Impervious to time too. It seemed to Edmonds, sitting at his solitary supper which he couldn’t eat, that he could actually see Lucas standing there in the room before him—the face which at sixty-seven looked actually younger than his own at forty-three, showed less of the ravages of passions and thought and satieties and frustrations than his own—the face which was not at all a replica even in caricature of his grandfather McCaslin’s but which had heired and now reproduced with absolute and shocking fidelity the old ancestor’s entire generation and thought—the face which, as old Isaac McCaslin had seen it that morning forty-five years ago, was a composite of a whole generation of fierce and undefeated young Confederate soldiers, embalmed and slightly mummified—and he thought with amazement and something very like horror: He’s more like old Carothers than all the rest of us put together, including old Carothers. He is both heir and prototype simultaneously of all the geography and climate and biology which sired old Carothers and all the rest of us and our kind, myriad, countless, faceless, even nameless now except himself who fathered himself, intact and complete, contemptuous, as old Carothers must have been, of all blood black white yellow or red, including his own.
2
It was full dark when he tied the mare to Lucas’ fence and walked up the rock path neatly bordered with broken brick and upended bottles and such set into the earth, and mounted the steps and entered. Lucas was waiting, standing in the door with his hat on, in silhouette against the firelight on the hearth. The old woman did not rise. She sat as in the commissary that afternoon, motionless, only bent a little forward, her tiny gnarled hands immobile again on the white apron, the shrunken and tragic mask touched here and there into highlight by the fire, and for the first time in his memory he was seeing her in or about the house without the clay pipe in her mouth. Lucas drew up a chair for him. But Lucas did not sit down. He went and stood at the other side of the hearth, the firelight touching him too—the broad sweep of the hand-made beaver hat which Edmonds’ grandfather had given him fifty years ago, the faintly Syriac features, the heavy gold watch-chain looped across the unbuttoned vest. “Now what’s all this?” Edmonds said.
“She wants a voce,” Lucas said. “All right.”
“All right?” Edmonds said. “All right?”
“Yes. What’s it going to cost me?”
“I see,” Edmonds said. “If you got to pay out money for it, she cant have one. Well, this is one thing you aint going to swangdangle anybody out of. You aint buying or selling a gold-finding machine either now, old man. She dont want any mule.”
“She can have it,” Lucas said. “I just want to know how much it will cost me. Why cant you declare us voced like you done Oscar and that yellow slut he fotched out here from Memphis last summer? You not only declared them voced, you took her back to town yourself and bought her a railroad ticket back to Memphis.”
“Because they were not married very hard,” Edmonds said. “And sooner or later she was going to take a lick at him with that razor she carried. And if she had ever missed or fumbled, Oscar would have torn her head off. He was just waiting for a chance to. That’s why I did it. But you aint Oscar. This is different. Listen to me, Lucas. You are an older man than me; I admit that. You may have more money than I’ve got, which I think you have, and you may have more sense than I’ve got, as you think you have. But you cant do this.”
“Dont tell me,” Lucas said. “Tell her. This aint my doing. I’m satisfied like this.”
“Yes. Sure. As long as you can do like you want to—spend all the time you aint sleeping and eating making George Wilkins walk up and down that creek bottom, toting that damn—that damn—” Then he stopped and started over, holding his voice not down only but back too, for a while yet at least: “I’ve told you and told you there aint any money buried around here. That you are just wasting your time. But that’s all right. You and George Wilkins both could walk around down there until you drop, for all of me. But Aunt Molly——”
“I’m a man,” Lucas said. “I’m the man here. I’m the one to say in my house, like you and your paw and his paw were the ones to say in his. You aint got any complaints about the way I farm my land and make my crop, have you?”
“No complaints?” Edmonds said. “No complaints?” The other didn’t even pause.
“Long as I do that, I’m the one to say about my private business, and your father would be the first to tell you so if he was here. Besides, I will have to quit hunting every night soon now, to get my cotton picked. Then I’ll just hunt Saturday and Sunday night.” Up to now he had been speaking to the ceiling apparently. Now he looked at Edmonds. “But them two nights is mine. On them two nights I dont farm nobody’s land, I dont care who he is that claims to own it.”
“Well,” Edmonds said. “Two nights a week. You’ll have to start that next week, because some of your cotton is ready.” He turned to the old woman. “There, Aunt Molly,” he said. “Two nights a week, and he’s bound, even Lucas, to come to his senses soon——”
“I dont axes him to stop hunting but two nights a week,” she said. She hadn’t moved, speaking in a monotonous singsong, looking at neither of them. “I dont axes him to stop hunting for it at all. Because it’s too late now. He cant help himself now. And I gots to be free.”
Edmonds looked up again at the impassive, the impenetrable face under the broad, old-fashioned hat. “Do you want her to go?” he said. “Is that it?”
“I’m going to be the man in this house,” Lucas said. It was not stubborn. It was quiet: final. His stare was as steady as Edmonds’ was, and immeasurably colder.
“Listen,” Edmonds said. “You’re getting along. You aint got a lot more time here. You said something about father a minute ago. All right. But when his time came and he laid down to die, he laid down in peace. Because he never had anything Jesus, he had almost said it aloud. Damn damn damn he thought had anything about his wife in her old age to have to say God forgive me for doing that. Almost aloud; he just caught it. “And your time’s coming to want to lay down in peace, and you dont know when.”
“Nor does you.”
“That’s correct. But I’m forty-three. You are sixty-seven.” They stared at one another. Still the face beneath the hat was impassive, impenetrable. Then Lucas moved. He turned and spat neatly into the fire.
“All right,” he said quietly. “I want to lay down in peace too. I’ll get shut of the machine. I’ll give it to George Wilkins—” That was when the old woman moved. When Edmonds looked around she was trying to rise from the chair, trying to thrust herself up with one hand, the other arm outstretched, not to ward Lucas off but toward him, Edmonds.
“No!” she cried. “Mister Zack! Cant you see? Not that he would keep on using it just the same as if he had kept it, but he would fotch onto Nat, my last one and least one, the curse of God that’s gonter destroy him or her that touches what’s done been rendered back to Him? I wants him to keep it! That’s why I got to go, so he can keep it and not have to even think about giving it to George! Dont you see?”
Edmonds had risen too, his chair crashing over backward. He was trembling, glaring at Lucas. “So you’ll try your tricks on me too. On me,” he said in a shaking voice. “All right. You’re not going to get any divorce. And you’re going to get rid of that machine. You bring that thing up to my house the first thing in the morning. You hear me?”
He returned home, or to the stable. There was a moon now, blanched upon the open cotton almost ready for picking. The curse of God. He knew what she meant, what she had been fumbling toward. Granted the almost unbelievable circumstance that there should be as much as a thousand dollars buried and forgotten somewhere within Lucas’ radius, and granted the even more impossible circumstance that Lucas should find it: what it might do to him, even to a man sixty-seven years old, who had, as Edmonds knew, three times that sum in a Jefferson bank; even a thousand dollars on which there was no sweat, at least none of his own. And to George, the daughter’s husb
and, who had not a dollar anywhere, who was not yet twenty-five and with an eighteen-year-old wife expecting a child next spring.
There was no one to take the mare; he had told Dan not to wait. He unsaddled himself and rubbed her down and opened the gate to the pasture lane and slipped the bridle and slapped her moon-bright rump as she rushed suddenly away, cantering, curvetting, her three stockings and the blaze glinting moonward for an instant as she turned. “God damn it,” he said, “I wish to hell either me or Lucas Beauchamp was a horse. Or a mule.”
Lucas did not appear the next morning with the divining machine. When Edmonds himself departed at nine oclock (it was Sunday) he still had not appeared. Edmonds was driving his car now; for a moment he thought of going to Lucas’ house, stopping there on his way. But it was Sunday; it seemed to him that he had been worrying and stewing over Lucas’ affairs for six days a week since last May and very likely he would resume stewing and fretting over them at sunup tomorrow, and since Lucas himself had stated that beginning next week he would devote only Saturdays and Sundays to the machine, possibly until that time he would consider himself under his own dispensation to refrain from it on those two days. So he went on. He was gone all that day—to church five miles away, then to Sunday dinner with some friends three miles further on, where he spent the afternoon looking at other men’s cotton and adding his voice to the curses at governmental interference with the raising and marketing of it. So it was after dark when he reached his own gate again and remembered Lucas and Molly and the divining machine once more. Lucas would not have left it at the empty house in his absence, so he turned and drove on to Lucas’ cabin. It was dark; when he shouted there was no answer. So he drove on the quarter-mile to George’s and Nat’s, but it was dark too, no answer there to his voice. Maybe it’s all right now, he thought. Maybe they’ve all gone to church. Anyway, it’ll be tomorrow in another twelve hours I’ll have to start in worrying about Lucas and something and so it might as well be this, something at least I am familiar with, accustomed to.
Then the next morning, Monday, he had been in the stable for almost an hour and neither Dan nor Oscar had appeared. He had opened the stalls himself and turned the mule drove into the lane to the pasture and was just coming out of the mare’s stall with the feed basket as Oscar came into the hallway, not running but trotting wearily and steadily. Then Edmonds saw that he still wore his Sunday clothes—a bright shirt and a tie, serge trousers with a long tear in one leg and splashed to the knees with mud. “It’s Aunt Molly Beauchamp,” Oscar said. “She been missing since yestiddy sometime. We been hunting her all night. We found where she went down to the creek and we been tracking her. Only she so little and light she dont hardly make a foot on the ground. Uncle Luke and George and Nat and Dan and some others are still hunting.”
“I’ll saddle the mare,” Edmonds said. “I’ve turned the mules out; you’ll have to go to the pasture and catch one. Hurry.”
The mules, free in the big pasture, were hard to catch; it was almost an hour before Oscar returned bareback on one of them. And it was two hours more before they overtook Lucas and George and Nat and Dan and another man where they followed and lost and hunted and found and followed again the faint, light prints of the old woman’s feet as they seemed to wander without purpose among the jungle of brier and rotted logs along the creek. It was almost noon when they found her, lying on her face in the mud, the once immaculate apron and the clean faded skirts stained and torn, one hand still grasping the handle of the divining-machine as she had fallen with it. She was not dead. When Oscar picked her up she opened her eyes, looking at no one, at nothing, and closed them again. “Run,” Edmonds told Dan. “Take the mare. Go back for the car and go get Doctor Rideout. Hurry.—Can you carry her?”
“I can tote her,” Oscar said. “She dont weigh hardly nothing. Not nigh as much as that finding-box.”
“I’ll tote her,” George said. “Bein as she’s Nat’s—” Edmonds turned on him, on Lucas too.
“You tote that box,” he said. “Both of you tote it. Hope it finds something between here and the house. Because if those needles ever move on my place afterward, neither of you all will be looking at them.—I’m going to see about that divorce,” he said to Lucas. “Before she kills herself. Before you and that machine kill her between you. By God, I’m glad I aint walking in your shoes right now. I’m glad I aint going to lie in your bed tonight, thinking about what you’re going to think about.”
The day came. The cotton was all in and ginned and baled and frost had fallen, completing the firing of the corn which was being gathered and measured into the cribs. With Lucas and Molly in the back seat, he drove in to Jefferson and stopped before the county courthouse where the Chancellor was sitting. “You dont need to come in,” he told Lucas. “They probably wouldn’t let you in. But you be around close. I’m not going to wait for you. And remember. Aunt Molly gets the house, and half your crop this year and half of it every year as long as you stay on my place.”
“You mean every year I keep on farming my land.”
“I mean every damned year you stay on my place. Just what I said.”
“Cass Edmonds give me that land to be mine long as I——”
“You heard me,” Edmonds said. Lucas looked at him. He blinked.
“Do you want me to move off of it?” he said.
“Why?” Edmonds said. “What for? When you are going to be on it all night long every night, hunting buried money? You might as well sleep on it all day too. Besides, you’ll have to stay on it to make Aunt Molly’s half-crop. And I dont mean just this year. I mean every——”
“She can have all of it,” Lucas said. “I’ll raise it all right. And she can have all of it. I got them three thousand dollars old Carothers left me, right there in that bank yonder. They’ll last me out my time—unless you done decided to give half of them to somebody. And when me and George Wilkins find that money——”
“Get out of the car,” Edmonds said. “Go on. Get out of it.”
The Chancellor was sitting in his office—a small detached building beside the courthouse proper. As they walked toward it Edmonds suddenly had to take the old woman’s arm, catching her just in time, feeling again the thin, almost fleshless arm beneath the layers of sleeve, dry and light and brittle and frail as a rotted stick. He stopped, holding her up. “Aunt Molly,” he said, “do you still want to do this? You dont have to. I’ll take that thing away from him. By God, I——”
She tried to go on, tugging at his hand. “I got to,” she said. “He’ll get another one. Then he’ll give that one to George the first thing to keep you from taking it. And they’ll find it some day and maybe I’ll be gone then and cant help. And Nat was my least and my last one. I wont never see the others before I die.”
“Come on,” Edmonds said. “Come on then.”
There were a few people going in and out of the office; a few inside, not many. They waited quietly at the back of the room until their turn came. Then he found that he actually was holding her up. He led her forward, still supporting her, believing that if he released her for an instant even she would collapse into a bundle of dried and lifeless sticks, covered by the old, faded, perfectly clean garments, at his feet. “Ah, Mr Edmonds,” the Chancellor said. “This is the plaintiff?”
“Yes, sir,” Edmonds said. The Chancellor (he was quite old) slanted his head to look at Molly above his spectacles. Then he shifted them up his nose and looked at her through them. He made a clucking sound. “After forty-five years. You cant do anything about it?”
“No, sir,” Edmonds said. “I tried. I …” The Chancellor made the clucking sound again. He looked down at the bill which the clerk laid before him.
“She will be provided for, of course.”
“Yes, sir. I’ll see to that.”
The Chancellor mused upon the bill. “There’s no contest, I suppose.”
“No, sir,” Edmonds said. And then—and he did not even know Lucas had follo
wed them until he saw the Chancellor slant his head again and look past them this time across the spectacles, and saw the clerk glance up and heard him say, “You, nigger! Take off your hat!”—then Lucas thrust Molly aside and came to the table, removing his hat as he did so.
“We aint gonter have no contest or no voce neither,” he said.
“You what?” the Chancellor said. “What’s this?” Lucas had not once looked at Edmonds. As far as Edmonds could tell, he was not looking at the Chancellor either. Edmonds thought idiotically how it must have been years since he had seen Lucas uncovered; in fact, he could not remember at all being aware previously that Lucas’ hair was gray.
“We dont want no voce,” Lucas said. “I done changed my mind.”
“Are you the husband?” the Chancellor said.
“That’s right,” Lucas said.
“Say sir to the court!” the clerk said. Lucas glanced at the clerk.
“What?” he said. “I dont want no court. I done changed my——”
“Why, you uppity—” the clerk began.
“Wait,” the Chancellor said. He looked at Lucas. “You have waited too late. This bill has been presented in due form and order. I am about to pronounce on it.”
“Not now,” Lucas said. “We dont want no voce. Roth Edmonds knows what I mean.”
“What? Who does?”
“Why, the uppity—” the clerk said. “Your Honor—” Again the Chancellor raised his hand slightly toward the clerk. He still looked at Lucas.
“Mister Roth Edmonds,” Lucas said. Edmonds moved forward quickly, still holding the old woman’s arm. The Chancellor looked at him.
“Yes, Mr Edmonds?”
“Yes, sir,” Edmonds said. “That’s right. We dont want it now.”