At eight o’clock the next morning the sheriff arrived, with his posse and the bloodhounds. They made one capture immediately, though the dogs had nothing to do with it. The church was deserted; there was not a negro in sight. The posse entered the church and looked quietly about at the wreckage. Then they emerged. The dogs had struck something immediately, but before they set out a deputy found, wedged into a split plank on the side of the church, a scrap of paper. It had been obviously put there by the hand of man, and opened, it proved to be an empty cigarette container torn open and spread smooth, and on the white inner side was a pencilled message. It was raggedly written, as though by an unpractised hand or perhaps in the dark, and it was not long. It was addressed to the sheriff by name and it was unprintable—a single phrase—and it was unsigned. “Didn’t I tell you?” one of the party said. He was unshaven too and muddy, like the quarry which they had not yet even seen, and his face looked strained and a little mad, with frustration, outrage, and his voice was hoarse, as though he had been doing a good deal of unheeded shouting or talking recently. “I told you all the time! I told you!”
“Told me what?” the sheriff said, in a cold, level voice, bearing upon the other a gaze cold and level, the pencilled message in his hand. “What did you tell me when?” The other looked at the sheriff, outraged, desperate, frayed almost to endurance’s limit; looking at him, the deputy thought, ‘If he don’t get that reward, he will just die.’ His mouth was open though voiceless as he glared at the sheriff with a kind of bated and unbelieving amaze. “And I done told you, too,” the sheriff said, in his bleak, quiet voice, “if you don’t like the way I am running this, you can wait back in town. There’s a good place there for you to wait in. Cool, where you won’t stay so heated up like out here in the sun. Ain’t I told you, now? Talk up.”
The other closed his mouth. He looked away, as though with a tremendous effort; as though with a tremendous effort he said “Yes” in a dry, suffocated voice.
The sheriff turned heavily, crumpling the message. “You try to keep that from slipping your mind again, then,” he said. “If you got any mind to even slip on you.” They were ringed about with quiet, interested faces in the early sunlight. “About which I got the Lord’s own doubts, if you or anybody else wants to know.” Some one guffawed, once. “Shet up that noise,” the sheriff said. “Let’s get going. Get them dogs started, Bufe.”
The dogs were cast, still on leash. They struck immediately. The trail was good, easily followed because of the dew. The fugitive had apparently made no effort whatever to hide it. They could even see the prints of his knees and hands where he had knelt to drink from a spring. “I never yet knew a murderer that had more sense than that about the folks that would chase him,” the deputy said. “But this durn fool don’t even suspect that we might use dogs.”
“We been putting dogs on him once a day ever since Sunday,” the sheriff said. “And we ain’t caught him yet.”
“Them were cold trails. We ain’t had a good hot trail until today. But he’s made his mistake at last. We’ll get him today. Before noon, maybe.”
“I’ll wait and see, I reckon,” the sheriff said.
“You’ll see,” the deputy said. “This trail is running straight as a railroad. I could follow it, myself almost. Look here. You can even see his footprints. The durn fool ain’t even got enough sense to get into the road, in the dust, where other folks have walked and where the dogs can’t scent him. Them dogs will find the end of them footprints before ten o’clock.”
Which the dogs did. Presently the trail bent sharply at right angles. They followed it and came onto a road, which they followed behind the lowheaded and eager dogs who, after a short distance, swung to the roadside where a path came down from a cotton house in a nearby field. They began to bay, milling, tugging, their voices loud, mellow, ringing; whining and surging with excitement. “Why, the durn fool!” the deputy said. “He set down here and rested: here’s his footmarks: them same rubber heels. He ain’t a mile ahead right now! Come on, boys!” They went on, the leashes taut, the dogs baying, the men moving now at a trot. The sheriff turned to the unshaven man.
“Now’s your chance to run ahead and catch him and get that thousand dollars,” he said. “Why don’t you do it?”
The man did not answer; none of them had much breath for talking, particularly when after about a mile the dogs, still straining and baying, turned from the road and followed a path which went quartering up a hill and into a corn field. Here they stopped baying, but if anything their eagerness seemed to increase; the men were running now. Beyond the headtall corn was a negro cabin. “He’s in there,” the sheriff said, drawing his pistol. “Watch yourselves now, boys. He’ll have a gun now.”
It was done with finesse and skill: the house surrounded by concealed men with drawn pistols, and the sheriff, followed by the deputy, getting himself for all his bulk swiftly and smartly flat against the cabin wall, out of range of any window. Still flat to the wall he ran around the corner and kicked open the door and sprang, pistol first, into the cabin. It contained a negro child. The child was stark naked and it sat in the cold ashes on the hearth, eating something. It was apparently alone, though an instant later a woman appeared in an inner door, her mouth open, in the act of dropping an iron skillet. She was wearing a pair of man’s shoes, which a member of the posse identified as having belonged to the fugitive. She told them about the white man on the road about daylight and how he had swapped shoes with her, taking in exchange a pair of her husband’s brogans which she was wearing at the time. The sheriff listened. “That happened right by a cotton house, didn’t it?” he said. She told him Yes. He returned to his men, to the leashed and eager dogs. He looked down at the dogs while the men asked questions and then ceased, watching him. They watched him put the pistol back into his pocket and then turn and kick the dogs, once each, heavily. “Get them durn eggsuckers on back to town,” he said.
But the sheriff was a good officer. He knew as well as his men that he would return to the cotton house, where he believed that Christmas had been hidden all the while, though. he knew now that Christmas would not be there when they returned. They had some trouble getting the dogs away from the cabin, so that it was in the hot brilliance of ten o’clock that they surrounded the cotton house carefully and skillfully and quietly and surprised it with pistols, quite by the rules and without any particular hope; and found one astonished and terrified field rat. Nevertheless the sheriff had the dogs—they had refused to approach the cotton house at all; they refused to leave the road, leaning and straining against the collars with simultaneous and reverted heads pointed back down the road toward the cabin from which they had been recently dragged away—brought up. It took two men by main strength to fetch them up, where as soon as the leashes were slacked, they sprang as one and rushed around the cotton house and through the very marks which the fugitive’s legs had left in the tall and still dewed weeds in the house’s shadow, and rushed leaping and straining back toward the road, dragging the two men for fifty yards before they succeeded in passing the leashes about a sapling and snubbing the dogs up. This time the sheriff did not even kick them.
At last the noise and the alarms, the sound and fury of the hunt, dies away, dies out of his hearing. He was not in the cotton house when the man and the dogs passed, as the sheriff believed. He paused there only long enough to lace up the brogans: the black shoes, the black shoes smelling of negro. They looked like they had been chopped out of iron ore with a dull axe. Looking down at the harsh, crude, clumsy shapelessness of them, he said “Hah” through his teeth. It seemed to him that he could see himself being hunted by white men at last into the black abyss which had been waiting, trying, for thirty years to drown him and into which now and at last he had actually entered, bearing now upon his ankles the definite and ineradicable gauge of its upward moving.
It is just dawn, daylight: that gray and lonely suspension filled with the peaceful and tentative waking of bi
rds. The air, inbreathed, is like spring water. He breathes deep and slow, feeling with each breath himself diffuse in the neutral grayness, becoming one with loneliness and quiet that has never known fury or despair. ‘That was all I wanted,’ he thinks in a quiet and slow amazement. ‘That was all, for thirty years. That didn’t seem to be a whole lot to ask in thirty years.’
He has not slept very much since Wednesday, and now Wednesday has come and gone again, though he does not know it. When he thinks about time, it seems to him now that for thirty years he has lived inside an orderly parade of named and numbered days like fence pickets, and that one night he went to sleep and when he waked up he was outside of them. For a time after he fled on that Friday night he tried to keep up with the days, after the old habit. Once, after lying all night in a haystack, he was awake in time to watch the farm house wake. He saw before daylight a lamp come yellowly alive in the kitchen, and then in the gray yetdark he heard the slow, clapping sound of an axe, and movement, manmovement, among the waking cattle sounds in the nearby barn. Then he could smell smoke, and food, the hot fierce food, and he began to say over and over to himself I have not eaten since I have not eaten since trying to remember how many days it had been since Friday in Jefferson, in the restaurant where he had eaten his supper, until after a while, in the lying still with waiting until the men should have eaten and gone to the field, the name of the day, of the week seemed more important than the food. Because when the men were gone at last and he descended, emerged, into the level, jonquilcolored sun and went to the kitchen door, he didn’t ask for food at all. He had intended to. He could feel the harsh words marshaling in his mind, just behind his mouth. And then the gaunt, leatherhard woman come to the door and looked at him and he could see shock and recognition and fear in her eyes and while he was thinking She knows me. She has got the word too he heard his mouth saying quietly: “Can you tell me what day this is? I just want to know what day this is.”
“What day it is?” Her face was gaunt as his, her body as gaunt and as tireless and as driven. She said: “You get away from here! It’s Tuesday! You get away from here! I’ll call my man!”
He said, “Thank you,” quietly as the door banged. Then he was running. He did not remember starting to run. He thought for a while that he ran because of and toward some destination that the running had suddenly remembered and hence his mind did not need to bother to remember why he was running, since the running was not difficult. It was quite easy, in fact. He felt quite light, weightless. Even in full stride his feet seemed to stray slowly and lightly and at deliberate random across an earth without solidity, until he fell. Nothing tripped him. He just fell full length, believing for a while that he was still on his feet and still running. But he was down, lying on his face in a shallow ditch at the edge of a plowed field. Then he said suddenly, “I reckon I better get up.” When he sat up he found that the sun, halfway up the sky, now shone upon him from the opposite direction. At first he believed that he was merely turned around. Then he realised that it was now evening. That it was morning when he fell running and that, though it seemed to him that he had sat up at once, it was now evening. ‘I have been asleep,’ he thought. ‘I have slept more than six hours. I must have gone to sleep running without knowing it. That is what I did.’
He felt no surprise. Time, the spaces of light and dark, had long since lost orderliness. It would be either one now, seemingly at an instant, between two movements of the eyelids, without warning. He could never know when he would pass from one to the other, when he would find that he had been asleep without remembering having lain down, or find himself walking without remembering having waked. Sometimes it would seem to him that a night of sleep, in hay, in a ditch, beneath an abandoned roof, would be followed immediately by another night without interval of day, without light between to see to flee by; that a day would be followed by another day filled with fleeing and urgency, without any night between or any interval for rest, as if the sun had not set but instead had turned in the sky before reaching the horizon and retraced its way. When he went to sleep walking or even kneeling in the act of drinking from a spring, he could never know if his eyes would open next upon sunlight or upon stars.
For a while he had been hungry all the time. He gathered and ate rotting and wormriddled fruit; now and then he crept into fields and dragged down and gnawed ripened ears of corn as hard as potato graters. He thought of eating all the time, imagining dishes, food. He would think of that meal set for him on the kitchen table three years ago and he would live again through the steady and deliberate backswinging of his arm as he hurled the dishes into the wall, with a kind of writhing and excruciating agony of regret and remorse and rage. Then one day he was no longer hungry. It came sudden and peaceful. He felt cool, quiet. Yet he knew that he had to eat. He would make himself eat the rotten fruit, the hard corn, chewing it slowly, tasting nothing. He would eat enormous quantities of it, with resultant crises of bleeding flux. Yet immediately afterward he would be obsessed anew with the need and the urge to eat. It was not with food that he was obsessed now, but with the necessity to eat. He would try to remember when he had eaten last of cooked, of decent food. He could feel, remember, somewhere a house, a cabin. House or cabin, white or black: he could not remember which. Then, as he sat quite still, with on his gaunt, sick, stubbled an expression of rapt bemusement, he smelled negro. Motionless (he was sitting against a tree beside a spring, is head back, his hands upon his lap, his face worn and peaceful) he smelled and saw negro dishes, negro food. “It was in a room. He did not remember how he got there. But the room was filled with flight and abrupt consternation, as though people had fled it recently and suddenly and in fear. He was sitting at a table, waiting, thinking of nothing in an emptiness, a silence filled with flight. Then there was food before him, appearing suddenly between long, limber black hands fleeing too in the act of setting down the dishes. It seemed to him that he could hear without hearing them wails of terror and distress quieter than sighs all about him, with the sound of the chewing and the swallowing. ‘It was a cabin that time,’ he thought. ‘And they were afraid. Of their brother afraid.’
That night a strange thing came into his mind. He lay ready for sleep, without sleeping, without seeming to need the sleep, as he would place his stomach acquiescent for food which it did not seem to desire or need. It was strange in the sense that he could discover neither derivation nor motivation nor explanation for it. He found that he was trying to calculate the day of the week. It was as though now and at last he had an actual and urgent need to strike off the accomplished days toward some purpose, some definite day or act, without either falling short or overshooting. He entered the coma state which sleeping had now become with the need in his mind. When he waked in the dewgray of dawn, it was so crystallised that the need did not seem strange anymore.
It is just dawn, daylight. He rises and descends to the spring and takes from his pocket the razor, the brush, the soap. But it is still too dim to see his face clearly in the water, so he sits beside the spring and waits until he can see better. Then he lathers his face with the hard, cold water, patiently. His hand trembles, despite the urgency he feels a lassitude so that he must drive himself. The razor is dull; he tries to whet it upon the side of one brogan, but the leather is ironhard and wet with dew. He shaves, after a fashion. His hand trembles; it is not a very good job, and he cuts himself three or four times, stanching the blood with the cold water until it stops. He puts the shaving tools away and begins to walk. He follows a straight line, disregarding the easier walking of the ridges. After a short distance he comes out upon a road and sits down beside it. It is a quiet road, appearing and vanishing quietly, the pale dust marked only by narrow and infrequent wheels and by the hooves of horses and mules and now and then by the print of human feet. He sits beside it, coatless, the once white shirt and the once creased trousers muddy and stained, his gaunt face blotched with patches of stubble and with dried blood, shaking slowly with wearine
ss and cold as the sun rises and warms him. After a time two negro children appear around the curve, approaching. They do not see him until he speaks; they halt, dead, looking at him with whiterolling eyes. “What day of the week is it?” he repeats. They say nothing at all, staring at him. He moves his head a little. “Go on,” he says. They go on. He does not watch them. He sits, apparently musing upon the place where they had stood, as though to him they had in moving merely walked out of two shells. He does not see that they are running.
Then, sitting there, the sun warming him slowly, he goes to sleep without knowing it, because the next thing of which he is conscious is a terrific clatter of jangling and rattling wood and metal and trotting hooves. He opens his eyes in time to see the wagon whirl slewing around the curve beyond and so out of sight, its occupants looking back at him over their shoulders, the whiphand of the driver rising and falling. ‘They recognised me too,’ he thinks. ‘Them, and that white woman. And the negroes where I ate that day. Any of them could have captured me, if that’s what they want. Since that’s what they all want: for me to be captured. But they all run first. They all want me to be captured, and then when I come up ready to say Here I am Yes I would say Here I am I am tired I am tired of running of having to carry my life like it was a basket of eggs they all run away. Like there is a rule to catch me by, and to capture me that way would not be like the rule says.’