Knight's Gambit Read online

  Only it was the sheriff who told that too: how yesterday afternoon the insurance company’s Memphis office had received a telegram, signed with Old Man Pritchel’s name, notifying them of the insured’s death, and the adjustor arrived at Old Man Pritchel’s house about two o’clock this afternoon and within thirty minutes had extracted from Old Man Pritchel himself the truth about his daughter’s death: the facts of it which the physical evidence—the truck and the three dead squirrels and the blood on the steps and on the ground—supported. This was that while the daughter was cooking dinner, Pritchel and Flint had driven the truck down to Pritchel’s woods lot to shoot squirrels for supper—‘And that’s correct,’ the sheriff said. ‘I asked. They did that every Sunday morning. Pritchel wouldn’t let anybody but Flint shoot his squirrels, and he wouldn’t even let Flint shoot them unless he was along’—and they shot the three squirrels and Flint drove the truck back to the house and up beside the back steps and the woman came out to take the squirrels and Flint opened the door and picked up the gun to get out of the truck and stumbled, caught his heel on the edge of the running-board and flinging up the hand carrying the gun to break his fall, so that the muzzle of the gun was pointing right at his wife’s head when it went off. And Old Man Pritchel not only denied having sent the wire, he violently and profanely repudiated any and all implication or suggestion that he even knew the policy existed at all. He denied to the very last that the shooting had been any part of an accident. He tried to revoke his own testimony as to what had happened when the daughter came out to get the dead squirrels and the gun went off, repudiating his own story when he realized that he had cleared his son-in-law of murder, snatching the paper from the adjustor’s hand, which he apparently believed was the policy itself, and attempting to tear it up and destroy it before the adjustor could stop him.

  ‘Why?’ Uncle Gavin said.

  ‘Why not?’ the sheriff said. ‘We had let Flint get away; Mr. Pritchel knew he was loose somewhere in the world. Do you reckon he aimed to let the man that killed his daughter get paid for it?’

  ‘Maybe,’ Uncle Gavin said. ‘But I don’t think so. I don’t think he is worried about that at all. I think Mr. Pritchel knows that Joel Flint is not going to collect that policy or any other prize. Maybe he knew a little country jail like ours wasn’t going to hold a wide-travelled ex-carnival man, and he expected Flint to come back out there and this time he was ready for him. And I think that as soon as people stop worrying him, he will send you word to come out there, and he will tell you so.’

  ‘Hah,’ the adjustor said. ‘Then they must have stopped worrying him. Listen to this. When I got there this afternoon, there were three men in the parlor with him. They had a certified check. It was a big check. They were buying his farm from him—lock, stock and barrel—and I didn’t know land in this country was worth that much either, incidentally. He had the deed all drawn and signed, but when I told them who I was, they agreed to wait until I could get back to town here and tell somebody—the sheriff, probably. And I left, and that old lunatic was still standing in the door, shaking that deed at me and croaking: “Tell the sheriff, damn you! Get a lawyer, too! Get that lawyer Stevens. I hear tell he claims to be pretty slick!” ’

  ‘We thank you,’ the sheriff said. He spoke and moved with that deliberate, slightly florid, old-fashioned courtesy which only big men can wear, except that his was constant; this was the first time I ever saw him quit anyone shortly, even when he would see them again tomorrow. He didn’t even look at the adjustor again. ‘My car’s outside,’ he told Uncle Gavin.

  So just before sunset we drove up to the neat picket fence enclosing Old Man Pritchel’s neat, bare little yard and neat, tight little house, in front of which stood the big, dust-covered car with its city license plates and Flint’s battered truck with a strange Negro youth at the wheel—strange because Old Man Pritchel had never had a servant of any sort save his daughter.

  ‘He’s leaving too,’ Uncle Gavin said.

  ‘That’s his right,’ the sheriff said. We mounted the steps. But before we reached the door, Old Man Pritchel was already shouting for us to come in—the harsh, cracked old man’s voice shouting at us from beyond the hall, beyond the door to the dining room where a tremendous old-fashioned telescope bag, strapped and bulging, sat on a chair and the three northerners in dusty khaki stood watching the door and Old Man Pritchel himself sat at the table. And I saw for the first time (Uncle Gavin told me he had seen him only twice) the uncombed thatch of white hair, a fierce tangle of eyebrows above steel-framed spectacles, a jut of untrimmed mustache and a scrabble of beard stained with chewing tobacco to the color of dirty cotton.

  ‘Come in,’ he said. ‘That lawyer Stevens, heh?’

  ‘Yes, Mr. Pritchel,’ the sheriff said.

  ‘Hehm,’ the old man barked. ‘Well, Hub,’ he said. ‘Can I sell my land, or can’t I?’

  ‘Of course, Mr. Pritchel,’ the sheriff said. ‘We hadn’t heard you aimed to.’

  ‘Heh,’ the old man said. ‘Maybe this changed my mind. The check and the folded deed both lay on the table in front of him. He pushed the check toward the sheriff. He didn’t look at Uncle Gavin again; he just said: ‘You, too.’ Uncle Gavin and the sheriff moved to the table and stood looking down at the check. Neither of them touched it. I could see their faces. There was nothing in them. ‘Well?’ Mr. Pritchel said.

  ‘It’s a good price,’ the sheriff said.

  This time the old man said ‘Hah!’ short and harsh. He unfolded the deed and spun it to face, not the sheriff but Uncle Gavin. ‘Well?’ he said. ‘You, lawyer?’

  ‘It’s all right, Mr. Pritchel,’ Uncle Gavin said. The old man sat back, both hands on the table before him, his head tilted back as he looked up at the sheriff.

  ‘Well?’ he said. ‘Fish, or cut bait.’

  ‘It’s your land,’ the sheriff said. ‘What you do with it is no man’s business else.’

  ‘Hah,’ Mr. Pritchel said. He didn’t move. ‘All right, gentlemen.’ He didn’t move at all; one of the strangers came forward and took up the deed. ‘I’ll be out of the house in thirty minutes. You can take possession then, or you will find the key under the mat tomorrow morning.’ I don’t believe he even looked after them as they went out, though I couldn’t be sure because of the glare on his spectacles. Then I knew that he was looking at the sheriff, had been looking at him for a minute or more, and then I saw that he was trembling, jerking and shaking as the old tremble, although his hands on the table were as motionless as two lumps of the clay would have been.

  ‘So you let him get away,’ he said.

  ‘That’s right,’ the sheriff said. ‘But you wait, Mr. Pritchel. We’ll catch him.’

  ‘When?’ the old man said. ‘Two years? Five years? Ten years? I am seventy-four years old; buried my wife and four children. Where will I be in ten years?’

  ‘Here, I hope,’ the sheriff said.

  ‘Here?’ the old man said. ‘Didn’t you just hear me tell that fellow he could have this house in thirty minutes? I own a automobile truck now; I got money to spend now, and something to spend it for.’

  ‘Spend it for what?’ the sheriff said. ‘That check? Even this boy here would have to start early and run late to get shut of that much money in ten years.’

  ‘Spend it running down the man that killed my Ellie!’ He rose suddenly, thrusting his chair back. He staggered, but when the sheriff stepped quickly toward him, he flung his arm out and seemed actually to strike the sheriff back a pace. ‘Let be,’ he said, panting. Then he said, harsh and loud in his cracked shaking voice: ‘Get out of here! Get out of my house all of you!’ But the sheriff didn’t move, nor did we, and after a moment the old man stopped trembling. But he was still holding to the table edge. But his voice was quiet. ‘Hand me my whiskey. On the sideboard. And three glasses.’ The sheriff fetched them—an old-fashioned cut-glass decanter and three heavy tumblers—and set them before him. And when he spoke this time, his vo
ice was almost gentle and I knew what the woman had felt that evening when she offered to come back tomorrow and cook another meal for him: ‘You’ll have to excuse me. I’m tired. I’ve had a heap of trouble lately, and I reckon I’m wore out. Maybe a change is what I need.’

  ‘But not tonight, Mr. Pritchel,’ the sheriff said.

  And then again, as when the woman had offered to come back and cook, he ruined it. ‘Maybe I won’t start tonight,’ he said. ‘And then maybe again I will. But you folks want to get on back to town, so we’ll just drink to goodbye and better days.’ He unstoppered the decanter and poured whiskey into the three tumblers and set the decanter down and looked about the table. ‘You, boy,’ he said, ‘hand me the water bucket. It’s on the back gallery shelf.’ Then, as I turned and started toward the door, I saw him reach and take up the sugar bowl and plunge the spoon into the sugar and then I stopped too. And I remember Uncle Gavin’s and the sheriff’s faces and I could not believe my eyes either as he put the spoonful of sugar into the raw whiskey and started to stir it. Because I had not only watched Uncle Gavin, and the sheriff when he would come to play chess with Uncle Gavin, but Uncle Gavin’s father too who was my grandfather, and my own father before he died, and all the other men who would come to Grandfather’s house who drank cold toddies as we call them, and even I knew that to make a cold toddy you do not put the sugar into the whiskey because sugar will not dissolve in raw whiskey but only lies in a little intact swirl like sand at the bottom of the glass; that you first put the water into the glass and dissolve the sugar into the water, in a ritual almost; then you add the whiskey, and that anyone like Old Man Pritchel who must have been watching men make cold toddies for nearly seventy years and had been making and drinking them himself for at least fifty-three, would know this too. And I remember how the man we had thought was Old Man Pritchel realized too late what he was doing and jerked his head up just as Uncle Gavin sprang toward him, and swung his arm back and hurled the glass at Uncle Gavin’s head, and the thud of the flung glass against the wall and the dark splash it made and the crash of the table as it went over and the raw stink of the spilled whiskey from the decanter and Uncle Gavin shouting at the sheriff: ‘Grab him, Hub! Grab him!’

  Then we were all three on him. I remember the savage strength and speed of the body which was no old man’s body; I saw him duck beneath the sheriff’s arm and the entire wig came off; I seemed to see his whole face wrenching itself furiously free from beneath the makeup which bore the painted wrinkles and the false eyebrows. When the sheriff snatched the beard and mustache off, the flesh seemed to come with it, springing quick and pink and then crimson, as though in that last desperate cast he had had to beard, disguise, not his face so much as the very blood which he had spilled.

  It took us only thirty minutes to find old Mr. Pritchel’s body. It was under the feed room in the stable, in a shallow and hurried trench, scarcely covered from sight. His hair had not only been dyed, it had been trimmed, the eyebrows trimmed and dyed too, and the mustache and beard shaved off. He was wearing the identical garments which Flint had worn to the jail and he had been struck at least one crushing blow on the face, apparently with the flat of the same axe which had split his skull from behind, so that his features were almost unrecognizable and, after another two or three weeks underground, would perhaps have been even unidentifiable as those of the old man. And pillowed carefully beneath the head was a big ledger almost six inches thick and weighing almost twenty pounds and filled with the carefully pasted clippings which covered twenty years and more. It was the record and tale of the gift, the talent, which at the last he had misapplied and betrayed and which had then turned and destroyed him. It was all there: inception, course, peak, and then decline—the handbills, the theatre programs, the news clippings, and even one actual ten-foot poster:

  SIGNOR CANOVA

  Master of Illusion

  He Disappears While You Watch Him

  Management offers One Thousand Dollars

  in Cash To Any Man or Woman or

  Child Who …

  Last of all was the final clipping, from our Memphis-printed daily paper, under the Jefferson date line, which was news and not press-agentry. This was the account of that last gamble in which he had cast his gift and his life against money, wealth, and lost—the clipped fragment of news-sheet which recorded the end not of one life but of three, though even here two of them cast but one shadow: not only that of the harmless dim-witted woman but of Joel Flint and Signor Canova too, with scattered among them and marking the date of that death too, the cautiously worded advertisements in Variety and Billboard, using the new changed name and no takers probably, since Signor Canova the Great was already dead then and already serving his purgatory in this circus for six months and that circus for eight—bandsman, ringman, Bornean wild man, down to the last stage where he touched bottom: the travelling from country town to country town with a roulette wheel wired against imitation watches and pistols which would not shoot, until one day instinct perhaps showed him one more chance to use the gift again.

  ‘And lost this time for good,’ the sheriff said. We were in the study again. Beyond the open side door fireflies winked and drifted across the summer night and the crickets and tree-frogs cheeped and whirred. ‘It was that insurance policy. If that adjustor hadn’t come to town and sent us back out there in time to watch him try to dissolve sugar in raw whiskey, he would have collected that check and taken that truck and got clean away. Instead, he sends for the adjustor, then he practically dares you and me to come out there and see past that wig and paint—’

  ‘You said something the other day about his destroying his witness too soon,’ Uncle Gavin said. ‘She wasn’t his witness. The witness he destroyed was the one we were supposed to find under that feed room.’

  ‘Witness to what?’ the sheriff said. ‘To the fact that Joel Flint no longer existed?’

  ‘Partly. But mostly to the first crime, the old one: the one in which Signor Canova died. He intended for that witness to be found. That’s why he didn’t bury it, hide it better and deeper. As soon as somebody found it, he would be at once and forever not only rich but free, free not only of Signor Canova who had betrayed him by dying eight years ago, but of Joel Flint too. Even if we had found it before he had a chance to leave, what would he have said?’

  ‘He ought to have battered the face a little more,’ the sheriff said.

  ‘I doubt it,’ Uncle Gavin said. ‘What would he have said?’

  ‘All right,’ the sheriff said. ‘What?’

  ‘ “Yes, I killed him. He murdered my daughter.” And what would you have said, being, as you are, the Law?’

  ‘Nothing,’ the sheriff said after a time.

  ‘Nothing,’ Uncle Gavin said. A dog was barking somewhere, not a big dog, and then a screech-owl flew into the mulberry tree in the back yard and began to cry, plaintive and tremulous, and all the little furred creatures would be moving now—the field mice, the possums and rabbits and foxes and the legless vertebrates—creeping or scurrying about the dark land which beneath the rainless summer stars was just dark: not desolate. ‘That’s one reason he did it,’ Uncle Gavin said.

  ‘One reason?’ the sheriff said. ‘What’s the other?’

  ‘The other is the real one. It had nothing to do with the money; he probably could not have helped obeying it if he had wanted to. That gift he had. His first regret right now is probably not that he was caught, but that he was caught too soon, before the body was found and he had the chance to identify it as his own; before Signor Canova had had time to toss his gleaming tophat vanishing behind him and bow to the amazed and stormlike staccato of adulant palms and turn and stride once or twice and then himself vanish from the pacing spotlight—gone, to be seen no more. Think what he did: he convicted himself of murder when he could very likely have escaped by flight; he acquitted himself of it after he was already free again. Then he dared you and me to come out there and actually be his witnes
ses and guarantors in the consummation of the very act which he knew we had been trying to prevent. What else could the possession of such a gift as his have engendered, and the successful practising of it have increased, but a supreme contempt for mankind? You told me yourself that he had never been afraid in his life.’

  ‘Yes,’ the sheriff said. ‘The Book itself says somewhere, Know thyself. Ain’t there another book somewhere that says, Man, fear thyself, thine arrogance and vanity and pride? You ought to know; you claim to be a book man. Didn’t you tell me that’s what that luck-charm on your watch chain means? What book is that in?’

  ‘It’s in all of them,’ Uncle Gavin said. ‘The good ones, I mean. It’s said in a lot of different ways, but it’s there.’

  Knight’s Gambit

  1

  One of them knocked. But the door opened in the middle of it, swinging right out from under the rapping knuckles, so that the two callers were already in the room when he and his uncle looked up from the chessboard. Then his uncle recognised them too.

  Their name was Harriss. They were brother and sister. At first glance they might have been twins, not just to strangers but to most of Jefferson too. Because there were probably not half a dozen people in Yoknapatawpha County who actually knew which one was the oldest. They lived six miles from town on what twenty years ago had been just another plantation raising cotton for the market and corn and hay to feed the mules which made the cotton. But now it was a county (or for that matter, a north Mississippi) landmark: a mile square of white panel and rail paddock- and pasture-fences and electric-lit stables and a once-simple country house transmogrified now into something a little smaller than a Before-the-War Hollywood set.