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PARTISAN REVIEW
that whole year in which not only to ingest surrender but( begging
the metaphor, the figure) to convert, metabolise it, and then defe–
cate it as fertilizer for the four-years' fallow land they were already
in train to rehabilitate a year before the Virginia knell rang the formal
change, the men of '65 returning to find themselves alien in the very
land they had been bred and born in and had fought for four years
to defend, to find a working and already solvent economy b.ased on
the premise that it could get along without them: (and now the
rest of this story, since it occurs, happens, here: not yet June in
'65; this one had indeed wasted no time getting back: a stranger,
alone; the town did not even know it had ever seen
him
before,
because the other time was a year ago and had lasted only while he
galloped through it firing a pistol backward at a Yankee army,
and he had been riding a horse-a fine though a little too small and
too delicate blooded mare-where now he rode a big mule, which for
that reason-its size-was a better mule than the horse was a horse,
but it was still a mule, and of course the town could not know that
he had swapped the mare for the mule on the same day that he
traded his lieutenant's sabre-he still had the pistol-for the stock–
ing full of seed corn he had seen growing in a Pennsylvania field
and had not let even the mule have one mouthful of it during the
long journey across the ruined land between the Atlantic seaboard
and the Jefferson jail, riding up to the jail at last, still gaunt and
tattered and dirty and still undefeated and not fleeing now but in–
stead making or at least planning a single-handed assault against
what any rational man would have considered insurmountable odds
((but then, that bubble had ever been immune to the ephemerae
of facts) ); perhaps, probably-without doubt: apparently she had
been standing leaning musing in it for three or four years in 1864;
nothing had happened since, not in a land which had even antici–
pated Appomattox, capable of shaking a meditation that rooted, that
durable, that veteran-the girl watched him get down and tie the
mule to the fence, and perhaps while he walked from the fence to
the door he even looked for a moment at her, though possibly, per–
haps even probably, not, since she was not
his
immediate object
now, he was not really concerned with her at the moment, because
he had so little time, he had none, really: still to reach Alabama and
the small hill farm which had been his father's and would now be
