They left Aleck Sander with his breakfast at the kitchen table and carried theirs into the diningroom, he and his uncle and Miss Habersham carrying the platter of fried eggs and meat and the pan of biscuits baked last night and warmed again in the oven until they were almost like toast and the coffeepot in which the unstrained grounds and the water had been boiling together until the sheriff had thought to remove the pot from the hot part of the stove; four of them although the sheriff had set five places and they had barely sat down when the sheriff raised his head listening though he himself heard nothing, then rose and went into the dark hall and toward the rear of the house and then he heard the sound of the back door and presently the sheriff came back with Will Legate though minus the shotgun, and he turned his head enough to look out the window behind him and sure enough it was daylight.
The sheriff served the plates while his uncle and Legate passed theirs and the sheriff’s cup to Miss Habersham at the coffeepot. Then at once he seemed to have been hearing for a long time the sheriff from a great distance saying “... boy ... boy ...” then “Wake him up, Gavin. Let him eat his breakfast before he goes to sleep:” and he jerked, it was still only daylight, Miss Habersham was still pouring coffee into the same cup and he began to eat, chewing and even swallowing, rising and falling as though to the motion of the chewing along the deep soft bottomless mire of sleep, into then out of the voices buzzing of old finished things no longer concern of his: the sheriff’s:
“Do you know Jake Montgomery, from over in Crossman County? Been in and out of town here for the last six months or so?” then Legate’s:
“Sure. A kind of jackleg timber buyer now. Used to run a place he called a restaurant just across the Tennessee line out of Memphis, though I never heard of nobody trying to buy nothing that had to be chewed in it, until a man went and got killed in it one night two-three years ago. They never did know just how much Jake did or didn’t have to do with it but the Tennessee police run him back across the Mississippi line just on principle. Since then I reckon he’s been laying around his pa’s farm over beyond Glasgow. Maybe he’s waiting until he figgers folks have forgot about that other business and he can set up again in another place on a highway with a hole under the floor big enough to hide a case of whiskey in.”
“What was he doing around here?” the sheriff said: then Legate:
“Buying timber, aint he? Aint him and Vinson Gowrie ...” Then Legate said with the barest inflection, “Was?” and then with no inflection at all: “What is he doing?” and he this time, his own voice indifferent along the soft deep edge of sleep, too indifferent to bother if it were aloud or not:
“He aint doing anything now.”
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!”
Intruder in the Dust Page 11
