Uncollected Stories of William Faulkner Read Online Free PDF Page A

this thing all the way upstairs and then tote it back down tomorrow?”
    “Somebody is,” Granny said. “Are you going to help or are me and Bayard going to do it alone?”
    Then Louvinia came in. She had already undressed. She looked tall as a ghost; she came and shoved Joby away and took hold of the trunk. “Git away, nigger,” she said. Joby groaned, then he shoved Louvinia away.
    “Git away, woman,” he said. He lifted his end of the trunk, then he looked back at Loosh, who had never let his end down. “If you gonter ride on hit, pick up your feet,” he said. We carried the trunk up to Granny’s room, and Joby was setting it down again, until Granny made him and Loosh pull the bed out from the wall and slide the trunk in behind it; Ringo and I helped again. I don’t believe it lacked much of weighing a thousand pounds.
    “Now I want everybody to go right to bed, so we can get an early start tomorrow,” Granny said.
    “That’s you,” Joby said. “Git everybody up at crack of day and it be noon ’fore we get started.”
    “Nummine about that,” Louvinia said. “You do like Miss Rosa tell you.” We went out. And then Ringo and I looked ateach other, because we heard the key turn in Granny’s lock.
    “I didn’t even know she had a key, let alone hit would turn,” Ringo said.
    “And that’s some more of yawl’s and Joby’s business,” Louvinia said. She was already in her cot; when we looked at her she was already covering her head up with the quilt. “Yawl get on to bed.”
    We went to our room and undressed. “Which un you reckon she dremp about?” Ringo said.
       We ate breakfast by lamplight; Ringo and I had on our Sunday clothes. When Granny came out to the wagon, she was carrying the musket. “Here,” she said to Joby. Joby looked at the musket.
    “We won’t need hit,” he said.
    “Put it in the wagon,” Granny said.
    “Nome, we won’t need nothing like that,” Joby said. “We be in Memphis so quick won’t even nobody have time to hear we on the road. I speck Marse John got the Yankees pretty well cleant out twixt here and Memphis anyway.”
    This time Granny didn’t say anything at all. She just held the musket out, and Joby put it into the wagon and we drove away, with Louvinia standing on the porch with father’s old hat on top of her head rag. Granny sat on the seat by Joby, with her hat on the top of her head and her umbrella already raised before the dew began to fall. Then I didn’t look back, but I could feel Ringo turning every few feet, even after we were outside the gates and in the road to town. Then we began to go around the curve. “Hit gone now,” Ringo said. “Good-by, Sartoris; Memphis, how-de-do!”
    The sun was just coming up when we came in sight of Jefferson; we passed a company of troops bivouacked in a pasture on the edge of town, eating breakfast. Their uniforms were not gray any more now; they were almost the color of dead leaves and some of them didn’t even have uniforms, and one man waved a skillet at us and he had on a pair of Yankee pants. “Hey, Miss’ippi!” he hollered. “Hooraw for Arkansas!” We left Granny at the Compsons’ to tell them good-by and to ask Mrs. Compson to see about her flowers now and then, and Ringo and I drove the wagon to the store, and we were just coming out with the salt when Uncle Buck McCaslin came hobbling across the square, waving his stick and hollering, and behind him the captainof the company we had passed eating breakfast.
    “By Godfrey, there he is!” Uncle Buck hollered, shaking his stick at me. “There’s John Sartoris’ boy!”
    The captain looked at me. “I’ve heard about your father,” he said.
    “Heard of him?” Uncle Buck hollered; by now they had begun to stop along the walk to listen to Uncle Buck, like they always did. “Who ain’t heard about him in this country? Git the Yankees to tell you about him sometime. By Godfrey, he raised the first damn regiment in Mississippi