The train checked speed; a jerk came back, and four whistle-blasts. The man in the soiled hat entered, taking a cigar from his breast pocket. He came down the aisle swiftly, looking at Horace. He slowed, the cigar in his fingers. The train jolted again. The man flung his hand out and caught the back of the seat facing Horace.
“Aint this Judge Benbow?” he said. Horace looked up into a vast, puffy face without any mark of age or thought whatever—a majestic sweep of flesh on either side of a small blunt nose, like looking out over a mesa, yet withal some indefinable quality of delicate paradox, as though the Creator had completed his joke by lighting the munificent expenditure of putty with something originally intended for some weak, acquisitive creature like a squirrel or a rat. “Dont I address Judge Benbow?” he said, offering his hand. “I’m Senator Snopes, Cla’ence Snopes.”
“Oh,” Horace said, “yes. Thanks,” he said, “but I’m afraid you anticipate a little. Hope, rather.”
The other waved the cigar, the other hand, palm-up, the third finger discolored faintly at the base of a huge ring, in Horace’s face. Horace shook it and freed his hand. “I thought I recognised you when you got on at Oxford,”
Snopes said, “but I—May I set down?” he said, already shoving at Horace’s knee with his leg. He flung the overcoat—a shoddy blue garment with a greasy velvet collar—on the seat and sat down as the train stopped. “Yes, sir, I’m always glad to see any of the boys, any time.……” He leaned across Horace and peered out the window at a small dingy station with its cryptic bulletin board chalked over, an express truck bearing a wire chicken coop containing two forlorn fowls, at three or four men in overalls gone restfully against the wall, chewing. “ ’Course you aint in my county no longer, but what I say a man’s friends is his friends, whichever way they vote. Because a friend is a friend, and whether he can do anything for me or not.……” He leaned back, the unlighted cigar in his fingers. “You aint come all the way up from the big town, then.”
“No,” Horace said.
“Anytime you’re in Jackson, I’ll be glad to accommodate you as if you was still in my county. Dont no man stay so busy he aint got time for his old friends, what I say. Let’s see, you’re in Kinston, now, aint you? I know your senators. Fine men, both of them, but I just caint call their names.”
“I really couldn’t say, myself,” Horace said. The train started. Snopes leaned into the aisle, looking back. His light gray suit had been pressed but not cleaned. “Well,” he said. He rose and took up the overcoat. “Any time you’re in the city.……You going to Jefferson, I reckon?”
“Yes,” Horace said.
“I’ll see you again, then.”
“Why not ride back here?” Horace said. “You’ll find it more comfortable.”
“I’m going up and have a smoke,” Snopes said, waving the cigar. “I’ll see you again.”
“You can smoke here. There aren’t any ladies.”
“Sure,” Snopes said. “I’ll see you at Holly Springs.” He went on back toward the day coach and passed out of sight with the cigar in his mouth. Horace remembered him ten years ago as a hulking, dull youth, son of a restaurant-owner, member of a family which had been moving from the Frenchman’s Bend neighborhood into Jefferson for the past twenty years, in sections; a family of enough ramifications to have elected him to the legislature without recourse to a public polling.
He sat quite still, the cold pipe in his hand. He rose and went forward through the day coach, then into the smoker. Snopes was in the aisle, his thigh draped over the arm of a seat where four men sat, using the unlighted cigar to gesture with. Horace caught his eye and beckoned from the vestibule. A moment later Snopes joined him, the overcoat on his arm.
“How are things going at the capital?” Horace said.
Snopes began to speak in his harsh, assertive voice. There emerged gradually a picture of stupid chicanery and petty corruption for stupid and petty ends, conducted principally in hotel rooms into which bellboys whisked with bulging jackets upon discreet flicks of skirts in swift closet doors. “Anytime you’re in town,” he said. “I always like to show the boys around. Ask anybody in town; they’ll tell you if it’s there, Cla’ence Snopes’ll know where it is. You got a pretty tough case up home there, what I hear.”
“Cant tell yet,” Horace said. He said: “I stopped off at Oxford today, at the university, speaking to some of my step-daughter’s friends. One of her best friends is no longer in school there. A young lady from Jackson named Temple Drake.”
Snopes was watching him with thick, small, opaque eyes. “Oh, yes; Judge Drake’s gal,” he said. “The one that ran away.”
“Ran away?” Horace said. “Ran back home, did she? What was the trouble? Fail in her work?”
“I dont know. When it come out in the paper folks thought she’d run off with some fellow. One of them companionate marriages.”
“But when she turned up at home, they knew it wasn’t that, I reckon. Well, well, Belle’ll be surprised. What’s she doing now? Running around Jackson, I suppose?”
“She aint there.”
“Not?” Horace said. He could feel the other watching him. “Where is she?”
“Her paw sent her up north somewhere, with an aunt. Michigan. It was in the papers couple days later.”
“Oh,” Horace said. He still held the cold pipe, and he discovered his hand searching his pocket for a match. He drew a deep breath. “That Jackson paper’s a pretty good paper. It’s considered the most reliable paper in the state, isn’t it?”
“Sure,” Snopes said. “You was at Oxford trying to locate her?”
“No, no. I just happened to meet a friend of my daughter who told me she had left school. Well, I’ll see you at Holly Springs.”
“Sure,” Snopes said. Horace returned to the pullman and sat down and lit the pipe.
When the train slowed for Holly Springs he went to the vestibule, then he stepped quickly back into the car. Snopes emerged from the day coach as the porter opened the door and swung down the step, stool in hand. Snopes descended. He took something from his breast pocket and gave it to the porter. “Here, George,” he said, “have a cigar.”
Horace descended. Snopes went on, the soiled hat towering half a head above any other. Horace looked at the porter.
“He gave it to you, did he?”
The porter chucked the cigar on his palm. He put it in his pocket.
“What’re you going to do with it?” Horace said.
“I wouldn’t give it to nobody I know,” the porter said.
“Does he do this very often?”
“Three-four times a year. Seems like I always git him, too.……Thank’ suh.”
Horace saw Snopes enter the waiting-room; the soiled hat, the vast neck, passed again out of his mind. He filled the pipe again.
From a block away he heard the Memphis-bound train come in. It was at the platform when he reached the station. Beside the open vestibule Snopes stood, talking with two youths in new straw hats, with something vaguely mentorial about his thick shoulders and his gestures. The train whistled. The two youths got on. Horace stepped back around the corner of the station.
When his train came he saw Snopes get on ahead of him and enter the smoker. Horace knocked out his pipe and entered the day coach and found a seat at the rear, facing backward.
20
As Horace was leaving the station at Jefferson a townward-bound car slowed beside him. It was the taxi which he used to go out to his sister’s. “I’ll give you a ride, this time,” the driver said.
“Much obliged,” Horace said. He got in. When the car entered the square, the court-house clock said only twenty minutes past eight, yet there was no light in the hotel room window. “Maybe the child’s asleep,” Horace said. He said, “If you’ll just drop me at the hotel—” Then he found that the driver was watching him, with a kind of discreet curiosity.
“You been out of town today,” the driver said.
?
??Yes,” Horace said. “What is it? What happened here today?”
“She aint staying at the hotel anymore. I heard Mrs Walker taken her in at the jail.”
“Oh,” Horace said. “I’ll get out at the hotel.”
The lobby was empty. After a moment the proprietor appeared: a tight, iron-gray man with a toothpick, his vest open upon a neat paunch. The woman was not there. “It’s these church ladies,” he said. He lowered his voice, the toothpick in his fingers. “They come in this morning. A committee of them. You know how it is, I reckon.”
“You mean to say you let the Baptist church dictate who your guests shall be?”
“It’s them ladies. You know how it is, once they get set on a thing. A man might just as well give up and do like they say. Of course, with me—”
“By God, if there was a man—”
“Shhhhhh,” the proprietor said. “You know how it is when them—”
“But of course there wasn’t a man who would—And you call yourself one, that’ll let—”
“I got a certain position to keep up myself,” the proprietor said in a placative tone. “If you come right down to it.” He stepped back a little, against the desk. “I reckon I can say who’ll stay in my house and who wont,” he said. “And I know some more folks around here that better do the same thing. Not no mile off, neither. I aint beholden to no man. Not to you, noways.”
“Where is she now? or did they drive her out of town?”
“That aint my affair, where folks go after they check out,” the proprietor said, turning his back. He said: “I reckon somebody took her in, though.”
“Yes,” Horace said. “Christians. Christians.” He turned toward the door. The proprietor called him. He turned. The other was taking a paper down from a pigeon-hole. Horace returned to the desk. The paper lay on the desk. The proprietor leaned with his hands on the desk, the toothpick tilted in his mouth.
“She said you’d pay it,” he said.
He paid the bill, counting the money down with shaking hands. He entered the jail yard and went to the door and knocked. After a while a lank, slattern woman came with a lamp, holding a man’s coat across her breast. She peered at him and said before he could speak:
“You’re lookin fer Miz Goodwin, I reckon.”
“Yes. How did—Did—”
“You’re the lawyer. I’ve seed you befo. She’s hyer. Sleepin now.”
“Thanks,” Horace said, “thanks. I knew that someone—I didn’t believe that—”
“I reckon I kin always find a bed fer a woman and child,” the woman said. “I dont keer whut Ed says. Was you wantin her special? She’s sleepin now.”
“No, no; I just wanted to——”
The woman watched him across the lamp. “ ’Taint no need botherin her, then. You kin come around in the mawnin and git her a boa’din-place. ’Taint no hurry.”
On the next afternoon Horace went out to his sister’s, again in a hired car. He told her what had happened. “I’ll have to take her home now.”
“Not into my house,” Narcissa said.
He looked at her. Then he began to fill his pipe slowly and carefully. “It’s not a matter of choice, my dear. You must see that.”
“Not in my house,” Narcissa said. “I thought we settled that.”
He struck the match and lit the pipe and put the match carefully into the fireplace. “Do you realise that she has been practically turned into the streets? That—”
“That shouldn’t be a hardship. She ought to be used to that.”
He looked at her. He put the pipe in his mouth and smoked it to a careful coal, watching his hand tremble upon the stem. “Listen. By tomorrow they will probably ask her to leave town. Just because she happens not to be married to the man whose child she carries about these sanctified streets. But who told them? That’s what I want to know. I know that nobody in Jefferson knew it except—”
“You were the first I heard tell it,” Miss Jenny said. “But, Narcissa, why—”
“Not in my house,” Narcissa said.
“Well,” Horace said. He drew the pipe to an even coal. “That settles it, of course,” he said, in a dry, light voice.
She rose. “Will you stay here tonight?”
“What? No. No. I’ll—I told her I’d come for her at the jail and.……” He sucked at his pipe. “Well, I dont suppose it matters. I hope it doesn’t.”
She was still paused, turning. “Will you stay or not?”
“I could even tell her I had a puncture,” Horace said. “Time’s not such a bad thing after all. Use it right, and you can stretch anything out, like a rubber band, until it busts somewhere, and there you are, with all tragedy and despair in two little knots between thumb and finger of each hand.”
“Will you stay, or wont you stay, Horace?” Narcissa said.
“I think I’ll stay,” Horace said.
He was in bed. He had been lying in the dark for about an hour, when the door of the room opened, felt rather than seen or heard. It was his sister. He rose to his elbow. She took shape vaguely, approaching the bed. She came and looked down at him. “How much longer are you going to keep this up?” she said.
“Just until morning,” he said. “I’m going back to town. You need not see me again.”
She stood beside the bed, motionless. After a moment her cold unbending voice came down to him: “You know what I mean.”
“I promise not to bring her into your house again. You can send Isom in to hide in the canna bed.” She said nothing. “Surely you dont object to my living there, do you?”
“I dont care where you live. The question is, where I live. I live here, in this town. I’ll have to stay here. But you’re a man. It doesn’t matter to you. You can go away.”
“Oh,” he said. He lay quite still. She stood above him, motionless. They spoke quietly, as though they were discussing wall-paper, food.
“Dont you see, this is my home, where I must spend the rest of my life. Where I was born. I dont care where else you go nor what you do. I dont care how many women you have nor who they are. But I cannot have my brother mixed up with a woman people are talking about. I dont expect you to have consideration for me; I ask you to have consideration for our father and mother. Take her to Memphis. They say you refused to let the man have bond to get out of jail; take her on to Memphis. You can think of a lie to tell him about that, too.”
“Oh. So you think that, do you?”
“I dont think anything about it. I dont care. That’s what people in town think. So it doesn’t matter whether it’s true or not. What I do mind is, everyday you force me to have to tell lies for you. Go away from here, Horace. Anybody but you would realise it’s a case of cold-blooded murder.”
“And over her, of course. I suppose they say that too, out of their odorous and omnipotent sanctity. Do they say yet that it was I killed him?”
“I dont see that it makes any difference who did it. The question is, are you going to stay mixed up with it? When people already believe you and she are slipping into my house at night.” Her cold, unbending voice shaped the words in the darkness above him. Through the window, upon the blowing darkness, came the drowsy dissonance of cicada and cricket.
“Do you believe that?” he said.
“It doesn’t matter what I believe. Go on away, Horace. I ask it.”
“And leave her—them, flat?”
“Hire a lawyer, if he still insists he’s innocent. I’ll pay for it. You can get a better criminal lawyer than you are. She wont know it. She wont even care. Cant you see that she is just leading you on to get him out of jail for nothing? Dont you know that woman has got money hidden away somewhere? You’re going back into town tomorrow, are you?” She turned, began to dissolve into the blackness. “You wont leave before breakfast.”
The next morning at breakfast, his sister said: “Who will be the lawyer on the other side of the case?”
“District Attorney. Why?”
She rang t
he bell and sent for fresh bread. Horace watched her. “Why do you ask that?” Then he said: “Damn little squirt.” He was talking about the district attorney, who had also been raised in Jefferson and who had gone to the town school with them. “I believe he was at the bottom of that business night before last. The hotel. Getting her turned out of the hotel for public effect, political capital. By God, if I knew that, believed that he had done that just to get elected to Congress.……”
After Horace left, Narcissa went up to Miss Jenny’s room. “Who is the District Attorney?” she said.
“You’ve known him all your life,” Miss Jenny said. “You even elected him. Eustace Graham. What do you want to know for? Are you looking around for a substitute for Gowan Stevens?”
“I just wondered,” Narcissa said.
“Fiddlesticks,” Miss Jenny said. “You dont wonder. You just do things and then stop until the next time to do something comes around.”
Horace met Snopes emerging from the barbershop, his jowls gray with powder, moving in an effluvium of pomade. In the bosom of his shirt, beneath his bow tie, he wore an imitation ruby stud which matched his ring. The tie was of blue polka-dots; the very white spots on it appeared dirty when seen close; the whole man with his shaved neck and pressed clothes and gleaming shoes emanated somehow the idea that he had been dry-cleaned rather than washed.
“Well, Judge,” he said, “I hear you’re having some trouble gittin a boarding-place for that client of yourn. Like I always say—” he leaned, his voice lowered, his mud-colored eyes roving aside “—the church aint got no place in politics, and women aint got no place in neither one, let alone the law. Let them stay at home and they’ll find plenty to do without upsetting a man’s law-suit. And besides, a man aint no more than human, and what he does aint nobody’s business but his. What you done with her?”
“She’s at the jail,” Horace said. He spoke shortly, making to pass on. The other blocked his way with an effect of clumsy accident.