“A still?” Edmonds said. “On my land?” He began to roar. “Haven’t I told and told every man woman and child on this place what I would do the first drop of white mule whisky I found on my land?”
“You didn’t need to tell me,” Lucas said. “I’ve lived on this place since I was born, since before your pa was. And you or him or old Cass either aint never heard of me having truck with any kind of whisky except that bottle of town whisky you and him give Molly Christmas.”
“I know it,” Edmonds said. “And I would have thought George Wilkins—” He ceased. He said, “Hah. Have I or haven’t I heard something about George wanting to marry that girl of yours?”
For just an instant Lucas didn’t answer. Then he said, “That’s right.”
“Hah,” Edmonds said again. “And so you thought that by telling me on George before he got caught himself, I would be satisfied to make him chop up his kettle and pour out his whisky and then forget about it.”
“I didn’t know,” Lucas said.
“Well, you know now,” Edmonds said. “And George will too when the sheriff—” he went back into the house. Lucas listened to the hard, rapid, angry clapping of his heels on the floor, then to the prolonged violent grinding of the telephone crank. Then he stopped listening, standing motionless in the half-darkness, blinking a little. He thought, All that worrying. I never even thought of that. Edmonds returned. “All right,” he said. “You can go on home now. Go to bed. I know it wont do a damn bit of good to mention it, but I would like to see your south creek piece planted by tomorrow night. You doped around in it today like you hadn’t been to bed for a week. I dont know what you do at night, but you are too old to be tomcatting around the country whether you think so or not.”
He went back home. Now that it was all over, done, he realised how tired he actually was. It was as if the alternating waves of alarm and outrage and anger and fear of the past ten days, culminating in last night’s frantic activity and the past thirty-six hours during which he had not even taken off his clothes, had narcotised him, deadened the very weariness itself. But it was all right now. If a little physical exhaustion, even another ten days or two weeks of it, was all required of him in return for that moment last night, he would not complain. Then he remembered that he had not told Edmonds of his decision to quit farming, for Edmonds to arrange to rent the land he had been working to someone else to finish his crop. But perhaps that was just as well too; perhaps even a single night would suffice to find the rest of the money which a churn that size must have contained, and he would keep the land, the crop, from old habit, for something to occupy him.—Provided I dont need to keep it for a better reason still, he thought grimly. Since I probably aint even made a scratch yet on the kind of luck that can wait unto I am sixty-seven years old, almost too old to even want it, to make me rich.
The house was dark except for a faint glow from the hearth in his and his wife’s room. The room across the hallway where his daughter slept was dark too. It would be empty too. He had expected that. I reckon George Wilkins is entitled to one more night of female company, he thought. From what I have heard, he wont find none of it where he’s going tomorrow.
When he got into bed his wife said without waking, “Whar you been? Walking the roads all last night. Walking the roads all tonight, with the ground crying to get planted. You just wait unto Mister Roth—” and then stopped talking without waking either. Sometime later, he waked. It was after midnight. He lay beneath the quilt on the shuck mattress. It would be happening about now. He knew how they did it—the white sheriff and revenue officers and deputies creeping and crawling among the bushes with drawn pistols, surrounding the kettle, sniffing and whiffing like hunting dogs at every stump and disfiguration of earth until every jug and keg was found and carried back to where the car waited; maybe they would even take a sup or two to ward off the night’s chill before returning to the still to squat until George walked innocently in. He was neither triumphant nor vindictive. He even felt something personal toward George now. He is young yet, he thought. They wont keep him down there forever. In fact, as far as he, Lucas, was concerned, two weeks would be enough. He can afford to give a year or two at it. And maybe when they lets him out it will be a lesson to him about whose daughter to fool with next time.
Then his wife was leaning over the bed, shaking him and screaming. It was just after dawn. In his shirt and drawers he ran behind her, out onto the back gallery. Sitting on the ground before it was George Wilkins’ patched and battered still; on the gallery itself was an assortment of fruit jars and stoneware jugs and a keg or so and one rusted five-gallon oilcan which, to Lucas’ horrified and sleep-dulled eyes, appeared capable of holding enough liquid to fill a ten-foot horse trough. He could even see it in the glass jars—a pale, colorless fluid in which still floated the shreds of corn-husks which George’s tenth-hand still had not removed. “Whar was Nat last night?” he cried. He grasped his wife by the shoulder, shaking her. “Whar was Nat, old woman?”
“She left right behind you!” his wife cried. “She followed you again, like night before last! Didn’t you know it?”
“I knows it now,” Lucas said. “Get the axe!” he said. “Bust it! We aint got time to get it away.” But there was not time for that either. Neither of them had yet moved when the sheriff of the county, followed by a deputy, came around the corner of the house—a tremendous man, fat, who obviously had been up all night and obviously still did not like it.
“Damn it, Lucas,” he said. “I thought you had better sense than this.”
“This aint none of mine,” Lucas said. “You know it aint. Even if it was, would I have had it here? George Wilkins——”
“Never you mind about George Wilkins,” the sheriff said. “I’ve got him too. He’s out there in the car, with that girl of yours. Go get your pants on. We’re going to town.”
Two hours later he was in the commissioner’s office in the federal courthouse in Jefferson. He was still inscrutable of face, blinking a little, listening to George Wilkins breathing hard beside him and to the voices of the white men.
“Confound it, Carothers,” the commissioner said, “what the hell kind of Senegambian Montague and Capulet is this anyhow?”
“Ask them!” Edmonds said violently. “Ask them! Wilkins and that girl of Lucas’ want to get married. Lucas wouldn’t hear of it for some reason—I just seem to be finding out now why. So last night Lucas came to my house and told me George was running a still on my land because—” without even a pause to draw a fresh breath Edmonds began to roar again “—he knew damn well what I would do because I have been telling every nigger on my place for years just what I would do if I ever found one drop of that damn wildcat——”
“Yes, yes,” the commissioner said; “all right, all right. So you telephoned the sheriff——”
“And we got the message—” it was one of the deputies, a plump man though nowhere as big as the sheriff, voluble, muddy about the lower legs and a little strained and weary in the face too “—and we went out there and Mr Roth told us where to look. But there aint no kettle in the gully where he said, so we set down and thought about just where would we hide a still if we was one of Mr Roth’s niggers and we went and looked there and sho enough there it was, neat and careful as you please, all took to pieces and about half buried and covered with brush against a kind of mound in the creek bottom. Only it was getting toward daybreak then, so we decided to come on back to George’s house and look under the kitchen floor like Mr Roth said, and then have a little talk with George. So we come on back to George’s house, only there aint any George or nobody else in it and nothing under the kitchen floor neither and so we are coming on back toward Mr Roth’s house to ask him if maybe he aint got the wrong house in mind maybe; it’s just about full daylight now and we are about a hundred yards from Lucas’s house when what do we see but George and the gal legging it up the hill toward Lucas’s cabin with a gallon jug in each hand, only George buste
d the jugs on a root before we could get to them. And about that time Lucas’s wife starts to yelling in the house and we run around to the back and there is another still setting in Lucas’s back yard and about forty gallons of whisky setting on his back gallery like he was fixing to hold a auction sale and Lucas standing there in his drawers and shirt-tail, hollering, ‘Git the axe and bust it! Git the axe and bust it!’ ”
“Yes,” the commissioner said. “But who do you charge? You went out there to catch George, but all your evidence is against Lucas.”
“There was two stills,” the deputy said. “And George and that gal both swear Lucas has been making and selling whisky right there in Edmonds’ back yard for twenty years.” For an instant Lucas looked up and met Edmonds’ glare, not of reproach and no longer even of surprise, but of grim and furious outrage. Then he looked away, blinking, listening to George Wilkins breathing hard beside him like a man in the profoundest depths of sleep, and to the voices.
“But you cant make his own daughter testify against him,” the commissioner said.
“George can, though,” the deputy said. “George aint any kin to him. Not to mention being in a fix where George has got to think up something good to say and think of it quick.”
“Let the court settle all that, Tom,” the sheriff said. “I was up all last night and I haven’t even had my breakfast yet. I’ve brought you a prisoner and thirty or forty gallons of evidence and two witnesses. Let’s get done with this.”
“I think you’ve brought two prisoners,” the commissioner said. He began to write on the paper before him. Lucas watched the moving hand, blinking. “I’m going to commit them both. George can testify against Lucas, and that girl can testify against George. She aint any kin to George either.”
He could have posted his and George’s appearance bonds without altering the first figure of his bank balance. When Edmonds had drawn his own check to cover them, they returned to Edmonds’ car. This time George drove it, with Nat in front with him. It was seventeen miles back home. For those seventeen miles he sat beside the grim and seething white man in the back seat, with nothing to look at but those two heads—that of his daughter where she shrank as far as possible from George, into her corner, never once looking back; that of George, the ruined panama hat raked above his right ear, who still seemed to swagger even sitting down. Leastways his face aint all full of teeth now like it used to be whenever it found anybody looking at it, he thought viciously. But never mind that either, right now. So he sat in the car when it stopped at the carriage gate and watched Nat spring out and run like a frightened deer up the lane toward his house, still without looking back, never once looking at him. Then they drove on to the mule lot, the stable, and he and George got out and again he could hear George breathing behind him while Edmonds, behind the wheel now, leaned his elbow in the window and glared at them both.
“Get your mules!” Edmonds said. “What in hell are you waiting for?”
“I thought you were fixing to say something,” Lucas said. “So a man’s kinfolks cant tell on him in court.”
“Never you mind about that!” Edmonds said. “George can tell plenty, and he aint any kin to you. And if he should begin to forget, Nat aint any kin to George and she can tell plenty. I know what you are thinking about. But you have waited too late. If George and Nat tried to buy a wedding license now, they would probably hang you and George both. Besides, damn that. I’m going to take you both to the penitentiary myself as soon as you are laid-by. Now you get on down to your south creek piece. By God, this is one time you will take advice from me. And here it is: dont come out until you have finished it. If dark catches you, don’t let it worry you. I’ll send somebody down there with a lantern.”
He was done with the south creek piece before dark; he had intended to finish it today anyhow. He was back at the stable, his mules watered and rubbed down and stalled and fed while George was still unharnessing. Then he entered the lane and in the beginning of twilight walked toward his house above whose chimney the windless supper smoke stood. He didn’t walk fast, neither did he look back when he spoke. “George Wilkins,” he said.
“Sir,” George said behind him. They walked on in single file and almost step for step, about five feet apart.
“Just what was your idea?”
“I don’t rightly know, sir,” George said. “It uz mostly Nat’s. We never aimed to get you into no trouble. She say maybe ifn we took and fotch that kettle from whar you and Mister Roth told them shurfs it was and you would find it settin on yo back porch, maybe when we offered to help you git shet of it fo they got here, yo mind might change about loandin us the money to—I mean to leffen us get married.”
“Hah,” Lucas said. They walked on. Now he could smell the cooking meat. He reached the gate and turned. George stopped too, lean, wasp-waisted, foppish even in faded overalls below the swaggering rake of the hat. “There’s more folks than just me in that trouble.”
“Yes sir,” George said. “Hit look like it is. I hope it gonter be a lesson to me.”
“I hope so too,” Lucas said. “When they get done sending you to Parchman you’ll have plenty of time between working cotton and corn you aint going to get no third and fourth of even, to study it.” They looked at one another.
“Yes sir,” George said. “Especially wid you there to help me worry hit out.”
“Hah,” Lucas said. He didn’t move; he hardly raised his voice even: “Nat.” He didn’t even look toward the house then as the girl came down the path, barefoot, in a clean, faded calico dress and a bright headrag. Her face was swollen from crying, but her voice was defiant, not hysterical.
“It wasn’t me that told Mister Roth to telefoam them shurfs!” she cried. He looked at her for the first time. He looked at her until even the defiance began to fade, to be replaced by something alert and speculative. He saw her glance flick past his shoulder to where George stood and return.
“My mind done changed,” he said. “I’m going to let you and George get married.” She stared at him. Again he watched her glance flick to George and return.
“It changed quick,” she said. She stared at him. Her hand, the long, limber, narrow, light-palmed hand of her race, rose and touched for an instant the bright cotton which bound her head. Her inflection, the very tone and pitch of her voice had changed. “Me, marry George Wilkins and go to live in a house whar the whole back porch is done already fell off and whar I got to walk a half a mile and back from the spring to fetch water? He aint even got no stove!”
“My chimbley cooks good,” George said. “And I can prop up the porch.”
“And I can get used to walking a mile for two lard buckets full of water,” she said. “I dont wants no propped-up porch. I wants a new porch on George’s house and a cook-stove and a well. And how you gonter get um? What you gonter pay for no stove with, and a new porch, and somebody to help you dig a well?” Yet it was still Lucas she stared at, ceasing with no dying fall of her high, clear soprano voice, watching her father’s face as if they were engaged with foils. His face was not grim and neither cold nor angry. It was absolutely expressionless, impenetrable. He might have been asleep standing, as a horse sleeps. When he spoke, he might have been speaking to himself.
“A cook-stove,” he said. “The back porch fixed. A well.”
“A new back porch,” she said. He might not have even heard her. She might not have spoken even.
“The back porch fixed,” he said. Then she was not looking at him. Again the hand rose, slender and delicate and markless of any labor, and touched the back of her headkerchief. Lucas moved. “George Wilkins,” he said.
“Sir,” George said.
“Come into the house,” Lucas said.
And so, in its own good time, the other day came at last. In their Sunday clothes he and Nat and George stood beside the carriage gate while the car came up and stopped. “Morning, Nat,” Edmonds said. “When did you get home?”
“I got home yisti
ddy, Mister Roth.”
“You stayed in Vicksburg a good while. I didn’t know you were going until Aunt Molly told me you were already gone.”
“Yassuh,” she said. “I lef the next day after them shurfs was here.—I didn’t know it neither,” she said. “I never much wanted to go. It was pappy’s idea for me to go and see my aunt——”
“Hush, and get in the car,” Lucas said. “If I’m going to finish my crop in this county or finish somebody else’s crop in Parchman county, I would like to know it soon as I can.”
“Yes,” Edmonds said. He spoke to Nat again. “You and George go on a minute. I want to talk to Lucas.” Nat and George went on. Lucas stood beside the car while Edmonds looked at him. It was the first time Edmonds had spoken to him since that morning three weeks ago, as though it had required those three weeks for his rage to consume itself, or die down at least. Now the white man leaned in the window, looking at the impenetrable face with its definite strain of white blood, the same blood which ran in his own veins, which had not only come to the negro through male descent while it had come to him from a woman, but had reached the negro a generation sooner—a face composed, inscrutable, even a little haughty, shaped even in expression in the pattern of his great-grandfather McCaslin’s face. “I reckon you know what’s going to happen to you,” he said. “When that federal lawyer gets through with Nat, and Nat gets through with George, and George gets through with you and Judge Gowan gets through with all of you. You have been on this place all your life, almost twice as long as I have. You knew all the McCaslins and Edmonds both that ever lived here, except old Carothers. Was that still and that whisky in your back yard yours?”
“You know it wasn’t,” Lucas said.
“All right,” Edmonds said. “Was that still they found in the creek bottom yours?”