Chapter Four

THERE WAS A WEATHERED battered second-hand-looking pickup truck parked at the curb in front of the house when he reached home. It was now well past eight oclock; it was a good deal more than a possibility that there remained less than four hours for his uncle to go to the sheriff’s house and convince him and then find a J.P. or whoever they would have to find and wake and then convince too to open the grave (in lieu of permission from the Gowries, which for any reason whatever, worst of all to save a nigger from being burned over a bonfire, the President of the United States himself let alone a country sheriff would never get) and then go out to Caledonia church and dig up the body and get back to town with it in time. Yet this of all nights would be one when a farmer whose stray cow or mule or hog had been impounded by a neighbor who insisted on collecting a dollar pound fee before he would release it, must come in to see his uncle, to sit for an hour in his uncle’s study saying yes or no or I reckon not while his uncle talked about crops or politics, one of which his uncle knew nothing about and the other the farmer didn’t, until the man would get around to telling what he came for.

 

But he couldn’t stand on ceremony now. He had been walking pretty fast since he left the jail but he was trotting now, catacorner across the lawn, onto the gallery and across it into the hall past the library where his father would still be sitting under one reading lamp with the Memphis paper’s Sunday crossword puzzle page and his mother under the other one with the new Book-of-the-Month book, and on back to what his mother used to try to call Gavin’s study but which Paralee and Aleck Sander had long since renamed the office so that everyone now called it that. The door was closed; he could hear the murmur of the man’s voice beyond it during the second in which without even stopping he rapped twice and at the same time opened the door and entered already saying:

 

“Good evening, sir. Excuse me. Uncle Gavin—”

 

Because the voice was his uncle’s; seated opposite his uncle beyond the desk, instead of a man with a shaved sunburned neck in neat tieless Sunday shirt and pants, was a woman in a plain cotton print dress and one of the round faintly dusty-looking black hats squarely on the top of her head such as his grandmother had used to wear and then he recognised her even before he saw the watch—small gold in a hunting case suspended by a gold brooch on her flat bosom almost like and in almost exactly the same position as the heart sewn on the breast of the canvas fencing vest—because since his grandmother’s death no other woman in his acquaintance wore or even owned one and in fact he should have recognised the pickup truck: Miss Habersham, whose name was now the oldest which remained in the county. There had been three once: Doctor Habersham and a tavern keeper named Holston and a Huguenot younger son named Grenier who had ridden horseback into the county before its boundaries had ever been surveyed and located and named, when Jefferson was a Chickasaw trading post with a Chickasaw word to designate it out of the trackless wilderness of cane-brake and forest of that time but all gone now, vanished except the one even from the county’s spoken recollection: Holston merely the name of the hotel on the Square and few in the county to know or care where the word came from, and the last of the blood of Louis Grenier the elegante, the dilettante, the Paris-educated architect who had practised a little of law but had spent most of his time as a planter and painter (and more amateur as a raiser of food and cotton than with canvas and brush) now warmed the bones of an equable cheerful middleaged man with the mind and face of a child who lived in a half-shed half-den he built himself of discarded boards and pieces of flattened stove-pipe and tin cans on the bank of the river twenty miles away, who didn’t know his age and couldn’t write even the Lonnie Grinnup which he now called himself and didn’t even know that the land he squatted on was the last lost scrap of the thousands of acres which his ancestor had been master of and only Miss Habersham remained: a kinless spinster of seventy living in the columned colonial house on the edge of town which had not been painted since her father died and had neither water nor electricity in it, with two Negro servants (and here again something nagged for an instant at his mind his attention but already in the same second gone, not even dismissed: just gone) in a cabin in the back yard, who (the wife) did the cooking while Miss Habersham and the man raised chickens and vegetables and peddled them about town from the pickup truck. Until two years ago they had used a plump aged white horse (it was said to be twenty years old when he first remembered it, with a skin beneath the burnished white hairs as clean and pink as a baby’s) and a buggy. Then they had a good season or something and Miss Habersham bought the pickup truck second hand and every morning winter and summer they would be seen about the streets from house to house, Miss Habersham at the wheel in cotton stockings and the round black hat which she had been wearing for at least forty years and the clean print dresses which you could see in the Sears Roebuck catalogues for two dollars and ninety-eight cents with the neat small gold watch pinned to the flat unmammary front and the shoes and the gloves which his mother said were made to her measure in a New York shop and cost thirty and forty dollars a pair for the one and fifteen and twenty for the other, while the Negro man trotted his vast belly in and out of the houses with a basket of bright greens or eggs in one hand and the plucked naked carcass of a chicken in the other;—recognised, remembered, even (his attention) nagged at and already dismissed because there wasn’t time, saying rapidly:

 

“Good evening, Miss Habersham. Excuse me. I’ve got to speak to Uncle Gavin:” then again to his uncle, “Uncle Gavin—”

 

“So is Miss Habersham,” his uncle said quick and immediate, in a tone a voice which in ordinary times he would have recognised at once; at an ordinary time he might even have comprehended the implication of what his uncle had said. But not now. He didn’t actually hear it. He wasn’t listening. In fact he really didn’t have time to talk himself, saying rapid yet calm too, merely urgent and even that only to his uncle because he had already forgotten Miss Habersham, even her presence:

 

“I’ve got to speak to you:” and only then stopped not because he had finished, he hadn’t even begun yet, but because for the first time he was hearing his uncle who hadn’t even paused, sitting half sideways in the chair, one arm thrown over the back and the other hand holding the burning cob pipe on the table in front of him, still speaking in that voice like the idle flicking of a small limber switch:

 

“So you took it up to him yourself. Or maybe you didn’t even bother with tobacco. And he told you a tale. I hope it was a good one.”

 

And that was all. He could go now, in fact should. For that matter he should never have stopped on his way through the hall or even come into the house at all but on around it where he could have called Aleck Sander on his way to the stable; Lucas had told him that thirty minutes ago in the jail when even he had come almost to the point and even under the very shadow of the Gowries had in the end known better than to try to tell his uncle or any other white man. Yet still he didn’t move. He had forgotten Miss Habersham. He had dismissed her; he had said “Excuse me” and so evanished her not only from the room but the moment too as the magician with one word or gesture disappears the palm tree or the rabbit or the bowl of roses and only they remained, the three of them: he at the door and still holding it, half in the room which he had never actually entered and shouldn’t have come even that far and half already back out of it in the hall where he should never have wasted time passing to begin with, and his uncle half sprawled behind the table littered with papers too and another of the German beermugs filled with paper spills and probably a dozen of the corncob pipes in various stages of char, and half a mile away the old kinless friendless opinionated arrogant hardheaded intractable independent (insolent too) Negro man alone in the cell where the first familiar voice he would hear would probably be old one-armed Nub Gowrie’s in the hall below saying, “Git out of the way, Will Legate. We’ve come for that nigger,” while outside the quiet lamplit room the vast millrace of time roared not toward midnight but dragging midnight with it, not to hurl midnight into wreckage but to hurl the wreckage of midnight down upon them in one poised skyblotting yawn: and he knew now that the irrevocable moment was not when he said “All right” to Lucas through the steel door of the cell but when he would step back into the hall and close this one behind him. So he tried again, still calm, not even rapid now, not even urgent: just specious explicit and reasonable:

 

“Suppose it wasn’t his pistol that killed him.”

 

“Of course.” his uncle said. “That’s exactly what I would claim myself if I were Lucas—or any other Negro murderer for that matter or any ignorant white murderer either for the matter of that. He probably even told you what he fired his pistol at. What was it? a rabbit, or maybe a tin can or a mark on a tree just to see if it really was loaded, really would go off. But let that pass. Grant it for the moment: then what? What do you suggest? No; what did Lucas tell you to do?”

 

And he even answered that: “Couldn’t Mr. Hampton dig him up and see?”

 

“On what grounds? Lucas was caught within two minutes after the shot, standing over the body with a recently-fired pistol in his pocket. He never denied having fired it; in fact he refused to make any statement at all, even to me, his lawyer—the lawyer he himself sent for. And how risk it? I’d just as soon go out there and shoot another one of his sons as to tell Nub Gowrie I wanted to dig his boy’s body up out of the ground it had been consecrated and prayed into. And if I went that far, I’d heap rather tell him I just wanted to exhume it to dig the gold out of its teeth than to tell him the reason was to save a nigger from being lynched.”

 

“But suppose—” he said.

 

“Listen to me.” his uncle said with a sort of weary yet indomitable patience: “Try to listen. Lucas is locked behind a proof steel door. He’s got the best protection Hampton or anybody else in this county can possibly give him. As Will Legate said, there are enough people in this county to pass him and Tubbs and even that door if they really want to. But I dont believe there are that many people in this county who really want to hang Lucas to a telephone pole and set fire to him with gasoline.”

 

And now too. But he still tried. “But just suppose—” he said again and now he heard for the third time almost exactly what he had heard twice in twelve hours, and he marvelled again at the paucity, the really almost standardised meagreness not of individual vocabularies but of Vocabulary itself, by means of which even man can live in vast droves and herds even in concrete warrens in comparative amity: even his uncle too:

 

“Suppose it then. Lucas should have thought of that before he shot a white man in the back.” And it was only later that he would realise his uncle was speaking to Miss Habersham too now; at the moment he was neither rediscovering her presence in the room nor even discovering it; he did not even remember that she had already long since ceased to exist, turning, closing the door upon the significantless speciosity of his uncle’s voice: “I’ve told him what to do. If anything was going to happen, they would have done it out there, at home, in their own back yard; they would never have let Mr. Hampton get to town with him. In fact, I still dont understand why they did. But whether it was luck or mismanagement or old Mr. Gowrie is failing with age, the result is good; he’s all right now and I’m going to persuade him to plead guilty to manslaughter; he’s old and I think the District Attorney will accept it. He’ll go to the penitentiary and perhaps in a few years if he lives—” and closed the door, who had heard it all before and would no more, out of the room which he had never completely entered anyway and shouldn’t have stopped at all, releasing the knob for the first time since he had put his hand on it and thinking with the frantic niggling patience of a man in a burning house trying to gather up a broken string of beads: Now I’ll have to walk all the way back to the jail to ask Lucas where it is: realising how Lucas probability doubts and everything else to the contrary he actually had expected his uncle and the sheriff would take charge and make the expedition, not because he thought they would believe him but simply because he simply could not conceive of himself and Aleck Sander being left with it: until he remembered that Lucas had already taken care of that too, foreseen that too; remembering not with relief but rather with a new burst of rage and fury beyond even his own concept of his capacity how Lucas had not only told him what he wanted but exactly where it was and even how to get there and only then as afterthought asked him if he would:—hearing the crackle of the paper on his father’s lap beyond the library door and smelling the cigar burning in the ashtray at his hand and then he saw the blue wisp of its smoke float slowly out of the open door as his father must have picked it up in some synonymous hiatus or throe and puffed it once: and (remembering) even by what means to get out there and back and he thought of himself opening the door again and saying to his uncle: Forget Lucas. Just lend me your car and then walking into the library and saying to his father who would have their car keys in his pocket until he would remember when he undressed to leave them where his mother could find them tomorrow: Let me have the keys, Pop. I want to run out to the country and dig up a grave; he even remembered Miss Habersham’s pickup truck in front of the house (not Miss Habersham; he never thought of her again. He just remembered a motor vehicle sitting empty and apparently unwatched on the street not fifty yards away); the key might be, probably was, still in the switch and the Gowrie who caught him robbing his son’s or brother’s or cousin’s grave might as well catch a car-thief too.

 

Because (quitting abandoning emerging from scattering with one sweep that confetti-swirl of raging facetiae) he realised that he had never doubted getting out there and even getting the body up. He could see himself reaching the church, the graveyard without effort nor even any great elapse of time; he could see himself singlehanded even having the body up and out still with no effort, no pant and strain of muscles and lungs nor laceration of the shrinking sensibilities. It was only then that the whole wrecked and tumbling midnight which peer and pant though he would he couldn’t see past and beyond, would come crashing down on him. So (moving: he had not stopped since the first second’s fraction while he closed the office door) he flung himself bodily with one heave into a kind of deadly reasonableness of enraged calculation, a calm sagacious and desperate rationability not of pros and cons because there were no pros: the reason he was going out there was that somebody had to and nobody else would and the reason somebody had to was that not even Sheriff Hampton (vide Will Legate and the shotgun stationed in the lower hall of the jail like on a lighted stage where anybody approaching would have to see him or them before they even reached the gate) were completely convinced that the Gowries and their kin and friends would not try to take Lucas out of the jail tonight and so if they were all in town tonight trying to lynch Lucas there wouldn’t be anybody hanging around out there to catch him digging up the grave and if that was a concrete fact then its obverse would be concrete too: if they were not in town after Lucas tonight then any one of the fifty or a hundred men and boys in the immediate connection by blood or just foxhunting and whiskeymaking and pine lumbertrading might stumble on him and Aleck Sander: and that too, that again: he must go on a horse for the same reason: that nobody else would except a sixteen-year-old boy who owned nothing to go on but a horse and he must even choose here: either to go alone on the horse in half the time and spend three times the time getting the body up alone because alone he would not only have to do all the digging but the watching and listening too, or take Aleck Sander with him (he and Aleck Sander had travelled that way before on Highboy for even more than ten miles—a big rawboned gelding who had taken five bars even under a hundred and seventy-five pounds and a good slow canter even with two up and a long jolting driving trot as fast as the canter except that not even Aleck Sander could stand it very long behind the saddle and then a shuffling nameless halfrun halfwalk which he could hold for miles under both of them, Aleck Sander behind him for the first time at the canter then trotting beside the horse holding to the off stirrup for the next one) and so get the body up in a third of the time at the risk of having Aleck Sander keeping Lucas company when the Gowries came with the gasoline: and suddenly he found himself escaped back into the confetti exactly as you put off having to step finally into the cold water, thinking seeing hearing himself trying to explain that to Lucas too:

 

We have to use the horse. We cant help it: and Lucas:

 

You could have axed him for the car: and he:

 

He would have refused. Dont you understand? He wouldn’t only have refused, he would have locked me up where I couldn’t even have walked out there, let alone had a horse: and Lucas:

 

All right, all right. I aint criticising you. After all, it aint you them Gowries is fixing to set afire:—moving down the hall to the back door: and he was wrong; not when he had said All right to Lucas through the steel bars nor when he had stepped back into the hall and closed the office door behind him, but here was the irrevocable moment after which there would be no return; he could stop here and never pass it, let the wreckage of midnight crash harmless and impotent against these walls because they were strong, they would endure; they were home, taller than wreckage, stronger than fear;—not even stopping, not even curious to ask himself if perhaps he dared not stop, letting the screen door quietly to behind him and down the steps into the vast furious vortex of the soft May night and walking fast now across the yard toward the dark cabin where Paralee and Aleck Sander were no more asleep than all the other Negroes within a mile of town would sleep tonight, not even in bed but sitting quietly in the dark behind the closed doors and shuttered windows waiting for what sound what murmur of fury and death to breathe the spring dark: and stopped and whistled the signal he and Aleck Sander had been using to one another ever since they learned to whistle, counting off the seconds until the moment should come to repeat it, thinking how if he were Aleck Sander he wouldn’t come out of the house to anybody’s whistle tonight either when suddenly with no sound and certainly no light behind to reveal him by Aleck Sander stood out from the shadows, walking, already quite near in the moonless dark, a little taller than he though there was only a few months’ difference between them: and came up, not even looking at him but past, over his head, toward the Square as if looking could make a lofting trajectory like a baseball, over the trees and the streets and the houses, to drop seeing into the Square—not the homes in the shady yards and the peaceful meals and the resting and the sleep which were the end and the reward, but the Square: the edifices created and ordained for trade and government and judgment and incarceration where strove and battled the passions of men for which the rest and the little death of sleep were the end and the escape and the reward.

 

“So they aint come for old Lucas yet,” Aleck Sander said.

 

“Is that what your people think about it too?” he said.

 

“And so would you,” Aleck Sander said. “It’s the ones like Lucas makes trouble for everybody.”

 

“Then maybe you better go to the office and sit with Uncle Gavin instead of coming with me.”

 

“Going where with you?” Aleck Sander said. And he told him, harsh and bald, in four words:

 

“Dig up Vinson Gowrie.” Aleck Sander didn’t move, still looking past and over his head toward the Square. “Lucas said it wasn’t his gun that killed him.”

 

Still not moving Aleck Sander began to laugh, not loud and with no mirth: just laughing; he said exactly what his uncle had said hardly a minute ago: “So would I,” Aleck Sander said. He said: “Me? Go out there and dig that dead white man up? Is Mr. Gavin already in the office or do I just sit there until he comes?”

 

“Lucas is going to pay you,” he said. “He told me that even before he told me what it was.”

 

Aleck Sander laughed, without mirth or scorn or anything else: with no more in the sound of it than there is anything in the sound of breathing but just breathing. “I aint rich,” he said. “I dont need money.”

 

“At least you’ll saddle Highboy while I hunt for a flashlight, wont you?” he said. “You’re not too proud about Lucas to do that, are you?”

 

“Certainly.” Aleck Sander said, turning.

 

“And get the pick and shovel. And the long tie-rope. I’ll need that too.”

 

“Certainly,” Aleck Sander said. He paused, half turned. “How you going to tote a pick and shovel both on Highboy when he dont even like to see a riding switch in your hand?”

 

“I dont know,” he said and Aleck Sander went on and he turned back toward the house and at first he thought it was his uncle coming rapidly around the house from the front, not because he believed that his uncle might have suspected and anticipated what he was about because he did not, his uncle had dismissed that too immediately and thoroughly not only from conception but from possibility too, but because he no longer remembered anyone else available for it to have been and even after he saw it was a woman he assumed it was his mother, even after he should have recognised the hat, right up to the instant when Miss Habersham called his name and his first impulse was to step quickly and quietly around the corner of the garage, from where he could reach the lot fence still unseen and climb it and go on to the stable and so go out the pasture gate without passing the house again at all, flashlight or not but it was already too late: calling his name: “Charles:” in that tense urgent whisper then came rapidly up and stopped facing him, speaking in that tense rapid murmur:

 

“What did he tell you?” and now he knew what it was that had nudged at his attention back in his uncle’s office when he had recognised her and then in the next second flashed away: old Molly, Lucas’ wife, who had been the daughter of one of old Doctor Habersham’s, Miss Habersham’s grandfather’s, slaves, she and Miss Habersham the same age, born in the same week and both suckled at Molly’s mother’s breast and grown up together almost inextricably like sisters, like twins, sleeping in the same room, the white girl in the bed, the Negro girl on a cot at the foot of it almost until Molly and Lucas married, and Miss Habersham had stood up the Negro church as godmother to Molly’s first child.

 

“He said it wasn’t his pistol,” he said.

 

“So he didn’t do it,” she said, rapid still and with something even more than urgency in her voice now.

 

“I dont know,” he said.

 

“Nonsense,” she said. “If it wasn’t his pistol—”

 

“I dont know,” he said.

 

“You must know. You saw him—talked to him—”

 

“I dont know,” he said. He said it calmly, quietly, with a kind of incredulous astonishment as though he had only now realised what he had promised, intended: “I just dont know. I still dont know. I’m just going out there ...” He stopped, his voice died. There was an instant a second in which he even remembered he should have been wishing he could recall it, the last unfinished sentence. Though it was probably already too late and she had already done herself what little finishing the sentence needed and at any moment now she would cry, protest, ejaculate and bring the whole house down on him. Then in the same second he stopped remembering it. She said:

 

“Of course:” immediate murmurous and calm; he thought for another half of a second that she hadn’t understood at all and then in the other half forgot that too, the two of them facing each other indistinguishable in the darkness across the tense and rapid murmur: and then he heard his own voice speaking in the same tone and pitch, the two of them not conspiratorial exactly but rather like two people who have irrevocably accepted a gambit they are not at all certain they can cope with: only that they will resist it: “We dont even know it wasn’t his pistol. He just said it wasn’t.”

 

“Yes.”

 

“He didn’t say whose it was nor whether or not he fired it. He didn’t even tell you he didn’t fire it. He just said it wasn’t his pistol.”

 

“Yes.”

 

“And your uncle told you there in his study that that’s just exactly what he would say, all he could say.” He didn’t answer that. It wasn’t a question. Nor did she give him time. “All right,” she said. “Now what? To find out if it wasn’t his pistol—find out whatever it was he meant? Go out there and what?”

 

He told her. as badly as he had told Aleck Sander, explicit and succinct: “Look at him:” not even pausing to think how here he should certainly have anticipated at least a gasp. “Go out there and dig him up and bring him to town where somebody that knows bullet holes can look at the bullet hole in him—”

 

“Yes,” Miss Habersham said. “Of course. Naturally he wouldn’t tell your uncle. He’s a Negro and your uncle’s a man:” and now Miss Habersham in her turn repeating and paraphrasing and he thought how it was not really a paucity a meagreness of vocabulary, it was in the first place because the deliberate violent blotting out obliteration of a human life was itself so simple and so final that the verbiage which surrounded it enclosed it insulated it intact into the chronicle of man had of necessity to be simple and uncomplex too, repetitive, almost monotonous even; and in the second place, vaster than that, adumbrating that, because what Miss Habersham paraphrased was simple truth, not even fact and so there was not needed a great deal of diversification and originality to express it because truth was universal, it had to be universal to be truth and so there didn’t need to be a great deal of it just to keep running something no bigger than one earth and so anybody could know truth; all they had to do was just to pause, just to stop, just to wait: “Lucas knew it would take a child—or an old woman like me: someone not concerned with probability, with evidence. Men like your uncle and Mr. Hampton have had to be men too long, busy too long.—Yes?” she said. “Bring him in to town where someone who knows can look at the bullet hole. And suppose they look at it and find out it was Lucas’ pistol?” And he didn’t answer that at all, nor had she waited again, saying, already turning: “We’ll need a pick and shovel. I’ve got a flashlight in the truck—”

 

“We?” he said.

 

She stopped; she said almost patiently: “It’s fifteen miles out there—”

 

“Ten,” he said.

 

“—a grave is six feet deep. It’s after eight now and you may have only until midnight to get back to town in time—” and something else but he didn’t even hear it. He wasn’t even listening. He had said this himself to Lucas only fifteen minutes ago but it was only now that he understood what he himself had said. It was only after hearing someone else say it that he comprehended not the enormity of his intention but the simple inert unwieldy impossible physical vastness of what he faced; he said quietly, with hopeless indomitable amazement:

 

“We cant possibly do it.”

 

“No,” Miss Habersham said. “Well?”

 

“Ma’am?” he said. “What did you say?”

 

“I said you haven’t even got a car.”

 

“We were going on the horse.”

 

Now she said, “We?”

 

“Me and Aleck Sander.”

 

“Then we’ll have three,” she said. “Get your pick and shovel. They’ll begin to wonder in the house why they haven’t heard my truck start.” She moved again.

 

“Yessum,” he said. “Drive on down the lane to the pasture gate. We’ll meet you there.”

 

He didn’t wait either. He heard the truck start as he climbed the lot fence; presently he could see Highboy’s blaze in the black yawn of the stable hallway; Aleck Sander jerked the buckled girth-strap home through the keeper as he came up. He unsnapped the tie-rope from the bit-ring before he remembered and snapped it back and untied the other end from the wall-ring and looped it and the reins up over Highboy’s head and led him out of the hallway and got up.

 

“Here,” Aleck Sander said reaching up the pick and shovel but Highboy had already begun to dance even before he could have seen them as he always did even at a hedge switch and he set him back hard and steadied him as Aleck Sander said “Stand still!” and gave Highboy a loud slap on the rump, passing up the pick and shovel and he steadied them across the saddle-bow and managed to hold Highboy back on his heels for another second, long enough to free his foot from the near stirrup for Aleck Sander to get his foot into it, Highboy moving then in a long almost buck-jump as Aleck Sander swung up behind and still trying to run until he steadied him again with one hand, the pick and shovel jouncing on the saddle, and turned him across the pasture toward the gate. “Hand me them damn shovels and picks,” Aleck Sander said. “Did you get the flashlight?”

 

“What do you care?” he said. Aleck Sander reached his spare hand around him and took the pick and shovel; again for a second Highboy could actually see them but this time he had both hands free for the snaffle and the curb too. “You aint going anywhere to need a flashlight. You just said so.”

 

They had almost reached the gate. He could see the dark blob of the halted truck against the pale road beyond it; that is, he could believe he saw it because he knew it was there. But Aleck Sander actually saw it: who seemed able to see in the dark almost like an animal. Carrying the pick and shovel, Aleck Sander had no free hand, nevertheless he had one with which he reached suddenly again and caught the reins outside his own hands and jerked Highboy almost back to a squat and said in a hissing whisper: “What’s that?”

 

“It’s Miss Eunice Habersham’s truck,” he said. “She’s going with us. Turn him loose, confound it!” wrenching the reins from Aleck Sander, who released them quickly enough now, saying,

 

“She’s gonter take the truck:” and not even dropping the pick and shovel but flinging them clattering and clanging against the gate and slipping down himself and just in time because now Highboy stood erect on his hind feet until he struck him hard between the ears with the looped tie-rope.

 

“Open the gate,” he said.

 

“We wont need the horse,” Aleck Sander said. “Unsaddle and bridle him here. We’ll put um up when we get back.”

 

Which was what Miss Habersham said; through the gate now and Highboy still sidling and beating his hooves while Aleck Sander put the pick and shovel into the back of the truck as though he expected Aleck Sander to throw them at him this time, and Miss Habersham’s voice from the dark cab of the truck:

 

“He sounds like a good horse. Has he got a four-footed gait too?”

 

“Yessum.” he said. “Nome.” he said. “I’ll take the horse too. The nearest house is a mile from the church but somebody might still hear a car. We’ll leave the truck at the bottom of the hill when we cross the branch.” Then he answered that too before she had time to say it: “We’ll need the horse to bring him back down to the truck.”

 

“Heh.” Aleck Sander said. It wasn’t laughing. But then nobody thought it was. “How do you reckon that horse is going to tote what you dug up when he dont even want to tote what you going to do the digging with?” But he had already thought of that too, remembering his grandfather telling of the old days when deer and bear and wild turkey could be hunted in Yoknapatawpha County within twelve miles of Jefferson, of the hunters: Major de Spain who had been his grandfather’s cousin and old General Compson and Uncle Ike McCaslin, Carothers Edmonds’ great-uncle, still alive at ninety, and Boon Hogganbeck whose mother’s mother had been a Chickasaw woman and the Negro Sam Fathers whose father had been a Chickasaw chief, and Major de Spain’s one-eyed hunting mule Alice who wasn’t afraid even of the smell of bear and he thought how if you really were the sum of your ancestry it was too bad the ancestors who had evoluted him into a secret resurrector of country graveyards hadn’t thought to equip him with a descendant of that unspookable one-eyed mule to transport his subjects on.

 

“I dont know.” he said.

 

“Maybe he’ll learn by the time we get back to the truck,” Miss Habersham said. “Can Aleck Sander drive?”

 

“Yessum,” Aleck Sander said.

 

Highboy was still edgy; held down he would merely have lathered himself to no end so since it was cool tonight for the first mile he actually kept in sight of the truck’s taillight. Then he slowed, the light fled diminishing on and vanished beyond a curve and he settled Highboy into the shambling halfrun halfwalk which no show judge would ever pass but which covered ground; nine miles of it to be covered and he thought with a kind of ghastly amusement that at last he would have time to think, thinking how it was too late to think now, not one of the three of them dared think now, if they had done but one thing tonight it was at least to put all thought ratiocination contemplation forever behind them; five miles from town and he would cross (probably Miss Habersham and Aleck Sander in the truck already had) the invisible surveyor’s line which was the boundary of Beat Four: the notorious, the fabulous almost and certainly least of all did any of them dare think now, thinking how it was never difficult for an outlander to do two things at once which Beat Four wouldn’t like since Beat Four already in advance didn’t like most of the things which people from town (and from most of the rest of the county too for that matter) did: but that it remained for them, a white youth of sixteen and a Negro one of the same and an old white spinster of seventy to elect and do at the same time the two things out of all man’s vast reservoir of invention and capability that Beat Four would repudiate and retaliate on most violently: to violate the grave of one of its progeny in order to save a nigger murderer from its vengeance.

 

But at least they would have some warning (not speculating on who the warning could help since they who would be warned were already six and seven miles from the jail and still moving away from it as fast as he dared push the horse) because if Beat Four were coming in tonight he should begin to pass them soon (or they pass him)—the battered mud-stained cars, the empty trucks for hauling cattle and lumber, and the saddled horses and mules. Yet so far he had passed nothing whatever since he left town; the road lay pale and empty before and behind him too; the lightless houses and cabins squatted or loomed beside it, the dark land stretched away into the darkness strong with the smell of plowed earth and now and then the heavy scent of flowering orchards lying across the road for him to ride through like stagnant skeins of smoke so maybe they were making better time than even he had hoped and before he could stop it he had thought Maybe we can, maybe we will after all;— before he could leap and spring and smother and blot it from thinking not because he couldn’t really believe they possibly could and not because you dont dare think whole even to yourself the entirety of a dear hope or wish let alone a desperate one else you yourself have doomed it but because thinking it into words even only to himself was like the struck match which doesn’t dispel the dark but only exposes its terror—one weak flash and glare revealing for a second the empty road’s the dark and empty land’s irrevocable immitigable negation.

 

Because—almost there now; Aleck Sander and Miss Habersham had already arrived probably a good thirty minutes ago and he took a second to hope Aleck Sander had the forethought enough to drive the truck off the road where anybody passing would not see it, then in the same second he knew that of course Aleck Sander had done that and it was not Aleck Sander he had ever doubted but himself for even for one second doubting Aleck Sander—he had not seen one Negro since leaving town, with whom at this hour on Sunday night in May the road should have been constant as beads almost—the men and young women and girls and even a few old men and women and even children before it got too late, but mostly the men the young bachelors who since last Monday at daylight had braced into the shearing earth the lurch and heave of plows behind straining and surging mules then at noon Saturday had washed and shaved and put on the clean Sunday shirts and pants and all Saturday night had walked the dusty roads and all day Sunday and all Sunday night would still walk them until barely time to reach home and change back into the overalls and the brogans and catch and gear up the mules and forty-eight hours even bedless save for the brief time there was a woman in it be back in the field again the plow’s point set into the new furrow when Monday’s sun rose: but not now, not tonight: where in town except for Paralee and Aleck Sander he had seen none either for twenty-four hours but he had expected that, they were acting exactly as Negroes and whites both would have expected Negroes to act at such a time; they were still there, they had not fled, you just didn’t see them—a sense a feeling of their constant presence and nearness: black men and women and children breathing and waiting inside their barred and shuttered houses, not crouching cringing shrinking, not in anger and not quite in fear: just waiting, biding since theirs was an armament which the white man could not match nor—if he but knew it—even cope with: patience; just keeping out of sight and out of the way,—but not here, no sense feeling here of a massed adjacence. a dark human presence biding and unseen: this land was a desert and a witness, this empty road its postulate (it would be some time yet before he would realise how far he had come: a provincial Mississippian. a child who when the sun set this same day had appeared to be—and even himself believed, provided he had thought about it at all—still a swaddled unwitting infant in the long tradition of his native land—or for that matter a witless foetus itself struggling—if he was aware that there had been any throes—blind and insentient and not even yet awaked in the simple painless convulsion of emergence) of the deliberate turning as with one back of the whole dark people on which the very economy of the land itself was founded, not in heat or anger nor even regret but in one irremediable invincible inflexible repudiation, upon not a racial outrage but a human shame.

 

Now he was there; Highboy tightened and even began to drive a little, even after nine miles, smelling water and now he could see distinguish the bridge or at least the gap of lighter darkness where the road spanned the impenetrable blackness of the willows banding the branch and then Aleck Sander stood out from the bridge rail; Highboy snorted at him then he recognised him too, without surprise, not even remembering how he had wondered once if Aleck Sander would have forethought to hide the truck, not even remembering that he had expected no less, not stopping, checking Highboy back to a walk across the bridge then giving him his head to turn from the road beyond the bridge and drop in stiff fore-legged jolts down toward the water invisible for a moment longer then he too could see the reflected wimpling where it caught the sky: until Highboy stopped and snorted again then heaved suddenly up and back, almost unseating him.

 

“He smell quicksand,” Aleck Sander said. “Let him wait till he gets home, anyway. I’d rather be doing something else than what I am too.”

 

But he took Highboy a little further down the bank where he might get down to the water but again he only feinted at it so he pulled away and back onto the road and freed the stirrup for Aleck Sander, Highboy again already in motion when Aleck Sander swung up. “Here,” Aleck Sander said but he had already swung Highboy off the gravel and into the narrow dirt road turning sharp toward the black loom of the ridge and beginning almost at once its long slant up into the hills though even before it began to rise the strong constant smell of pines was coming down on them with no wind behind it yet firm and hard as a hand almost, palpable against the moving body as water would have been. The slant steepened under the horse and even carrying double he essayed to run at it as was his habit at any slope, gathering and surging out until he checked him sharply back and even then he had to hold him hard-wristed in a strong lurching uneven walk until the first level of the plateau flattened and even as Aleck Sander said “Here” again Miss Habersham stood out of the obscurity at the roadside carrying the pick and shovel. Aleck Sander slid down as Highboy stopped. He followed.

 

“Stay on,” Miss Habersham said. “I’ve got the tools and the flashlight.”

 

“It’s a half mile yet,” he said. “Up hill. This aint a sidesaddle but maybe you could sit sideways. Where’s the truck?” he said to Aleck Sander.

 

“Behind them bushes,” Aleck Sander said. “We aint holding a parade. Leastways I aint.”

 

“No no,” Miss Habersham said. “I can walk.”

 

“We’ll save time,” he said. “It must be after ten now. He’s gentle. That was just when Aleck Sander threw the pick and shovel—”

 

“Of course,” Miss Habersham said. She handed the tools to Aleck Sander and approached the horse.

 

“I’m sorry it aint—” he said.

 

“Pah,” she said and took the reins from him and before he could even brace his hand for her foot she put it in the stirrup and went up as light and fast as either he or Aleck Sander could have done, onto the horse astride so that he had just time to avert his face, feeling her looking down in the darkness at his turned head. “Pah,” she said again. “I’m seventy years old. Besides, we’ll worry about my skirt after we are done with this:”—moving Highboy herself before he had hardly time to take hold of the bit, back into the road when Aleck Sander said:

 

“Hush.” They stopped, immobile in the long constant invisible flow of pine. “Mule coming down the hill,” Aleck Sander said.

 

He began to turn the horse at once. “I dont hear anything,” Miss Habersham said. “Are you sure?”

 

“Yessum,” he said, turning Highboy back off the road: “Aleck Sander’s sure.” And standing at Highboy’s head among the trees and undergrowth, his other hand lying on the horse’s nostrils in case he decided to nicker at the other animal, he heard it too—the horse or mule coming steadily down the road from the crest. It was unshod probably; actually the only sound he really heard was the creak of leather and he wondered (without doubting for one second that he had) how Aleck Sander had heard it at all the two minutes and more it had taken the animal to reach them. Then he could see it or that is where it was passing them—a blob, a movement, a darker shadow than shadow against the pale dirt of the road, going on down the hill, the soft steady shuffle and creak of leather dying away, then gone. But they waited a moment more.

 

“What was that he was toting on the saddle in front of him?” Aleck Sander said.

 

“I couldn’t even see whether it was a man on it or not,” he said.

 

“I couldn’t see anything,” Miss Habersham said. He led the horse back into the road. Suppose—” she said.

 

“Aleck Sander will hear it in time,” he said. So once more Highboy surged strong and steady at the steepening pitch, he carrying the shovel and clutching the leather under Miss Habersham’s thin hard calf on one side and Aleck Sander with the pick on the other, mounting, really moving quite fast through the strong heady vivid living smell of the pines which did something to the lungs, the breathing as (he imagined: he had never tasted it. He could have—the sip from the communion cup didn’t count because it was not only a sip but sour consecrated and sharp: the deathless blood of our Lord not to be tasted, moving not downward toward the stomach but upward and outward into the Allknowledge between good and evil and the choice and the repudiation and the acceptance forever—at the table at Thanksgiving and Christmas but he had never wanted to.) wine did to the stomach. They were quite high now, the ridged land opening and tumbling away invisible in the dark yet with the sense, the sensation of height and space; by day he could have seen them, ridge on pine-dense ridge rolling away to the east and the north in similitude of the actual mountains in Carolina and before that in Scotland where his ancestors had come from but he hadn’t seen yet, his breath coming a little short now and he could not only hear but feel too the hard short blasts from Highboy’s lungs as he was actually trying to run at this slope too even carrying a rider and dragging two, Miss Habersham steadying him, holding him down until they came out onto the true crest and Aleck Sander said once more “Here” and Miss Habersham turned the horse out of the road because he could still see nothing until they were off the road and only then he distinguished the clearing not because it was a clearing but because in a thin distillation of starlight there stood, canted a little where the earth had sunk, the narrow slab of a marble headstone. And he could hardly see the church (weathered, unpainted, of wood and not much larger than a single room) at all even when he led Highboy around behind it and tied the reins to a sapling and unsnapped the tie-rope from the bit and went back to where Miss Habersham and Aleck Sander were waiting.

 

“It’ll be the only fresh one,” he said. “Lucas said there hasn’t been a burying here since last winter.”

 

“Yes,” Miss Habersham said. “The flowers too. Aleck Sander’s already found it.” But to make sure (he thought quietly, he didn’t know to whom: I’m going to make a heap more mistakes but dont let this be one of them.) he hooded the flashlight in his wadded handkerchief so that one thin rapid pencil touched for a second the raw mound with its meagre scattering of wreaths and bouquets and even single blooms and then for another second the headstone adjacent to it, long enough to read the engraved name: Amanda Workitt wife of N. B. Forrest Gowrie 1878 1926 then snapped it off and again the darkness came in and the strong scent of the pines and they stood for a moment beside the raw mound, doing nothing at all. “I hate this,” Miss Habersham said.

 

“You aint the one,” Aleck Sander said. “It’s just a half a mile back to the truck. Down hill too.”

 

She moved; she was first. “Move the flowers,” she said. “Carefully. Can you see?”

 

“Yessum,” Aleck Sander said. “Aint many. Looks like they throwed them at it too.”

 

“But we wont,” Miss Habersham said. “Move them carefully.” And it must be nearing eleven now, they would not possibly have time; Aleck Sander was right: the thing to do was to go back to the truck and drive away, back to town and through town and on, not to stop, not even to have time to think for having to keep on driving, steering, keeping the truck going in order to keep on moving, never to come back; but then they had never had time, they had known that before they ever left Jefferson and he thought for an instant how if Aleck Sander really had meant it when he said he would not come and if he would have come alone in that case and then (quickly) he wouldn’t think about that at all, Aleck Sander using the shovel for the first shift while he used the pick though the dirt was still so loose they didn’t really need the pick (and if it hadn’t been still loose they couldn’t have done it at all even by daylight); two shovels would have done and faster too but it was too late for that now until suddenly Aleck Sander handed him the shovel and climbed out of the hole and vanished and (not even using the flashlight) with that same sense beyond sight and hearing both which had realised that what Highboy smelled at the branch was quicksand and which had discovered the horse or the mule coming down the hill a good minute before either he or Miss Habersham could begin to hear it, returned with a short light board so that both of them had shovels now and he could hear the chuck! and then the faint swish as Aleck Sander thrust the board into the dirt and then flung the load up and outward, expelling his breath, saying “Hah!” each time—a sound furious raging and restrained, going faster and faster until the ejaculation was almost as rapid as the beat of someone running: “Hah! ... Hah! ... Hah!” so that he said over his shoulder:

 

“Take it easy. We’re doing all right:” straightened his own back for a moment to mop his sweating face and seeing as always Miss Habersham in motionless silhouette on the sky above him in the straight cotton dress and the round hat on on the exact top of her head such as few people had seen in fifty years and probably no one at any time looking up out of a halfway rifled grave: more than halfway because spading again he heard the sudden thud of wood on wood, then Aleck Sander said sharply:

 

“Go on. Get out of here and gimme room:” and flung the board up and out and took, jerked the shovel from his hands and he climbed out of the pit and even as he stooped groping Miss Habersham handed him the coiled tie-rope.

 

“The flashlight too,” he said and she handed him that and he stood too while the strong hard immobile flow of the pines bleached the sweat from his body until his wet shirt felt cold on his flesh and invisible below him in the pit the shovel rasped and scraped on wood, and stooping and hooding the light again he flashed it downward upon the unpainted lid of the pine box and switched it off.

 

“All right,” he said. “That’s enough. Get out:” and Aleck Sander with the last shovel of dirt released the shovel too, flinging the whole thing arching out of the pit like a javelin and followed it in one motion, and carrying the rope and the light he dropped into the pit and only then remembered he would need a hammer, crowbar—something to open the lid with and the only thing of that nature would be what Miss Habersham might happen to have in the truck a half-mile away and the walk back uphill, stooping to feel, examine the catch or whatever it was to be forced when he discovered that the lid was not fastened at all: so that straddling it, balancing himself on one foot he managed to open the lid up and back and prop it with one elbow while he shook the rope out and found the end and snapped on the flashlight and pointed it down and then said, “Wait.” He said, “Wait.” He was still saying “Wait” when he finally heard Miss Habersham speaking in a hissing whisper:

 

“Charles ... Charles.”

 

“This aint Vinson Gowrie,” he said. “This man’s name is Montgomery. He’s some kind of a shoestring timber buyer from over in Crossman County.”