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.