“I done left,” she said. “I come to find my boy.” Then, sitting on the hard chair opposite him and without moving, she began to chant. “Roth Edmonds sold my Benjamin. Sold him in Egypt. Pharaoh got him——”
“Wait,” Stevens said. “Wait, Aunty.” Because memory, recollection, was about to mesh and click. “If you dont know where your grandson is, how do you know he’s in trouble? Do you mean that Mr Edmonds has refused to help you find him?”
“It was Roth Edmonds sold him,” she said. “Sold him in Egypt. I dont know whar he is. I just knows Pharaoh got him. And you the Law. I wants to find my boy.”
“All right,” Stevens said. “I’ll try to find him. If you’re not going back home, where will you stay in town? It may take some time, if you dont know where he went and you haven’t heard from him in five years.”
“I be staying with Hamp Worsham. He my brother.”
“All right,” Stevens said. He was not surprised. He had known Hamp Worsham all his life, though he had never seen the old Negress before. But even if he had, he still would not have been surprised. They were like that. You could know two of them for years; they might even have worked for you for years, bearing different names. Then suddenly you learn by pure chance that they are brothers or sisters.
He sat in the hot motion which was not breeze and listened to her toiling slowly down the steep outside stairs, remembering the grandson. The papers of that business had passed across his desk before going to the District Attorney five or six years ago—Butch Beauchamp, as the youth had been known during the single year he had spent in and out of the city jail: the old Negress’ daughter’s child, orphaned of his mother at birth and deserted by his father, whom the grandmother had taken and raised, or tried to. Because at nineteen he had quit the country and come to town and spent a year in and out of jail for gambling and fighting, to come at last under serious indictment for breaking and entering a store.
Caught red-handed, whereupon he had struck with a piece of iron pipe at the officer who surprised him and then lay on the ground where the officer had felled him with a pistol-butt, cursing through his broken mouth, his teeth fixed into something like furious laughter through the blood. Then two nights later he broke out of jail and was seen no more—a youth not yet twenty-one, with something in him from the father who begot and deserted him and who was now in the State Penitentiary for manslaughter—some seed not only violent but dangerous and bad.
And that’s who I am to find, save, Stevens thought. Because he did not for one moment doubt the old Negress’ instinct. If she had also been able to divine where the boy was and what his trouble was, he would not have been surprised, and it was only later that he thought to be surprised at how quickly he did find where the boy was and what was wrong.
His first thought was to telephone Carothers Edmonds, on whose farm the old Negress’ husband had been a tenant for years. But then, according to her, Edmonds had already refused to have anything to do with it. Then he sat perfectly still while the hot wind blew in his wild white mane. Now he comprehended what the old Negress had meant. He remembered now that it was Edmonds who had actually sent the boy to Jefferson in the first place: he had caught the boy breaking into his commissary store and had ordered him off the place and had forbidden him ever to return. And not the sheriff, the police, he thought. Something broader, quicker in scope.… He rose and took his old fine worn panama and descended the outside stairs and crossed the empty square in the hot suspension of noon’s beginning, to the office of the county newspaper. The editor was in—an older man but with hair less white than Stevens’, in a black string tie and an old-fashioned boiled shirt and tremendously fat.
“An old nigger woman named Mollie Beauchamp,” Stevens said. “She and her husband live on the Edmonds place. It’s her grandson. You remember him—Butch Beauchamp, about five or six years ago, who spent a year in town, mostly in jail, until they finally caught him breaking into Rouncewell’s store one night? Well, he’s in worse trouble than that now. I dont doubt her at all. I just hope, for her sake as well as that of the great public whom I represent, that his present trouble is very bad and maybe final too——”
“Wait,” the editor said. He didn’t even need to leave his desk. He took the press association flimsy from its spike and handed it to Stevens. It was datelined from Joliet, Illinois, this morning:
Mississippi negro, on eve of execution for murder of Chicago policeman, exposes alias by completing census questionnaire. Samuel Worsham Beauchamp——
Five minutes later Stevens was crossing again the empty square in which noon’s hot suspension was that much nearer. He had thought that he was going home to his boarding house for the noon meal, but he found that he was not. Besides, I didn’t lock my office door, he thought. Only, how under the sun she could have got to town from those seventeen miles. She may even have walked. “So it seems I didn’t mean what I said I hoped,” he said aloud, mounting the outside stairs again, out of the hazy and now windless sunglare, and entered his office. He stopped. Then he said,
“Good morning, Miss Worsham.”
She was quite old too—thin, erect, with a neat, old-time piling of white hair beneath a faded hat of thirty years ago, in rusty black, with a frayed umbrella faded now until it was green instead of black. He had known her too all his life. She lived alone in the decaying house her father had left her, where she gave lessons in china-painting and, with the help of Hamp Worsham, descendant of one of her father’s slaves, and his wife, raised chickens and vegetables for market.
“I came about Mollie,” she said. “Mollie Beauchamp. She said that you——”
He told her while she watched him, erect on the hard chair where the old Negress had sat, the rusty umbrella leaning against her knee. On her lap, beneath her folded hands, lay an old-fashioned beaded reticule almost as big as a suitcase. “He is to be executed tonight.”
“Can nothing be done? Mollie’s and Hamp’s parents belonged to my grandfather. Mollie and I were born in the same month. We grew up together as sisters would.”
“I telephoned,” Stevens said. “I talked to the Warden at Joliet, and to the District Attorney in Chicago. He had a fair trial, a good lawyer—of that sort. He had money. He was in a business called numbers, that people like him make money in.” She watched him, erect and motionless. “He is a murderer, Miss Worsham. He shot that policeman in the back. A bad son of a bad father. He admitted, confessed it afterward.”
“I know,” she said. Then he realised that she was not looking at him, not seeing him at least. “It’s terrible.”
“So is murder terrible,” Stevens said. “It’s better this way.” Then she was looking at him again.
“I wasn’t thinking of him. I was thinking of Mollie. She mustn’t know.”
“Yes,” Stevens said. “I have already talked with Mr Wilmoth at the paper. He has agreed not to print anything. I will telephone the Memphis paper, but it’s probably too late for that.… If we could just persuade her to go on back home this afternoon, before the Memphis paper … Out there, where the only white person she ever sees is Mr Edmonds, and I will telephone him; and even if the other darkies should hear about it, I’m sure they wouldn’t. And then maybe in about two or three months I could go out there and tell her he is dead and buried somewhere in the North.…” This time she was watching him with such an expression that he ceased talking; she sat there, erect on the hard chair, watching him until he had ceased.
“She will want to take him back home with her,” she said.
“Him?” Stevens said. “The body?” She watched him. The expression was neither shocked nor disapproving. It merely embodied some old, timeless, female affinity for blood and grief. Stevens thought: She has walked to town in this heat. Unless Hamp brought her in the buggy he peddles eggs and vegetables from.
“He is the only child of her oldest daughter, her own dead first child. He must come home.”
“He must come home,” Stevens said as quietly. “I’ll at
tend to it at once. I’ll telephone at once.”
“You are kind.” For the first time she stirred, moved. He watched her hands draw the reticule toward her, clasping it. “I will defray the expenses. Can you give me some idea——?”
He looked her straight in the face. He told the lie without batting an eye, quickly and easily. “Ten or twelve dollars will cover it. They will furnish a box and there will be only the transportation.”
“A box?” Again she was looking at him with that expression curious and detached, as though he were a child. “He is her grandson, Mr Stevens. When she took him to raise, she gave him my father’s name—Samuel Worsham. Not just a box, Mr Stevens. I understand that can be done by paying so much a month.”
“Not just a box,” Stevens said. He said it in exactly the same tone in which he had said He must come home. “Mr Edmonds will want to help, I know. And I understand that old Luke Beauchamp has some money in the bank. And if you will permit me——”
“That will not be necessary,” she said. He watched her open the reticule; he watched her count onto the desk twenty-five dollars in frayed bills and coins ranging down to nickels and dimes and pennies. “That will take care of the immediate expenses. I will tell her—You are sure there is no hope?”
“I am sure. He will die tonight.”
“I will tell her this afternoon that he is dead then.”
“Would you like for me to tell her?”
“I will tell her,” she said.
“Would you like for me to come out and see her, then, talk to her?”
“It would be kind of you.” Then she was gone, erect, her feet crisp and light, almost brisk, on the stairs, ceasing. He telephoned again, to the Illinois warden, then to an undertaker in Joliet. Then once more he crossed the hot, empty square. He had only to wait a short while for the editor to return from dinner.
“We’re bringing him home,” he said. “Miss Worsham and you and me and some others. It will cost——”
“Wait,” the editor said. “What others?”
“I dont know yet. It will cost about two hundred. I’m not counting the telephones; I’ll take care of them myself. I’ll get something out of Carothers Edmonds the first time I catch him; I dont know how much, but something. And maybe fifty around the square. But the rest of it is you and me, because she insisted on leaving twenty-five with me, which is just twice what I tried to persuade her it would cost and just exactly four times what she can afford to pay——”
“Wait,” the editor said. “Wait.”
“And he will come in on Number Four the day after tomorrow and we will meet it, Miss Worsham and his grandmother, the old nigger, in my car and you and me in yours. Miss Worsham and the old woman will take him back home, back where he was born. Or where the old woman raised him. Or where she tried to. And the hearse out there will be fifteen more, not counting the flowers——”
“Flowers?” the editor cried.
“Flowers,” Stevens said. “Call the whole thing two hundred and twenty-five. And it will probably be mostly you and me. All right?”
“No it aint all right,” the editor said. “But it dont look like I can help myself. By Jupiter,” he said, “even if I could help myself, the novelty will be almost worth it. It will be the first time in my life I ever paid money for copy I had already promised before hand I wont print.”
“Have already promised before hand you will not print,” Stevens said. And during the remainder of that hot and now windless afternoon, while officials from the city hall, and justices of the peace and bailiffs come fifteen and twenty miles from the ends of the county, mounted the stairs to the empty office and called his name and cooled their heels a while and then went away and returned and sat again, fuming, Stevens passed from store to store and office to office about the square—merchant and clerk, proprietor and employee, doctor dentist lawyer and barber—with his set and rapid speech: “It’s to bring a dead nigger home. It’s for Miss Worsham. Never mind about a paper to sign: just give me a dollar. Or a half a dollar then. Or a quarter then.”
And that night after supper he walked through the breathless and star-filled darkness to Miss Worsham’s house on the edge of town and knocked on the paintless front door. Hamp Worsham admitted him—an old man, belly-bloated from the vegetables on which he and his wife and Miss Worsham all three mostly lived, with blurred old eyes and a fringe of white hair about the head and face of a Roman general.
“She expecting you,” he said. “She say to kindly step up to the chamber.”
“Is that where Aunt Mollie is?” Stevens said.
“We all dar,” Worsham said.
So Stevens crossed the lamplit hall (he knew that the entire house was still lighted with oil lamps and there was no running water in it) and preceded the Negro up the clean, paintless stairs beside the faded wallpaper, and followed the old Negro along the hall and into the clean, spare bedroom with its unmistakable faint odor of old maidens. They were all there, as Worsham had said—his wife, a tremendous light-colored woman in a bright turban leaning in the door, Miss Worsham erect again on a hard straight chair, the old Negress sitting in the only rocking chair beside the hearth on which even tonight a few ashes smoldered faintly.
She held a reed-stemmed clay pipe but she was not smoking it, the ash dead and white in the stained bowl; and actually looking at her for the first time, Stevens thought: Good Lord, she’s not as big as a ten-year-old child. Then he sat too, so that the four of them—himself, Miss Worsham, the old Negress and her brother—made a circle about the brick hearth on which the ancient symbol of human coherence and solidarity smoldered.
“He’ll be home the day after tomorrow, Aunt Mollie,” he said. The old Negress didn’t even look at him; she never had looked at him.
“He dead,” she said. “Pharaoh got him.”
“Oh yes, Lord,” Worsham said. “Pharaoh got him.”
“Done sold my Benjamin,” the old Negress said. “Sold him in Egypt.” She began to sway faintly back and forth in the chair.
“Oh yes, Lord,” Worsham said.
“Hush,” Miss Worsham said. “Hush, Hamp.”
“I telephoned Mr Edmonds,” Stevens said. “He will have everything ready when you get there.”
“Roth Edmonds sold him,” the old Negress said. She swayed back and forth in the chair. “Sold my Benjamin.”
“Hush,” Miss Worsham said. “Hush, Mollie. Hush now.”
“No,” Stevens said. “No he didn’t, Aunt Mollie. It wasn’t Mr Edmonds. Mr Edmonds didn’t—” But she cant hear me, he thought. She was not even looking at him. She never had looked at him.
“Sold my Benjamin,” she said. “Sold him in Egypt.”
“Sold him in Egypt,” Worsham said.
“Roth Edmonds sold my Benjamin.”
“Sold him to Pharaoh.”
“Sold him to Pharaoh and now he dead.”
“I’d better go,” Stevens said. He rose quickly. Miss Worsham rose too, but he did not wait for her to precede him. He went down the hall fast, almost running; he did not even know whether she was following him or not. Soon I will be outside, he thought. Then there will be air, space, breath. Then he could hear her behind him—the crisp, light, brisk yet unhurried feet as he had heard them descending the stairs from his office, and beyond them the voices:
“Sold my Benjamin. Sold him in Egypt.”
“Sold him in Egypt. Oh yes, Lord.”
He descended the stairs, almost running. It was not far now; now he could smell and feel it: the breathing and simple dark, and now he could manner himself to pause and wait, turning at the door, watching Miss Worsham as she followed him to the door—the high, white, erect, old-time head approaching through the old-time lamplight. Now he could hear the third voice, which would be that of Hamp’s wife—a true constant soprano which ran without words beneath the strophe and antistrophe of the brother and sister:
“Sold him in Egypt and now he dead.”
“Oh yes,
Lord. Sold him in Egypt.”
“Sold him in Egypt.”
“And now he dead.”
“Sold him to Pharaoh.”
“And now he dead.”
“I’m sorry,” Stevens said. “I ask you to forgive me. I should have known. I shouldn’t have come.”
“It’s all right,” Miss Worsham said. “It’s our grief.”
And on the next bright hot day but one the hearse and the two cars were waiting when the southbound train came in. There were more than a dozen cars, but it was not until the train came in that Stevens and the editor began to notice the number of people, Negroes and whites both. Then, with the idle white men and youths and small boys and probably half a hundred Negroes, men and women too, watching quietly, the Negro undertaker’s men lifted the gray-and-silver casket from the train and carried it to the hearse and snatched the wreaths and floral symbols of man’s ultimate and inevitable end briskly out and slid the casket in and flung the flowers back and clapped-to the door.
Then, with Miss Worsham and the old Negress in Stevens’ car with the driver he had hired and himself and the editor in the editor’s, they followed the hearse as it swung into the long hill up from the station, going fast in a whining lower gear until it reached the crest, going pretty fast still but with an unctuous, an almost bishoplike purr until it slowed into the square, crossing it, circling the Confederate monument and the courthouse while the merchants and clerks and barbers and professional men who had given Stevens the dollars and half-dollars and quarters and the ones who had not, watched quietly from doors and upstairs windows, swinging them into the street which at the edge of town would become the country road leading to the destination seventeen miles away, already picking up speed again and followed still by the two cars containing the four people—the high-headed erect white woman, the old Negress, the designated paladin of justice and truth and right, the Heidelberg Ph.D.—in formal component complement to the Negro murderer’s catafalque: the slain wolf.
When they reached the edge of town the hearse was going quite fast. Now they flashed past the metal sign which said Jefferson. Corporate Limit. and the pavement vanished, slanting away into another long hill, becoming gravel. Stevens reached over and cut the switch, so that the editor’s car coasted, slowing as he began to brake it, the hearse and the other car drawing rapidly away now as though in flight, the light and unrained summer dust spurting from beneath the fleeing wheels; soon they were gone. The editor turned his car clumsily, grinding the gears, sawing and filling until it was back in the road facing town again. Then he sat for a moment, his foot on the clutch.