Page 16 of Intruder in the Dust

  “Your secretary was right the first time,” the sheriff said. “It was a mule.”

  “Not a black one with a rope-burn,” his uncle said. “Surely not that. Not even a murderer is that crassly and arrogantly extrovert.”

  “Yes,” the sheriff said. “That’s why they’re dangerous, why we must destroy them or lock them up:” and looking down he saw them too: the narrow delicate almost finicking mule-prints out of all proportion to the animal’s actual size, mashed pressed deep, too deep for any one mule no matter how heavy carrying just one man, into the damp muck, the tracks filled with water and even as he watched a minute aquatic beast of some sort shot across one of them leaving a tiny threadlike spurt of dissolving mud; and standing in the trail, now that they had found it they could see the actual path itself through the crushed shoulder-high growth in sus­pension held like a furrow across a field or the frozen wake of a boat, crossing the marsh arrow-straight until it vanished into the jungle which bordered the branch. They followed it, walking in it, treading the two sets of prints not going and returning but both going in the same direction, now and then the print of the same hoof superposed on its previous one, the sheriff still in the lead talking again, speaking aloud but without looking back as though—he thought at first— to no one:

  “He wouldn’t come back this way. The first time he didn’t have time. He went back straight up the hill that time, woods or not and dark or not. That was when he heard whatever it was he heard.” Then he knew who the sheriff was talking to: “Maybe your secretary was whistling up there or some­thing. Being in a graveyard that time of night.”

  Then they stood on the bank of the branch itself—a broad ditch in a channel through which during the winter and spring rains a torrent rushed but where now there flowed a thin current scarcely an inch deep and never much over a yard wide from pool to pool along the blanched sand—and even as his uncle said, “Surely the fool—” the sheriff ten yards or so further along the bank said:

  “Here it is:” and they went to him and then he saw where the mule had stood tied to a sapling and then the prints where the man himself had thrashed on along the bank, his prints also deeper than any man no matter how heavy should have made and he thought of that too: the anguish, the des­peration, the urgency in the black dark and the briers and the dizzy irrevocable fleeing on seconds, carrying a burden man was not intended to carry: then he was hearing a snap­ping and thrashing of underbrush still further along the bank and then the mare and then old Gowrie shouted and then another crash which would be the mule coming up and then simple pandemonium: the old man shouting and cursing and the yelping of the hounds and the thudding sound a man’s shoe makes against a dog’s ribs: but they couldn’t hurry any­more, thrashing and crashing their own way through the tearing clinging briers and vines until they could look down into the ditch and the low mound of fresh shaled earth into which the two hounds had been digging and old Gowrie still kicking at them and cursing and then they were all down in the ditch except the two Negroes.

  “Hold up. Mr. Gowrie,” the sheriff said. “That aint Vinson.” But the old man didn’t seem to hear him. He didn’t even seem aware that anyone else was there; he seemed even to have forgot why he was kicking the dogs: that he had merely set out to drive them back from the mound, still hobbling and hopping after them on one leg and the other poised and cocked to kick even after they had retreated from the mound and were merely trying to dodge past him and get out of the ditch into safety, still kicking at them and cursing after the sheriff caught him by his one arm and held him.

  “Look at the dirt,” the sheriff said. “Cant you see? He hardly took time to bury it. This was the second one, when he was in the hurry, when it was almost daylight and he had to get it hidden?” and they could all see now—the low hum­mock of fresh dirt lying close under the bank and in the bank above it the savage ragged marks of the shovel as if he had hacked at the bank with the edge of the blade like swinging an axe (and again: thinking: the desperation the urgency the frantic hand-to-hand combat with the massy intolerable in­ertia of the earth itself) until enough of it shaled off and down to hide what he had to hide.

  This time they didn’t need even the shovels. The body was barely covered; the dogs had already exposed it and he realised now the true magnitude of the urgency and despera­tion: the frantic and desperate bankrupt in time who had not even enough of it left to hide the evidence of his despera­tion and the reason for his urgency; it had been after two oclock when he and Aleck Sander, even two of them work­ing with furious speed, had got the grave filled back up again: so that by the time the murderer, not only alone but who had already moved six feet of dirt and then put it back once since the sun set yesterday, had the second body out and the grave filled for the second time it must have been daylight, later than daylight perhaps, the sun itself watching him while he rode for the second time down the hill and across to the branch; morning itself watching him while he tumbled the body beneath the bank’s overhang then hacked furiously from it just enough dirt to hide the body temporarily from sight with something of that frantic desperation of the wife flinging her peignoir over the lover’s forgotten glove:—lying (the body) face down and only the back of the crushed skull visible until the old man stooped and with his one hand jerked it stiffly over onto its back.

  “Yep,” old Gowrie said in the high brisk carrying voice: “It’s that Montgomery, damned if it aint:” and rose lean and fast as a tripped watch-spring yelling shouting at the hounds again: “Hi boys! Find Vinson!” and then his uncle shouting too to make himself heard:

  “Wait, Mr. Gowrie. Wait:” then to the sheriff: “He was a fool then just because he didn’t have time, not because he is a fool. I just dont believe it twice—” looking around, his eyes darting. Then he stopped them on the twins. He said sharply: “Where’s the quicksand?”

  “What?” one of the twins said.

  “The quicksand,” his uncle said. “The quicksand bed in the branch here. Where is it?”

  “Quicksand?” old Gowrie said. “Sonabitch, Lawyer. Put a man in quicksand? my boy in quicksand?”

  “Shut up, Mr. Gowrie,” the sheriff said. Then to the twin: “Well? Where?”

  But he answered first. He had been intending to for a sec­ond or so. Now he did: “It’s by the bridge:” then—he didn’t know why: and then that didn’t matter either—“It wasn’t Aleck Sander that time. It was Highboy.”

  “Under the highway bridge,” the twin corrected. “Where it’s been all the time.”

  “Oh,” the sheriff said. “Which one was Highboy?” And he was about to answer that: then suddenly the old man seemed to have forgot about his mare too, whirling, already running before any of them moved and even before he himself moved, running for several strides against the purchaseless sand while they watched him, before he turned and with that same cat­like agility he mounted the mare with, clawed himself one-handed up the steep bank and was thrashing and crashing on out of sight before anybody else except the two Negroes who had never quitted it were even up the bank.

  “Jump,” the sheriff said to the twins: “Catch him.” But they didn’t. They thrashed and crashed on after him, one of the twins in front then the rest of them and the two Negroes pell-mell through the briers and brush, on back along the branch and out of the jungle into the cleared right-of-way below the road at the bridge; he saw the sliding hoof-marks where Highboy had come almost down to the water and then refused, the stream the water crowded over against the oppo­site concrete revetment flowing in a narrow band whose nearer edge faded without demarcation into an expanse of wet sand as smooth and innocent and markless of surface as so much milk; he stepped sprang over a long willow pole lying above the bank-edge and coated for three or four feet up its length with a thin patina of dried sand like when you thrust a stick into a bucket or vat of paint and even as the sheriff shouted to the twin in front “Grab him, you!” he saw the old man jump feet first off the bank and with no splash no disturb
ance of any sort continue right on not through the bland surface but past it as if he had jumped not into anything but past the edge of a cliff or a window-sill and then stopping half-disappeared as suddenly with no shock or jolt: just fixed and immobile as if his legs had been cut off at the loins by one swing of a scythe, leaving his trunk sitting upright on the bland depthless milklike sand.

  “All right, boys!” old Gowrie cried, brisk and carrying: “Here he is. I’m standing on him.”

  And one twin got the rope bridle from the mule and the leather one and the saddle girth from the mare and using the shovels like axes the Negroes hacked willow branches while the rest of them dragged up other brush and poles and whatever else they could reach or find or free and now both twins and the two Negroes, their empty shoes sitting on the bank, were down in the sand too and steadily there came down from the hills the ceaseless strong murmur of the pines but no other sound yet although he strained his ears listening in both directions along the road, not for the dignity of death because death has no dignity but at least for the decorum of it: some little at least of that decorum which should be every man’s helpless right until the carrion he leaves can be hidden from the ridicule and the shame, the body coming out now feet first, gallowsed up and out of the inscrutable suck to the heave of the crude tackle then free of the sand with a faint smacking plop like the sound of lips perhaps in sleep and in the bland surface nothing: a faint wimple wrinkle already fading then gone like the end of a faint secret fading smile, and then on the bank now while they stood about and over it and he was listening harder than ever now with something of the mur­derer’s own frantic urgency both ways along the road though there was still nothing: only hearing recognising his own voice apparently long after everyone else had, watching the old man coated to the waist with the same thin patina of sand like the pole, looking down at the body, his face wrenched and his upper lip wrenched upward from the life­less porcelain glare and the pink bloodless gums of his false teeth:

  “Oh gee, Uncle Gavin, oh gee, Uncle Gavin, let’s get him away from the road, at least let’s get him back into the woods—”

  “Steady,” his uncle said. “They’ve all passed now. They’re all in town now:” and still watching as the old man stooped and began to brush clumsily with his one hand at the sand clogged into the eyes and nostrils and mouth, the hand look­ing curious and stiff at this which had been shaped so supple and quick to violence: to the buttons on the shirt and the butt and hammer of the pistol: then the hand went back and began to fumble at the hip pocket but already his uncle had produced a handkerchief and extended it but that was too late too as kneeling now the old man jerked out the tail of his shirt and bending to bring it close, wiped at the dead face with it then bending tried to blow the wet sand from it as though he had forgotten the sand was still damp. Then the old man stood up again and said in the high flat carrying voice in which there was still no real inflection at all:

  “Well, Shurf?”

  “It wasn’t Lucas Beauchamp, Mr. Gowrie,” the sheriff said. “Jake Montgomery was at Vinson’s funeral yesterday. And while Vinson was being buried Lucas Beauchamp was locked up in my jail in town.”

  “I aint talking about Jake Montgomery, Shurf,” old Gow­rie said.

  “Neither am I, Mr. Gowrie,” the sheriff said. “Because it wasn’t Lucas Beauchamp’s old forty-one Colt that killed Vinson either.”

  And watching he thought No! No! Dont say it! Dont ask! and for a while he believed the old man would not as he stood facing the sheriff but not looking at him now because his wrinkled eyelids had come down hiding his eyes but only in the way they do when somebody looks down at something at his feet so you couldn’t really say whether the old man had closed them or was just looking down at what lay on the ground between him and the sheriff. But he was wrong; the eyelids went up again and again the old man’s hard pale eyes were looking at the sheriff; again his voice to nine hundred men out of nine hundred and one would have sounded just cheerful:

  “What was it killed Vinson, Shurf?”

  “A German Luger automatic, Mr. Gowrie,” the sheriff said. “Like the one Buddy McCallum brought home from France in 1919 and traded that summer for a pair of fox hounds.”

  And he thought how this was where the eyelids might even should have closed again but again he was wrong: only until the old man himself turned, quick and wiry, already in mo­tion, already speaking peremptory and loud, not brookless of opposition or argument, simply incapable of conceiving either:

  “All right, sons. Let’s load our boy on the mule and take him home.”

  Chapter Nine

  AND TWO OCLOCK that afternoon in his uncle’s car just be­hind the truck (it was another pickup: they—the sheriff— had commandeered it. with a slatted cattle frame on the bed which one of the Gowrie twins had known would be stand­ing in the deserted yard of the house two miles away which had the telephone too—and he remembered how he won­dered what the truck was doing there, how they had got to town themselves who had left it—and the Gowrie had turned the switch on with a table fork which by the Gowrie’s di­rection he had found in the unlocked kitchen when his uncle went in to telephone the coroner and the Gowrie was driving it) blinking rapidly and steadily not against glare so much as something hot and gritty inside his eyelids like a dust of ground glass (which certainly could and even should have been dust after twenty-odd miles of sand and gravel roads in one morning except that no simple dust refused as this did to moisten at all with blinking) it seemed to him that he saw crowding the opposite side of the street facing the jail not just the county, not just Beat One and Two and Three and Five in their faded tieless khaki and denim and print cotton but the town too—not only the faces he had seen get­ting out of the Beat Four dusty cars in front of the barber­shop and the poolhall Saturday afternoon and then in the barbershop Sunday morning and again here in the street Sunday noon when the sheriff drove up with Lucas, but the others who except for the doctors and lawyers and ministers were not just the town but the Town: merchants and cotton-buyers and automobile dealers and the younger men who were the clerks in the stores and cotton offices and salesrooms and mechanics in the garages and filling stations on the way back to work from lunch—who without even waiting for the sheriff’s car to get close enough to be recognised had already turned and begun to flow back toward the Square like the turn of a tide, already in motion when the sheriff’s car reached the jail, already pouring back into the Square and converging in that one direction across it when first the sheriff then the truck then his uncle turned into the alley be­yond the jail leading to the loading ramp at the undertaker’s back door where the coroner was waiting for them: so that moving not only parallel with them beyond the intervening block but already in advance, it would even reach the under­taker’s first; and then suddenly and before he could even turn in the seat to look back he knew that it had even boiled into the alley behind them and in a moment a second now it would roar down on them, overtake and snatch them up in order: his uncle’s car then the truck then the sheriff’s like three hencoops and sweep them on and fling them at last in one inextricable aborted now-worthless jumble onto the ramp at the coroner’s feet; still not moving yet it seemed to him that he was already leaning out the window or maybe ac­tually clinging to the fleeing runningboard yelling back at them in a kind of unbearable unbelieving outrage:

  “You fools, dont you see you are too late, that you’ll have to start all over again now to find a new reason?” then turn­ing in the seat and looking back through the rear window for a second or maybe two he actually saw it—not faces but a face, not a mass nor even a mosaic of them but a Face: not even ravening nor uninsatiate but just in motion, insensate, vacant of thought or even passion: an Expression significantless and without past like the one which materialises suddenly after seconds or even minutes of painful even frantic staring from the innocent juxtaposition of trees and clouds and land­scape in the soap-advertisement puzzle-picture or on the sev­ered
head in the news photo of the Balkan or Chinese atroc­ity: without dignity and not even evocative of horror: just neckless slack-muscled and asleep, hanging suspended face to face with him just beyond the glass of the back window yet in the same instant rushing and monstrous down at him so that he actually started back and had even begun to think In a second more it will when flick! it was gone, not only the Face but the faces, the alley itself empty behind them: no­body and nothing in it at all and in the street beyond the vacant mouth less than a dozen people now standing looking up the alley after them who even as he looked turned also and began to move back toward the Square.

  He hesitated only an instant. They’ve all gone around to the front he thought rapid and quite calm, having a little trouble (he noticed that the car was stopped now) getting his hand onto the door handle, remarking the sheriff’s car and the truck both stopped too at the loading ramp where four or five men were lifting a stretcher up to the truck’s open endgate and he even heard his uncle’s voice behind him:

  “Now we’re going home and put you to bed before your mother has a doctor in to give us both a squirt with a needle:” then finding the handle and out of the car, stumbling a little but only once, then his heels although he was not running at all pounding too hard on the concrete, his leg-muscles cramped from the car or perhaps even charley-horsed from thrashing up and down branch bottoms not to mention a night spent digging and undigging graves but at least the jar­ring was clearing his head somewhat or maybe it was the wind of motion doing it; anyway if he was going to have delusions at least he would have a clear brain to look at them with: up the walkway between the undertaker’s and the build­ing next to it though already too late of course, the Face in one last rush and surge long since by now already across the Square and the pavement, in one last crash against then right on through the plate glass window trampling to flinders the little bronze-and-ebony membership plaque in the national funeraleers association and the single shabby stunted palm in its maroon earthenware pot and exploding to tatters the sun-faded purple curtain which was the last frail barrier shielding what was left of Jake Montgomery had of what was left of his share of human dignity.