Now it was a very odd noise which the whole length of Oak Ridge was making: the guns contributed little, and the afternoon ached with their cessation. It was mainly the sound of men, uncounted tribes of them, each exclaiming or muttering and beginning to leave the crest of the hill. They clung together in blocks or bunches, each regiment with a flag or two for its nucleus, but they moved more rapidly every minute and soon they would be running. The foremost swarms jogged out of the woods and gathered momentum. Men—a multitude of them, and dressed mostly in dark blue clothes—had been attending some sort of a political rally on that hill; suddenly a fire had burst out, or a hurricane came close, and everybody was going home.

Chapter 6

6.

A new kind of thudding possessed the yard, and Mrs. Fanning knew that people were not being careful about the garden. No matter what lashed these soldiers in their madcap exploits, it was indecent of them to ruin the cabbages and the parsley borders, and that was what they were doing. She wailed, “Bedford, I’ve a great notion to go up and complain to the officers. Honey boy wouldn’t let his soldiers go wrecking other folks’s gardens! He—” There came a faint, musical crash as someone plowed through the cucumber frames. Irene heard herself soothing falsely: “Mother. Please. I will go up. No, I’m not in the least afraid. The guns have stopped. Maybe the fighting is all over, and the rebels gone.” A savage blast shook the towering house above them, and made the cellar stairs complain; Mrs. Fanning squealed; the girl went up, all the same.

She was not afraid of those smudges on the kitchen floor … He had been such a baffled, innocent person— no one to fear, but certainly a youth to be mourned time out of mind. Mr. Fanning was stricken by the utter conclusiveness of it; he suffered no further inflammation of the bowels, but a deeper and more serious burn, and it showed in his eyes. He had groped away to the cellar, and slid to the sofa with his hand over his eyes. “Mother,” he asked, after a time, “read a chapter.” It was a Psalm; the Hebraic passion had a rich sensuousness, even with Mrs. Fanning mouthing it fearfully. Irene thought about David. She wondered if the freckled boy had been named David, and she rather thought that he had.