The Oxford Book of American Det (71 page)

“Do you know what it means, what it was doing there?”

“Yes,” Uncle Gavin said. “But why?”

“Well, I can’t tell you. And he never will. Because he’s gone, Gavin. Oh, we’ll catch him—somebody will, I mean, someday, somewhere. But it won’t be here, and it won’t be for this. It’s like that poor, harmless, half-witted girl wasn’t important enough for even that justice you claim you prefer above truth, to avenge her.” And that did seem to be all of it. Mrs. Flint was buried that afternoon. The old man was still locked in his room during the funeral, and even after they departed with the coffin for the churchyard, leaving in the house only the deputy in his tilted chair outside the locked door, and two neighbour women who remained to cook a hot meal for old Pritchel, finally prevailing on him to open the door long enough to take the tray from them. And he thanked them for it, clumsily and gruffly, thanking them for their kindness during all the last twenty-four hours. One of the women was moved enough to offer to return tomorrow and cook another meal for him, whereupon his old-time acerbity and choler returned and the kind-hearted woman was even regretting that she had made the offer at all when the harsh, cracked old voice from inside the half-closed door added: “I don’t need no help. I ain’t had no darter nohow in two years,” and the door slammed in their faces and the bolt shot home.

Then the two women left, and there was only the deputy sitting in his tilted chair beside the door. He was back in town the next morning, telling how the old man had snatched the door suddenly open and kicked the chair out from beneath the dozing deputy before he could move and ordered him off the place with violent curses, and how as he (the deputy) peered at the house from around the corner of the barn a short time later, the shotgun blared from the kitchen window and the charge of squirrel shot slammed into the stable wall not a yard above his head. The sheriff telephoned that to Uncle Gavin too:

“So he’s out there alone again. And since that’s what he seems to want, it’s all right with me. Sure I feel sorry for him. I feel sorry for anybody that has to live with a disposition like his. Old and alone, to have all this happen to him. It’s like being snatched up by a tornado and whirled and slung and then slammed right back down where you started from, without even the benefit and pleasure of having taken a trip.

What was it I said yesterday about living by the sword?”

“I don’t remember,” Uncle Gavin said. “You said a lot yesterday.”

“And a lot of it was right. I said it was finished yesterday. And it is. That fellow will trip himself again someday, but it won’t be here.”

Only it was more than that. It was as if Flint had never been here at all—no mark, no scar to show that he had ever been in the jail cell. The meagre group of people who pitied but did not mourn, departing, separating, from the raw grave of the woman who had had little enough hold on our lives at best, whom a few of us had known without ever having seen her and some of us had seen without ever knowing her... The childless old man whom most of us had never seen at all, once more alone in the house where, as he said himself, there had been no child anyway in two years...

“As though none of it had ever happened,” Uncle Gavin said. “As if Flint had not only never been in that cell but had never existed at all. That triumvirate of murderer, victim, and bereaved—not three flesh-and-blood people but just an illusion, a shadow-play on a sheet—not only neither men nor women nor young nor old but just three labels which cast two shadows for the simple and only reason that it requires a minimum of two in order to postulate the verities of injustice and grief. That’s it. They have never cast but two shadows, even though they did bear three labels, names. It was as though only by dying did that poor woman ever gain enough substance and reality even to cast a shadow.”

“But somebody killed her,” I said.

“Yes,” Uncle Gavin said. “Somebody killed her.”

That was at noon. About five that afternoon I answered the telephone. It was the sheriff. “Is your uncle there?” he said. “Tell him to wait. I’m coming right over.” He had a stranger with him—a city man, in neat city clothes.

“This is Mr. Workman,” the sheriff said. “The adjuster. There was an insurance policy.

For five hundred, taken out seventeen months ago. Hardly enough to murder anybody for.”

“If it ever was a murder,” the adjuster said. His voice was cold too, cold yet at the same time at a sort of seething boil. “That policy will be paid at once, without question or any further investigation. And I’ll tell you something else you people here don’t seem to know yet. That old man is crazy. It was not the man Flint who should have been brought to town and locked up.”

Only it was the sheriff who told that too: how yesterday afternoon the insurance company’s Memphis office had received a telegram, signed with Old Man Pritchel’s name, notifying them of the insured’s death, and the adjuster arrived at Old Man Pritchel’s house about two o’clock this afternoon and within thirty minutes had extracted from Old Man Pritchel himself the truth about his daughter’s death: the facts of it which the physical evidence—the truck and the three dead squirrels and the blood on the steps and on the ground—supported. This was that while the daughter was cooking dinner, Pritchel and Flint had driven the truck down to Pritchel’s woods lot to shoot squirrels for supper—“And that’s correct,” the sheriff said. “I asked. They did that every Sunday morning. Pritchel wouldn’t let anybody but Flint shoot his squirrels, and he wouldn’t even let Flint shoot them unless he was along”—and they shot the three squirrels and Flint drove the truck back to the house and up beside the back steps and the woman came out to take the squirrels and Flint opened the door and picked up the gun to get out of the truck and stumbled, caught his heel on the edge of the running-board and flinging up the hand carrying the gun to break his fall, so that the muzzle of the gun was pointing right at his wife’s head when it went off. And Old Man Pritchel not only denied having sent the wire, he violently and profanely repudiated any and all implication or suggestion that he even knew the policy existed at all. He denied to the very last that the shooting had been any part of an accident. He tried to revoke his own testimony as to what had happened when the daughter came out to get the dead squirrels and the gun went off, repudiating his own story when he realised that he had cleared his son-in-law of murder, snatching the paper from the adjuster’s hand, which he apparently believed was the policy itself, and attempting to tear it up and destroy it before the adjuster could stop him.

“Why?” Uncle Gavin said.

“Why not?” the sheriff said. “We had let Flint get away; Mr. Pritchel knew he was loose somewhere in the world. Do you reckon he aimed to let the man that killed his daughter get paid for it?”

“Maybe,” Uncle Gavin said. “But I don’t think so. I don’t think he is worried about that at all. I think Mr. Pritchel knows that Joel Flint is not going to collect that policy or any other prize. Maybe he knew a little country jail like ours wasn’t going to hold a wide-travelled ex-carnival man, and he expected Flint to come back out there and this time he was ready for him. And I think that as soon as people stop worrying him, he will send you word to come out there, and he will tell you so.”

“Hah,” the adjuster said. “Then they must have stopped worrying him. Listen to this.

When I got there this afternoon^ there were three men in the parlour with him. They had a certified check. It was a big check. They were buying his farm from him—lock, stock and barrel—and I didn’t know land in this country was worth that much either, incidentally. He had the deed all drawn and signed, but when I told them who I was, they agreed to wait until I could get back to town here and tell somebody—the sheriff, probably. And I left, and that old lunatic was still standing in the door, shaking that deed at me and croaking: ‘Tell the sheriff, damn you! Get a lawyer, too! Get that lawyer Stevens. I hear tell he claims to be pretty slick!’”

“We thank you,” the sheriff said. He spoke and moved with that deliberate, slightly florid, old-fashioned courtesy which only big men can wear, except that his was constant; this was the first time I ever saw him quit anyone shortly, even when he would see them again tomorrow. He didn’t even look at the adjuster again. “My car’s outside,” he told Uncle Gavin.

So just before sunset we drove up to the neat picket fence enclosing Old Man Pritchel’s neat, bare little yard and neat, tight little house, in front of which stood the big, dust-covered car with its city license plates and Flint’s battered truck with a strange Negro youth at the wheel—strange because Old Man Pritchel had never had a servant of any sort save his daughter.

“He’s leaving too?” Uncle Gavin said.

“That’s his right,” the sheriff said. We mounted the steps. But before we reached the door, Old Man Pritchel was already shouting for us to come in—the harsh, cracked old man’s voice shouting at us from beyond the hall, beyond the door to the dining room where a tremendous old-fashioned telescope bag, strapped and bulging, sat on a chair and the three northerners in dusty khaki stood watching the door and Old Man Pritchel himself sat at the table. And I saw for the first time (Uncle Gavin told me he had seen him only twice) the uncombed thatch of white hair, a fierce tangle of eyebrows above steel-framed spectacles, a jut of untrimmed moustache and a scrabble of beard stained with chewing tobacco to the colour of dirty cotton.

“Come in,” he said. “That lawyer Stevens, heh?”

“Yes, Mr. Pritchel,” the sheriff said.

“Hehm,” the old man barked. “Well, Hub,” he said. “Can I sell my land, or can’t I?”

“Of course, Mr. Pritchel,” the sheriff said. “We hadn’t heard you aimed to.”

“Heh,” the old man said. “Maybe this changed my mind!” The check and the folded deed both lay on the table in front of him. He pushed the check toward the sheriff. He didn’t look at Uncle Gavin again; he just said: “You, too.” Uncle Gavin and the sheriff moved to the table and stood looking down at the check. Neither of them touched it. I could see their faces. There was nothing in them. “Well?” Mr. Pritchel said.

“It’s a good price,” the sheriff said.

This time the old man said “Hah!” short and harsh. He unfolded the deed and spun it to face, not the sheriff but Uncle Gavin. “Well?” he said. “You, lawyer?”

“It’s all right, Mr. Pritchel,” Uncle Gavin said. The old man sat back, both hands on the table before him, his head tilted back as he looked up at the sheriff.

“Well?” he said. “Fish, or cut bait.”

“It’s your land,” the sheriff said. “What you do with it is no man’s business else.”

“Hah,” Mr. Pritchel said. He didn’t move. “All right, gentlemen.” He didn’t move at all: one of the strangers came forward and took up the deed. “I’ll be out of the house in thirty minutes. You can take possession then, or you will find the key under the mat tomorrow morning.” I don’t believe he even looked after them as they went out, though I couldn’t be sure because of the glare on his spectacles. Then I knew that he was looking at the sheriff, had been looking at him for a minute or more, and then I saw that he was trembling, jerking and shaking as the old tremble, although his hands on the table were as motionless as two lumps of the clay would have been.

“So you let him get away,” he said.

“That’s right,” the sheriff said. “But you wait, Mr. Pritchel. We’ll catch him.”

“When?” the old man said. “Two years? Five years? Ten years? I am seventy-four years old: buried my wife and four children. Where will I be in ten years?”

“Here, I hope,” the sheriff said.

“Here?” the old man said. “Didn’t you just hear me tell that fellow he could have this house in thirty minutes? I own a automobile truck now; I got money to spend now, and something to spend it for.”

“Spend it for what?” the sheriff said. “That check? Even this boy here would have to start early and run late to get shut of that much money in ten years.”

“Spend it running down the man that killed my Ellie!” He rose suddenly, thrusting his chair back. He staggered, but when the sheriff stepped quickly toward him, he flung his arm out and seemed actually to strike the sheriff back a pace. “Let be,” he said, panting. Then he said, harsh and loud in his cracked shaking voice: “Get out of here!

Get out of my house all of you!” But the sheriff didn’t move, nor did we, and after a moment the old man stopped trembling. But he was still holding to the table edge. But his voice was quiet. “Hand me my whiskey. On the sideboard. And three glasses.” The sheriff fetched them—an old-fashioned cut-glass decanter and three heavy tumblers—

and set them before him. And when he spoke this time, his voice was almost gentle and I knew what the woman had felt that evening when she offered to come back tomorrow and cook another meal for him: “You’ll have to excuse me. I’m tired. I’ve had a heap of trouble lately, and I reckon I’m wore out. Maybe a change is what I need.”

“But not tonight, Mr. Pritchel,” the sheriff said.

And then again, as when the woman had offered to come back and cook, he ruined it.

“Maybe I won’t start tonight,” he said. “And then maybe again I will. But you folks want to get on back to town, so we’ll just drink to goodbye and better days.” He unstoppered the decanter and poured whiskey into the three tumblers and set the decanter down and looked about the table. “You, boy,” he said, “hand me the water bucket. It’s on the back gallery shelf.” Then, as I turned and started toward the door, I saw him reach and take up the sugar bowl and plunge the spoon into the sugar and then I stopped too. And I remember Uncle Gavin’s and the sheriff’s faces and I could not believe my eyes either, as he put the spoonful of sugar into the raw whiskey and started to stir it. Because I had not only watched Uncle Gavin, and the sheriff when he would come to play chess with Uncle Gavin, but Uncle Gavin’s father too who was my grandfather, and my own father before he died, and all the other men who would come to Grandfather’s house who drank cold toddies as we call them, and even I knew that to make a cold toddy you do not put the sugar into the whiskey because sugar will not dissolve in raw whiskey but only lies in a little intact swirl like sand at the bottom of the glass; that you first put the water into the glass and dissolve the sugar into the water, in a ritual almost; then you add the whiskey, and that anyone like Old Man Pritchel who must have been watching men make cold toddies for nearly seventy years and had been making and drinking them himself for at least fifty-three, would know this too. And I remember how the man we had thought was Old Man Pritchel realised too late what he was doing and jerked his head up just as Uncle Gavin sprang toward him, and swung his arm back and hurled the glass at Uncle Gavin’s head, and the thud of the flung glass against the wall and the dark splash it made and the crash of the table as it went over and the raw stink of the spilled whiskey from the decanter and Uncle Gavin shouting at the sheriff: “Grab him, Hub! Grab him!” Then we were all three on him. I remember the savage strength and speed of the body which was no old man’s body; I saw him duck beneath the sheriff’s arm and the entire wig came off; I seemed to see his whole face wrenching itself furiously free from beneath the makeup which bore the painted wrinkles and the false eyebrows. When the sheriff snatched the beard and moustache off, the flesh seemed to come with it, springing quick and pink and then crimson, as though in that last desperate cast he had had to beard, disguise, not his face so much as the very blood which he had spilled.