“But suppose—” he said.
“Listen to me.” his uncle said with a sort of weary yet indomitable patience: “Try to listen. Lucas is locked behind a proof steel door. He’s got the best protection Hampton or anybody else in this county can possibly give him. As Will Legate said, there are enough people in this county to pass him and Tubbs and even that door if they really want to. But I dont believe there are that many people in this county who really want to hang Lucas to a telephone pole and set fire to him with gasoline.”
And now too. But he still tried. “But just suppose—” he said again and now he heard for the third time almost exactly what he had heard twice in twelve hours, and he marvelled again at the paucity, the really almost standardised meagreness not of individual vocabularies but of Vocabulary itself, by means of which even man can live in vast droves and herds even in concrete warrens in comparative amity: even his uncle too:
“Suppose it then. Lucas should have thought of that before he shot a white man in the back.” And it was only later that he would realise his uncle was speaking to Miss Habersham too now; at the moment he was neither rediscovering her presence in the room nor even discovering it; he did not even remember that she had already long since ceased to exist, turning, closing the door upon the significantless speciosity of his uncle’s voice: “I’ve told him what to do. If anything was going to happen, they would have done it out there, at home, in their own back yard; they would never have let Mr. Hampton get to town with him. In fact, I still dont understand why they did. But whether it was luck or mismanagement or old Mr. Gowrie is failing with age, the result is good; he’s all right now and I’m going to persuade him to plead guilty to manslaughter; he’s old and I think the District Attorney will accept it. He’ll go to the penitentiary and perhaps in a few years if he lives—” and closed the door, who had heard it all before and would no more, out of the room which he had never completely entered anyway and shouldn’t have stopped at all, releasing the knob for the first time since he had put his hand on it and thinking with the frantic niggling patience of a man in a burning house trying to gather up a broken string of beads: Now I’ll have to walk all the way back to the jail to ask Lucas where it is: realising how Lucas probability doubts and everything else to the contrary he actually had expected his uncle and the sheriff would take charge and make the expedition, not because he thought they would believe him but simply because he simply could not conceive of himself and Aleck Sander being left with it: until he remembered that Lucas had already taken care of that too, foreseen that too; remembering not with relief but rather with a new burst of rage and fury beyond even his own concept of his capacity how Lucas had not only told him what he wanted but exactly where it was and even how to get there and only then as afterthought asked him if he would:—hearing the crackle of the paper on his father’s lap beyond the library door and smelling the cigar burning in the ashtray at his hand and then he saw the blue wisp of its smoke float slowly out of the open door as his father must have picked it up in some synonymous hiatus or throe and puffed it once: and (remembering) even by what means to get out there and back and he thought of himself opening the door again and saying to his uncle: Forget Lucas. Just lend me your car and then walking into the library and saying to his father who would have their car keys in his pocket until he would remember when he undressed to leave them where his mother could find them tomorrow: Let me have the keys, Pop. I want to run out to the country and dig up a grave; he even remembered Miss Habersham’s pickup truck in front of the house (not Miss Habersham; he never thought of her again. He just remembered a motor vehicle sitting empty and apparently unwatched on the street not fifty yards away); the key might be, probably was, still in the switch and the Gowrie who caught him robbing his son’s or brother’s or cousin’s grave might as well catch a car-thief too.
Because (quitting abandoning emerging from scattering with one sweep that confetti-swirl of raging facetiae) he realised that he had never doubted getting out there and even getting the body up. He could see himself reaching the church, the graveyard without effort nor even any great elapse of time; he could see himself singlehanded even having the body up and out still with no effort, no pant and strain of muscles and lungs nor laceration of the shrinking sensibilities. It was only then that the whole wrecked and tumbling midnight which peer and pant though he would he couldn’t see past and beyond, would come crashing down on him. So (moving: he had not stopped since the first second’s fraction while he closed the office door) he flung himself bodily with one heave into a kind of deadly reasonableness of enraged calculation, a calm sagacious and desperate rationability not of pros and cons because there were no pros: the reason he was going out there was that somebody had to and nobody else would and the reason somebody had to was that not even Sheriff Hampton (vide Will Legate and the shotgun stationed in the lower hall of the jail like on a lighted stage where anybody approaching would have to see him or them before they even reached the gate) were completely convinced that the Gowries and their kin and friends would not try to take Lucas out of the jail tonight and so if they were all in town tonight trying to lynch Lucas there wouldn’t be anybody hanging around out there to catch him digging up the grave and if that was a concrete fact then its obverse would be concrete too: if they were not in town after Lucas tonight then any one of the fifty or a hundred men and boys in the immediate connection by blood or just foxhunting and whiskeymaking and pine lumbertrading might stumble on him and Aleck Sander: and that too, that again: he must go on a horse for the same reason: that nobody else would except a sixteen-year-old boy who owned nothing to go on but a horse and he must even choose here: either to go alone on the horse in half the time and spend three times the time getting the body up alone because alone he would not only have to do all the digging but the watching and listening too, or take Aleck Sander with him (he and Aleck Sander had travelled that way before on Highboy for even more than ten miles—a big rawboned gelding who had taken five bars even under a hundred and seventy-five pounds and a good slow canter even with two up and a long jolting driving trot as fast as the canter except that not even Aleck Sander could stand it very long behind the saddle and then a shuffling nameless halfrun halfwalk which he could hold for miles under both of them, Aleck Sander behind him for the first time at the canter then trotting beside the horse holding to the off stirrup for the next one) and so get the body up in a third of the time at the risk of having Aleck Sander keeping Lucas company when the Gowries came with the gasoline: and suddenly he found himself escaped back into the confetti exactly as you put off having to step finally into the cold water, thinking seeing hearing himself trying to explain that to Lucas too:
We have to use the horse. We cant help it: and Lucas:
You could have axed him for the car: and he:
He would have refused. Dont you understand? He wouldn’t only have refused, he would have locked me up where I couldn’t even have walked out there, let alone had a horse: and Lucas:
All right, all right. I aint criticising you. After all, it aint you them Gowries is fixing to set afire:—moving down the hall to the back door: and he was wrong; not when he had said All right to Lucas through the steel bars nor when he had stepped back into the hall and closed the office door behind him, but here was the irrevocable moment after which there would be no return; he could stop here and never pass it, let the wreckage of midnight crash harmless and impotent against these walls because they were strong, they would endure; they were home, taller than wreckage, stronger than fear;—not even stopping, not even curious to ask himself if perhaps he dared not stop, letting the screen door quietly to behind him and down the steps into the vast furious vortex of the soft May night and walking fast now across the yard toward the dark cabin where Paralee and Aleck Sander were no more asleep than all the other Negroes within a mile of town would sleep tonight, not even in bed but sitting quietly in the dark behind the closed doors and shuttered windows wa
iting for what sound what murmur of fury and death to breathe the spring dark: and stopped and whistled the signal he and Aleck Sander had been using to one another ever since they learned to whistle, counting off the seconds until the moment should come to repeat it, thinking how if he were Aleck Sander he wouldn’t come out of the house to anybody’s whistle tonight either when suddenly with no sound and certainly no light behind to reveal him by Aleck Sander stood out from the shadows, walking, already quite near in the moonless dark, a little taller than he though there was only a few months’ difference between them: and came up, not even looking at him but past, over his head, toward the Square as if looking could make a lofting trajectory like a baseball, over the trees and the streets and the houses, to drop seeing into the Square—not the homes in the shady yards and the peaceful meals and the resting and the sleep which were the end and the reward, but the Square: the edifices created and ordained for trade and government and judgment and incarceration where strove and battled the passions of men for which the rest and the little death of sleep were the end and the escape and the reward.
“So they aint come for old Lucas yet,” Aleck Sander said.
“Is that what your people think about it too?” he said.
“And so would you,” Aleck Sander said. “It’s the ones like Lucas makes trouble for everybody.”
“Then maybe you better go to the office and sit with Uncle Gavin instead of coming with me.”
“Going where with you?” Aleck Sander said. And he told him, harsh and bald, in four words:
“Dig up Vinson Gowrie.” Aleck Sander didn’t move, still looking past and over his head toward the Square. “Lucas said it wasn’t his gun that killed him.”
Still not moving Aleck Sander began to laugh, not loud and with no mirth: just laughing; he said exactly what his uncle had said hardly a minute ago: “So would I,” Aleck Sander said. He said: “Me? Go out there and dig that dead white man up? Is Mr. Gavin already in the office or do I just sit there until he comes?”
“Lucas is going to pay you,” he said. “He told me that even before he told me what it was.”
Aleck Sander laughed, without mirth or scorn or anything else: with no more in the sound of it than there is anything in the sound of breathing but just breathing. “I aint rich,” he said. “I dont need money.”
“At least you’ll saddle Highboy while I hunt for a flashlight, wont you?” he said. “You’re not too proud about Lucas to do that, are you?”
“Certainly.” Aleck Sander said, turning.
“And get the pick and shovel. And the long tie-rope. I’ll need that too.”
“Certainly,” Aleck Sander said. He paused, half turned. “How you going to tote a pick and shovel both on Highboy when he dont even like to see a riding switch in your hand?”
“I dont know,” he said and Aleck Sander went on and he turned back toward the house and at first he thought it was his uncle coming rapidly around the house from the front, not because he believed that his uncle might have suspected and anticipated what he was about because he did not, his uncle had dismissed that too immediately and thoroughly not only from conception but from possibility too, but because he no longer remembered anyone else available for it to have been and even after he saw it was a woman he assumed it was his mother, even after he should have recognised the hat, right up to the instant when Miss Habersham called his name and his first impulse was to step quickly and quietly around the corner of the garage, from where he could reach the lot fence still unseen and climb it and go on to the stable and so go out the pasture gate without passing the house again at all, flashlight or not but it was already too late: calling his name: “Charles:” in that tense urgent whisper then came rapidly up and stopped facing him, speaking in that tense rapid murmur:
“What did he tell you?” and now he knew what it was that had nudged at his attention back in his uncle’s office when he had recognised her and then in the next second flashed away: old Molly, Lucas’ wife, who had been the daughter of one of old Doctor Habersham’s, Miss Habersham’s grandfather’s, slaves, she and Miss Habersham the same age, born in the same week and both suckled at Molly’s mother’s breast and grown up together almost inextricably like sisters, like twins, sleeping in the same room, the white girl in the bed, the Negro girl on a cot at the foot of it almost until Molly and Lucas married, and Miss Habersham had stood up the Negro church as godmother to Molly’s first child.
“He said it wasn’t his pistol,” he said.
“So he didn’t do it,” she said, rapid still and with something even more than urgency in her voice now.
“I dont know,” he said.
“Nonsense,” she said. “If it wasn’t his pistol—”
“I dont know,” he said.
“You must know. You saw him—talked to him—”
“I dont know,” he said. He said it calmly, quietly, with a kind of incredulous astonishment as though he had only now realised what he had promised, intended: “I just dont know. I still dont know. I’m just going out there ...” He stopped, his voice died. There was an instant a second in which he even remembered he should have been wishing he could recall it, the last unfinished sentence. Though it was probably already too late and she had already done herself what little finishing the sentence needed and at any moment now she would cry, protest, ejaculate and bring the whole house down on him. Then in the same second he stopped remembering it. She said:
“Of course:” immediate murmurous and calm; he thought for another half of a second that she hadn’t understood at all and then in the other half forgot that too, the two of them facing each other indistinguishable in the darkness across the tense and rapid murmur: and then he heard his own voice speaking in the same tone and pitch, the two of them not conspiratorial exactly but rather like two people who have irrevocably accepted a gambit they are not at all certain they can cope with: only that they will resist it: “We dont even know it wasn’t his pistol. He just said it wasn’t.”
“Yes.”
“He didn’t say whose it was nor whether or not he fired it. He didn’t even tell you he didn’t fire it. He just said it wasn’t his pistol.”
“Yes.”
“And your uncle told you there in his study that that’s just exactly what he would say, all he could say.” He didn’t answer that. It wasn’t a question. Nor did she give him time. “All right,” she said. “Now what? To find out if it wasn’t his pistol—find out whatever it was he meant? Go out there and what?”
He told her. as badly as he had told Aleck Sander, explicit and succinct: “Look at him:” not even pausing to think how here he should certainly have anticipated at least a gasp. “Go out there and dig him up and bring him to town where somebody that knows bullet holes can look at the bullet hole in him—”
“Yes,” Miss Habersham said. “Of course. Naturally he wouldn’t tell your uncle. He’s a Negro and your uncle’s a man:” and now Miss Habersham in her turn repeating and paraphrasing and he thought how it was not really a paucity a meagreness of vocabulary, it was in the first place because the deliberate violent blotting out obliteration of a human life was itself so simple and so final that the verbiage which surrounded it enclosed it insulated it intact into the chronicle of man had of necessity to be simple and uncomplex too, repetitive, almost monotonous even; and in the second place, vaster than that, adumbrating that, because what Miss Habersham paraphrased was simple truth, not even fact and so there was not needed a great deal of diversification and originality to express it because truth was universal, it had to be universal to be truth and so there didn’t need to be a great deal of it just to keep running something no bigger than one earth and so anybody could know truth; all they had to do was just to pause, just to stop, just to wait: “Lucas knew it would take a child—or an old woman like me: someone not concerned with probability, with evidence. Men like your uncle and Mr. Hampton have had to be men too long, busy too long.—Yes?” she said. “Bring him i
n to town where someone who knows can look at the bullet hole. And suppose they look at it and find out it was Lucas’ pistol?” And he didn’t answer that at all, nor had she waited again, saying, already turning: “We’ll need a pick and shovel. I’ve got a flashlight in the truck—”
“We?” he said.
She stopped; she said almost patiently: “It’s fifteen miles out there—”
“Ten,” he said.
“—a grave is six feet deep. It’s after eight now and you may have only until midnight to get back to town in time—” and something else but he didn’t even hear it. He wasn’t even listening. He had said this himself to Lucas only fifteen minutes ago but it was only now that he understood what he himself had said. It was only after hearing someone else say it that he comprehended not the enormity of his intention but the simple inert unwieldy impossible physical vastness of what he faced; he said quietly, with hopeless indomitable amazement:
“We cant possibly do it.”
“No,” Miss Habersham said. “Well?”
“Ma’am?” he said. “What did you say?”
“I said you haven’t even got a car.”
“We were going on the horse.”
Now she said, “We?”
“Me and Aleck Sander.”
“Then we’ll have three,” she said. “Get your pick and shovel. They’ll begin to wonder in the house why they haven’t heard my truck start.” She moved again.
“Yessum,” he said. “Drive on down the lane to the pasture gate. We’ll meet you there.”
He didn’t wait either. He heard the truck start as he climbed the lot fence; presently he could see Highboy’s blaze in the black yawn of the stable hallway; Aleck Sander jerked the buckled girth-strap home through the keeper as he came up. He unsnapped the tie-rope from the bit-ring before he remembered and snapped it back and untied the other end from the wall-ring and looped it and the reins up over Highboy’s head and led him out of the hallway and got up.
Intruder in the Dust Page 8
