Chapter Six

SO THEY DROVE Miss Habersham home, out to the edge of town and through the shaggy untended cedar grove to the paintless columned portico where she got out and went into the house and apparently on through it without even stopping because at once they could hear her somewhere in the back yelling at someone—the old Negro man probably who was Molly’s brother and Lucas’ brother-in-law—in her strong voice strained and a little high from sleeplessness and fatigue, then she came out again carrying a big cardboard box full of what looked like unironed laundry and long limp webs and ropes of stockings and got back into the car and they drove back to the Square through the fresh quiet morning streets: the old big decaying wooden houses of Jefferson’s long-ago foundation set like Miss Habersham’s deep in shaggy un-tended lawns of old trees and rootbound scented and flowering shrubs whose very names most people under fifty no longer knew and which even when children lived in them seemed still to be spellbound by the shades of women, old women still spinsters and widows waiting even seventy-five years later for the slow telegraph to bring them news of Tennessee and Virginia and Pennsylvania battles, which no longer even faced the street but peered at it over the day-after-tomorrow shoulders of the neat small new one-storey houses designed in Florida and California set with matching garages in their neat plots of clipped grass and tedious flowerbeds, three and four of them now, a subdivision now in what twenty-five years ago had been considered a little small for one decent front lawn, where the prosperous young married couples lived with two children each and (as soon as they could afford it) an automobile each and the memberships in the country club and the bridge clubs and the junior rotary and chamber of commerce and the patented electric gadgets for cooking and freezing and cleaning and the neat trim colored maids in frilled caps to run them and talk to one another over the telephone from house to house while the wives in sandals and pants and painted toenails puffed lipstick-stained cigarettes over shopping bags in the chain groceries and drugstores.

 

Or would have been and should have been; Sunday and they might have passed, accepted a day with no one to plug and unplug the humming sweepers and turn the buttons on the stoves as a day off a vacation or maybe an occasion like a baptising or a picnic or a big funeral but this was Monday, a new day and a new week, rest and the need to fill time and conquer boredom was over, children fresh for school and husband and father for store or office or to stand around the Western Union desk where the hourly cotton reports came in; breakfast must be forward and the pandemoniac bustle of exodus yet still no Negro had they seen—the young ones with straightened hair and makeup in the bright trig tomorrow’s clothes from the mailorder houses who would not even put on the Harper’s Bazaar caps and aprons until they were inside the white kitchens and the older ones in the ankle-length homemade calico and gingham who wore the long plain homemade aprons all the time so that they were no longer a symbol but a garment, not even the men who should have been mowing the lawns and clipping the hedges; not even (crossing the Square now) the street department crews who should have been flushing the pavement with hoses and sweeping up the discarded Sunday papers and empty cigarette packs; across the Square and on to the jail where his uncle got out too and went up the walk with Miss Habersham and up the steps and through the still-open door where he could still see Legate’s empty chair still propped against the wall and he heaved himself bodily again out of the long soft timeless rushing black of sleep to find as usual that no time had passed, his uncle still putting his hat back on and turning to come back down the walk to the car. Then they stopped at home, Aleck Sander already out of the car and gone around the side of the house and vanished and he said,

 

“No.”

 

“Yes,” his uncle said. “You’ve got to go to school. Or better still, to bed and to sleep. —Yes,” his uncle said suddenly: “and Aleck Sander too. He must stay at home today too. Because this mustn’t be talked about, not one word about it until we have finished it. You understand that.”

 

But he wasn’t listening, he and his uncle were not even talking about the same thing, not even when he said “No” again and his uncle out of the car and already turning toward the house stopped and looked back at him and then stood looking at him for a good long moment and then said,

 

“We are going at this a little hindpart-before, aint we? I’m the one who should be asking you if I can go.” Because he was thinking about his mother, not just remembered about her because he had done that as soon as they crossed the Square five minutes ago and the simplest thing would have been to get out of his uncle’s car there and go and get in the sheriff’s car and simply stay in it until they were ready to go back out to the church and he had probably thought about it at the time and would even have done it probably if he hadn’t been so worn out and anticlimaxed and dull for sleep and he knew he couldn’t cope with her this time even if he had been completely fresh; the very fact that he had already done it twice in eleven hours, once by secrecy and once by sheer surprise and rapidity of movement and of mass, but doomed him completer now to defeat and rout: musing on his uncle’s naive and childlike rationalising about school and bed when faced with that fluid and implacable attack, when once more his uncle read his mind, standing beside the car and looking down at him for another moment with compassion and no hope even though he was a bachelor of fifty thirty-five years free of woman’s dominion, his uncle too knowing remembering how she would use the excuses of his education and his physical exhaustion only less quicker than she would have discarded them; who would listen no more to rational reasons for his staying at home than for—civic duty or simple justice or humanity or to save a life or even the peace of his own immortal soul—his going. His uncle said:

 

“All right. Come on. I’ll talk to her.”

 

He moved, getting out; he said suddenly and quietly, in amazement not at despair of hope but at how much hopelessness you could really stand: “You’re just my uncle.”

 

“I’m worse than that,” his uncle said. “I’m just a man.” Then his uncle read his mind again: “All right. I’ll try to talk to Paralee too. The same condition obtains there; motherhood doesn’t seem to have any pigment in its skin.”

 

And his uncle too was probably thinking how you not only couldn’t beat them, you couldn’t even find the battlefield in time to admit defeat before they had moved it again; he remembered, it was two years ago now, he had finally made the high school football team or that is he had won or been chosen for one of the positions to make an out-of-town trip because the regular player had been injured in practice or fallen behind in his grades or maybe his mother either wouldn’t let him go, something, he had forgotten exactly what because he had been too busy all that Thursday and Friday racking his brains in vain to think how to tell his mother he was going to Mottstown to play on the regular team, right up to the last minute when he had to tell her something and so did: badly: and weathered it since his father happened to be present (though he really hadn’t calculated it that way—not that he wouldn’t have if he hadn’t been too worried and perplexed with a blending of anger and shame and shame at being angry and ashamed ((crying at her at one point: “Is it the team’s fault that I’m the only child you’ve got?”)) to think of it) and left that Friday afternoon with the team feeling as he imagined a soldier might feel wrenching out of his mother’s restraining arms to go fight a battle for some shameful cause; she would grieve for him of course if he fell and she would even look on his face again if he didn’t but there would be always ineradicable between them the ancient green and perennial adumbration: so that all that Friday night trying to go to sleep in a strange bed and all the next forenoon too waiting for the game to start he thought better for the team if he had not come since he probably had too much on his mind to be worth anything to it: until the first whistle blew and on and afterward until bottom-most beneath the piled mass of both teams, the ball clutched to his chest and his mouth and nostrils both full of the splashed dried whitewash marking the goal line he heard and recognised above all the others that one voice shrill triumphant and bloodthirsty and picked up at last and the wind thumped back into him he saw her foremost in the crowd not sitting in the grandstand but among the ones trotting and even running up and down the sideline following each play, then in the car that evening on the way back to Jefferson, himself in the front seat beside the hired driver and his mother and three of the other players in the back and her voice as proud and serene and pitiless as his own could have been: “Does your arm still hurt?”—entering the hall and only then discovering that he had expected to find her still just inside the front door still in the loose hair and the nightdress and himself walking back even after three hours into the unbroken uninterrupted wail. But instead it was his father already roaring who came out of the dining-room and still at it even with his uncle yelling back almost into his face:

 

“Charley. Charley. Dammit, will you wait?” and only then his mother fully dressed, brisk busy and composed, coming up the hall from the back, the kitchen, saying to his father without even raising her voice:

 

“Charley. Go back and finish your breakfast. Paralee isn’t feeling well this morning and she doesn’t want to be all day getting dinner ready:” then to him—the fond constant familiar face which he had known all his life and therefore could neither have described it so that a stranger could recognise it nor recognise it himself from anyone’s description but only brisk calm and even a little inattentive now, the wail a wail only because of the ancient used habit of its verbiage: “You haven’t washed your face:” nor even pausing to see if he followed, on up the stairs and into the bathroom, even turning on the tap and putting the soap into his hands and standing with the towel open and waiting, the familiar face wearing the familiar expression of amazement and protest and anxiety and invincible repudiation which it had worn all his life each time he had done anything removing him one more step from infancy, from childhood: when his uncle had given him the Shetland pony someone had taught to take eighteen- and twenty-four-inch jumps and when his father had given him the first actual powder-shooting gun and the afternoon when the groom delivered Highboy in the truck and he got up for the first time and Highboy stood on his hind legs and her scream and the groom’s calm voice saying, “Hit him hard over the head when he does that. You dont want him falling over backward on you” but the muscles merely falling into the old expression through inattention and long usage as her voice had merely chosen by inattention and usage the long-worn verbiage of wailing because there was something else in it now—the same thing which had been there in the car that afternoon when she said, “Your arm doesn’t hurt at all now does it?” and on the other afternoon when his father came home and found him jumping Highboy over the concrete watertrough in the lot, his mother leaning on the fence watching and his father’s fury of relief and anger and his mother’s calm voice this time: “Why not? The trough isn’t near as tall as that flimsy fence-thing you bought him that isn’t even nailed together:” so that even dull for sleep he recognised it and turned his face and hands dripping and cried at her in amazed and incredulous outrage: “You aint going too! You cant go!” then even dull for sleep realising the fatuous naïveté of anyone using cant to her on any subject and so playing his last desperate card: “If you go, then I wont! You hear me? I wont go!”

 

“Dry your face and comb your hair,” she said. “Then come on down and drink your coffee.”

 

That too. Paralee was all right too apparently because his uncle was at the telephone in the hall when he entered the diningroom, his father already roaring again before he had even sat down:

 

“Dammit, why didn’t you tell me last night? Dont you ever again—”

 

“Because you wouldn’t have believed him either,” his uncle said coming in from the hall. “You wouldn’t have listened either. It took an old woman and two children for that, to believe truth for no other reason than that it was truth, told by an old man in a fix deserving pity and belief, to someone capable of the pity even when none of them really believed him. Which you didn’t at first,” his uncle said to him. “When did you really begin to believe him? When you opened the coffin, wasn’t it? I want to know, you see. Maybe I’m not too old to learn either. When was it?”

 

“I dont know,” he said. Because he didn’t know. It seemed to him that he had known all the time. Then it seemed to him that he had never really believed Lucas. Then it seemed to him that it had never happened at all, heaving himself once more with no movement up out of the long deep slough of sleep but at least to some elapse of time now, he had gained that much anyway, maybe enough to be safe on for a while like the tablets night truck drivers took not as big hardly as a shirt button yet in which were concentrated enough wakefulness to reach the next town because his mother was in the room now brisk and calm, setting the cup of coffee down in front of him in a way that if Paralee had done it she would have said that Paralee had slopped it at him: which, the coffee, was why neither his father nor his uncle had even looked at her, his father on the contrary exclaiming,

 

“Coffee? What the devil is this? I thought the agreement was when you finally consented for Gavin to buy that horse that he would neither ask for nor even accept a spoonful of coffee until he was eighteen years old:” and his mother not even listening, with the same hand and in the same manner half shoving and half popping the cream pitcher then the sugar bowl into his reach and already turning back toward the kitchen, her voice not really hurried and impatient: just brisk:

 

“Drink it now. We’re already late:” and now they looked at her for the first time: dressed, even to her hat, with in the crook of her other arm the straw basket out of which she had darned his and his father’s and his uncle’s socks and stockings ever since he could remember, though his uncle at first saw only the hat and for a moment seemed to join him in the same horrified surprise he had felt in the bathroom.

 

“Maggie!” his uncle said. “You cant! Charley—”

 

“I dont intend to,” his mother said, not even stopping. “This time you men will have to do the digging. I’m going to the jail:” already in the kitchen now and only her voice coming back: “I’m not going to let Miss Habersham sit there by herself with the whole county gawking at her. As soon as I help Paralee plan dinner we’ll—” but not dying fading: ceasing, quitting: since she had dismissed them though his father still tried once more:

 

“He’s got to go to school.”

 

But even his uncle didn’t listen. “You can drive Miss Eunice’s truck, cant you?” his uncle said. “There wont be a Negro school today for Aleck Sander to be going to so he can leave it at the jail. And even if there was I doubt if Paralee’s going to let him cross the front yard inside the next week.” Then his uncle seemed even to have heard his father or at least decided to answer him: “Nor any white school either for that matter if this boy hadn’t listened to Lucas, which I wouldn’t, and to Miss Habersham, which I didn’t. Well?” his uncle said. “Can you stay awake that long? You can get a nap once we are on the road.”

 

“Yes sir,” he said. So he drank the coffee which the soap and water and hard toweling had unfogged him enough to know he didn’t like and didn’t want but not enough for him to choose what simple thing to do about it: that is not drink it: tasting sipping then adding more sugar to it until each— coffee and sugar—ceased to be either and became a sickish quinine sweet amalgam of the worst of both until his uncle said,

 

“Dammit, stop that,” and got up and went to the kitchen and returned with a saucepan of heated milk and a soup bowl and dumped the coffee into the bowl and poured the hot milk into it and said. “Go on. Forget about it. Just drink it.” So he did, from the bowl in both hands like water from a gourd, hardly tasting it and still his father flung a little back in his chair looking at him and talking, asking him just how scared Aleck Sander was and if he wasn’t even scareder than Aleck Sander only his vanity wouldn’t allow him to show it before a darky and to tell the truth now, neither of them would have touched the grave in the dark even enough to lift the flowers off of it if Miss Habersham hadn’t driven them at it: his uncle interrupting:

 

“Aleck Sander even told you then that the grave had already been disturbed by someone in a hurry, didn’t he?”

 

“Yes sir,” he said and his uncle said:

 

“Do you know what I’m thinking now?”

 

“No sir,” he said.

 

“I’m being glad Aleck Sander couldn’t completely penetrate darkness and call out the name of the man who came down the hill carrying something in front of him on the mule.” And he remembered that: the three of them all thinking it but not one of them saying it: just standing invisible to one another above the pit’s invisible inky yawn.

 

“Fill it up,” Miss Habersham said. They did, the (five times now) loosened dirt going down much faster than it came up though it seemed forever in the thin starlight filled with the constant sound of the windless pines like one vast abateless hum not of amazement but of attention, watching, curiosity; amoral, detached, not involved and missing nothing. “Put the flowers back,” Miss Habersham said.

 

“It’ll take time,” he said.

 

“Put them back,” Miss Habersham said, So they did.

 

“I’ll get the horse,” he said. “You and Aleck Sander—”

 

“We’ll all go,” Miss Habersham said. So they gathered up the tools and the rope (nor did they use the flashlight again) and Aleck Sander said “Wait” and found by touch the board he had used for a shovel and carried that until he could push it back under the church and he untied Highboy and held the stirrup but Miss Habersham said, “No. We’ll lead him. Aleck Sander can walk exactly behind me and you walk exactly behind Aleck Sander and lead the horse.”

 

“We could go faster—” he said again and they couldn’t see her face: only the thin straight shape, the shadow, the hat which on anyone else wouldn’t even have looked like a hat but on her as on his grandmother looked exactly right, like exactly nothing else, her voice not loud, not much louder than breathing, as if she were not even moving her lips, not to anyone, just murmuring:

 

“It’s the best I know to do. I dont know anything else to do.”

 

“Maybe we all ought to walk in the middle,” he said, loud, too loud, twice louder than he had intended or even thought; it should carry for miles especially over a whole countryside already hopelessly waked and alerted by the sleepless sibilant what Paralee probably and old Ephraim certainly and Lucas too would call “miration” of the pines. She was looking at him now. He could feel it.

 

“I’ll never be able to explain to your mother but Aleck Sander hasn’t got any business here at all,” she said. “Youall walk exactly behind me and let the horse come last:” and turned and went on though what good that would do he didn’t know because in his understanding the very word “ambush” meant “from the flank, the side:” back in single file that way down the hill to where Aleck Sander had driven the truck into the bushes: and he thought If I were him this is where it would be and so did she; she said, “Wait.”

 

“How can you keep on standing in front of us if we dont stay together?” he said. And this time she didn’t even say This is all I can think of to do but just stood there so that Aleck Sander walked past her and on into the bushes and started the truck and backed it out and swung it to point down the hill, the engine running but no lights yet and she said, “Tie the reins up and let him go. Wont he come home?”

 

“I hope so,” he said. He got up.

 

“Then tie him to a tree,” she said. “We will come back and get him as soon as we have seen your uncle and Mr. Hampton—”

 

“Then we can all watch him ride down the road with maybe a horse or the mule in front of him too,” Aleck Sander said. He raced the engine then let it idle again. “Come on, get in, He’s either here watching us or he aint and if he aint we’re all right and if he is he’s done waited too late now when he let us get back to the truck.”

 

“Then you ride right behind the truck,” she said. “We’ll go slow—”

 

“Nome,” Aleck Sander said; he leaned out. “Get started; we’re going to have to wait for you anyway when we get to town.”

 

So—he needed no urging—he let Highboy down the hill, only holding his head up; the truck’s lights came on and it moved and once on the flat even in the short space to the highroad Highboy was already trying to run but he checked him back and up onto the highroad, the lights of the truck fanning up and out as it came down onto the flat then he slacked the curb, Highboy beginning to run, clashing the snaffle as always, thinking as always that one more champing regurg would get it forward enough to get his teeth on it, running now when the truck lights swung up onto the highroad too, his feet in eight hollow beats on the bridge and he leaned into the dark wind and let him go, the truck lights not even in sight during the full half-mile until he slowed him into the long reaching hard road-gait and almost a mile then before the truck overtook and then passed and the ruby tail-lamp drew on and away and then was gone but at least he was out of the pines, free of that looming down-watching sibilance uncaring and missing nothing saying to the whole circumambience: Look. Look: but then they were still saying it somewhere and they had certainly been saying it long enough for all Beat Four, Gowries and Ingrums and Workitts and Frasers and all to have heard it by this time so he wouldn’t think about that and so he stopped thinking about it now, all in the same flash in which he had remembered it, swallowing the last swallow from the bowl and setting it down as his father more or less plunged up from the table, clattering his chairlegs back across the floor, saying:

 

“Maybe I better go to work. Somebody’ll have to earn a little bread around here while the rest of you are playing cops and robbers:” and went out and apparently the coffee had done something to what he called his thinking processes or anyway the processes of what people called thinking because now he knew the why for his father too—the rage which was relief after the event which had to express itself some way and chose anger not because he would have forbidden him to go but because he had had no chance to, the pseudo-scornful humorous impugnment of his and Aleck Sander’s courage which blinked not even as much at a rifled grave in the dark as it did at Miss Habersham’s will,—in fact the whole heavy-handed aspersion of the whole thing by reducing it to the terms of a kind of kindergarten witch-hunt: which was probably merely the masculine form of refusing also to believe that he was what his uncle called big enough to button his pants and so dismissed his father, hearing his mother about to emerge from the kitchen and pushing his chair back and getting up himself when suddenly he was thinking how coffee was already a good deal more than he had known but nobody had warned him that it produced illusions like cocaine or opium: seeing watching his father’s noise and uproar flick and vanish away like blown smoke or mist, not merely revealing but exposing the man who had begot him looking back at him from beyond the bridgeless abyss of that begetting not with just pride but with envy too; it was his uncle’s abnegant and rhetorical self-lacerating which was the phony one and his father was gnawing the true bitter irremediable bone of all which was dismatchment with time, being born too soon or late to have been himself sixteen and gallop a horse ten miles in the dark to save an old nigger’s insolent and friendless neck.

 

But at least he was awake. The coffee had accomplished that anyway. He still needed to doze only now he couldn’t; the desire to sleep was there but it was awakefulness now he would have to combat and abate. It was after eight now; one of the county schoolbusses passed as he prepared to drive Miss Habersham’s truck away from the curb and the street would be full of children too fresh for Monday morning with books and paper bags of recess-time lunches and behind the schoolbus was a string of cars and trucks stained with country mud and dust so constant and unbroken that his uncle and his mother would already have reached the jail before he ever managed to cut into it because Monday was stock-auction day at the sales barns behind the Square and he could see them, the empty cars and trucks rank on dense rank along the courthouse curb like shoats at a feed-trough and the men with their stock-trader walking-sticks not even stopping but gone straight across the Square and along the alley to the sales barns to chew tobacco and unlighted cigars from pen to pen amid the ammonia-reek of manure and liniment and the bawling of calves and the stamp and sneeze of horses and mules and the secondhand wagons and plow gear and guns and harness and watches and only the women (what few of them that is since stock-sale day unlike Saturday was a man’s time) remained about the Square and the stores so that the Square itself would be empty except for the parked cars and trucks until the men would come back for an hour at noon to meet them at the cafes and restaurants.

 

Whereupon this time he jerked himself, no reflex now, not even out of sleep but illusion, who had carried hypnosis right out of the house with him even into the bright strong sun of day, even driving the pickup truck which before last night he would not even have recognised yet which since last night had become as inexpugnable a part of his memory and experience and breathing as hiss of shoveled dirt or the scrape of a metal blade on a pine box would ever be, through a mirage-vacuum in which not simply last night had not happened but there had been no Saturday either, remembering now as if he had only this moment seen it that there had been no children in the schoolbus but only grown people and in the stream of cars and trucks following it and now following him where he had finally cut in, a few of which even on stock-auction Monday (on Saturday half of the flat open beds would have been jammed and packed with them, men women and children in the cheap meagre finery in which they came to town) should have carried Negroes, there had not been one dark face.

 

Nor one school-bound child on the street although he had heard without listening enough of his uncle at the telephone to know that the superintendent had called whether to have school today or not and his uncle had told him yes, and in sight of the Square now he could see already three more of the yellow busses supposed and intended to bring the county children in to school but which their owner-contractor-operators translated on Saturdays and holidays into pay-passenger transport and then the Square itself, the parked cars and trucks as always as should be but the Square itself anything but empty: no exodus of men toward the stock pens nor women into the stores so that as he drove the pickup into the curb behind his uncle’s car he could see already where visible and sense where not a moil and mass of movement, one dense pulse and hum filling the Square as when the crowd overflows the carnival midway or the football field, flowing into the street and already massed along the side opposite to the jail until the head of it had already passed the blacksmith’s where he had stood yesterday trying to be invisible as if they were waiting for a parade to pass (and almost in the middle of the street so that the still unbroken stream of cars and trucks had to detour around them a clump of a dozen or so more like the group in a reviewing stand in whose center in its turn he recognized the badged official cap of the town marshal who at this hour on this day would have been in front of the schoolhouse holding up traffic for children to cross the street and he did not have to remember that the marshal’s name was Ingrum, a Beat Four Ingrum come to town as the apostate sons of Beat Four occasionally did to marry a town girl and become barbers and bailiffs and nightwatchmen as petty Germanic princelings would come down out of their Brandenburg hills to marry the heiresses to European thrones)—the men and the women and not one child, the weathered country faces and sunburned necks and backs of hands, the clean faded tieless earthcolored shirts and pants and print cotton dresses thronging the Square and the street as though the stores themselves were closed and locked, not even staring yet at the blank front of the jail and the single barred window which had been empty and silent too for going on forty-eight hours now but just gathering, condensing, not expectant nor in anticipation nor even attentive yet but merely in that preliminary settling down like the before-curtain in a theatre: and he thought that was it: holiday: which meant a day for children yet here turned upside down; and suddenly he realised that he had been completely wrong; it was not Saturday which had never happened but only last night which to them had not happened yet, that not only they didn’t know about last night but there was nobody, not even Hampton, who could have told them because they would have refused to believe him; whereupon something like a skim or a veil like that which crosses a chicken’s eye and which he had not even known was there went flick! from his own and he saw them for the first time—the same weathered still almost inattentive faces and the same faded clean cotton shirts and pants and dresses but no crowd now waiting for the curtain to rise on a stage’s illusion but rather the one in the courtroom waiting for the sheriff’s officer to cry Oyez Oyez Oyez. This honorable court; not even impatient because the moment had not even come yet to sit in judgment not on Lucas Beauchamp, they had already condemned him but on Beat Four, come not to see what they called justice done nor even retribution exacted but to see that Beat Four should not fail its white man’s high estate.

 

So that he had stopped the truck was out and had already started to run when he stopped himself: something of dignity something of pride remembering last night when he had instigated and in a way led and anyway accompanied the stroke which not one of the responsible elders but had failed even to recognise its value, let alone its need, and something of caution too remembering how his uncle had said almost nothing was enough to put a mob in motion so perhaps even a child running toward the jail would have been enough: then he remembered again the faces myriad yet curiously identical in their lack of individual identity, their complete relinquishment of individual identity into one We not even impatient, not even hurryable, almost gala in its complete obliviousness of its own menace, not to be stampeded by a hundred running children: and then in the same flash the obverse: not to be halted or deflected by a hundred times a hundred of them, and having realised its sheer hopelessness when it was still only an intention and then its physical imponderability when it entered accomplishment he now recognised the enormity of what he had blindly meddled with and that his first instinctive impulse—to run home and fling saddle and bridle on the horse and ride as the crow flies into the last stagger of exhaustion and then sleep and then return after it was all over—had been the right one (who now simply because it seemed to him now that he was responsible for having brought into the light and glare of day something shocking and shameful out of the whole white foundation of the county which he himself must partake of too since he too was bred of it, which otherwise might have flared and blazed merely out of Beat Four and then vanished back into its darkness or at least invisibility with the fading embers of Lucas’ crucifixion.)

 

But it was too late now, he couldn’t even repudiate, relinquish, run: the jail door still open and opposite it now he could see Miss Habersham sitting in the chair Legate had sat in, the cardboard box on the floor at her feet and a garment of some sort across her lap; she was still wearing the hat and he could see the steady motion of her hand and elbow and it seemed to him he could even see the flash and flick of the needle in her hand though he knew he could not at this distance; but his uncle was in the way so he had to move further along the walk but at that moment his uncle turned and came out the door and recrossed the veranda and then he could see her too in the second chair beside Miss Habersham; a car drew up to the curb beside him and stopped and now without haste she chose a sock from the basket and slipped the darningegg into it; she even had the needle already threaded stuck in the front of her dress and now he could distinguish the flash and glint of it and maybe that was because he knew so well the motion, the narrow familiar suppleness of the hand which he had watched all his life but at least no man could have disputed him that it was his sock.

 

“Who’s that?” the sheriff said behind him. He turned. The sheriff sat behind the wheel of his car, his neck and shoulders bowed and hunched so he could peer out below the top of the window-frame. The engine was still running and he saw in the back of the car the handles of two shovels and the pick too which they would not need and on the back seat quiet and motionless save for the steady glint and blink of their eyewhites, two Negroes in blue jumpers and the soiled black-ringed convict pants which the street gangs wore.

 

“Who would it be?” his uncle said behind him too but he didn’t turn this time nor did he even listen further because three men came suddenly out of the street and stopped beside the car and as he watched five or six more came up and in another moment the whole crowd would begin to flow across the street; already a passing car had braked suddenly (and then the following one behind it) at first to keep from running over them and then for its occupants to lean out looking at the sheriff’s car where the first man to reach it had already stopped to peer into it, his brown farmer’s hands grasping the edge of the open window, his brown weathered face thrust into the car curious divinant and abashless while behind him his massed duplicates in their felt hats and sweat-stained panamas listened.

 

“What you up to, Hope?” the man said. “Dont you know the Grand Jury’ll get you, wasting county money this way? Aint you heard about that new lynch law the Yankees passed? the folks that lynches the nigger is supposed to dig the grave?”

 

“Maybe he’s taking them shovels out there for Nub Gowrie and them boys of his to practice with,” the second said.

 

“Then it’s a good thing Hope’s taking shovel hands too,” the third said. “If he’s depending on anybody named Gowrie to dig a hole or do anything else that might bring up a sweat, he’ll sure need them.”

 

“Or maybe they aint shovel hands,” the fourth said. “Maybe it’s them the Gowries are going to practice on.” Yet even though one guffawed they were not laughing, more than a dozen now crowded around the car to take one quick all-comprehensive glance into the back of it where the two Negroes sat immobile as carved wood staring straight ahead at nothing and no movement even of breathing other than an infinitesimal widening and closing of the whites around their eyeballs, then looking at the sheriff again with almost exactly the expression he had seen on the faces waiting for the spinning tapes behind a slotmachine’s glass to stop.

 

“I reckon that’ll do,” the sheriff said. He thrust his head and one vast arm out the window and with the arm pushed the nearest ones back and away from the car as effortlessly as he would have opened a curtain, raising his voice but not much: “Willy.” The marshal came up; he could already hear him:

 

“Gangway, boys. Lemme see what the high sheriff’s got on his mind this morning.”

 

“Why dont you get these folks out of the street so them cars can get to town?” the sheriff said. “Maybe they want to stand around and look at the jail too.”

 

“You bet,” the marshal said. He turned, shoving his hands at the nearest ones, not touching them, as if he were putting into motion a herd of cattle. “Now boys,” he said.

 

They didn’t move, looking past the marshal still at the sheriff, not at all defiant, not really daring anyone: just tolerant, goodhumored, debonair almost.

 

“Why, Sheriff,” a voice said, then another.

 

“It’s a free street, aint it, Sheriff? You town folks wont mind us just standing on it long as we spend our money with you, will you?”

 

“But not to block off the other folks trying to get to town to spend a little,” the sheriff said. “Move on now. Get them out of the street, Willy.”

 

“Come on, boys,” the marshal said. “There’s other folks besides you wants to get up where they can watch them bricks.” They moved then but still without haste, the marshal herding them back across the street like a woman driving a flock of hens across a pen, she to control merely the direction not the speed and not too much of that, the fowls moving ahead of her flapping apron not recalcitrant, just unpredictable, fearless of her and not yet even alarmed; the halted car and the ones behind it moved too, slowly, dragging at creeping pace their loads of craned faces; he could hear the marshal shouting at the drivers: “Get on. Get on. There’s cars behind you—”

 

The sheriff was looking at his uncle again. “Where’s the other one?”

 

“The other what?” his uncle said.

 

“The other detective. The one that can see in the dark.”

 

“Aleck Sander,” his uncle said. “You want him too?”

 

“No,” the sheriff said. “I just missed him. I was just surprised to find one human in this county with taste and judgment enough to stay at home today. You ready? Let’s get started.”

 

“Right,” his uncle said. The sheriff was notorious as a driver who used up a car a year as a heavy-handed sweeper wears out brooms: not by speed but by simple friction; now the car actually shot away from the curb and almost before he could watch it, was gone. His uncle went to theirs and opened the door. “Jump in,” his uncle said.

 

Then he said it; at least this much was simple: “I’m not going.”

 

His uncle paused and now he saw watching him the quizzical saturnine face, the quizzical eyes which given a little time didn’t miss much; had in fact as long as he had known them never missed anything until last night.

 

“Ah,” his uncle said. “Miss Habersham is of course a lady but this other female is yours.”

 

“Look at them,” he said, not moving, barely moving his lips even. “Across the street. On the Square too and nobody but Willy Ingrum and that damn cap—”

 

“Didn’t you hear them talking to Hampton?” his uncle said.

 

“I heard them,” he said. “They were not even laughing at their own jokes. They were laughing at him.”

 

“They were not even taunting him,” his uncle said. “They were not even jeering at him. They were just watching him. Watching him and Beat Four, to see what would happen. These people just came to town to see what either or both of them are going to do.”

 

“No,” he said. “More than that.”

 

“All right,” his uncle said, quite soberly too now. “Granted. Then what?”

 

“Suppose—” But his uncle interrupted:

 

“Suppose Beat Four comes in and picks up your mother’s and Miss Habersham’s chairs and carries them out into the yard where they’ll be out of the way? Lucas aint in that cell. He’s in Mr. Hampton’s house, probably sitting in the kitchen right now eating his breakfast. What did you think Will Legate was doing coming in by the back door within fifteen minutes of when we got there and told Mr. Hampton? Aleck Sander even heard him telephoning.”

 

“Then what’s Mr. Hampton in such a hurry for?” he said: and his uncle’s voice was quite sober now: but just sober, that was all:

 

“Because the best way to stop having to suppose or deny either is for us to get out there and do what we have to do and get back here. Jump in the car.”