Chapter Three

SO IF HE HAD GONE straight home from the barbershop this morning and saddled Highboy when he first thought of it he would be ten hours away by now, probably fifty miles.

 

There were no bells now. What people on the street now would have been going to the less formal more intimate evening prayer-meeting, walking decorously across the shadow-bitten darkness from streetlamp to streetlamp; so in keeping with the Sabbath’s still suspension that he and his uncle would have been passing them steadily, recognising them yards ahead without knowing or even pausing to speculate on when or how or why they had done so—not by silhouette nor even the voice needed; the presence, the aura perhaps; perhaps merely the juxtaposition: this living entity at this point at this moment on this day, as is all you need to recognise the people with, among whom you have lived all your life—stepping off the concrete onto the bordering grass to pass them, speaking (his uncle) to them by name, perhaps exchanging a phrase, a sentence then on, onto the concrete again.

 

But tonight the street was empty. The very houses themselves looked close and watchful and tense as though the people who lived in them, who on this soft May night (those who had not gone to church) would have been sitting on the dark galleries for a little while after supper in rocking chairs or porchswings, talking quietly among themselves or perhaps talking from gallery to gallery when the houses were close enough. But tonight they passed only one man and he was not walking but standing just inside the front gate to a small neat shoebox of a house built last year between two other houses already close enough together to hear one another’s toilets flush (his uncle had explained that: “When you were born and raised and lived all your life where you can’t hear anything but owls at night and roosters at dawn and on damp days when sound carries your nearest neighbor chopping wood two miles away, you like to live where you can hear and smell people on either side of you every time they flush a drain or open a can of salmon or of soup.”), himself darker than shadow and certainly stiller—a country man who had moved to town a year ago and now owned a small shabby side street grocery whose customers were mostly Negroes, whom they had not even seen until they were almost on him though he had already recognised them or at least his uncle some distance away and was waiting for them, already speaking to his uncle before they came abreast of him:

 

“Little early, ain’t you. Lawyer? Them Beat Four folks have got to milk and then chop wood to cook breakfast tomorrow with before they can eat supper and get in to town.”

 

“Maybe they’ll decide to stay at home on a Sunday night,” his uncle said pleasantly, passing on: whereupon the man said almost exactly what the man in the barbershop had said this morning (and he remembered his uncle saying once how little of vocabulary man really needed to get comfortably and even efficiently through his life, how not only in the individual but within his whole type and race and kind a few simple clichés served his few simple passions and needs and lusts):

 

“Sho now. It ain’t their fault it’s Sunday. That sonofabitch ought to thought of that before he taken to killing white men on a Saturday afternoon.” Then he called after them as they went on, raising his voice: “My wife ain’t feeling good tonight, and besides I don’t want to stand around up there just looking at the front of that jail. But tell um to holler if they need help.”

 

“I expect they know already they can depend on you. Mr. Lilley,” his uncle said. They went on. “You see?” his uncle said. “He has nothing against what he calls niggers. If you ask him, he will probably tell you he likes them even better than some white folks he knows and he will believe it. They are probably constantly beating him out of a few cents here and there in his store and probably even picking up things—packages of chewing gum or bluing or a banana or a can of sardines or a pair of shoelaces or a bottle of hair-straightener—under their coats and aprons and he knows it; he probably even gives them things free of charge—the bones and spoiled meat out of his butcher’s icebox and spoiled candy and lard. All he requires is that they act like niggers. Which is exactly what Lucas is doing: blew his top and murdered a white man—which Mr. Lilley is probably convinced all Negroes want to do—and now the white people will take him out and burn him. all regular and in order and themselves acting exactly as he is convinced Lucas would wish them to act: like white folks; both of them observing implicitly the rules: the nigger acting like a nigger and the white folks acting like white folks and no real hard feelings on either side (since Mr. Lilley is not a Gowrie) once the fury is over; in fact Mr. Lilley would probably be one of the first to contribute cash money toward Lucas’ funeral and the support of his widow and children if he had them. Which proves again how no man can cause more grief than that one clinging blindly to the vices of his ancestors.”

 

Now they could see the Square, empty too—the amphitheatric lightless stores, the slender white pencil of the Confederate monument against the mass of the courthouse looming in columned upsoar to the dim quadruple face of the clock lighted each by a single faint bulb with a quality as intransigent against their four fixed mechanical shouts of adjuration and warning as the glow of a firefly. Then, the jail and at that moment, with a flash and glare and wheel of lights and a roar of engine at once puny against the vast night and the empty town yet insolent too, a car rushed from nowhere and circled the Square; a voice, a young man’s voice squalled from it—no words, not even a shout: a squall significant and meaningless—and the car rushed on around the Square, completing the circle back to nowhere and died away. They turned in at the jail.

 

It was of brick, square, proportioned, with four brick columns in shallow basrelief across the front and even a brick cornice under the eaves because it was old, built in a time when people took time to build even jails with grace and care and he remembered how his uncle had said once that not courthouses nor even churches but jails were the true record of a county’s, a community’s history, since not only the cryptic forgotten initials and words and even phrases cries of defiance and indictment scratched into the walls but the very bricks and stones themselves held, not in solution but in suspension, intact and biding and potent and indestructible, the agonies and shames and griefs with which hearts long since unmarked and unremembered dust had strained and perhaps burst. Which was certainly true of this one because it and one of the churches were the oldest buildings in the town, the courthouse and everything else on or in the Square having been burned to rubble by Federal occupation forces after a battle in 1864. Because scratched into one of the panes of the fanlight beside the door was a young girl’s single name, written by her own hand into the glass with a diamond in that same year and sometimes two or three times a year he would go up onto the gallery to look at it, it cryptic now in reverse, not for a sense of the past but to realise again the eternality, the deathlessness and changelessness of youth—the name of one of the daughters of the jailer of that time (and his uncle who had for everything an explanation not in facts but long since beyond dry statistics into something far more moving because it was truth: which moved the heart and had nothing whatever to do with what mere provable information said, had told him this too: how this part of Mississippi was new then, as a town a settlement a community less than fifty years old, and all the men who had come into it less long ago almost than even the oldest’s lifetime were working together to secure it, doing the base jobs along with the splendid ones not for pay or politics but to shape a land for their posterity, so that a man could be the jailer then or the innkeeper or farrier or vegetable peddler yet still be what the lawyer and planter and doctor and parson called a gentleman) who stood at that window that afternoon and watched the battered remnant of a Confederate brigade retreat through the town, meeting suddenly across that space the eyes of the ragged unshaven lieutenant who led one of the broken companies scratching into the glass not his name also, not only because a young girl of that time would never have done that but because she didn’t know his name then, let alone that six months later he would be her husband.

 

In fact it still looked like a residence with its balustraded wooden gallery stretching across the front of the lower floor. But above that the brick wall was windowless except for the single tall crossbarred rectangle and he thought again of the Sunday nights which seemed now to belong to a time as dead as Nineveh when from suppertime until the jailer turned the lights out and yelled up the stairs for them to shut up, the dark limber hands would lie in the grimed interstices while the mellow untroubled repentless voices would shout down to the women in the aprons of cooks or nurses and the girls in their flash cheap clothes from the mail order houses or the other young men who had not been caught yet or had been caught and freed yesterday, gathered along the street. But not tonight and even the room behind it was dark though it was not yet eight oclock and he could see, imagine them not huddled perhaps but certainly all together, within elbow’s touch whether they were actually touching or not and certainly quiet, not laughing tonight nor talking either, sitting in the dark and watching the top of the stairs because this would not be the first time when to mobs of white men not only all black cats were gray but they didn’t always bother to count them either.

 

And the front door was open, standing wide to the street which he had never seen before even in summer although the ground floor was the jailer’s living quarters, and tilted in a chair against the back wall so that he faced the door in full sight of the street, was a man who was not the jailer nor even one of the sheriffs deputies either. Because he had recognised him too: Will Legate, who lived on a small farm two miles from town and was one of the best woodsmen, the finest shot and the best deer-hunter in the county, sitting in the tilted chair holding the colored comic section of today’s Memphis paper, with leaning against the wall beside him not the hand-worn rifle with which he had killed more deer (and even running rabbits with it) than even he remembered but a double barrelled shotgun, who apparently without even lowering or moving the paper had already seen and recognised them even before they turned in at the gate and was now watching them steadily as they came up the walk and mounted the steps and crossed the gallery and entered: at which moment the jailer himself emerged from a door to the right—a snuffy untidy potbellied man with a harried concerned outraged face, wearing a heavy pistol bolstered onto a cartridge belt around his waist which looked as uncomfortable and out of place as a silk hat or a fifth-century iron slavecollar, who shut the door behind him, already crying at his uncle:

 

“He wont even shut and lock the front door! Just setting there with that durn funny paper waiting for anybody that wants to walk right in!”

 

“I’m doing what Mr. Hampton told me to,” Legate said in his pleasant equable voice.

 

“Does Hampton think that funny paper’s going to stop them folks from Beat Four?” the jailer cried.

 

“I dont think he’s worrying about Beat Four yet,” Legate said still pleasantly and equably. “This here’s just for local consumption now.”

 

His uncle glanced at Legate. “It seems to have worked. We saw the car—or one of them—make one trip around the Square as we came up. I suppose it’s been by here too.”

 

“Oh, once or twice,” Legate said. “Maybe three times. I really aint paid much mind.”

 

“And I hope to hell it keeps on working,” the jailer said. “Because you sure aint going to stop anybody with just that one britch-loader.”

 

“Sure,” Legate said. “I dont expect to stop them. If enough folks get their minds made up and keep them made up, aint anything likely to stop them from what they think they want to do. But then, I got you and that pistol to help me.”

 

“Me?” the jailer cried. “Me get in the way of them Gowries and Ingrums for seventy-five dollars a month? Just for one nigger? And if you aint a fool, you wont neither.”

 

“Oh I got to,” Legate said in his easy pleasant voice. “I got to resist. Mr. Hampton’s paying me five dollars for it.” Then to his uncle: “I reckon you want to see him.”

 

“Yes,” his uncle said. “If it’s all right with Mr. Tubbs.”

 

The jailer stared at his uncle, irate and harried. “So you got to get mixed up in it too. You can’t let well enough alone neither.” He turned abruptly. “Come on:” and led the way through the door beside which Legate’s chair was tilted, into the back hall where the stairway rose to the upper floor, snapping on the light switch at the foot of the stairs and began to mount them, his uncle then he following while he watched the hunch and sag of the holster at the jailer’s hip. Suddenly the jailer seemed about to stop; even his uncle thought so, stopping too but the jailer went on, speaking over his shoulder: “Dont mind me. I’m going to do the best I can; I taken an oath of office too.” His voice rose a little, still calm, just louder: “But dont think nobody’s going to make me admit I like it. I got a wife and two children; what good am I going to be to them if I get myself killed protecting a goddamn stinking nigger?” His voice rose again; it was not calm now: “And how am I going to live with myself if I let a passel of nogood sonabitches take a prisoner away from me?” Now he stopped and turned on the step above them, higher than both, his face once more harried and frantic, his voice frantic and outraged: “Better for everybody if them folks had took him as soon as they laid hands on him yesterday—”

 

“But they didn’t,” his uncle said. “I dont think they will. And if they do, it wont really matter. They either will or they wont and if they dont it will be all right and if they do we will do the best we can, you and Mr. Hampton and Legate and the rest of us, what we have to do, what we can do. So we dont need to worry about it. You see?”

 

“Yes,” the jailer said. Then he turned and went on, unsnapping his keyring from his belt under the pistol belt, to the heavy oak door which closed off the top of the stairs (It was one solid handhewn piece over two inches thick, locked with a heavy modern padlock in a handwrought iron bar through two iron slots which like the heavy risette-shaped hinges were handwrought too, hammered out over a hundred years ago in the blacksmith shop across the street where he had stood yesterday; one day last summer a stranger, a city man, an architect who reminded him somehow of his uncle, hatless and tieless, in tennis shoes and a pair of worn flannel trousers and what was left of a case of champagne in a convertible-top car which must have cost three thousand dollars, driving not through town but into it, not hurting anyone but just driving the car up onto the pavement and across it through a plate glass window, quite drunk, quite cheerful, with less than fifty cents in cash in his pocket but all sorts of identification cards and a check folder whose stubs showed a balance in a New York bank of over six thousand dollars, who insisted on being put in jail even though the marshal and the owner of the window both were just trying to persuade him to go to the hotel and sleep it off so he could write a check for the window and the wall: until the marshal finally put him in jail where he went to sleep at once like a baby and the garage sent for the car and the next morning the jailer telephoned the marshal at five oclock to come and get the man out because he had waked the whole household up talking from his cell across to the niggers in the bullpen. So the marshal came and made him leave and then he wanted to go out with the street gang to work and they wouldn’t let him do that and his car was ready too but he still wouldn’t leave, at the hotel that night and two nights later his uncle even brought him to supper, where he and his uncle talked for three hours about Europe and Paris and Vienna and he and his mother listening too though his father had excused himself: and still there two days after that, still trying from his uncle and the mayor and the board of aldermen and at last the board of supervisors themselves to buy the whole door or if they wouldn’t sell that, at least the bar and slots and the hinges.) and unlocked it and swung it back.

 

But already they had passed out of the world of man, men: people who worked and had homes and raised families and tried to make a little more money than they perhaps deserved by fair means of course or at least by legal, to spend a little on fun and still save something against old age. Because even as the oak door swung back there seemed to rush out and down at him the stale breath of all human degradation and shame—a smell of creosote and excrement and stale vomit and incorrigibility and defiance and repudiation like something palpable against the thrust and lift of their bodies as they mounted the last steps and into a passage which was actually a part of the main room, the bullpen, cut off from the rest of the room by a wall of wire mesh like a chicken run or a dog-kennel, inside which in tiered bunks against the farther wall lay five Negroes, motionless, their eyes closed but no sound of snoring, no sound of any sort, lying there immobile orderly and composed under the dusty glare of the single shadeless bulb as if they had been embalmed, the jailer stopping again, his own hands gripped into the mesh while he glared at the motionless shapes. “Look at them,” the jailer said in that voice too loud, too thin, just under hysteria: “Peaceful as lambs but aint a damned one of them asleep. And I dont blame them, with a mob of white men boiling in here at midnight with pistols and cans of gasoline.—Come on,” he said and turned and went on. Just beyond there was a door in the mesh, not padlocked but just hooked with a hasp and staple such as you might see on a dog-kennel or a corn crib but the jailer passed it.

 

“You put him in the cell, did you?” his uncle said.

 

“Hampton’s orders,” the jailer said over his shoulder. “I dont know what the next white man that figgers he can rest good until he kills somebody is going to think about it. I taken all the blankets off the cot though.”

 

“Maybe because he wont be here long enough to have to go to sleep?” his uncle said.

 

“Ha ha,” the jailer said in that strained high harsh voice without mirth: “Ha ha ha ha:” and following behind his uncle he thought how of all human pursuits murder has the most deadly need of privacy; how man will go to almost any lengths to preserve the solitude in which he evacuates or makes love but he will go to any length for that in which he takes life, even to homicide, yet by no act can he more completely and irrevocably destroy it: a modern steel barred door this time with a built-in lock as large as a woman’s handbag which the jailer unlocked with another key on the ring and then turned, the sound of his feet almost as rapid as running back down the corridor until the sound of the oak door at the head of the stairs cut them off, and beyond it the cell lighted by another single dim dusty flyspecked bulb behind a wire screen cupped to the ceiling, not much larger than a broom closet and in fact just wide enough for the double bunk against the wall, from both beds of which not just the blankets but the mattresses too had been stripped, he and his uncle entering and still all he saw yet was the first thing he had seen: the hat and the black coat hanging neatly from a nail in the wall: and he would remember afterward how he thought in a gasp, a surge of relief: They’ve already got him. He’s gone. It’s too late. It’s already over now. Because he didn’t know what he had expected, except that it was not this: a careful spread of newspaper covering neatly the naked springs of the lower cot and another section as carefully placed on the upper one so it would shield his eyes from the light and Lucas himself lying on the spread papers, asleep, on his back, his head pillowed on one of his shoes and his hands folded on his breast, quite peacefully or as peacefully as old people sleep, his mouth open and breathing in faint shallow jerky gasps; and he stood in an almost unbearable surge not merely of outrage but of rage, looking down at the face which for the first time, defenceless at last for a moment, revealed its age, and the lax gnarled old man’s hands which only yesterday had sent a bullet into the back of another human being, lying still and peaceful on the bosom of the old-fashioned collarless boiled white shirt closed at the neck with the oxidising brass button shaped like an ‘ arrow and almost as large as the head of a small snake, thinking: He’s just a nigger after all for all his high nose and his stiff neck and his gold watch-chain and refusing to mean mister to anybody even when he says it. Only a nigger could kill a man, let alone shoot him in the back, and then sleep like a baby as soon as he found something flat enough to lie down on; still looking at him when without moving otherwise Lucas closed his mouth and his eyelids opened, the eyes staring up for another second, then still without the head moving at all the eyeballs turned until Lucas was looking straight at his uncle but still not moving: just lying there looking at him.

 

“Well, old man,” his uncle said. “You played hell at last.” Then Lucas moved. He sat up stiffly and swung his legs stiffly over the edge of the cot, picking one of them up by the knee between his hands and swinging it around as you open or close a sagging gate, groaning, grunting not just frankly and unabashed and aloud but comfortably, as the old grunt and groan with some long familiar minor stiffness so used and accustomed as to be no longer even an ache and which if they were ever actually cured of it, they would be bereft and lost; he listening and watching still in that rage and now amazement too at the murderer not merely in the shadow of the gallows but of a lynch-mob, not only taking time to groan over a stiffness in his back but doing it as if he had all the long rest of a natural life in which to be checked each time he moved by the old familiar catch.

 

“Looks like it,” Lucas said. “That’s why I sent for you. What you going to do with me?”

 

“Me?” his uncle said. “Nothing. My name aint Gowrie. It aint even Beat Four.”

 

Moving stiffly again Lucas bent and peered about his feet, then he reached under the cot and drew out the other shoe and sat up again and began to turn creakily and stiffly to look behind him when his uncle reached and took the first shoe from the cot and dropped it beside the other. But Lucas didn’t put them on. Instead he sat again, immobile, his hands on his knees, blinking. Then with one hand he made a gesture which completely dismissed Gowries, mob, vengeance, holocaust and all. “I’ll worry about that when they walks in here,” he said. “I mean the law. Aint you the county lawyer?”

 

“Oh,” his uncle said. “It’s the District Attorney that’ll hang you or send you to Parchman—not me.”

 

Lucas was still blinking, not rapidly: just steadily. He watched him. And suddenly he realised that Lucas was not looking at his uncle at all and apparently had not been for three or four seconds.

 

“I see,” Lucas said. “Then you can take my case.”

 

“Take your case? Defend you before the judge?”

 

“I’m gonter pay you,” Lucas said. “You dont need to worry.”

 

“I dont defend murderers who shoot people in the back,” his uncle said.

 

Again Lucas made the gesture with one of the dark gnarled hands. “Let’s forgit the trial. We aint come to it yet.” And now he saw that Lucas was watching his uncle, his head lowered so that he was watching his uncle upward from beneath through the grizzled tufts of his eyebrows—a look shrewd secret and intent. Then Lucas said: “I wants to hire somebody—” and stopped. And watching him, he thought remembered an old lady, dead now, a spinster, a neighbor who wore a dyed transformation and had always on a pantry shelf a big bowl of homemade teacakes for all the children on the street, who one summer (he couldn’t have been over seven or eight then) taught all of them to play Five Hundred: sitting at the card table on her screened side gallery on hot summer mornings and she would wet her fingers and take a card from her hand and lay it on the table, her hand not still poised over it of course but just lying nearby until the next player revealed exposed by some movement or gesture of triumph or exultation or maybe by just simple increased hard breathing his intention to trump or overplay it, whereupon she would say quickly: “Wait. I picked up the wrong one” and take up the card and put it back into her hand and play another one. That was exactly what Lucas had done. He had sat still before but now he was absolutely immobile. He didn’t even seem to be breathing.

 

“Hire somebody?” his uncle said. “You’ve got a lawyer. I had already taken your case before I came in here. I’m going to tell you what to do as soon as you have told me what happened.”

 

“No,” Lucas said. “I wants to hire somebody. It dont have to be a lawyer.”

 

Now it was his uncle who stared at Lucas. “To do what?”

 

He watched them. Now it was no childhood’s game of stakeless Five Hundred. It was more like the poker games he had overlooked. “Are you or aint you going to take the job?” Lucas said.

 

“So you aint going to tell me what you want me to do until after I have agreed to do it,” his uncle said. “All right,” his uncle said. “Now I’m going to tell you what to do. Just exactly what happened out there yesterday?”

 

“So you dont want the job,” Lucas said. “You aint said yes or no yet.”

 

“No!” his uncle said, harsh, too loud, catching himself but already speaking again before he had brought his voice back down to a sort of furious explicit calm: “Because you aint got any job to offer anybody. You’re in jail, depending on the grace of God to keep those damned Gowries from dragging you out of here and hanging you to the first lamp post they come to. Why they ever let you get to town in the first place I still dont understand—”

 

“Nemmine that now,” Lucas said. “What I needs is—”

 

“Nemmine that!” his uncle said. “Tell the Gowries to never mind it when they bust in here tonight. Tell Beat Four to just forget it—” He stopped; again with an effort you could almost see he brought his voice back to that furious patience. He drew a deep breath and expelled it. “Now. Tell me exactly what happened yesterday.”

 

For another moment Lucas didn’t answer, sitting on the bunk, his hands on his knees, intractable and composed, no longer looking at his uncle, working his mouth faintly as if he were tasting something. He said: “They was two folks, partners in a sawmill. Leastways they was buying the lumber as the sawmill cut it—”

 

“Who were they?” his uncle said.

 

“Vinson Gowrie was one of um.”

 

His uncle stared at Lucas for a long moment. But his voice was quite calm now. “Lucas,” he said, “has it ever occurred to you that if you just said mister to white people and said it like you meant it, you might not be sitting here now?”

 

“So I’m to commence now.” Lucas said. “I can start off by saying mister to the folks that drags me out of here and builds a fire under me.”

 

“Nothing’s going to happen to you—until you go before the judge,” his uncle said. “Dont you know that even Beat Four dont take liberties with Mr. Hampton—at least not here in town?”

 

“Shurf Hampton’s home in bed now.”

 

“But Mr. Will Legate’s sitting down stairs with a shotgun.”

 

“I aint ’quainted with no Will Legate.”

 

“The deer-hunter? The man that can hit a running rabbit with a thirty-thirty rifle?”

 

“Hah,” Lucas said. “Them Gowries aint deer. They might be cattymounts and panthers but they aint deer.”

 

“All right,” his uncle said. “Then I’ll stay here if you’ll feel better. Now. Go on. Vinson Gowrie and another man were buying lumber together. What other man?”

 

“Vinson Gowrie’s the only one that’s public yet.”

 

“And he got public by being shot in broad daylight in the back,” his uncle said. “Well, that’s one way to do it.—All right,” his uncle said. “Who was the other man?”

 

Lucas didn’t answer. He didn’t move; he might not even have heard, sitting peaceful and inattentive, not even really waiting: just sitting there while his uncle watched him. Then his uncle said:

 

“All right. What were they doing with it?”

 

“They was yarding it up as the mill cut it, gonter sell it all at once when the sawing was finished. Only the other man was hauling it away at night, coming in late after dark with a truck and picking up a load and hauling it over to Glasgow or Hollymount and selling it and putting the money in his pocket.”

 

“How do you know?”

 

“I seen um. Watched um.” Nor did he doubt this for a moment because he remembered Ephraim, Paralee’s father before he died, an old man, a widower who would pass most of the day dozing and waking in a rocking chair on Paralee’s gallery in summer and in front of the fire in winter and at night would walk the roads, not going anywhere, just moving, at times five and six miles from town before he would return at dawn to doze and wake all day in the chair again.

 

“All right,” his uncle said. “Then what?”

 

“That’s all,” Lucas said. “He was just stealing a load of lumber every night or so.”

 

His uncle stared at Lucas for perhaps ten seconds. He said in a voice of calm, almost hushed amazement: “So you took your pistol and went to straighten it out. You, a nigger, took a pistol and went to rectify a wrong between two white men, What did you expect? What else did you expect?”

 

“Nemmine expecting,” Lucas said. “I wants—”

 

“You went to the store,” his uncle said, “only you happened to find Vinson Gowrie first and followed him into the woods and told him his partner was robbing him and naturally he cursed you and called you a liar whether it was true or not, naturally he would have to do that; maybe he even knocked you down and walked on and you shot him in the back—”

 

“Never nobody knocked me down,” Lucas said.

 

“So much the worse,” his uncle said. “So much the worse for you. It’s not even self-defense. You just shot him in the back. And then you stood there over him with the fired pistol in your pocket and let the white folks come up and grab you. And if it hadn’t been for that little shrunk-up rheumatic constable who had no business being there in the first place and in the second place had no business whatever, at the rate of a dollar a prisoner every time he delivered a subpoena or served a warrant, having guts enough to hold off that whole damn Beat Four for eighteen hours until Hope Hampton saw fit or remembered or got around to bringing you in to jail—holding off that whole countryside that you nor all the friends you could drum up in a hundred years—”

 

“I aint got friends,” Lucas said with stern and inflexible pride, and then something else though his uncle was already talking:

 

“You’re damned right you haven’t. And if you ever had that pistol shot would have blown them to kingdom come too—What?” his uncle said “What did you say?”

 

“I said I pays my own way,” Lucas said.

 

“I see,” his uncle said. “You dont use friends; you pay cash. Yes. I see. Now you listen to me. You’ll go before the grand jury tomorrow. They’ll indict you. Then if you like I’ll have Mr. Hampton move you to Mottstown or even further away than that, until court convenes next month. Then you’ll plead guilty; I’ll persuade the District Attorney to let you do that because you’re an old man and you never were in trouble before; I mean as far as the judge and the District Attorney will know since they dont live within fifty miles of Yoknapatawpha County. Then they wont hang you; they’ll send you to the penitentiary; you probably wont live long enough to be paroled but at least the Gowries cant get to you there. Do you want me to stay in here with you tonight?”

 

“I reckon not,” Lucas said. “They kept me up all last night and I’m gonter try to get some sleep. If you stay here you’ll talk till morning.”

 

“Right,” his uncle said harshly, then to him: “Come on:” already moving toward the door. Then his uncle stopped. “Is there anything you want?”

 

“You might send me some tobacco,” Lucas said. “If them Gowries leaves me time to smoke it.”

 

“Tomorrow,” his uncle said. “I dont want to keep you awake tonight:” and went on, he following, his uncle letting him pass first through the door so that he stepped aside in his turn and stood looking back into the cell while his uncle came through the door and drew it after him, the heavy steel plunger crashing into its steel groove with a thick oily sound of irrefutable finality like that ultimate cosmolined doom itself when as his uncle said man’s machines had at last effaced and obliterated him from the earth and, purposeless now to themselves with nothing left to destroy, closed the last carborundum-grooved door upon their own progenitorless apotheosis behind one clockless lock responsive only to the last stroke of eternity, his uncle going on, his feet ringing and echoing down the corridor and then the sharp rattle of his knuckles on the oak door while he and Lucas still looked at one another through the steel bars, Lucas standing too now in the middle of the floor beneath the light and looking at him with whatever it was in his face so that he thought for a second that Lucas had spoken aloud. But he hadn’t, he was making no sound: just looking at him with that mute patient urgency until the jailer’s feet thumped nearer and nearer on the stairs and the slotted bar on the door rasped back.

 

And the jailer locked the bar again and they passed Legate still with his funny paper in the tilted chair beside the shotgun facing the open door, then outside, down the walk to the gate and the street, following through the gate where his uncle had already turned toward home: stopping, thinking a nigger a murderer who shoots white people in the back and aint even sorry.

 

He said: “I imagine I’ll find Skeets McGowan loafing somewhere on the Square. He’s got a key to the drugstore. I’ll take Lucas some tobacco tonight.” His uncle stopped.

 

“It can wait till morning,” his uncle said.

 

“Yes.” he said, feeling his uncle watching him, not even wondering what he would do if his uncle said no, not even waiting really, just standing there.

 

“All right,” his uncle said. “Dont be too long.” So he could have moved then. But still he didn’t.

 

“I thought you said nothing would happen tonight.”

 

“I still dont think it will,” his uncle said. “But you cant tell. People like the Gowries dont attach a great deal of importance to death or dying. But they do put a lot of stock in the dead and how they died—particularly their own. If you get the tobacco, let Tubbs carry it up to him and you come on home.”

 

So he didn’t have to say even yes this time, his uncle turning first then he turned and walked toward the Square, walking on until the sound of his uncle’s feet had ceased, then standing until his uncle’s black silhouette had changed to the white gleam of his linen suit and then that faded beyond the last arclight and if he had gone on home and got Highboy as soon as he recognised the sheriff’s car this morning that would be eight hours and almost forty miles, turning then and walking back toward the gate with Legate’s eyes watching him, already recognising him across the top of the funny paper even before he reached the gate and if he just went straight on now he could follow the lane behind the hedge and across into the lot and saddle Highboy and go out by the pasture gate and turn his back on Jefferson and nigger murderers and all and let Highboy go as fast as he wanted to go and as far as he wanted to go even when he had blown himself at last and agreed to walk, just so his tail was still turned to Jefferson and nigger murderers: through the gate and up the walk and across the gallery and again the jailer came quickly through the door at the right, his expression already giving way to the one of harried outrage.

 

“Again,” the jailer said. “Dont you never get enough?”

 

“I forgot something,” he said.

 

“Let it wait till morning,” the jailer said.

 

“Let him get it now,” Legate said in his equable drawl. “If he leaves it there till morning it might get trompled on.” So the jailer turned; again they mounted the stairs, again the jailer unlocked the bar across the oak door.

 

“Never mind the other one,” he said. “I can attend to it through the bars:” and didn’t wait, the door closed behind him, he heard the bar slide back into the slot but still all he had to do was just to rap on it, hearing the jailer’s feet going away back down the stairs but even then all he had to do was just to yell loud and bang on the floor and Legate anyway would hear him, thinking Maybe he will remind me of that goddamn plate of collards and sidemeat or maybe he’ll even tell me I’m all he’s got, all that’s left and that will be enough—walking fast, then the steel door and Lucas had not moved, still standing in the middle of the cell beneath the light, watching the door when he came up to it and stopped and said in a voice as harsh as his uncle’s had ever been:

 

“All right. What do you want me to do?”

 

“Go out there and look at him,” Lucas said.

 

“Go out where and look at who?” he said. But he understood all right. It seemed to him that he had known all the time what it would be; he thought with a kind of relief So that’s all it is even while his automatic voice was screeching with outraged disbelief: “Me? Me?” It was like something you have dreaded and feared and dodged for years until it seemed like all your life, then despite everything it happened to you and all it was was just pain, all it did was hurt and so it was all over, all finished, all right.

 

“I’ll pay you.” Lucas said.

 

So he wasn’t listening, not even to his own voice in amazed incredulous outrage: “Me go out there and dig up that grave?” He wasn’t even thinking anymore So this is what that plate of meat and greens is going to cost me. Because he had already passed that long ago when that something—whatever it was—had held him here five minutes ago looking back across the vast, the almost insuperable chasm between him and the old Negro murderer and saw, heard Lucas saying something to him not because he was himself, Charles Mallison junior, nor because he had eaten the plate of greens and warmed himself at the fire, but because he alone of all the white people Lucas would have a chance to speak to between now and the moment when he might be dragged out of the cell and down the steps at the end of a rope, would hear the mute unhoping urgency of the eyes. He said:

 

“Come here.” Lucas did so, approaching, taking hold of two of the bars as a child stands inside a fence. Nor did he remember doing so but looking down he saw his own hands holding to two of the bars, the two pairs of hands, the black ones and the white ones, grasping the bars while they faced one another above them. “All right,” he said. “Why?”

 

“Go and look at him,” Lucas said. “If it’s too late when you get back, I’ll sign you a paper now saying I owes you whatever you think it’s worth.”

 

But still he wasn’t listening; he knew it: only to himself: “I’m to go seventeen miles out there in the dark—”

 

“Nine,” Lucas said. “The Gowries buries at Caledonia Chapel. You takes the first right hand up into the hills just beyond the Nine-Mile branch bridge. You can be there in a half hour in your uncle’s automobile.”

 

“—I’m to risk having the Gowries catch me digging up that grave. I aim to know why. I dont even know what I’ll be looking for. Why?”

 

“My pistol is a fawty-one Colt,” Lucas said. Which it would be; the only thing he hadn’t actually known was the calibre—that weapon workable and efficient and well cared for yet as archaic peculiar and unique as the gold toothpick, which had probably (without doubt) been old Carothers McCaslin’s pride a half century ago.

 

“All right,” he said. “Then what?”

 

“He wasn’t shot with no fawty-one Colt.”

 

“What was he shot with?”

 

But Lucas didn’t answer that, standing there on his side of the steel door, his hands light-clasped and motionless around the two bars, immobile save for the faint movement of his breathing. Nor had he expected Lucas to and he knew that Lucas would never answer that, say any more, any further to any white man, and he knew why, as he knew why Lucas had waited to tell him, a child, about the pistol when he would have told neither his uncle nor the sheriff who would have been the one to open the grave and look at the body; he was surprised that Lucas had come as near as he had to telling his uncle about it and he realised, appreciated again that quality in his uncle which brought people to tell him things they would tell nobody else, even tempting Negroes to tell him what their nature forbade them telling white men: remembering old Ephraim and his mother’s ring that summer five years ago—a cheap thing with an imitation stone; two of them in fact, identical, which his mother and her room-mate at Sweetbriar Virginia had saved their allowances and bought and exchanged to wear until death as young girls will, and the room-mate grown and living in California with a daughter of her own at Sweetbriar now and she and his mother had not seen one another in years and possibly never would again yet his mother still kept the ring: then one day it disappeared; he remembered how he would wake late at night and see lights burning downstairs and he would know she was still searching for it: and all this time old Ephraim was sitting in his home-made rocking chair on Paralee’s front gallery until one day Ephraim told him that for half a dollar he would find the ring and he gave Ephraim the half dollar and that afternoon he left for a week at a Scout camp and returned and found his mother in the kitchen where she had spread newspapers on the table and emptied the stone crock she and Paralee kept the cornmeal in onto it and she and Paralee were combing through the meal with forks and for the first time in a week he remembered the ring and went back to Paralee’s house and there was Ephraim sitting in the chair on the gallery and Ephraim said, “Hit’s under the hawg-trough at your pa’s farm:” nor did Ephraim need to tell him how then because he had already remembered by then: Mrs. Downs: an old white woman who lived alone in a small filthy shoebox of a house that smelled like a foxden on the edge of town in a settlement of Negro houses, in and out of which Negroes came and went steadily all day long and without doubt most of the night: who (this not from Paralee who seemed always to not know or at least to have no time at the moment to talk about it, but from Aleck Sander) didn’t merely tell fortunes and cure hexes but found things: which was where the half dollar had gone and he believed at once and so implicitly that the ring was now found that he dismissed that phase at once and forever and it was only the things secondary and corollary which moved his interest, saying to Ephraim: “You’ve known all this week where it was and you didn’t even tell them?” and Ephraim looked at him a while rocking steadily and placidly and sucking at his cold ashfilled pipe with each rock like the sound of a small asthmatic cylinder: “I mought have told your maw. But she would need help. So I waited for you. Young folks and womens, they aint cluttered. They can listen. But a middle-year man like your paw and your uncle, they cant listen. They aint got time. They’re too busy with facks. In fact, you mought bear this in yo mind; someday you mought need it. If you ever needs to get anything done outside the common run, dont waste yo time on the menfolks; get the womens and children to working at it.” And he remembered his father’s not rage so much as outrage, his almost furious repudiation, his transference of the whole thing into a realm of assailed embattled moral principle, and even his uncle who until now had had no more trouble than he believing things that all other grown people doubted for the sole reason that they were unreasonable, while his mother went serenely and stubbornly about her preparations to go out to the farm which she hadn’t visited in over a year and even his father hadn’t seen it since months before the ring was missing and even his uncle refused to drive the car so his father hired a man from the garage and he and his mother went out to the farm and with the help of the overseer found under the trough where the hogs were fed, the ring. Only this was no obscure valueless little ring exchanged twenty years ago between two young girls but the death by shameful violence of a man who would die not because he was a murderer but because his skin was black. Yet this was all Lucas was going to tell him and he knew it was all; he thought in a kind of raging fury: Believe? Believe what? because Lucas was not even asking him to believe anything; he was not even asking a favor, making no last desperate plea to his humanity and pity but was even going to pay him provided the price was not too high, to go alone seventeen miles (no, nine: he remembered at least that he had heard that now) in the dark and risk being caught violating the grave of a member of a clan of men already at the pitch to commit the absolute of furious and bloody outrage without even telling him why. Yet he tried it again, as he knew Lucas not only knew he was going to but knew that he knew what answer he would get:

 

“What gun was he shot with, Lucas?” and got exactly what even Lucas knew he had expected:

 

“I’m gonter pay you,” Lucas said. “Name yo price at anything in reason and I will pay it.”

 

He drew a long breath and expelled it while they faced each other through the bars, the bleared old man’s eyes watching him, inscrutable and secret. They were not even urgent now and he thought peacefully He’s not only beat me, he never for one second had any doubt of it. He said: “All right. Just for me to look at him wouldn’t do any good, even if I could tell about the bullet. So you see what that means. I’ve got to dig him up, get him out of that hole before the Gowries catch me, and in to town where Mr. Hampton can send to Memphis for an expert that can tell about bullets.” He looked at Lucas, at the old man holding gently to the bars inside the cell and not even looking at him anymore. He drew a long breath again. “But the main thing is to get him up out of the ground where somebody can look at him before the ...” He looked at Lucas. “I’ll have to get out there and dig him up and get back to town before midnight or one oclock and maybe even midnight will be too late. I dont see how I can do it. I cant do it.”

 

“I’ll try to wait,” Lucas said.