Intruder in the Dust Read online

  “Well, old man,” his uncle said. “You played hell at last.” Then Lucas moved. He sat up stiffly and swung his legs stiffly over the edge of the cot, picking one of them up by the knee between his hands and swinging it around as you open or close a sagging gate, groaning, grunting not just frankly and unabashed and aloud but comfortably, as the old grunt and groan with some long familiar minor stiffness so used and accustomed as to be no longer even an ache and which if they were ever actually cured of it, they would be bereft and lost; he listening and watching still in that rage and now amazement too at the murderer not merely in the shadow of the gallows but of a lynch-mob, not only taking time to groan over a stiffness in his back but doing it as if he had all the long rest of a natural life in which to be checked each time he moved by the old familiar catch.

  “Looks like it,” Lucas said. “That’s why I sent for you. What you going to do with me?”

  “Me?” his uncle said. “Nothing. My name aint Gowrie. It aint even Beat Four.”

  Moving stiffly again Lucas bent and peered about his feet, then he reached under the cot and drew out the other shoe and sat up again and began to turn creakily and stiffly to look behind him when his uncle reached and took the first shoe from the cot and dropped it beside the other. But Lucas didn’t put them on. Instead he sat again, immobile, his hands on his knees, blinking. Then with one hand he made a gesture which completely dismissed Gowries, mob, vengeance, holo­caust and all. “I’ll worry about that when they walks in here,” he said. “I mean the law. Aint you the county lawyer?”

  “Oh,” his uncle said. “It’s the District Attorney that’ll hang you or send you to Parchman—not me.”

  Lucas was still blinking, not rapidly: just steadily. He watched him. And suddenly he realised that Lucas was not looking at his uncle at all and apparently had not been for three or four seconds.

  “I see,” Lucas said. “Then you can take my case.”

  “Take your case? Defend you before the judge?”

  “I’m gonter pay you,” Lucas said. “You dont need to worry.”

  “I dont defend murderers who shoot people in the back,” his uncle said.

  Again Lucas made the gesture with one of the dark gnarled hands. “Let’s forgit the trial. We aint come to it yet.” And now he saw that Lucas was watching his uncle, his head low­ered so that he was watching his uncle upward from beneath through the grizzled tufts of his eyebrows—a look shrewd secret and intent. Then Lucas said: “I wants to hire some­body—” and stopped. And watching him, he thought re­membered an old lady, dead now, a spinster, a neighbor who wore a dyed transformation and had always on a pantry shelf a big bowl of homemade teacakes for all the children on the street, who one summer (he couldn’t have been over seven or eight then) taught all of them to play Five Hundred: sitting at the card table on her screened side gallery on hot summer mornings and she would wet her fingers and take a card from her hand and lay it on the table, her hand not still poised over it of course but just lying nearby until the next player revealed exposed by some movement or gesture of triumph or exultation or maybe by just simple increased hard breathing his intention to trump or overplay it, whereupon she would say quickly: “Wait. I picked up the wrong one” and take up the card and put it back into her hand and play another one. That was exactly what Lucas had done. He had sat still before but now he was absolutely immobile. He didn’t even seem to be breathing.

  “Hire somebody?” his uncle said. “You’ve got a lawyer. I had already taken your case before I came in here. I’m going to tell you what to do as soon as you have told me what happened.”

  “No,” Lucas said. “I wants to hire somebody. It dont have to be a lawyer.”

  Now it was his uncle who stared at Lucas. “To do what?”

  He watched them. Now it was no childhood’s game of stakeless Five Hundred. It was more like the poker games he had overlooked. “Are you or aint you going to take the job?” Lucas said.

  “So you aint going to tell me what you want me to do until after I have agreed to do it,” his uncle said. “All right,” his uncle said. “Now I’m going to tell you what to do. Just exactly what happened out there yesterday?”

  “So you dont want the job,” Lucas said. “You aint said yes or no yet.”

  “No!” his uncle said, harsh, too loud, catching himself but already speaking again before he had brought his voice back down to a sort of furious explicit calm: “Because you aint got any job to offer anybody. You’re in jail, depending on the grace of God to keep those damned Gowries from dragging you out of here and hanging you to the first lamp post they come to. Why they ever let you get to town in the first place I still dont understand—”

  “Nemmine that now,” Lucas said. “What I needs is—”

  “Nemmine that!” his uncle said. “Tell the Gowries to never mind it when they bust in here tonight. Tell Beat Four to just forget it—” He stopped; again with an effort you could almost see he brought his voice back to that furious pa­tience. He drew a deep breath and expelled it. “Now. Tell me exactly what happened yesterday.”

  For another moment Lucas didn’t answer, sitting on the bunk, his hands on his knees, intractable and composed, no longer looking at his uncle, working his mouth faintly as if he were tasting something. He said: “They was two folks, partners in a sawmill. Leastways they was buying the lum­ber as the sawmill cut it—”

  “Who were they?” his uncle said.

  “Vinson Gowrie was one of um.”

  His uncle stared at Lucas for a long moment. But his voice was quite calm now. “Lucas,” he said, “has it ever occurred to you that if you just said mister to white people and said it like you meant it, you might not be sitting here now?”

  “So I’m to commence now.” Lucas said. “I can start off by saying mister to the folks that drags me out of here and builds a fire under me.”

  “Nothing’s going to happen to you—until you go before the judge,” his uncle said. “Dont you know that even Beat Four dont take liberties with Mr. Hampton—at least not here in town?”

  “Shurf Hampton’s home in bed now.”

  “But Mr. Will Legate’s sitting down stairs with a shotgun.”

  “I aint ’quainted with no Will Legate.”

  “The deer-hunter? The man that can hit a running rabbit with a thirty-thirty rifle?”

  “Hah,” Lucas said. “Them Gowries aint deer. They might be cattymounts and panthers but they aint deer.”

  “All right,” his uncle said. “Then I’ll stay here if you’ll feel better. Now. Go on. Vinson Gowrie and another man were buying lumber together. What other man?”

  “Vinson Gowrie’s the only one that’s public yet.”

  “And he got public by being shot in broad daylight in the back,” his uncle said. “Well, that’s one way to do it.—All right,” his uncle said. “Who was the other man?”

  Lucas didn’t answer. He didn’t move; he might not even have heard, sitting peaceful and inattentive, not even really waiting: just sitting there while his uncle watched him. Then his uncle said:

  “All right. What were they doing with it?”

  “They was yarding it up as the mill cut it, gonter sell it all at once when the sawing was finished. Only the other man was hauling it away at night, coming in late after dark with a truck and picking up a load and hauling it over to Glasgow or Hollymount and selling it and putting the money in his pocket.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I seen um. Watched um.” Nor did he doubt this for a moment because he remembered Ephraim, Paralee’s father before he died, an old man, a widower who would pass most of the day dozing and waking in a rocking chair on Paralee’s gallery in summer and in front of the fire in winter and at night would walk the roads, not going anywhere, just moving, at times five and six miles from town before he would return at dawn to doze and wake all day in the chair again.

  “All right,” his uncle said. “Then what?”

  “That�
��s all,” Lucas said. “He was just stealing a load of lumber every night or so.”

  His uncle stared at Lucas for perhaps ten seconds. He said in a voice of calm, almost hushed amazement: “So you took your pistol and went to straighten it out. You, a nigger, took a pistol and went to rectify a wrong between two white men, What did you expect? What else did you expect?”

  “Nemmine expecting,” Lucas said. “I wants—”

  “You went to the store,” his uncle said, “only you hap­pened to find Vinson Gowrie first and followed him into the woods and told him his partner was robbing him and natur­ally he cursed you and called you a liar whether it was true or not, naturally he would have to do that; maybe he even knocked you down and walked on and you shot him in the back—”

  “Never nobody knocked me down,” Lucas said.

  “So much the worse,” his uncle said. “So much the worse for you. It’s not even self-defense. You just shot him in the back. And then you stood there over him with the fired pistol in your pocket and let the white folks come up and grab you. And if it hadn’t been for that little shrunk-up rheumatic constable who had no business being there in the first place and in the second place had no business whatever, at the rate of a dollar a prisoner every time he delivered a subpoena or served a warrant, having guts enough to hold off that whole damn Beat Four for eighteen hours until Hope Hampton saw fit or remembered or got around to bringing you in to jail—holding off that whole countryside that you nor all the friends you could drum up in a hundred years—”

  “I aint got friends,” Lucas said with stern and inflexible pride, and then something else though his uncle was already talking:

  “You’re damned right you haven’t. And if you ever had that pistol shot would have blown them to kingdom come too—What?” his uncle said “What did you say?”

  “I said I pays my own way,” Lucas said.

  “I see,” his uncle said. “You dont use friends; you pay cash. Yes. I see. Now you listen to me. You’ll go before the grand jury tomorrow. They’ll indict you. Then if you like I’ll have Mr. Hampton move you to Mottstown or even fur­ther away than that, until court convenes next month. Then you’ll plead guilty; I’ll persuade the District Attorney to let you do that because you’re an old man and you never were in trouble before; I mean as far as the judge and the District Attorney will know since they dont live within fifty miles of Yoknapatawpha County. Then they wont hang you; they’ll send you to the penitentiary; you probably wont live long enough to be paroled but at least the Gowries cant get to you there. Do you want me to stay in here with you tonight?”

  “I reckon not,” Lucas said. “They kept me up all last night and I’m gonter try to get some sleep. If you stay here you’ll talk till morning.”

  “Right,” his uncle said harshly, then to him: “Come on:” already moving toward the door. Then his uncle stopped. “Is there anything you want?”

  “You might send me some tobacco,” Lucas said. “If them Gowries leaves me time to smoke it.”

  “Tomorrow,” his uncle said. “I dont want to keep you awake tonight:” and went on, he following, his uncle letting him pass first through the door so that he stepped aside in his turn and stood looking back into the cell while his uncle came through the door and drew it after him, the heavy steel plunger crashing into its steel groove with a thick oily sound of irrefutable finality like that ultimate cosmolined doom itself when as his uncle said man’s machines had at last effaced and obliterated him from the earth and, purpose­less now to themselves with nothing left to destroy, closed the last carborundum-grooved door upon their own progenitorless apotheosis behind one clockless lock responsive only to the last stroke of eternity, his uncle going on, his feet ringing and echoing down the corridor and then the sharp rattle of his knuckles on the oak door while he and Lucas still looked at one another through the steel bars, Lucas standing too now in the middle of the floor beneath the light and looking at him with whatever it was in his face so that he thought for a second that Lucas had spoken aloud. But he hadn’t, he was making no sound: just looking at him with that mute patient urgency until the jailer’s feet thumped nearer and nearer on the stairs and the slotted bar on the door rasped back.

  And the jailer locked the bar again and they passed Legate still with his funny paper in the tilted chair beside the shot­gun facing the open door, then outside, down the walk to the gate and the street, following through the gate where his uncle had already turned toward home: stopping, thinking a nigger a murderer who shoots white people in the back and aint even sorry.

  He said: “I imagine I’ll find Skeets McGowan loafing somewhere on the Square. He’s got a key to the drugstore. I’ll take Lucas some tobacco tonight.” His uncle stopped.

  “It can wait till morning,” his uncle said.

  “Yes.” he said, feeling his uncle watching him, not even wondering what he would do if his uncle said no, not even waiting really, just standing there.

  “All right,” his uncle said. “Dont be too long.” So he could have moved then. But still he didn’t.

  “I thought you said nothing would happen tonight.”

  “I still dont think it will,” his uncle said. “But you cant tell. People like the Gowries dont attach a great deal of im­portance to death or dying. But they do put a lot of stock in the dead and how they died—particularly their own. If you get the tobacco, let Tubbs carry it up to him and you come on home.”

  So he didn’t have to say even yes this time, his uncle turning first then he turned and walked toward the Square, walking on until the sound of his uncle’s feet had ceased, then standing until his uncle’s black silhouette had changed to the white gleam of his linen suit and then that faded beyond the last arclight and if he had gone on home and got Highboy as soon as he recognised the sheriff’s car this morning that would be eight hours and almost forty miles, turning then and walking back toward the gate with Legate’s eyes watching him, already recognising him across the top of the funny paper even before he reached the gate and if he just went straight on now he could follow the lane behind the hedge and across into the lot and saddle Highboy and go out by the pasture gate and turn his back on Jefferson and nig­ger murderers and all and let Highboy go as fast as he wanted to go and as far as he wanted to go even when he had blown himself at last and agreed to walk, just so his tail was still turned to Jefferson and nigger murderers: through the gate and up the walk and across the gallery and again the jailer came quickly through the door at the right, his expression already giving way to the one of harried outrage.

  “Again,” the jailer said. “Dont you never get enough?”

  “I forgot something,” he said.

  “Let it wait till morning,” the jailer said.

  “Let him get it now,” Legate said in his equable drawl. “If he leaves it there till morning it might get trompled on.” So the jailer turned; again they mounted the stairs, again the jailer unlocked the bar across the oak door.

  “Never mind the other one,” he said. “I can attend to it through the bars:” and didn’t wait, the door closed behind him, he heard the bar slide back into the slot but still all he had to do was just to rap on it, hearing the jailer’s feet going away back down the stairs but even then all he had to do was just to yell loud and bang on the floor and Legate any­way would hear him, thinking Maybe he will remind me of that goddamn plate of collards and sidemeat or maybe he’ll even tell me I’m all he’s got, all that’s left and that will be enough—walking fast, then the steel door and Lucas had not moved, still standing in the middle of the cell beneath the light, watching the door when he came up to it and stopped and said in a voice as harsh as his uncle’s had ever been:

  “All right. What do you want me to do?”

  “Go out there and look at him,” Lucas said.

  “Go out where and look at who?” he said. But he under­stood all right. It seemed to him that he had known all the time what it would be; he thought with a kind of relief So th
at’s all it is even while his automatic voice was screeching with outraged disbelief: “Me? Me?” It was like something you have dreaded and feared and dodged for years until it seemed like all your life, then despite everything it hap­pened to you and all it was was just pain, all it did was hurt and so it was all over, all finished, all right.

  “I’ll pay you.” Lucas said.