Yes.
I see now.
The train rushed on.
Leaning to the window, watching the fleeing countryside, he talked in the bright, happy voice of a child:
“I could have come to Jefferson before, at almost any time.
But I didn’t.
I could have come at any time.
There is a difference, you know, between civilian and military casualness.
Military casualness?
Ah, it was the casualness of desperation.
A handful of men (he was not an officer: I think that was the only point on which father and old Cinthy were ever in accord: that grandfather wore no sword, galloped with no sword waving in front of the rest of them) performing with the grim levity of schoolboys a prank so foolhardy that the troops who had opposed them for four years did not believe’ that even they would have attempted it.
Riding for a hundred miles through a country where every grove and hamlet had its Yankee bivouac, and into a garrisoned town—I know the very street that they rode into town upon and then out again.
I have never seen it, but I know exactly how it will look.
I know exactly how the house that we will someday own and live in upon the street will look.
It won’t be at first, for a while.
We will have to live in the parsonage at first.
But soon, as soon as we can, where we can look out the window and see the street, maybe even the hoofmarks or their shapes in the air, because the same air will be there even if the dust, the mud, is gone— Hungry, gaunt, yelling, setting fire to the store depots of a whole carefully planned campaign and riding out again.
No looting at all: no stopping for even shoes, tobacco.
I tell you, they were not men after spoils and glory; they were boys riding the sheer tremendous tidal wave of desperate living.
Boys.
Because this.
This is beautiful.
Listen.
Try to see it.
Here is that fine shape of eternal youth and virginal desire which makes heroes.
That makes the doings of heroes border so close upon the unbelievable that it is no wonder that their doings must emerge now and then like gunflashes in the smoke, and that their very physical passing becomes rumor with a thousand faces before breath is out of them, lest paradoxical truth outrage itself.
Now this is what Cinthy told me.
And I believe.
I know.
It’s too fine to doubt. It’s too fine, too simple, ever to have been invented by white thinking.
A negro might have invented it.
And if Cinthy did, I still believe.
Because even fact cannot stand with it.
I don’t know whether grandfather’s squadron were lost or not.
I don’t think so.
I think that they did it deliberately, as boys who had set fire to an enemy’s barn, without taking so much as a shingle or a door hasp, might pause in flight to steal a few apples from a neighbor, a friend.
Mind you, they were hungry.
They had been hungry for three years.
Perhaps they were used to that.
Anyway, they had just set fire to tons of food and clothing and tobacco and liquors, taking nothing though there had not been issued any order against looting, and they turn now, with all that for background, backdrop: the consternation, the conflagration; the sky itself must have been on fire.
You can see it, hear it: the shouts, the shots, the shouting of triumph and terror, the drumming hooves, the trees uprearing against that red glare as though fixed too in terror, the sharp gables of houses like the jagged edge of the exploding and ultimate earth.
Now it is a close place: you can feel, hear in the darkness horses pulled short up, plunging; clashes of arms; whispers overloud, hard breathing, the voices still triumphant; behind them the rest of the troops galloping past toward the rallying bugles.
That you must hear, feel: then you see.
You see before the crash, in the abrupt red glare the horses with wide eyes and nostrils in tossing heads, sweatstained; the gleam of metal, the white gaunt faces of living scarecrows who have not eaten all they wanted at one time since they could remember; perhaps some of them had already dismounted, perhaps one or two had already entered the henhouse.
All this you see before the crash of the shotgun comes: then blackness again.
It was just the one shot.
‘And of course he would be right in de way of hit,’ Cinthy said. ‘Stealin’ chickens.
A man growed, wid a married son, gone to a war whar his business was killin’ Yankees, killed in somebody else’s henhouse wid a han’ful of feathers: Stealing chickens.” His voice was high, childlike, exalted.
Already his wife was clutching his arm: Shhhhhhh!
Shhhhhhhhh!