“You’d be strange anywhere you was at,” the deputy said. “Even at home. Come on.”
“I’m a American citizen,” Brown said. “I reckon I got my rights, even if I dont wear no tin star on my galluses.”
“Sho,” the deputy said. “That’s what I am doing now: helping you get your rights.”
Brown’s face lighted: it was a flash. “Have they — Are they going to pay—”
“That reward? Sho. I’m going to take you to the place myself right now, where if you are going to get any reward, you’ll get it.”
Brown sobered. But he moved, though he still watched the deputy suspiciously. “This here is a funny way to go about it,” he said. “Keeping me shut up in jail while them bastards tries to beat me out of it.”
“I reckon the bastard aint been whelped yet that can beat you at anything,” the deputy said. “Come on. They’re waiting on us.”
They emerged from the jail. In the sunlight Brown blinked, looking this way and that, then he jerked his head up, looking back over his shoulder with that horselike movement. The car was waiting at the curb. Brown looked at the car and then at the deputy, quite sober, quite wary. “Where are we going in a car?” he said. “It wasn’t too far for me to walk to the courthouse this morning.”
“Watt sent the car to help bring back the reward in,” the deputy said. “Get in.”
Brown grunted. “He’s done got mighty particular about my comfort all of a sudden. A car to ride in, and no handcuffs. And just one durn fellow to keep me from running away.”
“I aint keeping you from running,” the deputy said. He paused in the act of starting the car. “You want to run now?”
Brown looked at him, glaring, sullen, outraged, suspicious. “I see,” he said. “That’s his trick. Trick me into running and then collect that thousand dollars himself. How much of it did he promise you?”
“Me? I’m going to get the same as you, to a cent.”
For a moment longer Brown glared at the deputy. He cursed, pointless, in a weak, violent way. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s go if we are going.”
They drove out to the scene of the fire and the murder. At steady, almost timed intervals Brown jerked his head up and back with that movement of a free mule running in front of a car in a narrow road. “What are we going out here for?”
“To get your reward,” the deputy said.
“Where am I going to get it?”
“In that cabin yonder. It’s waiting for you there.”
Brown looked about, at the blackened embers which had once been a house, at the blank cabin in which he had lived for four months sitting weathered and quiet in the sunlight. His face was quite grave, quite alert. “There’s something funny about this. If Kennedy thinks he can tromple on my rights, just because he wears a durn little tin star . . .”
“Get on,” the deputy said. “If you dont like the reward, I’ll be waiting to take you back to jail any time you want. Just any time you want.” He pushed Brown on, opening the cabin door and pushing him into it and closing the door behind him and sitting on the step.
Brown heard the door close behind him. He was still moving forward. Then, in the midst of one of those quick, jerking, all-embracing looks, as if his eyes could not wait to take in the room, he stopped dead still. Lena on the cot watched the white scar beside his mouth vanish completely, as if the ebb of blood behind it had snatched the scar in passing like a rag from a clothesline. She did not speak at all. She just lay there, propped on the pillows, watching him with her sober eyes in which there was nothing at all — joy, surprise, reproach, love — while over his face passed shock, astonishment, outrage, and then downright terror, each one mocking in turn at the telltale little white scar, while ceaselessly here and there about the empty room went his harried and desperate eyes. She watched him herd them by will, like two terrified beasts, and drive them up to meet her own. “Well, well,” he said. “Well, well, well. It’s Lena.” She watched him, holding his eyes up to hers like two beasts about to break, as if he knew that when they broke this time he would never catch them, turn them again, and that he himself would be lost. She could almost watch his mind casting this way and that, ceaseless, harried, terrified, seeking words which his voice, his tongue, could speak. “If it aint Lena. Yes, sir. So you got my message. Soon as I got here I sent you a message last month as soon as I got settled down and I thought it had got lost — It was a fellow I didn’t know what his name was but he said he would take — He didn’t look reliable but I had to trust him but I thought when I gave him the ten dollars for you to travel on that he . . .” His voice died somewhere behind his desperate eyes. Yet still she could watch his mind darting and darting as without pity, without anything at all, she watched him with her grave, unwinking, unbearable gaze, watched him fumble and flee and tack until at last all that remained in him of pride, of what sorry pride the desire for justification was, fled from him and left him naked. Then for the first time she spoke. Her voice was quiet, unruffled, cool.
“Come over here,” she said. “Come on. I aint going to let him bite you.” When he moved he approached on tiptoe. She saw that, though she was now no longer watching him. She knew that just as she knew that he was now standing with a kind of clumsy and diffident awe above her and the sleeping child. But she knew that it was not at and because of the child. She knew that in that sense he had not even seen the child. She could still see, feel, his mind darting and darting. He is going to make out like he was not afraid she thought. He will have no more shame than to lie about being afraid, just as he had no more shame than to be afraid because he lied
“Well, well,” he said. “So there it is, sho enough.”
“Yes,” she said. “Will you set down?” The chair which Hightower had drawn up was still beside the cot. He had already remarked it. She had it all ready for me he thought. Again he cursed, soundless, badgered, furious. Them bastards. Them bastards But his face was quite smooth when he sat down.
“Yes, sir. Here we are again. Same as I had planned it. I would have had it all fixed up ready for you, only I have been so busy lately. Which reminds me—” Again he made that abrupt, mulelike, backlooking movement of the head. She was not looking at him. She said:
“There is a preacher here. That has already come to see me.”
“That’s fine,” he said. His voice was loud, hearty. Yet the heartiness, like the timbre, seemed to be as impermanent as the sound of the words, vanishing, leaving nothing, not even a definitely stated thought in the ear or the belief. “That’s just fine. Soon as I get caught up with all this business—” He jerked his arm in a gesture vague, embracing, looking at her. His face was smooth and blank. His eyes were bland, alert, secret, yet behind them there lurked still that quality harried and desperate. But she was not looking at him.
“What kind of work are you doing now? At the planing mill?”
He watched her. “No. I quit that.” His eyes watched her. It was as though they were not his eyes, had no relation to the rest of him, what he did and what he said. “Slaving like a durn nigger ten hours a day. I got something on the string now that means money. Not no little piddling fifteen cents a hour. And when I get it, soon as I get a few little details cleared up, then you and me will . . .” Hard, intent, secret, the eyes watched her, her lowered face in profile. Again she heard that faint, abrupt sound as he jerked his head up and back. “And that reminds me—”
She had not moved. She said: “When will it be, Lucas?” Then she could hear, feel, utter stillness, utter silence.
“When will what be?”
“You know. Like you said. Back home. It was all right for just me. I never minded. But it’s different now. I reckon I got a right to worry now.”
“Oh, that,” he said. “That. Dont you worry about that. Just let me get this here business cleaned up and get my hands on that money. It’s mine by right. There cant nere a bastard one of them—” He stopped. His voice had begun to rise, as though he had for
got where he was and had been thinking aloud. He lowered it; he said: “You just leave it to me. Dont you worry none. I aint never give you no reason yet to worry, have I? Tell me that.”
“No. I never worried. I knowed I could depend on you.”
“Sho you knowed it. And these here bastards — these here—” He had risen from the chair. “Which reminds me—” She neither looked up nor spoke while he stood above her with those eyes harried, desperate, and importunate. It was as if she held him there and that she knew it. And that she released him by her own will, deliberately.
“I reckon you are right busy now, then.”
“For a fact, I am. With all I got to bother me, and them bastards—” She was looking at him now. She watched him as he looked at the window in the rear wall. Then he looked back at the closed door behind him. Then he looked at her, at her grave face which had either nothing in it, or everything, all knowledge. He lowered his voice. “I got enemies here. Folks that dont want me to get what I done earned. So I am going to—” Again it was as though she held him, forcing him to, trying him with, that final lie at which even his sorry dregs of pride revolted; held him neither with rods nor cords but with something against which his lying blew trivial as leaves or trash. But she said nothing at all. She just watched him as he went on tiptoe to the window and opened it without a sound. Then he looked at her. Perhaps he thought that he was safe then, that he could get out the window before she could touch him with a physical hand. Or perhaps it was some sorry tagend of shame, as a while ago it had been pride. Because he looked at her, stripped naked for the instant of verbiage and deceit. His voice was not much louder than a whisper: “It’s a man outside. In front, waiting for me.” Then he was gone, through the window, without a sound, in a single motion almost like a long snake. From beyond the window she heard a single faint sound as he began to run. Then only did she move, and then but to sigh once, profoundly.
“Now I got to get up again,” she said, aloud.
When Brown emerges from the woods, onto the railroad right-of-way, he is panting. It is not with fatigue, though the distance which he has covered in the last twenty minutes is almost two miles and the going was not smooth. Rather, it is the snarling and malevolent breathing of a fleeing animal: while he stands looking both ways along the empty track his face, his expression, is that of an animal fleeing alone, desiring no fellowaid, clinging to its solitary dependence upon its own muscles alone and which, in the pause to renew breath, hates every tree and grassblade in sight as if it were a live enemy, hates the very earth it rests upon and the very air it needs to renew breathing.
He has struck the railroad within a few hundred yards of the point at which he aimed. This is the crest of a grade where the northbound freights slow to a terrific and crawling gait of almost less than that of a walking man. A short distance ahead of him the twin bright threads appear to have been cut short off as though with scissors.
For a while he stands just within the screen of woods beside the right-of-way, still hidden. He stands like a man in brooding and desperate calculation, as if he sought in his mind for some last desperate cast in a game already lost. After standing for a moment longer in an attitude of listening, he turns and runs again, through the woods and paralleling the track. He seems to know exactly where he is going; he comes presently upon a path and follows it, still running, and emerges into a clearing in which a negro cabin sits. He approaches the front, walking now. On the porch an old negro woman is sitting, smoking a pipe, her head wrapped in a white cloth. Brown is not running, but he is breathing fast, heavily. He quiets it to speak. “Hi, Aunty,” he says, “who’s here?”
The old negress removes the pipe. “Ise here. Who wanter know?”
“I got to send a message back to town. In a hurry.” He holds his breathing down to talk. “I’ll pay. Aint there somebody here that can take it?”
“If it’s all that rush, you better tend to it yourself.”
“I’ll pay, I tell you!” he says. He speaks with a kind of raging patience, holding his voice, his breathing, down. “A dollar, if he just goes quick enough. Aint there somebody here that wants to make a dollar? Some of the boys?”
The old woman smokes, watching him. With an aged and inscrutable midnight face she seems to contemplate him with a detachment almost godlike but not at all benign. “A dollar cash?”
He makes a gesture indescribable, of hurry and leashed rage and something like despair. He is about to turn away when the negress speaks again. “Aint nobody here but me and the two little uns. I reckon they’d be too little for you.”
Brown turns back. “How little? I just want somebody that can take a note to the sheriff in a hurry and—”
“The sheriff? Then you come to the wrong place. I aint ghy have none of mine monkeying around no sheriff. I done had one nigger that thought he knowed a sheriff well enough to go and visit with him. He aint never come back, neither. You look somewhere else.”
But Brown is already moving away. He does not run at once. He has not yet thought about running again; for the moment he cannot think at all. His rage and impotence is now almost ecstatic. He seems to muse now upon a sort of timeless and beautiful infallibility in his unpredictable frustrations. As though somehow the very fact that he should be so consistently supplied with them elevates him somehow above the petty human hopes and desires which they abrogate and negative. Hence the negress has to shout twice at him before he hears and turns. She has said nothing, she has not moved: she merely shouted. She says, “Here one will take it for you.”
Standing beside the porch now, materialised apparently from thin air, is a negro who may be either a grown imbecile or a hulking youth. His face is black, still, also quite inscrutable. They stand looking at one another. Or rather, Brown looks at the negro. He cannot tell if the negro is looking at him or not. And that too seems somehow right and fine and in keeping: that his final hope and resort should be a beast that does not appear to have enough ratiocinative power to find the town, let alone any given individual in it. Again Brown makes an indescribable gesture. He is almost running now, back toward the porch, pawing at his shirt pocket. “I want you to take a note to town and bring me back an answer,” he says. “Can you do it?” But he does not listen for a reply. He has taken from his shirt a scrap of soiled paper and a chewed pencil stub, and bending over the edge of the porch, he writes, laborious and hurried, while the negress watches him:
Mr Wat Kenedy Dear sir please give barer My reward Money for captain Murder Xmas rapp it up in Paper 4 given it toe barer yrs truly
He does not sign it. He snatches it up, glaring at it, while the negress watches him. He glares at the dingy and innocent paper, at the labored and hurried pencilling in which he had succeeded for an instant in snaring his whole soul and life too. Then he claps it down and writes not Sined but All rigt You no who and folds it and gives it to the negro. “Take it to the sheriff. Not to nobody else. You reckon you can find him?”
“If the sheriff dont find him first,” the old negress says. “Give it to him. He’ll find him, if he is above ground. Git your dollar and go on, boy.”
The negro had started away. He stops. He just stands there, saying nothing, looking at nothing. On the porch the negress sits, smoking, looking down at the white man’s weak, wolflike face: a face handsome, plausible, but drawn now by a fatigue more than physical, into a spent and vulpine mask. “I thought you was in a hurry,” she says.
“Yes,” Brown says. He takes a coin from his pocket. “Here. And if you bring me back the answer to that inside of an hour. I’ll give you five more like it.”
“Git on, nigger,” the woman says. “You aint got all day. You want the answer brought back here?”
For a moment longer Brown looks at her. Then again caution, shame, all flees from him. “No. Not here. Bring it to the top of the grade yonder. Walk up the track until I call to you. I’ll be watching you all the time too. Dont you forget that. Do you hear?”
“You
needn’t to worry,” the negress says. “He’ll git there with it and git back with the answer, if dont nothing stop him. Git on, boy.”
The negro goes on. But something does stop him, before he has gone a half mile. It is another white man, leading a mule.
“Where?” Byron says. “Where did you see him?”
“Just now. Up yon at de house.” The white man goes on, leading the mule. The negro looks after him. He did not show the white man the note because the white man did not ask to see it. Perhaps the reason the white man did not ask to see the note was that the white man did not know that he had a note; perhaps the negro is thinking this, because for a while his face mirrors something terrific and subterraneous. Then it clears. He shouts. The white man turns, halting. “He aint dar now,” the negro shouts. “He say he gwine up ter de railroad grade to wait.”
“Much obliged,” the white man says. The negro goes on.
Brown returned to the track. He was not running now. He was saying to himself, ‘He wont do it. He cant do it. I know he cant find him, cant get it, bring it back.’ He called no names, thought no names. It seemed to him now that they were all just shapes like chessmen — the negro, the sheriff, the money, all — unpredictable and without reason moved here and there by an Opponent who could read his moves before he made them and who created spontaneous rules which he and not the Opponent, must follow. He was for the time being even beyond despair as he turned from the rails and entered the underbrush near the crest of the grade. He moved now without haste, gauging his distance as though there were nothing else in the world or in his life at least, save that. He chose his place and sat down, hidden from the track but where he himself could see it.
‘Only I know he wont do it,’ he thinks. ‘I dont even expect it. If I was to see him coming back with the money in his hand, I would not believe it. It wouldn’t be for me. I would know that. I would know that it was a mistake. I would say to him You go on. You are looking for somebody else beside me. You aint looking for Lucas Burch. No, sir, Lucas Burch dont deserve that money, that reward. He never done nothing to get it. No, sir’ He begins to laugh, squatting, motionless, his spent face bent, laughing. ‘Yes, sir. All Lucas Burch wanted was justice. Just justice. Not that he told them bastards the murderer’s name and where to find him only they wouldn’t try. They never tried because they would have had to give Lucas Burch the money. Justice.’ Then he says aloud, in a harsh, tearful voice: “Justice. That was all. Just my rights. And them bastards with their little tin stars, all sworn everyone of them on oath, to protect a American citizen.” He says it harshly, almost crying with rage and despair and fatigue: “I be dog if it aint enough to make a man turn downright bowlsheyvick.” Thus he hears no sound at all until Byron speaks directly behind him:
Complete Works of William Faulkner Page 166
