THE JAIL
605
hour or a day or a night, and the host-guide-answers them, to the
best of his ability out of the town's composite heritage of remembering
that long back, told, repeated, inherited to him by his father; or
rather, his mother: from her mother: or better still, to him when
he himself was a child, direct from his great-aunt: the spinsters,
maiden and childless out of a time when there were too many women
because too many of the young men were maimed or dead: the
indomitable and undefeated, maiden progenitresses of spinster and
childless descendants still capable of rising up and stalking out in
the middle of
Gone With the Wind;
And again one sense assumes the office of two or three: not only
hearing, listening, and seeing too, but you are even standing on the
same spot, the same boards she did that day she wrote her name
into the window and on the other one three years later watching and
hearing through and beyond that faint fragile defacement the sudden
rush and thunder: the dust: the crackle and splatter of pistols: then
the face, gaunt, battle-dirty, stubbled-over; urgent of course, but
merely harried, harassed; not defeated, turned for a fleeing instant
across the tunnoil and the fury, then gone: and still the girl in the
window (the guide-host-has never said one or the other; without
doubt in the town's remembering after a hundred years it has changed
that many times from blonde to dark and back to blonde again;
which doesn't matter, since in your own remembering that tender
mist and vail will be forever blonde) not even waiting: musing; a
year, and still not even waiting: meditant, not even unimpatient;
just patienceless, in the sense that blindness and zenith are colorless;
until at last the mule, not out of the long northeastern panorama
of defeat and dust and fading smoke, but drawn out of it by that
impregnable, that invincible, that incredible, that terrifying passivity,
coming at that one fatigueless unflagging jog all the way from
Virginia-the mule which was a better mule in 1865 than the blood
mare had been a horse in -'2 and -'3 and -'4, for the reason that this
was now 1865, and the man, still gaunt and undefeated: merely
harried and urgent and short of time to get on to Alabama and see
the condition of his farm--or (for that matter)
if
he still had a
farm, and now the girl, the fragile and workless girl not only incap–
able of milking a cow but of whom it was never even demanded,
required, suggested, that she substitute for her father in drying the
dishes, mounting pillon on a mule behind a paroled cavalry subaltern
out of a surrendered army who had swapped his charger for a mule
