“What’s going on around here, Shurf?”
“I’m going to open this grave, Mr. Gowrie,” the sheriff said.
“No, Shurf,” the other said, immediate, with no change whatever in the voice: not disputative, nothing: just a statement: “Not that grave.”
“Yes, Mr. Gowrie,” the sheriff said. “I’m going to open it.”
Without haste or fumbling, almost deliberate in fact, the old man with his one hand unbuttoned two buttons on the front of his shirt and thrust the hand inside, hunching his hip slightly around to meet the hand and drew from the inside of the shirt a heavy nickel-plated pistol and still with no haste but no pause either thrust the pistol into his left armpit, clamping it butt-forward against his body by the stub of the arm while his one hand buttoned the shirt, then took the pistol once more into the single hand not pointing it at anything, just holding it.
But long before this he had seen the sheriff already moving, moving with really incredible speed not toward the old man but around the end of the grave, already in motion even before the two Negroes turned to run. so that when they whirled they seemed to run full tilt into the sheriff as into a cliff, even seeming to bounce back a little before the sheriff grasped them one in each hand as if they were children and then in the next instant seemed to be holding them both in one hand like two rag dolls, turning his body so that he was between them and the little wiry old man with the pistol, saying in that mild even lethargic voice:
“Stop it. Dont you know the worst thing that could happen to a nigger would be dodging loose in a pair of convict pants around out here today?”
“That’s right, boys,” the old man said in his high inflectionless voice. “I aint going to hurt you. I’m talking to the Shurf here. Not my boy’s grave, Shurf.”
“Send them back to the car,” his uncle murmured rapidly. But the sheriff didn’t answer, still looking at the old man.
“Your boy aint in that grave, Mr. Gowrie,” the sheriff said. And watching he thought of all the things the old man might have said—the surprise, the disbelief, the outrage perhaps, even the thinking aloud: How do you come to know my boy aint there?—the rationalising by reflective in which he might have paraphrased the sheriff speaking to his uncle six hours ago: You wouldn’t be telling me this if you didn’t know it was so; watching, even following the old man as he cut straight across all this and he thought suddenly with amazement: Why, he’s grieving: thinking how he had seen grief twice now in two years where he had not expected it or anyway anticipated it, where in a sense a heart capable of breaking had no business being: once in an old nigger who had just happened to outlive his old nigger wife and now in a violent foulmouthed godless old man who had happened to lose one of the six lazy violent more or less lawless a good deal more than just more or less worthless sons, only one of whom had even benefitted his community and kind and that only by the last desperated resort of getting murdered out of it: hearing the high flat voice again immediate and strong and without interval, inflectionless, almost conversational:
“Why, I just hope you dont tell me the name of the fellow that proved my boy aint there. Shurf. I just hope you wont mention that:”—little hard pale eyes staring at little hard pale eyes, the sheriff’s voice mild still, inscrutable now:
“No, Mr. Gowrie. It aint empty:” and later, afterward, he realised that this was when he believed he knew not perhaps why Lucas had ever reached town alive because the reason for that was obvious: there happened to be no Gowrie present at the moment but the dead one: but at least how the old man and two of his sons happened to ride out of the woods behind the church almost as soon as he and the sheriff and his uncle reached the grave, and certainly why almost forty-eight hours afterward Lucas was still breathing. “It’s Jake Montgomery down there,” the sheriff said.
The old man turned, immediate, not hurriedly and even quickly but just easily as if his spare small fleshless frame offered neither resistance to the air nor weight to the motive muscles, and shouted toward the fence where the two younger men still sat the mule identical as two clothing store dummies and as immobile, not even having begun yet to descend until the old man shouted: “Here, boys.”
“Never mind,” the sheriff said. “We’ll do it.” He turned to the two Negroes. “All right. Get your shovels—”
“I told you,” his uncle murmured rapidly again. “Send them back to the car.”
“That’s right, Lawyer—Lawyer Stevens, aint it?” the old man said. “Get ’em away from here. This here’s our business. We’ll attend to it.”
“It’s my business now, Mr. Gowrie,” the sheriff said.
The old man raised the pistol, steadily and without haste, bending his elbow until it came level, his thumb curling up and over the hammer cocking it so that it came already cocked level or not quite, not quite pointing at anything somewhere about the height of the empty belt-loops on the sheriff’s trousers. “Get them out of here, Shurf,” the old man said.
“All right,” the sheriff said without moving. “You boys go back to the car.”
“Further than that,” the old man said. “Send ’em back to town.”
“They’re prisoners, Mr. Gowrie,” the sheriff said. “I cant do that.” He didn’t move. “Go back and get in the car,” he told them. They moved then, walking not back toward the gate but directly away across the enclosure, walking quite fast, lifting their feet and knees in the filthy barred trousers quite high, walking quite fast by the time they reached the opposite fence and half stepping half hopping over it and only then changing direction back toward the two cars so that until they reached the sheriff’s car they would never be any nearer the two white men on the mule than when they had left the grave: and he looked at them now sitting the mule identical as two clothes pins on a line, the identical faces even weathered exactly alike, surly quick-tempered and calm, until the old man shouted again:
“All right, boys:” and they got down as one, at the same time even like a trained vaudeville team and again as one stepped with the same left leg over the fence, completely ignoring the gate: the Gowrie twins, identical even to the clothing and shoes except that one wore a khaki shirt and the other a sleeveless jersey; about thirty, a head taller than their father and with their father’s pale eyes and the nose too except that it was not the beak of an eagle but rather that of a hawk, coming up with no word, no glance even for any of them from the bleak composed humorless faces until the old man pointed with the pistol (he saw that the hammer was down now anyway) at the two shovels and said in his high voice which sounded almost cheerful even:
“Grab ’em boys. They belong to the county; if we bust one it aint anybody’s business but the Grand Jury’s:”—the twins, facing each other now at opposite ends of the mound and working again in that complete almost choreographic unison: the next two youngest before the dead one, Vinson; fourth and fifth of the six sons:—Forrest, the oldest who had not only wrenched himself free of his fiery tyrant of a father but had even got married and for twenty years now had been manager of a delta cotton plantation above Vicksburg; then Crawford, the second one who had been drafted on the second day of November 1918 and on the night of the tenth (with a bad luck in guessing which, his uncle said, should not happen to any man—a point of view in which in fact his federal captors themselves seemed to concur since his term in the Leavenworth prison had been only one year) had deserted and lived for almost eighteen months in a series of caves and tunnels in the hills within fifteen miles of the federal courthouse in Jefferson until he was captured at last after something very like a pitched battle (though luckily for him nobody was seriously hurt) during which he made good his cave for thirty-odd hours armed with (and, his uncle said, a certain consistency and fitness here: a deserter from the United States army defending his freedom from the United States government with a piece of armament captured from the enemy whom he had refused to fight) an automatic pistol which one of the McCallum boys had taken from a capt
ured German officer and traded shortly after he got home for a brace of Gowrie foxhounds, and served his year and came home and the town next heard of him in Memphis where it was said he was (1) running liquor up from New Orleans, (2) acting as a special employer-bonded company officer during a strike, but anyway coming back to his father’s home suddenly where nobody saw much of him until a few years back when the town began to hear of him as having more or less settled down, dealing in a little timber and cattle and even working a little land; and Bryan, the third one who was the actual force, power, cohering element, whatever you might call it, in or behind the family farm which fed them all; then the twins, Vardaman and Bilbo who spent their nights squatting in front of smoldering logs and stumps while the hounds ran foxes and their days sleeping flat on the naked planks of the front gallery until dark came and time to cast the hounds again: and the last one, Vinson, who even as a child had shown an aptitude for trading and for money so that now, though dead at only twenty-eight, he was not only said to own several small parcels of farmland about the county but was the first Gowrie who could sign his name to a check and have any bank honor it;—the twins, kneedeep then waistdeep, working with a grim and sullen speed, robotlike and in absolute unison so that the two shovels even seemed to ring at the same instant on the plank box and even then seeming to communicate by no physical means as birds or animals do: no sound no gesture: simply one of them released his shovel in a continuation of the same stroke which flung the dirt and then himself flowed effortless up out of the pit and stood among the rest of them while his brother cleaned off what remained of dirt from the top of the coffin, then tossed his shovel up and out without even looking and—as he himself had done last night—kicked the last of the earth away from the edge of the lid and stood on one leg and grasped the lid and heaved it up and over and away until all of them standing along the rim of the grave could look down past him into the box.
It was empty. There was nothing in it at all until a thin trickle of dirt flowed down into it with a whispering pattering sound.
Chapter Eight
AND HE WOULD REMEMBER IT: the five of them standing at the edge of the pit above the empty coffin, then with another limber flowing motion like his twin’s the second Gowrie came up out of the grave and stooped and with an air of rapt displeased even faintly outraged concern began to brush and thump the clay particles from the lower legs of his trousers, the first twin moving as the second stooped, going straight to him with a blind unhurried undeviable homing quality about him like the other of a piece of machinery, the other spindle say of a lathe, travelling on the same ineluctable shaft to its socket, and stooped too and began to brush and strike the dirt from the back of his brother’s trousers; and this time almost a spadeful of dirt slid down across the out-slanted lid and rattled down into the empty box. almost loud enough or with mass and weight enough to produce a small hollow echo.
“Now he’s got two of them,” his uncle said.
“Yes,” the sheriff said. “Where?”
“Durn two of them,” old Gowrie said. “Where’s my boy, Shurf?”
“We’re going to find him now, Mr. Gowrie,” the sheriff said. “And you were smart to bring them hounds. Put your pistol up and let your boys catch them dogs and hold them till we get straightened out here.”
“Never you mind the pistol nor the dogs neither,” old Gowrie said. “They’ll trail and they’ll ketch anything that ever run or walked either. But my boy and that Jake Montgomery—if it was Jake Montgomery whoever it was found laying in my son’s coffin—never walked away from here to leave no trail.”
The sheriff said, “Hush now, Mr. Gowrie.” The old man glared back up at the sheriff. He was not trembling, not eager, baffled, amazed, not anything. Watching him he thought of one of the cold light-blue tear-shaped apparently heatless flames which balance themselves on even less than tiptoe over gasjets.
“All right,” the old man said. “I’m hushed. And now you get started. You’re the one that seems to know all about this, that sent me word out to my breakfast table at six oclock this morning to meet you here. Now you get started.”
“That’s what we’re going to do,” the sheriff said. “We’re going to find out right now where to start.” He turned to his uncle, saying in the mild rational almost diffident voice: “It’s say around eleven oclock at night. You got a mule or maybe it’s a horse, anyway something that can walk and tote a double load, and a dead man across your saddle. And you aint got much time; that is, you aint got all of time. Of course it’s around eleven oclock, when most folks is in bed, and a Sunday night too when folks have got to get up early tomorrow to start a new week in the middle of cotton-planting time, and there aint any moon and even if folks might still be moving around you’re in a lonely part of the country where the chances all are you wont meet nobody. But you still got a dead man with a bullet hole in his back and even at eleven oclock day’s going to come sooner or later. All right. What would you do?”
They looked, stared at one another, or that is his uncle stared—the too-thin bony eager face, the bright intent rapid eyes, and opposite the sheriff’s vast sleepy face, the eyes not staring, apparently not even looking, blinking almost drowsily, the two of them cutting without speech across all that too: “Of course,” his uncle said. “Into the earth again. And not far, since you said daylight comes sooner or later even when it’s still just eleven oclock. Especially when he still had time to come back and do it all over again, alone, by himself, no hand but his on the shovel.—And think of that too: the need, the terrible need, not just to have it all to do again but to have to do it again for the reason he had; to think that he had done all he possibly could, all anyone could have asked or expected him to do or even dreamed that he would have to do; it was as safe as he could hope to be—and then to be drawn back by a sound, a noise or perhaps he blundered by sheer chance on the parked truck or perhaps it was just his luck, his good fortune, whatever god or djinn or genie looks after murderers for a little while, keeps him secure and safe until the other fates have had time to spin and knot the rope,—anyway to have to crawl, tie the mule or horse or whatever it was to a tree and crawl on his belly back up here to lie (who knows? perhaps just behind the fence yonder) and watch a meddling old woman and two children who should have been two hours ago in bed ten miles away, wreck the whole careful edifice of his furious labor, undo the work not merely of his life but of his death too ...” His uncle stopped, and now he saw the bright almost luminous eyes glaring down at him: “And you. You couldn’t have had any idea Miss Habersham was coming with you until you got home. And without her, you could have had no hope whatever that Aleck Sander would come with you alone at all. So if you ever really had any idea of coming out here alone to dig this grave up, dont even tell me—”
“Let that be now,” the sheriff said. “All right. Somewhere in the ground. And what sort of ground? What dirt digs easiest and fastest for a man in a hurry and by himself even if he has a shovel? What sort of dirt could you hope to hide a body in quick even if you never had nothing but a pocket knife?”
“In sand,” his uncle said immediately, rapidly, almost indifferently, almost inattentively. “In the bed of the branch. Didn’t they tell you at three oclock this morning that they saw him going there with it? What are we waiting for?”
“All right,” the sheriff said. “Let’s go then.” Then to him: “Show us exactly where—”
“Except that Aleck Sander said it might not have been a mule,” he said.
“All right,” the sheriff said. “Horse then. Show us exactly where ...”
He could remember it: watching the old man clap the pistol again butt-forward into his armpit and clamp it there with the stump of the arm while the one hand unbuttoned the shirt then took the pistol from the armpit and thrust it back inside the shirt then buttoned the shirt again then turned even faster quicker than the two sons half his age, already in front of everybody when he hopped back over the fence a
nd went to the mare and caught the reins and pommel all in one hand, already swinging up: then the two cars dropping in second speed against gravity back down the steep pitch until he said “Here” where the pickup’s tracks slewed off the road into the bushes then back into the road again and his uncle stopped: and he watched the fierce old stump-armed man jump the buckskin mare up out of the road into the woods on the opposite side already falling away down toward the branch, then the two hounds flowing up the bank behind him and then the mule with the two identical wooden-faced sons on it: then he and his uncle were out of the car the sheriffs car bumper to bumper behind them, hearing the mare crashing on down toward the branch and then the old man’s high flat voice shouting at the hounds:
“Hi! Hi! Hum on boy! At him, Ring!” and then his uncle:
“Handcuff them through the steering wheel:” and then the sheriff:
“No. We’ll need the shovels:” and he had climbed the bank too, listening off and downward toward the crashing and the shouts, then his uncle and the sheriff and the two Negroes carrying the shovels were beside him. Although the branch crossed almost at right angles the highway just beyond where the dirt road forked away, it was almost a quarter-mile from where they now stood or walked rather and although they could all hear old Gowrie whooping at the dogs and the crashing of the mare and the mule too in the dense thicket below, the sheriff didn’t go that way, bearing instead off along the hill almost parallel with the road for several minutes and only beginning to slant away from it when they came out into the sawgrass and laurel and willow-choked flat between the hill and the branch: and on across that, the sheriff in front until he stopped still looking down then turned his head and looked back at him, watching him as he and his uncle came up.