She rose and moved toward the door. He hobbled over to open it; again she put that cold, still, unfathomable gaze upon him as though he were a dog or a cow and she waited for it to get out of her path. Then she was gone. He closed the door and struck a clumsy clog-step, snapping his fingers just as the door opened again; he snapped his hands toward his tie and looked at her in the door, holding it open.
“What day do you think it will be over with?” she said.
“Why, I cuh—Court opens the twentieth,” he said. “It will be the first case. Say.…Two days. Or three at the most, with your kind assistance. And I need not assure you that this will be held in strictest confidence between us.……” He moved toward her, but her blank calculating gaze was like a wall, surrounding him.
“That will be the twenty-fourth.” Then she was looking at him again. “Thank you,” she said, and closed the door.
That night she wrote Belle that Horace would be home on the twenty-fourth. She telephoned Horace and asked for Belle’s address.
“Why?” Horace said.
“I’m going to write her a letter,” she said, her voice tranquil, without threat. Dammit, Horace thought, holding the dead wire in his hand, How can I be expected to combat people who will not even employ subterfuge. But soon he forgot it, forgot that she had called. He did not see her again before the trial opened.
Two days before it opened Snopes emerged from a dentist’s office and stood at the curb, spitting. He took a gold-wrapped cigar from his pocket and removed the foil and put the cigar gingerly between his teeth. He had a black eye, and the bridge of his nose was bound in soiled adhesive tape. “Got hit by a car in Jackson,” he told them in the barbershop. “But dont think I never made the bastard pay,” he said, showing a sheaf of yellow bills. He put them into a notecase and stowed it away. “I’m an American,” he said. “I dont brag about it, because I was born one. And I been a decent Baptist all my life, too. Oh, I aint no preacher and I aint no old maid; I been around with the boys now and then, but I reckon I aint no worse than lots of folks that pretends to sing loud in church. But the lowest, cheapest thing on this earth aint a nigger: it’s a jew. We need laws against them. Drastic laws. When a durn lowlife jew can come to a free country like this and just because he’s got a law degree, it’s time to put a stop to things. A jew is the lowest thing on this creation. And the lowest kind of jew is a jew lawyer. And the lowest kind of jew lawyer is a Memphis jew lawyer. When a jew lawyer can hold up an American, a white man, and not give him but ten dollars for something that two Americans, Americans, southron gentlemen; a judge living in the capital of the State of Mississippi and a lawyer that’s going to be as big a man as his pa some day, and a judge too; when they give him ten times as much for the same thing than the lowlife jew, we need a law. I been a liberal spender all my life; whatever I had has always been my friends’ too. But when a durn, stinking, lowlife jew will refuse to pay an American one tenth of what another American, and a judge at that—”
“Why did you sell it to him, then?” the barber said.
“What?” Snopes said. The barber was looking at him.
“What was you trying to sell to that car when it run over you?” the barber said.
“Have a cigar,” Snopes said.
27
The trial was set for the twentieth of June. A week after his Memphis visit, Horace telephoned Miss Reba. “Just to know if she’s still there,” he said. “So I can reach her if I need to.”
“She’s here,” Miss Reba said. “But this reaching. I dont like it. I dont want no cops around here unless they are on my business.”
“It’ll be only a bailiff,” Horace said. “Someone to hand a paper into her own hand.”
“Let the postman do it, then,” Miss Reba said. “He comes here anyway. In a uniform too. He dont look no worse in it than a full-blowed cop, neither. Let him do it.”
“I wont bother you,” Horace said. “I wont make you any trouble.”
“I know you aint,” Miss Reba said. Her voice was thin, harsh, over the wire. “I aint going to let you. Minnie’s done took a crying spell tonight, over that bastard that left her, and me and Miss Myrtle was sitting here, and we got started crying too. Me and Minnie and Miss Myrtle. We drunk up a whole new bottle of gin. I cant afford that. So dont you be sending no jay cops up here with no letters for nobody. You telephone me and I’ll turn them both out on the street and you can have them arrested there.”
On the night of the nineteenth he telephoned her again. He had some trouble in getting in touch with her.
“They’re gone,” she said. “Both of them. Dont you read no papers?”
“What papers?” Horace said. “Hello. Hello!”
“They aint here no more, I said,” Miss Reba said. “I dont know nuttin about them and I dont want to know nuttin except who’s going to pay me a week’s room rent on—”
“But cant you find where she went to? I may need her.”
“I dont know nuttin and I dont want to know nuttin,” Miss Reba said. He heard the receiver click. Yet the disconnection was not made at once. He heard the receiver thud onto the table where the telephone sat, and he could hear Miss Reba shouting for Minnie: “Minnie. Minnie!” Then some hand lifted the receiver and set it onto the hook; the wire clicked in his ear. After a while a detached Delsarte-ish voice said: “Pine Bluff dizzent.…Enkyew!”
The trial opened the next day. On the table lay the sparse objects which the District Attorney was offering: the bullet from Tommy’s skull, a stoneware jug containing corn whiskey. “I will call Mrs Goodwin to the stand,” Horace said. He did not look back. He could feel Goodwin’s eyes on his back as he helped the woman into the chair. She was sworn, the child lying on her lap. She repeated the story as she had told it to him on the day after the child was ill. Twice Goodwin tried to interrupt and was silenced by the Court. Horace would not look at him.
The woman finished her story. She sat erect in the chair, in her neat, worn gray dress and hat with the darned veil, the purple ornament on her shoulder. The child lay on her lap, its eyes closed in that drugged immobility. For a while her hand hovered about its face, performing those needless maternal actions as though unawares.
Horace went and sat down. Then only did he look at Goodwin. But the other sat quietly now, his arms folded and his head bent a little, but Horace could see that his nostrils were waxy white with rage against his dark face. He leaned toward him and whispered, but Goodwin did not move.
The District Attorney now faced the woman.
“Mrs Goodwin,” he said, “what was the date of your marriage to Mr Goodwin?”
“I object!” Horace said, on his feet.
“Can the prosecution show how this question is relevant?” the Court said.
“I waive, your Honor,” the District Attorney said, glancing at the jury.
When court adjourned for the day Goodwin said bitterly: “Well, you’ve said you would kill me someday, but I didn’t think you meant it. I didn’t think that you—”
“Dont be a fool,” Horace said. “Dont you see your case is won? That they are reduced to trying to impugn the character of your witness?” But when they left the jail he found the woman still watching him from some deep reserve of foreboding. “You mustn’t worry at all, I tell you. You may know more about making whiskey or love than I do, but I know more about criminal procedure than you, remember.”
“You dont think I made a mistake?”
“I know you didn’t. Dont you see how that explodes their case? The best they can hope for now is a hung jury. And the chances of that are not one in fifty. I tell you, he’ll walk out of that jail tomorrow a free man.”
“Then I guess it’s time to think about paying you.”
“Yes,” Horace said, “all right. I’ll come out tonight.”
“Tonight?”
“Yes. He may call you back to the stand tomorrow. We’d better prepare for it, anyway.”
At eight oclock he entered th
e mad woman’s yard. A single light burned in the crazy depths of the house, like a firefly caught in a brier patch, but the woman did not appear when he called. He went to the door and knocked. A shrill voice shouted something; he waited a moment. He was about to knock again when he heard the voice again, shrill and wild and faint, as though from a distance, like a reedy pipe buried by an avalanche. He circled the house in the rank, waist-high weeds. The kitchen door was open. The lamp was there, dim in a smutty chimney, filling the room—a jumble of looming shapes rank with old foul female flesh—not with light but with shadow. White eyeballs rolled in a high, tight bullet head in brown gleams above a torn singlet strapped into overalls. Beyond the negro the mad woman turned in an open cupboard, brushing her lank hair back with her forearm.
“Your bitch has gone to jail,” she said. “Go on with her.”
“Jail?” Horace said.
“That’s what I said. Where the good folks live. When you get a husband, keep him in jail where he cant bother you.” She turned to the negro, a small flask in her hand. “Come on, dearie. Give me a dollar for it. You got plenty money.”
Horace returned to town, to the jail. They admitted him. He mounted the stairs; the jailer locked a door behind him.
The woman admitted him to the cell. The child lay on the cot. Goodwin sat beside it, his arms crossed, his legs extended in the attitude of a man in the last stage of physical exhaustion.
“Why are you sitting there, in front of that slit?” Horace said. “Why not get into the corner, and we’ll put the mattress over you.”
“You come to see it done, did you?” Goodwin said. “Well, that’s no more than right. It’s your job. You promised I wouldn’t hang, didn’t you?”
“You’ve got an hour yet,” Horace said. “The Memphis train doesn’t get here until eight-thirty. He’s surely got better sense than to come here in that canary-colored car.” He turned to the woman. “But you. I thought better of you. I know that he and I are fools, but I expected better of you.”
“You’re doing her a favor,” Goodwin said. “She might have hung on with me until she was too old to hustle a good man. If you’ll just promise to get the kid a newspaper grift when he’s old enough to make change, I’ll be easy in my mind.”
The woman had returned to the cot. She lifted the child onto her lap. Horace went to her. He said: “You come on, now. Nothing’s going to happen. He’ll be all right here. He knows it. You’ve got to go home and get some sleep, because you’ll both be leaving here tomorrow. Come, now.”
“I reckon I better stay,” she said.
“Damn it, dont you know that putting yourself in the position for disaster is the surest way in the world to bring it about? Hasn’t your own experience shown you that? Lee knows it. Lee, make her stop this.”
“Go on, Ruby,” Goodwin said. “Go home and go to bed.”
“I reckon I better stay,” she said.
Horace stood over them. The woman mused above the child, her face bent and her whole body motionless. Goodwin leaned back against the wall, his brown wrists folded into the faded sleeves of his shirt. “You’re a man now,” Horace said. “Aren’t you? I wish that jury could see you now, locked up in a concrete cell, scaring women and children with fifth grade ghost stories. They’d know you never had the guts to kill anybody.”
“You better go on and go to bed yourself,” Goodwin said. “We could sleep here, if there wasn’t so much noise going on.”
“No; that’s too sensible for us to do,” Horace said. He left the cell. The jailer unlocked the door for him and he quitted the building. In ten minutes he returned, with a parcel. Goodwin had not moved. The woman watched him open the package. It contained a bottle of milk, a box of candy, a box of cigars. He gave Goodwin one of the cigars and took one himself. “You brought his bottle, didn’t you?”
The woman produced the bottle from a bundle beneath the cot. “It’s got some in it,” she said. She filled it from the bottle. Horace lit his and Goodwin’s cigars. When he looked again the bottle was gone.
“Not time to feed him yet?” he said.
“I’m warming it,” the woman said.
“Oh,” Horace said. He tilted the chair against the wall, across the cell from the cot.
“Here’s room on the bed,” the woman said. “It’s softer. Some.”
“Not enough to change, though,” Horace said.
“Look here,” Goodwin said, “you go on home. No use in you doing this.”
“We’ve got a little work to do,” Horace said. “That lawyer’ll call her again in the morning. That’s his only chance: to invalidate her testimony someway. You might try to get some sleep while we go over it.”
“All right,” Goodwin said.
Horace began to drill the woman, tramping back and forth upon the narrow floor. Goodwin finished his cigar and sat motionless again, his arms folded and his head bent. The clock above the square struck nine and then ten. The child whimpered, stirred. The woman stopped and changed it and took the bottle from beneath her flank and fed it. Then she leaned forward carefully and looked into Goodwin’s face. “He’s asleep,” she whispered.
“Shall we lay him down?” Horace whispered.
“No. Let him stay there.” Moving quietly she laid the child on the cot and moved herself to the other end of it. Horace carried the chair over beside her. They spoke in whispers.
The clock struck eleven. Still Horace drilled her, going over and over the imaginary scene. At last he said: “I think that’s all. Can you remember it, now? If he should ask you anything you cant answer in the exact words you’ve learned tonight, just say nothing for a moment. I’ll attend to the rest. Can you remember, now?”
“Yes,” she whispered. He reached across and took the box of candy from the cot and opened it, the glazed paper crackling faintly. She took a piece. Goodwin had not moved. She looked at him, then at the narrow slit of window.
“Stop that,” Horace whispered. “He couldn’t reach him through that window with a hat-pin, let alone a bullet. Dont you know that?”
“Yes,” she said. She held the bon-bon in her hand. She was not looking at him. “I know what you’re thinking,” she whispered.
“What?”
“When you got to the house and I wasn’t there. I know what you’re thinking.” Horace watched her, her averted face. “You said tonight was the time to start paying you.”
For a while longer he looked at her. “Ah,” he said. “O tempora! O mores! O hell! Can you stupid mammals never believe that any man, every man—You thought that was what I was coming for? You thought that if I had intended to, I’d have waited this long?”
She looked at him briefly. “It wouldn’t have done you any good if you hadn’t waited.”
“What? Oh. Well. But you would have tonight?”
“I thought that was what—”
“You would now, then?” She looked around at Goodwin. He was snoring a little. “Oh, I dont mean right this minute,” he whispered. “But you’ll pay on demand.”
“I thought that was what you meant. I told you we didn’t have—If that aint enough pay, I dont know that I blame you.”
“It’s not that. You know it’s not that. But cant you see that perhaps a man might do something just because he knew it was right, necessary to the harmony of things that it be done?”
The woman turned the bon-bon slowly in her hand. “I thought you were mad about him.”
“Lee?”
“No. Him.” She touched the child. “Because I’d have to bring him with us.”
“You mean, with him at the foot of the bed, maybe? perhaps you holding him by the leg all the time, so he wouldn’t fall off?”
She looked at him, her eyes grave and blank and contemplative. Outside the clock struck twelve.
“Good God,” he whispered. “What kind of men have you known?”
“I got him out of jail once that way. Out of Leavenworth, too. When they knew he was guilty.”
; “You did?” Horace said. “Here. Take another piece. That one’s about worn out.” She looked down at her chocolate-stained fingers and the shapeless bon-bon. She dropped it behind the cot. Horace extended his handkerchief.
“It’ll soil it,” she said. “Wait.” She wiped her fingers on the child’s discarded garment and sat again, her hands clasped in her lap. Goodwin was snoring regularly. “When he went to the Philippines he left me in San Francisco. I got a job and I lived in a hall room, cooking over a gas-jet, because I told him I would. I didn’t know how long he’d be gone, but I promised him I would and he knew I would. When he killed that other soldier over that nigger woman, I didn’t even know it. I didn’t get a letter from him for five months. It was just when I happened to see an old newspaper I was spreading on a closet shelf in the place where I worked that I saw the regiment was coming home, and when I looked at the calendar it was that day. I’d been good all that time. I’d had good chances; everyday I had them with the men coming in the restaurant.
“They wouldn’t let me off to go and meet the ship, so I had to quit. Then they wouldn’t let me see him, wouldn’t even let me on the ship. I stood there while they came marching off of it, watching for him and asking the ones that passed if they knew where he was and them kidding me if I had a date that night, telling me they never heard of him or that he was dead or he had run off to Japan with the colonel’s wife. I tried to get on the ship again, but they wouldn’t let me. So that night I dressed up and went to the cabarets until I found one of them and let him pick me up, and he told me. It was like I had died. I sat there with the music playing and all, and that drunk soldier pawing at me, and me wondering why I didn’t let go, go on with him, get drunk and never sober up again and me thinking And this is the sort of animal I wasted a year over. I guess that was why I didn’t.
“Anyway, I didn’t. I went back to my room and the next day I started looking for him. I kept on, with them telling me lies and trying to make me, until I found he was in Leavenworth. I didn’t have enough money for a ticket, so I had to get another job. It took two months to get enough money. Then I went to Leavenworth. I got another job as waitress, in Childs’, nightshifts, so I could see Lee every other Sunday afternoon. We decided to get a lawyer. We didn’t know that a lawyer couldn’t do anything for a federal prisoner. The lawyer didn’t tell me, and I hadn’t told Lee how I was getting the lawyer. He thought I had saved some money. I lived with the lawyer two months before I found it out.