So he moves back into the bushes. This time he is alert and he hears the wagon before it comes into sight. He does not show himself until the wagon is abreast of him. Then he steps forth and says, “Hey.” The wagon stops, jerked up. The negro driver’s head jerks also; into his face also comes the astonishment, then the recognition and the terror. “What day is this?” Christmas says.
The negro glares at him, slackjawed. “W-what you say?”
“What day of the week is this? Thursday? Friday? What? What day? I am not going to hurt you.”
“It’s Friday,” the negro says. “O Lawd God, it’s Friday.”
“Friday,” Christmas says. Again he jerks his head. “Get on.” The whip falls, the mules surge forward. This wagon too whirls from sight at a dead run, the whip rising and falling. But Christmas has already turned and entered the woods again.
Again his direction is straight as a surveyor’s line, disregarding hill and valley and bog. Yet he is not hurrying. He is like a man who knows where he is and where he wants to go and how much time to the exact minute he has to get there in. It is as though he desires to see his native earth in all its phases for the first or the last time. He had grown to manhood in the country, where like the unswimming sailor his physical shape and his thought had been molded by its compulsions without his learning anything about its actual shape and feel. For a week now he has lurked and crept among its secret places, yet he remained a foreigner to the very immutable laws which earth must obey. For some time as he walks steadily on, he thinks that this is what it is—the looking and seeing—which gives him peace and unhaste and quiet, until suddenly the true answer comes to him. He feels dry and light. ‘I don’t have to bother about having to eat anymore,’ he thinks. ‘That’s what it is.’
By noon he has walked eight miles. He comes now to a broad gravelled road, a highway. This time the wagon stops quietly at his raised hand. On the face of the negro youth who drives it there is neither astonishment nor recognition. “Where does this road go?” Christmas says.
“Mottstown. Whar I gwine.”
“Mottstown. You going to Jefferson too?”
The youth rubs his head. “Don’t know whar that is. I gwine to Mottstown.”
“Oh,” Christmas says. “I see. You don’t live around here, then.”
“Naw, sir. I stays two counties back yonder. Been on the road three days. I gwine to Mottstown to get a yellin calf pappy bought. You wanter go to Mottstown?”
“Yes,” Christmas says. He mounts to the seat beside the youth. The wagon moves on. ‘Mottstown,’ he thinks. Jefferson is only twenty miles away. ‘Now I can let go for a while,’ he thinks. ‘I haven’t let go for seven days, so I guess I’ll let go for a while.’ He thinks that perhaps, sitting, with the wagon’s motion to lull him, he will sleep. But he does not sleep. He is not sleepy or hungry or even tired. He is somewhere between and among them, suspended, swaying to the motion of the wagon without thought, without feeling. He has lost account of time and distance; perhaps it is an hour later, perhaps three. The youth says:
“Mottstown. Dar tis.”
Looking, he can see the smoke low on the sky, beyond an imperceptible corner; he is entering it again, the street which ran for thirty years. It had been a paved street, where going should be fast. It had made a circle and he is still inside of it. Though during the last seven days he has had no paved street, yet he has travelled further than in all the thirty years before. And yet he is still inside the circle. ‘And yet I have been further in these seven days than in all the thirty years,’ he thinks. ‘But I have never got outside that circle. I have never broken out of the ring of what I have already done and cannot ever undo,’ he thinks quietly, sitting on the seat, with planted on the dashboard before him the shoes, the black shoes smelling of negro: that mark on his ankles the gauge definite and ineradicable of the black tide creeping up his legs, moving from his feet upward as death moves.
Chapter 15
ON that Friday when Christmas was captured in Mottstown, there lived in the town an old couple named Hines. They were quite old. They lived in a small bungalow in a neighborhood of negroes; how, upon what, the town in general did not know since they appeared to live in filthy poverty and complete idleness, Hines, as far as the town knew, not having done any work, steady work, in twenty-five years.
They came to Mottstown thirty years ago. One day the town found the woman established in the small house where they had lived ever since, though for the next five years Hines was at home only once a month, over the weekend. Soon it became known that he held some kind of a position in Memphis. Exactly what, was not known, since even at that time he was a secret man who could have been either thirty-five or fifty, with something in his glance coldly and violently fanatical and a little crazed, precluding questioning, curiosity. The town looked upon them both as being a little touched—lonely, gray in color, a little smaller than most other men and women, as if they belonged to a different race, species—even though for the next five or six years after the man appeared to have come to Mottstown to settle down for good in the small house where his wife lived, people hired him to do various odd jobs which they considered within his strength. But in time he stopped this, too, The town wondered for a while, how they would live now, then it forgot to speculate about this just as later when the town learned that Hines went on foot about the county, holding revival services in negro churches, and that now and then negro women carrying what were obviously dishes of food would be seen entering from the rear the house where the couple lived, and emerging emptyhanded, it wondered about this for a time and then forgot it. In time the town either forgot or condoned, because Hines was an old man and harmless, that which in a young man it would have crucified. It just said, “They are crazy; crazy on the subject of negroes. Maybe they are Yankees,” and let it go at that. Or perhaps what it condoned was not the man’s selfdedication to the saving of negro souls, but the public ignoring of the fact of that charity which they received from negro hands, since it is a happy faculty of the mind to slough that which conscience refuses to assimilate.
So for twenty-five years the old couple had had no visible means of support, the town blinding its collective eye to the negro women and the covered dishes and pans, particularly as some of the dishes and pans had in all likelihood been borne intact from white kitchens where the women cooked. Perhaps this was a part of the mind’s sloughing. Anyway the town did not look, and for twenty-five years now the couple had lived in the slack backwater of their lonely isolation, as though they had been two muskoxen strayed from the north pole, or two homeless and belated beasts from beyond the glacial period.
The woman was hardly ever seen at all, though the man—he was known as Uncle Doc—was a fixture about the square: a dirty little old man with a face which had once been either courageous, or violent—either a visionary or a supreme egoist—collarless, in dirty blue jean clothes and with a heavy piece of handpeeled hickory worn about the grip dark as walnut and smooth as glass. At first, while he held the Memphis position, on his monthly visits he had talked a little about himself, with a selfconfidence not alone of the independent man, but with a further quality, as though at one time in his life he had been better than independent, and that not long ago. There was nothing beaten about him. It was rather that confidence of a man who has had the controlling of lesser men and who had voluntarily and for a reason which he believed that no other man could question or comprehend, changed his life. But what he told about himself and his present occupation did not make sense, for all its apparent coherence. So they believed that he was a little crazy, even then. It was not that he seemed to be trying to conceal one thing by telling another. It was that his words, his telling, just did not synchronise with what his hearers believed would (and must) be the scope of a single individual. Sometimes they decided that he had once been a minister. Then he would talk about Memphis, the city, in a vague and splendid way, as though all his life he had been incumbent there of some
important though still nameless municipal office. “Sure,” the men in Mottstown said behind his back; “he was railroad superintendent there. Standing in the middle of the street crossing with a red flag every time a train passed,” or “He’s a big newspaperman. Gathers up the papers from under the park benches.” They did not say this to his face, not the boldest among them, not the ones with the most precariously nourished reputations for wit.
Then he lost the Memphis job, or quit it. One weekend he came home, and when Monday came he did not go away. After that he was downtown all day long, about the square, untalkative, dirty, with that furious and preclusive expression about the eyes which the people took for insanity: that quality of outworn violence like a scent, an odor; that fanaticism like a fading and almost extinct ember, of some kind of twofisted evangelism which had been one quarter violent conviction and three quarters physical hardihood. So they were not so surprised when they learned that he was going about the county, usually on foot, preaching in negro churches; not even when a year later they learned what his subject was. That this white man who very nearly depended on the bounty and charity of negroes for sustenance was going singlehanded into remote negro churches and interrupting the service to enter the pulpit and in his harsh, dead voice and at times with violent obscenity, preach to them humility before all skins lighter than theirs, preaching the superiority of the white race, himself his own exhibit A, in fanatic and unconscious paradox. The negroes believed that he was crazy, touched by God, or having once touched Him. They probably did not listen to, could not understand much of, what he said. Perhaps they took him to be God Himself, since God to them was a white man too and His doings also a little inexplicable.
He was downtown that afternoon when Christmas’ name first flew up and down the street, and the boys and men—the merchants, the clerks, the idle and the curious, with countrymen in overalls predominating—began to run. Hines ran too. But he could not run fast and he was not tall enough to see over the clotted shoulders when he did arrive. Nevertheless he tried, as brutal and intent as any there, to force his way into the loud surging group as though in a resurgence of the old violence which had marked his face, clawing at the backs and at last striking at them with the stick until men turned and recognised him and held him, struggling, striking at them with the heavy stick. “Christmas?” he shouted. “Did they say Christmas?”
“Christmas!” one of the men who held him cried back, his face too strained, glaring. “Christmas! That white nigger that did that killing up at Jefferson last week!”
Hines glared at the man, his toothless mouth lightly foamed with spittle. Then he struggled again, violent, cursing: a frail little old man with the light, frail bones of a child, trying to fight free with the stick, trying to club his way into the center where the captive stood bleeding about the face. “Now, Uncle Doc!” they said, holding him; “now, Uncle Doc. They got him. He can’t get away. Here, now.”
But he struggled and fought, cursing, his voice cracked, thin, his mouth slavering, they who held him struggling too like men trying to hold a small threshing hose in which the pressure is too great for its size. Of the entire group the captive was the only calm one. They held Hines, cursing, his old frail bones and his stringlike muscles for the time inherent with the fluid and supple fury of a weasel. He broke free of them and sprang forward, burrowing, and broke through and came face to face with the captive. Here he paused for an instant, glaring at the captive’s face. It was a full pause, but before they could grasp him again he had raised the stick and struck the captive once and he was trying to strike again when they caught him at last and held him impotent and raging, with that light, thin foam about his lips. They had not stopped his mouth. “Kill the bastard!” he cried. “Kill him. Kill him.”
Thirty minutes later two men brought him home in a car. One of them drove while the other held Hines up in the back seat. His face was pale now beneath the stubble and the dirt, and his eyes were closed. They lifted him bodily from the car and carried him through the gate and up the walk of rotting bricks and shards of concrete, to the steps. His eyes were open now, but they were quite empty, rolled back into his skull until the dirty, bluish whites alone showed. But he was still quite limp and helpless. Just before they reached the porch the front door opened and his wife came out and closed the door behind her and stood there, watching them. They knew that it was his wife because she came out of the house where he was known to live. One of the men, though a resident of the town, had never seen her before. “What is it?” she said.
“He’s all right,” the first man said. “We just been having a right smart of excitement downtown a while ago, and with this hot weather and all, it was a little too much for him.” She stood before the door as if she were barring them from the house—a dumpy, fat little woman with a, round face like dirty and unovened dough, and a tight screw of scant hair. “They just caught that nigger Christmas that killed that lady up at Jefferson last week,” the man said. “Uncle Doc just got a little upset over it.”
Mrs. Hines was already turning back, as though to open the door. As the first man said later to his companion, she halted in the act of turning, as if someone had hit her lightly with a thrown pebble. “Caught who?” she said.
“Christmas,” the man said. “That nigger murderer. Christmas.”
She stood at the edge of the porch, looking down at them with her gray, still face. “As if she already knew what I would tell her,” the man said to his companion as they returned to the car. “Like she wanted all at the same time for me to tell her it was him and it wasn’t him.”
“What does he look like?” she said.
“I never noticed much,” the man said. “They had to bloody him up some, catching him. Young fellow. He don’t look no more like a nigger than I do, either.” The woman looked at them, down at them. Between the two men Hines stood on his own legs now, muttering a little now as if he were waking from sleep. “What do you want us to do with Uncle Doc?” the man said.
She did not answer that at all. It was as though she had not even recognised her husband, the man told his companion later. “What are they going to do with him?” she said.
“Him?” the man said. “Oh. The nigger. That’s for Jefferson to say. He belongs to them up there.”
She looked down at them, gray, still, remote. “Are they going to wait on Jefferson?”
“They?” the man said. “Oh,” he said. “Well, if Jefferson ain’t too long about it.” He shifted his grip on the old man’s arm. “Where do you want us to put him?” The woman moved then. She descended the steps and approached. “Well tote him into the house for you,” the man said.
“I can tote him,” she said. She and Hines were about the same height, though she was the heavier. She grasped him beneath the arms. “Eupheus,” she said, not loud; “Eupheus.” She said to the two men, quietly: “Let go. I got him.” They released him. He walked a little now. They watched her help him up the steps and into the door. She did not look back.
“She never even thanked us,” the second man said. “Maybe we ought to take him back and put him in jail with the nigger, since he seemed to know him so well.”
“Eupheus,” the first man said. “Eupheus. I been wondering for fifteen years what his name might be. Eupheus.”
“Come on. Let’s get on back. We might miss some of it.”
The first man looked at the house, at the closed door through which the two people had vanished. “She knowed him too.”
“Knowed who?”
“That nigger. Christmas.”
“Come on.” They returned to the car. “What do you think about that durn fellow, coming right into town here, within twenty miles of where he done it, walking up and down the main street until somebody recognised him. I wish it had been me that recognised him. I could have used that thousand dollars. But I never do have any luck.” The car moved on. The first man was still looking back at the blank door through which the two people had disappeared.
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In the hall of that little house dark and small and ranklyodored as a cave, the old couple stood. The old man’s spent condition was still little better than coma, and when his wife led him to a chair and helped him into it, it seemed a matter of expediency and concern. But there was no need to return and lock the front door, which she did. She came and stood over him for a while. At first it seemed as if she were just watching him, with concern and solicitude. Then a third person would have seen that she was trembling violently and that she had lowered him into the chair either before she dropped him to the floor or in order to hold him prisoner until she could speak. She leaned above him: dumpy, obese, gray in color, with a face like that of a drowned corpse. When she spoke her voice shook and she strove with it, shaking, her hands clenched upon the arms of the chair in which he half lay, her voice shaking, restrained: “Eupheus. You listen to me. You got to listen to me. I ain’t worried you before. In thirty years I ain’t worried you. But now I am going to. I am going to know and you got to tell me. What did you do with Milly’s baby?”
Through the long afternoon they clotted about the square and before the jail—the clerks, the idle, the countrymen in overalls; the talk. It went here and thereabout the town, dying and borning again like a wind or a fire until in the lengthening shadows the country people began to depart in wagons and dusty cars and the townspeople began to move supperward. Then the talk flared again, momentarily revived, to wives and families about supper tables in electrically lighted rooms and in remote hill cabins with kerosene lamps. And on the next day, the slow, pleasant country Sunday while they squatted in their clean shirts and decorated suspenders, with peaceful pipes about country churches or about the shady dooryards of houses where the visiting teams and cars were tethered and parked along the fence and the womenfolks were in the kitchen, getting dinner, they told it again: “He don’t look any more like a nigger than I do. But it must have been the nigger blood in him. It looked like he had set out to get himself caught like a man might set out to get married. He had got clean away for a whole week. If he had not set fire to the house, they might not have found out about the murder for a month. And they would not have suspected him then if it hadn’t been for a fellow named Brown, that the nigger used to sell whiskey while he was pretending to be a white man and tried to lay the whiskey and the killing both on Brown and Brown told the truth.