So again he had only five more years and he would be free. And thime he had learned the lesson which the fool young lawyer had tried to teach him thirty-five years ago. There were eleven of them. They worked and ate and slept as a gang, a unit, living in a detached wire-canvas-and-plank hut (it was summer); shackled to the same chain they went to the mess hall to eat, then to the field to work and, chained again, back to the hut to sleep again. So when the escape was planned, the other ten had to take him into their plot to prevent his giving it away by simple accident. They didn’t want to take him in; two of them were never converted to the idea. Because ever since his own abortive attempt eighteen or twenty years ago he had been known as a sort of self-ordained priest of the doctrine of non-escape.
So when they finally told him simply because he would have to be in the secret to protect it, whether he joined them or not, the moment he said, cried, “No! Here now, wait! Wait! Dont you see, if any of us tries to get out they’ll come down on all of us and wont none of us ever get free even when our forty years is up,” he knew he had already talked too much. So when he said to himself, “Now I got to get out of this chain and get away from them,” he did not mean Because if dark catches me alone in this room with them and no guard handy, I’ll never see light again but simply I got to get to the Warden in time, before they try it maybe tonight even and wreck ever body.
And even he would have to wait for the very darkness he feared, until the lights were out and they were all supposed to have settled down for sleep, so that his murderers would make their move, since only during or because of the uproar of the attack on him could he hope to get the warning, his message, to a guard and be believed. Which meant he would have to match guile with guile: to lie rigid on his cot until they set up the mock snoring which was to lull him off guard, himself tense and motionless and holding his own breath to distinguish in time through the snoring whatever sound would herald the plunging knife (or stick or whatever it would be) in time to roll, fling himself off the cot and in one more convulsive roll underneath it, as the men—he could not tell how many since the spurious loud snoring had if anything increased—hurled themselves onto the vacancy where a split second before he had been lying.
“Grab him,” one hissed, panted. “Who’s got the knife?” Then another:
“I’ve got the knife. Where in hell is he?” Because he—Mink—had not even paused; another convulsive roll and he was out from under the cot, on all-fours among the thrashing legs, scrabbling, scuttling to get as far away from the cot as he could. The whole room was now in a sort of sotto-voce uproar. “We got to have a light,” a voice muttered. “Just a second of light.” Suddenly he was free, clear; he could stand up. He screamed, shouted: no word, cry: just a loud human sound; at once the voice muttered, panted: “There. Grab him,” but he had already sprung, leaped, to carom from invisible body to body, shouting, bellowing steadily even after he realised he could see, the air beyond the canvas walls not only full of searchlights but the siren too, himself surrounded, enclosed by the furious silent faces which seemed to dart like fish in then out of the shoulder-high light which came in over the plank half-walls, through the wire mesh; he even saw the knife gleam once above him as he plunged, hurling himself among the surging legs, trying to get back under a cot, any cot, anything to intervene before the knife. But it was too late, they could also see him now. He vished beneath them all. But it was too late for them too: the glaring and probing of all the searchlights, the noise of the siren itself, seemed to concentrate downward upon, into the flimsy ramshackle cubicle filled with cursing men. Then the guards were among them, clubbing at heads with pistols and shotgun barrels, dragging them off until he lay exposed, once more battered and bleeding but this time still conscious. He had even managed one last convulsive wrench and twist so that the knife which should have pinned him to it merely quivered in the floor beside his throat.
“Hit was close,” he told the guard. “But looks like we made hit.”
But not quite. He was in the infirmary again and didn’t hear until afterward how on the very next night two of them—Stillwell, a gambler who had cut the throat of a Vicksburg prostitute (he had owned the knife), and another, who had been the two who had held out against taking him into the plot at all but advocated instead killing him at once—made the attempt anyway though only Stillwell escaped, the other having most of his head blown off by a guard’s shotgun blast.
Then he was in the Warden’s office again. This time he had needed little bandaging and no stitches at all; they had not had time enough, and no weapons save their feet and fists except Stillwell’s knife. “It was Stillwell that had the knife, wasn’t it?” the Warden said.
He couldn’t have said why he didn’t tell. “I never seen who had it,” he answered. “I reckon hit all happened too quick.”
“That’s what Stillwell seems to think,” the Warden said. He took from his desk a slitted envelope and a sheet of cheap ruled paper, folded once or twice. “This came this morning. But that’s right: you cant read writing, can you?”
“No,” he said. The Warden unfolded the sheet.
“It was mailed yesterday in Texarkana. It says, ‘He’s going to have to explain Jake Barron’ ” (he was the other convict, whom the guard had killed) “ ‘to somebody someday so take good care of him. Maybe you better take good care of him anyway since there are some of us still inside.’ ” The Warden folded the letter back into the envelope and put it back into the drawer and closed the drawer. “So there you are. I cant let you go around loose inside here, where any of them can get at you. You’ve only got five more years; even though you didn’t stop all of them, probably on a recommendation from me, the Governor would let you out tomorrow. But I cant do that because Still-well will kill you.”
“If Cap’m Jabbo” (the guard who shot) “had jest killed Stillwell too, I could go home tomorrow?” he said. “Couldn’t you trace out where he’s at by the letter, and send Cap’m Jabbo wherever that is?”
“You want the same man to kill Stillwell that kept Stillwell from killing you two nights ago?”
“Send somebody else then. It don’t seem fair for him to get away when I got to stay here five more years.” Then he said, “But hit’s all right. Maybe we did have at le one champion here, after all.”
“Champion?” the Warden said. “One what here?” But he didn’t answer that. And now for the first time he began to count off the days and months. He had never done this before, not with that original twenty years they had given him at the start back there in Jefferson, nor even with the second twenty years they had added onto it after he let Montgomery Ward persuade him into that woman’s mother hub-bard and sunbonnet. Because nobody was to blame for that but himself; when he thought of Flem in connection with it, it was with a grudging admiration, almost pride that they were of the same blood; he would think, say aloud, without envy even: “That Flem Snopes. You cant beat him. There aint a man in Missippi nor the U.S. and A. both put together that can beat Flem Snopes.”
But this was different. He had tried himself to escape and had failed and had accepted the added twenty years of penalty without protest; he had spent fifteen of them not only never trying to escape again himself, but he had risked his life to foil ten others who planned to: as his reward for which he would have been freed the next day, only a trained guard with a shotgun in his hands let one of the ten plotters get free. So these last five years did not belong to him at all. He had discharged his forty years in good faith; it was not his fault that they actually added up to only thirty-five, and these five extra ones had been compounded onto him by a vicious, even a horseplayish, gratuitor.
That Christmas his (now: for the first time) slowly diminishing sentence began to be marked off for him. It was a Christmas card, postmarked in Mexico, addressed to him in care of the Warden, who read it to him; they both knew who it was from: “Four years now. Not as far as you think.” On Valentine’s Day it was homemade: the coarse ruled paper bearin
g, drawn apparently with a carpenter’s or a lumberman’s red crayon, a crude heart into which a revolver was firing. “You see?” the Warden said. “Even if your five years were up …”
“It aint five now,” he said. “Hit’s four years and six months and nineteen days. You mean, even then you wont let me out?”
“And have you killed before you could even get home?”
“Send out and ketch him.”
“Send where?” the Warden said. “Suppose you were outside and didn’t want to come back and knew I wanted to get you back. Where would I send to catch you?”
“Yes,” he said. “So there jest aint nothing no human man can do.”
“Yes,” the Warden said. “Give him time and he will do something else the police somewhere will catch him for.”
“Time,” he said. “Suppose a man aint got time jest to depend on time.”
“At least you have got your four years and six months and nineteen days before you have to worry about it.”
“Yes,” he said. “He’ll have that much time to work in.”
Then Christmas again, another card with the Mexican postmark: “Three years now. Not near as far as you think.” He stood there, fragile and small and durable in the barred overalls, his face lowered a little, peaceful. “Still Mexico, I notice,” he said. “Maybe He will kill him there.” “What?” the Warden said. “What did you say?”
He didn’t answer. He just stood there, peaceful, musing, serene. Then he said: “Before I had that-ere cow trouble with Jack Houston, when I was still a boy, I used to go to church ever Sunday and Wednesday prayer meeting too with the lady that raised me until I—”
“Who were they?” the Warden said. “You said your mother died.”
“He was a son of a bitch. She wasn’t no kin a-tall. She was jest his wife.—ever Sunday until I—”
“Was his name Snopes?” the Warden said.
“He was my paw.—until I got big enough to burn out on God like you do when you think you are already growed up and dont need nothing from nobody. Then when you told me how by keeping nine of them ten fellers from breaking out I didn’t jest add five more years to my time, I fixed it so you wasn’t going to let me out a-tall, I taken it back.”
“Took what back?” the Warden said. “Back from who?” “I taken it back from God.”
“You mean you’ve rejoined the church since that night two years ago? No you haven’t. You’ve never been inside the chapel since you came here back in 1908.” Which was true. Though the present Warden and his predecessor had not really been surprised at that. What they had expected him to gravitate to was one of the small violent irreconcilable nonconformist non-everything and -everybody else which existed along with the regular prison religious establishment in probably all Southern rural penitentiaries—small fierce cliques and groups (this one called themselves Jehovah’s Shareholders) headed by self-ordained leaders who had reached prison through a curiously consistent pattern: by the conviction of crimes peculiar to the middle class, to respectability, originating in domesticity or anyway uxoriousness: bigamy, rifling the sect’s funds for a woman: his wife or someone else’s or, in an occasional desperate case, a professional prostitute.
“I didn’t need no church,” he said. “I done it in confidence.”
“In confidence?” the Warden said.
“Yes,” he said, almost impatiently. “You dont need to write God a letter. He has done already seen inside you long before He would even need to bother to read it. Because a man will learn a little sense in time even outside. But he learns it quick in here. That when a Judgment powerful enough to help you, will help you if all you got to do is jest take back and accept it, you are a fool not to.”
“So He will take care of Stillwell for you,” the Warden said.
“Why not? What’s He got against me?”
“Thou shalt not kill,” the Warden said.
“Why didn’t He tell Houston that? I never went all the way in to Jefferson to have to sleep on a bench in the depot jest to try to buy them shells, until Houston made me.”
“Well I’ll be damned,” the Warden said. “I will be eternally damned. You’ll be out of here in three more years anyway but if I had my way you’d be out of here now, today, before whatever the hell it is that makes you tick starts looking cross-eyed at me. I dont want to spend the rest of my life even thinking somebody is thinking the kind of hopes about me you wish about folks that get in your way. Go on now. Get back to work.”
So when it was only October, no holiday valentine or Christmas card month that he knew of, when the Warden sent for him, he was not even surprised. The Warden sat looking at him for maybe half a minute, with something not just aghast but almost respectful in the look, then said: “I will be damned.” It was a telegram this time. “It’s from the Chief of Police in San Diego, California. There was a church in the Mexican quarter. They had stopped using it as a church, had a new one or something. Anyway it had been deconsecrated, so what went on inside it since, even the police haven’t quite caught up with yet. Last week it fell down. They dont know why: it just fell down all of a sudden. They found a man in it—what was left of him. This is what the telegram says: ‘Fingerprints F.B.I. identification your man Number 08213 Shuford H. Stillwell.’ ” The Warden folded the telegram back into the envelope and put it back into the drawer. “Tell me again about that church you said you used to go to before Houston made you kill him.”
He didn’t answer that at all. He just drew a long breath and exhaled it. “I can go now,” he said. “I can be free.”
“Not right this minute,” the Warden said. “It will take a month or two. The petition will have to be got up and sent to the Governor. Then he will ask for my recommendation. Then he will sign the pardon.”
“The petition?” he said.
“You got in here by law,” the Warden said. “You’ll have to get out by law.”
“A petition,” he said.
“That your family will have a lawyer draw up, asking the Governor to issue a pardon. Your wife—but that’s right, she’s dead. One of your daughters then.”
“Likely they done married away too by now.”
“All right,” the Warden said. Then he said, “Hell, man, you’re already good as out. Your cousin, whatever he is, right there in Jackson now in the legislature—Egglestone Snopes, that got beat for Congress two years ago?”
He didn’t move, his head bent a little; he said, “Then I reckon I’ll stay here after all.” Because how could he tell ay here aftanger: Clarence, my own oldest brothers grandson, is in politics that depends on votes. When I leave here I wont have no vote. What will I have to buy Clarence Snopes’s name on my paper? Which just left Eck’s boy, Wallstreet, whom nobody yet had ever told what to do. “I reckon I’ll be with you them other three years too,” he said.
“Write your sheriff yourself,” the Warden said. “I’ll write the letter for you.”
“Hub Hampton that sent me here is dead.”
“You’ve still got a sheriff, haven’t you? What’s the matter with you? Have forty years in here scared you for good of fresh air and sunshine?”
“Thirty-eight years this coming summer,” he said.
“All right. Thirty-eight. How old are you?”
“I was born in eighty-three,” he said.
“So you’ve been here ever since you were twenty-five years old.” “I dont know. I never counted.”
“All right,” the Warden said. “Beat it. When you say the word I’ll write a letter to your sheriff.”
“I reckon I’ll stay,” he said. But he was wrong. Five months later the petition lay on the Warden’s desk.
“Who is Linda Snopes Kohl?” the Warden said.
He stood completely still for quite a long time. “Her paw’s a rich banker in Jefferson. His and my grandpaw had two sets of chillen.”
“She was the member of your family that signed the petition to the Governor to let you out.”
&n
bsp; “You mean the sheriff sent for her to come and sign it?”
“How could he? You wouldn’t let me write the sheriff.”
“Yes,” he said. He looked down at the paper which he could not read. It was upside down to him, though that meant nothing either. “Show me where the ones signed to not let me out”
“What?” the Warden said.
“The ones that dont want me out.”
“Oh, you mean Houston’s family. No, the only other names on it are the District Attorney who sent you here and your Sheriff, Hubert Hampton, Junior, and V. K. Ratliff. Is he a Houston?”
“No,” he said. He drew the slow deep breath again. “So I’m free.”
“With one thing more,” the Warden said. “Your luck’s not even holding: it’s doubling.” But he handled that too the next morning after they gave him a pair of shoes, a shirt, overalls and jumper and a hat, all brand new, and a ten-dolar bill and the three dollars and eighty-five cents which were still left from the forty dollars Flem had sent him eighteen years ago, and the Warden said, “There’s a deputy here today with a prisoner from Greenville. He’s going back tonight. For a dollar he’ll drop you off right at the end of the bridge to Arkansas, if you want to go that way.”
“Much obliged,” he said. “I’m going by Memphis first. I got some business to tend to there.”
It would probably take all of the thirteen dollars and eighty-five cents to buy a pistol even in a Memphis pawn shop. He had planned to beat his way to Memphis on a freight train, riding the rods underneath a boxcar or between two of them, as he had once or twice as a boy and a youth. But as soon as he was outside the gate, he discovered that he was afraid to. He had been shut too long, he had forgotten how; his muscles might have lost the agility and co-ordination, the simple bold quick temerity for physical risk. Then he thought of watching his chance to scramble safely into an empty car and found that he didn’t dare that either, that in thirty-eight years he might even have forgotten the unspoken rules of the freemasonry of petty lawbreaking without knowing it until too late.
Snopes: The Hamlet, the Town, the Mansion Page 88
