'He bought them himself,' Mr Compson said. 'He bought the two of them while the regiment was in Virginia, after Judith got word to him that her mother was dead. He ordered them from Italy, the best, the finest to he had — his wife's complete and his with the date left blank: and this while on active service with an army which had not only the highest mortality rate of any before or since but which had a custom of electing a new set of regimental officers each year (and by which system he was at the moment entitled to call himself colonel, since he had been voted in and Colonel Sartoris voted out only last summer) so that for all he could know, before his order could be filled or even received he might be already under ground and his grave marked (if at all) by a shattered musket thrust into the earth, or lacking that he might be a second lieutenant or even a private — provided of course that his men would have the courage to demote him — yet he not only ordered the stones and managed to pay for them, but stranger still he managed to get them past a seacoast so closely blockaded that the incoming runners refused any cargo except ammunition — ' It seemed to Quentin that he could actually see them: the ragged and starving troops without shoes, the gaunt powder-blackened faces looking backward over tattered shoulders, the glaring eyes in which burned some indomitable desperation of undefeat watching that dark interdict ocean across which a grim lightless solitary ship fled with in its hold two thousand precious pounds-space containing not bullets, not even something to eat, but that much bombastic and inert carven rock which for the next year was to be a part of the' regiment, to follow it into Pennsylvania and be present at Gettysburg, moving behind the regiment in a wagon driven by the demon's body servant through swamp and plain and mountain pass, the regiment moving no faster than the wagon could, with starved gaunt men and gaunt spent horses knee deep in icy mud or snow, sweating and cursing it through bog and morass like a piece of artillery, speaking of the two stones as 'Colonel' and 'Mrs Colonel'; then through the Cumberland Gap and down through the Tennessee mountains, traveling at night to dodge Yankee patrols, and into Mississippi in the late fall of '64, where the daughter waited whose marriage he had interdict and who was to be a widow the next summer though apparently not bereaved, where his wife was dead and his son self-excommunicated and — banished, and put one of the stones over his wife's grave and set the other upright in the hall of the house, where Miss Coldfield possibly (maybe doubtless) looked at it every day as though it were his portrait, possibly (maybe doubtless here too) reading among the lettering more of maiden hope and virgin expectation than she ever told Quentin about, since she never mentioned the stone to him at all, and (the demon) drank the parched corn coffee and ate the hoe cake which Judith and Clytie prepared for him and kissed Judith on the forehead and said, 'Well, Clytie' and returned to the war, all in twenty-four hours; he could see it; he might even have been there.
Then he thought No. If I had been there I could not have seen it this plain.
'But that don't explain the other three,' he said. 'They must have cost something too." 'Who would have paid for them?" Mr Compson said.
Quentin could feel him looking at him. 'Think." Quentin looked at the three identical headstones with their faint identical lettering, slanted a little in the soft loamy decay of accumulated cedar needles, these decipherable too when he looked close, the first one: Charles Bon. Born in New Orleans, Louisiana. Died at Sutpen's Hundred, Mississippi, May 3, 1856. Aged 33 years and 5 months. He could feel his father watching him.
'She did it,' he said. 'With that money she got when she sold the store." 'Yes,' Mr Compson said.
Quentin had to stoop and brush away some of the cedar needles to read the next one. As he did so one of the dogs rose and approached him, thrusting its head in to see what he was looking at like a human being would, as if from association with human beings it had acquired the quality of curiosity which is an attribute only of men and apes.
'Get away,' he said, thrusting the dog back with one hand while with the other he brushed the cedar needles away, smoothing with his hand into legibility the faint lettering, the grayed words: Charles Etienne Saint-Valery Bon .1859-1884 feeling his father watching him, remarking before he rose that the third stone bore that same date, 1884. 'It couldn't have been the store this time,' he said. 'Because she sold the store in '70, and besides 1884 is the same date that's on hers' thinking how it would have been terrible for her sure enough if she had wanted to put Beloved Husband of on that first one.
'Ah,' Mr Compson said. 'That was the one your grandfather attended to.
