Light In August Part 11

"Go and see," the sheriff said.

The deputy went and returned.

"It's a woman. A young woman. And she's all fixed up to live there a good spell, it looks like. And Byron Bunch is camped in a tent about as far from the cabin as from here to the post-office."

"Byron Bunch?" the sheriff says. "Who is the woman?" "I don't know. She is a stranger. A young woman. She told me all about it. She begun telling me almost before I got inside the cabin, like it was a speech. Like she had done got used to telling it, done got into the habit. And I reckon she has, coming here from over in Alabama somewhere, looking for her husband. He had done come on ahead of her to find work, it seems like, and after a while she started out after him and folks told her on the road that he was here. And about that time Byron come in and he said he could tell me about it. Said he aimed to tell you."

"Byron Bunch," the sheriff says.

"Yes," the deputy says. He says: "She's fixing to have a kid. It ain't going to be long, neither."

"A kid?" the sheriff says. He looks at the deputy. "And from Alabama. From anywhere. You can't tell me that about Byron Bunch."

"No more am I trying to," the deputy says. "I ain't saying it's Byron's. Leastways, Byron ain't saying it's his. I'm just telling you what he told me."

"Oh," the sheriff says. "I see. Why she is out there. So it's one of them fellows. It's Christmas, is it?"

"No. This is what Byron told me. He took me outside and told me, where she couldn't hear. He said he aimed to come and tell you. It's Brown's. Only his name ain't Brown. It's Lucas Burch. Byron told me. About how Brown or Burch left her over in Alabama. Told her he was just coming to find work and fix up a home and then send for her. But her time come nigh and she hadn't heard from him, where he was at or anything, so she just decided to not wait any longer. She started out afoot, asking along the road if anybody knowed a fellow named Lucas Burch, getting a ride here and there, asking everybody she met if they knew him. And so after a while somebody told her how there was a fellow named Burch or Bunch or something working at the planing mill in Jefferson, and she come on here. She got here Sat.u.r.day, on a wagon, while we were all out at the murder, and she come out to the mill and found it was Bunch instead of Burch. And Byron said he told her that her husband was in Jefferson before he knew it. And then he said she had him pinned down and he had to tell her where Brown lived. But he ain't told her that Brown or Burch is mixed up with Christmas in this killing. He just told her that Brown was away on business. And I reckon you can call it business. Work, anyway. I never saw a man want a thousand dollars badder and suffer more to get it, than him. And so she said that Brown's house was bound to be the one that Lucas Burch had promised to get ready for her to live in, and so she moved out to wait until Brown come back from this here business he is away on. Byron said he couldn't stop her because he didn't want to tell her the truth about Brown after he had already lied to her in a way of speaking. He said he aimed to come and tell you about it before now, only you found it out too quick, before he had got her settled down good."

"Lucas Burch?" the sheriff says.

"I was some surprised, myself," the deputy says. "What do you aim to do about it?"'

"Nothing," the sheriff says. "I reckon they won't do no harm out there And it ain't none of my house to tell her to get out of it. And like Byron told her, Burch or Brown or whatever his name is, is going to be right busy for a while longer yet."

"Do you aim to tell Brown about her?"

"I reckon not," the sheriff says. "It ain't any of my business. I ain't interested in the wives he left in Alabama, or anywhere else. What I am interested in is the husband he seems to have had since he come to Jefferson."

The deputy guffaws. "I reckon that's a fact," he says. He sobers, muses. "If he don't get that thousand dollars, I reckon he will just die."

"I reckon he won't," the sheriff says.

At three o'clock Wednesday morning a negro rode into town on a saddleless mule. He went to the sheriff's home and waked him. He had come direct from a negro church twenty miles away, where a revival meeting was in nightly progress. On the evening before, in the middle of a hymn, there had come a tremendous noise from the rear of the church, and turning the congregation saw a man standing in the door. The door had not been locked or even shut yet the man had apparently grasped it by the k.n.o.b and hurled it back into the wall so that the sound crashed into the blended voices like a pistol shot. Then the man came swiftly up the aisle, where the singing had stopped short off, toward the pulpit where the preacher leaned, his hands still raised, his mouth still open. Then they saw that the man was white: In the thick, cavelike gloom which the two oil lamps but served to increase, they could not tell at once what he was until he was halfway up the aisle. Then they saw that his face was not black, and a woman began to shriek, and people in the rear sprang up and began to run toward the door; and another woman on the mourners' bench, already in a semihysterical state, sprang up and whirled and glared at him for an instant with white rolling eyes and screamed, "It's the devil! It's Satan himself!" Then she ran, quite blind. She ran straight toward him and he knocked her down without stopping and stepped over her and went on, with the faces gaped for screaming falling away before him, straight to the pulpit and put his hand on the minister.

"Wasn't n.o.body bothering him, even then," the messenger said. "It was all happening so fast, and n.o.body knowed him, who he was or what he wanted or nothing. And the women hollering and screeching and him done retch into the pulpit and caught Brother Bedenberry by the throat, trying to s.n.a.t.c.h him outen the pulpit. We could see Brother Bedenberry talking to him, trying to pacify him quiet, and him jerking at Brother Bedenberry and slapping his face with his hand. And the womenfolks screeching and hollering so you couldn't hear what Brother Bedenberry was saying, cep he never tried to hit back nor nothing, and then some of the old men, the deacons, went up to him and tried to talk to him and he let Brother Bedenberry go and he whirled and he knocked seventy year old Pappy Thompson clean down into the mourners' pew and then he retch down and caught up a chair and whirled and made a pa.s.s at the others until they give back. And the folks still yelling and screeching and trying to get out. Then he turned and clumb into the pulpit, where Brother Bedenberry had done clumb out the other side, and he stood there-he was all muddy, his pants and his s.h.i.+rt, and his jaw black with whiskers-with his hands raised like a preacher. And he begun to curse, hollering it out, at the folks, and he cursed G.o.d louder than the women screeching, and some of the men trying to hold Roz Thompson, Pappy Thompson's daughter's boy, that was six foot tall and had a razor nekkid in his hand, hollering, 'I'll kill him. Lemme go, folks. He hit my grandpappy. I'll kill him. Lemme go. Please lemme go,' and the folks trying to get out, rus.h.i.+ng and trompling in the aisle and through the door, and him in the pulpit cursing G.o.d and the men dragging Roz Thompson out backwards and Roz still begging them to let him go. But they got Roz out and we went back into the bushes and him still hollering and cursing back there in the pulpit. Then he quit after a while and we seed him come to the door and stand there. And they had to hold Roz again. He must have heard. the racket they made holding Roz, because he begun to laugh. He stood there in the door, with the light behind him, laughing loud, and then he begun to curse again and we could see him s.n.a.t.c.h up a bench leg and swing it back. And we heard the first lamp bust, and it got dim in the church, and then we heard the other lamp bust and then it was dark and we couldn't see him no. more. And where they was trying to hold Roz a terrible racket set up, with them hollerwhispering, 'Hold him! Hold him! Ketch him! Ketch him!' Then somebody hollered, 'He's done got loose,' and we could hear Roz running back toward the church and Deacon Vines says to me, 'Roz will kill him. Jump on a mule and ride for the sheriff. Tell him just what you seen.' And wasn't n.o.body bothering him, captain," the negro said. "We never even knowed him to call his name. Never even seed him before. And we tried to hold Roz back. But Roz a big man, and him done knocked down Roz' seventy year old grandpappy and Roz with that nekkid razor in his hand, not caring much who else he had to cut to carve his path back to the church where that white man was. But 'fore G.o.d we tried to hold Roz."

That was what he told, because that was what he knew. He had departed immediately: he did not know that at the time he was telling it, the negro Roz was lying unconscious in a neighboring cabin, with his skull fractured where Christmas, just inside the now dark door, had struck him with the bench leg when Roz plunged into the church. Christmas struck just once, hard, savagely, at the sound of running feet, the thick shape which rushed headlong through the doorway, and heard it without pause plunge on cras.h.i.+ng among the overturned benches and become still. Also without pausing Christmas sprang out and to the earth, where he stood lightly poised, still grasping the bench leg, cool, not even breathing hard. He was quite cool, no sweat; the darkness cool upon him. The churchyard was a pallid crescent of trampled and beaten earth, shaped and enclosed by undergrowth and trees. He knew that the undergrowth was full of negroes: he could feel the eyes. 'Looking and looking,' he thought. 'Don't even know they can't see me.' He breathed deeply; he found that he was hefting the bench leg, curiously, as though trying its balance, as if he had never touched it before. 'I'll cut a notch in it tomorrow,' he thought. He leaned the leg carefully against the wall beside him and took from his s.h.i.+rt a cigarette and a match. As he struck the match he paused, and with the yellow flame spurting punily into life he stood, his head turned a little. It was hooves which he heard. He heard them come alive and grow swift, diminis.h.i.+ng. "A mule," he said aloud, not loud. "Bound for town with the good news." He lit the cigarette and flipped the match away and he stood there, smoking, feeling the negro eyes upon the tiny living coal. Though he stood there until the cigarette was smoked down, he was quite alert. He had set his back against the "wall and he held the bench leg in his right hand again. He smoked the cigarette completely down, then he flipped it, twinkling, as far as he could toward the undergrowth where he could feel the negroes crouching. "Have a b.u.t.t, boys," he said, his voice sudden and loud in the silence. In the undergrowth where they crouched they watched the cigarette twinkle toward the earth and glow there for a time. But they could not see him when he departed, nor which way he went.

At eight o'clock the next morning the sheriff arrived, with his posse and the bloodhounds. They made one capture immediately, though the dogs had nothing to do with it. The church was deserted; there was not a negro in sight. The posse entered the church and looked quietly about at the wreckage. Then they emerged. The dogs had struck something immediately, but before they set out a deputy found, wedged into a split plank on the side of the church, a sc.r.a.p of paper. It had been obviously put there by the hand of man, and opened, it proved to be an empty cigarette container torn open and spread smooth, and on the white inner side was a pencilled message. It was raggedly written, as though by an unpractised hand or perhaps in the dark, and it was not long. It was addressed to the sheriff by name and it was unprintable-a single phrase-and it was unsigned. "Didn't I tell you?" one of the party said. He was unshaven too and muddy, like the quarry which they had not yet even seen, and his face looked strained and a little mad, with frustration, outrage, and his voice was hoa.r.s.e, as though he had been doing a good deal of unheeded shouting or talking recently. "I told you all the time! I told you!"

"Told me what?" the sheriff said, in a cold, level voice, bearing upon the other a gaze cold and level, the pencilled message in his hand. "What did you tell me when?" The other looked at the sheriff, outraged, desperate, frayed almost to endurance's limit; looking at him, the deputy thought, 'If he don't get that reward, he will just die.' His mouth was open though voiceless as he glared at the sheriff with a kind of bated and unbelieving amaze. "And I done told you, too," the sheriff said, in his bleak, quiet voice, "if you don't like the way I am running this, you can wait back in town. There's a good place there for you to wait in. Cool, where you won't stay so heated up like out here in the sun. Ain't I told you, now? Talk up."

The other closed his mouth. He looked away, as though with a tremendous effort; as though with a tremendous effort he said "Yes" in a dry, suffocated voice.

The sheriff turned heavily, crumpling the message. "You try to keep that from slipping your mind again, then," he said. "If you got any mind to even slip on you." They were ringed about with quiet, interested faces in the early sunlight. "About which I got the Lord's own doubts, if you or anybody else wants to know." Some one guffawed, once. "Shet up that noise," the sheriff said. "Let's get going. Get them dogs started, Bufe."

The dogs were cast, still on leash. They struck immediately. The trail was good, easily followed because of the dew. The fugitive had apparently made no effort whatever to hide it. They could even see the prints of his knees and hands where he had knelt to drink from a spring. "I never yet knew a murderer that had more sense than that about the folks that would chase him," the deputy said. "But this durn fool don't even suspect that we might use dogs."

"We been putting dogs on him once a day ever since Sunday," the sheriff said. "And we ain't caught him yet."

"Them were cold trails. We ain't had a good hot trail until today. But he's made his mistake at last. We'll get him today. Before noon, maybe."

"I'll wait and see, I reckon," the sheriff said.

"You'll see," the deputy said. "This trail is running straight as a railroad. I could follow it, myself almost. Look here. You can even see his footprints. The durn fool ain't even got enough sense to get into the road, in the dust, where other folks have walked and where the dogs can't scent him. Them dogs will find the end of them footprints before ten o'clock."

Which the dogs did. Presently the trail bent sharply at right angles. They followed it and came onto a road, which they followed behind the lowheaded and eager dogs who, after a short distance, swung to the roadside where a path came down from a cotton house in a nearby field. They began to bay, milling, tugging, their voices loud, mellow, ringing; whining and surging with excitement. "Why, the durn fool!" the deputy said. "He set down here and rested: here's his footmarks: them same rubber heels. He ain't a mile ahead right now! Come on, boys!" They went on, the leashes taut, the dogs baying, the men moving now at a trot. The sheriff turned to the unshaven man.

"Now's your chance to run ahead and catch him and get that thousand dollars," he said. "Why don't you do it?"

The man did not answer; none of them had much breath for talking, particularly when after about a mile the dogs, still straining and baying, turned from the road and followed a path which went quartering up a hill and into a corn field. Here they stopped baying, but if anything their eagerness seemed to increase; the men were running now. Beyond the headtall corn was a negro cabin. "He's in there," the sheriff said, drawing his pistol. "Watch yourselves now, boys. He'll have a gun now."

It was done with finesse and skill: the house surrounded by concealed men with drawn pistols, and the sheriff, followed by the deputy, getting himself for all his bulk swiftly and smartly flat against the cabin wall, out of range of any window. Still flat to the wall he ran around the corner and kicked open the door and sprang, pistol first, into the cabin. It contained a negro child. The child was stark naked and it sat in the cold ashes on the hearth, eating something. It was apparently alone, though an instant later a woman appeared in an inner door, her mouth open, in the act of dropping an iron skillet. She was wearing a pair of man's shoes, which a member of the posse identified as having belonged to the fugitive. She told them about the white man on the road about daylight and how he had swapped shoes with her, taking in exchange a pair of her husband's brogans which she was wearing at the time. The sheriff listened. "That happened right by a cotton house, didn't it?" he said. She told him Yes. He returned to his men, to the leashed and eager dogs. He looked down at the dogs while the men asked questions and then ceased, watching him. They watched him put the pistol back into his pocket and then turn and kick the dogs, once each, heavily. "Get them durn eggsuckers on back to town," he said.

But the sheriff was a good officer. He knew as well as his men that he would return to the cotton house, where he believed that Christmas had been hidden all the while, though. he knew now that Christmas would not be there when they returned. They had some trouble getting the dogs away from the cabin, so that it was in the hot brilliance of ten o'clock that they surrounded the cotton house carefully and skillfully and quietly and surprised it with pistols, quite by the rules and without any particular hope; and found one astonished and terrified field rat. Nevertheless the sheriff had the dogs-they had refused to approach the cotton house at all; they refused to leave the road, leaning and straining against the collars with simultaneous and reverted heads pointed back down the road toward the cabin from which they had been recently dragged away-brought up. It took two men by main strength to fetch them up, where as soon as the leashes were slacked, they sprang as one and rushed around the cotton house and through the very marks which the fugitive's legs had left in the tall and still dewed weeds in the house's shadow, and rushed leaping and straining back toward the road, dragging the two men for fifty yards before they succeeded in pa.s.sing the leashes about a sapling and snubbing the dogs up. This time the sheriff did not even kick them.

At last the noise and the alarms, the sound and fury of the hunt, dies away, dies out of his hearing. He was not in the cotton house when the man and the dogs pa.s.sed, as the sheriff believed. He paused there only long enough to lace up the brogans: the black shoes, the black shoes smelling of negro. They looked like they had been chopped out of iron ore with a dull axe. Looking down at the harsh, crude, clumsy shapelessness of them, he said "Hah" through his teeth. It seemed to him that he could see himself being hunted by white men at last into the black abyss which had been waiting, trying, for thirty years to drown him and into which now and at last he had actually entered, bearing now upon his ankles the definite and ineradicable gauge of its upward moving.

It is just dawn, daylight: that gray and lonely suspension filled with the peaceful and tentative waking of birds. The air, inbreathed, is like spring water. He breathes deep and slow, feeling with each breath himself diffuse in the neutral grayness, becoming one with loneliness and quiet that has never known fury or despair. 'That was all I wanted,' he thinks in a quiet and slow amazement. 'That was all, for thirty years. That didn't seem to be a whole lot to ask in thirty years.'

He has not slept very much since Wednesday, and now Wednesday has come and gone again, though he does not know it. When he thinks about time, it seems to him now that for thirty years he has lived inside an orderly parade of named and numbered days like fence pickets, and that one night he went to sleep and when he waked up he was outside of them. For a time after he fled on that Friday night he tried to keep up with the days, after the old habit. Once, after lying all night in a haystack, he was awake in time to watch the farm house wake. He saw before daylight a lamp come yellowly alive in the kitchen, and then in the gray yetdark he heard the slow, clapping sound of an axe, and movement, manmovement, among the waking cattle sounds in the nearby barn. Then he could smell smoke, and food, the hot fierce food, and he began to say over and over to himself I have not eaten since I have not eaten since trying to remember how many days it had been since Friday in Jefferson, in the restaurant where he had eaten his supper, until after a while, in the lying still with waiting until the men should have eaten and gone to the field, the name of the day, of the week seemed more important than the food. Because when the men were gone at last and he descended, emerged, into the level, jonquilcolored sun and went to the kitchen door, he didn't ask for food at all. He had intended to. He could feel the harsh words marshaling in his mind, just behind his mouth. And then the gaunt, leatherhard woman come to the door and looked at him and he could see shock and recognition and fear in her eyes and while he was thinking She knows me. She has got the word too he heard his mouth saying quietly: "Can you tell me what day this is? I just want to know what day this is."

"What day it is?" Her face was gaunt as his, her body as gaunt and as tireless and as driven. She said: "You get away from here! It's Tuesday! You get away from here! I'll call my man!"

He said, "Thank you," quietly as the door banged. Then he was running. He did not remember starting to run. He thought for a while that he ran because of and toward some destination that the running had suddenly remembered and hence his mind did not need to bother to remember why he was running, since the running was not difficult. It was quite easy, in fact. He felt quite light, weightless. Even in full stride his feet seemed to stray slowly and lightly and at deliberate random across an earth without solidity, until he fell. Nothing tripped him. He just fell full length, believing for a while that he was still on his feet and still running. But he was down, lying on his face in a shallow ditch at the edge of a plowed field. Then he said suddenly, "I reckon I better get up." When he sat up he found that the sun, halfway up the sky, now shone upon him from the opposite direction. At first he believed that he was merely turned around. Then he realised that it was now evening. That it was morning when he fell running and that, though it seemed to him that he had sat up at once, it was now evening. 'I have been asleep,' he thought. 'I have slept more than six hours. I must have gone to sleep running without knowing it. That is what I did.'

He felt no surprise. Time, the s.p.a.ces of light and dark, had long since lost orderliness. It would be either one now, seemingly at an instant, between two movements of the eyelids, without warning. He could never know when he would pa.s.s from one to the other, when he would find that he had been asleep without remembering having lain down, or find himself walking without remembering having waked. Sometimes it would seem to him that a night of sleep, in hay, in a ditch, beneath an abandoned roof, would be followed immediately by another night without interval of day, without light between to see to flee by; that a day would be followed by another day filled with fleeing and urgency, without any night between or any interval for rest, as if the sun had not set but instead had turned in the sky before reaching the horizon and retraced its way. When he went to sleep walking or even kneeling in the act of drinking from a spring, he could never know if his eyes would open next upon sunlight or upon stars.

For a while he had been hungry all the time. He gathered and ate rotting and wormriddled fruit; now and then he crept into fields and dragged down and gnawed ripened ears of corn as hard as potato graters. He thought of eating all the time, imagining dishes, food. He would think of that meal set for him on the kitchen table three years ago and he would live again through the steady and deliberate backswinging of his arm as he hurled the dishes into the wall, with a kind of writhing and excruciating agony of regret and remorse and rage. Then one day he was no longer hungry. It came sudden and peaceful. He felt cool, quiet. Yet he knew that he had to eat. He would make himself eat the rotten fruit, the hard corn, chewing it slowly, tasting nothing. He would eat enormous quant.i.ties of it, with resultant crises of bleeding flux. Yet immediately afterward he would be obsessed anew with the need and the urge to eat. It was not with food that he was obsessed now, but with the necessity to eat. He would try to remember when he had eaten last of cooked, of decent food. He could feel, remember, somewhere a house, a cabin. House or cabin, white or black: he could not remember which. Then, as he sat quite still, with on his gaunt, sick, stubbled an expression of rapt bemus.e.m.e.nt, he smelled negro. Motionless (he was sitting against a tree beside a spring, is head back, his hands upon his lap, his face worn and peaceful) he smelled and saw negro dishes, negro food. "It was in a room. He did not remember how he got there. But the room was filled with flight and abrupt consternation, as though people had fled it recently and suddenly and in fear. He was sitting at a table, waiting, thinking of nothing in an emptiness, a silence filled with flight. Then there was food before him, appearing suddenly between long, limber black hands fleeing too in the act of setting down the dishes. It seemed to him that he could hear without hearing them wails of terror and distress quieter than sighs all about him, with the sound of the chewing and the swallowing. 'It was a cabin that time,' he thought. 'And they were afraid. Of their brother afraid.'

That night a strange thing came into his mind. He lay ready for sleep, without sleeping, without seeming to need the sleep, as he would place his stomach acquiescent for food which it did not seem to desire or need. It was strange in the sense that he could discover neither derivation nor motivation nor explanation for it. He found that he was trying to calculate the day of the week. It was as though now and at last he had an actual and urgent need to strike off the accomplished days toward some purpose, some definite day or act, without either falling short or overshooting. He entered the coma state which sleeping had now become with the need in his mind. When he waked in the dewgray of dawn, it was so crystallised that the need did not seem strange anymore.

It is just dawn, daylight. He rises and descends to the spring and takes from his pocket the razor, the brush, the soap. But it is still too dim to see his face clearly in the water, so he sits beside the spring and waits until he can see better. Then he lathers his face with the hard, cold water, patiently. His hand trembles, despite the urgency he feels a la.s.situde so that he must drive himself. The razor is dull; he tries to whet it upon the side of one brogan, but the leather is ironhard and wet with dew. He shaves, after a fas.h.i.+on. His hand trembles; it is not a very good job, and he cuts himself three or four times, stanching the blood with the cold water until it stops. He puts the shaving tools away and begins to walk. He follows a straight line, disregarding the easier walking of the ridges. After a short distance he comes out upon a road and sits down beside it. It is a quiet road, appearing and vanis.h.i.+ng quietly, the pale dust marked only by narrow and infrequent wheels and by the hooves of horses and mules and now and then by the print of human feet. He sits beside it, coatless, the once white s.h.i.+rt and the once creased trousers muddy and stained, his gaunt face blotched with patches of stubble and with dried blood, shaking slowly with weariness and cold as the sun rises and warms him. After a time two negro children appear around the curve, approaching. They do not see him until he speaks; they halt, dead, looking at him with whiterolling eyes. "What day of the week is it?" he repeats. They say nothing at all, staring at him. He moves his head a little. "Go on," he says. They go on. He does not watch them. He sits, apparently musing upon the place where they had stood, as though to him they had in moving merely walked out of two sh.e.l.ls. He does not see that they are running.

Then, sitting there, the sun warming him slowly, he goes to sleep without knowing it, because the next thing of which he is conscious is a terrific clatter of jangling and rattling wood and metal and trotting hooves. He opens his eyes in time to see the wagon whirl slewing around the curve beyond and so out of sight, its occupants looking back at him over their shoulders, the whiphand of the driver rising and falling. 'They recognised me too,' he thinks. 'Them, and that white woman. And the negroes where I ate that day. Any of them could have captured me, if that's what they want. Since that's what they all want: for me to be captured. But they all run first. They all want me to be captured, and then when I come up ready to say Here I am Yes I would say Here I am I am tired I am tired of running of having to carry my life like it was a basket of eggs they all run away. Like there is a rule to catch me by, and to capture me that way would not be like the rule says.'

So he moves back into the bushes. This time he is alert and he hears the wagon before it comes into sight. He does not show himself until the wagon is abreast of him. Then he steps forth and says, "Hey." The wagon stops, jerked up. The negro driver's head jerks also; into his face also comes the astonishment, then the recognition and the terror. "What day is this?" Christmas says.

The negro glares at him, slackjawed. "W-what you say?"

"What day of the week is this? Thursday? Friday? What? What day? I am not going to hurt you."

"It's Friday," the negro says. "O Lawd G.o.d, it's Friday."

"Friday," Christmas says. Again he jerks his head. "Get on." The whip falls, the mules surge forward. This wagon too whirls from sight at a dead run, the whip rising and falling. But Christmas has already turned and entered the woods again.

Again his direction is straight as a surveyor's line, disregarding hill and valley and bog. Yet he is not hurrying. He is like a man who knows where he is and where he wants to go and how much time to the exact minute he has to get there in. It is as though he desires to see his native earth in all its phases for the first or the last time. He had grown to manhood in the country, where like the unswimming sailor his physical shape and his thought had been molded by its compulsions without his learning anything about its actual shape and feel. For a week now he has lurked and crept among its secret places, yet he remained a foreigner to the very immutable laws which earth must obey. For some time as he walks steadily on, he thinks that this is what it is-the looking and seeing-which gives him peace and unhaste and quiet, until suddenly the true answer comes to him. He feels dry and light. 'I don't have to bother about having to eat anymore,' he thinks. 'That's what it is.'

By noon he has walked eight miles. He comes now to a broad gravelled road, a highway. This time the wagon stops quietly at his raised hand. On the face of the negro youth who drives it there is neither astonishment nor recognition. "Where does this road go?" Christmas says.

"Mottstown. Whar I gwine."

"Mottstown. You going to Jefferson too?"

The youth rubs his head. "Don't know whar that is. I gwine to Mottstown."

"Oh," Christmas says. "I see. You don't live around here, then."

"Naw, sir. I stays two counties back yonder. Been on the road three days. I gwine to Mottstown to get a yellin calf pappy bought. You wanter go to Mottstown?"

"Yes," Christmas says. He mounts to the seat beside the youth. The wagon moves on. 'Mottstown,' he thinks. Jefferson is only twenty miles away. 'Now I can let go for a while,' he thinks. 'I haven't let go for seven days, so I guess I'll let go for a while.' He thinks that perhaps, sitting, with the wagon's motion to lull him, he will sleep. But he does not sleep. He is not sleepy or hungry or even tired. He is somewhere between and among them, suspended, swaying to the motion of the wagon without thought, without feeling. He has lost account of time and distance; perhaps it is an hour later, perhaps three. The youth says: "Mottstown. Dar tis."

Looking, he can see the smoke low on the sky, beyond an imperceptible corner; he is entering it again, the street which ran for thirty years. It had been a paved street, where going should be fast. It had made a circle and he is still inside of it. Though during the last seven days he has had no paved street, yet he has travelled further than in all the thirty years before. And yet he is still inside the circle. 'And yet I have been further in these seven days than in all the thirty years,' he thinks. 'But I have never got outside that circle. I have never broken out of the ring of what I have already done and cannot ever undo,' he thinks quietly, sitting on the seat, with planted on the dashboard before him the shoes, the black shoes smelling of negro: that mark on his ankles the gauge definite and ineradicable of the black tide creeping up his legs, moving from his feet upward as death moves.

Chapter 15.

On that Friday when Christmas was captured in Mottstown, there lived in the town an old couple named Hines. They were quite old. They lived in a small bungalow in a neighborhood of negroes; how, upon what, the town in general did not know since they appeared to live in filthy poverty and complete idleness, Hines, as far as the town knew, not having done any work, steady work, in twenty-five years.

They came to Mottstown thirty years ago. One day the town found the woman established in the small house where they had lived ever since, though for the next five years Hines was at home only once a month, over the weekend. Soon it became known that he held some kind of a position in Memphis. Exactly what, was not known, since even at that time he was a secret man who could have been either thirty-five or fifty, with something in his glance coldly and violently fanatical and a little crazed, precluding questioning, curiosity. The town looked upon them both as being a little touched-lonely, gray in color, a little smaller than most other men and women, as if they belonged to a different race, species-even though for the next five or six years after the man appeared to have come to Mottstown to settle down for good in the small house where his wife lived, people hired him to do various odd jobs which they considered within his strength. But in time he stopped this, too, The town wondered for a while, how they would live now, then it forgot to speculate about this just as later when the town learned that Hines went on foot about the county, holding revival services in negro churches, and that now and then negro women carrying what were obviously dishes of food would be seen entering from the rear the house where the couple lived, and emerging emptyhanded, it wondered about this for a time and then forgot it. In time the town either forgot or condoned, because Hines was an old man and harmless, that which in a young man it would have crucified. It just said, "They are crazy; crazy on the subject of negroes. Maybe they are Yankees," and let it go at that. Or perhaps what it condoned was not the man's selfdedication to the saving of negro souls, but the public ignoring of the fact of that charity which they received from negro hands, since it is a happy faculty of the mind to slough that which conscience refuses to a.s.similate.

So for twenty-five years the old couple had had no visible means of support, the town blinding its collective eye to the negro women and the covered dishes and pans, particularly as some of the dishes and pans had in all likelihood been borne intact from white kitchens where the women cooked. Perhaps this was a part of the mind's sloughing. Anyway the town did not look, and for twenty-five years now the couple had lived in the slack backwater of their lonely isolation, as though they had been two muskoxen strayed from the north pole, or two homeless and belated beasts from beyond the glacial period.

The woman was hardly ever seen at all, though the man-he was known as Uncle Doc-was a fixture about the square: a dirty little old man with a face which had once been either courageous, or violent-either a visionary or a supreme egoist-collarless, in dirty blue jean clothes and with a heavy piece of handpeeled hickory worn about the grip dark as walnut and smooth as gla.s.s. At first, while he held the Memphis position, on his monthly visits he had talked a little about himself, with a selfconfidence not alone of the independent man, but with a further quality, as though at one time in his life he had been better than independent, and that not long ago. There was nothing beaten about him. It was rather that confidence of a man who has had the controlling of lesser men and who had voluntarily and for a reason which he believed that no other man could question or comprehend, changed his life. But what he told about himself and his present occupation did not make sense, for all its apparent coherence. So they believed that he was a little crazy, even then. It was not that he seemed to be trying to conceal one thing by telling another. It was that his words, his telling, just did not synchronise with what his hearers believed would (and must) be the scope of a single individual. Sometimes they decided that he had once been a minister. Then he would talk about Memphis, the city, in a vague and splendid way, as though all his life he had been inc.u.mbent there of some important though still nameless munic.i.p.al office. "Sure," the men in Mottstown said behind his back; "he was railroad superintendent there. Standing in the middle of the street crossing with a red flag every time a train pa.s.sed," or "He's a big newspaperman. Gathers up the papers from under the park benches." They did not say this to his face, not the boldest among them, not the ones with the most precariously nourished reputations for wit.

Then he lost the Memphis job, or quit it. One weekend he came home, and when Monday came he did not go away. After that he was downtown all day long, about the square, untalkative, dirty, with that furious and preclusive expression about the eyes which the people took for insanity: that quality of outworn violence like a scent, an odor; that fanaticism like a fading and almost extinct ember, of some kind of twofisted evangelism which had been one quarter violent conviction and three quarters physical hardihood. So they were not so surprised when they learned that he was going about the county, usually on foot, preaching in negro churches; not even when a year later they learned what his subject was. That this white man who very nearly depended on the bounty and charity of negroes for sustenance was going singlehanded into remote negro churches and interrupting the service to enter the pulpit and in his harsh, dead voice and at times with violent obscenity, preach to them humility before all skins lighter than theirs, preaching the superiority of the white race, himself his own exhibit A, in fanatic and unconscious paradox. The negroes believed that he was crazy, touched by G.o.d, or having once touched Him. They probably did not listen to, could not understand much of, what he said. Perhaps they took him to be G.o.d Himself, since G.o.d to them was a white man too and His doings also a little inexplicable.

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 n.i.g.g.e.r 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 can't 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 thres.h.i.+ng 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 b.a.s.t.a.r.d!" 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 n.i.g.g.e.r 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 n.i.g.g.e.r 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 b.l.o.o.d.y him up some, catching him. Young fellow. He don't look no more like a n.i.g.g.e.r 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 n.i.g.g.e.r. 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 ain't too long about it." He s.h.i.+fted 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. "Well 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 n.i.g.g.e.r, 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 n.i.g.g.e.r. Christmas."

"Come on." They returned to the car. "What do you think about that durn fellow, coming right into town here, within twenty 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 ranklyodored 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 ain't worried you before. In thirty years I ain't 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 thereabout the town, dying and borning 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 supper tables 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 s.h.i.+rts and decorated suspenders, with peaceful pipes about country churches or about the 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 don't look any more like a n.i.g.g.e.r than I do. But it must have been the n.i.g.g.e.r 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 n.i.g.g.e.r 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 Sat.u.r.day 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 s.h.i.+rt 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 pa.s.sing him a dozen times and not knowing it, until Halliday saw him and ran up and grabbed him and said, 'Ain't your name Christmas?' and the n.i.g.g.e.r said that it was. He never denied it. He never did anything. He never acted like either a n.i.g.g.e.r 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 n.i.g.g.e.r too.

"And so Halliday (he was excited, thinking about that thousand dollars, and he had already hit the n.i.g.g.e.r a couple of times in the face, and the n.i.g.g.e.r acting like a n.i.g.g.e.r 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 n.i.g.g.e.r with his walking stick until at last two men had to hold Uncle Doc quiet and took him home in a car. n.o.body knew if he really did know the n.i.g.g.e.r 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 n.i.g.g.e.r 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 s...o...b..ring 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 n.i.g.g.e.r 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 pa.s.s, calling them cowards because they wouldn't take the n.i.g.g.e.r 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 n.i.g.g.e.r. 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 n.i.g.g.e.r should live or should die. And folks were beginning to think that maybe the place for him was in the jail with the n.i.g.g.e.r, 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 n.i.g.g.e.rtown 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, s...o...b..ring. 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. Don't 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 s...o...b..r still running out of his mouth, onto his s.h.i.+rt.

"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 n.i.g.g.e.r. 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 ain't going to bother him,' she said. 'I just want to look at him.'