Intruder in the Dust (11 page)

‘Going where with you?’ Aleck Sander said. And he told him, harsh and bald, in four words:

‘Dig up Vinson Gowrie.’ Aleck Sander didn’t move,
still looking past and over his head toward the Square. ‘Lucas said it wasn’t his gun that killed him.’

Still not moving Aleck Sander began to laugh, not loud and with no mirth: just laughing; he said exactly what his uncle had said hardly a minute ago: ‘So would I,’ Aleck Sander said. He said: ‘Me? Go out there and dig that dead white man up? Is Mr Gavin already in the office or do I just sit there until he comes?’

‘Lucas is going to pay you,’ he said. ‘He told me that even before he told me what it was.’

Aleck Sander laughed, without mirth or scorn or anything else: with no more in the sound of it than there is anything in the sound of breathing but just breathing. ‘I aint rich,’ he said. ‘I dont need money.’

‘At least you’ll saddle Highboy while I hunt for a flashlight, wont you?’ he said. ‘You’re not too proud about Lucas to do that, are you?’

‘Certainly,’ Aleck Sander said, turning.

‘And get the pick and shovel. And the long tie-rope. I’ll need that too.’

‘Certainly,’ Aleck Sander said. He paused, half turned. ‘How you going to tote a pick and shovel both on Highboy when he dont even like to see a riding switch in your hand?’

‘I dont know,’ he said and Aleck Sander went on and he turned back toward the house and at first he thought it was his uncle coming rapidly around the house from the front, not because he believed that his uncle might have suspected and anticipated what he was about because he did not, his uncle had dismissed that too immediately and thoroughly not only from conception but from possibility too, but because he no longer remembered anyone else available for it to have been and even after he saw it was a woman he assumed it was his mother, even after
he should have recognised the hat, right up to the instant when Miss Habersham called his name and his first impulse was to step quickly and quietly around the corner of the garage, from where he could reach the lot fence still unseen and climb it and go on to the stable and so go out the pasture gate without passing the house again at all, flashlight or not but it was already too late: calling his name: ‘Charles:’ in that tense urgent whisper then came rapidly up and stopped facing him, speaking in that tense rapid murmur:

‘What did he tell you?’ and now he knew what it was that had nudged at his attention back in his uncle’s office when he had recognised her and then in the next second flashed away: old Molly, Lucas’ wife, who had been the daughter of one of old Doctor Habersham’s, Miss Habersham’s grandfather’s, slaves, she and Miss Habersham the same age, born in the same week and both suckled at Molly’s mother’s breast and grown up together almost inextricably like sisters, like twins, sleeping in the same room, the white girl in the bed, the Negro girl on a cot at the foot of it almost until Molly and Lucas married, and Miss Habersham had stood up in the Negro church as godmother to Molly’s first child.

‘He said it wasn’t his pistol,’ he said.

‘So he didn’t do it,’ she said, rapid still and with something even more than urgency in her voice now.

‘I dont know,’ he said.

‘Nonsense,’ she said. ‘If it wasn’t his pistol——’

‘I dont know,’ he said.

‘You must know. You saw him—talked to him——’

‘I dont know,’ he said. He said it calmly, quietly, with a kind of incredulous astonishment as though he had only now realised what he had promised, intended: ‘I
just dont know. I still dont know. I’m just going out there……’ He stopped, his voice died. There was an instant a second in which he even remembered he should have been wishing he could recall it, the last unfinished sentence. Though it was probably already too late and she had already done herself what little finishing the sentence needed and at any moment now she would cry, protest, ejaculate and bring the whole house down on him. Then in the same second he stopped remembering it. She said:

‘Of course:’ immediate murmurous and calm; he thought for another half of a second that she hadn’t understood at all and then in the other half forgot that too, the two of them facing each other indistinguishable in the darkness across the tense and rapid murmur: and then he heard his own voice speaking in the same tone and pitch, the two of them not conspiratorial exactly but rather like two people who have irrevocably accepted a gambit they are not at all certain they can cope with: only that they will resist it: ‘We dont even know it wasn’t his pistol. He just said it wasn’t.’

‘Yes.’

‘He didn’t say whose it was nor whether or not he fired it. He didn’t even tell you he didn’t fire it. He just said it wasn’t his pistol.’

‘Yes.’

‘And your uncle told you there in his study that that’s just exactly what he would say, all he could say.’ He didn’t answer that. It wasn’t a question. Nor did she give him time. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘Now what? To find out if it wasn’t his pistol—find out whatever it was he meant? Go out there and what?

He told her, as badly as he had told Aleck Sander,
explicit and succinct: ‘Look at him:’ not even pausing to think how here he should certainly have anticipated at least a gasp. ‘Go out there and dig him up and bring him to town where somebody that knows bullet holes can look at the bullet hole in him——’

‘Yes,’ Miss Habersham said. ‘Of course. Naturally he wouldn’t tell your uncle. He’s a Negro and your uncle’s a man:’ and now Miss Habersham in her turn repeating and paraphrasing and he thought how it was not really a paucity a meagreness of vocabulary, it was in the first place because the deliberate violent blotting out obliteration of a human life was itself so simple and so final that the verbiage which surrounded it enclosed it insulated it intact into the chronicle of man had of necessity to be simple and uncomplex too, repetitive, almost monotonous even; and in the second place, vaster than that, adumbrating that, because what Miss Habersham paraphrased was simple truth, not even fact and so there was not needed a great deal of diversification and originality to express it because truth was universal, it had to be universal to be truth and so there didn’t need to be a great deal of it just to keep running something no bigger than one earth and so anybody could know truth; all they had to do was just to pause, just to stop, just to wait: ‘Lucas knew it would take a child—or an old woman like me: someone not concerned with probability, with evidence. Men like your uncle and Mr Hampton have had to be men too long, busy too long.——Yes?’ she said. ‘Bring him in to town where someone who knows can look at the bullet hole. And suppose they look at it and find out it was Lucas’ pistol?’ And he didn’t answer that at all, nor had she waited again, saying, already turning: ‘We’ll need a pick and shovel. I’ve got a flashlight in the truck——’

‘We?’ he said.

She stopped; she said almost patiently: ‘It’s fifteen miles out there——’

‘Ten,’ he said.

‘—a grave is six feet deep. It’s after eight now and you may have only until midnight to get back to town in time——’ and something else but he didn’t even hear it. He wasn’t even listening. He had said this himself to Lucas only fifteen minutes ago but it was only now that he understood what he himself had said. It was only after hearing someone else say it that he comprehended not the enormity of his intention but the simple inert unwieldy impossible physical vastness of what he faced; he said quietly, with hopeless indomitable amazement:

‘We cant possibly do it.’

‘No,’ Miss Habersham said. ‘Well?’

‘Ma’am?’ he said. ‘What did you say?’

‘I said you haven’t even got a car.’

‘We were going on the horse.’

Now she said, ‘We?’

‘Me and Aleck Sander.’

‘Then we’ll have three,’ she said. ‘Get your pick and shovel. They’ll begin to wonder in the house why they haven’t heard my truck start.’ She moved again.

‘Yessum,’ he said. ‘Drive on down the lane to the pasture gate. We’ll meet you there.’

He didn’t wait either. He heard the truck start as he climbed the lot fence; presently he could see Highboy’s blaze in the black yawn of the stable hallway; Aleck Sander jerked the buckled girth-strap home through the keeper as he came up. He unsnapped the tie-rope from the bit-ring before he remembered and snapped it back and untied the other end from the wall-ring and looped it and the reins up over Highboy’s head and led him out of the hallway and got up.

‘Here,’ Aleck Sander said reaching up the pick and shovel but Highboy had already begun to dance even before he could have seen them as he always did even at a hedge switch and he set him back hard and steadied him as Aleck Sander said ‘Stand still!’ and gave Highboy a loud slap on the rump, passing up the pick and shovel and he steadied them across the saddle-bow and managed to hold Highboy back on his heels for another second, long enough to free his foot from the near stirrup for Aleck Sander to get his foot into it, Highboy moving then in a long almost buck-jump as Aleck Sander swung up behind and still trying to run until he steadied him again with one hand, the pick and shovel jouncing on the saddle, and turned him across the pasture toward the gate. ‘Hand me them damn shovels and picks,’ Aleck Sander said. ‘Did you get the flashlight?’

‘What do you care?’ he said. Aleck Sander reached his spare hand around him and took the pick and shovel; again for a second Highboy could actually see them but this time he had both hands free for the snaffle and the curb too. ‘You aint going anywhere to need a flashlight. You just said so.’

They had almost reached the gate. He could see the dark blob of the halted truck against the pale road beyond it; that is, he could believe he saw it because he knew it was there. But Aleck Sander actually saw it: who seemed able to see in the dark almost like an animal. Carrying the pick and shovel, Aleck Sander had no free hand, nevertheless he had one with which he reached suddenly again and caught the reins outside his own hands and jerked Highboy almost back to a squat and said in a hissing whisper: ‘What’s that?’

‘It’s Miss Eunice Habersham’s truck,’ he said. ‘She’s going with us. Turn him loose, confound it!’ wrenching
the reins from Aleck Sander, who released them quickly enough now, saying,

‘She’s gonter take the truck:’ and not even dropping the pick and shovel but flinging them clattering and clanging against the gate and slipping down himself and just in time because now Highboy stood erect on his hind feet until he struck him hard between the ears with the looped tie-rope.

‘Open the gate,’ he said.

‘We wont need the horse,’ Aleck Sander said. ‘Unsaddle and bridle him here. We’ll put um up when we get back.’

Which was what Miss Habersham said; through the gate now and Highboy still sidling and beating his hooves while Aleck Sander put the pick and shovel into the back of the truck as though he expected Aleck Sander to throw them at him this time, and Miss Habersham’s voice from the dark cab of the truck:

‘He sounds like a good horse. Has he got a four-footed gait too?’

‘Yessum,’ he said. ‘Nome,’ he said. ‘I’ll take the horse too. The nearest house is a mile from the church but somebody might still hear a car. We’ll leave the truck at the bottom of the hill when we cross the branch.’ Then he answered that too before she had time to say it: ‘We’ll need the horse to bring him back down to the truck.’

‘Heh,’ Aleck Sander said. It wasn’t laughing. But then nobody thought it was. ‘How do you reckon that horse is going to tote what you dug up when he dont even want to tote what you going to do the digging with?’ But he had already thought of that too, remembering his grandfather telling of the old days when deer and bear and wild turkey could be hunted in Yoknapatawpha County within twelve miles of Jefferson, of the hunters: Major de Spain
who had been his grandfather’s cousin and old General Compson and Uncle Ike McCaslin, Carothers Edmonds’ great-uncle, still alive at ninety, and Boon Hogganbeck whose mother’s mother had been a Chickasaw woman and the Negro Sam Fathers whose father had been a Chickasaw chief, and Major de Spain’s one-eyed hunting mule Alice who wasn’t afraid even of the smell of bear and he thought how if you really were the sum of your ancestry it was too bad the ancestors who had evoluted him into a secret resurrector of country graveyards hadn’t thought to equip him with a descendant of that unspookable one-eyed mule to transport his subjects on.

‘I dont know,’ he said.

‘Maybe he’ll learn by the time we get back to the truck,’ Miss Habersham said. ‘Can Aleck Sander drive?’

‘Yessum,’ Aleck Sander said.

Highboy was still edgy; held down he would merely have lathered himself to no end so since it was cool tonight for the first mile he actually kept in sight of the truck’s tail-light. Then he slowed, the light fled diminishing on and vanished beyond a curve and he settled Highboy into the shambling halfrun halfwalk which no show judge would ever pass but which covered ground; nine miles of it to be covered and he thought with a kind of ghastly amusement that at last he would have time to think, thinking how it was too late to think now, not one of the three of them dared think now, if they had done but one thing tonight it was at least to put all thought ratiocination contemplation forever behind them; five miles from town and he would cross (probably Miss Habersham and Aleck Sander in the truck already had) the invisible surveyor’s line which was the boundary of Beat Four: the notorious, the fabulous almost and certainly least of all did any of them dare think now, thinking how
it was never difficult for an outlander to do two things at once which Beat Four wouldn’t like since Beat Four already in advance didn’t like most of the things which people from town (and from most of the rest of the county too for that matter) did: but that it remained for them, a white youth of sixteen and a Negro one of the same and an old white spinster of seventy to elect and do at the same time the two things out of all man’s vast reservoir of invention and capability that Beat Four would repudiate and retaliate on most violently: to violate the grave of one of its progeny in order to save a nigger murderer from its vengeance.

But at least they would have some warning (not speculating on who the warning could help since they who would be warned were already six and seven miles from the jail and still moving away from it as fast as he dared push the horse) because if Beat Four were coming in tonight he should begin to pass them soon (or they pass him)—the battered mud-stained cars, the empty trucks for hauling cattle and lumber, and the saddled horses and mules. Yet so far he had passed nothing whatever since he left town; the road lay pale and empty before and behind him too; the lightless houses and cabins squatted or loomed beside it, the dark land stretched away into the darkness strong with the smell of plowed earth and now and then the heavy scent of flowering orchards lying across the road for him to ride through like stagnant skeins of smoke so maybe they were making better time than even he had hoped and before he could stop it he had thought
Maybe we can, maybe we will after all;
—before he could leap and spring and smother and blot it from thinking not because he couldn’t really believe they possibly could and not because you dont dare think whole even to yourself the entirety of a dear hope or wish let
alone a desperate one else you yourself have doomed it but because thinking it into words even only to himself was like the struck match which doesn’t dispel the dark but only exposes its terror—one weak flash and glare revealing for a second the empty road’s the dark and empty land’s irrevocable immitigable negation.