read it in secret, then two nights later as they sat opposite each other at the kitchen hearth he said, “I’m going to Memphis,” and then sat exactly as a horse which knows it cannot reach shelter faces into the final shred of quiet at the forefront of a storm. But the storm never came. His mother did not even cease to knit; it was his own voice that rose:
“I’ve got a right to. He’s my grandfather. I want—”
“Did I say you didn’t have?”
“I’m going to get rich. I’m going to be rich as any carpet-bagger. So I can—” He was about to say So I can do more for you, only he realized that she would never permit anyone to do more for her than she could do for herself, not even him. “Don’t think I’m going up there just because they are rich and haven’t got any folks!”
“Why shouldn’t you, if you want to? He’s your grandfather, just as you said. And rich. Why shouldn’t you ride around in a broadcloth coat on a blooded horse all day long if you want to? When do you want to go?” Now was his time to say All right. I won’t go. If you have made out for both of us here this long, I can make out for both of us from now on. But he didn’t say it. Because she did believe he was going up there for the fine horse and the broadcloth, and it was too late now; it was to be years yet before, sitting in his small bare afternoon cubbyhole, the smoke of the good cigar peaceful and windless about his head, he would say to himself with humorous admiration, “By God! I believe she even faked that letter herself.” So he said nothing, and after a moment she quit looking at him and spoke to the negress over her shoulder, and he realized that she had never even ceased knitting: “Get the trunk down from the attic, Joanna. And tell Awce to have the wagon hitched up at daylight.”
She didn’t go to the railroad station with him. She didn’t even kiss him goodbye; she just stood in the kitchen door in that late fall dawn—the thin woman in the faded calico, not so much middle-aged as of no age and almost of no sex, who years ago had put off over night and forever youth and womanhood too like the virgin’s confirmation dress, who advanced impervious through time like the prow of a vessel through water, no more permanently marked by the succeeding seas. The railroad was twenty-five miles away. He had one suit, four home spun shirts, a pair of sheets and two towels made of flour sacking, a black gum tooth brush and a lump of home made soap in a tin can, ten silver dollars and the letter bearing his grandparents’ address sewn into his waistband. He had never seen a railroad until he climbed with the cowhide trunk into the box car. He had been in it sixteen hours without even water when the car stopped for the last time. But even then he did not get out at once. He took from his waist band the page which bore his grandfather’s address and folded it carefully and began to tear it across and across again and again until there was no more purchase for his fingers, watching the fragments flutter down onto the cinders. I’ll write her he thought. I’ll write to her first thing and tell her. Then he thought No. Damn if I will. If she wants to believe that about me, let her believe it.
His first job was in a cotton compress, loading and unloading the bales from freight cars
and steamboats. He worked side by side with negroes, the crew boss was a negro. Once a month he wrote the letter home telling nothing save that he was well. If she wants to believe I am riding around in a frock-tailed coat on that horse, let her, he thought. Then one day his name was called, he looked up and saw an old man in a good suit and linen, leaning on a stick, trembling, saying in a shaking voice: “Charles. Charles.”
“My name is Randolph,” he said.
“Yes, yes; of course,” the grandfather said. “Why didn’t you—we wouldn’t have known if your mother hadn’t—the only letter we have had from her in a year—”
“Mother? But she couldn’t have known—You mean she knew I wasn’t living with you?”
“Yes. Just that you were in Memphis, working. And we wouldn’t have known—wouldn’t have—”
She knew, he thought, in a surge of pride and vindication: She knew all the time I wasn’t going to. She knew all the time. He tried to explain it; that was the next Sunday—a tall solid quiet dim brick house among magnolias, a plump small woman in black, with soft tiny trembling ineffectual hands and baffled blue eyes, the heavy shuttered parlor, the portrait, the dashing gallant face beneath the draped old flag and the sabre, above the mantle; he tried to explain it.
“You don’t need to work, labor among negroes,” the grandfather said. “School. The University, a position waiting for you in the office.” He looked at the calm obdurate face. “Is it because I have a Yankee for a partner? He lost his son too. That was why he came South: trying to find him. Our sons at least died at home.”