‘Stop, men! This hyer’s the Law!’—who, without doubt if they had run at him, would have stood his ground, still holding the pistol which he had not and would not even cock, dying without a struggle beneath the trampling feet in that one last high second of his badge and warrant:—a small, mild, ordinary man whom you have seen in his ten thousands walking the streets of little American towns, and some not so little either, not just in the vast central Valley but on the eastern and western watersheds and the high mountain plateaus too, who had received his job and office out of that inexhaustible reservoir of nepotism from which, during the hundred-odd years since the republic’s founding, almost that many millions of its children had received not just their daily bread but a little something over for Saturday and Christmas too, since, coeval with the republic, it was one of the prime foundations,—in this case, from the current sheriff, whose remote kinswoman, to his unending surprise and unbelief even ten years afterward, the turnkey had somehow managed to marry;—a man so quiet so mild and so ordinary that none remarked the manner in which he accepted and affirmed the oath when sworn into his office: merely somebody else’s nameless and unknown cousin by blood or maybe just marriage, promising to be as brave and honest and loyal as anyone could or should expect for the pay he would receive during the next four years in a position he would lose the day the sheriff went out of office, turning to meet his one high moment as the male mayfly concentrates his whole one day of life in the one evening act of procreation and then relinquishes it. But the crowd was not running at him: only walking, and that only because he was between them and the courthouse, checking for an instant at sight of the drawn pistol, until a voice said: ‘Take that thing away from him before he hurts somebody:’ and they did: a hand, not ungently nor even unkindly, wrenching the pistol firmly from him, the crowd moving again, converging on him, the same voice, not impatient so much as irascible, speaking to him by name this time:
‘Gwan, Irey. Get out of the sun’: so that, turning again, the turnkey faced merely another gambit, he must choose all over again: either to acquiesce forever more to man or sever himself forever more from the human race by the act—getting either himself or the prisoner free from one end or the other of the steel chain joining them—which would enable him to flee. Or not flee, not flight; who to dispute the moment’s heroic image even in that last second: no puny fumbling with a blind mechanical insentient key, but instead one single lightning-stroke of sword or scimitar across the betraying wrist, and then running, the scarlet-spurting stump inevictably aloft like an unbowed pennon’s staff or the undefeated lance’s headless shank, not even in adjuration but in abdication of all man and his corruption.
But there was not even time for that; his only choice was against being trampled as, shoulder to shoulder now with his captive and, if anything, slightly behind him, they moved on in the center of the crowd, across the square and into the courthouse, a firm hand now grasping him above the elbow and thrusting him firmly on exactly as he had nightlily dreamed ever since he assumed his office of himself in the act of doing, as soon as he found a felon either small enough or mild enough to permit him, through the corridor and up the stairs to the judge’s chambers, where the New Orleans lawyer gave one start of outrage then of astonishment and then the infinitesimal flicker which never reached his face at all nor even his eyes, until the same calm merely irascible voice said, ‘This aint big enough. We’ll use the courtroom’ and he (the lawyer) was moving too, the three of them now—himself, the turnkey and the prisoner like three hencoops on a flood—filling the little room with a sibilant sound as though all the ghosts of Coke upon Littleton upon Blackstone upon Napoleon upon Julius Caesar had started up and back in one inextricable rustle, one aghast and dusty cry, and through the opposite door into the courtroom itself, where suddenly the lawyer was not only himself free of the crowd, he had managed (quite skilfully for all his bulk: a man not only tall but big, in rich dark broadcloth and an immaculate pique waistcoat and a black cravat bearing a single pearl like the egg of a celestial humming bird) to extricate the turnkey and the prisoner too, in the same motion kneeing the swing gate in the low railing enclosing Bench and witness stand and jury box and counsels’ tables, and thrust the other two through it and followed and let the gate swing back while the crowd itself poured on into the auditorium.
People were entering now not only through the judge’s chambers but through the main doors at the back too, not just men and boys now but women also—young girls who already at eight and nine in the morning had been drinking coca cola in the drugstores, and housewives testing meat and cabbages in the groceries and markets, or matching scraps of lace and buttons over drygoods counters—until not just the town but the county itself, all of which had probably seen the three-legged horse run, and most of which had contributed at least one or two each of the dollars (by now the total had reached the thirty thousands) which the two men had won and which the old Negro preacher had escaped with and indubitably concealed—seemed to be converging steadily into the courthouse, ringing with unhurried thunder the corridor and stairs and the cavernous courtroom itself, filling row by row the hard pew-like wooden benches until the last reverberation faded behind the cool frantic pulsing of pigeons in the clock tower on the roof and the brittle chitter and rattle of sparrows in the sycamores and locusts in the yard, and the calm merely irascible voice said—and not from behind any face but as though no one man spoke but rather the room itself: ‘All right, Mister. Commence.’
And, standing with his prize behind the railing’s flimsy sanctuary, bayed, trapped in fact, between the little wooden barrier which a child could step over in one stride like a degree of latitude or of honesty, and the sacred dais to which, even before he saw it, he had already lost his appeal, not alone except for his two companions nor even despite them, but in fact because of them, for a moment yet the lawyer watched Man pouring steadily into the tabernacle, the shrine itself, of his last tribal mysteries, entering it without temerity or challenge, because why not? it was his, he had decreed it, built it, sweated it up: not out of any particular need nor any long agony of hope, because he was not aware of any lack or long history of agony or that he participated in any long chronicle of frustrated yearning, but because he wanted it, could afford it, or anyway was going to have it whether he could afford it or not: to be no symbol nor cradle nor any mammalian apex, harbor where the incredible cockleshell of his invincible dream made soundings at last from the chartless latitudes of his lost beginnings and where, like that of the enduring sea, the voice of his affirmation roared murmuring home to the atoll-dais of his unanimity where no mere petty right, but blind justice itself, reigned ruthless and inattentive amid the deathless invincible smells of his victories: his stale tobacco spit and his sweat. Because to begin with, he was not he but they, and they only by electing to be, because what he actually was, was I and in the first place he was not a mammal and as for his chartless latitudes, he not only knew exactly where he came from six thousand years ago, but that in three score and ten or thereabouts he was going back there; and as for affirmation, the mark of a free man was his right to say no for no other reason except no, which answered for the unanimity too; and the floor was his because he had built it, paid for it, and who could spit on it if not he. And perhaps the lawyer had even read Dickens and Hugo once long ago when he was a young man, looking now across the flimsy barrier into no brick-and-plaster barn built yesterday by the God-fearing grandfathers of other orderly and decorous and God-fearing Missouri farmers, but back a hundred years into the stone hall older than Orleans or Capet or Charlemagne, filled with the wooden sabots until yesterday reeking with plowed land and manure, which had stained and fouled the trampled silks and lilies which had lasted a thousand years and were to have endured ten thousand more; and the caps of Mediterranean fishermen, and the smocks of cobblers and porters and road-menders stiffening with the crimson smears of the hands which had rent and cast down the silks and the lilies, looking out
at them not even with mere awe and respect, not alone alarm, but with triumph and pride: pride in the triumph of man, and that out of all his kind, time and geography had matched him with this hour:—America, the United States in this April of Our Lord one thousand nine hundred and fourteen, where man had had a hundred and forty years in which to become so used to liberty that the simple unchallenged right to attend its ordered and regimented charades sufficed to keep him quiet and content; looking out at them a moment longer, then he turned and struck the handcuffs a sharp and almost musical blow and thundered down at the turnkey:
‘What does this mean? Dont you know that no man shall be put twice in the same jeopardy?’ then turned again and spoke into the room in that same voice like the rich snore of an organ: ‘This man has been illegally arrested. The law compels his right to consult a lawyer. We will recess for ten minutes,’ and turned again and opened the gate in the railing this time by thrusting the other two through it and on ahead of him toward the door to the judge’s chambers, not even looking back as five men rose at the back of the room and went out through the main doors, and thrust the Negro and the turnkey into the judge’s chambers and followed and shut the door and—the turnkey told this afterward—without even stopping, went on to the opposite door and opened it and was already standing in it when the five men from the courtroom came around the corner.
‘Five minutes, gentlemen,’ the lawyer said. ‘Then we will resume in the courtroom,’ and closed the door and came back to where the turnkey and the Negro stood. But he didn’t even look at the Negro; and the turnkey, spent, exhausted, almost comatose from courage and excitement, discovered, realised with a kind of outraged unbelief that the lawyer, who had voluntarily given himself only ten minutes to do whatever he intended to do, was apparently going to use up some of them smoking, watching the lawyer produce the cigar from an upper pocket of the white vest which looked as if it had come right out from under the washerwoman’s smoothing-iron five minutes ago—a pocket which contained three more just like it. Then the turnkey recognised its brand and therefore its cost—one dollar—because he had owned one once (and on the following Sunday morning smoked it) through the mistake of a stranger under the impression that it was the sheriff who had married his, the turnkey’s, sister instead of he who had married the sheriff’s brother’s wife’s niece, recognised it with grief and outrage too, the same thing happening again but this time a thousand times worse: the man who gave him the other cigar had asked nothing of him, whereas he knew now and at last what the lawyer wanted, was after, had been after all the while, setting the price of his, the turnkey’s, corruption at that of one one-dollar cigar: this was the forty thousand dollars which the nigger had escaped with and hidden so good that even the Federal Government couldn’t find it. Then the grief and outrage was not even outrage, let alone grief; it was triumph and pride and even joy too, since not only had the lawyer already lost even before he laid eyes on the nigger, he (the lawyer) wasn’t even going to find it out until he (the turnkey) got good and ready to tell him, waiting for the lawyer to speak first, with no organ in the voice either now, which instead was as hard and calm and cold and vacant of trash as that of his wife’s uncle-by-marriage:
‘You’ve got to get him out of town. It’s your only chance.’ And maybe his (the turnkey’s) voice wasn’t too calm and maybe to a big city lawyer it didn’t sound too hard either. But even one as big as this one could have heard the finality in it and, if he listened, the scorn and the contempt and the pleasure too:
‘I can think of another. In fact, I’m fixing right now to take it.’ Then to the nigger: ‘Come on:’ already moving toward the corridor door, drawing the nigger after him, and already reaching from the snap on his belt the ring containing the handcuff key. ‘You’re thinking of that money. I aint. Because it aint mine to think about. It’s his, half of it is that is; whether or not a nigger aint got any business with half of forty thousand dollars aint none of my business nor yours neither. And soon as I unlock these handcuffs, he can go and get it,’ and turned the knob and had opened the door when the voice stopped him—the hard calm not even loud voice behind him sounding like somebody dropping pebbles into a churn:
‘Neither am I. Because there’s not any money. I’m not even thinking about you. I’m thinking about your bondsmen:’ and (the turnkey) heard the match and turned in time to watch the flame’s hunchy squat at the drawing cigar’s tip and the first pale gout of smoke hiding for an instant the lawyer’s face.
‘That’s all right too,’ the turnkey said. ‘I been living in the jail two years already. So I wont even have to move. I expect I can even stand chain-gang work too.’
‘Pah,’ the lawyer said, not through smoke but in smoke, by means of smoke, the puff, the gout, the pale rich costly balloon bursting, vanishing, leaving the hard calm not loud word as durable and single as a piece of gravel or a buckshot: ‘When you arrested this man the second time, you broke the law. As soon as you turn him loose, he wont have to hunt for a lawyer because there are probably a dozen of them from Memphis and Saint Louis and Little Rock waiting down there in the yard now, just hoping you will have no more sense than to turn him loose. They’re not going to put you in jail. They’re not even going to sue you. Because you haven’t got any money or know where any is, anymore than this nigger does. They’re going to sue your bondsmen—whoever they were and whatever it was they thought you could do for them—and your—what is it? brother-in-law?—the sheriff.’
‘They were my——’ he started to say kinsmen, but they were not, they were his wife’s kinsmen; he had plenty of his own, but none of them—or all of them together, for that matter—had enough money in a bank anywhere to guarantee a bond. Then he started to say friends, but they were his wife’s family’s friends too. But then it didn’t matter what he said, because the voice had already read his mind:
‘—which makes it harder; you might leave your own kin-folks holding the sack, but these are the sheriff’s friends and you’ve got to sleep in the same bed with his niece every night.’ Which was wrong too, since three years and two months and thirteen nights ago now, but that didn’t matter either, the cigar smoking in the judge’s ashtray now, and the voice: ‘Come back here’: and he returned, drawing the Negro with him, until they stood facing the white vest with its loop of watch-chain like a section of gold plow-trace, and the voice: ‘You’ve got to get him into a jail somewhere where they can hold him long enough for you to put a charge on him that the law will accept. They can turn him loose the next day or the next minute if they want to; all you want is to have him on record as having been charged with a legal crime or misdemeanor by a legally qualified officer of a legally constituted court, then when his lawyers sue your bondsmen for false arrest, they can tell them to go chase themselves.’
‘What charge?’ the turnkey said.
‘What’s the next big jail from here? Not a county seat: a town with at least five thousand people in it?’ The turnkey told him. ‘All right. Take him there. Take my car; it’s in the hotel garage; I’ll telephone my driver from here. Only, you’ll——but surely I dont need to tell you how to spirit a prisoner out of the clutches of a mob.’ Which was true too, that was a part of the turnkey’s dream too; he had planned it all, run it through his mind, out to the last splendid and victorious gesture, time and again since that moment two years ago when he had laid his hand on the Book and sworn the oath, not that he really expected it to happen but to be prepared against that moment when he should be called upon to prove not merely his fitness for his office but his honor and courage as a man, by preserving and defending the integrity of his oath in the very face of them by whose sufferance he held his office.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Only——’
‘All right,’ the lawyer said. ‘Unlock that damn thing. Here, give me the key:’ and took it from his hand and unlocked the handcuffs and flung them onto the table, where they made again that faint musical note.
‘Only——’
the turnkey said again.
‘Now go around by the corridor and shut the big door to the courtroom and lock it on the outside.’
‘That wont stop them—hold them——’
‘Dont worry about them. I’ll attend to that. Go on.’
‘Yes,’ he said, and turned, then stopped again. ‘Wait. What about them fellows outside the door there?’ For perhaps two or three seconds the lawyer didn’t say anything at all, and when he did speak, it was as though there was nobody else in the room, or in fact as though he was not even speaking aloud:
‘Five men. And you a sworn officer of the law, armed. You might even draw your pistol. They’re not dangerous, if you’re careful.’
‘Yes,’ he said, and turned again and stopped again, not looking back: just stopping as he had turned. ‘That charge.’
‘Vagrancy,’ the lawyer said.
‘Vagrancy?’ he said. ‘A man owning half of forty-five thousand dollars?’
‘Pah,’ the lawyer said. ‘He doesn’t own half of anything, even one dollar. Go on.’ But now it was he who didn’t move; maybe he didn’t look back, but he didn’t move either, talking himself this time, and calm enough too:
‘Because this thing is all wrong. It’s backwards. The law spirits a nigger prisoner out of jail and out of town, to protect him from a mob that wants to take him out and burn him. All these folks want to do is to set this one free.’
‘Dont you think the law should cut both ways?’ the lawyer said. ‘Dont you think it should protect people who didn’t steal forty-five thousand dollars too?’
‘Yes,’ the turnkey said; and now he looked at the lawyer, his hand on the doorknob again but not turning it yet. ‘Only that aint the question I want to ask anyway. And I reckon you got an answer to this one too and I hope it’s a good one—’ speaking calm and slow and clear himself too: ‘This is all to it. I just take him to Blankton long enough to get a legal charge on the books. Then he can go.’
A Fable Page 19
