Light in August - William Faulkner [95]
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. I don’t know.”
“Oh,” Christmas said. “They might have done that? dug them up after they were already killed, dead? Just when do men that have different blood in them stop hating one another?”
“When do they?” Her voice ceased. She went on: “I don’t know. I don’t know whether they would have dug them up or not. I wasn’t alive then. I was not born until fourteen years after Calvin was killed. I don’t know what men might have done then. But father thought they might have. So he hid the graves. And then Calvin’s mother died and he buried her there, with Calvin and grandpa. And so it sort of got to be our burying ground before we knew it. Maybe father hadn’t planned to bury her there. I remember how my mother (father sent for her up to New Hampshire where some of our kin people still live, soon after Calvin’s mother died. He was alone here, you see. I suppose if it hadn’t been for Calvin and grandpa buried out yonder, he would have gone away) told me that father started once to move away, when Calvin’s mother died. But she died in the summer, and it would have been too hot then to take her back to Mexico, to her people. So he buried her here. Maybe that’s why he decided to stay here. Or maybe it was because he was getting old too then, and all the men who had fought in the War were getting old and the negroes hadn’t raped or murdered anybody to speak of. Anyway, he buried her here. He had to hide that grave too, because he thought that someone might