The Unvanquished by William Faulkner Read Free Book Online

single card, theLord Himself might have held His own with one of them at a time, but that with both of them even He would have lost His shirt.
    There was more to Uncle Buck and Buddy than just that. Father said they were ahead of their time; he said they not only possessed, but put into practice, ideas about social relationship that maybe fifty years after they were both dead people would have a name for. These ideas were about land. They believed that land did not belong to people but that people belonged to land and that the earth would permit them to live on and out of it and use it only so long as they behaved and that if they did not behave right, it would shake them off just like a dog getting rid of fleas. They had some kind of a system of book-keeping which must have been even more involved than their betting score against one another, by which all their niggers were to be freed, not given freedom, but earning it, buying it not in money from Uncle Buck and Buddy, but in work from the plantation. Only there were others besides niggers, and this was the reason why Uncle Buck came hobbling across the square, shaking his stick at me and hollering, or at least why it was Uncle Buck who was hobbling and hollering and shaking the stick. One day Father said how they suddenly realised that if the county ever split up into private feuds either with votes or weapons, no family could contend with the McCaslins because all the other families would have only their cousins and kin to recruit from, while Uncle Buck and Buddy would already have an army. These were the dirt farmers, the people whomthe niggers called ‘white trash’—men who had owned no slaves and some of whom even lived worse than the slaves on big plantations. It was another side of Uncle Buck’s and Buddy’s ideas about men and land, which Father said people didn’t have a name for yet, by which Uncle Buck and Buddy had persuaded the white men to pool their little patches of poor hill land along with the niggers and the McCaslin plantation, promising them in return nobody knew exactly what, except that their women and children did have shoes, which not all of them had had before, and a lot of them even went to school. Anyway, they (the white men, the trash) looked on Uncle Buck and Buddy like Deity Himself, so that when Father began to raise his first regiment to take to Virginia and Uncle Buck and Buddy came to town to enlist and the others decided they were too old (they were past seventy), it looked for a while as if Father’s regiment would have to fight its first engagement right there in our pasture. At first Uncle Buck and Buddy said they would form a company of their own men in opposition to Father’s. Then they realised that this wouldn’t stop Father, since he didn’t care whom the men fought under just so they fought, so then Uncle Buck and Buddy put the thumbscrews on Father sure enough. They told Father that if he did not let them go, the solid bloc of private soldier white trash votes which they controlled would not only force Father to call a special election of officers before the regiment left the pasture, it would also demote Father from colonel to major or maybe only a company commander. Fatherdidn’t mind what they called him; colonel or corporal, it would have been all the same to him, as long as they let him tell them what to do, and he probably wouldn’t have minded being demoted even to private by God Himself; it was the idea that there could be latent within the men he led the power, let alone the desire, to so affront him. So they compromised; they agreed at last that one of the McCaslins should be allowed to go. Father and Uncle Buck and Buddy shook hands on it and they stuck to it; the following summer after Second Manassas when the men did demote Father, it was the McCaslin votes who stuck with and resigned from the regiment along with Father and returned to Mississippi with him and formed his irregular cavalry. So one of them