Mrs. Habersham said. "I am a neighbor and I hope to be a friend." And then she said,
"You poor child."
We just looked at her; when Brasilia finally spoke, she sounded like Ringo and I would when Father would say" something to us in Latin for a joke. "Ma'am?" Brasilia said.
Because I was just fifteen; I still didn't know what it was all about; I just stood there and listened without even thinking much, like when they had been talking in the cabin. "My condition?" Brasilia said. "My------"
"Yes," Mrs. Habersham said. "No mother, no woman to ... forced to these straits—" kind of waving her hand at the mules that hadn't stopped and at Joby and Ringo goggling at her and the three others still peeping around her at Brasilia. "—to offer you not only our help, but our sympathy."
"My condition," Brasilia said. "My con . . . Help and sym—" Then she began to say, "Oh.
Oh. Oh," standing there, and then she was running. She began to ran like a deer, that starts to ran and then decides where it wants to go; she turned right in the air and came toward me,
running light over the logs and planks, with her mouth open, saying "John, John" not loud; for a minute it was like she thought I was Father until she waked up and found I was not; she stopped without even ceasing to run, like a bird stops in the air, motionless yet still furious with movement. "Is that what you think too?" she said. Then she was gone. Every now and then I could see her footprints, spaced and fast, just inside the woods, but when I came out of the bottom, I couldn't see her. But the surreys and buggies were still in front of the cabin and I could see Mrs. Compson and the other ladies on the porch, looking out across the pasture toward the bottom, so I did not go there. But before I came to the other cabin, where Louvinia and Joby and Ringo lived, I saw Louvinia come up the hill from the spring, carrying her cedar water bucket and singing. Then she went into the cabin and the singing stopped short off and so I knew where Brasilia was.
But I didn't hide. I went to the window and looked in and saw Brasilia just turning from where she had been leaning her head in her arms on the mantel when Louvinia came in with the water bucket and a gum twig in her mouth and Father's old hat on top of her head rag. Brasilia was crying. "That's what it is, then," she said. "Coming down there to the mill and telling me that in my condition—sympathy and help— Strangers; I never saw any of them before and I don't care a damn what they— But you and Bayard. Is that what you believe? that
John and I—that we------" Then Louvinia moved. Her
hand came out quicker than Brasilia could jerk back and lay flat on the belly of Brasilia's overalls, then Louvinia was holding Brasilia in her arms like she used to hold me and Brasilia was crying hard. "That John and I—that we— And Gavin dead at Shiloh and John's home burned and his plantation ruined, that he and I— We went to the war to hurt Yankees, not hunting women!"
"I knows you ain't," Louvinia said. "Hush now. Hush."
And that's about all. It didn't take them long. I don't know whether Mrs. Habersham made Mrs. Compson send for Aunt Louisa or whether Aunt Louisa just gave them a deadline and then came herself. Because we were
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busy, Drusilla and Joby and Ringo and me at the mill, and Father in town; we wouldn't see him from the time he would ride away in the morning until when he would get back, sometimes late, at night. Because they were strange times then. For four years we had lived for just one thing, even the women and children who could not fight: to get Yankee troops out of the country; we thought that when that happened, it would be all over. And now that had happened, and then before the summer began I heard Father say to Drusilla,
"We were promised Federal troops; Lincoln himself promised to send us troops. Then things will be all right." That, from a man who had commanded a regiment for four years with the avowed purpose of driving Federal troops from the country. Now it was as though we had not surrendered at all, we had joined forces with the men who had been our enemies against a new foe whose means we could not always fathom but whose aim we could always dread. So he was busy in town all day long. They were building Jefferson back, the courthouse and the stores, but it was more than that which Father and the other men were doing; it was something which he would not let Drusilla or me or Ringo go into town to see. Then one day Ringo slipped off and went to town and came back and he looked at me with his eyes •tolling a little.
"Do you know what I ain't?" he said. "What?" I said.
"I ain't a nigger any more. I done been abolished." Then I asked him what he was, if he wasn't a nigger any more and he showed me what he had in his hand. It was a new scrip dollar; it was drawn on the United States, Resident Treasurer, Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, and signed "Cassius Q. Benbow, Acting Marshal" in a neat clerk's hand, with a big sprawling X under it.
"Cassius Q. Benbow?" I said.
"Co-rect," Ringo said. "Uncle Cash that druv the Benbow carriage twell he run off with the Yankees two years ago. He back now and he gonter be elected Marshal of Jefferson.
That's what Marse John and the other white folks is so busy about."
SKIRMISH AT SARTORIS
15,
"A nigger?" I said. "A nigger?"
"No," Ringo said. "They ain't no more niggers, ii Jefferson nor nowhere else." Then he told me about th< two Burdens from Missouri, with a patent from Wash ington to organise the niggers into Republicans, and hov Father and the other men were trying to prevent it "Naw, suh," he said. "This war ain't over. Hit jus started good. Used to be when you seed a Yankee yoi knowed him because he never had nothing but a gun o a mule halter or a handful of hen feathers. Now you don' even know him and stid of the gun he got a clutch of thii stuff in one hand and a clutch of nigger voting tickets ii the yuther."
So we were busy; we just saw Father at nigh and sometimes then Ringo and I and even Drusilla wouk take one look at him and we wouldn't ask him anj questions. So it didn't take them long, because Drusilla was already beaten; she was just marking time without knowing it from that afternoon when the fourteen ladies got into the surreys and buggies and weni back to town until one afternoon about two months later when we heard Denny hollering even before the wagon came in the gates, and Aunt Louisa sitting on one of the trunks (that's what beat Drusilla: the trunks, They had her dresses in them that she hadn't worn in three years; Ringo never had seen her in a dress until Aunt Louisa came) in mourning even to the crepe bow on her umbrella handle, that hadn't worn mourning when we were at Hawkhurst two years ago thougt Uncle Dennison was just as dead then as he was now, She came to the cabin and got out of the wagon, already crying and talking just like the letters sounded, like even when you listened to her you had to skif around fast to make any sense:
"I have come to appeal to them once more with £ mother's tears though I don't think it will do any gooc though I had prayed until the very last that this boy's innocence might be spared and preserved but what musl be must be and at least we can all three bear our burder together"; sitting in Granny's chair in the middle of ths room, without even laying down the umbrella or taking her bonnet off, looking at the pallet where Father and 1 slept and then at the quilt nailed to the rafter to make a
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room for Drusilla, dabbing at her mouth with a handkerchief that made the whole cabin smell like dead roses. And then Drusilla came in from the mill, in the muddy brogans and the sweaty shirt and overalls and her hair sunburned and full of sawdust, and Aunt Louisa looked at her once and began to cry again, saying, "Lost, lost. Thank God in His mercy that Dennison Hawk was taken before he lived to see what I see."