The Unvanquished Read Online Free PDF

delivering a homily suitable only for a lady with grandchildren—or one grandchild and a negro companion.” Now he was about to go too, we could tell it even beneath the skirt; this time it was Granny herself:
    “There is little of refreshment I can offer you, sir. But if a glass of cool milk after your ride—”
    Only for a long time he didn’t answer at all; Louvinia said how he just looked at Granny with his hard bright eyes and that hard bright silence full of laughing. “No, no,” he said. “I thank you. You are taxing yourself beyond mere politeness and into sheer bravado.”
    “Louvinia,” Granny said, “conduct the gentleman to the diningroom and serve him with what we have.”
    He was out of the room now because Granny began to tremble now, trembling and trembling but not relaxing yet; we could hear her panting now. And we breathed too now, looking at one another. “We never killed him!” I whispered. “We never killed him! We haven’t killed anybody at all!” So it was Granny’s body that told us again, only this time I could almost feel him looking at Granny’s spread skirt where we crouched while he thanked her for the milk and told her his name and regiment.
    “Perhaps it is just as well that you have no grandchildren,” he said. “Since doubtless you wish to live in peace. I have three boys myself, you see. And I have not even had time to become a grandparent.” And now there wasn’t any laughing behind his voice and Louviniasaid he was standing there in the door, with the brass bright on his dark blue and his hat in his hand and his bright beard and hair, looking at Granny without the laughing now: “I wont apologise; fools cry out at wind or fire. But permit me to say and hope that you will never have anything worse than this to remember us by.” Then he was gone. We heard his spurs in the hall and on the porch, then the horse, dying away, ceasing, and then Granny let go. She went back into the chair with her hand at her breast and her eyes closed and the sweat on her face in big drops; all of a sudden I began to holler, “Louvinia! Louvinia!” But she opened her eyes then and looked at me; they were looking at me when they opened. Then she looked at Ringo for a moment, but she looked back at me, panting.
    “Bayard,” she said. “What was that word you used?”
    “Word?” I said. “When, Granny?” Then I remembered; I didn’t look at her and she lying back in the chair, looking at me and panting.
    “Dont repeat it. You cursed. You used obscene language, Bayard.”
    I didn’t look at her. I could see Ringo’s feet too. “Ringo did too,” I said. She didn’t answer, but I could feel her looking at me; I said suddenly: “And you told a lie. You said we were not here.”
    “I know it,” she said. She moved. “Help me up.” She got out of the chair, holding to us. We didn’t know what she was trying to do. We just stood there while she held to us and to the chair and let herself down toher knees beside it. It was Ringo that knelt first. Then I knelt too while she asked the Lord to forgive her for telling the lie. Then she rose; we didn’t have time to help her. “Go to the kitchen and get a pan of water and the soap,” she said. “Get the new soap.”
5.
    It was late, as if time had slipped up on us while we were still caught, enmeshed by the sound of the musket and were too busy to notice it; the sun shone almost level into our faces while we stood at the edge of the back gallery, spitting, rinsing the soap from our mouths turn and turn about from the gourd dipper, spitting straight into the sun. For a while, just by breathing we could blow soap bubbles, but soon it was just the taste of the spitting. Then even that began to go away although the impulse to spit did not, while away to the north we could see the cloudbank, faint and blue and faraway at the base and touched with copper sun along the crest. When Father came home in the spring, we tried to understand