Knight's Gambit Page 6

  ‘That was Gambrell,’ Uncle Gavin said. ‘Go on.’

  ‘Yes. I told him I was. I told him. Because he laughed at me. He didn’t have to do that. He could have voted agin me and let it go at that. He never had to laugh. He said I would stay here as long as he did or could keep me, and that he was here for life. And he was. He stayed here all his life. That’s just exactly how long he stayed.’ But he wasn’t laughing, Uncle Gavin said. It wasn’t laughing.

  ‘Yes. And so you told Monk—’

  ‘Yes. I told him. I said here we all were, pore ignorant country folks that hadn’t had no chance. That God had made to live outdoors in the free world and farm His land for Him; only we were pore and ignorant and didn’t know it, and the rich folks wouldn’t tell us until it was too late. That we were pore ignorant country folks that never saw a train before, getting on the train and nobody caring to tell us where to get off and farm in the free world like God wanted us to do, and that he was the one that held us back, kept us locked up outen the free world to laugh at us agin the wishes of God. But I never told him to do it. I just said “And now we can’t never get out because we ain’t got no pistol. But if somebody had a pistol we would walk out into the free world and farm it, because that’s what God aimed for us to do and that’s what we want to do. Ain’t that what we want to do?” and he said, “Yes. That’s it. That’s what it is.” And I said, “Only we ain’t got nara pistol.” And he said, “I can get a pistol.” And I said, “Then we will walk in the free world because we have sinned against God but it wasn’t our fault because they hadn’t told us what it was He aimed for us to do. But now we know what it is because we want to walk in the free world and farm for God!” That’s all I told him. I never told him to do nothing. And now go tell them. Let them hang me too. Gambrell is rotted, and that batbrain is rotted, and I just as soon rot under ground as to rot in here. Go on and tell them.’

  ‘Yes,’ Uncle Gavin said. ‘All right. You will go free.’

  For a minute he said Terrel did not move at all. Then he said, ‘Free?’

  ‘Yes,’ Uncle Gavin said. ‘Free. But remember this. A while ago you threatened me. Now I am going to threaten you. And the curious thing is, I can back mine up. I am going to keep track of you. And the next time anything happens, the next time anybody tries to frame you with a killing and you can’t get anybody to say you were not there nor any of your kinsfolks to take the blame for it—You understand?’ Terrel had looked up at him when he said Free, but now he looked down again. ‘Do you?’ Uncle Gavin said.

  ‘Yes,’ Terrel said. ‘I understand.’

  ‘All right,’ Uncle Gavin said. He turned; he called to the guard. ‘You can let us out this time,’ he said. He returned to the mess hall, where the Governor was calling the men up one by one and giving them their papers and where again the Governor paused, the smooth, inscrutable face looking up at Uncle Gavin. He did not wait for Uncle Gavin to speak.

  ‘You were successful, I see,’ he said.

  ‘Yes. Do you want to hear—’

  ‘My dear sir, no. I must decline. I will put it stronger than that: I must refuse.’ Again Uncle Gavin said he looked at him with that expression warm, quizzical, almost pitying, yet profoundly watchful and curious. ‘I really believe that you never have quite given up hope that you can change this business. Have you?’

  Now Uncle Gavin said he did not answer for a moment. Then he said, ‘No. I haven’t. So you are going to turn him loose? You really are?’ Now he said that the pity, the warmth vanished, that now the face was as he first saw it: smooth, completely inscrutable, completely false.

  ‘My dear Mr. Stevens,’ the Governor said. ‘You have already convinced me. But I am merely the moderator of this meeting; here are the votes. But do you think that you can convince these gentlemen?’ And Uncle Gavin said he looked around at them, the identical puppet faces of the seven or eight of the Governor’s battalions and battalions of factory-made colonels.

  ‘No,’ Uncle Gavin said. ‘I can’t.’ So he left then. It was in the middle of the morning, and hot, but he started back to Jefferson at once, riding across the broad, heat-miraged land, between the cotton and the corn of God’s long-fecund, remorseless acres, which would outlast any corruption and injustice. He was glad of the heat, he said; glad to be sweating, sweating out of himself the smell and the taste of where he had been.

  Hand Upon the Waters

  1

  The two men followed the path where it ran between the river and the dense wall of cypress and cane and gum and brier. One of them carried a gunny sack which had been washed and looked as if it had been ironed too. The other was a youth, less than twenty, by his face. The river was low, at mid-July level.

  ‘He ought to been catching fish in this water,’ the youth said.

  ‘If he happened to feel like fishing,’ the one with the sack said. ‘Him and Joe run that line when Lonnie feels like it, not when the fish are biting.’

  ‘They’ll be on the line, anyway,’ the youth said. ‘I don’t reckon Lonnie cares who takes them off for him.’

  Presently the ground rose to a cleared point almost like a headland. Upon it sat a conical hut with a pointed roof, built partly of mildewed canvas and odd-shaped boards and partly of oil tins hammered out flat. A rusted stovepipe projected crazily above it, there was a meager woodpile and an ax, and a bunch of cane poles leaned against it. Then they saw, on the earth before the open door, a dozen or so short lengths of cord just cut from a spool near by, and a rusted can half full of heavy fishhooks, some of which had already been bent onto the cords. But there was nobody there.

  ‘The boat’s gone,’ the man with the sack said. ‘So he ain’t gone to the store.’ Then he discovered that the youth had gone on, and he drew in his breath and was just about to shout when suddenly a man rushed out of the undergrowth and stopped, facing him and making an urgent whimpering sound—a man not large, but with tremendous arms and shoulders; an adult, yet with something childlike about him, about the way he moved, barefoot, in battered overalls and with the urgent eyes of the deaf and dumb.

  ‘Hi, Joe,’ the man with the sack said, raising his voice as people will with those who they know cannot understand them. ‘Where’s Lonnie?’ He held up the sack. ‘Got some fish?’

  But the other only stared at him, making that rapid whimpering. Then he turned and scuttled on up the path where the youth had disappeared, who, at that moment, shouted: ‘Just look at this line!’

  The older one followed. The youth was leaning eagerly out over the water beside a tree from which a light cotton rope slanted tautly downward into the water. The deaf-and-dumb man stood just behind him, still whimpering and lifting his feet rapidly in turn, though before the older man reached him he turned and scuttled back past him, toward the hut. At this stage of the river the line should have been clear of the water, stretching from bank to bank, between the two trees, with only the hooks on the dependent cords submerged. But now it slanted into the water from either end, with a heavy downstream sag, and even the older man could feel movement on it. ‘It’s big as a man!’ the youth cried.

  ‘Yonder’s his boat,’ the older man said. The youth saw it, too—across the stream and below them, floated into a willow clump inside a point. ‘Cross and get it, and we’ll see how big this fish is.’

  The youth stepped out of his shoes and overalls and removed his shirt and waded out and began to swim, holding straight across to let the current carry him down to the skiff, and got the skiff and paddled back, standing erect in it and staring eagerly upstream toward the heavy sag of the line, near the center of which the water, from time to time, roiled heavily with submerged movement. He brought the skiff in below the older man, who, at that moment, discovered the deaf-and-dumb man just behind him again, still making the rapid and urgent sound and trying to enter the skiff.

  ‘Get back!’ the older man said, pushing the other back with his arm. ‘Get back, Joe!’

  ‘Hurry up!’ the youth
said, staring eagerly toward the submerged line, where, as he watched, something rolled sluggishly to the surface, then sank again. ‘There’s something on there, or there ain’t a hog in Georgia. It’s big as a man too!’

  The older one stepped into the skiff. He still held the rope, and he drew the skiff, hand over hand, along the line itself.

  Suddenly, from the bank of the river behind them, the deaf-and-dumb man began to make an actual sound. It was quite loud.

  2

  ‘Inquest?’ Stevens said.

  ‘Lonnie Grinnup.’ The coroner was an old country doctor. ‘Two fellows found him drowned on his own trotline this morning.’

  ‘No!’ Stevens said. ‘Poor damned feeb. I’ll come out.’ As county attorney he had no business there, even if it had not been an accident. He knew it. He was going to look at the dead man’s face for a sentimental reason. What was now Yoknapatawpha County had been founded not by one pioneer but by three simultaneous ones. They came together on horseback, through the Cumberland Gap from the Carolinas, when Jefferson was still a Chickasaw Agency post, and bought land in the Indian patent and established families and flourished and vanished, so that now, a hundred years afterward, there was in all the county they helped to found but one representative of the three names.

  This was Stevens, because the last of the Holston family had died before the end of the last century, and the Louis Grenier, whose dead face Stevens was driving eight miles in the heat of a July afternoon to look at, had never even known he was Louis Grenier. He could not even spell the Lonnie Grinnup he called himself—an orphan, too, like Stevens, a man a little under medium size and somewhere in his middle thirties, whom the whole county knew—the face which was almost delicate when you looked at it again, equable, constant, always cheerful, with an invariable fuzz of soft golden beard which had never known a razor, and light-colored peaceful eyes—‘touched,’ they said, but whatever it was, had touched him lightly, taking not very much away that need be missed—living, year in and year out, in the hovel he had built himself of an old tent and a few mismatched boards and flattened oil tins, with the deaf-and-dumb orphan he had taken into his hut ten years ago and clothed and fed and raised, and who had not even grown mentally as far as he himself had.

  Actually his hut and trotline and fish trap were in almost the exact center of the thousand and more acres his ancestors had once owned. But he never knew it.

  Stevens believed he would not have cared, would have declined to accept the idea that any one man could or should own that much of the earth which belongs to all, to every man for his use and pleasure—in his own case, that thirty or forty square feet where his hut sat and the span of river across which his trotline stretched, where anyone was welcome at any time, whether he was there or not, to use his gear and eat his food as long as there was food.

  And at times he would wedge his door shut against prowling animals and with his deaf-and-dumb companion he would appear without warning or invitation at houses or cabins ten and fifteen miles away, where he would remain for weeks, pleasant, equable, demanding nothing and without servility, sleeping wherever it was convenient for his hosts to have him sleep—in the hay of lofts, or in beds in family or company rooms, while the deaf-and-dumb youth lay on the porch or the ground just outside, where he could hear him who was brother and father both, breathing. It was his one sound out of all the voiceless earth. He was infallibly aware of it.

  It was early afternoon. The distances were blue with heat. Then, across the long flat where the highway began to parallel the river bottom, Stevens saw the store. By ordinary it would have been deserted, but now he could already see clotted about it the topless and battered cars, the saddled horses and mules and the wagons, the riders and drivers of which he knew by name. Better still, they knew him, voting for him year after year and calling him by his given name even though they did not quite understand him, just as they did not understand the Harvard Phi Beta Kappa key on his watch chain. He drew in beside the coroner’s car.

  Apparently it was not to be in the store, but in the grist mill beside it, before the open door of which the clean Saturday overalls and shirts and the bared heads and the sunburned necks striped with the white razor lines of Saturday neck shaves were densest and quietest. They made way for him to enter. There was a table and three chairs where the coroner and two witnesses sat.

  Stevens noticed a man of about forty holding a clean gunny sack, folded and refolded until it resembled a book, and a youth whose face wore an expression of weary yet indomitable amazement. The body lay under a quilt on the low platform to which the silent mill was bolted. He crossed to it and raised the corner of the quilt and looked at the face and lowered the quilt and turned, already on his way back to town, and then he did not go back to town. He moved over among the men who stood along the wall, their hats in their hands, and listened to the two witnesses—it was the youth telling it in his amazed, spent, incredulous voice—finish describing the finding of the body. He watched the coroner sign the certificate and return the pen to his pocket, and he knew he was not going back to town.

  ‘I reckon that’s all,’ the coroner said. He glanced toward the door. ‘All right, Ike,’ he said. ‘You can take him now.’

  Stevens moved aside with the others and watched the four men cross toward the quilt. ‘You going to take him, Ike?’ he said.

  The eldest of the four glanced back at him for a moment. ‘Yes. He had his burying money with Mitchell at the store.’

  ‘You, and Pose, and Matthew, and Jim Blake,’ Stevens said.

  This time the other glanced back at him almost with surprise, almost impatiently.

  ‘We can make up the difference,’ he said.

  ‘I’ll help,’ Stevens said.

  ‘I thank you,’ the other said. ‘We got enough.’

  Then the coroner was among them, speaking testily: ‘All right, boys. Give them room.’

  With the others, Stevens moved out into the air, the afternoon again. There was a wagon backed up to the door now which had not been there before. Its tail gate was open, the bed was filled with straw, and with the others Stevens stood bareheaded and watched the four men emerge from the shed, carrying the quilt-wrapped bundle, and approach the wagon. Three or four others moved forward to help, and Stevens moved, too, and touched the youth’s shoulder, seeing again that expression of spent and incredulous wild amazement.

  ‘You went and got the boat before you knew anything was wrong,’ he said.

  ‘That’s right,’ the youth said. He spoke quietly enough at first. ‘I swum over and got the boat and rowed back. I knowed something was on the line. I could see it swagged—’

  ‘You mean you swam the boat back,’ Stevens said.

  ‘—down into the—Sir?’

  ‘You swam the boat back. You swam over and got it and swam it back.’

  ‘No, sir! I rowed the boat back. I rowed it straight back across! I never suspected nothing! I could see them fish—’

  ‘What with?’ Stevens said. The youth glared at him. ‘What did you row it back with?’

  ‘With the oar! I picked up the oar and rowed it right back, and all the time I could see them flopping around in the water. They didn’t want to let go! They held on to him even after we hauled him up, still eating him! Fish were! I knowed turtles would, but these were fish! Eating him! Of course it was fish we thought was there! It was! I won’t never eat another one! Never!’

  It had not seemed long, yet the afternoon had gone somewhere, taking some of the heat with it. Again in his car, his hand on the switch, Stevens sat looking at the wagon, now about to depart. And it’s not right, he thought. It don’t add. Something more that I missed, didn’t see. Or something that hasn’t happened yet.

  The wagon was now moving, crossing the dusty banquette toward the highroad, with two men on the seat and the other two on saddled mules beside it. Stevens’ hand turned the switch; the car was already in gear. It passed the wagon, already going fast.


  A mile down the road he turned into a dirt lane, back toward the hills. It began to rise, the sun intermittent now, for in places among the ridges sunset had already come. Presently the road forked. In the V of the fork stood church, white-painted and steepleless, beside an unfenced straggle of cheap marble headstones and other graves outlined only by rows of inverted glass jars and crockery and broken brick.

  He did not hesitate. He drove up beside the church and turned and stopped the car facing the fork and the road over which he had just come where it curved away and vanished. Because of the curve, he could hear the wagon for some time before he saw it, then he heard the truck. It was coming down out of the hills behind him, fast, sweeping into sight, already slowing—a cab, a shallow bed with a tarpaulin spread over it.

  It drew out of the road at the fork and stopped; then he could hear the wagon again, and then he saw it and the two riders come around the curve in the dusk, and there was a man standing in the road beside the truck now, and Stevens recognized him: Tyler Ballenbaugh—a farmer, married and with a family and a reputation for self-sufficiency and violence, who had been born in the county and went out West and returned, bringing with him, like an effluvium, rumors of sums he had won gambling, who had married and bought land and no longer gambled at cards, but on certain years would mortgage his own crop and buy or sell cotton futures with the money—standing in the road beside the wagon, tall in the dusk, talking to the men in the wagon without raising his voice or making any gesture. Then there was another man beside him, in a white shirt, whom Stevens did not recognize or look at again.