Knight's Gambit Read online

  And the story itself was old and unoriginal enough: The country girl of seventeen, her imagination fired by the swagger and the prowess and the daring and the glib tongue; the father who tried to reason with her and got exactly as far as parents usually do in such cases; then the interdiction, the forbidden door, the inevitable elopement at midnight; and at four o’clock the next morning Bookwright waked Will Varner, the justice of the peace and the chief officer of the district, and handed Varner his pistol and said, ‘I have come to surrender. I killed Thorpe two hours ago.’ And a neighbor named Quick, who was first on the scene, found the half-drawn pistol in Thorpe’s hand; and a week after the brief account was printed in the Memphis papers, a woman appeared in Frenchman’s Bend who claimed to be Thorpe’s wife, and with a wedding license to prove it, trying to claim what money or property he might have left.

  I can remember the surprise that the grand jury even found a true bill; when the clerk read the indictment, the betting was twenty to one that the jury would not be out ten minutes. The district attorney even conducted the case through an assistant, and it did not take an hour to submit all the evidence. Then Uncle Gavin rose, and I remember how he looked at the jury—the eleven farmers and storekeepers and the twelfth man, who was to ruin his case—a farmer, too, a thin man, small, with thin gray hair and that appearance of hill farmers—at once frail and work-worn, yet curiously imperishable—who seem to become old men at fifty and then become invincible to time. Uncle Gavin’s voice was quiet, almost monotonous, not ranting as criminal-court trials had taught us to expect; only the words were a little different from the ones he would use in later years. But even then, although he had been talking to them for only a year, he could already talk so that all the people in our country—the Negroes, the hill people, the rich flatland plantation owners—understood what he said.

  ‘All of us in this country, the South, have been taught from birth a few things which we hold to above all else. One of the first of these—not the best; just one of the first—is that only a life can pay for the life it takes; that the one death is only half complete. If that is so, then we could have saved both these lives by stopping this defendant before he left his house that night; we could have saved at least one of them, even if we had had to take this defendant’s life from him in order to stop him. Only we didn’t know in time. And that’s what I am talking about—not about the dead man and his character and the morality of the act he was engaged in; not about self-defense, whether or not this defendant was justified in forcing the issue to the point of taking life, but about us who are not dead and what we don’t know—about all of us, human beings who at bottom want to do right, want not to harm others; human beings with all the complexity of human passions and feelings and beliefs, in the accepting or rejecting of which we had no choice, trying to do the best we can with them or despite them—this defendant, another human being with that same complexity of passions and instincts and beliefs, faced by a problem—the inevitable misery of his child who, with the headstrong folly of youth—again that same old complexity which she, too, did not ask to inherit—was incapable of her own preservation—and solved that problem to the best of his ability and beliefs, asking help of no one, and then abode by his decision and his act.’

  He sat down. The district attorney’s assistant merely rose and bowed to the court and sat down again. The jury went out and we didn’t even leave the room. Even the judge didn’t retire. And I remember the long breath, something, which went through the room when the clock hand above the bench passed the ten-minute mark and then passed the half-hour mark, and the judge beckoned a bailiff and whispered to him, and the bailiff went out and returned and whispered to the judge, and the judge rose and banged his gavel and recessed the court.

  I hurried home and ate my dinner and hurried back to town. The office was empty. Even grandfather, who took his nap after dinner, regardless of who hung and who didn’t, returned first; after three o’clock then, and the whole town knew now that Uncle Gavin’s jury was hung by one man, eleven to one for acquittal; then Uncle Gavin came in fast, and grandfather said, ‘Well, Gavin, at least you stopped talking in time to hang just your jury and not your client.’

  ‘That’s right, sir,’ Uncle Gavin said. Because he was looking at me with his bright eyes, his thin, quick face, his wild hair already beginning to turn white. ‘Come here, Chick,’ he said. ‘I need you for a minute.’

  ‘Ask Judge Frazier to allow you to retract your oration, then let Charley sum up for you,’ grandfather said. But we were outside then, on the stairs, Uncle Gavin stopping halfway down, so that we stood exactly halfway from anywhere, his hand on my shoulder, his eyes brighter and intenter than ever.

  ‘This is not cricket,’ he said. ‘But justice is accomplished lots of times by methods that won’t bear looking at. They have moved the jury to the back room in Mrs. Rouncewell’s boardinghouse. The room right opposite that mulberry tree. If you could get into the back yard without anybody seeing you, and be careful when you climb the tree—’

  Nobody saw me. But I could look through the windy mulberry leaves into the room, and see and hear, both—the nine angry and disgusted men sprawled in chairs at the far end of the room; Mr. Holland, the foreman, and another man standing in front of the chair in which the little, worn, dried-out hill man sat. His name was Fentry. I remembered all their names, because Uncle Gavin said that to be a successful lawyer and politician in our country you did not need a silver tongue nor even an intelligence; you needed only an infallible memory for names. But I would have remembered his name anyway, because it was Stonewall Jackson—Stonewall Jackson Fentry.

  ‘Don’t you admit that he was running off with Book-wright’s seventeen-year-old daughter?’ Mr. Holland said. ‘Don’t you admit that he had a pistol in his hand when they found him? Don’t you admit that he wasn’t hardly buried before that woman turned up and proved she was already his wife? Don’t you admit that he was not only no-good but dangerous, and that if it hadn’t been Bookwright, sooner or later somebody else would have had to, and that Bookwright was just unlucky?’

  ‘Yes,’ Fentry said.

  ‘Then what do you want?’ Mr. Holland said. ‘What do you want?’

  ‘I can’t help it,’ Fentry said. ‘I ain’t going to vote Mr. Bookwright free.’

  And he didn’t. And that afternoon Judge Frazier discharged the jury and set the case for retrial in the next term of court; and the next morning Uncle Gavin came for me before I had finished breakfast.

  ‘Tell your mother we might be gone overnight,’ he said. ‘Tell her I promise not to let you get either shot, snake-bit or surfeited with soda pop.… Because I’ve got to know,’ he said. We were driving fast now, out the northeast road, and his eyes were bright, not baffled, just intent and eager. ‘He was born and raised and lived all his life out here at the very other end of the county, thirty miles from Frenchman’s Bend. He said under oath that he had never even seen Bookwright before, and you can look at him and see that he never had enough time off from hard work to learn how to lie in. I doubt if he ever even heard Bookwright’s name before.’

  We drove until almost noon. We were in the hills now, out of the rich flat land, among the pine and bracken, the poor soil, the little tilted and barren patches of gaunt corn and cotton which somehow endured, as the people they clothed and fed somehow endured; the roads we followed less than lanes, winding and narrow, rutted and dust choked, the car in second gear half the time. Then we saw the mailbox, the crude lettering: G. A. FENTRY; beyond it, the two-room log house with an open hall, and even I, a boy of twelve, could see that no woman’s hand had touched it in a lot of years. We entered the gate.

  Then a voice said, ‘Stop! Stop where you are!’ And we hadn’t even seen him—an old man, barefoot, with a fierce white bristle of mustache, in patched denim faded almost to the color of skim milk, smaller, thinner even than the son, standing at the edge of the worn gallery, holding a shotgun across his middle and shaking
with fury or perhaps with the palsy of age.

  ‘Mr. Fentry—’ Uncle Gavin said.

  ‘You’ve badgered and harried him enough!’ the old man said. It was fury; the voice seemed to rise suddenly with a fiercer, an uncontrollable blaze of it: ‘Get out of here! Get off my land! Go!’

  ‘Come,’ Uncle Gavin said quietly. And still his eyes were only bright, eager, intent and grave. We did not drive fast now. The next mailbox was within the mile, and this time the house was even painted, with beds of petunias beside the steps, and the land about it was better, and this time the man rose from the gallery and came down to the gate.

  ‘Howdy, Mr. Stevens,’ he said. ‘So Jackson Fentry hung your jury for you.’

  ‘Howdy, Mr. Pruitt,’ Uncle Gavin said. ‘It looks like he did. Tell me.’

  And Pruitt told him, even though at that time Uncle Gavin would forget now and then and his language would slip back to Harvard and even to Heidelberg. It was as if people looked at his face and knew that what he asked was not just for his own curiosity or his own selfish using.

  ‘Only ma knows more about it than I do,’ Pruitt said. ‘Come up to the gallery.’

  We followed him to the gallery, where a plump, white-haired old lady in a clean gingham sunbonnet and dress and a clean white apron sat in a low rocking chair, shelling field peas into a wooden bowl. ‘This is Lawyer Stevens,’ Pruitt said. ‘Captain Stevens’ son, from town. He wants to know about Jackson Fentry.’

  So we sat, too, while they told it, the son and the mother talking in rotation.

  ‘That place of theirs,’ Pruitt said. ‘You seen some of it from the road. And what you didn’t see don’t look no better. But his pa and his grandpa worked it, made a living for themselves and raised families and paid their taxes and owed no man. I don’t know how they done it, but they did. And Jackson was helping from the time he got big enough to reach up to the plow handles. He never got much bigger than that neither. None of them ever did. I reckon that was why. And Jackson worked it, too, in his time, until he was about twenty-five and already looking forty, asking no odds of nobody, not married and not nothing, him and his pa living alone and doing their own washing and cooking, because how can a man afford to marry when him and his pa have just one pair of shoes between them. If it had been worth while getting a wife a-tall, since that place had already killed his ma and his grandma both before they were forty years old. Until one night—’

  ‘Nonsense,’ Mrs. Pruitt said. ‘When your pa and me married, we didn’t even own a roof over our heads. We moved into a rented house, on rented land—’

  ‘All right,’ Pruitt said. ‘Until one night he come to me and said how he had got him a sawmilling job down at Frenchman’s Bend.’

  ‘Frenchman’s Bend?’ Uncle Gavin said, and now his eyes were much brighter and quicker than just intent. ‘Yes,’ he said.

  ‘A day-wage job,’ Pruitt said. ‘Not to get rich; just to earn a little extra money maybe, risking a year or two to earn a little extra money, against the life his grandpa led until he died between the plow handles one day, and that his pa would lead until he died in a corn furrow, and then it would be his turn, and not even no son to come and pick him up out of the dirt. And that he had traded with a nigger to help his pa work their place while he was gone, and would I kind of go up there now and then and see that his pa was all right.’

  ‘Which you did,’ Mrs. Pruitt said.

  ‘I went close enough,’ Pruitt said. ‘I would get close enough to the field to hear him cussing at the nigger for not moving fast enough and to watch the nigger trying to keep up with him, and to think what a good thing it was Jackson hadn’t got two niggers to work the place while he was gone, because if that old man—and he was close to sixty then—had had to spend one full day sitting in a chair in the shade with nothing in his hands to chop or hoe with, he would have died before sundown. So Jackson left. He walked. They didn’t have but one mule. They ain’t never had but one mule. But it ain’t but about thirty miles. He was gone about two and a half years. Then one day—’

  ‘He come home that first Christmas,’ Mrs. Pruitt said.

  ‘That’s right,’ Pruitt said. ‘He walked them thirty miles home and spent Christmas Day, and walked them other thirty miles back to the sawmill.’

  ‘Whose sawmill?’ Uncle Gavin said.

  ‘Quick’s,’ Pruitt said. ‘Old Man Ben Quick’s. It was the second Christmas he never come home. Then, about the beginning of March, about when the river bottom at Frenchman’s Bend would be starting to dry out to where you could skid logs through it and you would have thought he would be settled down good to his third year of sawmilling, he come home to stay. He didn’t walk this time. He come in a hired buggy. Because he had the goat and the baby.’

  ‘Wait,’ Uncle Gavin said.

  ‘We never knew how he got home,’ Mrs. Pruitt said. ‘Because he had been home over a week before we even found out he had the baby.’

  ‘Wait,’ Uncle Gavin said.

  They waited, looking at him, Pruitt sitting on the gallery railing and Mrs. Pruitt’s fingers still shelling the peas out of the long brittle hulls, looking at Uncle Gavin. His eyes were not exultant now any more than they had been baffled or even very speculative before; they had just got brighter, as if whatever it was behind them had flared up, steady and fiercer, yet still quiet, as if it were going faster than the telling was going.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Tell me.’

  ‘And when I finally heard about it and went up there,’ Mrs. Pruitt said, ‘that baby wasn’t two weeks old. And how he had kept it alive, and just on goat’s milk—’

  ‘I don’t know if you know it,’ Pruitt said. ‘A goat ain’t like a cow. You milk a goat every two hours or so. That means all night too.’

  ‘Yes,’ Mrs. Pruitt said. ‘He didn’t even have diaper cloths. He had some split floursacks the midwife had showed him how to put on. So I made some cloths and I would go up there; he had kept the nigger on to help his pa in the field and he was doing the cooking and washing and nursing that baby, milking the goat to feed it; and I would say, “Let me take it. At least until he can be weaned. You come stay at my house, too, if you want,” and him just looking at me—little, thin, already wore-out something that never in his whole life had ever set down to a table and et all he could hold—saying, “I thank you, ma’am. I can make out.” ’

  ‘Which was correct,’ Pruitt said. ‘I don’t know how he was at sawmilling, and he never had no farm to find out what kind of a farmer he was. But he raised that boy.’

  ‘Yes,’ Mrs. Pruitt said. ‘And I kept on after him: “We hadn’t even heard you was married,” I said. “Yessum,” he said. “We was married last year. When the baby come, she died.” “Who was she?” I said. “Was she a Frenchman Bend girl?” “No’m,” he said. “She come from downstate.” “What was her name?” I said. “Miss Smith,” he said.’

  ‘He hadn’t even had enough time off from hard work to learn how to lie either,’ Pruitt said. ‘But he raised that boy. After their crops were in in the fall, he let the nigger go, and next spring him and the old man done the work like they use to. He had made a kind of satchel, like they say Indians does, to carry the boy in. I would go up there now and then while the ground was still cold and see Jackson and his pa plowing and chopping brush, and that satchel hanging on a fence post and that boy asleep bolt upright in it like it was a feather bed. He learned to walk that spring, and I would stand there at the fence and watch that durn little critter out there in the middle of the furrow, trying his best to keep up with Jackson, until Jackson would stop the plow at the turn row and go back and get him and set him straddle of his neck and take up the plow and go on. In the late summer he could walk pretty good. Jackson made him a little hoe out of a stick and a scrap of shingle, and you could see Jackson chopping in the middle-thigh cotton, but you couldn’t see the boy at all; you could just see the cotton shaking where he was.’

  ‘Jackson made his clothes,’
Mrs. Pruitt said. ‘Stitched them himself, by hand. I made a few garments and took them up there. I never done it but once though. He took them and he thanked me. But you could see it. It was like he even begrudged the earth itself for what that child had to eat to keep alive. And I tried to persuade Jackson to take him to church, have him baptized. “He’s already named,” he said. “His name is Jackson and Longstreet Fentry. Pa fit under both of them.” ’

  ‘He never went nowhere,’ Pruitt said. ‘Because where you saw Jackson, you saw that boy. If he had had to steal that boy down there at Frenchman’s Bend, he couldn’t ‘a’ hid no closer. It was even the old man that would ride over to Haven Hill store to buy their supplies, and the only time Jackson and that boy was separated as much as one full breath was once a year when Jackson would ride in to Jefferson to pay their taxes, and when I first seen the boy I thought of a setter puppy, until one day I knowed Jackson had gone to pay their taxes and I went up there and the boy was under the bed, not making any fuss, just backed up into the corner, looking out at me. He didn’t blink once. He was exactly like a fox or a wolf cub somebody had caught just last night.’

  We watched him take from his pocket a tin of snuff and tilt a measure of it into the lid and then into his lower lip, tapping the final grain from the lid with delicate deliberation.

  ‘All right,’ Uncle Gavin said. ‘Then what?’

  ‘That’s all,’ Pruitt said. ‘In the next summer him and the boy disappeared.’

  ‘Disappeared?’ Uncle Gavin said.

  ‘That’s right. They were just gone one morning. I didn’t know when. And one day I couldn’t stand it no longer, I went up there and the house was empty, and I went on to the field where the old man was plowing, and at first I thought the spreader between his plow handles had broke and he had tied a sapling across the handles, until he seen me and snatched the sapling off, and it was that shotgun, and I reckon what he said to me was about what he said to you this morning when you stopped there. Next year he had the nigger helping him again. Then, about five years later, Jackson come back. I don’t know when. He was just there one morning. And the nigger was gone again, and him and his pa worked the place like they use to. And one day I couldn’t stand it no longer, I went up there and I stood at the fence where he was plowing, until after a while the land he was breaking brought him up to the fence, and still he hadn’t never looked at me; he plowed right by me, not ten feet away, still without looking at me, and he turned and come back, and I said, “Did he die, Jackson?” and then he looked at me. “The boy,” I said. And he said, “What boy?” ’