Sanctuary

17

The last trumpet-shaped bloom had fallen from the heaven tree at the corner of the jail yard. They lay thick, viscid underfoot, sweet and oversweet in the nostrils with a sweetness surfeitive and moribund, and at night now the ragged shadow of full-fledged leaves pulsed upon the barred window in shabby rise and fall. The window was in the general room, the white-washed walls of which were stained with dirty hands, scribbled and scratched over with names and dates and blasphemous and obscene doggerel in pencil or nail or knifeblade. Nightly the negro murderer leaned there, his face checkered by the shadow of the grating in the restless interstices of leaves, singing in chorus with those along the fence below.

Sometimes during the day he sang also, alone then save for the slowing passerby and ragamuffin boys and the garage men across the way. “One day mo! Aint no place fer you in heavum! Aint no place fer you in hell! Aint no place fer you in whitefolks’ jail! Nigger, whar you gwine to? Whar you gwine to, nigger?”

Each morning Isom fetched in a bottle of milk, which Horace delivered to the woman at the hotel, for the child. On Sunday afternoon he went out to his sister’s. He left the woman sitting on the cot in Goodwin’s cell, the child on her lap. Heretofore it had lain in that drugged apathy, its eyelids closed to thin crescents, but today it moved now and then in frail, galvanic jerks, whimpering.

Horace went up to Miss Jenny’s room. His sister had not appeared. “He wont talk,” Horace said. “He just says they will have to prove he did it. He said they had nothing on him, no more than on the child. He wouldn’t even consider bond, if he could have got it. He says he is better off in the jail. And I suppose he is. His business out there is finished now, even if the sheriff hadn’t found his kettles and destroyed—”

“Kettles?”

“His still. After he surrendered, they hunted around until they found the still. They knew what he was doing, but they waited until he was down. Then they all jumped on him. The good customers, that had been buying whiskey from him and drinking all that he would give them free and maybe trying to make love to his wife behind his back. You should hear them down town. This morning the Baptist minister took him for a text. Not only as a murderer, but as an adulterer; a polluter of the free Democratico-Protestant atmosphere of Yoknapatawpha county. I gathered that his idea was that Goodwin and the woman should both be burned as a sole example to that child; the child to be reared and taught the English language for the sole end of being taught that it was begot in sin by two people who suffered by fire for having begot it. Good God, can a man, a civilized man, seriously.……”

“They’re just Baptists,” Miss Jenny said. “What about the money?”

“He had a little, almost a hundred and sixty dollars. It was buried in a can in the barn. They let him dig that up. ‘That’ll keep her’ he says ‘until it’s over. Then we’ll clear out. We’ve been intending to for a good while. If I’d listened to her, we’d have been gone already. You’ve been a good girl’ he says. She was sitting on the cot beside him, holding the baby, and he took her chin in his hand and shook her head a little.”

“It’s a good thing Narcissa aint going to be on that jury,” Miss Jenny said.

“Yes. But the fool wont even let me mention that that gorilla was ever on the place. He said ‘They cant prove anything on me. I’ve been in a jam before. Everybody that knows anything about me knows that I wouldn’t hurt a feeb.’ But that wasn’t the reason he doesn’t want it told about that thug. And he knew I knew it wasn’t, because he kept on talking, sitting there in his overalls, rolling his cigarettes with the sack hanging in his teeth. ‘I’ll just stay here until it blows over. I’ll be better off here; cant do anything outside, anyway. And this will keep her, with maybe something over for you until you’re better paid.’

“But I knew what he was thinking. ‘I didn’t know you were a coward’ I said.

“ ‘You do like I say’ he said. ‘I’ll be all right here’. But he doesn’t.……” He sat forward, rubbing his hands slowly. “He doesn’t realise.…… Dammit, say what you want to, but there’s a corruption about even looking upon evil, even by accident; you cannot haggle, traffic, with putrefaction—You’ve seen how Narcissa, just hearing about it, how it’s made her restless and suspicious. I thought I had come back here of my own accord, but now I see that—Do you suppose she thought I was bringing that woman into the house at night, or something like that?”

“I did too, at first,” Miss Jenny said. “But I reckon now she’s learned that you’ll work harder for whatever reason you think you have, than for anything anybody could offer you or give you.”

“You mean, she’d let me think they never had any money, when she—”

“Why not? Aint you doing all right without it?”

Narcissa entered.

“We were just talking about murder and crime,” Miss Jenny said.

“I hope you’re through, then,” Narcissa said. She did not sit down.

“Narcissa has her sorrows too,” Miss Jenny said. “Dont you, Narcissa?”

“What now?” Horace said. “She hasn’t caught Bory with alcohol on his breath, has she?”

“She’s been jilted. Her beau’s gone and left her.”

“You’re such a fool,” Narcissa said.

“Yes, sir,” Miss Jenny said, “Gowan Stevens has thrown her down. He didn’t even come back from that Oxford dance to say goodbye. He just wrote her a letter.” She began to search about her in the chair. “And now I flinch everytime the doorbell rings, thinking that his mother—”

“Miss Jenny,” Narcissa said, “you give me my letter.”

“Wait,” Miss Jenny said, “here it is. Now, what do you think of that for a delicate operation on the human heart without anaesthetic? I’m beginning to believe all this I hear, about how young folks learn all the things in order to get married, that we had to get married in order to learn.”

Horace took the single sheet.

Narcissa my dear

This has no heading. I wish it could have no date. But if my heart were as blank as this page, this would not be necessary at all. I will not see you again. I cannot write it, for I have gone through with an experience which I cannot face. I have but one rift in the darkness, that is that I have injured no one save myself by my folly, and that the extent of that folly you will never learn. I need not say that the hope that you never learn it is the sole reason why I will not see you again. Think as well of me as you can. I wish I had the right to say, if you learn of my folly think not the less of me.

G.

Horace read the note, the single sheet. He held it between his hands. He did not say anything for a while.

“Good Lord,” Horace said. “Someone mistook him for a Mississippi man on the dance floor.”

“I think, if I were you—” Narcissa said. After a moment she said: “How much longer is this going to last, Horace?”

“Not any longer than I can help. If you know of any way in which I can get him out of that jail by tomorrow.…”

“There’s only one way,” she said. She looked at him a moment. Then she turned toward the door. “Which way did Bory go? Dinner’ll be ready soon.” She went out.

“And you know what that way is,” Miss Jenny said. “If you aint got any backbone.”

“I’ll know whether or not I have any backbone when you tell me what the other way is.”

“Go back to Belle,” Miss Jenny said. “Go back home.”

The negro murderer was to be hung on a Saturday without pomp, buried without circumstance: one night he would be singing at the barred window and yelling down out of the soft myriad darkness of a May night; the next night he would be gone, leaving the window for Goodwin. Goodwin had been bound over for the June term of court, without bail. But still he would not agree to let Horace divulge Popeye’s presence at the scene of the murder.

“I tell you, they’ve got nothing on me,” Goodwin said.

“How do you know they haven’t?” Horace said.

“Well, no matter what they think they have on me, I stand a chance in court. But just let it get to Memphis that I said he was anywhere around there, what chance do you think I’d have to get back to this cell after I testified?”

“You’ve got the law, justice, civilization.”

“Sure, if I spend the rest of my life squatting in that corner yonder. Come here.” He led Horace to the window. “There are five windows in that hotel yonder that look into this one. And I’ve seen him light matches with a pistol at twenty feet. Why, damn it all, I’d never get back here from the courtroom the day I testified that.”

“But there’s such a thing as obstruct—”

“Obstructing damnation. Let them prove I did it. Tommy was found in the barn, shot from behind. Let them find the pistol. I was there, waiting. I didn’t try to run. I could have, but I didn’t. It was me notified the sheriff. Of course my being there alone except for her and Pap looked bad. If it was a stall, dont common sense tell you I’d have invented a better one?”

“You’re not being tried by common sense,” Horace said. “You’re being tried by a jury.”

“Then let them make the best of it. That’s all they’ll get. The dead man is in the barn, hadn’t been touched; me and my wife and child and Pap in the house; nothing in the house touched; me the one that sent for the sheriff. No, no; I know I run a chance this way, but let me just open my head about that fellow, and there’s no chance to it. I know what I’ll get.”

“But you heard the shot,” Horace said. “You have already told that.”

“No,” he said, “I didn’t. I didn’t hear anything. I dont know anything about it.……Do you mind waiting outside a minute while I talk to Ruby?”

It was five minutes before she joined him. He said:

“There’s something about this that I dont know yet; that you and Lee haven’t told me. Something he just warned you not to tell me. Isn’t there?” She walked beside him, carrying the child. It was still whimpering now and then, tossing its thin body in sudden jerks. She tried to soothe it, crooning to it, rocking it in her arms. “Maybe you carry it too much,” Horace said; “maybe if you could leave it at the hotel.…”

“I guess Lee knows what to do,” she said.

“But the lawyer should know all the facts, everything. He is the one to decide what to tell and what not to tell. Else, why have one? That’s like paying a dentist to fix your teeth and then refusing to let him look into your mouth, dont you see? You wouldn’t treat a dentist or a doctor this way.” She said nothing, her head bent over the child. It wailed.

“Hush,” she said, “hush, now.”

“And worse than that, there’s such a thing called obstructing justice. Suppose he swears there was nobody else there, suppose he is about to be cleared—which is not likely—and somebody turns up who saw Popeye about the place, or saw his car leaving. Then they’ll say, if Lee didn’t tell the truth about an unimportant thing, why should we believe him when his neck’s in danger?”

They reached the hotel. He opened the door for her. She did not look at him. “I guess Lee knows best,” she said, going in. The child wailed, a thin, whimpering, distressful cry. “Hush,” she said. “Shhhhhhhhhhhh.”

Isom had been to fetch Narcissa from a party; it was late when the car stopped at the corner and picked him up. A few of the lights were beginning to come on, and men were already drifting back toward the square after supper, but it was still too early for the negro murderer to begin to sing. “And he’d better sing fast, too,” Horace said. “He’s only got two days more.” But he was not there yet. The jail faced west; a last faint copper-colored light lay upon the dingy grating and upon the small, pale blob of a hand, and in scarce any wind a blue wisp of tobacco floated out and dissolved raggedly away. “If it wasn’t bad enough to have her husband there, without that poor brute counting his remaining breaths at the top of his voice.……”

“Maybe they’ll wait and hang them both together,” Narcissa said. “They do that sometimes, dont they?”

That night Horace built a small fire in the grate. It was not cool. He was using only one room now, taking his meals at the hotel; the rest of the house was locked again. He tried to read, then he gave up and undressed and went to bed, watching the fire die in the grate. He heard the town clock strike twelve. “When this is over, I think I’ll go to Europe,” he said. “I need a change. Either I, or Mississippi, one.”

Maybe a few of them would still be gathered along the fence, since this would be his last night; the thick, small-headed shape of him would be clinging to the bars, gorillalike, singing, while upon his shadow, upon the checkered orifice of the window, the ragged grief of the heaven tree would pulse and change, the last bloom fallen now in viscid smears upon the sidewalk. Horace turned again in the bed. “They ought to clean that damn mess off the sidewalk,” he said. “Damn. Damn. Damn.”

He was sleeping late the next morning; he had seen daylight. He was wakened by someone knocking at the door. It was half-past six. He went to the door. The negro porter of the hotel stood there.

“What?” Horace said. “Is it Mrs Goodwin?”

“She say for you to come when you up,” the negro said.

“Tell her I’ll be there in ten minutes.”

As he entered the hotel he passed a young man with a small black bag, such as doctors carry. Horace went on up. The woman was standing in the half-open door, looking down the hall.

“I finally got the doctor,” she said. “But I wanted anyway.……” The child lay on the bed, its eyes shut, flushed and sweating, its curled hands above its head in the attitude of one crucified, breathing in short, whistling gasps. “He was sick all last night. I went and got some medicine and I tried to keep him quiet until daylight. At last I got the doctor.” She stood beside the bed, looking down at the child. “There was a woman there,” she said. “A young girl.”

“A—” Horace said. “Oh,” he said. “Yes. You’d better tell me about it.”