He was downtown that afternoon when Christmas’ name first flew up and down the street, and the boys and men — the merchants, the clerks, the idle and the curious, with countrymen in overalls predominating — began to run. Hines ran too. But he could not run fast and he was not tall enough to see over the clotted shoulders when he did arrive. Nevertheless he tried, as brutal and intent as any there, to force his way into the loud surging group as though in a resurgence of the old violence which had marked his face, clawing at the backs and at last striking at them with the stick until men turned and recognised him and held him, struggling, striking at them with the heavy stick. “Christmas?” he shouted. “Did they say Christmas?”
“Christmas!” one of the men who held him cried back, his face too strained, glaring. “Christmas! That white nigger that did that killing up at Jefferson last week!”
Hines glared at the man, his toothless mouth lightly foamed with spittle. Then he struggled again, violent, cursing: a frail little old man with the light, frail bones of a child, trying to fight free with the stick, trying to club his way into the center where the captive stood bleeding about the face. “Now, Uncle Doc!” they said, holding him; “now, Uncle Doc. They got him. He cant get away. Here, now.”
But he struggled and fought, cursing, his voice cracked, thin, his mouth slavering, they who held him struggling too like men trying to hold a small threshing hose in which the pressure is too great for its size. Of the entire group the captive was the only calm one. They held Hines, cursing, his old frail bones and his stringlike muscles for the time inherent with the fluid and supple fury of a weasel. He broke free of them and sprang forward, burrowing, and broke through and came face to face with the captive. Here he paused for an instant, glaring at the captive’s face. It was a full pause, but before they could grasp him again he had raised the stick and struck the captive once and he was trying to strike again when they caught him at last and held him impotent and raging, with that light, thin foam about his lips. They had not stopped his mouth. “Kill the bastard!” he cried. “Kill him. Kill him.”
Thirty minutes later two men brought him home in a car. One of them drove while the other held Hines up in the back seat. His face was pale now beneath the stubble and the dirt, and his eyes were closed. They lifted him bodily from the car and carried him through the gate and up the walk of rotting bricks and shards of concrete, to the steps. His eyes were open now, but they were quite empty, rolled back into his skull until the dirty, bluish whites alone showed. But he was still quite limp and helpless. Just before they reached the porch the front door opened and his wife came out and closed the door behind her and stood there, watching them. They knew that it was his wife because she came out of the house where he was known to live. One of the men, though a resident of the town, had never seen her before. “What is it?” she said.
“He’s all right,” the first man said. “We just been having a right smart of excitement downtown a while ago, and with this hot weather and all, it was a little too much for him.” She stood before the door as if she were barring them from the house — a dumpy, fat little woman with a round face like dirty and unovened dough, and a tight screw of scant hair. “They just caught that nigger Christmas that killed that lady up at Jefferson last week,” the man said. “Uncle Doc just got a little upset over it.”
Mrs Hines was already turning back, as though to open the door. As the first man said later to his companion, she halted in the act of turning, as if someone had hit her lightly with a thrown pebble. “Caught who?” she said.
“Christmas,” the man said. “That nigger murderer. Christmas.”
She stood at the edge of the porch, looking down at them with her gray, still face. “As if she already knew what I would tell her,” the man said to his companion as they returned to the car. “Like she wanted all at the same time for me to tell her it was him and it wasn’t him.”
“What does he look like?” she said.
“I never noticed much,” the man said. “They had to bloody him up some, catching him. Young fellow. He dont look no more like a nigger than I do, either.” The woman looked at them, down at them. Between the two men Hines stood on his own legs now, muttering a little now as if he were waking from sleep. “What do you want us to do with Uncle Doc?” the man said.
She did not answer that at all. It was as though she had not even recognised her husband, the man told his companion later. “What are they going to do with him?” she said.
“Him?” the man said. “Oh. The nigger. That’s for Jefferson to say. He belongs to them up there.”
She looked down at them, gray, still, remote. “Are they going to wait on Jefferson?”
“They?” the man said. “Oh,” he said. “Well, if Jefferson aint too long about it.” He shifted his grip on the old man’s arm. “Where do you want us to put him?” The woman moved then. She descended the steps and approached. “We’ll tote him into the house for you,” the man said.
“I can tote him,” she said. She and Hines were about the same height, though she was the heavier. She grasped him beneath the arms. “Eupheus,” she said, not loud; “Eupheus.” She said to the two men, quietly: “Let go. I got him.” They released him. He walked a little now. They watched her help him up the steps and into the door. She did not look back.
“She never even thanked us,” the second man said. “Maybe we ought to take him back and put him in jail with the nigger, since he seemed to know him so well.”
“Eupheus,” the first man said. “Eupheus. I been wondering for fifteen years what his name might be. Eupheus.”
“Come on. Let’s get on back. We might miss some of it.”
The first man looked at the house, at the closed door through which the two people had vanished. “She knowed him too.”
“Knowed who?”
“That nigger. Christmas.”
“Come on.” They returned to the car. “What do you think about that durn fellow, coming right into town here, within twently miles of where he done it, walking up and down the main street until somebody recognised him. I wish it had been me that recognised him. I could have used that thousand dollars. But I never do have any luck.” The car moved on. The first man was still looking back at the blank door through which the two people had disappeared.
In the hall of that little house dark and small and rankly-odored as a cave, the old couple stood. The old man’s spent condition was still little better than coma, and when his wife led him to a chair and helped him into it, it seemed a matter of expediency and concern. But there was no need to return and lock the front door, which she did. She came and stood over him for a while. At first it seemed as if she were just watching him, with concern and solicitude. Then a third person would have seen that she was trembling violently and that she had lowered him into the chair either before she dropped him to the floor or in order to hold him prisoner until she could speak. She leaned above him: dumpy, obese, gray in color, with a face like that of a drowned corpse. When she spoke her voice shook and she strove with it, shaking, her hands clenched upon the arms of the chair in which he half lay, her voice shaking, restrained: “Eupheus. You listen to me. You got to listen to me. I aint worried you before. In thirty years I aint worried you. But now I am going to. I am going to know and you got to tell me. What did you do with Milly’s baby?”
Through the long afternoon they clotted about the square and before the jail — the clerks, the idle, the countrymen in overalls; the talk. It went here and there about the town, dying and homing again like a wind or a fire until in the lengthening shadows the country people began to depart in wagons and dusty cars and the townspeople began to move supperward. Then the talk flared again, momentarily revived, to wives and families about suppertables in electrically lighted rooms and in remote hill cabins with kerosene lamps. And on the next day, the slow, pleasant country Sunday while they squatted in their clean shirts and decorated suspenders, with peaceful pipes about country churches or about t
he shady dooryards of houses where the visiting teams and cars were tethered and parked along the fence and the womenfolks were in the kitchen, getting dinner, they told it again: “He dont look any more like a nigger than I do. But it must have been the nigger blood in him. It looked like he had set out to get himself caught like a man might set out to get married. He had got clean away for a whole week. If he had not set fire to the house, they might not have found out about the murder for a month. And they would not have suspected him then if it hadn’t been for a fellow named Brown, that the nigger used to sell whiskey while he was pretending to be a white man and tried to lay the whiskey and the killing both on Brown and Brown told the truth.
“Then yesterday morning he come into Mottstown in broad daylight, on a Saturday with the town full of folks. He went into a white barbershop like a white man, and because he looked like a white man they never suspected him. Even when the bootblack saw how he had on a pair of second hand brogans that were too big for him, they never suspected. They shaved him and cut his hair and he payed them and walked out and went right into a store and bought a new shirt and a tie and a straw hat, with some of the very money he stole from the woman he murdered. And then he walked the streets in broad daylight, like he owned the town, walking back and forth with people passing him a dozen times and not knowing it, until Halliday saw him and ran up and grabbed him and said, ‘Aint your name Christmas?’ and the nigger said that it was. He never denied it. He never did anything. He never acted like either a nigger or a white man. That was it. That was what made the folks so mad. For him to be a murderer and all dressed up and walking the town like he dared them to touch him, when he ought to have been skulking and hiding in the woods, muddy and dirty and running. It was like he never even knew he was a murderer, let alone a nigger too.
“And so Halliday (he was excited, thinking about that thousand dollars, and he had already hit the nigger a couple of times in the face, and the nigger acting like a nigger for the first time and taking it, not saying anything: just bleeding sullen and quiet) — Halliday was hollering and holding him when the old man they call Uncle Doc Hines come up and begun to hit the nigger with his walking stick until at last two men had to hold Uncle Doc quiet and took him home in a car. Nobody knew if he really did know the nigger or not. He just come hobbling up, screeching, ‘Is his name Christmas? Did you say Christmas?’ and shoved up and took one look at the nigger and then begun to beat him with the walking stick. He acted like he was hypnotised or something. They had to hold him, and his eyes rolling blue into his head and slobbering at the mouth and cutting with that stick at everything that come into reach, until all of a sudden he kind of flopped. Then two fellows carried him home in a car and his wife come out and took him into the house, and the two fellows come on back to town. They didn’t know what was wrong with him, to get so excited after the nigger was caught, but anyway they thought that he would be all right now. But here it was not a half an hour before he was back downtown again. He was pure crazy by now, standing on the corner and yelling at whoever would pass, calling them cowards because they wouldn’t take the nigger out of jail and hang him right then and there, Jefferson or no Jefferson. He looked crazy in the face, like somebody that had done slipped away from a crazy house and that knew he wouldn’t have much time before they come and got him again. Folks say that he used to be a preacher, too.
“He said that he had a right to kill the nigger. He never said why, and he was too worked up and crazy to make sense even when somebody would stop him long enough to ask a question. There was a right good crowd around him by then, and him yelling about how it was his right to say first whether the nigger should live or should die. And folks were beginning to think that maybe the place for him was in the jail with the nigger, when here his wife come up.
“There are folks that have lived in Mottstown for thirty years and haven’t ever seen her. They didn’t know who she was then until she spoke to him, because the ones that had seen her, she was always around that little house in Niggertown where they live, in a mother hubbard and one of his woreout hats. But she was dressed up now. She had on a purple silk dress and a hat with a plume on it and she was carrying a umbrella and she come up to the crowd where he was hollering and yelling and she said, ‘Eupheus.’ He stopped yelling then and he looked at her, with that stick still raised in his hand and it kind of shaking, and his jaw dropped slack, slobbering. She took him by the arm. A lot of folks had been scared to come nigh him because of that stick; he looked like he might hit anybody at any minute and not even knowed it or intended it. But she walked right up under the stick and took him by the arm and led him across to where there was a chair in front of a store and she set him down in the chair and she said, ‘You stay here till I come back. Dont you move, now. And you quit that yelling.’
“And he did. He sho did. He set right there where she put him, and she never looked back, neither. They all noticed that. Maybe it was because folks never saw her except around home, staying at home. And him being a kind of fierce little old man that a man wouldn’t cross without he thought about it first. Anyhow they were surprised. They hadn’t even thought of him taking orders from anybody. It was like she had got something on him and he had to mind her. Because he sat down when she told him to, in that chair, not hollering and talking big now, but with his head bent down and his hands shaking on that big walking stick and a little slobber still running out of his mouth, onto his shirt.
“She went straight to the jail. There was a big crowd in front of it, because Jefferson had sent word that they were on the way down to get the nigger. She walked right through them and into the jail and she said to Metcalf, ‘I want to see that man they caught.’
“ ’What do you want to see him for?’ Metcalf said.
“ ’I aint going to bother him,’ she said. ‘I just want to look at him.’
“Metcalf told her there was a right smart of other folks that wanted to do that, and that he knew she didn’t aim to help him escape, but that he was just the jailer and he couldn’t let anybody in without he had permission from the sheriff. And her standing there, in that purple dress and the plume not even nodding and bending, she was that still. ‘Where is the sheriff?’ she said.
“ ’He might be in his office,’ Metcalf said. ‘You find him and get permission from him. Then you can see the nigger.’ Metcalf thought that that would finish it. So he watched her turn and go out and walk through the crowd in front of the jail and go back up the street toward the square. The plume was nodding now. He could see it nodding along above the fence. And then he saw her go across the square and in to the courthouse. The folks didn’t know what she was doing, because Metcalf hadn’t had time to tell them what happened at the jail. They just watched her go on into the courthouse, and then Russell said how he was in the office and he happened to look up and there that hat was with the plume on it just beyond the window across the counter. He didn’t know how long she had been standing there, waiting for him to look up. He said she was just tall enough to see over the counter, so that she didn’t look like she had any body at all. It just looked like somebody had sneaked up and set a toy balloon with a face painted on it and a comic hat set on top of it, like the Katzenjammer kids in the funny paper. ‘I want to see the sheriff,’ she says.
“ ’He aint here,’ Russell says. ‘I’m his deputy. What can I do for you?’
“He said she didn’t answer for a while, standing there. Then she said, ‘Where can I find him?’
“ ’He might be at home,’ Russell says. ‘He’s been right busy, this week. Up at night some, helping those Jefferson officers. He might be home taking a nap. But maybe I can—’ But he said that she was already gone. He said he looked out the window and watched her go on across the square and turn the corner toward where the sheriff lived. He said he was still trying to place her, to think who she was.
“She never found the sheriff. But it was too late then, anyway. Because the sheriff was already at
the jail, only Metcalf hadn’t told her, and besides she hadn’t got good away from the jail before the Jefferson officers came up in two cars and went into the jail. They came up quick and went in quick. But the word had already got around that they were there, and there must have been two hundred men and boys and women too in front of the jail when the two sheriffs come out onto the porch and our sheriff made a speech, asking the folks to respect the law and that him and the Jefferson sheriff both promised that the nigger would get a quick and fair trial; and then somebody in the crowd says, ‘Fair, hell. Did he give that white woman a fair trial?’ And they hollered then, crowding up, like they were hollering for one another to the dead woman and not to the sheriffs. But the sheriff kept on talking quiet to them, about how it was his sworn word given to them on the day they elected him that he was trying to keep. ‘I have no more sympathy with nigger murderers than any other white man here,’ he says. ‘But it is my sworn oath, and by God I aim to keep it. I dont want no trouble, but I aint going to dodge it. You better smoke that for a while.’ And Halliday was there too, with the sheriffs. He was the foremost one about reason and not making trouble. ‘Yaaah,’ somebody hollers; ‘we reckon you dont want him lynched. But he aint worth any thousand dollars to us. He aint worth a thousand dead matches to us.’ And then the sheriff says quick: ‘What if Halliday dont want him killed? Dont we all want the same thing? Here it’s a local citizen that will get the reward: the money will be spent right here in Mottstown. Just suppose it was a Jefferson man was going to get it. Aint that right, men? Aint that sensible?’ His voice sounded little, like a doll’s voice, like even a big man’s voice will sound when he is talking not against folks’ listening but against their already half-made-up minds.
Complete Works of William Faulkner Page 159
