Intruder in the Dust (13 page)

‘Charles.….Charles.’

‘This aint Vinson Gowrie,’ he said. ‘This man’s name is Montgomery. He’s some kind of a shoestring timber-buyer from over in Crossman County.’

T
HEY HAD TO FILL THE HOLE
back up of course and besides he had the horse. But even then it was a good while until daylight when he left Highboy with Aleck Sander at the pasture gate and tried remembered to tiptoe into the house but at once his mother her hair loose and in her nightdress wailed from right beside the front door: ‘Where have you been?’ then followed him to his uncle’s door and then while his uncle was putting some clothes on: ‘You? Digging up a grave?’ and he with a sort of weary indefatigable patience, just about worn out himself now from riding and digging then turning around and undigging and then riding again, somehow
managing to stay that one jump ahead of what he had really never hoped to beat anyway:

‘Aleck Sander and Miss Habersham helped:’ which if anything seemed to be worse though she was still not loud: just amazed and inexpugnable until his uncle came out fully dressed even to his necktie but not shaved and said,

‘Now Maggie, do you want to wake Charley?’ then following them back to the front door and this time she said—and he thought again how you could never really beat them because of their fluidity which was not just a capacity for mobility but a willingness to abandon with the substanceless promptitude of wind or air itself not only position but principle too; you didn’t have to marshal your forces because you already had them: superior artillery, weight, right justice and precedent and usage and everything else and made your attack and cleared the field, swept all before you—or so you thought until you discovered that the enemy had not retreated at all but had already abandoned the field and had not merely abandoned the field but had usurped your very battlecry in the process; you believed you had captured a citadel and instead found you had merely entered an untenable position and then found the unimpaired and even unmarked battle set up again in your unprotected and unsuspecting rear—she said:

‘But he’s got to sleep! He hasn’t even been to bed!’ so that he actually stopped until his uncle said, hissed at him:

‘Come on. What’s the matter with you? Dont you know she’s tougher than you and me both just as old Habersham was tougher than you and Aleck Sander put together; you might have gone out there without her to drag you by the hand but Aleck Sander wouldn’t and I’m still not so
sure you would when you came right down to it.’ So he moved on too beside his uncle toward where Miss Habersham sat in the truck behind his uncle’s parked car (it had been in the garage at nine oclock last night; later when he had time he would remember to ask his uncle just where his mother had sent him to look for him). ‘I take that back,’ his uncle said. ‘Forget it. Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings and old ladies——’ he paraphrased. ‘Quite true, as a lot of truth often is, only a man just dont like to have it flung in his teeth at three oclock in the morning. And dont even forget your mother, which of course you cant; she has already long since seen to that. Just remember that they can stand anything, accept any fact (it’s only men who burk at facts) provided they dont have to face it; can assimilate it with their heads turned away and one hand extended behind them as the politician accepts the bribe. Look at her: who will spend a long contented happy life never abating one jot of her refusal to forgive you for being able to button your own pants.’

And still a good while until daylight when his uncle stopped the car at the sheriff’s gate and led the way up the short walk and onto the rented gallery. (Since he couldn’t succeed himself, although now in his third term the elapsed time covering Sheriff Hampton’s tenure was actually almost twice as long as the twelve years of his service. He was a countryman, a farmer and son of farmers when he was first elected and now owned himself the farm and house where he had been born, living in the rented one in town during his term of office then returning to the farm which was his actual home at each expiration, to live there until he could run for—and be elected—sheriff again.)

‘I hope he’s not a heavy sleeper,’ Miss Habersham said.

‘He aint asleep,’ his uncle said. ‘He’s cooking breakfast.’

‘Cooking breakfast?’ Miss Habersham said: and then he knew that, for all her flat back and the hat which had never shifted from the exact top of her head as though she kept it balanced there not by any pins but simply by the rigid unflagging poise of her neck as Negro women carry a whole family wash, she was about worn out with strain and lack of sleep too.

‘He’s a country man,’ his uncle said. ‘Any food he eats after daylight in the morning is dinner. Mrs. Hampton’s in Memphis with their daughter waiting for the baby and the only woman who’ll cook a man’s breakfast at half-past three a. m. is his wife. No hired town cook’s going to do it. She comes at a decent hour about eight oclock and washes the dishes.’ His uncle didn’t knock. He started to open the door then stopped and looked back past both of them to where Aleck Sander stood at the bottom of the front steps. ‘And dont you think you’re going to get out of it just because your mama dont vote,’ he told Aleck Sander. ‘You come on too.’

Then his uncle opened the door and at once they smelled the coffee and the frying hogmeat, walking on linoleum toward a faint light at the rear of the hall then across a linoleum-floored diningroom in rented Grand Rapids mission into the kitchen, into the hard cheerful blast of a woodstove where the sheriff stood over a sputtering skillet in his undershirt and pants and socks, his braces dangling and his hair mussed and tousled with sleep like that of a ten-year-old boy, a battercake turner in one hand and a cuptowel in the other. The sheriff had already turned his vast face toward the door before they
entered it and he watched the little hard pale eyes flick from his uncle to Miss Habersham to himself and then to Aleck Sander and even then it was not the eyes which widened so much for that second but rather the little hard black pupils which had tightened in that one flick to pinpoints. But the sheriff said nothing yet, just looking at his uncle now and now even the little hard pupils seemed to expand again as when an expulsion of breath untightens the chest and while the three of them stood quietly and steadily watching the sheriff his uncle told it, rapid and condensed and succinct, from the moment in the jail last night when his uncle had realised that Lucas had started to tell—or rather ask—him something, to the one when he had entered his uncle’s room ten minutes ago and waked him up, and stopped and again they watched the little hard eyes go flick. flick. slick. across their three faces then back to his uncle again, staring at his uncle for almost a quarter of a minute without even blinking. Then the sheriff said:

‘You wouldn’t come here at four oclock in the morning with a tale like that if it wasn’t so.’

‘You aint listening just to two sixteen-year-old children,’ his uncle said. ‘I remind you that Miss Habersham was there.’

‘You dont have to,’ the sheriff said. ‘I haven’t forgot it. I dont think I ever will.’ Then the sheriff turned. A gigantic man and in the fifties too, you wouldn’t think he could move fast and he didn’t really seem to yet he had taken another skillet from a nail in the wall behind the stove and was already turning toward the table (where for the first time he noticed, saw the side of smoked meat) before he seemed to have moved at all, picking up a butcher knife from beside the meat before his uncle could even begin to speak:

‘Have we got time for that? You’ve got to drive sixty miles to Harrisburg to the District Attorney; you’ll have to take Miss Habersham and these boys with you for witnesses to try and persuade him to originate a petition for the exhumation of Vinson Gowrie’s body——’

The sheriff wiped the handle of the knife rapidly with the cuptowel. ‘I thought you told me Vinson Gowrie aint in that grave.’

‘Officially he is,’ his uncle said. ‘By the county records he is. And if you, living right here and knowing Miss Habersham and me all your political life, had to ask me twice, what do you think Jim Halladay is going to do?—Then you’ve got to drive sixty miles back here with your witnesses and the petition and get Judge Maycox to issue an order——’

The sheriff dropped the cuptowel onto the table. ‘Have I?’ he said mildly, almost inattentively: so that his uncle stopped perfectly still watching him as the sheriff turned from the table, the knife in his hand.

‘Oh,’ his uncle said.

‘I’ve thought of something else too,’ the sheriff said. ‘I’m surprised you aint. Or maybe you have.’

His uncle stared at the sheriff. Then Aleck Sander—he was behind them all, not yet quite through the diningroom door into the kitchen—said in a voice as mild and impersonal as though he were reading off a slogan catchphrase advertising some object he didn’t own and never expected to want:

‘It mought not a been a mule. It mought have been a horse.’

‘Maybe you’ve thought of it now,’ the sheriff said.

‘Oh,’ his uncle said. He said: ‘Yes.’ But Miss Habersham was already talking. She had given Aleck Sander
one quick hard look but now she was looking at the sheriff again as quick and as hard.

‘So do I,’ she said. ‘And I think we deserve better than secrecy.’

‘I do too, Miss Eunice,’ the sheriff said. ‘Except that the one that needs considering right now aint in this room.’

‘Oh,’ Miss Habersham said. She said ‘Yes’ too. She said, ‘Of course:’ already moving, meeting the sheriff halfway between the table and the door and taking the knife from him and going on to the table when he passed her and came on toward the door, his uncle then he then Aleck Sander moving out of the way as the sheriff went on into the diningroom and across it into the dark hall, shutting the door behind him: and then he was wondering why the sheriff hadn’t finished dressing when he got up; a man who didn’t mind or had to or anyway did get up at half-past three in the morning to cook himself some breakfast would hardly mind getting up five minutes earlier and have time to put his shirt and shoes on too then Miss Habersham spoke and he remembered her; a lady’s presence of course was why he had gone to put on the shirt and shoes without even waiting to eat the breakfast and Miss Habersham spoke and he jerked, without moving heaved up out of sleep, having been asleep for seconds maybe even minutes on his feet as a horse sleeps but Miss Habersham was still only turning the side of meat onto its edge to cut the first slice. She said: ‘Cant he telephone to Harrisburg and have the District Attorney telephone back to Judge Maycox?’

‘That’s what he doing now,’ Aleck Sander said. ‘Telephoning.’

‘Maybe you’d better go to the hall where you can
overhear good what he’s saying,’ his uncle told Aleck Sander. Then his uncle looked at Miss Habersham again; he too watched her slicing rapid slice after slice of the bacon as fast and even almost as a machine could have done it. ‘Mr Hampton says we wont need any papers. We can attend to it ourselves without bothering Judge Maycox——’

Miss Habersham released the knife. She didn’t lay it down, she just opened her hand and in the same motion picked up the cuptowel and was wiping her hands as she turned from the table, crossing the kitchen toward them faster, a good deal faster than even the sheriff had moved. ‘Then what are we wasting time here for?’ she said. ‘For him to put on his necktie and coat?’

His uncle stepped quickly in front of her. ‘We cant do anything in the dark,’ he said. ‘We must wait for daylight.’

‘We didn’t,’ Miss Habersham said. Then she stopped; it was either that or walk over his uncle though his uncle didn’t touch her, just standing between her and the door until she had to stop at least for the second for his uncle to get out of the way: and he looked at her too, straight, thin, almost shapeless in the straight cotton dress beneath the round exactitude of the hat and he thought
She’s too old for this
and then corrected it:
No a woman a lady shouldn’t have to do this
and then remembered last night when he had left the office and walked across the back yard and whistled for Aleck Sander and he knew he had believed—and he still believed it—that he would have gone alone even if Aleck Sander had stuck to his refusal but it was only after Miss Habersham came around the house and spoke to him that he knew he was going to go through with it and he remembered again what old Ephraim had told him after they found the ring under the hog trough:
If you got something outside the common run
that’s got to be done and cant wait, dont waste your time on the menfolks; they works on what your uncle calls the rules and the cases. Get the womens and the children at it; they works on the circumstances
. Then the hall door opened. He heard the sheriff cross the diningroom to the kitchen door. But the sheriff didn’t enter the kitchen, stopping in the door, standing in it even after Miss Habersham said in a harsh, almost savage voice:

‘Well?’ and he hadn’t put on his shoes nor even picked up the dangling galluses and he didn’t seem to have heard Miss Habersham at all: just standing looming bulging in the door looking at Miss Habersham—not at the hat, not at her eyes nor even her face: just at her—as you might look at a string of letters in Russian or Chinese which someone you believed had just told you spelled your name, saying at last in a musing baffled voice: