Chapter Nine

AND TWO OCLOCK that afternoon in his uncle’s car just behind the truck (it was another pickup: they—the sheriff— had commandeered it. with a slatted cattle frame on the bed which one of the Gowrie twins had known would be standing in the deserted yard of the house two miles away which had the telephone too—and he remembered how he wondered what the truck was doing there, how they had got to town themselves who had left it—and the Gowrie had turned the switch on with a table fork which by the Gowrie’s direction he had found in the unlocked kitchen when his uncle went in to telephone the coroner and the Gowrie was driving it) blinking rapidly and steadily not against glare so much as something hot and gritty inside his eyelids like a dust of ground glass (which certainly could and even should have been dust after twenty-odd miles of sand and gravel roads in one morning except that no simple dust refused as this did to moisten at all with blinking) it seemed to him that he saw crowding the opposite side of the street facing the jail not just the county, not just Beat One and Two and Three and Five in their faded tieless khaki and denim and print cotton but the town too—not only the faces he had seen getting out of the Beat Four dusty cars in front of the barbershop and the poolhall Saturday afternoon and then in the barbershop Sunday morning and again here in the street Sunday noon when the sheriff drove up with Lucas, but the others who except for the doctors and lawyers and ministers were not just the town but the Town: merchants and cotton-buyers and automobile dealers and the younger men who were the clerks in the stores and cotton offices and salesrooms and mechanics in the garages and filling stations on the way back to work from lunch—who without even waiting for the sheriff’s car to get close enough to be recognised had already turned and begun to flow back toward the Square like the turn of a tide, already in motion when the sheriff’s car reached the jail, already pouring back into the Square and converging in that one direction across it when first the sheriff then the truck then his uncle turned into the alley beyond the jail leading to the loading ramp at the undertaker’s back door where the coroner was waiting for them: so that moving not only parallel with them beyond the intervening block but already in advance, it would even reach the undertaker’s first; and then suddenly and before he could even turn in the seat to look back he knew that it had even boiled into the alley behind them and in a moment a second now it would roar down on them, overtake and snatch them up in order: his uncle’s car then the truck then the sheriff’s like three hencoops and sweep them on and fling them at last in one inextricable aborted now-worthless jumble onto the ramp at the coroner’s feet; still not moving yet it seemed to him that he was already leaning out the window or maybe actually clinging to the fleeing runningboard yelling back at them in a kind of unbearable unbelieving outrage:

 

“You fools, dont you see you are too late, that you’ll have to start all over again now to find a new reason?” then turning in the seat and looking back through the rear window for a second or maybe two he actually saw it—not faces but a face, not a mass nor even a mosaic of them but a Face: not even ravening nor uninsatiate but just in motion, insensate, vacant of thought or even passion: an Expression significantless and without past like the one which materialises suddenly after seconds or even minutes of painful even frantic staring from the innocent juxtaposition of trees and clouds and landscape in the soap-advertisement puzzle-picture or on the severed head in the news photo of the Balkan or Chinese atrocity: without dignity and not even evocative of horror: just neckless slack-muscled and asleep, hanging suspended face to face with him just beyond the glass of the back window yet in the same instant rushing and monstrous down at him so that he actually started back and had even begun to think In a second more it will when flick! it was gone, not only the Face but the faces, the alley itself empty behind them: nobody and nothing in it at all and in the street beyond the vacant mouth less than a dozen people now standing looking up the alley after them who even as he looked turned also and began to move back toward the Square.

 

He hesitated only an instant. They’ve all gone around to the front he thought rapid and quite calm, having a little trouble (he noticed that the car was stopped now) getting his hand onto the door handle, remarking the sheriff’s car and the truck both stopped too at the loading ramp where four or five men were lifting a stretcher up to the truck’s open endgate and he even heard his uncle’s voice behind him:

 

“Now we’re going home and put you to bed before your mother has a doctor in to give us both a squirt with a needle:” then finding the handle and out of the car, stumbling a little but only once, then his heels although he was not running at all pounding too hard on the concrete, his leg-muscles cramped from the car or perhaps even charley-horsed from thrashing up and down branch bottoms not to mention a night spent digging and undigging graves but at least the jarring was clearing his head somewhat or maybe it was the wind of motion doing it; anyway if he was going to have delusions at least he would have a clear brain to look at them with: up the walkway between the undertaker’s and the building next to it though already too late of course, the Face in one last rush and surge long since by now already across the Square and the pavement, in one last crash against then right on through the plate glass window trampling to flinders the little bronze-and-ebony membership plaque in the national funeraleers association and the single shabby stunted palm in its maroon earthenware pot and exploding to tatters the sun-faded purple curtain which was the last frail barrier shielding what was left of Jake Montgomery had of what was left of his share of human dignity.

 

Then out of the walkway onto the sidewalk, the Square, and stopped dead still for what seemed to him the first time since he and his uncle left the supper table and walked out of the house a week or a month or a year ago or whenever it had been that last Sunday night was. Because this time he didn’t even need the flick. They were there of course nose-pressed to the glass but there were not even enough of them to block the pavement let alone compound a Face; less than a dozen here too and some most of them were even boys who should have been in school at this hour—not one country face nor even one true man because even the other four or five were the man-sized neither men nor boys who were always there when old epileptic Uncle Hogeye Mosby from the poorhouse fell foaming into the gutter or when Willy Ingrum finally managed to shoot through the leg or loins what some woman had telephoned him was a mad-dog: and standing at the entrance to the walkway while his uncle came pounding up it behind him, blinking painfully his painful moistureless eyelids he watched why: the Square not empty yet because there were too many of them but getting empty, the khaki and denim and the printed cotton streaming into it and across it toward the parked cars and trucks, clotting and crowding at the doors while one by one they crawled and climbed into the seats and beds and cabs; already starters were whining and engines catching and racing and idling and gears scraping and grinding while the passengers still hurried toward them and now not one but five or six at once backed away from the curb and turned and straightened out with people still running toward them and scrambling aboard and then he could no longer have kept count of them even if he had ever tried, standing beside his uncle watching them condense into four streams into the four main streets leading out of town in the four directions, already going fast even before they were out of the Square, the faces for one last moment more looking not back but out, not at anything, just out just once and that not for long and then no more, vanishing rapidly in profile and seeming already to be traveling much faster than the vehicle which bore them, already by their faces out of town long before they had passed from view: and twice more even from the car; his mother standing suddenly not touching him, come obviously through the walkway too from the jail right past where they were probably still hoicking Montgomery out of the truck but then his uncle had told him they could stand anything provided they still retained always the right to refuse to admit it was visible, saying to his uncle:

 

“Where’s the car?” then not even waiting to be answered, turning back into the walkway ahead of them, walking slender and erect and rigid with her back looking and her heels clicking and popping on the concrete as they did at home when he and Aleck Sander and his father and uncle all four had better walk pretty light for a while, back past the ramp where only the sheriff’s empty car and the empty truck stood now and on to the alley where she was already holding open the door of the car when he and his uncle got there and saw them again crossing the mouth of the alley like across a stage—the cars and trucks, the faces in invincible profile not amazed not aghast but in a sort of irrevocable repudiation, shooting across the alley-mouth so constant and unbroken and so many of them it was like the high school senior class or maybe an itinerant one-night travelling troupe giving the Battle of San Juan Hill and you not only didn’t hear you didn’t even need to not listen to the muted confused backstage undersounds to the same as see the marching or charging troops as soon as they reached the wings break into a frantic stumbling run swapping coats and caps and fake bandages as they doubled back behind the rippling cheesecloth painted with battle and courage and death to fall in on their own rear and at heroic attention cross the footlights again.

 

“We’ll take Miss Habersham home first,” he said.

 

“Get in,” his mother said and one turn to the left into the street behind the jail and he could still hear them and another turn to the left into the next cross street and there they were again fleeing across that proscenium too unbroken and breakless, the faces rigid in profile above the long tearing sound of cement and rubber and it had taken him two or three minutes in the pickup this morning to find a chance just to get into it and go the same way it was going; it would take his uncle five or ten to find a hole to get through it and go back to the jail.

 

“Go on,” his mother said. “Make them let you in:” and he knew they were not going by the jail at all; he said:

 

“Miss Habersham—”

 

“How do I do it?” his uncle said. “Just shut both eyes and mash hard with my right foot?” and perhaps did; they were in the stream too now turning with it toward home which was all right, he had never worried about getting into it but getting out of it again before that frantic pell-mell not of flight then if any liked that better so just call it evacuation swept them on into nightfall to spew them at last hours and miles away high and dry and battered and with the wind knocked out of them somewhere along the county’s ultimate scarce-mapped perimeter to walk back in the dark: saying again:

 

“Miss Habersham—”

 

“She has her truck,” his uncle said. “Don’t you remember?”—who had been doing nothing else steadily for five minutes now, even trying three times to say it: Miss Habersham in the truck and her house not half a mile away and all holding her back was she couldn’t possibly get to it, the house on one side and the truck on the other of that unpierceable barrier of rushing bumper-locked cars and trucks and so almost as interdict to an old maiden lady in a second-hand vegetable-peddler’s pickup as if it were in Mongolia or the moon: sitting in the truck with the engine running and the gears meshed and her foot on the accelerator independent solitary and forlorn erect and slight beneath the exact archaic even moribund hat waiting and watching and wanting only but nothing but to get through it so she could put the darned clothes away and feed the chickens and eat supper and get some rest too after going on thirty-six hours which to seventy must have been worse than a hundred to sixteen, watching and waiting that dizzying profiled blur for a while even a good while but not forever not too long because she was a practical woman who hadn’t taken long last night to decide that the way to get a dead body up out of a grave was to go out to the grave and dig it up and not long now to decide that the way to get around an obstruction especially with the sun already tumbling down the west was to go around it, the truck in motion now running along parallel with the obstruction and in its direction, forlorn and solitary still yet independent still too and only a little nervous, perhaps just realising that she was already driving a little faster than she was used and liked to, faster in fact than she had ever driven before and even then not keeping abreast of it but only beside it because it was going quite fast now: one endless profiled whizz: and now she would know that when the gap came perhaps she would not have the skill or strength or speed or quickness of eye or maybe even the simple nerve: herself going faster and faster and so intent trying to not miss the gap with one eye and watch where she was going with the other that she wouldn’t realise until afterward that she had made the turn going not south but east now and not just her house diminishing rapidly and squarely behind her but Jefferson too because they or it was not moving in just one direction out of town but in all of them on all the main roads leading away from the jail and the undertaker’s and Lucas Beauchamp and what was left of Vinson Gowrie and Montgomery like the frantic scattering of waterbugs on a stagnant pond when you drop a rock into it: so she would be more desperate than ever now with all distance fleeing between her and home and another night coming on, nerving herself for any gap or crevice now, the battered pickup barely skimming the ground beside that impenetrable profiled blur drawing creeping closer and closer beside it when the inevitable happened: some failure of eye or tremor of hand or an involuntary flick of the eyelid on alertness’s straining glare or maybe simple topography: a stone or clod in the path as inaccessible to indictment as God but anyway too close and then too late, the truck snatched up and into the torrent of ballbearing rubber and refinanced pressed steel and hurled pell-mell on still gripping the useless steering wheel and pressing the gelded accelerator solitary and forlorn across the long peaceful creep of late afternoon, into the mauve windless dome of dusk, faster and faster now toward one last crescendo just this side of the county line where they would burst scattering into every crossroad and lane like rabbits or rats nearing at last their individual burrows, the truck slowing and then stopping a little crossways in the road perhaps where momentum had spewed it because she was safe now, in Crossman County and she could turn south again now along the edge of Yoknapatawpha turning on the lights now going as fast as she dared along the fringing unmarked country roads; full night now and in Mott County now she could even turn west at last watching her chance to turn north and make her dash, nine and ten oclock along the markless roads fringing the imaginary line beyond which the distant frantic headlights flashed and darted plunging into their burrows and dens; Okatoba County soon and midnight and surely she could turn north then back into Yoknapatawpha, wan and spent solitary and indomitable among the crickets and treefrogs and lightningbugs and owls and whippoorwills and the hounds rushing bellowing out from under the sleeping houses and even at last a man in his nightshirt and unlaced shoes, carrying a lantern:

 

Where you trying to go, lady?

 

I’m trying to get to Jefferson.

 

Jefferson’s behind you, lady.

 

I know. I had to detour around an arrogant insufferable old nigger who got the whole county upset trying to pretend he murdered a white man: when suddenly he discovered that he was going to laugh, discovering it almost in time, not quite in time to prevent it but in time to begin to stop it pretty quick, really more surprised than anything else, until his mother said harshly:

 

“Blow the horn. Blow them out of the way” and he discovered that it was not laughing at all or anyway not just laughing, that is the sound it was making was about the same as laughing but there was more of it and it felt harder, seemed to be having more trouble getting out and the harder it felt and sounded the less and less he could seem to remember what he must have been laughing at and his face was suddenly wet not with a flow but a kind of burst and spring of water; anyway there he was, a hulking lump the second largest of the three of them, more bigger than his mother than his uncle was than he, going on seventeen years old and almost a man yet because three in the car were so crowded he couldn’t help but feel a woman’s shoulder against his and her narrow hand on his knee sitting there like a spanked child before he had even had warning enough to begin to stop it.

 

“They ran,” he said.

 

“Pull out, damn you,” his mother said. “Go around them:” which his uncle did, on the wrong side of the street and going almost as fast as he had driven this morning on the way to the church trying to keep in sight of the sheriff and it wasn’t because his mother had rationalised that since all of them were already in town trying their best to get out of it there wouldn’t be anybody to be coming toward the Square on that side of the street so it was simply just having one in the car with you even if she wasn’t driving it, that’s all you needed to do: remembering them once before in a car and his uncle driving and his uncle said then,

 

“All right, how do I do it, just shut both eyes and mash the accelerator?” and his mother said,

 

“How many collisions did you ever see with women driving both of them?” and his uncle said,

 

“All right, touché, maybe it’s because one of them’s car is still in the shop where a man ran into it yesterday:” then he could no longer see them but only hear the long tearing without beginning or end and leaving no scar of tires and pavement in friction like the sound of raw silk and luckily the house was on the same wrong side of the street too and carrying the sound into the yard with him too and now he could do something about the laughing by taking a moment to put his hand on whatever it was that seemed to have got him started and bringing it out into the light where even he could see it wasn’t that funny; about ten thousand miles of being funny enough to set his mother swearing; he said:

 

“They ran” and at once knew that was wrong, almost too late even while he was standing right there looking at himself, walking fast across the yard until he stopped and not jerked just pulled his arm away and said, “Look, I’m not crippled. I’m just tired. I’m going up to my room and lie down a while:” and then to his uncle: “I’ll be all right then. Come up and call me in about fifteen minutes:” then stopped and turned again to his uncle: “I’ll be ready in fifteen minutes:” and went on this time carrying it into the house with him and even in his room too he could still hear it even through the drawn shades and the red jumping behind his eyelids until he started up onto one elbow under his mother’s hand too again to his uncle just beyond the footboard:

 

“Fifteen minutes. You wont go without me? You promise?”

 

“Sure,” his uncle said. “I wont go without you. I’ll just—”

 

“Will you please get to hell out of here, Gavin?” his mother said and then to him, “Lie down” and he did and there it still was even through even against the hand, the narrow slim cool palm but too dry too rough and maybe even too cool, the dry hot gritty feel of his skull better than the feel of the hand on it because at least he was used to it by now, he had had it long enough, even rolling his head but about as much chance to escape that one frail narrow inevictible palm as to roll your forehead out from under a birthmark and it was not even a face now because their backs were toward him but the back of a head, the composite one back of one Head one fragile mushfilled bulb indefensible as an egg yet terrible in its concorded unanimity rushing not at him but away.

 

“They ran,” he said. “They saved their consciences a good ten cents by not having to buy him a package of tobacco to show they had forgiven him.”

 

“Yes,” his mother said. “Just let go:” which was like telling a man dangling with one hand over a cliff to just hold on: who wanted nothing right now but a chance to let go and relinquish into the nothing of sleep what little of nothing he still had who last night had wanted to go to sleep and could have but didn’t have time and now wanted more than ever to go to sleep and had all the time in the world for the next fifteen minutes (or the next fifteen days or fifteen years as far as anybody knew because there was nothing anybody could do but hope Crawford Gowrie would decide to come in and hunt up the sheriff and say All right I did it because all they had was Lucas who said that Vinson Gowrie wasn’t shot with a forty-one Colt or anyway his, Lucas’ forty-one Colt and Buddy McCallum to say or not say Yes I swapped Crawford Gowrie a German pistol twenty-five years ago; not even Vinson Gowrie for somebody from the Memphis police to come and look at and say what bullet killed him because the sheriff had already let old Gowrie take him back home and wash the quicksand off and bury him again tomorrow: where this time Hampton and his uncle could go out there tomorrow night and dig him up) only he had forgotten how: or maybe that was it and he didn’t dare relinquish into nothing what little he had left: which was nothing: no grief to be remembered nor pity nor even awareness of shame, no vindication of the deathless aspiration of man by man to man through the catharsis of pity and shame but instead only an old man for whom grief was not even a component of his own but merely a temporary phenomenon of his slain son jerking a strange corpse over onto its back not in appeasement to its one mute indicting cry not for pity not for vengeance but for justice but just to be sure he had the wrong one, crying cheery abashless and loud: “Yep it’s that damned Montgomery damned if it aint,” and a Face; who had no more expected Lucas to be swept out of his cell shoulder high on a tide of expiation and set for his moment of vindication and triumph on the base say of the Confederate monument (or maybe better on the balcony of the postoffice building beneath the pole where the national flag flew) than he had expected such for himself and Aleck Sander and Miss Habersham: who (himself) not only had not wanted that but could not have accepted it since it would have abrogated and made void the whole sum of what part he had done which had to be anonymous else it was valueless: who had wanted of course to leave his mark too on his time in man but only that, no more than that, some mark on his part in earth but humbly, waiting wanting humbly even, not really hoping even, nothing (which of course was everything) except his own one anonymous chance too to perform something passionate and brave and austere not just in but into man’s enduring chronicle worthy of a place in it (who knew? perhaps adding even one anonymous jot to the austerity of the chronicle’s brave passion) in gratitude for the gift of his tune in it, wanting only that and not even with hope really, willing to accept the fact that he had missed it because he wasn’t worthy, but certainly he hadn’t expected this:—not a life saved from death nor even a death saved from shame and indignity nor even the suspension of a sentence but merely the grudging pretermission of a date; not indignity shamed with its own shameful cancellation, not sublimation and humility with humility and pride remembered nor the pride of courage and passion nor of pity nor the pride and austerity and grief, but austerity itself debased by what it had gained, courage and passion befouled by what they had had to cope with;—a Face, the composite Face of his native kind his native land, his people his blood his own with whom it had been his joy and pride and hope to be found worthy to present one united unbreakable front to the dark abyss the night—a Face monstrous unravening omniverous and not even uninsatiate, not frustrated nor even thwarted, not biding nor waiting and not even needing to be patient since yesterday today and tomorrow are Is: Indivisible: One (his uncle for this too, anticipating this too two or three or four years ago as his uncle had everything else which as he himself became more and more a man he had found to be true: “It’s all now you see. Yesterday wont be over until tomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago. For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it’s still not yet two oclock on that July afternoon in 1863, the brigades are in position behind the rail fence, the guns are laid and ready in the woods and the furled flags are already loosened to break out and Pickett himself with his long oiled ringlets and his hat in one hand probably and his sword in the other looking up the hill waiting for Longstreet to give the word and it’s all in the balance, it hasn’t happened yet, it hasn’t even begun yet, it not only hasn’t begun yet but there is still time for it not to begin against that position and those circumstances which made more men than Garnett and Kemper and Armstead and Wilcox look grave yet it’s going to begin, we all know that, we have come too far with too much at stake and that moment doesn’t need even a fourteen-year-old boy to think This time. Maybe this time with all this much to lose and all this much to gain: Pennsylvania, Maryland, the world, the golden dome of Washington itself to crown with desperate and unbelievable victory the desperate gamble, the cast made two years ago; or to anyone who ever sailed even a skiff under a quilt sail, the moment in 1492 when somebody thought This is it: the absolute edge of no return, to turn back now and make home or sail irrevocably on and either find land or plunge over the world’s roaring rim. A small voice, a sound sensitive lady poet of the time of my youth said the scattered tea goes with the leaves and every day a sunset dies: a poet’s extravagance which as quite often mirrors truth but upside down and backward since the mirror’s unwitting manipulator busy in his preoccupation has forgotten that the back of it is glass too: because if they only did, instead of which yesterday’s sunset and yesterday’s tea both are inextricable from the scattered indestructible uninfusable grounds blown through the endless corridors of tomorrow, into the shoes we will have to walk in and even the sheets we will have (or try) to sleep between: because you escape nothing, you flee nothing; the pursuer is what is doing the running and tomorrow night is nothing but one long sleepless wrestle with yesterday’s omission and regrets.”): who had pretermitted not even a death nor even a death to Lucas but merely Lucas, Lucas in ten thousand Sambo-avatars to scurry unheeding and not even aware through that orifice like mice through the slot of a guillotine until at the One unheeding moment the unheeding unwitting uncaring chopper falls; tomorrow or at least tomorrow or at most tomorrow and perhaps this time to intervene where angels fear no white and black children sixteen and an old white spinster long on the way to eighty; who ran, fled not even to deny Lucas but just to keep from having to send up to him by the drugstore porter a can of tobacco not at all to say they were sorry but so they wouldn’t have to say out loud that they were wrong: and spurned the cliff away in one long plunge up and up slowing into it already hearing it, only the most faintly oscillant now hearing it listening to it, not moving yet nor even opening his eyes as he lay for a moment longer listening to it, then opened them and then his uncle stood silhouetted against the light beyond the footboard in that utter that complete that absolute silence now with nothing in it now but the breathing of darkness and the tree-frogs and bugs: no fleeing nor repudiation nor for this moment more even urgency anywhere in the room or outside it either above or below or before or behind the tiny myriad beast-sounds and the vast systole and diastole of summer night.

 

“It’s gone,” he said.

 

“Yes,” his uncle said. “They’re probably all in bed asleep by now. They got home to milk and even have time before dark to chop wood for tomorrow’s breakfast too.”

 

Which made once though still he didn’t move. “They ran,” he said.

 

“No,” his uncle said. “It was more than that.”

 

“They ran,” he said. “They reached the point where there was nothing left for them to do but admit that they were wrong. So they ran home.”

 

“At least they were moving,” his uncle said: which made twice: who hadn’t even needed the first cue since not only the urgency the need the necessity to move again or rather not really to have stopped moving at all at that moment four or five or six hours or whatever it had been ago when he really believed he was going to lie down for only fifteen minutes (and which incidentally knew fifteen minutes whether he apparently did or not) hadn’t come back, it had never been anywhere to come back from because it was still there, had been there all the time, never for one second even vacated even from behind the bizarre phantasmagoriae whose ragtag and bobends still befogged him, with or among which he had wasted nearer fifteen hours than fifteen minutes; it was still there or at least his unfinished part in it which was not even a minuscule but rather a minutecule of his uncle’s and the sheriff’s in the unfinishability of Lucas Beauchamp and Crawford Gowrie since as far as they knew before he lost track this morning neither of them knew what they were going to do next even before Hampton had disposed of what little of evidence they had by giving it back to old one-armed pistol Gowrie where even two children and an old woman couldn’t get it back this time; the need not to finish anything but just to keep moving not even to remain where they were but just desperately to keep up with it like having to run on a treadmill not because you wanted to be where the treadmill was but simply not to be flung pell-mell still running frantically backward off the whole stage out of sight, and not waiting static for the moment to flow back into him again and explode him up into motion but rather already in endless motion like the treadmill’s endless band less than an inch’s fraction above the ultimate point of his nose and chest where the first full breath would bring him into its snatching orbit, himself lying beneath it like a hobo trapped between the rails under a speeding train, safe only so long as he did not move.

 

So he moved; he said “Time:” swinging his legs over: “What time is it? I said fifteen minutes. You promised—”

 

“It’s only nine-thirty,” his uncle said. “Plenty of time for a shower and your supper too. They wont leave before we get there.”

 

“They?” he said: up onto his bare feet (he had not undressed except his shoes and sox) already reaching for his slippers. “You’ve been back to town. Before we get there? We’re not going with them?”

 

“No,” his uncle said. “It’ll take both of us to hold Miss Habersham back. She’s going to meet us at the office. So move along now; she’s probably already waiting for us.”

 

“Yes,” he said. But he was already unfastening his shirt and his belt and trousers too with the other hand, all ready to step in one motion out of both. And this time it was laughing. It was all right. You couldn’t even hear it. “So that was why,” he said. “So their women wouldn’t have to chop wood in the dark with half-awake children holding lanterns.”

 

“No,” his uncle said. “They were not running from Lucas. They had forgotten about him—”

 

“That’s exactly what I’m saying,” he said. “They didn’t even wait to send him a can of tobacco and say It’s all right, old man, everybody makes mistakes and we wont hold this one against you.”

 

“Was that what you wanted?” his uncle said. “The can of tobacco? That would have been enough?—Of course it wouldn’t. Which is one reason why Lucas will ultimately get his can of tobacco; they will insist on it, they will have to. He will receive installments on it for the rest of his life in this country whether he wants them or not and not just Lucas but Lucas: Sambo since what sets a man writhing sleepless in bed at night is not having injured his fellow so much as having been wrong; the mere injury (if he cannot justify it with what he calls logic) he can efface by destroying the victim and the witnesses but the mistake is his and that is one of his cats which he always prefers to choke to death with butter. So Lucas will get his tobacco. He wont want it of course and he’ll try to resist it. But he’ll get it and so we shall watch right here in Yoknapatawpha County the ancient oriental relationship between the savior and the life he saved turned upside down: Lucas Beauchamp once the slave of any white man within range of whose notice he happened to come, now tyrant over the whole county’s white conscience. And they—Beat One and Two and Three and Five—knew that too so why take time now to send him a ten-cent can of tobacco when they have got to spend the balance of their lives doing it? So they had dismissed him for the time. They were not running from him, they were running from Crawford Gowrie; they simply repudiated not even in horror but in absolute unanimity a shall-not and should-not which without any warning whatever turned into a must-not. Thou shall not kill you see—no accusative, heatless: a simple moral precept; we have accepted it in the distant anonymity of our forefathers, had it so long, cherished it, fed it, kept the sound of it alive and the very words themselves unchanged, handled it so long that all the corners are now worn smoothly off; we can sleep right in the bed with it; we have even distilled our own antidotes for it as the fore-sighted housewife keeps a solution of mustard or handy egg-whites on the same shelf with the ratpoison; as familiar as grandpa’s face, as unrecognisable as grandpa’s face beneath the turban of an Indian prince, as abstract as grandpa’s flatulence at the family supper-table; even when it breaks down and the spilled blood stands sharp and glaring in our faces we still have the precept, still intact, still true: we shall not kill and maybe next time we even wont. But thou shall not kill thy mother’s child. It came right down into the street that time to walk in broad daylight at your elbow, didn’t it?”

 

“So for a lot of Gowries and Workitts to burn Lucas Beauchamp to death with gasoline for something he didn’t even do is one thing but for a Gowrie to murder his brother is another.”

 

“Yes,” his uncle said.

 

“You cant say that.” he said.

 

“Yes,” his uncle said. “Thou shalt not kill in precept and even when you do, precept still remains unblemished and scarless: Thou shalt not kill and who knows, perhaps next time maybe you wont. But Gowrie must not kill Gowrie’s brother: no maybe about it, no next time to maybe not Gowrie kill Gowrie because there must be no first time. And not just for Gowrie but for all: Stevens and Mallison and Edmonds and McCaslin too; if we are not to hold to the belief that that point not just shall not but must not and cannot come at which Gowrie or Ingrum or Stevens or Mallison may shed Gowrie or Ingrum or Stevens or Mallison blood, how hope ever to reach that one where Thou shalt not kill at all, where Lucas Beauchamp’s life will be secure not despite the fact that he is Lucas Beauchamp but because he is?”

 

“So they ran to keep from having to lynch Crawford Gowrie,” he said.

 

“They wouldn’t have lynched Crawford Gowrie,” his uncle said. “There were too many of them. Dont you remember, they packed the street in front of the jail and the Square too all morning while they still believed Lucas had shot Vinson Gowrie in the back without bothering him at all?”

 

“They were waiting for Beat Four to come in and do it.”

 

“Which is exactly what I am saying—granted for the moment that that’s true. That part of Beat Four composed of Gowries and Workitts and the four or five others who wouldn’t have given a Gowrie or Workitt either a chew of tobacco and who would have come along just to see the blood, is small enough to produce a mob. But not all of them together because there is a simple numerical point at which a mob cancels and abolishes itself, maybe because it has finally got too big for darkness, the cave it was spawned in is no longer big enough to conceal it from light and so at last whether it will or not it has to look at itself, or maybe because the amount of blood in one human body is no longer enough, as one peanut might titillate one elephant but not two or ten. Or maybe it’s because man having passed into mob passes then into mass which abolishes mob by absorption, metabolism, then having got too large even for mass becomes man again conceptible of pity and justice and conscience even if only in the recollection of his long painful aspiration toward them, toward that something anyway of one serene universal light.”

 

“So man is always right,” he said.

 

“No,” his uncle said. “He tries to be if they who use him for their own power and aggrandisement let him alone. Pity and justice and conscience too—that belief in more than the divinity of individual man (which we in America have debased into a national religion of the entrails in which man owes no duty to his soul because he has been absolved of soul to owe duty to and instead is static heir at birth to an inevictible quit-claim on a wife a car a radio and an old-age pension) but in the divinity of his continuity as Man; think how easy it would have been for them to attend to Crawford Gowrie: no mob moving fast in darkness watching constantly over its shoulder but one indivisible public opinion: that peanut vanishing beneath a whole concerted trampling herd with hardly one elephant to really know the peanut had even actually been there since the main reason for a mob is that the individual red hand which actually snapped the thread may vanish forever into one inviolable confraternity of namelessness; where in this case that one would have had no more reason to lie awake at night afterward than a paid hangman. They didn’t want to destroy Crawford Gowrie. They repudiated him. If they had lynched him they would have taken only his life. What they really did was worse: they deprived him to the full extent of their capacity of his citizenship in man.”

 

He didn’t move yet. “You’re a lawyer.” Then he said, “They were not running from Crawford Gowrie or Lucas Beauchamp either. They were running from themselves. They ran home to hide their heads under the bedclothes from their own shame.”

 

“Exactly correct,” his uncle said. “Haven’t I been saying that all the time? There were too many of them. This time there were enough of them to be able to run from shame, to have found unbearable the only alternative which would have been the mob’s: which (the mob) because of its smallness and what it believed was its secretness and tightness and what it knew to be its absolute lack of trust in one another, would have chosen the quick and simple alternative of abolishing knowledge of the shame by destroying the witness to it. So as you like to put it they ran.”

 

“Leaving you and Mr. Hampton to clean up the vomit, which even dogs dont do. Though of course Mr. Hampton is a paid dog and I reckon you might be called one too.—Because dont forget Jefferson either,” he said. “They were clearing off out of sight pretty fast too. Of course some of them couldn’t because it was still only the middle of the afternoon so they couldn’t shut up the stores and run home too yet; there still might be a chance to sell each other a nickel’s worth of something.”

 

“I said Stevens and Mallison too,” his uncle said.

 

“Not Stevens,” he said. “And not Hampton either. Because somebody had to finish it, somebody with a strong enough stomach to mop a floor. The sheriff to catch (or try to or hope to or whatever it is you are going to do) the murderer and a lawyer to defend the lynchers.”

 

“Nobody lynched anybody to be defended from it,” his uncle said.

 

“All right,” he said. “Excuse them then.”

 

“Not that either,” his uncle said. “I’m defending Lucas Beauchamp. I’m defending Sambo from the North and East and West—the outlanders who will fling him decades back not merely into injustice but into grief and agony and violence too by forcing on us laws based on the idea that man’s injustice to man can be abolished overnight by police. Sambo will suffer it of course; there are not enough of him yet to do anything else. And he will endure it, absorb it and survive because he is Sambo and has that capacity; he will even beat us there because he has the capacity to endure and survive but he will not be thrown back decades and what he survives to may not be worth having because by that time divided we may have lost America.”

 

“But you’re still excusing it.”

 

“No,” his uncle said. I only say that the injustice is ours. the South’s. We must expiate and abolish it ourselves, alone and without help nor even (with thanks) advice. We owe that to Lucas whether he wants it or not (and this Lucas anyway wont) not because of his past since a man or a race either if he’s any good can survive his past without even needing to escape from it and not because of the high quite often only to rhetorical rhetoric of humanity but for the simple indubitable practical reason of his future: that capacity to survive and absorb and endure and still be steadfast.”

 

“All right,” he said again. “You’re still a lawyer and they still ran. Maybe they intended for Lucas to clean it up since he came from a race of floor-moppers. Lucas and Hampton and you since Hampton ought to do something now and then for his money and they even elected you to a salary too. Did they think to tell you how to do it? what to use for bait to get Crawford Gowrie to come in and say All right, boys, I pass. Deal them again. Or were they too busy being— being ...”

 

His uncle said quietly: “Righteous?”

 

Now he completely stopped. But only for a second. He said, “They ran,” calm and completely final, not even contemptuous, flicking the shirt floating away behind him and at the same moment dropping the trousers and stepping barefoot out of them in nothing now but shorts. “Besides, it’s all right. I dreamed through all that; I dreamed through them too, dreamed them away too; let them stay in bed or milking their cows before dark or chopping wood before dark or after or by lanterns or not lanterns either. Because they were not the dream; I just passed them to get to the dream—” talking quite fast now, a good deal faster than he realised until it would be too late: “It was something ... somebody ... something about how maybe this was too much to expect of us, too much for people just sixteen or going on eighty or ninety or whatever she is to have to bear, and then right off I was answering what you told me, you remember, about the English boys not much older than me leading troops and flying scout aeroplanes in France in 1918? how you said that by 1918 all British officers seemed to be either subalterns of seventeen or one-eyed or one-armed or one-legged colonels of twenty-three?”—checking then or trying to because he had got the warning at last quite sharp not as if he had heard suddenly in advance the words he was going to say but as if he had discovered suddenly not what he had already said but where it was going, what the ones he had already spoken were going to compel him to say in order bring them to a stop: but too late of course like mashing suddenly on the brake pedal going downhill then discovering to your horror that the brake rod had snapped: “—only there was something else too—I was trying ...” and he stopped them at last feeling the hot hard blood burn all the way up his neck into his face and nowhere even to look not because he was standing there almost naked to begin with but because no clothes nor expression nor talking either smoke-screened anything from his uncle’s bright grave eyes.

 

“Yes?” his uncle said. Then his uncle said, “Yes. Some things you must always be unable to bear. Some things you must never stop refusing to bear. Injustice and outrage and dishonor and shame. No matter how young you are or how old you have got. Not for kudos and not for cash: your picture in the paper nor money in the bank either. Just refuse to bear them. That it?”

 

“Who, me,” he said, moving now already crossing the room, not even waiting for the slippers. “I haven’t been a Tenderfoot scout since I was twelve years old.”

 

“Of course not,” his uncle said. “But just regret it; dont be ashamed.”