“Of why Dobbin’s hanging so close. And all of them knowing it, I’ll wager, except yours truly.” He paused, then put his fist against his forehead, not distracted but grave, as Pierre had once seen him do long ago. “Of course. Of why yours truly has been let be foreman at all.”
“But you said … the judge appointed …”
“Before this, the judge was always Fourchette. Or another one of that—of the like. A closed corporation, as they say, for judge and jury both. Why, not one of that crowd but’s been on it a dozen times. A fiddle for the foreman it must have been usually—any one of them who could read.” He looked up from his twirling of the cup that Lucine had just set before him. “Frazer can’t, you know, for one. But he’s sitting there.”
“Surely all that’s nothing new. Not for here.”
Pierre, in his corner, started. He had never heard her speak of Tuscana from such disloyal distance—from any—or not for years. Frost. Are there frosts here? Not since then.
“No, that’s not.”
“George …” Impossible for her to shrink further, into a smaller space, one would have said, but now she seemed to. “Then it’s you. With that crowd. Some danger. Because you never—” She broke off, glancing sidewise at the servant. Because he never had joined them, she had been going to say. Up to now, Pierre had never thought of this as remarkable. Their reticence—his mother’s and his uncle’s—had always left so much submerged, unremarked.
“No, Dolly, of course not,” he said, intent on the cup. “I don’t like to be the last to know, though.” His words came more measured even than usual. “I like to know. I like to know beforehand what’s going on. One doesn’t like to be used.” Then he looked up and saw her. “There’s no danger,” he said quickly. Gulping his tea at a draught, he set the cup down and leaned astride of her, a hand on either arm of her chair.
To be a good liar one must have more self-deception, thought Pierre, remembering them seen once through the bedroom door, just so posed. To lie well, especially to those one loves, one must join one’s own self-deception to theirs—and he has none.
“There’s no danger!” his uncle repeated.
At once his mother sat back, knowing at once that there was. “From where?” she said.
His uncle sat down again. “It’s naught … naught.” One of his hands went out, hovered over the tight knot of hers, and withdrew, as if this could not be lied to.
What queerly constricted gestures the old made, they made, Pierre thought. He had never seen them kiss. But in times of stress, they always made for each other’s hands. Then he remembered, with a shock because he had forgotten, he had forgotten, the time of stress when this had been their only means of communication.
“When the towns went under,” said his uncle. “They’re looking into it—you might say.”
“When the dam burned …” She was quiet for what seemed long. Then she spoke crisply. “Arson. Is that it? And they meant to hang it on Bean.”
“No,” said his uncle, “not on Bean. And not arson.”
“Six years ago.” Her voice dimmed momentarily, to the one people kept for the past—the good past.
“Seven,” said Pierre. His voice was hoarse from silence. “September, nineteen thirty-two.”
“We were in Memphis,” she said, and Pierre wondered how even on the night of his homecoming, he could ever have thought the three of them, under their evening light, a trinity—for here she was, dreaming back on her wedding trip, he of the boy who had been left behind, and meanwhile his uncle, catching his eye, was trying to exchange with him the glance that two men, in the presence, of an infinitely wounded woman, will give one another. Only the watcher outside sees a unity, he told himself, and still felt his chest fill with longing.
“Almost seven.” She came out of her dream. “But that’s so far back. So long ago … what are they? … and not arson … and not …” Her needle-finger moved back and forth on her thumb. Soon she would have it, whatever it was, and if time were allowed her, the outcome too. (“They’ll send the girl to Martindale.”)
“Long enough,” said his uncle. He reached for his newspaper, and not finding it, held his cup sideways to be refilled. When it had been, he sat without drinking. “Long enough. But they’ve ways of getting what they’re after. That thing they call ‘statute of limitations.’” He pronounced it carefully. “It doesn’t hold. Not against—murder.” A cheek muscle twitched, as if his mouth begrudged the word it had made.
Neither of his auditors repeated it, but the word went round the table, joining the three of them like an alerting whisper.
Finally his mother spoke. “Whose?”
Pierre held his breath, so sure of the name that would come like a face seen at a window pane and summoned from within, the name of another boy whom by now no one should have remembered.
“I doubt if they know for certain—or care. But they’re inquiring into the disappearance of two brothers, one of them a boy that the hiring office took on a few days before the dam went. Two colored boys—by the name of Perry Brown and Lucius Asher.”
A low groan came from behind them—not a sound that anyone would ever forget—a low dove-bubble of woe.
Lucine still held the pot. They saw that when she turned. It was not until they turned on her, a phalanx of three suddenly reminded that they were four, that the old pot slid from her hand. She backed up before them, eyes shifting like an animal that has messed, and hunched herself, still backward, through the house door. Inside, they heard her at the closet that held the brooms. They waited without speaking, but she did not return.
“Curse the habit here,” his uncle said then, very low. “Never a second name, like dogs. Is she an Asher … or a Brown?”
“Both,” his mother whispered. “They were her sons.” Her glance was terrible, from eyes stretched wide in sockets worn down at the temples to two thin, pulsing spots like a baby’s soft one, the fontanel reborn in the death’s head. And her cry, when it came, was terrible, that piercing wail so strangely colonial, so late. “This never would have happened—at home!”
But although her gaze was fixed, they could not tell whom it accused, whether it was for his uncle—over the deed just done, or because now she knew exactly what was his danger, or for her son—because he was a son, or because he too had taken himself from her, or whether it was only for the old smashed pot, lying there with its great shards sticking up awkward as broken bones through wet orange wool and weeping tea leaves.
If a member of the grand jury know, or have reason to believe, that a crime has been committed which is triable in the county, he must declare the same to his fellow jurors, who must thereupon investigate the same.
Code Cr. Proc., Section 252
“There is no statute of limitations against m-memory.” All that night the words inserted themselves through his tossing, in the dreamer’s blind, timbreless notation—the first phrase coming with exaggerated slowness from around a corner, then the final one appearing, always with the stammer, then the substitution. While it was still dark, he forced himself up from sleep, dressed, shivering with the low physical ebb of the hour, turned on the light over his childhood desk and sat down there, still drugged, to wait for whatever people did wait in such vigils—perhaps the birds. Long before their edgy cries, he heard the call of a train, one out of all that convocation which used to push up the dawn here, a short, stopped plaint from far across the hill, in the new yard miles away. Then he was left to hear what, since his arrival, he had never quite kept himself from hearing: the noiseless current of “no change in spite of change”—as if valved from a venous system shared by all inhabitants here—that had always seemed to him the real sound of this place. No quicklime of leaving, under which his new world had all but vanished, was ever to be proof against it. Across from him was the same window frame at which he had once flung Demuth’s chocolate. He had lost the power ever again to see that clearly ahead of him. On the desk at his elbow were two half-fini
shed letters, one, already crumpled days back, to Lovey, the other to Serlin—neither of which he was ever to mail. As he left the room, about to douse the light, he let it stay, for the possible use, maybe, of some crafty presence that must never have left it, his own Doppelgänger perhaps that all these years must have remained here holding down the seat reserved for him somewhere between honesty and doom.
There was a dim light on in the parlor too. In direct line down the passage, his uncle sat under it in his own vigil, in the chair so recently arranged for him, his head bowed over his knees. He has fallen asleep under it, Pierre thought, glancing through the door, slightly ajar, of the second bedroom, where, in the blue light of yet another lamp, his mother lay profoundly still under her sedative. Then his uncle’s shoulders moved, his head bobbed above hands clasped tightly in front of him, and Pierre, frozen where he was, thought “He is weeping,” turned to move away and could not, stayed by the bond in his breast that held him toward the man on the sofa, toward the figure of him seen from the train three years back—figure of a man he could ask, could trust never to ask—and scarcely breathing, he stood there, thinking “He can weep.” He himself had not wept since the night he had gone to look for Johnny, and now, with the careful stiffness of one reared by women, he let himself think “A man can weep.” As he watched, these thoughts passed through him, riot in confusion, under their own lamp, and he took a step, his own eyes hot, across the distance that had always been too great for speech.
“Mind yourself—!”
He had been stopped just short of treading on a line of shards spread on the floor to dry, their edges glistening. Others lay on the table, some grouped on a square of paper. A tube of glue lay beside them. His uncle looked up from the pieces he held gripped together for pressure between his fingers, the undamaged handle protruding. He made the faint, shamed grimace of someone detected at a puzzle not deep enough. After a minute he got up, carrying his hands before him as if he had a cracked egg in them, and leaned over the table, examining the paper.
Behind him, Pierre leaned with him, his eyes returning to focus. Neatly, as in a mechanical drawing, his uncle had outlined the pot, dotted in the shape of the fragments, and numbered them. Very slowly now he shifted the mended pair to the proper spot in the center, imperceptibly released them, and withdrew his hands. He flexed his cramped fingers, uttering a sigh that said nothing distinguishable, cast Pierre the same apologetic grimace, and went out to the scullery, where he could be heard setting the kettle to boil. Bending down, Pierre picked up the fragments from the rug and set them on the table, one by one. Neither will he speak, he thought, neither will he press others to.
On a spindle of a chair nearby, a black oilcloth shopping bag hung slackly by one of its worn straps, the shiny surface rubbed down to the fabric in many old creasings—Lucine’s tote-bag, used each night to carry back to her own quarters that tithe of the day’s larder which she considered her due. All of the house servants “toted,” in anonymous packages or in bags like these, the contents of which must never be questioned and never were, except by those new wives from the North who could not be made to understand the difference between this and stealing, that it was the “squeeze” which still linked servant to household in the old way of owning and being owned—a portion which could never be taken care of (as more than one, to local smirkings, had tried) in the wage. Lucine, by marriage an Asher and a Brown, by color probably a Booker, or one of the Dibbelaises or Bontemps brought here by whites from Louisiana, came of trusted strains; she had been away, but not too far, to the convent—by virtue of all this, not in spite of it, she still toted. Tonight the canvas cot she slept on here in the parlor was neatly stacked as usual in the corner in which she replaced it each morning, took it down again after her evening visit to the backs—for this too, even if they slept in, was their unfailing habit, as if the company here drained a strength that only the touch of their own could renew. But now it was nearly morning. The broom closet hung open, bare of the single change of garment and towel she kept there, and she had gone without her tote-bag.
In the hall, the phone, long since muffled by some trick of his uncle, struggled to burr, scarcely doing so before his uncle reached it. He spoke into it at some length, so inaudibly that Pierre could hear the kettle at boil. Mashing the tea, putting the milk in the cups as had been done in his childhood, he peered out the scullery window. All the other houses on the street were dark. To any watcher opposite, theirs, frailly lit at all corners, must seem like some warning craft cradling disaster as carefully as his uncle had his cracked egg, making the watcher think perhaps of how all households ripened toward dispersal, even of how tonight Higby’s was the safest, since it rode the dark already knowing where its own disaster lay.
“That was the hospital,” said his uncle, returning. “They’ve no nurse to spare us.” He sat down heavily for him, always so neat and median in his ways. The china bits on the table listed faintly, and some of the sugar he was spooning pattered like sand. “We’ll have to manage by ourselves.”
“She won’t come back, then?” Pierre nodded toward the tote-bag.
“They’ll want to stay out of it. One can’t blame them. Even if she would—the rest won’t let her. They’ll fold their tents—now that they’ve heard.”
“But you’ll be out of it too, then. If you have to stay here.”
“Yes,” said his uncle. “I s’ll have to beg off. I s’ll be out of it. Yes.”
Pierre drank his tea in silence. The silence of the young, cold with its own fear of compromise, is a bitter courtesy.
“I do not choose to,” said his uncle.
You chose not to beg off in the beginning.
“Last night, when I said what I did—that I would not be used—I said it in anger. …”
Last night, when my mother cried out again and said, “Now send me to hospital!” you refused her. “No,” you said, “you’ll stay here. And I with you.” I saw her grateful look when you said that. You chose.
“One way or t’other,” said his uncle, “a man must expect to be used.”
You chose to break your oath. You will be.
“But one doesn’t always choose for oneself, d’ya see … you see that?”
I see that you can speak, in your way.
“For that matter … rather by Dobbin … than by that crowd—”
And I listen—in mine.
“That man, Dabney Mount—the one who’s always hanging about the courthouse—that scrap—you remember?”
I remember. All the characters are coming out of lodging.
“Stopped me yesterday, as I was leaving. Asked after your mother … that dirt. Hinted he’d like to sponsor me at the cockfight, down at Semple’s. They keep a cock there, you know, match it once in a while, just for show.”
I know. Shall I ever tell you—what I know?
“The Lord is my witness I’ve never been friend to them.”
No one is my witness. And the listener is never the friend.
“What’s Dobbin after?” said Pierre.
At these words, his uncle leaned back in his chair, his eyelids rising and falling—and Pierre saw that he had been speaking in that communicative trance which comes with exhaustion; not counting other interrupted nights and days, he had been up since six the previous morning. “Jury trial.” He spoke thickly. “Get them to a jury trial, no matter the verdict. Get the names down on legal record, sooner or later they’re done for.” He rested his head back. “Done.” He closed his eyes, his lips still moving. “Write that kind of cock with two k’s, don’t you,’ I said, ‘Mount?’”
“What’s in it for Dobbin? Why would he?” The district attorney’s name was faintly familiar, surely local.
“Judgeship. Say he wants … federal ju’ship.” His head moved from side to side. “Do a job, maybe—know whose blood he is.” His jaw fell, closed again. “Forty winks. You spell me.” His chin sank to his breast; the stubbled cheeks moving tranquilly out and in. I
t had barely rested so, when the whole head snapped back, eyes wide. “Somebody outside. At the door.”
Pierre went to answer it; had his hand on the knob.
“Stand back!” His uncle’s whisper warmed his ear; he had been crept up upon from behind. Silently he was motioned aside, his uncle’s hand, arm outstretched, replacing his on the knob, turning it fraction by fraction. Suddenly he whipped the door back against him.
Nothing entered except a little dark, of the same temperature as the room, yet different, the infinitesimal gap between outdoors and in, appreciable in the roots of the hair, by the skin on the backs of the hands. His uncle peered around the door, Pierre after him. Nothing was there. As they stood there, they heard the gathering chip-chip of the birds.
“Dreaming myself in Ireland—must have—” said his uncle. He had been a Tommy there from 1916 until the truce, was ashamed of his part in the war, ordinarily never spoke of it. “That’s what they used to tell us.” He spoke close to Pierre’s shoulder, eyes on the distance, as an elder huntsman might speak in low-voiced counsel. “Never stand in a lighted door.”
Pierre nodded, as if he too could see Ireland. Eastward, the great embankments rode like true cloud, their immense counterside as hidden. At such an hour, or darker, a town enfeoffed here might still dream it kept its own horizon.
“Uncle—” He spoke without thinking, as men say—or from the seat in the depths of thought, ever reserved. “Get me to Dobbin. I know the names.”
In the moment he spoke he knew his stumble as an actor does, foresaw the look on his uncle’s face before it turned.
“You—?You know?”
The role of the listener is never fully learned.
His uncle swept an arm outward. Against that wide sweep, his whisper seemed small. “D’ya think there’s anyone—including Dobbin—who doesn’t?”
Still whispering, he pushed Pierre inside. “Including—the jury?”
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