The father grunted. “I’ll be bound. If there was trouble there, I’ll be bound he was in it. You tell him,” he said violently, “if he lets them yellowbellied priests bamboozle him, I’ll shoot him myself quick as I would a Reb.”
“You tell him to come on back home,” the oldest girl said. “That’s what you tell him.”
“Yessum,” the messenger said. “I’ll shore tell him. I’m going east to Indianny for a spell. But I’ll see him soon as I get back. I’ll shore tell him. Oh, yes; I nigh forgot. He said to tell you the woman and kid was fine.”
“Whose woman and kid?” the father said.
“His,” the messenger said. “I thank you kindly again. And good-bye all.”
They heard from the son a third time before they saw him again. They heard him shouting one day out in front of the house, though still some distance away. It was in 1866. The family had moved again, a hundred miles further west, and it had taken the son two months to find them, riding back and forth across Kansas and Missouri in a buckboard with two leather sacks of gold dust and minted coins and crude jewels thrown under the seat like a pair of old shoes, before he found the sod cabin and drove up to it, shouting. Sitting in a chair before the cabin door was a man. “There’s father,” Nathaniel said to the woman on the buckboard seat beside him. “See?” Though the father was only in his late fifties, his sight had begun to fail. He did not distinguish his son’s face until the buckboard had stopped and the sisters had billowed shrieking through the door. Then Calvin rose; he gave a long, booming shout. “Well,” Nathaniel said; “here we are.”
Calvin was not speaking sentences at all. He was just yelling, cursing. “I’m going to frail the tar out of you!” he roared. “Girls! Vangie! Beck! Sarah!” The sisters had already emerged. They seemed to boil through the door in their full skirts like balloons on a torrent, with shrill cries, above which the father’s voice boomed and roared. His coat—the frockcoat of Sunday or the wealthy or the retired—was open now and he was tugging at something near his waist with the same gesture and attitude with which he might be drawing the pistol. But he was merely dragging from about his waist with his single hand a leather strap, and flourishing it he now thrust and shoved through the shrill and birdlike hovering of the women. “I’ll learn you yet!” he roared. “I’ll learn you to run away!” The strap fell twice across Nathaniel’s shoulders. It fell twice before the two men locked.
It was in play, in a sense: a kind of deadly play and smiling seriousness: the play of two lions that might or might not leave marks. They locked, the strap arrested: face to face and breast to breast they stood: the old man with his gaunt, grizzled face and his pale New England eyes, and the young one who bore no resemblance to him at all, with his beaked nose and his white teeth smiling. “Stop it,” Nathaniel said. “Don’t you see who’s watching yonder in the buckboard?”
They had none of them looked at the buckboard until now. Sitting on the seat was a woman and a boy of about twelve. The father looked once at the woman; he did not even need to see the boy. He just looked at the woman, his jaw slacked as if he had seen a ghost. “Evangeline!” he said. She looked enough like his dead wife to have been her sister. The boy who could hardly remember his mother at all, had taken for wife a woman who looked almost exactly like her.
“That’s Juana,” he said. “That’s Calvin with her. We come home to get married.”
After supper that night, with the woman and child in bed, Nathaniel told them. They sat about the lamp: the father, the sisters, the returned son. There were no—ministers out there where he had been, he explained; just priests and Catholics. “So when we found that the chico was on the way, she begun to talk about a priest. But I wasn’t going to have any Burden born a heathen. So I begun to look around, to humor her. But first one thing and then another come up and I couldn’t get away to meet a minister; and then the boy came and so it wasn’t any rush anymore. But she kept on worrying, about priests and such, and so in a couple of years I heard how there was to be a white minister in Santa Fe on a certain day. So we packed up and started out and got to Santa Fe just in time to see the dust of the stage that was carrying the minister on away. So we waited there and in a couple more years we had another chance, in Texas. Only this time I got kind of mixed up with helping some Rangers that were cleaning up some kind of a mess where some folks had a deputy treed in a dance hall. So when that was over we just decided to come on home and get married right. And here we are.”
The father sat, gaunt, grizzled, and austere, beneath the lamp. He had been listening, but his expression was brooding, with a kind of violently slumbering contemplativeness and bewildered outrage. “Another damn black Burden,” he said. “Folks will think I bred to a damn slaver. And now he’s got to breed to one, too.” The son listened quietly, not even attempting to tell his father that the woman was Spanish and not Rebel. “Damn, lowbuilt black folks: low built because of the weight of the wrath of God, black because of the sin of human bondage staining their blood and flesh.” His gaze was vague, fanatical, and convinced. “But we done freed them now, both black and white alike. They’ll bleach out now. In a hundred years they will be white folks again. Then maybe we’ll let them come back into America.” He mused, smoldering, immobile. “By God,” he said suddenly, “he’s got a man’s build, anyway, for all his black look. By God, he’s going to be as big a man as his grandpappy; not a runt like his pa. For all his black dam and his black look, he will.”
She told Christmas this while they sat on the cot in the darkening cabin. They had not moved for over an hour. He could not see her face at all now; he seemed to swing faintly, as though in a drifting boat, upon the sound of her voice as upon some immeasurable and drowsing peace evocative of nothing of any moment, scarce listening. “His name was Calvin, like grandpa’s, and he was as big as grandpa, even if he was dark like father’s mother’s people and like his mother. She was not my mother: he was just my halfbrother. Grandpa was the last of ten, and father was the last of two, and Calvin was the last of all.” He had just turned twenty when he was killed in the town two miles away by an exslaveholder and Confederate soldier named Sartoris, over a question of negro voting.
She told Christmas about the graves—the brother’s, the grandfather’s, the father’s and his two wives—on a cedar knoll in the pasture a half mile from the house; listening quietly, Christmas thought. ‘Ah. She’ll take me to see them. I will have to go.’ But she did not. She never mentioned the graves to him again after that night when she told him where they were and that he could go and see them for himself if he wished. “You probably can’t find them, anyway,” she said. “Because when they brought grandfather and Calvin home that evening, father waited until after dark and buried them and hid the graves, levelled the mounds and put brush and things over them.”
“Hid them?” Christmas said.
There was nothing soft, feminine, mournful and retrospective in her voice. “So they would not find them. Dig them up. Maybe butcher them.” She went on, her voice a little impatient, explanatory: “They hated us here. We were Yankees. Foreigners. Worse than foreigners: enemies. Carpetbaggers. And it—the War—still too close for even the ones that got whipped to be very sensible. Stirring up the negroes to murder and rape, they called it. Threatening white supremacy. So I suppose that Colonel Sartoris was, a town hero because he killed with two shots from the same pistol an old onearmed man and a boy who had never even cast his first vote. Maybe they were right. I don’t know.”
“Oh,” Christmas said. “They might have done that? dug them up after they were already killed, dead? Just when do men that have different blood in them stop hating one another?”