“It was my letter,” Lucas said. “That aint enough.”
“Twenty,” the salesman said. “And that’s all.”
“I want half,” Lucas said.
“Half?”
“And that mule paper back, and another paper saying that that machine is mine.”
“Ha ha,” the salesman said. “And ha ha ha. You say that letter said in the orchard. The orchard aint very big. And most of the night left, not to mention tomor——”
“I said it said some of it was in the orchard,” Lucas said. They faced one another in the darkness.
“Tomorrow,” the salesman said.
“Now,” Lucas said.
“Tomorrow.”
“Now,” Lucas said. The invisible face stared at his own invisible face. Both he and George seemed to feel the windless summer air moving to the white man’s trembling.
“Jack,” the salesman said, “how much did you say them other fellows found?” But Lucas answered before George could speak.
“Twenty-two thousand dollars.”
“Hit mought er been more than twenty-two thousand,” George said. “Hit was a big——”
“All right,” the salesman said. “I’ll give you a bill of sale for it as soon as we finish.”
“I want it now,” Lucas said. They returned to the car. Lucas held the flashlight. They watched the salesman rip open his patent brief case and jerk out of it and fling toward Lucas the bill of sale for the mule. Then they watched his jerking hand fill in the long printed form with its carbon duplicates and sign it and rip out one of the duplicates.
“You get possession tomorrow morning,” he said. “It belongs to me until then.” He sprang out of the car. “Come on.”
“And half it finds is mine,” Lucas said.
“How in hell is it going to be any half or any nothing, with you standing there running your mouth?” the salesman said. “Come on.” But Lucas didn’t move.
“What about them fifty dollars we done already found then?” he said. “Dont I get half of them?” This time the salesman merely stood laughing at him, harsh and steady and without mirth. Then he was gone. He hadn’t even closed the brief case. He snatched the machine from George and the flashlight from Lucas and ran back toward the orchard, the light jerking and leaping as he ran. “George Wilkins,” Lucas said.
“Sir,” George said.
“Take that mule back where you got it. Then go tell Roth Edmonds he can quit worrying folks about it.”
3
He mounted the gnawed steps beside which the bright mare stood under the wide saddle, and entered the long room with its ranked shelves of tinned food, the hooks from which hung collars and traces and hames and plowlines, its smell of molasses and cheese and leather and kerosene. Edmonds swivelled the chair around from the desk. “Where’ve you been?” he said. “I sent word to you two days ago I wanted to see you. Why didn’t you come?”
“I was in bed, I reckon,” Lucas said. “I been up all night long for the last three nights. I cant stand it any more like when I was a young man. You wont neither when you are my age.”
“And I’ve got better sense at half your age than to try it. And maybe when you get twice mine, you’ll have too. But that’s not what I wanted. I want to know about that damn Saint Louis drummer. Dan says he’s still here. What’s he doing?”
“Hunting buried money,” Lucas said.
For a moment Edmonds didn’t speak. Then he said, “What? Hunting what? What did you say?”
“Hunting buried money,” Lucas said. He let himself go easily back against the edge of the counter. He took from his vest pocket a small tin of snuff and uncapped it and filled the cap carefully and exactly with snuff and drew his lower lip outward between thumb and finger and tilted the snuff into it and capped the tin and put it back in his vest pocket. “Using my finding box. He rents it from me by the night. That’s why I’ve been having to stay up all night, to see I got the box back. But last night he never turned up, so I got a good night’s sleep for a change. So I reckon he’s done gone back wherever it was he come from.”
Edmonds sat in the swivel chair and stared at Lucas. “Rents it from you? The same machine you stole my—that you—the same machine——”
“For twenty-five dollars a night,” Lucas said. “That’s what he charged me to use it one night. So I reckon that’s the regular rent on them. He sells them; he ought to know. Leastways, that’s what I charges.” Edmonds put his hands on the chair arms, but he didn’t move yet. He sat perfectly still, leaning forward a little, staring at the negro leaning against the counter, in whom only the slight shrinkage of the jaws revealed the old man, in threadbare mohair trousers such as Grover Cleveland or President Taft might have worn in the summertime, a white stiff-bosomed collarless shirt beneath a pique vest yellow with age and looped across by a heavy gold watchchain, and the sixty-dollar handmade beaver hat which Edmonds’ grandfather had given him fifty years ago above the face which was not sober and not grave but wore no expression at all. “Because he was looking in the wrong place,” he said. “He was hunting up there on that hill. That money is buried down yonder by the creek somewhere. Them two white men that slipped in here that night four years ago and got clean away with twenty-two thousand dollars—” Now Edmonds got himself out of the chair and onto his feet. He drew a long deep breath and began to walk steadily toward Lucas. “And now we done got shut of him, me and George Wilkins—” Walking steadily toward him, Edmonds expelled his breath. He had believed it would be a shout but it was not much more than a whisper.
“Get out of here,” he said. “Go home. And dont come back. Dont ever come back. When you need supplies, send Aunt Molly after them.”
Chapter Three
When Edmonds glanced up from the ledger and saw the old woman coming up the road, he did not recognise her. He returned to the ledger and it was not until he heard her toiling up the steps and saw her enter the commissary itself, that he knew who it was. Because for something like four or five years now he had never seen her outside her own gate. He would pass the house on his mare while riding his crops and see her sitting on the gallery, her shrunken face collapsed about the reed stem of a clay pipe, or moving about the washing-pot and clothes-line in the back yard, moving slowly and painfully, as the very old move, appearing to be much older even to Edmonds, when he thought about it at all, than Edmonds certainly knew her to be. And regularly once a month he would get down and tie the mare to the fence and enter the house with a tin of tobacco and a small sack of the soft cheap candy which she loved, and visit with her for a half hour. He called it a libation to his luck, as the centurion spilled first a little of the wine he drank, though actually it was to his ancestors and to the conscience which he would have probably affirmed he did not possess, in the form, the person, of the negro woman who had been the only mother he ever knew, who had not only delivered him on that night of rain and flood when her husband had very nearly lost his life fetching the doctor who arrived too late, but moved into the very house, bringing her own child, the white child and the black one sleeping in the same room with her so she could suckle them both until he was weaned, and never out of the house very long at a time until he went off to school at twelve—a small woman, almost tiny, who in the succeeding forty years seemed to have grown even smaller, in the same clean white headcloth and aprons which he first remembered, whom he knew to be actually younger than Lucas but who looked much older, incredibly old, who during the last few years had begun to call him by his father’s name, or even by the title which the older negroes referred to his grandfather.
“Good Lord,” he said. “What are you doing away over here? Why didn’t you send Lucas? He ought to know better than to let you——”
“He’s in bed asleep now,” she said. She was panting a little from the walk. “That’s how I had a chance to come. I dont want nothing. I come to talk to you.” She turned a little toward the window. Then he saw the myriad-wrinkled face.
&n
bsp; “Why, what is it?” he said. He rose from the swivel chair and drew the other one, a straight chair with wire-braced legs, out from behind the desk. “Here,” he said. But she only looked from him to the chair with the same blind look until he took her by the arm which, beneath the two or three layers of clothing beneath the faded, perfectly clean dress, felt no larger than the reed stem of the pipe she smoked. He led her to the chair and lowered her into it, the voluminous layer on layer of her skirts and underskirts spreading. Immediately she bowed her head and turned it aside and raised one gnarled hand, like a tiny clump of dried and blackened roots, before her eyes.
“The light hurts them,” she said. He helped her up and turned the chair until its back was toward the window. This time she found it herself and sat down. Edmonds returned to the swivel chair.
“All right,” he said. “What is it?”
“I want to leave Lucas,” she said. “I want one of them … one of them …” Edmonds sat perfectly motionless, staring at the face which now he could not distinctly see.
“You what?” he said. “A divorce? After forty-five years, at your age? What will you do? How will you get along without somebody——”
“I can work. I will——”
“Damn that,” Edmonds said. “You know I didn’t mean that. Even if father hadn’t fixed it in his will to take care of you for the rest of your life. I mean what will you do? Leave the house that belongs to you and Lucas and go live with Nat and George?”
“That will be just as bad,” she said. “I got to go clean away. Because he’s crazy. Ever since he got that machine, he’s done went crazy. Him and—and …” Even though he had just spoken it, he realised that she couldn’t even think of George’s name. She spoke again, immobile, looking at nothing as far as he could tell, her hands like two cramped ink-splashes on the lap of the immaculate apron: “—stays out all night long every night with it, hunting that buried money. He dont even take care of his own stock right no more. I feeds the mare and the hogs and milks, tries to. But that’s all right. I can do that. I’m glad to do that when he is sick in the body. But he’s sick in the mind now. Bad sick. He dont even get up to go to church on Sunday no more. He’s bad sick, marster. He’s doing a thing the Lord aint meant for folks to do. And I’m afraid.”
“Afraid of what?” Edmonds said. “Lucas is strong as a horse. He’s a better man than I am, right now. He’s all laid-by now, with nothing to do until his crop makes. It wont hurt him to stay up all night walking up and down that creek with George for a while. He’ll have to quit next month to pick his cotton.”
“It aint that I’m afraid of.”
“Then what?” he said. “What is it?”
“I’m afraid he’s going to find it.”
Again Edmonds sat in his chair, looking at her. “Afraid he’s going to find it?” Still she looked at nothing that he could see, motionless, tiny, like a doll, an ornament.
“Because God say, ‘What’s rendered to My earth, it belong to Me unto I resurrect it. And let him or her touch it, and beware.’ And I’m afraid. I got to go. I got to be free of him.”
“There aint any buried money in this country,” Edmonds said. “Hasn’t he been poking around in the bottom ever since last spring, hunting for it? And that machine aint going to find it either. I tried my best to keep him from buying it. I did everything I knew except have that damn agent arrested for trespass. I wish now I had done that. If I had just forseen— But that wouldn’t have done any good. Lucas would just have met him down the road somewhere and bought it. But he aint going to find any more buried money with it than he found walking up and down the creek, making George Wilkins dig where he thought it ought to be. Even he’ll believe that soon. He’ll quit. Then he’ll be all right.”
“No,” she said. “Lucas is an old man. He dont look it, but he’s sixty-seven years old. And when a man that old takes up money-hunting, it’s like when he takes up gambling or whisky or women. He aint going to have time to quit. And then he’s gonter be lost, lost.…” She ceased. She did not move on the hard chair, not even the depthless splotches of her knotted hands against the apron’s blanched spread. Damn, damn, damn, Edmonds thought.
“I could tell you how to cure him in two days,” he said. “If you were twenty years younger. But you couldn’t do it now.”
“Tell me. I can do it.”
“No,” he said. “You are too old now.”
“Tell me. I can do it.”
“Wait till he comes in with that thing tomorrow morning, then take it yourself and go down to the creek and hunt buried money. Do it the next morning, and the one after that. Let him find out that’s what you are doing—using his machine while he is asleep, all the time he is asleep and cant watch it, cant hunt himself. Let him come in and find there’s no breakfast ready for him, wake up and find there’s no supper ready because you’re still down in the creek bottom, hunting buried money with his machine. That’ll cure him. But you’re too old. You couldn’t stand it. You go back home and when Lucas wakes up, you and he— No, that’s too far for you to walk twice in one day. Tell him I said to wait there for me. I’ll come after supper and talk to him.”
“Talking wont change him. I couldn’t. And you cant. All I can do is to go clean away from him.”
“Maybe it cant,” Edmonds said. “But I can damn sure try it: And he will damn sure listen. I’ll be there after supper. You tell him to wait.”
She rose then. He watched her toil back down the road toward home, tiny, almost like a doll. It was not just concern, and, if he had told himself the truth, not concern for her at all. He was raging—an abrupt boiling-over of an accumulation of floutings and outrages covering not only his span but his father’s lifetime too, back into the time of his grandfather McCaslin Edmonds. Lucas was not only the oldest person living on the place, older even than Edmonds’ father would have been, there was that quarter strain not only of white blood and not even Edmonds blood, but of old Carothers McCaslin himself, from whom Lucas was descended not only by a male line but in only two generations, while Edmonds was descended by a female line and five generations back; even as a child the boy remarked how Lucas always referred to his father as Mr Edmonds, never as Mister Zack, as the other negroes did, and how with a cold and deliberate calculation he evaded having to address the white man by any name whatever when speaking to him.
Yet it was not that Lucas made capital of his white or even his McCaslin blood, but the contrary. It was as if he were not only impervious to that blood, he was indifferent to it. He didn’t even need to strive with it. He didn’t even have to bother to defy it. He resisted it simply by being the composite of the two races which made him, simply by possessing it. Instead of being at once the battleground and victim of the two strains, he was a vessel, durable, ancestryless, nonconductive, in which the toxin and its anti stalemated one another, seetheless, unrumored in the outside air. There had been three of them once: James, then a sister named Fonsiba, then Lucas, children of Aunt Tomey’s Turl, old Carothers McCaslin’s son, and Tennie Beauchamp, whom Edmonds’ great-uncle Amodeus McCaslin won from a neighbor in a poker game in 1859. Fonsiba married and went to Arkansas to live and never returned, though Lucas continued to hear from her until her death. But James, the eldest, ran away before he became of age and didn’t stop until he had crossed the Ohio River and they never heard from or of him again at all—that is, that his white kindred ever knew. It was as though he had not only (as his sister was later to do) put running water between himself and the land of his grandmother’s betrayal and his father’s nameless birth, but he had interposed latitude and geography too, shaking from his feet forever the very dust of the land where his white ancestor could acknowledge or repudiate him from one day to another, according to his whim, but where he dared not even repudiate the white ancestor save when it met the white man’s humor of the moment.
But Lucas remained. He didn’t have to stay. Of the three children, he not only had no material shackles
(nor, as Carothers Edmonds began to comprehend later, moral ones either) holding him to the place, he alone was equipped beforehand with financial independence to have departed forever at any time after his twenty-first birthday. It was known father to son to son among the Edmonds until it came to Carothers in his turn, how when in the early fifties old Carothers McCaslin’s twin sons, Amodeus and Theophilus, first put into operation their scheme for the manumission of their father’s slaves, there was made an especial provision (hence a formal acknowledgment, even though only by inference and only from his white half-brothers) for their father’s negro son. It was a sum of money, with the accumulated interest, to become the negro son’s on his verbal demand but which Tomey’s Turl, who elected to remain even after his constitutional liberation, never availed himself of. And he died, and old Carothers McCaslin was dead more than fifty years then, and Amodeus and Theophilus were dead too, at seventy and better, in the same year as they had been born in the same year, and McCaslin Edmonds now had the land, the plantation, in fee and title both, relinquished to him by Isaac McCaslin, Theophilus’ son, for what reason, what consideration other than the pension which McCaslin and his son Zachary and his son Carothers still paid to Isaac in his little jerry-built bungalow in Jefferson, no man certainly knew. But relinquished it certainly was, somehow and somewhere back in that dark time in Mississippi when a man had to be hard and ruthless to get a patrimony to leave behind himself and strong and hard to keep it until he could bequeath it;—relinquished, repudiated even, by its true heir (Isaac, ‘Uncle Ike’, childless, a widower now, living in his dead wife’s house the title to which he likewise declined to assume, born into his father’s old age and himself born old and became steadily younger and younger until, past seventy himself and at least that many years nearer eighty than he ever admitted any more, he had acquired something of a young boy’s high and selfless innocence) who had retained of the patrimony, and by his own request, only the trusteeship of the legacy which his negro uncle still could not quite seem to comprehend was his for the asking.
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