The Unvanquished by William Faulkner

Author:William Faulkner [Faulkner, William]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
ISBN: 978-0-307-79219-8
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-05-17T16:00:00+00:00

3.

It was a bright warm day; we saw the guns and the bits shining a long way down the road, but this time Ringo didn’t even move. He just quit drawing and looked up from the paper and said, “So Ab Snopes was lying. Gret God, aint we gonter never get shet of them?”

It was just a lieutenant; by this time Ringo and I could tell the different officers’ ranks better than we could tell Confederate ranks because one day we counted up and the only Confederate officers we had ever seen were Father and the captain that talked to us with Uncle Buck McCaslin that day in Jefferson before Grant burned it. And this was to be the last time we would see any uniforms at all except as the walking symbols of defeated men’s pride and indomitable unregret, but we didn’t know that now. So it was just a lieutenant. He looked about forty and kind of mad and gleeful both at the same time; Ringo didn’t recognise him because he had not been in the wagon with us, but I did: from the way he sat the horse, or maybe from the way he looked mad and happy both, like he had been mad for several days, thinking about how much he was going to enjoy being mad when the right time came. And he recognised me too; he looked at me once and said, “Hah!” with his teeth showing and pushed his horse up and looked at Ringo’s picture. There were maybe a dozen cavalry behind him; we never noticed especially. “Hah,” he said again, then he said, “What’s that?”

“A house,” Ringo said. Ringo had never even looked at him good yet. He had seen even more of them than I had. “Look at it.”

The lieutenant looked at me and said “Hah” again behind his teeth; every now and then while he was talking to Ringo he would do that. He looked at Ringo’s picture. Then he looked up the grove to where the chimneys rose out of the pile of rubble and ashes. Grass and weeds had come up out of the ashes now and unless you knew better, all you saw was the four chimneys. Some of the golden rod was still in bloom. “Oh,” the officer said. “I see. You’re drawing it like it used to be.”

“Co-rect,” Ringo said. “What I wanter draw hit like hit is now for? I can walk down here ten times a day and look at hit like hit is now. I can even ride in that gate on a horse and do that.”

The lieutenant didn’t say “Hah!” this time. He didn’t do anything yet; I reckon he was still enjoying waiting a little longer to get good and mad. He just kind of grunted. “When you get done here, you can move into town and keep busy all winter, cant you?” he said. Then he sat back in the saddle. He didn’t say “Hah” now either; it

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.