Intruder in the Dust (20 page)

A
ND HE WOULD REMEMBER IT
: the five of them standing at the edge of the pit above the empty coffin, then with another limber flowing motion like his twin’s the second Gowrie came up out of the grave and stooped and with an air of rapt displeased even faintly outraged concern began to brush and thump the clay particles from the lower legs of his trousers, the first twin moving as the second stooped, going straight to him with a blind unhurried undeviable homing quality about him like the other of a piece of machinery, the other spindle say of a lathe, travelling on the same ineluctable shaft to its socket, and stooped too and began to brush and strike
the dirt from the back of his brother’s trousers; and this time almost a spadeful of dirt slid down across the out-slanted lid and rattled down into the empty box, almost loud enough or with mass and weight enough to produce a small hollow echo.

‘Now he’s got two of them,’ his uncle said.

‘Yes,’ the sheriff said. ‘Where?’

‘Durn two of them,’ old Gowrie said. ‘Where’s my boy, Shurf?’

‘We’re going to find him now, Mr Gowrie,’ the sheriff said. ‘And you were smart to bring them hounds. Put your pistol up and let your boys catch them dogs and hold them till we get straightened out here.’

‘Never you mind the pistol nor the dogs neither,’ old Gowrie said. ‘They’ll trail and they’ll ketch anything that ever run or walked either. But my boy and that Jake Montgomery—if it was Jack Montgomery whoever it was found laying in my son’s coffin—never walked away from here to leave no trail.’

The sheriff said, ‘Hush now, Mr Gowrie.’ The old man glared back up at the sheriff. He was not trembling, not eager, baffled, amazed, not anything. Watching him he thought of one of the cold lightblue tearshaped apparently heatless flames which balance themselves on even less than tiptoe over gasjets.

‘All right,’ the old man said. ‘I’m hushed. And now you get started. You’re the one that seems to know all about this, that sent me word out to my breakfast table at six oclock this morning to meet you here. Now you get started.’

‘That’s what we’re going to do,’ the sheriff said. ‘We’re going to find out right now where to start.’ He turned to his uncle, saying in the mild rational almost diffident voice: ‘It’s say around eleven oclock at night. You got a
mule or maybe it’s a horse, anyway something that can walk and tote a double load, and a dead man across your saddle. And you aint got much time; that is, you aint got all of time. Of course it’s around eleven oclock, when most folks is in bed, and a Sunday night too when folks have got to get up early tomorrow to start a new week in the middle of cotton-planting time, and there aint any moon and even if folks might still be moving around you’re in a lonely part of the country where the chances all are you wont meet nobody. But you still got a dead man with a bullet hole in his back and even at eleven oclock day’s going to come sooner or later. All right. What would you do?’

They looked, stared at one another, or that is his uncle stared—the too-thin bony eager face, the bright intent rapid eyes, and opposite the sheriff’s vast sleepy face, the eyes not staring, apparently not even looking, blinking almost drowsily, the two of them cutting without speech across all that too: ‘Of course,’ his uncle said. ‘Into the earth again. And not far, since as you said daylight comes sooner or later even when it’s still just eleven oclock. Especially when he still had time to come back and do it all over again, alone, by himself, no hand but his on the shovel.—And think of that too: the need, the terrible need, not just to have it all to do again but to have to do it again for the reason he had; to think that he had done all he possibly could, all anyone could have asked or expected him to do or even dreamed that he would have to do; was as safe as he could hope to be—and then to be drawn back by a sound, a noise or perhaps he blundered by sheer chance on the parked truck or perhaps it was just his luck, his good fortune, whatever god or djinn or genie looks after murderers for a little while, keeps him secure and safe until the other fates have had time
to spin and knot the rope,—anyway to have to crawl, tie the mule or horse or whatever it was to a tree and crawl on his belly back up here to lie (who knows? perhaps just behind the fence yonder) and watch a meddling old woman and two children who should have been two hours ago in bed ten miles away, wreck the whole careful edifice of his furious labor, undo the work not merely of his life but of his death too …’ His uncle stopped, and now he saw the bright almost luminous eyes glaring down at him: ‘And you. You couldn’t have had any idea Miss Habersham was coming with you until you got home. And without her, you could have had no hope whatever that Aleck Sander would come with you alone at all. So if you ever really had any idea of coming out here alone to dig this grave up, dont even tell me——’

‘Let that be now,’ the sheriff said. ‘All right. Somewhere in the ground. And what sort of ground? What dirt digs easiest and fastest for a man in a hurry and by himself even if he has a shovel? What sort of dirt could you hope to hide a body in quick even if you never had nothing but a pocket knife?’

‘In sand,’ his uncle said immediately, rapidly, almost indifferently, almost inattentively. ‘In the bed of the branch. Didn’t they tell you at three oclock this morning that they saw him going there with it? What are we waiting for?’

‘All right,’ the sheriff said. ‘Let’s go then.’ Then to him: ‘Show us exactly where——’

‘Except that Aleck Sander said it might not have been a mule,’ he said.

‘All right,’ the sheriff said. ‘Horse then. Show us exactly where.…’

He would remember it: watching the old man clap the pistol again butt-forward into his armpit and clamp it
there with the stump of the arm while the one hand unbuttoned the shirt then took the pistol from the armpit and thrust it back inside the shirt then buttoned the shirt again then turned even faster quicker than the two sons half his age, already in front of everybody when he hopped back over the fence and went to the mare and caught reins and pommel all in one hand, already swinging up: then the two cars dropping in second speed against gravity back down the steep pitch until he said ‘Here’ where the pickup’s tracks slewed off the road into the bushes then back into the road again and his uncle stopped: and he watched the fierce old stump-armed man jump the buckskin mare up out of the road into the woods on the opposite side already falling away down toward the branch, then the two hounds flowing up the bank behind him and then the mule with the two identical wooden-faced sons on it: then he and his uncle were out of the car the sheriff’s car bumper to bumper behind them, hearing the mare crashing on down toward the branch and then the old man’s high flat voice shouting at the hounds:

‘Hi! Hi! Hum on boy! At him, Ring!’ and then his uncle:

‘Handcuff them through the steering wheel:’ and then the sheriff:

‘No. We’ll need the shovels:’ and he had climbed the bank too, listening off and downward toward the crashing and the shouts, then his uncle and the sheriff and the two Negroes carrying the shovels were beside him. Although the branch crossed almost at right angles the highway just beyond where the dirt road forked away, it was almost a quarter-mile from where they now stood or walked rather and although they could all hear old Gowrie still whooping at the dogs and the crashing of the mare and the mule
too in the dense thicket below, the sheriff didn’t go that way, bearing instead off along the hill almost parallel with the road for several minutes and only beginning to slant away from it when they came out into the sawgrass and laurel and willow-choked flat between the hill and the branch: and on across that, the sheriff in front until he stopped still looking down then turned his head and looked back at him, watching him as he and his uncle came up.

‘Your secretary was right the first time,’ the sheriff said. ‘It was a mule.’

‘Not a black one with a rope-burn,’ his uncle said. ‘Surely not that. Not even a murderer is that crassly and arrogantly extrovert.’

‘Yes,’ the sheriff said. ‘That’s why they’re dangerous, why we must destroy them or lock them up:’ and looking down he saw them too: the narrow delicate almost finicking mule-prints out of all proportion to the animal’s actual size, mashed pressed deep, too deep for any one mule no matter how heavy carrying just one man, into the damp muck, the tracks filled with water and even as he watched a minute aquatic beast of some sort shot across one of them leaving a tiny threadlike spurt of dissolving mud; and standing in the trail, now that they had found it they could see the actual path itself through the crushed shoulder-high growth in suspension held like a furrow across a field or the frozen wake of a boat, crossing the marsh arrow-straight until it vanished into the jungle which bordered the branch. They followed it, walking in it, treading the two sets of prints not going and returning but both going in the same direction, now and then the print of the same hoof superposed on its previous one, the sheriff still in the lead talking again, speaking aloud
but without looking back as though—he thought at first—to no one:

‘He wouldn’t come back this way. The first time he didn’t have time. He went back straight up the hill that time, woods or not and dark or not. That was when he heard whatever it was he heard.’ Then he knew who the sheriff was talking to: ‘Maybe your secretary was whistling up there or something. Being in a graveyard that time of night.’

Then they stood on the bank of the branch itself—a broad ditch a channel through which during the winter and spring rains a torrent rushed but where now there flowed a thin current scarcely an inch deep and never much over a yard wide from pool to pool along the blanched sand—and even as his uncle said, ‘Surely the fool——’ the sheriff ten yards or so further along the bank said:

‘Here it is:’ and they went to him and then he saw where the mule had stood tied to a sapling and then the prints where the man himself had thrashed on along the bank, his prints also deeper than any man no matter how heavy should have made and he thought of that too: the anguish, the desperation, the urgency in the black dark and the briers and the dizzy irrevocable fleeing on seconds, carrying a burden man was not intended to carry: then he was hearing a snapping and thrashing of underbrush still further along the bank and then the mare and then old Gowrie shouted and then another crash which would be the mule coming up and then simple pandemonium: the old man shouting and cursing and the yelping of the hounds and the thudding sound a man’s shoe makes against a dog’s ribs: but they couldn’t hurry anymore, thrashing and crashing their own way through the
tearing clinging briers and vines until they could look down into the ditch and the low mound of fresh shaled earth into which the two hounds had been digging and old Gowrie still kicking at them and cursing, and then they were all down in the ditch except the two Negroes.

‘Hold up, Mr Gowrie,’ the sheriff said. ‘That aint Vinson.’ But the old man didn’t seem to hear him. He didn’t even seem aware that anyone else was there; he seemed even to have forgot why he was kicking the dogs: that he had merely set out to drive them back from the mound, still hobbling and hopping after them on one leg and the other poised and cocked to kick even after they had retreated from the mound and were merely trying to dodge past him and get out of the ditch into safety, still kicking at them and cursing after the sheriff caught him by his one arm and held him.

‘Look at the dirt,’ the sheriff said. ‘Cant you see? He hardly took time to bury it. This was the second one, when he was in the hurry, when it was almost daylight and he had to get it hidden?’ and they could all see now—the low hummock of fresh dirt lying close under the bank and in the bank above it the savage ragged marks of the shovel as if he had hacked at the bank with the edge of the blade like swinging an axe (and again: thinking: the desperation the urgency the frantic hand-to-hand combat with the massy intolerable inertia of the earth itself) until enough of it shaled off and down to hide what he had to hide.

This time they didn’t need even the shovels. The body was barely covered; the dogs had already exposed it and he realised now the true magnitude of the urgency and desperation: the frantic and desperate bankrupt in time who had not even enough of it left to hide the evidence of his desperation and the reason for his urgency; it had
been after two oclock when he and Aleck Sander, even two of them working with furious speed, had got the grave filled back up again: so that by the time the murderer, not only alone but who had already moved six feet of dirt and then put it back once since the sun set yesterday, had the second body out and the grave filled for the second time it must have been daylight, later than daylight perhaps, the sun itself watching him while he rode for the second time down the hill and across to the branch; morning itself watching him while he tumbled the body beneath the bank’s overhang then hacked furiously from it just enough dirt to hide the body temporarily from sight with something of that frantic desperation of the wife flinging her peignoir over the lover’s forgotten glove:—lying (the body) face down and only the back of the crushed skull visible until the old man stooped and with his one hand jerked it stiffly over onto its back.

‘Yep,’ old Gowrie said in the high brisk carrying voice: ‘It’s that Montgomery, damned if it aint:’ and rose lean and fast as a tripped watch-spring yelling shouting at the hounds again: ‘Hi boys! Find Vinson!’ and then his uncle shouting too to make himself heard:

‘Wait, Mr Gowrie. Wait:’ then to the sheriff: ‘He was a fool then just because he didn’t have time, not because he is a fool. I just dont believe it twice——’ looking around, his eyes darting. Then he stopped them on the twins. He said sharply: ‘Where’s the quicksand?’

‘What?’ one of the twins said.

‘The quicksand,’ his uncle said. ‘The quicksand bed in the branch here. Where is it?’

‘Quicksand?’ old Gowrie said. ‘Sonabitch, Lawyer. Put a man in quicksand? my boy in quicksand?’

‘Shut up, Mr Gowrie,’ the sheriff said. Then to the twin: ‘Well? Where?’