"He"s already did that. You take a boy thirteen year old is equal in meanness to a man twict his age. It"s no telling what he"ll think up to do. You never know where he"ll strike next. This morning Hollis seen them behind the bull pen and that big one ast if it wasn"t some place they could wash at and Hollis said no it wasn"t and that you didn"t want no boys dropping cigarette b.u.t.ts in your woods and he said, *She don"t own them woods," and Hollis said, *She does too," and that there little one he said, *Man, Gawd owns them woods and her too," and that there one with the gla.s.ses said, *I reckon she owns the sky over this place too," and that there littlest one says, *Owns the sky and can"t no airplane go over here without she says so," and then the big one says, *I never seen a place with so many damm women on it, how do you stand it here?" and Hollis said he had done had enough of their big talk by then and he turned and walked off without giving no reply one way or the other."
"I"m going out there and tell those boys they can get a ride away from here on the milk truck," Mrs. Cope said and she went out the back door, leaving Mrs. Pritchard and the child together in the kitchen.
"Listen," the child said. "I could handle them quicker than that."
"Yeah?" Mrs. Pritchard murmured, giving her a long leering look. "How"d you handle them?"
The child gripped both hands together and made a contorted face as if she were strangling someone.
"They"d handle you," Mrs. Pritchard said with satisfaction.
The child retired to the upstairs window to get out of her way and looked down where her mother was walking off from the three boys who were squatting under the water tower, eating something out of a cracker box. She heard her come in the kitchen door and say, "They say they"ll go on the milk truck, and no wonder they aren"t hungrya"they have that suitcase half full of food."
"Likely stole every bit of it too," Mrs. Pritchard said.
When the milk truck came, the three boys were nowhere in sight, but as soon as it left without them their three faces appeared, looking out of the opening in the top of the calf barn. "Can you beat this?" Mrs. Cope said, standing at one of the upstairs windows with her hands at her hips. "It"s not that I wouldn"t be glad to have thema"it"s their att.i.tude."
"You never like n.o.body"s att.i.tude," the child said. "I"ll go tell them they got five minutes to leave here in."
"You are not to go anywhere near those boys, do you hear me?" Mrs. Cope said.
"Why?" the child asked.
"I"m going out there and give them a piece of my mind," Mrs. Cope said.
The child took over the position in the window and in a few minutes she saw the stiff green hat catching the glint of the sun as her mother crossed the road toward the calf barn. The three faces immediately disappeared from the opening, and in a second the large boy dashed across the lot, followed an instant later by the other two. Mrs. Pritchard came out and the two women started for the grove of trees the boys had vanished into. Presently the two sunhats disappeared in the woods and the three boys came out at the left side of it and ambled across the field and into another patch of woods. By the time Mrs. Cope and Mrs. Pritchard reached the field, it was empty and there was nothing for them to do but come home again.
Mrs. Cope had not been inside long before Mrs. Pritchard came running toward the house, shouting something. "They"ve let out the bull!" she hollered. "Let out the bull!" And in a second she was followed by the bull himself, ambling, black and leisurely, with four geese hissing at his heels. He was not mean until hurried and it took Mr. Pritchard and the two Negroes a half-hour to ease him back to his pen. While the men were engaged in this, the boys let the oil out of the three tractors and then disappeared again into the woods.
Two blue veins had come out on either side of Mrs. Cope"s forehead and Mrs. Pritchard observed them with satisfaction. "Like I toljer," she said, "there ain"t a thing you can do about it."
Mrs. Cope ate her dinner hastily, not conscious that she had her sunhat on. Every time she heard a noise, she jumped up. Mrs. Pritchard came over immediately after dinner and said, "Well, you want to know where they are now?" and smiled in an omniscient rewarded way.
"I want to know at once," Mrs. Cope said, coming to an almost military attention.
"Down to the road, throwing rocks at your mailbox," Mrs. Pritchard said, leaning comfortably in the door "Done already about knocked it off its stand."
"Get in the car," Mrs. Cope said.
The child got in too and the three of them drove down the road to the gate. The boys were sitting on the embankment on the other side of the highway, aiming rocks across the road at the mailbox. Mrs. Cope stopped the car almost directly beneath them and looked up out of her window. The three of them stared at her as if they had never seen her before, the large boy with a sullen glare, the small one glint-eyed and unsmiling, and Powell with his two sided gla.s.sed gaze hanging vacantly over the crippled destroyer on his shirt.
"Powell," she said, "I"m sure your mother would be ashamed of you," and she stopped and waited for this to make its effect. His face seemed to twist slightly but he continued to look through her at nothing in particular.
"Now I"ve put up with this as long as I can," she said. "I"ve tried to be nice to you boys. Haven"t I been nice to you boys?"
They might have been three statues except that the big one, barely opening his mouth, said, "We"re not even on your side the road, lady."
"There ain"t a thing you can do about it," Mrs. Pritchard hissed loudly. The child was sitting on the back seat close to the side. She had a furious outraged look on her face but she kept her head drawn back from the window so that they couldn"t see her.
Mrs. Cope spoke slowly, emphasizing every word. "I think I have been very nice to you boys. I"ve fed you twice. Now I"m going into town and if you"re still here when I come back, I"ll call the sheriff," and with this, she drove off. The child, turning quickly so that she could see out the back window, observed that they had not moved; they had not even turned their heads.
"You done angered them now," Mrs. Pritchard said, "and it ain"t any telling what they"ll do."
"They"ll be gone when we get back," Mrs. Cope said.
Mrs. Pritchard could not stand an anticlimax. She required the taste of blood from time to time to keep her equilibrium. "I known a man oncet that his wife was poisoned by a child she had adopted out of pure kindness," she said. When they returned from town, the boys were not on the embankment and she said, "I would rather to see them than not to see them. When you see them you know what they"re doing."
"Ridiculous," Mrs. Cope muttered. "I"ve scared them and they"ve gone and now we can forget them."
"I ain"t forgetting them," Mrs. Pritchard said. "I wouldn"t be none surprised if they didn"t have a gun in that there suitcase."
Mrs. Cope prided herself on the way she handled the type of mind that Mrs. Pritchard had. When Mrs. Pritchard saw signs and omens, she exposed them calmly for the figments of imagination that they were, but this afternoon her nerves were taut and she said, "Now I"ve had about enough of this. Those boys are gone and that"s that."
"Well, we"ll wait and see," Mrs. Pritchard said.
Everything was quiet for the rest of the afternoon but at supper time, Mrs. Pritchard came over to say that she had heard a high vicious laugh pierce out of the bushes near the hog pen. It was an evil laugh, full of calculated meanness, and she had heard it come three times, herself, distinctly.
"I haven"t heard a thing," Mrs. Cope said.
"I look for them to strike just after dark," Mrs. Pritchard said.
That night Mrs. Cope and the child sat on the porch until nearly ten o"clock and nothing happened. The only sounds came from tree frogs and from one whippoorwill who called faster and faster from the same spot of darkness. "They"ve gone," Mrs. Cope said, "poor things," and she began to tell the child how much they had to be thankful for, for she said they might have had to live in a development themselves or they might have been Negroes or they might have been in iron lungs or they might have been Europeans ridden in boxcars like cattle, and she began a litany of her blessings, in a stricken voice, that the child, straining her attention for a sudden shriek in the dark, didn"t listen to.
There was no sign of them the next morning either. The fortress line of trees was a hard granite blue, the wind had risen overnight and the sun had come up a pale gold. The season was changing. Even a small change in the weather made Mrs. Cope thankful, but when the seasons changed she seemed almost frightened at her good fortune in escaping whatever it was that pursued her. As she sometimes did when one thing was finished and another about to begin, she turned her attention to the child who had put on a pair of overalls over her dress and had pulled a man"s old felt hat down as far as it would go on her head and was arming herself with two pistols in a decorated holster that she had fastened around her waist. The hat was very tight and seemed to be squeezing the redness into her face. It came down almost to the tops of her gla.s.ses. Mrs. Cope watched her with a tragic look. "Why do you have to look like an idiot?" she asked. "Suppose company were to come? When are you going to grow up? What"s going to become of you? I look at you and I want to cry! Sometimes you look like you might belong to Mrs. Pritchard!"
"Leave me be," the child said in a high irritated voice. "Leave me be. Just leave me be. I ain"t you," and she went off to the woods as if she were stalking out an enemy, her head thrust forward and each hand gripped on a gun.
Mrs. Pritchard came over, sour-humored, because she didn"t have anything calamitous to report. "I got the misery in my face today," she said, holding on to what she could salvage. "Theseyer teeth. They each one feel like an individual boil."
The child crashed through the woods, making the fallen leaves sound ominous under her feet. The sun had risen a little and was only a white hole like an opening for the wind to escape through in a sky a little darker than itself, and the tops of the trees were black against the glare. "I"m going to get you," she said. "I"m going to get you one by one and beat you black and blue. Line up. LINE UP!" she said and waved one of the pistols at a cl.u.s.ter of long bare-trunked pines, four times her height, as she pa.s.sed them. She kept moving, muttering and growling to herself and occasionally hitting out with one of the guns at a branch that got in her way. From time to time she stopped to remove the thorn vine that caught in her shirt and she would say, "Leave me be, I told you. Leave me be," and give it a crack with the pistol and then stalk on.
Presently she sat down on a stump to cool off but she planted both feet carefully and firmly on the ground. She lifted them and put them down several times, grinding them fiercely into the dirt as if she were crushing some-thing under her heels. Suddenly she heard a laugh.
She sat up, p.r.i.c.kle-skinned. It came again. She heard the sound of splashing and she stood up, uncertain which way to run. She was not far from where this patch of woods ended and the back pasture began. She eased toward the pasture, careful not to make a sound, and coming suddenly to the edge of it, she saw the three boys, not twenty feet away, washing in the cow trough. Their clothes were piled against the black valise out of reach of the water that flowed over the side of the tank. The large boy was standing up and the small one was trying to climb onto his shoulders. Powell was sitting down looking straight ahead through gla.s.ses that were splashed with water. He was not paying any attention to the other two. The trees must have looked like green waterfalls through his wet gla.s.ses. The child stood partly hidden behind a pine trunk, the side of her face pressed into the bark.
"I wish I lived here!" the little boy shouted, balancing with his knees clutched around the big one"s head.
"I"m G.o.ddam glad I don"t," the big boy panted, and jumped up to dislodge him.
Powell sat without moving, without seeming to know that the other two were behind him, and looked straight ahead like a ghost sprung upright in his coffin. "If this place was not here any more," he said, "you would never have to think of it again."
"Listen," the big boy said, sitting down quietly in the water with the little one still moored to his shoulders, "it don"t belong to n.o.body."
"It"s ours," the little boy said.
The child behind the tree did not move.
Powell jumped out of the trough and began to run. He ran all the way around the field as if something were after him and as he pa.s.sed the tank again, the other two jumped out and raced with him, the sun glinting on their long wet bodies. The big one ran the fastest and was the leader. They dashed around the field twice and finally dropped down by their clothes and lay there with their ribs moving up and down. After a while, the big one said hoa.r.s.ely, "Do you know what I would do with this place if I had the chance?"
"No, what?" the little boy said and sat up to give him his full attention.
"I"d build a big parking lot on it, or something," he muttered.
They began to dress. The sun made two white spots on Powell"s gla.s.ses and blotted out his eyes. "I know what let"s do," he said. He took something small from his pocket and showed it to them. For almost a minute they sat looking at what he had in his hand. Then without any more discussion, Powell picked up the suitcase and they got up and moved past the child and entered the woods not ten feet from where she was standing, slightly away from the tree now, with the imprint of the bark embossed red and white on the side of her face.
She watched with a dazed stare as they stopped and collected all the matches they had between them and began to set the brush on fire. They began to whoop and holler and beat their hands over their mouths and in a few seconds there was a narrow line of fire widening between her and them. While she watched, it reached up from the brush, s.n.a.t.c.hing and biting at the lowest branches of the trees. The wind carried rags of it higher and the boys disappeared shrieking behind it.
She turned and tried to run across the field but her legs were too heavy and she stood there, weighted down with some new unplaced misery that she had never felt before. But finally she began to run.
Mrs. Cope and Mrs. Pritchard were in the field behind the barn when Mrs. Cope saw smoke rising from the woods across the pasture. She shrieked and Mrs. Pritchard pointed up the road to where the child came loping heavily, screaming, "Mama, Mama, they"re going to build a parking lot here!"
Mrs. Cope began to scream for the Negroes while Mrs. Pritchard, charged now, ran down the road shouting. Mr. Pritchard came out of the open end of the barn and the two Negroes stopped filling the manure spreader in the lot and started toward Mrs. Cope with their shovels. "Hurry, hurry!" she shouted. "Start throwing dirt on it!" They pa.s.sed her almost without looking at her and headed off slowly across the field toward the smoke. She ran after them a little way, shrilling, "Hurry, hurry, don"t you see it! Don"t you see it!"
"It"ll be there when we git there," Culver said and they thrust their shoulders forward a little and went on at the same pace.
The child came to a stop beside her mother and stared up at her face as if she had never seen it before. It was the face of the new misery she felt, but on her mother it looked old and it looked as if it might have belonged to anybody, a Negro or a European or to Powell himself. The child turned her head quickly, and past the Negroes" ambling figures she could see the column of smoke rising and widening unchecked inside the granite line of trees. She stood taut, listening, and could just catch in the distance a few wild high shrieks of joy as if the prophets were dancing in the fiery furnace, in the circle the angel had cleared for them.
A Late Encounter With the Enemy
General Sash was a hundred and four years old. He lived with his granddaughter, Sally Poker Sash, who was sixty-two years old and who prayed every night on her knees that he would live until her graduation from college. The General didn"t give two slaps for her graduation but he never doubted he would live for it. Living had got to be such a habit with him that he couldn"t conceive of any other condition. A graduation exercise was not exactly his idea of a good time, even if, as she said, he would be expected to sit on the stage in his uniform. She said there would be a long procession of teachers and students in their robes but that there wouldn"t be anything to equal him in his uniform. He knew this well enough without her telling him, and as for the damm procession, it could march to h.e.l.l and back and not cause him a quiver. He liked parades with floats full of Miss Americas and Miss Daytona Beaches and Miss Queen Cotton Products. He didn"t have any use for processions and a procession full of schoolteachers was about as deadly as the River Styx to his way of thinking. However, he was willing to sit on the stage in his uniform so that they could see him.
Sally Poker was not as sure as he was that he would Uve until her graduation. There had not been any perceptible change in him for the last five years, but she had the sense that she might be cheated out of her triumph because she so often was. She had been going to summer school every year for the past twenty because when she started teaching, there were no such things as degrees. In those times, she said, everything was normal but nothing had been normal since she was sixteen, and for the past twenty summers, when she should have been resting, she had had to take a trunk in the burning heat to the state teacher"s college; and though when she returned in the fall, she always taught in the exact way she had been taught not to teach, this was a mild revenge that didn"t satisfy her sense of justice. She wanted the General at her graduation because she wanted to show what she stood for, or, as she said, "what all was behind her," and was not behind them. This them was not anybody in particular. It was just all the upstarts who had turned the world on its head and unsettled the ways of decent living.
She meant to stand on that platform in August with the General sitting in his wheel chair on the stage behind her and she meant to hold her head very high as if she were saying, "See him! See him! My kin, all you upstarts! Glorious upright old man standing for the old traditions! Dignity! Honor! Courage! See him!" One night in her sleep she screamed, "See him! See him!" and turned her head and found him sitting in his wheel chair behind her with a terrible expression on his face and with all his clothes off except the general"s hat and she had waked up and had not dared to go back to sleep again that night.
For his part, the General would not have consented even to attend her graduation if she had not promised to see to it that he sit on the stage. He liked to sit on any stage. He considered that he was still a very handsome man. When he had been able to stand up, he had measured five feet four inches of pure game c.o.c.k. He had white hair that reached to his shoulders behind and he would not wear teeth because he thought his profile was more striking without them. When he put on his full-dress general"s uniform, he knew well enough that there was nothing to match him anywhere.
This was not the same uniform he had worn in the War between the States. He had not actually been a general in that war. He had probably been a foot soldier; he didn"t remember what he had been; in fact, he didn"t remember that war at all. It was like his feet, which hung down now shriveled at the very end of him, without feeling, covered with a blue-gray afghan that Sally Poker had crocheted when she was a little girl. He didn"t remember the Spanish-American War in which he had lost a son; he didn"t even remember the son. He didn"t have any use for history because he never expected to meet it again. To his mind, history was connected with processions and life with parades and he liked parades. People were always asking him if he remembered this or thata"a dreary black procession of questions about the past. There was only one event in the past that had any significance for him and that he cared to talk about: that was twelve years ago when he had received the general"s uniform and had been in the premiere.
"I was in that preemy they had in Atlanta," he would tell visitors sitting on his front porch. "Surrounded by beautiful guls. It wasn"t a thing local about it. It was nothing local about it. Listen here. It was a nashnul event and they had me in ita"up onto the stage. There was no bob-tails at it. Every person at it had paid ten dollars to get in and had to wear his tuxseeder. I was in this uniform. A beautiful gul presented me with it that afternoon in a hotel room."
"It was in a suite in the hotel and I was in it too, Papa," Sally Poker would say, winking at the visitors. "You weren"t alone with any young lady in a hotel room."
"Was, I"d a known what to do," the old General would say with a sharp look and the visitors would scream with laughter. "This was a Hollywood, California, gul," he"d continue. "She was from Hollywood, California, and didn"t have any part in the pitcher. Out there they have so many beautiful guls that they don"t need that they call them a extra and they don"t use them for nothing but presenting people with things and having their pitchers taken. They took my pitcher with her. No, it was two of them. One on either side and me in the middle with my arms around each of them"s waist and their waist ain"t any bigger than a half a dollar."
Sally Poker would interrupt again. "It was Mr. Govisky that gave you the uniform, Papa, and he gave me the most exquisite corsage. Really, I wish you could have seen it. It was made with gladiola petals taken off and painted gold and put back together to look like a rose. It was exquisite. I wish you could have seen it, it wasa"
"It was as big as her head," the General would snarl. "I was tellin it. They gimme this uniform and they gimme this soward and they say, *Now General, we don"t want you to start a war on us. All we want you to do is march right up on that stage when you"re innerduced tonight and answer a few questions. Think you can do that?" *Think I can do it!" I say. *Listen here. I was doing things before you were born," and they hollered."
"He was the hit of the show," Sally Poker would say, but she didn"t much like to remember the premiere on account of what had happened to her feet at it. She had bought a new dress for the occasiona"a long black crepe dinner dress with a rhinestone buckle and a boleroa"and a pair of silver slippers to wear with it, because she was supposed to go up on the stage with him to keep him from falling. Everything was arranged for them. A real limousine came at ten minutes to eight and took them to the theater. It drew up under the marquee at exactly the right time, after the big stars and the director and the author and the governor and the mayor and some less important stars. The police kept traffic from jamming and there were ropes to keep the people off who couldn"t go. All the people who couldn"t go watched them step out of the limousine into the lights. Then they walked down the red and gold foyer and an usherette in a Confederate cap and little short skirt conducted them to their special seats. The audience was already there and a group of UDC members began to clap when they saw the General in his uniform and that started everybody to clap. A few more celebrities came after them and then the doors closed and the lights went down.
A young man with blond wavy hair who said he represented the motion-picture industry came out and began to introduce everybody and each one who was introduced walked up on the stage and said how really happy he was to be here for this great event. The General and his granddaughter were introduced sixteenth on the program. He was introduced as General Tennessee Flintrock Sash of the Confederacy, though Sally Poker had told Mr. Govisky that his name was George Poker Sash and that he had only been a major. She helped him up from his seat but her heart was beating so fast she didn"t know whether she"d make it herself.
The old man walked up the aisle slowly with his fierce white head high and his hat held over his heart. The orchestra began to play the Confederate Battle Hymn very softly and the UDC members rose as a group and did not sit down again until the General was on the stage. When he reached the center of the stage with Sally Poker just behind him guiding his elbow, the orchestra burst out in a loud rendition of the Battle Hymn and the old man, with real stage presence, gave a vigorous trembling salute and stood at attention until the last blast had died away. Two of the usherettes in Confederate caps and short skirts held a Confederate and a Union flag crossed behind them.
The General stood in the exact center of the spotlight and it caught a weird moon-shaped slice of Sally Pokera"the corsage, the rhinestone buckle and one hand clenched around a white glove and handkerchief. The young man with the blond wavy hair inserted himself into the circle of light and said he was really happy to have here tonight for this great event, one, he said, who had fought and bled in the battles they would soon see daringly reacted on the screen, and "Tell me, General," he asked, "how old are you?"
"Niiiiiinnttty-two!" the General screamed.
The young man looked as if this were just about the most impressive thing that had been said all evening. "Ladies and gentlemen," he said, "let"s give the General the biggest hand we"ve got!" and there was applause immediately and the young man indicated to Sally Poker with a motion of his thumb that she could take the old man back to his seat now so that the next person could be introduced; but the General had not finished. He stood immovable in the exact center of the spotlight, his neck thrust forward, his mouth slightly open, and his voracious gray eyes drinking in the glare and the applause. He elbowed his granddaughter roughly away. "How I keep so young," he screeched, "I kiss all the pretty guls!"
This was met with a great din of spontaneous applause and it was at just that instant that Sally Poker looked down at her feet and discovered that in the excitement of getting ready she had forgotten to change her shoes: two brown Girl Scout oxfords protruded from the bottom of her dress. She gave the General a yank and almost ran with him off the stage. He was very angry that he had not got to say how glad he was to be here for this event and on the way back to his seat, he kept saying as loud as he could, "I"m glad to be here at this preemy with all these beautiful guls!" but there was another celebrity going up the other aisle and n.o.body paid any attention to him. He slept through the picture, muttering fiercely every now and then in his sleep.
Since then, his life had not been very interesting. His feet were completely dead now, his knees worked like old hinges, his kidneys functioned when they would, but his heart persisted doggedly to beat. The past and the future were the same thing to him, one forgotten and the other not remembered; he had no more notion of dying than a cat. Every year on Confederate Memorial Day, he was bundled up and lent to the Capitol City Museum where he was displayed from one to four in a musty room full of old photographs, old uniforms, old artillery, and historic doc.u.ments. All these were carefully preserved in gla.s.s cases so that children would not put their hands on them. He wore his general"s uniform from the premiere and sat, with a fixed scowl, inside a small roped area. There was nothing about him to indicate that he was alive except an occasional movement in his milky gray eyes, but once when a bold child touched his sword, his arm shot forward and slapped the hand off in an instant. In the spring when the old homes were opened for pilgrimages, he was invited to wear his uniform and sit in some conspicuous spot and lend atmosphere to the scene. Some of these times he only snarled at the visitors but sometimes he told about the premiere and the beautiful girls.
If he had died before Sally Poker"s graduation, she thought she would have died herself. At the beginning of the summer term, even before she knew if she would pa.s.s, she told the Dean that her grandfather, General Tennessee Flintrock Sash of the Confederacy, would attend her graduation and that he was a hundred and four years old and that his mind was still clear as a bell. Distinguished visitors were always welcome and could sit on the stage and be introduced. She made arrangements with her nephew, John Wesley Poker Sash, a Boy Scout, to come wheel the General"s chair. She thought how sweet it would be to see the old man in his courageous gray and the young boy in his clean khakia"the old and the new, she thought appropriatelya"they would be behind her on the stage when she received her degree.
Everything went almost exactly as she had planned. In the summer while she was away at school, the General stayed with other relatives and they brought him and John Wesley, the Boy Scout, down to the graduation. A reporter came to the hotel where they stayed and took the General"s picture with Sally Poker on one side of him and John Wesley on the other. The General, who had had his picture taken with beautiful girls, didn"t think much of this. He had forgotten precisely what kind of event this was he was going to attend but he remembered that he was to wear his uniform and carry the sword.
On the morning of the graduation, Sally Poker had to line up in the academic procession with the B.S."s in Elementary Education and she couldn"t see to getting him on the stage herselfa"but John Wesley, a fat blond boy of ten with an executive expression, guaranteed to take care of everything. She came in her academic gown to the hotel and dressed the old man in his uniform. He was as frail as a dried spider. "Aren"t you just thrilled, Papa?" she asked. "I"m just thrilled to death!"
"Put the soward acrost my lap, damm you," the old man said, "where it"ll shine."
She put it there and then stood back looking at him. "You look just grand," she said.
"G.o.d damm it," the old man said in a slow monotonous certain tone as if he were saying it to the beating of his heart. "G.o.d damm every G.o.ddam thing to h.e.l.l."
"Now, now," she said and left happily to join the procession.
The graduates were lined up behind the Science building and she found her place just as the line started to move. She had not slept much the night before and when she had, she had dreamed of the exercises, murmuring, "See him, see him?" in her sleep but waking up every time just before she turned her head to look at him behind her. The graduates had to walk three blocks in the hot sun in their black wool robes and as she plodded stolidly along she thought that if anyone considered this academic procession something impressive to behold, they need only wait until they saw that old General in his courageous gray and that clean young Boy Scout stoutly wheeling his chair across the stage with the sunlight catching the sword. She imagined that John Wesley had the old man ready now behind the stage.
The black procession wound its way up the two blocks and started on the main walk leading to the auditorium. The visitors stood on the gra.s.s, picking out their graduates. Men were pushing back their hats and wiping their foreheads and women were lifting their dresses slightly from the shoulders to keep them from sticking to their backs. The graduates in their heavy robes looked as if the last beads of ignorance were being sweated out of them. The sun blazed off the fenders of automobiles and beat from the columns of the buildings and pulled the eye from one spot of glare to another. It pulled Sally Poker"s toward the big red Coca-Cola machine that had been set up by the side of the auditorium. Here she saw the General parked, scowling and hatless in his chair in the blazing sun while John Wesley, his blouse loose behind, his hip and cheek pressed to the red machine, was drinking a Coca-Cola. She broke from the line and galloped to them and s.n.a.t.c.hed the bottle away. She shook the boy and thrust in his blouse and put the hat on the old man"s head. "Now get him in there!" she said, pointing one rigid finger to the side door of the building.
For his part the General felt as if there were a little hole beginning to widen in the top of his head. The boy wheeled him rapidly down a walk and up a ramp and into a building and b.u.mped him over the stage entrance and into position where he had been told and the General glared in front of him at heads that all seemed to flow together and eyes that moved from one face to another. Several figures in black robes came and picked up his hand and shook it. A black procession was flowing up each aisle and forming to stately music in a pool in front of him. The music seemed to be entering his head through the little hole and he thought for a second that the procession would try to enter it too.
He didn"t know what procession this was but there was something familiar about it. It must be familiar to him since it had come to meet him, but he didn"t like a black procession. Any procession that came to meet him, he thought irritably, ought to have floats with beautiful guls on them like the floats before the preemy. It must be something connected with history like they were always having. He had no use for any of it. What happened then wasn"t anything to a man living now and he was living now.
When all the procession had flowed into the black pool, a black figure began orating in front of it. The figure was telling something about history and the General made up his mind he wouldn"t listen, but the words kept seeping in through the little hole in his head. He heard his own name mentioned and his chair was shuttled forward roughly and the Boy Scout took a big bow. They called his name and the fat brat bowed. G.o.ddam you, the old man tried to say, get out of my way, I can stand up!a"but he was jerked back again before he could get up and take the bow. He supposed the noise they made was for him. If he was over, he didn"t intend to listen to any more of it. If it hadn"t been for the little hole in the top of his head, none of the words would have got to him. He thought of putting his finger up there into the hole to block them but the hole was a little wider than his finger and it felt as if it were getting deeper.
Another black robe had taken the place of the first one and was talking now and he heard his name mentioned again but they were not talking about him, they were still talking about history. "If we forget our past," the speaker was saying, "we won"t remember our future and it will be as well for we won"t have one." The General heard some of these words gradually. He had forgotten history and he didn"t intend to remember it again. He had forgotten the name and face of his wife and the names and faces of his children or even if he had a wife and children, and he had forgotten the names of places and the places themselves and what had happened at them.
He was considerably irked by the hole in his head. He had not expected to have a hole in his head at this event. It was the slow black music that had put it there and though most of the music had stopped outside, there was still a little of it in the hole, going deeper and moving around in his thoughts, letting the words he heard into the dark places of his brain. He heard the words, Chickamauga, Shiloh, Johnston, Lee, and he knew he was inspiring all these words that meant nothing to him. He wondered if he had been a general at Chickamauga or at Lee. Then he tried to see himself and the horse mounted in the middle of a float full of beautiful girls, being driven slowly through downtown Atlanta. Instead, the old words began to stir in his head as if they were trying to wrench themselves out of place and come to life.
The speaker was through with that war and had gone on to the next one and now he was approaching another and all his words, like the black procession, were vaguely familiar and irritating. There was a long finger of music in the General"s head, probing various spots that were words, letting in a little light on the words and helping them to live. The words began to come toward him and he said, Dammit! I ain"t going to have it! and he started edging backwards to get out of the way. Then he saw the figure in the black robe sit down and there was a noise and the black pool in front of him began to rumble and to flow toward him from either side to the black slow music, and he said, Stop dammit! I can"t do but one thing at a time! He couldn"t protect himself from the words and attend to the procession too and the words were coming at him fast. He felt that he was running backwards and the words were coming at him like musket fire, just escaping him but getting nearer and nearer. He turned around and began to run as fast as he could but he found himself running toward the words. He was running into a regular volley of them and meeting them with quick curses. As the music swelled toward him, the entire past opened up on him out of nowhere and he felt his body riddled in a hundred places with sharp stabs of pain and he fell down, returning a curse for every hit. He saw his wife"s narrow face looking at him critically through her round gold-rimmed gla.s.ses; he saw one of his squinting bald-headed sons; and his mother ran toward him with an anxious look; then a succession of placesa"Chickamauga, Shiloh, Marthasvillea"rushed at him as if the past were the only future now and he had to endure it. Then suddenly he saw that the black procession was almost on him. He recognized it, for it had been d.o.g.g.i.ng all his days. He made such a desperate effort to see over it and find out what comes after the past that his hand clenched the sword until the blade touched bone.
The graduates were crossing the stage in a long file to receive their scrolls and shake the president"s hand. As Sally Poker, who was near the end, crossed, she glanced at the General and saw him sitting fixed and fierce, his eyes wide open, and she turned her head forward again and held it a perceptible degree higher and received her scroll. Once it was all over and she was out of the auditorium in the sun again, she located her kin and they waited together on a bench in the shade for John Wesley to wheel the old man out. That crafty scout had b.u.mped him out the back way and rolled him at high speed down a flagstone path and was waiting now, with the corpse, in the long line at the Coca-Cola machine.
Good Country People