Intruder in the Dust

  “It’s gone,” he said.

  “Yes,” his uncle said. “They’re probably all in bed asleep by now. They got home to milk and even have time before dark to chop wood for tomorrow’s breakfast too.”

  Which made once though still he didn’t move. “They ran,” he said.

  “No,” his uncle said. “It was more than that.”

  “They ran,” he said. “They reached the point where there was nothing left for them to do but admit that they were wrong. So they ran home.”

  “At least they were moving,” his uncle said: which made twice: who hadn’t even needed the first cue since not only the urgency the need the necessity to move again or rather not really to have stopped moving at all at that moment four or five or six hours or whatever it had been ago when he really believed he was going to lie down for only fifteen minutes (and which incidentally knew fifteen minutes whether he apparently did or not) hadn’t come back, it had never been anywhere to come back from because it was still there, had been there all the time, never for one second even vacated even from behind the bizarre phantasmagoriae whose ragtag and bobends still befogged him, with or among which he had wasted nearer fifteen hours than fifteen minutes; it was still there or at least his unfinished part in it which was not even a minuscule but rather a minutecule of his uncle’s and the sheriff’s in the unfinishability of Lucas Beauchamp and Crawford Gowrie since as far as they knew before he lost track this morning neither of them knew what they were going to do next even before Hampton had disposed of what little of evidence they had by giving it back to old one-armed pistol Gowrie where even two children and an old woman couldn’t get it back this time; the need not to finish anything but just to keep moving not even to remain where they were but just desperately to keep up with it like having to run on a treadmill not because you wanted to be where the tread­mill was but simply not to be flung pell-mell still running frantically backward off the whole stage out of sight, and not waiting static for the moment to flow back into him again and explode him up into motion but rather already in endless motion like the treadmill’s endless band less than an inch’s fraction above the ultimate point of his nose and chest where the first full breath would bring him into its snatching orbit, himself lying beneath it like a hobo trapped between the rails under a speeding train, safe only so long as he did not move.

  So he moved; he said “Time:” swinging his legs over: “What time is it? I said fifteen minutes. You promised—”

  “It’s only nine-thirty,” his uncle said. “Plenty of time for a shower and your supper too. They wont leave before we get there.”

  “They?” he said: up onto his bare feet (he had not un­dressed except his shoes and sox) already reaching for his slippers. “You’ve been back to town. Before we get there? We’re not going with them?”

  “No,” his uncle said. “It’ll take both of us to hold Miss Habersham back. She’s going to meet us at the office. So move along now; she’s probably already waiting for us.”

  “Yes,” he said. But he was already unfastening his shirt and his belt and trousers too with the other hand, all ready to step in one motion out of both. And this time it was laughing. It was all right. You couldn’t even hear it. “So that was why,” he said. “So their women wouldn’t have to chop wood in the dark with half-awake children holding lanterns.”

  “No,” his uncle said. “They were not running from Lucas. They had forgotten about him—”

  “That’s exactly what I’m saying,” he said. “They didn’t even wait to send him a can of tobacco and say It’s all right, old man, everybody makes mistakes and we wont hold this one against you.”

  “Was that what you wanted?” his uncle said. “The can of tobacco? That would have been enough?—Of course it wouldn’t. Which is one reason why Lucas will ultimately get his can of tobacco; they will insist on it, they will have to. He will receive installments on it for the rest of his life in this country whether he wants them or not and not just Lucas but Lucas: Sambo since what sets a man writhing sleepless in bed at night is not having injured his fellow so much as having been wrong; the mere injury (if he cannot justify it with what he calls logic) he can efface by destroy­ing the victim and the witnesses but the mistake is his and that is one of his cats which he always prefers to choke to death with butter. So Lucas will get his tobacco. He wont want it of course and he’ll try to resist it. But he’ll get it and so we shall watch right here in Yoknapatawpha County the ancient oriental relationship between the savior and the life he saved turned upside down: Lucas Beauchamp once the slave of any white man within range of whose notice he hap­pened to come, now tyrant over the whole county’s white conscience. And they—Beat One and Two and Three and Five—knew that too so why take time now to send him a ten-cent can of tobacco when they have got to spend the balance of their lives doing it? So they had dismissed him for the time. They were not running from him, they were running from Crawford Gowrie; they simply repudiated not even in horror but in absolute unanimity a shall-not and should-not which without any warning whatever turned into a must-not. Thou shall not kill you see—no accusative, heatless: a simple moral precept; we have accepted it in the dis­tant anonymity of our forefathers, had it so long, cherished it, fed it, kept the sound of it alive and the very words them­selves unchanged, handled it so long that all the corners are now worn smoothly off; we can sleep right in the bed with it; we have even distilled our own antidotes for it as the fore-sighted housewife keeps a solution of mustard or handy egg-whites on the same shelf with the ratpoison; as familiar as grandpa’s face, as unrecognisable as grandpa’s face beneath the turban of an Indian prince, as abstract as grandpa’s flatu­lence at the family supper-table; even when it breaks down and the spilled blood stands sharp and glaring in our faces we still have the precept, still intact, still true: we shall not kill and maybe next time we even wont. But thou shall not kill thy mother’s child. It came right down into the street that time to walk in broad daylight at your elbow, didn’t it?”

  “So for a lot of Gowries and Workitts to burn Lucas Beauchamp to death with gasoline for something he didn’t even do is one thing but for a Gowrie to murder his brother is another.”

  “Yes,” his uncle said.

  “You cant say that.” he said.

  “Yes,” his uncle said. “Thou shalt not kill in precept and even when you do, precept still remains unblemished and scarless: Thou shalt not kill and who knows, perhaps next time maybe you wont. But Gowrie must not kill Gowrie’s brother: no maybe about it, no next time to maybe not Gowrie kill Gowrie because there must be no first time. And not just for Gowrie but for all: Stevens and Mallison and Edmonds and McCaslin too; if we are not to hold to the belief that that point not just shall not but must not and cannot come at which Gowrie or Ingrum or Stevens or Mal­lison may shed Gowrie or Ingrum or Stevens or Mallison blood, how hope ever to reach that one where Thou shalt not kill at all, where Lucas Beauchamp’s life will be secure not despite the fact that he is Lucas Beauchamp but because he is?”

  “So they ran to keep from having to lynch Crawford Gowrie,” he said.

  “They wouldn’t have lynched Crawford Gowrie,” his uncle said. “There were too many of them. Dont you remember, they packed the street in front of the jail and the Square too all morning while they still believed Lucas had shot Vinson Gowrie in the back without bothering him at all?”

  “They were waiting for Beat Four to come in and do it.”

  “Which is exactly what I am saying—granted for the mo­ment that that’s true. That part of Beat Four composed of Gowries and Workitts and the four or five others who wouldn’t have given a Gowrie or Workitt either a chew of tobacco and who would have come along just to see the blood, is small enough to produce a mob. But not all of them together because there is a simple numerical point at which a mob cancels and abolishes itself, maybe because it has finally got too big for darkness, the cave it was spawned in is no longer big enough to conceal it from light and
so at last whether it will or not it has to look at itself, or maybe because the amount of blood in one human body is no longer enough, as one peanut might titillate one elephant but not two or ten. Or maybe it’s because man having passed into mob passes then into mass which abolishes mob by absorp­tion, metabolism, then having got too large even for mass becomes man again conceptible of pity and justice and con­science even if only in the recollection of his long painful aspiration toward them, toward that something anyway of one serene universal light.”

  “So man is always right,” he said.

  “No,” his uncle said. “He tries to be if they who use him for their own power and aggrandisement let him alone. Pity and justice and conscience too—that belief in more than the divinity of individual man (which we in America have de­based into a national religion of the entrails in which man owes no duty to his soul because he has been absolved of soul to owe duty to and instead is static heir at birth to an inevictible quit-claim on a wife a car a radio and an old-age pension) but in the divinity of his continuity as Man; think how easy it would have been for them to attend to Crawford Gowrie: no mob moving fast in darkness watching con­stantly over its shoulder but one indivisible public opinion: that peanut vanishing beneath a whole concerted trampling herd with hardly one elephant to really know the peanut had even actually been there since the main reason for a mob is that the individual red hand which actually snapped the thread may vanish forever into one inviolable confraternity of namelessness; where in this case that one would have had no more reason to lie awake at night afterward than a paid hangman. They didn’t want to destroy Crawford Gowrie. They repudiated him. If they had lynched him they would have taken only his life. What they really did was worse: they deprived him to the full extent of their capacity of his citizenship in man.”

  He didn’t move yet. “You’re a lawyer.” Then he said, “They were not running from Crawford Gowrie or Lucas Beauchamp either. They were running from themselves. They ran home to hide their heads under the bedclothes from their own shame.”

  “Exactly correct,” his uncle said. “Haven’t I been saying that all the time? There were too many of them. This time there were enough of them to be able to run from shame, to have found unbearable the only alternative which would have been the mob’s: which (the mob) because of its smallness and what it believed was its secretness and tightness and what it knew to be its absolute lack of trust in one another, would have chosen the quick and simple alternative of abolishing knowledge of the shame by destroying the witness to it. So as you like to put it they ran.”

  “Leaving you and Mr. Hampton to clean up the vomit, which even dogs dont do. Though of course Mr. Hampton is a paid dog and I reckon you might be called one too.—Because dont forget Jefferson either,” he said. “They were clearing off out of sight pretty fast too. Of course some of them couldn’t because it was still only the middle of the afternoon so they couldn’t shut up the stores and run home too yet; there still might be a chance to sell each other a nickel’s worth of something.”

  “I said Stevens and Mallison too,” his uncle said.

  “Not Stevens,” he said. “And not Hampton either. Because somebody had to finish it, somebody with a strong enough stomach to mop a floor. The sheriff to catch (or try to or hope to or whatever it is you are going to do) the murderer and a lawyer to defend the lynchers.”

  “Nobody lynched anybody to be defended from it,” his uncle said.

  “All right,” he said. “Excuse them then.”

  “Not that either,” his uncle said. “I’m defending Lucas Beauchamp. I’m defending Sambo from the North and East and West—the outlanders who will fling him decades back not merely into injustice but into grief and agony and vio­lence too by forcing on us laws based on the idea that man’s injustice to man can be abolished overnight by police. Sambo will suffer it of course; there are not enough of him yet to do anything else. And he will endure it, absorb it and sur­vive because he is Sambo and has that capacity; he will even beat us there because he has the capacity to endure and sur­vive but he will not be thrown back decades and what he survives to may not be worth having because by that time divided we may have lost America.”

  “But you’re still excusing it.”

  “No,” his uncle said. I only say that the injustice is ours. the South’s. We must expiate and abolish it ourselves, alone and without help nor even (with thanks) advice. We owe that to Lucas whether he wants it or not (and this Lucas anyway wont) not because of his past since a man or a race either if he’s any good can survive his past without even needing to escape from it and not because of the high quite often only to rhetorical rhetoric of humanity but for the sim­ple indubitable practical reason of his future: that capacity to survive and absorb and endure and still be steadfast.”

  “All right,” he said again. “You’re still a lawyer and they still ran. Maybe they intended for Lucas to clean it up since he came from a race of floor-moppers. Lucas and Hampton and you since Hampton ought to do something now and then for his money and they even elected you to a salary too. Did they think to tell you how to do it? what to use for bait to get Crawford Gowrie to come in and say All right, boys, I pass. Deal them again. Or were they too busy being— being ...”

  His uncle said quietly: “Righteous?”

  Now he completely stopped. But only for a second. He said, “They ran,” calm and completely final, not even con­temptuous, flicking the shirt floating away behind him and at the same moment dropping the trousers and stepping bare­foot out of them in nothing now but shorts. “Besides, it’s all right. I dreamed through all that; I dreamed through them too, dreamed them away too; let them stay in bed or milking their cows before dark or chopping wood before dark or after or by lanterns or not lanterns either. Because they were not the dream; I just passed them to get to the dream—” talking quite fast now, a good deal faster than he realised until it would be too late: “It was something ... some­body ... something about how maybe this was too much to expect of us, too much for people just sixteen or going on eighty or ninety or whatever she is to have to bear, and then right off I was answering what you told me, you remember, about the English boys not much older than me leading troops and flying scout aeroplanes in France in 1918? how you said that by 1918 all British officers seemed to be either subalterns of seventeen or one-eyed or one-armed or one-legged colonels of twenty-three?”—checking then or trying to because he had got the warning at last quite sharp not as if he had heard suddenly in advance the words he was going to say but as if he had discovered suddenly not what he had already said but where it was going, what the ones he had already spoken were going to compel him to say in order bring them to a stop: but too late of course like mashing suddenly on the brake pedal going downhill then discovering to your horror that the brake rod had snapped: “—only there was something else too—I was trying ...” and he stopped them at last feeling the hot hard blood burn all the way up his neck into his face and nowhere even to look not because he was standing there almost naked to begin with but because no clothes nor expression nor talking either smoke-screened anything from his uncle’s bright grave eyes.