Intruder in the Dust

But it was better afterward, out of the stale warm house again into the air, the morning, the sun in one soft high level golden wash in the highest tips of the trees, gilding the motion­less obese uprush of the town water tank in spiderlegged elongate against the blue, the four of them in his uncle’s car once more while the sheriff stood leaned above the driver’s window, dressed now even to a bright orange-and-yellow necktie, saying to his uncle:

“You run Miss Eunice home so she can get some sleep. I’ll pick you up at your house in say an hour—”

Miss Habersham in the front seat with his uncle said “Pah.” That was all. She didn’t curse. She didn’t need to. It was far more definite and final than just cursing. She leaned forward to look past his uncle at the sheriff. “Get in your car and go to the jail or wherever you’ll go to get somebody to do the digging this time. We had to fill it up again because we knew you wouldn’t believe it even yet unless you saw it there your­self. Go on,” she said. “We’ll meet you out there. Go on,” she said.

But the sheriff didn’t move. He could hear him breathing, vast subterrene and deliberate, like sighing almost. “Of course I dont know about you,” the sheriff said. “A lady without nothing but a couple thousand chickens to feed and nurse and water and a vegetable farm hardly five acres big to run, might not have nothing to do all day. But these boys anyway have got to go to school. Leastways I never heard about any rule in the School Board to give holidays for digging up corpses.”

And that even stopped her. But she didn’t sit back yet. She still leaned forward where she could look past his uncle at the sheriff and he thought again She’s too old for this, to have to do this: only if she hadn’t then he and Aleck Sander, what she and his uncle and the sheriff all three and his mother and father and Paralee too would have called children, would have had to do it—not would have done it but would have had to do it to preserve not even justice and decency but innocence; and he thought of man who apparently had to kill man not for motive or reason but simply for the sake the need the compulsion of having to kill man, inventing creating his motive and reason afterward so that he could still stand up among man as a rational creature: whoever had had to kill Vinson Gowrie had then to dig him up dead and slay an­other to put in his vacated grave so that whoever had to kill him could rest; and Vinson Gowrie’s kin and neighbors who would have to kill Lucas or someone or anyone, it would not really matter who, so that they could lie down and breathe quiet and even grieve quiet and so rest. The sheriff’s voice was mild, almost gentle even: “You go home. You and these boys have done fine. Likely you saved a life. Now you go home and let us attend to the rest of it. That wont be any place for a lady out there.”

But Miss Habersham was just stopped, nor even that for long: “It wasn’t for a man either last night.”

“Wait, Hope,” his uncle said. Then his uncle turned to Miss Habersham. “Your job’s in town here,” he said. “Dont you know that?” Now Miss Habersham watched his uncle. But she still hadn’t sat back in the seat, giving no ground to anyone yet; watching, it was as though she had not at all ex­changed one opponent for another but without pause or falter had accepted them both, asking no quarter, crying no odds. “Will Legate’s a farmer,” his uncle said. “Besides being up all night. He’s got to go home and see to his own business for a little while.”

“Hasn’t Mr. Hampton got other deputies?” Miss Haber­sham said. “What are they for?”

“They’re just men with guns,” his uncle said. “Legate him­self told Chick and me last night that if enough men made up their minds and kept them made up, they would pass him and Mr. Tubbs both in time. But if a woman, a lady, a white lady ...” His uncle stopped, ceased; they stared at each other; watching them he thought again of his uncle and Lucas in the cell last night (it was last night, of course; it seemed like years now): again except for the fact that his uncle and Miss Habersham were actually looking into each other’s phys­ical eyes instead of bending each upon the other that absolute concentration of all the senses in the sum of which mere clumsy fallible perception weighed little more than the ability to read Sanskrit would, he might have been watching the last two stayers in a poker-pot. “... just to sit there, in sight, where the first one that passes can have the word spread long before Beat Four can even get the truck cranked up to start to town ... while we go out there and finish it for good, for ever—”

Miss Habersham leaned slowly back until her back came against the seat. She said: “So I’m to sit there on that stair­case with my skirts spread or maybe better with my back against the balustrade and one foot propped against the wall of Mrs. Tubbs’ kitchen while you men who never had time yesterday to ask that old nigger a few questions and so all he had last night was a boy, a child—” His uncle said nothing. The sheriff leaned above the window breathing vast subter­ranean sighs, not breathing hard but just as a big man seems to have to breathe. Miss Habersham said: “Drive me home first. I’ve got some mending to do. I aint going to sit there all morning doing nothing so that Mrs. Tubbs will think she has to talk to me. Drive me home first. I realised an hour ago what a rush and hurry you and Mr. Hampton are in but you can spare the time for that. Aleck Sander can bring my truck to the jail on his way to school and leave it in front of the gate.”

“Yessum,” his uncle said.

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.”

Chapter Seven

THEY NEVER SAW the sheriff’s car again until they reached the church. Nor for him was the reason sleep who in spite of the coffee might have expected that and in fact had. Up to the moment when at the wheel of the pickup he had got near enough to see the Square and then the mass of people lining the opposite side of the street in front of the jail he had ex­pected that as soon as he and his uncle were on the road back to the church, coffee or no coffee he would not even be once more fighting sleep but on the contrary would relin­quish and accept it and so in the nine miles of gravel and the one of climbing dirt regain at least a half-hour of the eight he had lost last night and—it seemed to him now—the three or four times that many he had spent trying to quit thinking about Lucas Beauchamp the night before.

And when they reached town a little before three this morning nobody could have persuaded him that by this time, almost nine oclock, he would not have made back at least five and a half hours of sleep even if not the full six, remem­bering how he—and without doubt Miss Habersham and Aleck Sander too—had believed that as soon as they and his uncle entered the sheriff’s house that would be all of it; they would enter the front door and lay into the sheriff’s broad competent ordained palm as you drop your hat on the hall table in passing, the whole night’s nightmare of doubt and in­decision and sleeplessness and strain and fatigue and shock and amazement and (he admitted it) some of fear too. But it hadn’t happened and he knew now that he had never really expected it to; the idea had ever entered their heads only because they had been worn out, spent not so much from sleeplessness and fatigue and strain as exhausted by shock and amazement and anticlimax; he had not even needed the massed faces watching the blank brick front of the jail nor the ones which had crossed the street and even blocked it while they crowded around the sheriff’s car, to read and then dismiss its interior with that one mutual concordant glance comprehensive abashless trustless and undeniable as the busy parent pauses for an instant to check over and anticipate the intentions of a loved though not too reliable child. If he needed anything he certainly had that—the faces the voices not even taunting and not even jeering: just perspicuant jocular and without pity—poised under the first relaxation of succumbence like a pin in the mattress so he was as wide awake as his uncle even who had slept all night or at least most of it, free of town now and going fast now, passing within the first mile the last of the cars and trucks and then no more of them because all who would come to town today would by this time be inside that last rapidly contracting mile—the whole white part of the county taking advantage of the good weather and the good allweather roads which were their roads because their taxes and votes and the votes of their kin and connections who could bring pressure on the congress­men who had the giving away of the funds had built them, to get quickly into the town which was theirs too since it existed only by their sufferance and support to contain their jail and their courthouse, to crow and jam and block its streets too if they saw fit: patient biding and unpitying, neither to be hurried nor checked nor dispersed nor denied since theirs was the murdered and the murderer too; theirs the affronter and the principle affronted: the white man and the bereavement of his vacancy, theirs the right not just to mere justice but vengeance too to allot or withhold.

They were going quite fast now, faster than he could ever remember his uncle driving, out the long road where he had ridden last night on the horse but in daylight now, morning’s bland ineffable May; now he could see the white bursts of dogwood in the hedgerows marking the old section-line sur­veys or standing like nuns in the cloistral patches and bands of greening woods and the pink and white of peach and pear and the pinkwhite of the first apple trees in the orchards which last night he had only smelled: and always beyond and around them the enduring land—the fields geometric with furrows where corn had been planted when the first doves began to call in late March and April, and cotton when the first whippoorwills cried at night around the beginning of May a week ago: but empty, vacant of any movement and any life—the farmhouses from which no smoke rose because breakfast was long over by now and no dinner to be cooked where none would be home to eat it, the paintless Negro cabins where on Monday morning in the dust of the grassless treeless yards halfnaked children should have been crawl­ing and scrabbling after broken cultivator wheels and worn-out automobile tires and empty snuff-bottles and tin cans and in the back yards smoke-blackened iron pots should have been bubbling over wood fires beside the sagging fences of vegetable patches and chickenruns which by nightfall would be gaudy with drying overalls and aprons and towels and unionsuits: but not this morning, not now; the wheels and the giant-doughnuts of chewed rubber and the bottles and cans lying scattered and deserted in the dust since that mo­ment Saturday afternoon when the first voice shouted from inside the house, and in the back yards the pots sitting empty and cold among last Monday’s ashes among the empty clotheslines and as the car flashed past the blank and vacant doors he would catch one faint gleam of fire on hearth and no more see but only sense among the shadows the still white roll of eyes; but most of all, the empty fields themselves in each of which on this day at this hour on the second Monday in May there should have been fixed in monotonous repeti­tion the land’s living symbol—a formal group of ritual almost mystic significance identical and monotonous as milestones tying the county-seat to the county’s ultimate rim as mile­stones would: the beast the plow and the man integrated in one foundationed into the frozen wave of their furrow tre­mendous with effort yet at the same time vacant of progress, ponderable immovable and immobile like groups of wrestling statuary set against the land’s immensity—until suddenly (they were eight miles from town; already the blue-green lift of the hills was in sight) he said with an incredulous and almost shocked amazement who except for Paralee and Aleck Sander and Lucas had not seen one in going on forty-eight hours:

“There’s a nigger.”

“Yes,” his uncle said. “Today is the ninth of May. This county’s got half of a hundred and forty-two thousand acres to plant yet. Somebody’s got to stay home and work:”—the car rushing boring up so that across the field’s edge and the perhaps fifty yards separating them he and the Negro behind the plow looked eye to eye into each other’s face be­fore the Negro looked away—the face black and gleamed with sweat and passionate with effort, tense concentrated and composed, the car flashing past and on while he leaned first out the open window to look back then turned in the seat to see back through the rear window, watching them still in their rapid unblurred diminishment—the man and the mule and the wooden plow which coupled them furious and solitary, fixed and without progress in the earth, leaning terrifically against nothing.

They could see the hills now; they were almost there—the long lift of the first pine ridge standing across half the horizon and beyond it a sense of feel of others, the mass of them seeming not so much to stand rush abruptly up out of the plateau as to hang suspended over it as his uncle had told him the Scottish highlands did except for the sharpness and color; that was two years ago, maybe three and his uncle had said, “Which is why the people who chose by preference to live on them on little patches which wouldn’t make eight bushels of corn or fifty pounds of line cotton an acre even if they were not too steep for a mule to pull a plow across (but then they dont want to make the cotton anyway, only the corn and not too much of that because it really doesn’t take a great deal of corn to run a still as big as one man and his sons want to fool with) are people named Gowrie and McCallum and Fraser and Ingrum that used to be Ingraham and Workitt that used to be Urquhart only the one that brought it to America and then Mississippi couldn’t spell it either, who love brawling and fear God and believe in Hell—” and it was as though his uncle had read his mind, holding the speedometer needle at fifty-five into the last mile of gravel (already the road was beginning to slant down to­ward the willow-and-cypress bottom of the Nine-Mile branch) speaking, that is volunteering to speak for the first time since they left town:

“Gowrie and Fraser and Workitt and Ingrum. And in the valleys along the rivers, the broad rich easy land where a man can raise something he can sell openly in daylight, the people named Littlejohn and Greenleaf and Armstead and Millingham and Bookwright—” and stopped, the car drop­ping on down the slope, increasing speed by its own weight; now he could see the bridge where Aleck Sander had waited for him in the dark and below which Highboy had smelled quicksand.

“We turn off just beyond it,” he said.

“I know,” his uncle said. “—And the ones named Sambo, they live in both, they elect both because they can stand either because they can stand anything.” The bridge was quite near now, the white railing of the entrance yawned rushing at them. “Not all white people can endure slavery and apparently no man can stand freedom (Which incidentally—the premise that man really wants peace and freedom—is the trouble with our relations with Europe right now, whose people not only dont know what peace is but—except for Anglo Saxons—actively fear and distrust personal lib­erty; we are hoping without really any hope that our atom bomb will be enough to defend an idea as obsolete as Noah’s Ark.); with one mutual instantaneous accord he forces his liberty into the hands of the first demagogue who rises into view: lacking that he himself destroys and obliterates it from his sight and ken and even remembrance with the frantic unanimity of a neighborhood stamping out a grass-fire. But the people named Sambo survived the one and who knows? they may even endure the other.—And who knows—”

Then a gleam of sand, a flash and glint of water; the white rail streamed past in one roar and rush and rattle of planking and they were across. He’ll have to slow down now he thought but his uncle didn’t, merely declutching, the car rolling on its own momentum which carried it still too fast through a slewing skidding turn into the dirt road and on for fifty yards bouncing among the ruts until the last of flat land died headlong into the first gentle slant, its momentum still carrying the car in high speed gear yet up the incline until then after he saw the tracks where Aleck Sander had driven the pickup off the road into the bushes and where he had stood ready with his hand poised over Highboy’s nostrils while the horse or the mule, whichever it was, had come down the hill with the burden in front of the rider which even Aleck Sander with his eyes like an owl or a mink or whatever else hunts at night, had failed to descry (and he remembered again not just his uncle at the table this morning but himself standing in the yard last night during that mo­ment after Aleck Sander walked away and before he recog­nised Miss Habersham when he actually believed he was coming out alone to do what must be done and he told him­self now as he had at the table: I wont think about that.); almost there now, practically were there in fact: what re­mained of space intervened not even to be measured in miles.

Though that little at a crawl, the car whining in second gear now against the motionless uprush of the main ridge and the strong constant resinous downflow of the pines where the dogwood looked indeed like nuns now in the long green corridors, up and onto the last crest, the plateau and now he seemed to see his whole native land, his home—the dirt, the earth which had bred his bones and those of his fathers for six generations and was still shaping him into not just a man but a specific man, not with just a man’s passions and aspirations and beliefs but the specific passions and hopes and convictions and ways of thinking and acting of a specific kind and even race: and even more: even among a kind and race specific and unique (according to the lights of most, cer­tainly all of them who had thronged into town this morning to stand across the street from the jail and crowd up around the sheriff’s car, damned unique) since it had also integrated into him whatever it was that had compelled him to stop and listen to a damned highnosed impudent Negro who even if he wasn’t a murderer had been about to get if not about what he deserved at least exactly what he had spent the sixty-odd years of his life asking for—unfolding beneath him like a map in one slow soundless explosion: to the east ridge on green ridge tumbling away toward Alabama and to the west and south the checkered fields and the woods flowing on into the blue and gauzed horizon beyond which lay at last like a cloud the long wall of the levee and the great River itself flowing not merely from the north but out of the North circumscribing and outland—the umbilicus of America joining the soil which was his home to the parent which three gener­ations ago it had failed in blood to repudiate; by turning his head he could see the faint stain of smoke which was town ten miles away and merely by looking ahead he could see the long reach of rich bottom land marked off into the big hold­ings, the plantations (one of which was Edmonds’ where the present Edmonds and Lucas both had been born, stemming from the same grandfather) along their own little river (though even in his grandfather’s memory steamboats had navigated it) and then the dense line of river jungle itself: and beyond that stretching away east and north and west not merely to where the ultimate headlands frowned back to back upon the waste of the two oceans and the long barrier of Canada but to the uttermost rim of earth itself, the North: not north but North, outland and circumscribing and not even a geographical place but an emotional idea, a condition of which he had fed from his mother’s milk to be ever and constant on the alert not at all to fear and not actually any­more to hate but just—a little wearily sometimes and some­times even with tongue in cheek—to defy: who had brought from infancy with him a childhood’s picture which on the threshold of manhood had found no reason or means to alter and which he had no reason to believe in his old age would alter either: a curving semicircular wall not high (anyone who really wanted to could have climbed it; he believed that any boy already would) from the top of which with the whole vast scope of their own rich teeming never-ravaged land of glittering undefiled cities and unburned towns and un-wasted farms so long-secured and opulent you would think there was no room left for curiosity, there looked down upon him and his countless row on row of faces which resembled his face and spoke the same language he spoke and at times even answered to the same names he bore yet between whom and him and his there was no longer any real kinship and soon there would not even be any contact since the very mu­tual words they used would no longer have the same signifi­cance and soon after that even this would be gone because they would be too far asunder even to hear one another: only the massed uncountable faces looking down at him and his in fading amazement and outrage and frustration and most curious of all, gullibility: a volitionless, almost helpless capacity and eagerness to believe anything about the South not even provided it be derogatory but merely bizarre enough and strange enough: whereupon once more his uncle spoke at complete one with him and again without surprise he saw his thinking not be interrupted but merely swap one saddle for another:

“It’s because we alone in the United States (I’m not speaking of Sambo right now; I’ll get to him in a minute) are a homogeneous people. I mean the only one of any size. The New Englander is too of course back inland from the coastal spew of Europe which this country quarantined unrootable into rootless ephemeral cities with factory and foundry and municipal paychecks as tight and close as any police could have done it, but there are no longer enough of him just as there are not of the Swiss who are not a people so much as a neat clean small quite solvent business. So we are not really resisting what the outland calls (and we too) progress and enlightenment. We are defending not actually our politics or beliefs or even our way of life, but simply our homogeneity from a federal government to which in simple desperation the rest of this country has had to surrender voluntarily more and more of its personal and private liberty in order to continue to afford the United States. And of course we will continue to defend it. We (I mean all of us: Beat Four will be unable to sleep at night until it has can­celled Lucas Beauchamp ((or someone else)) against Vinson Gowrie in the same color of ink, and Beat One and Two and Three and Five who on heatless principle intend to see that Beat Four makes that cancellation) dont know why it is valuable. We dont need to know. Only a few of us know that only from homogeneity comes anything of a people or for people of durable and lasting value—the literature, the art, the science, that minimum of government and police which is the meaning of freedom and liberty, and perhaps most valuable of all a national character worth anything in a crisis—that crisis we shall face someday when we meet an enemy with as many men as we have and as much material as we have and—who knows?—who can even brag and boast as we brag and boast.

“That’s why we must resist the North: not just to preserve ourselves nor even the two of us as one to remain one nation because that will be the inescapable byproduct of what we will preserve: which is the very thing that three generations ago we lost a bloody war in our own back yards so that it re­main intact: the postulate that Sambo is a human being liv­ing in a free country and hence must be free. That’s what we are really defending: the privilege of setting him free our­selves: which we will have to do for the reason that nobody else can since going on a century ago now the North tried it and have been admitting for seventy-five years now that they failed. So it will have to be us. Soon now this sort of thing wont even threaten anymore. It shouldn’t now. It should never have. Yet it did last Saturday and it probably will again, perhaps once more, perhaps twice more. But then no more, it will be finished; the shame will still be there of course but then the whole chronicle of man’s immortality is in the suf­fering he has endured, his struggle toward the stars in the stepping-stones of his expiations. Someday Lucas Beauchamp can shoot a white man in the back with the same impunity to lynch-rope or gasoline as a white man; in time he will vote anywhen and anywhere a white man can and send his chil­dren to the same school anywhere the white man’s children go and travel anywhere the white man travels as the white man does it. But it wont be next Tuesday. Yet people in the North believe it can be compelled even into next Monday by the simple ratification of votes of a printed paragraph: who have forgotten that although a long quarter-century ago Lucas Beauchamp’s freedom was made an article in our constitu­tion and Lucas Beauchamp’s master was not merely beaten to his knees but trampled for ten years on his face in the dust to make him swallow it, yet only three short generations later they are faced once more with the necessity of passing legislation to set Lucas Beauchamp free.

“And as for Lucas Beauchamp, Sambo, he’s a homogene­ous man too, except that part of him which is trying to es­cape not even into the best of the white race but into the second best—the cheap shoddy dishonest music, the cheap flash baseless overvalued money, the glittering edifice of publicity foundationed on nothing like a cardhouse over an abyss and all of the noisy muddle of political activity which used to be our minor national industry and is now our na­tional amateur pastime—all the spurious uproar produced by men deliberately fostering and then getting rich on our na­tional passion for the mediocre: who will accept the best provided it is debased and befouled before being fed to us: who are the only people on earth who brag publicly of being second-rate, i.e., lowbrows. I don’t mean that Sambo. I mean the rest of him who has a better homogeneity than we have and proved it by finding himself roots into the land where he had actually to displace white men to put them down: because he had patience even when he didn’t have hope, the long view even when there was nothing to see at the end of it, not even just the will but the desire to endure because he loved the old few simple things which no one wanted to take from him: not an automobile nor flash clothes nor his picture in the paper but a little of music (his own), a hearth, not his child but any child, a God a heaven which a man may avail himself a little of at any time without having to wait to die, a little earth for his own sweat to fall on among his own green shoots and plants. We—he and us—should confeder­ate: swap him the rest of the economic and political and cul­tural privileges which are his right, for the reversion of his capacity to wait and endure and survive. Then we would prevail; together we would dominate the United States; we would present a front not only impregnable but not even to be threatened by a mass of people who no longer have any­thing in common save a frantic greed for money and a basic fear of a failure of national character which they hide from one another behind a loud lipservice to a flag.”

Now they were there and not too long behind the sheriff. For though the car was already drawn off the road into the grove in front of the church, the sheriff was still standing beside it and one of the Negroes was just passing the pick backward out of the car to the other prisoner who stood holding both the shovels. His uncle drew in beside it and stopped and now in daylight he could see the church, for the first time actually who had lived within ten miles of it all his life and must have passed it, seen it at least half that many times. Yet he could not remember ever having actually looked at it before—a plank steepleless box no longer than some of the one-room cabins hill people lived in, paintless too yet (curiously) not shabby and not even in neglect or disrepair because he could see where sections of raw new lumber and scraps and fragments of synthetic roofing had been patched and carpentered into the old walls and shingles with a savage almost insolent promptitude, not squatting or crouching nor even sitting but standing among the trunks of the high strong constant shaggy pines, solitary but not forlorn, intractable and independent, asking nothing of any, making compromise with none and he remembered the tall slender spires which said Peace and the squatter utilitarian belfries which said Repent and he remembered one which even said Beware but this one said simply: Burn: and he and his uncle got out; the sheriff and the two Negroes carrying the tools were already inside the fence and he and his uncle followed, through the sagging gate in the low wire enclosure massed with honeysuckle and small odorless pink and white climbing roses and he saw the graveyard too for the first time, who had not only violated a grave in it but exploded one crime by exposing another—a fenced square of earth less large than garden plots he had seen and which by September would probably be choked and almost impenetrable and wellnigh invisible with sagegrass and ragweed and beggarlice, out of which stood without sym­metry or order like bookmarks thrust at random into a ledger or toothpicks in a loaf and canted always slightly as if they had taken their own frozen perpendicular from the limber unresting never-quite-vertical pines, shingle-thin slabs of cheap gray granite of the same weathered color as the paintless church as if they had been hacked out of its flank with axes (and carved mottoless with simple names and dates as though there had been nothing even their mourners re­membered of them that they had lived and they had died) and it had been neither decay nor time which had compelled back into the violated walls the raw new patching of unplaned paintless lumber but the simple exigencies of mor­tality and the doom of flesh.

He and his uncle threaded on among them to where the sheriff and the two Negroes already stood above the fresh raw mound which likewise he who had violated it now actually saw for the first time. But they hadn’t begun to dig yet. In­stead the sheriff had even turned, looking back at him until he and his uncle came up and stopped too.

“Now what?” his uncle said.

But the sheriff was speaking to him in the mild heavy voice: “I reckon you and Miss Eunice and your secretary were mighty careful not to let anybody catch you at this business last night, weren’t you?”

His uncle answered: “This is hardly the thing you’d want an audience at, is it?”

But the sheriff was still looking at him. “Then why didn’t they put the flowers back?”

Then he saw them too—the artificial wreath, the tedious intricate contrivance of wire and thread and varnished leaves and embalmed blooms which someone had brought or sent out from the florist in town, and the three bunches of wilted garden and field flowers tied with cotton string, all of which Aleck Sander had said last night looked as if they had been thrown at or onto the grave and which he remembered Aleck Sander and himself moving aside out of the way and which he knew they had put back after they filled the hole back up; he could remember Miss Habersham telling them twice to put them back even after he himself had protested about the un-need or at least the waste of time; perhaps he could even remember Miss Habersham herself helping to put them back: or then perhaps he didn’t remember them being put back at all but merely thought he did because they obviously hadn’t been, lying now tossed and inextricable to one side and ap­parently either he or Aleck Sander had trodden on the wreath though it didn’t really matter now, which was what his uncle was just saying:

“Never mind now. Let’s get started. Even when we finish here and are on the way back to town we will still be only started.”

“All right, boys,” the sheriff said to the Negroes. “Jump to it. Let’s get out of here—” and there was no sound, he heard nothing to warn him, he just looked up and around as his uncle and the sheriff did and saw, coming not down the road but around from behind the church as though from among the high windy pines themselves, a man in a wide pale hat and a clean faded blue shirt whose empty left sleeve was folded neatly back and pinned cuff to shoulder with a safetypin, on a small trim claybank mare showing too much eye-white and followed by two younger men riding double on a big saddleless back mule with a rope-burn on its neck and followed in their turn (and keeping carefully clear of the mule’s heels) by two gaunt Trigg foxhounds, coming at a rapid trot across the grove to the gate where the man stopped the mare and swung himself lightly and rapidly down with his one hand and dropped the reins across the mare’s neck and came with that light wiry almost springy rapidity through the gate and up to them—a short lean old man with eyes as pale as the sheriff’s and a red weathered face out of which jutted a nose like the hooked beak of an eagle, already speaking in a high thin strong uncracked voice:

“What’s going on around here, Shurf?”

“I’m going to open this grave, Mr. Gowrie,” the sheriff said.

“No, Shurf,” the other said, immediate, with no change whatever in the voice: not disputative, nothing: just a state­ment: “Not that grave.”

“Yes, Mr. Gowrie,” the sheriff said. “I’m going to open it.”

Without haste or fumbling, almost deliberate in fact, the old man with his one hand unbuttoned two buttons on the front of his shirt and thrust the hand inside, hunching his hip slightly around to meet the hand and drew from the in­side of the shirt a heavy nickel-plated pistol and still with no haste but no pause either thrust the pistol into his left arm­pit, clamping it butt-forward against his body by the stub of the arm while his one hand buttoned the shirt, then took the pistol once more into the single hand not pointing it at any­thing, just holding it.

But long before this he had seen the sheriff already mov­ing, moving with really incredible speed not toward the old man but around the end of the grave, already in motion even before the two Negroes turned to run. so that when they whirled they seemed to run full tilt into the sheriff as into a cliff, even seeming to bounce back a little before the sheriff grasped them one in each hand as if they were chil­dren and then in the next instant seemed to be holding them both in one hand like two rag dolls, turning his body so that he was between them and the little wiry old man with the pistol, saying in that mild even lethargic voice:

“Stop it. Dont you know the worst thing that could happen to a nigger would be dodging loose in a pair of convict pants around out here today?”

“That’s right, boys,” the old man said in his high inflectionless voice. “I aint going to hurt you. I’m talking to the Shurf here. Not my boy’s grave, Shurf.”

“Send them back to the car,” his uncle murmured rapidly. But the sheriff didn’t answer, still looking at the old man.

“Your boy aint in that grave, Mr. Gowrie,” the sheriff said. And watching he thought of all the things the old man might have said—the surprise, the disbelief, the outrage per­haps, even the thinking aloud: How do you come to know my boy aint there?—the rationalising by reflective in which he might have paraphrased the sheriff speaking to his uncle six hours ago: You wouldn’t be telling me this if you didn’t know it was so; watching, even following the old man as he cut straight across all this and he thought suddenly with amazement: Why, he’s grieving: thinking how he had seen grief twice now in two years where he had not expected it or anyway anticipated it, where in a sense a heart capable of breaking had no business being: once in an old nigger who had just happened to outlive his old nigger wife and now in a violent foulmouthed godless old man who had happened to lose one of the six lazy violent more or less lawless a good deal more than just more or less worthless sons, only one of whom had even benefitted his community and kind and that only by the last desperated resort of getting mur­dered out of it: hearing the high flat voice again immediate and strong and without interval, inflectionless, almost con­versational:

“Why, I just hope you dont tell me the name of the fellow that proved my boy aint there. Shurf. I just hope you wont mention that:”—little hard pale eyes staring at little hard pale eyes, the sheriff’s voice mild still, inscrutable now:

“No, Mr. Gowrie. It aint empty:” and later, afterward, he realised that this was when he believed he knew not perhaps why Lucas had ever reached town alive because the reason for that was obvious: there happened to be no Gowrie pres­ent at the moment but the dead one: but at least how the old man and two of his sons happened to ride out of the woods behind the church almost as soon as he and the sheriff and his uncle reached the grave, and certainly why almost forty-eight hours afterward Lucas was still breathing. “It’s Jake Montgomery down there,” the sheriff said.

The old man turned, immediate, not hurriedly and even quickly but just easily as if his spare small fleshless frame offered neither resistance to the air nor weight to the motive muscles, and shouted toward the fence where the two younger men still sat the mule identical as two clothing store dum­mies and as immobile, not even having begun yet to descend until the old man shouted: “Here, boys.”

“Never mind,” the sheriff said. “We’ll do it.” He turned to the two Negroes. “All right. Get your shovels—”

“I told you,” his uncle murmured rapidly again. “Send them back to the car.”

“That’s right, Lawyer—Lawyer Stevens, aint it?” the old man said. “Get ’em away from here. This here’s our business. We’ll attend to it.”

“It’s my business now, Mr. Gowrie,” the sheriff said.

The old man raised the pistol, steadily and without haste, bending his elbow until it came level, his thumb curling up and over the hammer cocking it so that it came already cocked level or not quite, not quite pointing at anything somewhere about the height of the empty belt-loops on the sheriff’s trousers. “Get them out of here, Shurf,” the old man said.

“All right,” the sheriff said without moving. “You boys go back to the car.”

“Further than that,” the old man said. “Send ’em back to town.”

“They’re prisoners, Mr. Gowrie,” the sheriff said. “I cant do that.” He didn’t move. “Go back and get in the car,” he told them. They moved then, walking not back toward the gate but directly away across the enclosure, walking quite fast, lifting their feet and knees in the filthy barred trousers quite high, walking quite fast by the time they reached the opposite fence and half stepping half hopping over it and only then changing direction back toward the two cars so that until they reached the sheriff’s car they would never be any nearer the two white men on the mule than when they had left the grave: and he looked at them now sitting the mule identical as two clothes pins on a line, the identical faces even weathered exactly alike, surly quick-tempered and calm, until the old man shouted again:

“All right, boys:” and they got down as one, at the same time even like a trained vaudeville team and again as one stepped with the same left leg over the fence, completely ig­noring the gate: the Gowrie twins, identical even to the clothing and shoes except that one wore a khaki shirt and the other a sleeveless jersey; about thirty, a head taller than their father and with their father’s pale eyes and the nose too except that it was not the beak of an eagle but rather that of a hawk, coming up with no word, no glance even for any of them from the bleak composed humorless faces until the old man pointed with the pistol (he saw that the hammer was down now anyway) at the two shovels and said in his high voice which sounded almost cheerful even:

“Grab ’em boys. They belong to the county; if we bust one it aint anybody’s business but the Grand Jury’s:”—the twins, facing each other now at opposite ends of the mound and working again in that complete almost choreographic unison: the next two youngest before the dead one, Vinson; fourth and fifth of the six sons:—Forrest, the oldest who had not only wrenched himself free of his fiery tyrant of a father but had even got married and for twenty years now had been manager of a delta cotton plantation above Vicksburg; then Crawford, the second one who had been drafted on the sec­ond day of November 1918 and on the night of the tenth (with a bad luck in guessing which, his uncle said, should not happen to any man—a point of view in which in fact his federal captors themselves seemed to concur since his term in the Leavenworth prison had been only one year) had deserted and lived for almost eighteen months in a series of caves and tunnels in the hills within fifteen miles of the fed­eral courthouse in Jefferson until he was captured at last after something very like a pitched battle (though luckily for him nobody was seriously hurt) during which he made good his cave for thirty-odd hours armed with (and, his uncle said, a certain consistency and fitness here: a deserter from the United States army defending his freedom from the United States government with a piece of armament captured from the enemy whom he had refused to fight) an automatic pistol which one of the McCallum boys had taken from a captured German officer and traded shortly after he got home for a brace of Gowrie foxhounds, and served his year and came home and the town next heard of him in Memphis where it was said he was (1) running liquor up from New Orleans, (2) acting as a special employer-bonded company officer during a strike, but anyway coming back to his father’s home suddenly where nobody saw much of him until a few years back when the town began to hear of him as having more or less settled down, dealing in a little timber and cattle and even working a little land; and Bryan, the third one who was the actual force, power, cohering element, whatever you might call it, in or behind the family farm which fed them all; then the twins, Vardaman and Bilbo who spent their nights squatting in front of smoldering logs and stumps while the hounds ran foxes and their days sleeping flat on the naked planks of the front gallery until dark came and time to cast the hounds again: and the last one, Vinson, who even as a child had shown an aptitude for trading and for money so that now, though dead at only twenty-eight, he was not only said to own several small parcels of farmland about the county but was the first Gowrie who could sign his name to a check and have any bank honor it;—the twins, kneedeep then waistdeep, working with a grim and sullen speed, robotlike and in absolute unison so that the two shovels even seemed to ring at the same instant on the plank box and even then seeming to communicate by no physical means as birds or animals do: no sound no gesture: simply one of them re­leased his shovel in a continuation of the same stroke which flung the dirt and then himself flowed effortless up out of the pit and stood among the rest of them while his brother cleaned off what remained of dirt from the top of the coffin, then tossed his shovel up and out without even looking and—as he himself had done last night—kicked the last of the earth away from the edge of the lid and stood on one leg and grasped the lid and heaved it up and over and away until all of them standing along the rim of the grave could look down past him into the box.

It was empty. There was nothing in it at all until a thin trickle of dirt flowed down into it with a whispering patter­ing sound.

Chapter Eight

AND HE WOULD REMEMBER IT: the five of them standing at the edge of the pit above the empty coffin, then with another limber flowing motion like his twin’s the second Gowrie came up out of the grave and stooped and with an air of rapt displeased even faintly outraged concern began to brush and thump the clay particles from the lower legs of his trousers, the first twin moving as the second stooped, going straight to him with a blind unhurried undeviable homing quality about him like the other of a piece of machinery, the other spindle say of a lathe, travelling on the same ineluctable shaft to its socket, and stooped too and began to brush and strike the dirt from the back of his brother’s trousers; and this time almost a spadeful of dirt slid down across the out-slanted lid and rattled down into the empty box. almost loud enough or with mass and weight enough to produce a small hollow echo.

“Now he’s got two of them,” his uncle said.

“Yes,” the sheriff said. “Where?”

“Durn two of them,” old Gowrie said. “Where’s my boy, Shurf?”

“We’re going to find him now, Mr. Gowrie,” the sheriff said. “And you were smart to bring them hounds. Put your pistol up and let your boys catch them dogs and hold them till we get straightened out here.”

“Never you mind the pistol nor the dogs neither,” old Gowrie said. “They’ll trail and they’ll ketch anything that ever run or walked either. But my boy and that Jake Mont­gomery—if it was Jake Montgomery whoever it was found laying in my son’s coffin—never walked away from here to leave no trail.”

The sheriff said, “Hush now, Mr. Gowrie.” The old man glared back up at the sheriff. He was not trembling, not eager, baffled, amazed, not anything. Watching him he thought of one of the cold light-blue tear-shaped apparently heatless flames which balance themselves on even less than tiptoe over gasjets.

“All right,” the old man said. “I’m hushed. And now you get started. You’re the one that seems to know all about this, that sent me word out to my breakfast table at six oclock this morning to meet you here. Now you get started.”

“That’s what we’re going to do,” the sheriff said. “We’re going to find out right now where to start.” He turned to his uncle, saying in the mild rational almost diffident voice: “It’s say around eleven oclock at night. You got a mule or maybe it’s a horse, anyway something that can walk and tote a double load, and a dead man across your saddle. And you aint got much time; that is, you aint got all of time. Of course it’s around eleven oclock, when most folks is in bed, and a Sunday night too when folks have got to get up early tomorrow to start a new week in the middle of cotton-plant­ing time, and there aint any moon and even if folks might still be moving around you’re in a lonely part of the country where the chances all are you wont meet nobody. But you still got a dead man with a bullet hole in his back and even at eleven oclock day’s going to come sooner or later. All right. What would you do?”

They looked, stared at one another, or that is his uncle stared—the too-thin bony eager face, the bright intent rapid eyes, and opposite the sheriff’s vast sleepy face, the eyes not staring, apparently not even looking, blinking almost drows­ily, the two of them cutting without speech across all that too: “Of course,” his uncle said. “Into the earth again. And not far, since you said daylight comes sooner or later even when it’s still just eleven oclock. Especially when he still had time to come back and do it all over again, alone, by him­self, no hand but his on the shovel.—And think of that too: the need, the terrible need, not just to have it all to do again but to have to do it again for the reason he had; to think that he had done all he possibly could, all anyone could have asked or expected him to do or even dreamed that he would have to do; it was as safe as he could hope to be—and then to be drawn back by a sound, a noise or perhaps he blun­dered by sheer chance on the parked truck or perhaps it was just his luck, his good fortune, whatever god or djinn or genie looks after murderers for a little while, keeps him secure and safe until the other fates have had time to spin and knot the rope,—anyway to have to crawl, tie the mule or horse or whatever it was to a tree and crawl on his belly back up here to lie (who knows? perhaps just behind the fence yonder) and watch a meddling old woman and two children who should have been two hours ago in bed ten miles away, wreck the whole careful edifice of his furious labor, undo the work not merely of his life but of his death too ...” His uncle stopped, and now he saw the bright almost luminous eyes glaring down at him: “And you. You couldn’t have had any idea Miss Habersham was coming with you until you got home. And without her, you could have had no hope whatever that Aleck Sander would come with you alone at all. So if you ever really had any idea of coming out here alone to dig this grave up, dont even tell me—”

“Let that be now,” the sheriff said. “All right. Somewhere in the ground. And what sort of ground? What dirt digs easiest and fastest for a man in a hurry and by himself even if he has a shovel? What sort of dirt could you hope to hide a body in quick even if you never had nothing but a pocket knife?”

“In sand,” his uncle said immediately, rapidly, almost in­differently, almost inattentively. “In the bed of the branch. Didn’t they tell you at three oclock this morning that they saw him going there with it? What are we waiting for?”

“All right,” the sheriff said. “Let’s go then.” Then to him: “Show us exactly where—”

“Except that Aleck Sander said it might not have been a mule,” he said.

“All right,” the sheriff said. “Horse then. Show us exactly where ...”

He could remember it: watching the old man clap the pistol again butt-forward into his armpit and clamp it there with the stump of the arm while the one hand unbuttoned the shirt then took the pistol from the armpit and thrust it back inside the shirt then buttoned the shirt again then turned even faster quicker than the two sons half his age, already in front of everybody when he hopped back over the fence and went to the mare and caught the reins and pommel all in one hand, already swinging up: then the two cars dropping in second speed against gravity back down the steep pitch until he said “Here” where the pickup’s tracks slewed off the road into the bushes then back into the road again and his uncle stopped: and he watched the fierce old stump-armed man jump the buckskin mare up out of the road into the woods on the opposite side already falling away down toward the branch, then the two hounds flowing up the bank behind him and then the mule with the two identical wooden-faced sons on it: then he and his uncle were out of the car the sheriffs car bumper to bumper behind them, hearing the mare crash­ing on down toward the branch and then the old man’s high flat voice shouting at the hounds:

“Hi! Hi! Hum on boy! At him, Ring!” and then his uncle:

“Handcuff them through the steering wheel:” and then the sheriff:

“No. We’ll need the shovels:” and he had climbed the bank too, listening off and downward toward the crashing and the shouts, then his uncle and the sheriff and the two Negroes carrying the shovels were beside him. Although the branch crossed almost at right angles the highway just beyond where the dirt road forked away, it was almost a quarter-mile from where they now stood or walked rather and al­though they could all hear old Gowrie whooping at the dogs and the crashing of the mare and the mule too in the dense thicket below, the sheriff didn’t go that way, bearing instead off along the hill almost parallel with the road for several minutes and only beginning to slant away from it when they came out into the sawgrass and laurel and willow-choked flat between the hill and the branch: and on across that, the sheriff in front until he stopped still looking down then turned his head and looked back at him, watching him as he and his uncle came up.

“Your secretary was right the first time,” the sheriff said. “It was a mule.”

“Not a black one with a rope-burn,” his uncle said. “Surely not that. Not even a murderer is that crassly and arrogantly extrovert.”

“Yes,” the sheriff said. “That’s why they’re dangerous, why we must destroy them or lock them up:” and looking down he saw them too: the narrow delicate almost finicking mule-prints out of all proportion to the animal’s actual size, mashed pressed deep, too deep for any one mule no matter how heavy carrying just one man, into the damp muck, the tracks filled with water and even as he watched a minute aquatic beast of some sort shot across one of them leaving a tiny threadlike spurt of dissolving mud; and standing in the trail, now that they had found it they could see the actual path itself through the crushed shoulder-high growth in sus­pension held like a furrow across a field or the frozen wake of a boat, crossing the marsh arrow-straight until it vanished into the jungle which bordered the branch. They followed it, walking in it, treading the two sets of prints not going and returning but both going in the same direction, now and then the print of the same hoof superposed on its previous one, the sheriff still in the lead talking again, speaking aloud but without looking back as though—he thought at first— to no one:

“He wouldn’t come back this way. The first time he didn’t have time. He went back straight up the hill that time, woods or not and dark or not. That was when he heard whatever it was he heard.” Then he knew who the sheriff was talking to: “Maybe your secretary was whistling up there or some­thing. Being in a graveyard that time of night.”

Then they stood on the bank of the branch itself—a broad ditch in a channel through which during the winter and spring rains a torrent rushed but where now there flowed a thin current scarcely an inch deep and never much over a yard wide from pool to pool along the blanched sand—and even as his uncle said, “Surely the fool—” the sheriff ten yards or so further along the bank said:

“Here it is:” and they went to him and then he saw where the mule had stood tied to a sapling and then the prints where the man himself had thrashed on along the bank, his prints also deeper than any man no matter how heavy should have made and he thought of that too: the anguish, the des­peration, the urgency in the black dark and the briers and the dizzy irrevocable fleeing on seconds, carrying a burden man was not intended to carry: then he was hearing a snap­ping and thrashing of underbrush still further along the bank and then the mare and then old Gowrie shouted and then another crash which would be the mule coming up and then simple pandemonium: the old man shouting and cursing and the yelping of the hounds and the thudding sound a man’s shoe makes against a dog’s ribs: but they couldn’t hurry any­more, thrashing and crashing their own way through the tearing clinging briers and vines until they could look down into the ditch and the low mound of fresh shaled earth into which the two hounds had been digging and old Gowrie still kicking at them and cursing and then they were all down in the ditch except the two Negroes.

“Hold up. Mr. Gowrie,” the sheriff said. “That aint Vinson.” But the old man didn’t seem to hear him. He didn’t even seem aware that anyone else was there; he seemed even to have forgot why he was kicking the dogs: that he had merely set out to drive them back from the mound, still hobbling and hopping after them on one leg and the other poised and cocked to kick even after they had retreated from the mound and were merely trying to dodge past him and get out of the ditch into safety, still kicking at them and cursing after the sheriff caught him by his one arm and held him.

“Look at the dirt,” the sheriff said. “Cant you see? He hardly took time to bury it. This was the second one, when he was in the hurry, when it was almost daylight and he had to get it hidden?” and they could all see now—the low hum­mock of fresh dirt lying close under the bank and in the bank above it the savage ragged marks of the shovel as if he had hacked at the bank with the edge of the blade like swinging an axe (and again: thinking: the desperation the urgency the frantic hand-to-hand combat with the massy intolerable in­ertia of the earth itself) until enough of it shaled off and down to hide what he had to hide.

This time they didn’t need even the shovels. The body was barely covered; the dogs had already exposed it and he realised now the true magnitude of the urgency and despera­tion: the frantic and desperate bankrupt in time who had not even enough of it left to hide the evidence of his despera­tion and the reason for his urgency; it had been after two oclock when he and Aleck Sander, even two of them work­ing with furious speed, had got the grave filled back up again: so that by the time the murderer, not only alone but who had already moved six feet of dirt and then put it back once since the sun set yesterday, had the second body out and the grave filled for the second time it must have been daylight, later than daylight perhaps, the sun itself watching him while he rode for the second time down the hill and across to the branch; morning itself watching him while he tumbled the body beneath the bank’s overhang then hacked furiously from it just enough dirt to hide the body temporarily from sight with something of that frantic desperation of the wife flinging her peignoir over the lover’s forgotten glove:—lying (the body) face down and only the back of the crushed skull visible until the old man stooped and with his one hand jerked it stiffly over onto its back.

“Yep,” old Gowrie said in the high brisk carrying voice: “It’s that Montgomery, damned if it aint:” and rose lean and fast as a tripped watch-spring yelling shouting at the hounds again: “Hi boys! Find Vinson!” and then his uncle shouting too to make himself heard:

“Wait, Mr. Gowrie. Wait:” then to the sheriff: “He was a fool then just because he didn’t have time, not because he is a fool. I just dont believe it twice—” looking around, his eyes darting. Then he stopped them on the twins. He said sharply: “Where’s the quicksand?”

“What?” one of the twins said.

“The quicksand,” his uncle said. “The quicksand bed in the branch here. Where is it?”

“Quicksand?” old Gowrie said. “Sonabitch, Lawyer. Put a man in quicksand? my boy in quicksand?”

“Shut up, Mr. Gowrie,” the sheriff said. Then to the twin: “Well? Where?”

But he answered first. He had been intending to for a sec­ond or so. Now he did: “It’s by the bridge:” then—he didn’t know why: and then that didn’t matter either—“It wasn’t Aleck Sander that time. It was Highboy.”

“Under the highway bridge,” the twin corrected. “Where it’s been all the time.”

“Oh,” the sheriff said. “Which one was Highboy?” And he was about to answer that: then suddenly the old man seemed to have forgot about his mare too, whirling, already running before any of them moved and even before he himself moved, running for several strides against the purchaseless sand while they watched him, before he turned and with that same cat­like agility he mounted the mare with, clawed himself one-handed up the steep bank and was thrashing and crashing on out of sight before anybody else except the two Negroes who had never quitted it were even up the bank.

“Jump,” the sheriff said to the twins: “Catch him.” But they didn’t. They thrashed and crashed on after him, one of the twins in front then the rest of them and the two Negroes pell-mell through the briers and brush, on back along the branch and out of the jungle into the cleared right-of-way below the road at the bridge; he saw the sliding hoof-marks where Highboy had come almost down to the water and then refused, the stream the water crowded over against the oppo­site concrete revetment flowing in a narrow band whose nearer edge faded without demarcation into an expanse of wet sand as smooth and innocent and markless of surface as so much milk; he stepped sprang over a long willow pole lying above the bank-edge and coated for three or four feet up its length with a thin patina of dried sand like when you thrust a stick into a bucket or vat of paint and even as the sheriff shouted to the twin in front “Grab him, you!” he saw the old man jump feet first off the bank and with no splash no disturbance of any sort continue right on not through the bland surface but past it as if he had jumped not into anything but past the edge of a cliff or a window-sill and then stopping half-disappeared as suddenly with no shock or jolt: just fixed and immobile as if his legs had been cut off at the loins by one swing of a scythe, leaving his trunk sitting upright on the bland depthless milklike sand.

“All right, boys!” old Gowrie cried, brisk and carrying: “Here he is. I’m standing on him.”

And one twin got the rope bridle from the mule and the leather one and the saddle girth from the mare and using the shovels like axes the Negroes hacked willow branches while the rest of them dragged up other brush and poles and whatever else they could reach or find or free and now both twins and the two Negroes, their empty shoes sitting on the bank, were down in the sand too and steadily there came down from the hills the ceaseless strong murmur of the pines but no other sound yet although he strained his ears listening in both directions along the road, not for the dignity of death because death has no dignity but at least for the decorum of it: some little at least of that decorum which should be every man’s helpless right until the carrion he leaves can be hidden from the ridicule and the shame, the body coming out now feet first, gallowsed up and out of the inscrutable suck to the heave of the crude tackle then free of the sand with a faint smacking plop like the sound of lips perhaps in sleep and in the bland surface nothing: a faint wimple wrinkle already fading then gone like the end of a faint secret fading smile, and then on the bank now while they stood about and over it and he was listening harder than ever now with something of the mur­derer’s own frantic urgency both ways along the road though there was still nothing: only hearing recognising his own voice apparently long after everyone else had, watching the old man coated to the waist with the same thin patina of sand like the pole, looking down at the body, his face wrenched and his upper lip wrenched upward from the life­less porcelain glare and the pink bloodless gums of his false teeth:

“Oh gee, Uncle Gavin, oh gee, Uncle Gavin, let’s get him away from the road, at least let’s get him back into the woods—”

“Steady,” his uncle said. “They’ve all passed now. They’re all in town now:” and still watching as the old man stooped and began to brush clumsily with his one hand at the sand clogged into the eyes and nostrils and mouth, the hand look­ing curious and stiff at this which had been shaped so supple and quick to violence: to the buttons on the shirt and the butt and hammer of the pistol: then the hand went back and began to fumble at the hip pocket but already his uncle had produced a handkerchief and extended it but that was too late too as kneeling now the old man jerked out the tail of his shirt and bending to bring it close, wiped at the dead face with it then bending tried to blow the wet sand from it as though he had forgotten the sand was still damp. Then the old man stood up again and said in the high flat carrying voice in which there was still no real inflection at all:

“Well, Shurf?”

“It wasn’t Lucas Beauchamp, Mr. Gowrie,” the sheriff said. “Jake Montgomery was at Vinson’s funeral yesterday. And while Vinson was being buried Lucas Beauchamp was locked up in my jail in town.”

“I aint talking about Jake Montgomery, Shurf,” old Gow­rie said.

“Neither am I, Mr. Gowrie,” the sheriff said. “Because it wasn’t Lucas Beauchamp’s old forty-one Colt that killed Vinson either.”

And watching he thought No! No! Dont say it! Dont ask! and for a while he believed the old man would not as he stood facing the sheriff but not looking at him now because his wrinkled eyelids had come down hiding his eyes but only in the way they do when somebody looks down at something at his feet so you couldn’t really say whether the old man had closed them or was just looking down at what lay on the ground between him and the sheriff. But he was wrong; the eyelids went up again and again the old man’s hard pale eyes were looking at the sheriff; again his voice to nine hundred men out of nine hundred and one would have sounded just cheerful:

“What was it killed Vinson, Shurf?”

“A German Luger automatic, Mr. Gowrie,” the sheriff said. “Like the one Buddy McCallum brought home from France in 1919 and traded that summer for a pair of fox hounds.”

And he thought how this was where the eyelids might even should have closed again but again he was wrong: only until the old man himself turned, quick and wiry, already in mo­tion, already speaking peremptory and loud, not brookless of opposition or argument, simply incapable of conceiving either:

“All right, sons. Let’s load our boy on the mule and take him home.”

Chapter Nine

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Miss Habersham—”

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

“Miss Habersham—”

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

Where you trying to go, lady?

I’m trying to get to Jefferson.

Jefferson’s behind you, lady.

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

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

“They ran,” he said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“It’s gone,” he said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes,” his uncle said.

“You cant say that.” he said.

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

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

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

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

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

“So man is always right,” he said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“But you’re still excusing it.”

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

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

His uncle said quietly: “Righteous?”

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

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

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

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

Chapter Ten

PERHAPS EATING had something to do with it, not even pausing while he tried with no particular interest nor curiosity to compute how many days since he had sat down to a table to eat and then in the same chew as it were remembering that it had not been one yet since even though already half asleep he had eaten a good breakfast at the sheriff’s at four this morning: remembering how his uncle (sitting across the table drinking coffee) had said that man didn’t necessarily eat his way through the world but by the act of eating and maybe only by that did he actually enter the world, get him­self into the world: not through it but into it, burrowing into the world’s teeming solidarity like a moth into wool by the physical act of chewing and swallowing the substance of its warp and woof and so making, translating into a part of himself and his memory, the whole history of man or maybe even relinquishing by mastication, abandoning, eating it into to be annealed, the proud vainglorious minuscule which he called his memory and his self and his I-Am into that vast teeming anonymous solidarity of the world from beneath which the ephemeral rock would cool and spin away to dust not even remarked and remembered since there was no yes­terday and tomorrow didn’t even exist so maybe only an ascetic living in a cave on acorns and spring water was really capable of vainglory and pride; maybe you had to live in a cave on acorns and spring water in rapt impregnable contemplation of your vainglory and righteousness and pride in order to keep up to that high intolerant pitch of its worship which brooked no compromise: eating steadily and quite a lot too and at what even he knew by this time was too fast since he had been hearing it for sixteen years and put his napkin down and rose and one last wail from his mother (and he thought how women couldn’t really stand anything except tragedy and poverty and physical pain; how this morning when he was where at sixteen he had no business being and doing what even at twice sixteen he had no busi­ness doing: chasing over the country with the sheriff digging up murdered corpses out of a ditch: she had been a hundred times less noisy than his father and a thousand times more valuable, yet now when all he intended was to walk to town with his uncle and sit for an hour or so in the same office in which he had already spent a probably elapsed quarter of his life, she had completely abolished Lucas Beauchamp and Crawford Gowrie both and had gone back indefatigable to the day fifteen years ago when she had first set out to per­suade him he couldn’t button his pants):

“But why cant Miss Habersham come here to wait?”

“She can,” his uncle said. “I’m sure she can find the house again.”

“You know what I mean,” he said. “Why don’t you make her? Sitting around a lawyer’s office until twelve oclock at night is no place for a lady.”

“Neither was digging up Jake Montgomery last night,” his uncle said. “But maybe this time we will break Lucas Beauchamp of making this constant drain on her gentility. Come along, Chick:” and so out of the house at last, not walking out of the house into it because he had brought it out of the house with him, having at some point between his room and the front door not acquired it nor even simply entered it nor even actually regained it but rather expiated his aberration from it, become once more worthy to be received into it since it was his own or rather he was its and so it must have been the eating, he and his uncle once more walking the same street almost exactly as they had walked it not twenty-two hours ago which had been empty then with a sort of aghast recoiled consternation: because it was not empty at all now, deserted and empty of movement certainly running as vacant of life from street lamp to street lamp as a dead street through an abandoned city but not really abandoned not really withdrawn but only making way for them who could do it better, only making way for them who could do it right, not to interfere or get in the way or even offer suggestion or even permit (with thanks) advice to them who would do it right and in their own homely way since it was their own grief and their own shame and their own expiation, laughing again now but it was all right, thinking: Because they always have me and Aleck Sander and Miss Habersham, not to mention Uncle Gavin and a sworn badge-wearing sheriff: when sud­denly he realized that that was a part of it too—that fierce desire that they should be perfect because they were his and he was theirs, that furious intolerance of any one single jot or tittle less than absolute perfection—that furious almost in­stinctive leap and spring to defend them from anyone any­where so that he might excoriate them himself without mercy since they were his own and he wanted no more save to stand with them unalterable and impregnable: one shame if shame must be, one expiation since expiation must surely be but above all one unalterable durable impregnable one: one peo­ple one heart one land: so that suddenly he said,

“Look—” and stopped but as always no more was needed:

“Yes?” his uncle said, then when he said no more: “Ah, I see. It’s not that they were right but that you were wrong.”

“I was worse,” he said. “I was righteous.”

“It’s all right to be righteous,” his uncle said. “Maybe you were right and they were wrong. Just dont stop.”

“Dont stop what?” he said.

“Even bragging and boasting is all right too,” his uncle said. “Just dont stop.”

“Dont stop what?” he said again. But he knew what now; he said,

“Aint it about time you stopped being a Tenderfoot scout too?”

“This is not Tenderfoot,” his uncle said. “This is the third degree. What do you call it?—”

“Eagle scout,” he said.

“Eagle scout,” his uncle said. “Tenderfoot is, Dont accept. Eagle scout is, Dont stop. You see? No, that’s wrong. Dont bother to see. Dont even bother to not forget it. Just dont stop.”

“No,” he said. “We dont need to worry about stopping now. It seems to me what we have to worry about now is where we’re going and how.”

“Yes you do,” his uncle said. “You told me yourself about fifteen minutes ago, dont you remember? About what Mr. Hampton and Lucas were going to use for bait to fetch Craw­ford Gowrie in to where they could put Mr. Hampton’s hand on him? They’re going to use Lucas—”

And he would remember: himself and his uncle standing beside the sheriff’s car in the alley beside the jail watching Lucas and the sheriff emerge from the jail’s side door and cross the dark yard toward them. It was quite dark in fact since the street light at the corner didn’t reach this far nor any sound either; only a little after ten oclock and on Monday night too yet the sky’s dark bowl cupped as though in a vac­uum like the old bride’s bouquet under its glass bell the town, the Square which was more than dead: abandoned: because he had gone on to look at it, without stopping leaving his uncle standing at the corner of the alley who said after him:

“Where are you going?” but not even answering, walking the last silent and empty block, ringing his footfalls deliberate and unsecret into the hollow silence, unhurried and solitary but nothing at all of forlorn, instead with a sense a feeling not possessive but proprietary, vicegeral, with humility still, him­self not potent but at least the vessel of a potency like the actor looking from wings or perhaps empty balcony down upon the waiting stage vacant yet garnished and empty yet, nevertheless where in a moment now he will walk and posture in the last act’s absolute cynosure, himself in himself nothing and maybe no world-beater of a play either but at least his to finish it, round it and put it away intact and unassailable, complete: and so onto into the dark and empty Square stopping as soon as he could perceive at effortless once that whole dark lifeless rectangle with but one light anywhere and that in the cafe which stayed open all night on account of the long-haul trucks whose (the cafe’s) real purpose some said, the real reason for the grant of its license by the town was to keep Willy Ingrum’s nocturnal counterpart awake who al­though the town had walled him off a little cubbyhole of an office in an alley with a stove and a telephone he wouldn’t stay there but used instead the cafe where there was somebody to talk to and he could be telephoned there of course but some people old ladies especially didn’t like to page the policeman in an allnight jukejoint coffee stall so the office telephone had been connected to a big burglar alarm bell on the outside wall loud enough for the counterman or a truck driver in the cafe to hear it and tell him it was ringing, and the two lighted second-storey windows (and he thought that Miss Habersham really had persuaded his uncle to give her the key to the office and then he thought that that was wrong, his uncle had per­suaded her to take the key since she would just as soon have sat in the parked truck until they came—and then added If she had waited because that was certainly wrong and what had really happened was that his uncle had locked her up in the office to give the sheriff and Lucas time to get out of town) but since the lights in a lawyer’s office were liable to burn any time the lawyer or the janitor forgot to turn them off when they left and the cafe like the power plant was a public institution they didn’t count and even the cafe was just lighted (he couldn’t see into it from here but he could have heard and the thought how that, formally shutting off the jukebox for twelve hours had probably been the night mar­shal’s first official act besides punching every hour the time clock on the wall at the bank’s back door since the mad-dog scare last August) and he remembered the other the normal Monday nights when no loud fury of blood and revenge and racial and family solidarity had come roaring in from Beat Four (or Beat One or Two or Three or Five for that matter or for the matter of that from the purlieus of the urban Georgian porticoes themselves) to rattle and clash among the old bricks and the old trees and the Doric capitals and leave them for one night anyway stricken: ten oclock on Monday night and although the first run of the film at the picture show would be forty or fifty minutes over now a few of the patrons who had come in late would still be passing homeward and all the young men sitting since that time drinking coca cola and playing nickels into the drugstore jukebox would certainly be, strolling timeless and in no haste since they were going nowhere since the May night itself was their destination and they carried that with them walking in it and (stock-auction day) even a few belated cars and trucks whose occupants had stayed in for the picture show too or to visit and take supper with kin or friends and now at last dispersing nightward sleep-ward tomorrow-ward about the dark mile-compassing land, remembering no longer ago than last night when he had thought it was empty too until he had had time to listen to it a moment and realised that it was not empty at all: a Sun­day night but with more than Sunday night’s quiet, the sort of quiet in fact that no night had any business with and of all nights Sunday night never, which had been Sunday night only because they had already named the calendar when the sheriff brought Lucas in to jail: an emptiness you could call empti­ness provided you called vacant and empty the silent and life­less terrain in front of a mobilised army, or peaceful the vestibule to a powder magazine or quiet the spillway under the locks of a dam—a sense not of waiting but of incrementa­tion, not of people—women and old folks and children—but of men not so much grim as grave and not so much tense as quiet, sitting quietly and not even talking much in back rooms and not just the bath-cabinets and Johns behind the barber­shop and the shed behind the poolhall stacked with soft drink cases and littered with empty whiskey bottles but the stock­rooms of stores and garages and behind the drawn shades of the offices themselves whose owners even the proprietors of the stores and garages conceded to belong not to a trade but a profession not waiting for an event a moment in time to come to them but for a moment in time when in almost volitionless concord they themselves would create the event, preside at and even serve an instant which was not even six or twelve or fifteen hours belated but was instead simply the continuation of the one when the bullet struck Vinson Gowrie and there had been no time between and so for all purposes Lucas was already dead since he had died then on the same instant when he had forfeited his life and theirs was merely to preside at his suttee, and now tonight to remember because tomorrow it would be over, tomorrow of course the Square would wake and stir, another day and it would fling hang­over, another and it would even fling off shame so that on Saturday the whole county with one pierceless unanimity of click and pulse and hum would even deny that the moment had ever existed when they could have been mistaken: so that he didn’t even need to remind himself in the absolute the utter the complete silence that the town was not dead nor even abandoned but only withdrawn giving room to do what homely thing must be done in its own homely way without help or interference or even (thank you) advice: three ama­teurs, an old white spinster and a white child and a black one to expose Lucas’ would-be murderer. Lucas himself and the county sheriff to catch him and so one last time: remem­bering: his uncle while he still stood barefoot on the rug with both edges of the unbuttoned shirt arrested in his hands thirty minutes ago and when they were mounting the last pitch of hill toward the church eleven hours ago and on what must have been a thousand other times since he had got big enough to listen and to understand and to remember:—to defend not Lucas nor even the union of the United States but the United States from the outlanders North East and West who with the highest of motives and intentions (let us say) are essaying to divide it at a time when no people dare risk division by using federal laws and federal police to abolish Lucas’ shameful con­dition, there may not be in any random one thousand South­erners one who really grieves or even is really concerned over that condition nevertheless neither is there always one who would himself lynch Lucas no matter what the occasion yet not one of that nine hundred ninety-nine plus that other first one making the thousand whole again would hesitate to re­pulse with force (and one would still be that lyncher) the outlander who came down here with force to intervene or punish him, you say (with sneer) You must know Sambo well to arrogate to yourself such calm assumption of his passivity and I reply I dont know him at all and in my opinion no white man does but I do know the Southern white man not only the nine hundred and ninety-nine but that one other too because he is our own too and more than that, that one other does not exist only in the South, you will see allied not North and East and West and Sambo against a handful of white men in the South but a paper alliance of theorists and fanatics and private and personal avengers plus a number of others under the assumption of enough physical miles to afford a principle against and possibly even outnumbered a concorded South which has drawn recruits whether it would or no from your own back-areas, not just your hinterland but the fine cities of your cultural pride your Chicagoes and Detroits and Los Angeleses and wherever else live ignorant people who fear the color of any skin or shape of nose save their own and who will grasp this opportunity to vent on Sambo the whole sum of their ancestral horror and scorn and fear of Indian and Chinese and Mexican and Carib and Jew, you will force us the one out of that first random thousand and the nine hun­dred and ninety-nine out of the second who do begrieve Lucas’ shameful condition and would improve it and have and are and will until (not tomorrow perhaps) that condition will be abolished to be not forgotten maybe but at least re­membered with less of pain and bitterness since justice was relinquished to him by us rather than torn from us and forced on him both with bayonets, willynilly into alliance with them with whom we have no kinship whatever in defence of a principle which we ourselves begrieve and abhor, we are in the position of the German after 1933 who had no other alter­native between being either a Nazi or a Jew or the present Russian (European too for that matter) who hasn’t even that but must be either a Communist or dead, only we must do it and we alone without help or interference or even (thank you) advice since only we can if Lucas’ equality is to be any­thing more than its own prisoner inside an impregnable bar­ricade of the direct heirs of the victory of 1861-1865 which probably did more than even John Brown to stalemate Lucas’ freedom which still seems to be in check going on a hundred years after Lee surrendered and when you say Lucas must not wait for that tomorrow because that tomorrow will never come because you not only cant you wont then we can only repeat Then you shall not and say to you Come down here and look at us before you make up your mind and you reply No thanks the smell is bad enough from here and we say Surely you will at least look at the dog you plan to house-break, a people divided at a time when history is still showing us that the anteroom to dissolution is division and you say At least we perish in the name of humanity and we reply When all is stricken but that nominative pronoun and that verb what price Lucas’ humanity then and turned and ran the short dead empty block back to the corner where his uncle had gone on without waiting and then up the alley too to where the sheriff’s car stood, the two of them watching the sheriff and Lucas cross the dark yard toward them the sheriff in front and Lucas about five feet behind walking not fast but just intently, neither furtive nor covert but exactly like two men simply busy not exactly late but with no time to dawdle, through the gate and across to the car where the sheriff opened the back door and said,

“Jump in,” and Lucas got in and the sheriff closed the door and opened the front one and crawled grunting into it, the whole car squatting onto its springs and rims when he let himself down into the seat and turned the switch and started the engine, his uncle standing at the window now holding the rim of it in both hands as though he thought or hoped sud­denly on some second thought to hold the car motionless be­fore it could begin to move, saying what he himself had been thinking off and on for thirty or forty minutes:

“Take somebody with you.”

“I am,” the sheriff said. “Besides I thought we settled all this three times this afternoon.”

“That’s still just one no matter how many times you count Lucas,” his uncle said.

“You let me have my pistol,” Lucas said, “and wont no­body have to do no counting. I’ll do it:” and he thought how many times the sheriff had probably told Lucas by now to shut up, which may have been why the sheriff didn’t say it now: except that (suddenly) he did, turning slowly and heavily and grunting in the seat to look back at Lucas, saying in the plaintive heavily-sighing voice:

“After all the trouble you got into Saturday standing with that pistol in your pocket in the same ten feet of air a Gowrie was standing in, you want to take it in your hand and walk around another one. Now I want you to hush and stay hushed. And when we begin to get close to Whiteleaf bridge I want you to be laying on the floor close up against the seat behind me and still hushed. You hear me?”

“I hear you,” Lucas said. “But if I just had my pistol—” but the sheriff had already turned to his uncle:

“No matter how many times you count Crawford Gowrie he’s still just one too:” and then went on in the mild sighing reluctant voice which nevertheless was already answering his uncle’s thoughts before even his uncle could speak it: “Who would he get?” and he thought of that too remembering the long tearing rubber-from-cement sound of the frantic cars and trucks scattering pell-mell hurling themselves in aghast ir­revocable repudiation in all directions toward the county’s outmost unmapped fastnesses except that little island in Beat Four known as Caledonia Church, into sanctuary: the old the used the familiar, home where the women and older girls and children could milk and chop wood for tomorrow’s breakfast while the little ones held lanterns and the men and older sons after they had fed the mules against tomorrow’s plowing would sit on the front gallery waiting for supper into the twilight: the whippoorwills: night: sleep: and this he could even see (provided that even a murderer’s infatuation could bring Crawford Gowrie ever again into the range and radius of that nub arm which—since Crawford was a Gowrie too—in agreement here with the sheriff he didn’t believe—and he knew now why Lucas had ever left Fraser’s store alive Satur­day afternoon, let alone ever got out of the sheriff’s car at the jail: that the Gowries themselves had known he hadn’t done it so they were just marking time waiting for somebody else, maybe Jefferson to drag him out into the street until he remembered—a flash, something like shame—the blue shirt squatting and the stiff awkward single hand trying to brush the wet sand from the dead face and he knew that whatever the furious old man might begin to think tomorrow he held nothing against Lucas then because there was no room for anything but his son)—night, the diningroom perhaps and again seven Gowrie men in the twenty-year womanless house because Forrest had come up from Vicksburg for the funeral yesterday and was probably still there this morning when the sheriff sent word out for old Gowrie to meet him at the church, a lamp burning in the center of the table among the crusted sugarbowls and molasses jugs and ketchup and salt and pepper in the same labeled containers they had come off the store shelf in and the old man sitting at the head of it his one arm lying on the table in front of him and the big pistol under his hand pronouncing judgment sentence doom and execution too on the Gowrie who had cancelled his own Gowriehood with his brother’s blood, then the dark road the truck (not commandeered this time because Vinson had owned one new and big and powerful convertible for either logs or cattle) the same twin driving it probably and the body boomed down onto the runninggear like a log itself with the heavy logchains, fast out of Caledonia out of Beat Four into the dark silent waiting town fast still up the quiet street across the Square to the sheriff’s house and the body tumbled and flung onto the sheriff’s front gallery and perhaps the truck even waiting while the other Gowrie twin rang the doorbell. “Stop worrying about Crawford,” the sheriff said. “He aint got anything against me. He votes for me. His trouble right now is having to kill extra folks like Jake Montgomery when all he ever wanted was just to keep Vinson from finding out he had been stealing lumber from him and Uncle Sudley Workitt. Even if he jumps onto the runningboard before I have time to keep up with what’s going on he’ll still have to waste a minute or two trying to get the door open so he can see exactly where Lucas is—provided by that time Lucas is doing good and hard what I told him to do, which I sure hope for his sake he is.”

“I’m going to,” Lucas said. “But if I just had my—”

“Yes,” his uncle said in the harsh voice: “Provided he’s there.”

The sheriff sighed. “You sent the message.”

“What message I could,” his uncle said. “However I could. A message making an assignation between a murderer and a policeman, that whoever finally delivers it to the murderer wont even know was intended for the murderer, that the mur­derer himself will not only believe he wasn’t intended to get it but that it’s true.”

“Well,” the sheriff said, “he’ll either get it or he wont get it and he’ll either believe it or he wont believe it and he’ll either be waiting for us in Whiteleaf bottom or he wont and if he aint me and Lucas will go on to the highway and come back to town.” He raced the engine let it idle again; now he turned on the lights. “But he may be there. I sent a message too.”

“All right,” his uncle said. “Why is that, Mr. Bones?”

“I got the mayor to excuse Willy Ingrum so he could go out and set up with Vinson again tonight and before Willy left I told him in confidence I was going to run Lucas over to Hollymount tonight through the old Whiteleaf cutoff so Lucas can testify tomorrow at Jake Montgomery’s inquest and reminded Willy that they aint finished the Whiteleaf fill yet and cars have to cross it in low gear and told him to be sure not to mention it to anybody.”

“Oh,” his uncle said, not quite turning the door loose yet. “No matter who might have claimed Jake Montgomery alive he belongs to Yoknapatawpha County now.—But then,” he said briskly, turning the door loose now, “we’re after just a murderer, not a lawyer.—All right,” he said. “Why dont you get started?”

“Yes,” the sheriff said. “You go on to your office and watch out for Miss Eunice. Willy may have passed her on the street too and if he did she might still beat us to Whiteleaf bridge in that pickup.”

Then into the Square this time to cross it catacornered to where the pickup stood nosedin empty to the otherwise empty curb and up the long muted groan and rumble of the stairway to the open office door and passing through it he thought without surprise how she was probably the only woman he knew who would have withdrawn the borrowed key from the lock as soon as she opened the strange door not to leave the key on the first flat surface she passed but to put it back into the reticule or pocket or whatever she had put it in when it was lent to her and she wouldn’t be sitting in the chair behind the table either and wasn’t, sitting instead bolt upright in the hat but another dress which looked exactly like the one she had worn last night and the same handbag on her lap with the eighteen-dollar gloves clasped on top of it and the flat-heeled thirty-dollar shoes planted side by side on the floor in front of the hardest straightest chair in the room, the one beside the door which nobody ever really sat in no matter how crowded the office and only moving to the easy chair behind the table after his uncle had spent a good two minutes insisting and finally explained it might be two or three hours yet because she had the gold brooch watch on her bosom open when they came in and seemed to think that by this time the sheriff should not only have been back with Craw­ford Gowrie but probably on the way to the penitentiary with him: then he in his usual chair beside the water cooler and finally his uncle even struck the match to the cob pipe still talking not just through the smoke but into it with it:

“—what happened because some of it we even know let alone what Lucas finally told us by watching himself like a hawk or an international spy to keep from telling us anything that would even explain him let alone save him, Vinson and Crawford were partners buying the timber from old man Sudley Workitt who was Mrs. Gowrie’s second or fourth cousin or uncle or something, that is they had agreed with old Sudley on a price by the board foot but to be paid him when the lumber was sold which was not to be until the last three was cut and Crawford and Vinson had delivered it and got their money and then they would pay old Sudley his, hiring a mill and crew to fell and saw and stack it right there within a mile of old Sudley’s house and not one stick to be moved until it was all cut. Only—except this part we dont really know yet until Hampton gets his hands on Crawford except it’s got to be this way or what in the world were you all doing digging Jake Montgomery out of Vinson’s grave?— and every time I think about this part of it and remember you three coming back down that hill to the exact spot where two of you heard him and one of you even saw riding past the man who already with one murdered corpse on the mule in front of him experienced such a sudden and urgent altera­tion of plan that when Hampton and I got there hardly six hours later there was nobody in the grave at all—”

“But he didn’t,” Miss Habersham said.

“—What?” his uncle said. “... Where was I? Oh yes.—only Lucas Beauchamp taking his walk one night heard something and went and looked or maybe he was actually passing and saw or maybe he already had the idea which was why he took the walk or that walk that night and saw a truck whether he recognised it or not being loaded in the dark with that lumber which the whole neighborhood knew was not to be moved until the mill itself closed up and moved away which would be some time yet and Lucas watched and listened and maybe he even went over into Crossman County to Glasgow and Hollymount until he knew for sure not only who was moving some of that lumber every night or so, not much at a time, just exactly not quite enough for anyone who was not there everyday to notice its absence (and the only people there everyday or even interested even to that extent were Crawford who represented himself and his brother and uncle who owned the trees and the resulting lumber and so could do what they liked with it, the one of which was run­ning about the country all day long attending to his other hot irons and the other an old rheumatic man to begin with and half blind on top of that who couldn’t have seen anything even if he could have got that far from his house—and the mill crew who were hired by the day and so wouldn’t have cared even if they had known what was going on at night as long as they got their pay every Saturday) but what he was doing with it, maybe learning even as far as Jake Mont­gomery though Lucas’ knowing about Jake made no differ­ence except that by getting himself murdered and into Vinson’s grave Jake probably saved Lucas’ life. But even when Hope told me how he had finally got that much out of Lucas in his kitchen this morning when Will Legate brought him from the jail and we were driving you home it explained only part of it because I was still saying what I had been saying ever since you all woke me this morning and Chick told me what Lucas had told him about the pistol: But why Vinson? Why did Crawford have to kill Vinson in order to obliterate the witness to his thieving? not that it shouldn’t have worked of course since Lucas really should have died as soon as the first white man came in sight of him standing over Vinson’s body with the handle of that pistol hunching the back of his coat, but why do it this way, by the bizarre detour of fratri­cide? so now that we had something really heavy enough to talk to Lucas with I went straight to Hampton’s house this afternoon into the kitchen and there was Hampton’s cook sitting on one side of the table and Lucas on the other eating greens and cornbread not from a plate but out of the two-gallon pot itself and I said,

“ ‘And you let him catch you—and I dont mean Craw­ford—’ and he said,

“ ‘No. I means Vinson too. Only it was too late then, the truck was done already loaded and pulling out fast without no lights burning or nothing and he said Whose truck is that? and I never said nothing.’

“ ‘All right,’ I said. ‘Then what?’

“ ‘That’s all,’ Lucas said. ‘Nothing.’

“ ‘Didn’t he have a gun?’

“ ‘I dont know,’ Lucas said. ‘He had a stick:’ and I said,

“ ‘All right. Go on.’ and he said,

“ ‘Nothing. He just stood there a minute with the stick drawed back and said Tell me whose truck that was and I never said nothing and he lowered the stick back down and turned and then I never saw him no more.’

“ ‘So you took your pistol,’ I said and he said, ‘and went—’ and he said,

“ ‘I never had to. He come to me, I mean Crawford this time, at my house the next night and was going to pay me to tell him whose truck that was, a heap of money, fifty dol­lars, he showed it to me and I said I hadn’t decided yet whose truck it was and he said he would leave me the money anyhow while I decided and I said I had already decided what I was going to do, I would wait until tomorrow—that was Friday night—for some kind of a evidence that Mr. Workitt and Vinson had got their share of that missing tim­ber money.’

“ ‘Yes?’ I said. ‘Then what?’

“ ‘Then I would go and tell Mr. Workitt he better—’

“ ‘Say that again.’ I said. ‘Slow.’

“ ‘Tell Mr. Workitt he better count his boards.’

“ ‘And you, a Negro, were going up to a white man and tell him his niece’s sons were stealing from him—and a Beat Four white man on top of that. Dont you know what would have happened to you?’

“ ‘It never had no chance,’ he said. ‘Because it was the next day—Sat-dy—I got the message—’ and I should have known then about the pistol because obviously Gowrie knew about it; his message couldn’t have been have replaced stolen money, would like your personal approval, bring your pistol and be sociable—something like that so I said,

“ ‘But why the pistol?’ and he said,

“ ‘It was Sat-dy,’ and I said,

“ ‘Yes, the ninth. But why the pistol?’ and then I under­stood; I said: ‘I see. You wear the pistol when you dress up on Saturday just like old Carothers did before he gave it to you:’ and he said,

“ ‘Sold it to me,’ and I said,

“ ‘All right, go on,’ and he said,

“ ‘—got the message to meet him at the store only—’ ” and now his uncle struck the match again and puffed the pipe still talking, talking through the pipe stem with the smoke as though you were watching the words themselves: “Only he never got to the store, Crawford met him in the woods sitting on a stump beside the path waiting for him almost before Lucas had left home good and now it was Crawford about the pistol, right off before Lucas could say good afternoon or were Vinson and Mr. Workitt glad to get the money or any­thing, saying ‘Even if it will shoot you probably couldn’t hit anything with it’ and so you can probably finish it yourself; Lucas said how Crawford finally put up a half dollar that Lucas couldn’t hit the stump from fifteen feet away and Lucas hit it and Crawford gave him the half dollar and they walked on the other two miles toward the store until Crawford told Lucas to wait there, that Mr. Workitt was sending a signed receipt for his share of the missing lumber to the store and Crawford would go and fetch it back so Lucas could see it with his own eyes and I said,

“ ‘And you didn’t suspicion anything even then?’ and he said,

“ ‘No. He cussed me so natural.’ And at least you can finish that, no need to prove any quarrel between Vinson and Crawford nor rack your brains very deep to imagine what Crawford said and did to have Vinson waiting at the store and then send him in front along the path since no more than this will do it: ‘All right. I’ve got him. If he still wont tell whose truck that was we’ll beat it out of him:’ because that doesn’t really matter either, enough that the next Lucas saw was Vinson coming down the path from the store in a good deal of a hurry Lucas said but probably what he meant was impatient, puzzled and annoyed both but probably mostly annoyed, probably doing exactly what Lucas was doing: waiting for the other to speak and explain except that Vinson quit waiting first according to Lucas, still walking saying get­ting as far as ‘So you changed your mind—’ when Lucas said he tripped over something and kind of bucked down onto his face and presently Lucas remembered that he had heard the shot and realised that what Vinson had tripped over was his brother Crawford, then the rest of them were there Lucas said before he even had time to hear them run­ning through the woods and I said,

“ ‘I reckon it looked to you right then that you were get­ting ready to trip pretty bad over Vinson, old Skipworth and Adam Fraser or not’ but at least I didn’t say But why didn’t you explain then and so at least Lucas didn’t have to say Explain what to who: and so he was all right— I dont mean Lucas of course, I mean Crawford, no mere child of mis­fortune he—” and there it was again and this time he knew what it was, Miss Habersham had done something he didn’t know what, no sound and she hadn’t moved and it wasn’t even that she had got any stiller but something had occurred, not something happened to her from the outside in but some­thing from the inside outward as though she not only hadn’t been surprised by it but had decreed authorised it but she hadn’t moved at all not even to take an extra breath and his uncle hadn’t even noticed that much “—but rather chosen and elected peculiar and unique out of man by the gods themselves to prove not to themselves because they had never doubted it but to man by this his lowest common denomina­tor that he has a soul, driven at last to murder his brother—”

“He put him in quicksand,” Miss Habersham said.

“Yes,” his uncle said. “Ghastly wasn’t it.—by the simple mischance of an old Negro man’s insomnambulism and then having got away with that by means of a plan a scheme so simple and water-tight in its biological and geographical psychology as to be what Chick here would call a natural, then to be foiled here by the fact that four years ago a child whose presence in the world he was not even aware of fell into a creek in the presence of that same Negro insomnambulist because this part we dont really know either and with Jake Montgomery in his present condition we probably never will though that doesn’t really matter either since the fact still remains, why else was he in Vinson’s grave except that in buying the lumber from Crawford (we found that out by a telephone call to the lumber’s ultimate consignee in Mem­phis this afternoon) Jake Montgomery knew where it came from too since knowing that would have been Jake’s nature and character too and indeed a factor in his middleman’s profit and so when Vinson Crawford’s partner tripped sud­denly on death in the woods behind Fraser’s store Jake didn’t need a crystal ball to read that either and so if this be sur­mise then make the most of it or give Mr. Hampton and me a better and we’ll swap, Jake knew about Buddy McCallum’s old war trophy too and I like to think for Crawford’s sake—” and there it was again and still no outward sign but this time his uncle saw or felt or sensed (or however it was) it too and stopped and even for a second seemed about to speak then in the next one forgot it apparently, talking again: “—that maybe Jake named the price of his silence and even collected it or an installment on it perhaps intending all the time to convict Crawford of the murder, perhaps with his contacts all established to get still more money or perhaps he didn’t like Crawford and wanted revenge or perhaps a purist he drew the line at murder and simply dug Vinson up to load him on the mule and take him in to the sheriff but anyway on the night after the funeral somebody with a conceivable reason for digging Vinson up dug him up, which must have been Jake, and somebody who not only didn’t want Vinson dug up but had a conceivable reason to be watching the someone who would have had a conceivable reason for digging him up, knew that he had been dug up within in—you said it was about ten when you and Aleck Sander parked the truck and it got dark enough for digging up graves about seven that night so that leaves three hours—and that’s what I mean about Crawford,” his uncle said and this time he noticed that his uncle had even stopped, expect­ing it and it came but still no sound no movement, the hat immobile and exact the neat precision of the clasped gloves and the handbag on her lap the shoes planted and motionless side by side as if she had placed them into a chalked dia­gram on the floor: “—watching there in the weeds behind the fence seeing himself not merely betrayed out of the black­mail but all the agony and suspense to go through again not to mention the physical labor who since one man already knew that the body couldn’t bear examination by trained policemen, could never know how many others might know or suspect so the body would have to come out of the grave now though at least he had help here whether the help knew it or not so he probably waited until Jake had the body out and was all ready to load it onto the mule (and we found that out too, it was the Gowrie’s plow mule, the same one the twins were riding this morning; Jake borrowed it himself late that Sunday afternoon and when you guess which Gowrie he borrowed it from you’ll be right: it was Crawford) and he wouldn’t have risked the pistol now anyway anymore than he would have used it if he could, who would rather have paid Jake over again the amount of the blackmail for the privilege of using whatever it was he crushed Jake’s skull with and put him into the coffin and filled the grave back up—and here it is again, the desperate the dreadful urgency, the loneliness the pariah-hood having not only the horror and repudiation of all man against him but having to struggle with the sheer inertia of earth and the terrible heedless rush of time but even beating all that coalition at last, the grave decent again even to the displaced flowers and the evidence of his original crime at last disposed and secure—” and it would have been again but this time his uncle didn’t pause “—then to straighten up at last and for the first time draw a full breath since the moment when Jake had approached him rubbing his thumb against the tips of the same fingers—and then to hear whatever it was that sent him plunging back up the hill then crawling creeping to lie once more panting but this tune not merely in rage and terror but in almost incredulous be­lief that one single man could be subject to this much bad luck, watching you three not only undo his work for the second time but double it now since you not only exposed Jake Montgomery but you refilled the grave and even put the flowers back: who couldn’t afford to let his brother Vinson be found in that grave but durst not let Jake Montgomery be found in it when (as he must have known) Hope Hampton got there tomorrow:” and stopped this time waiting for her to say it and she did: