Intruder in the Dust

  “ ‘I reckon it looked to you right then that you were get­ting ready to trip pretty bad over Vinson, old Skipworth and Adam Fraser or not’ but at least I didn’t say But why didn’t you explain then and so at least Lucas didn’t have to say Explain what to who: and so he was all right— I dont mean Lucas of course, I mean Crawford, no mere child of mis­fortune he—” and there it was again and this time he knew what it was, Miss Habersham had done something he didn’t know what, no sound and she hadn’t moved and it wasn’t even that she had got any stiller but something had occurred, not something happened to her from the outside in but some­thing from the inside outward as though she not only hadn’t been surprised by it but had decreed authorised it but she hadn’t moved at all not even to take an extra breath and his uncle hadn’t even noticed that much “—but rather chosen and elected peculiar and unique out of man by the gods themselves to prove not to themselves because they had never doubted it but to man by this his lowest common denomina­tor that he has a soul, driven at last to murder his brother—”

  “He put him in quicksand,” Miss Habersham said.

  “Yes,” his uncle said. “Ghastly wasn’t it.—by the simple mischance of an old Negro man’s insomnambulism and then having got away with that by means of a plan a scheme so simple and water-tight in its biological and geographical psychology as to be what Chick here would call a natural, then to be foiled here by the fact that four years ago a child whose presence in the world he was not even aware of fell into a creek in the presence of that same Negro insomnambulist because this part we dont really know either and with Jake Montgomery in his present condition we probably never will though that doesn’t really matter either since the fact still remains, why else was he in Vinson’s grave except that in buying the lumber from Crawford (we found that out by a telephone call to the lumber’s ultimate consignee in Mem­phis this afternoon) Jake Montgomery knew where it came from too since knowing that would have been Jake’s nature and character too and indeed a factor in his middleman’s profit and so when Vinson Crawford’s partner tripped sud­denly on death in the woods behind Fraser’s store Jake didn’t need a crystal ball to read that either and so if this be sur­mise then make the most of it or give Mr. Hampton and me a better and we’ll swap, Jake knew about Buddy McCallum’s old war trophy too and I like to think for Crawford’s sake—” and there it was again and still no outward sign but this time his uncle saw or felt or sensed (or however it was) it too and stopped and even for a second seemed about to speak then in the next one forgot it apparently, talking again: “—that maybe Jake named the price of his silence and even collected it or an installment on it perhaps intending all the time to convict Crawford of the murder, perhaps with his contacts all established to get still more money or perhaps he didn’t like Crawford and wanted revenge or perhaps a purist he drew the line at murder and simply dug Vinson up to load him on the mule and take him in to the sheriff but anyway on the night after the funeral somebody with a conceivable reason for digging Vinson up dug him up, which must have been Jake, and somebody who not only didn’t want Vinson dug up but had a conceivable reason to be watching the someone who would have had a conceivable reason for digging him up, knew that he had been dug up within in—you said it was about ten when you and Aleck Sander parked the truck and it got dark enough for digging up graves about seven that night so that leaves three hours—and that’s what I mean about Crawford,” his uncle said and this time he noticed that his uncle had even stopped, expect­ing it and it came but still no sound no movement, the hat immobile and exact the neat precision of the clasped gloves and the handbag on her lap the shoes planted and motionless side by side as if she had placed them into a chalked dia­gram on the floor: “—watching there in the weeds behind the fence seeing himself not merely betrayed out of the black­mail but all the agony and suspense to go through again not to mention the physical labor who since one man already knew that the body couldn’t bear examination by trained policemen, could never know how many others might know or suspect so the body would have to come out of the grave now though at least he had help here whether the help knew it or not so he probably waited until Jake had the body out and was all ready to load it onto the mule (and we found that out too, it was the Gowrie’s plow mule, the same one the twins were riding this morning; Jake borrowed it himself late that Sunday afternoon and when you guess which Gowrie he borrowed it from you’ll be right: it was Crawford) and he wouldn’t have risked the pistol now anyway anymore than he would have used it if he could, who would rather have paid Jake over again the amount of the blackmail for the privilege of using whatever it was he crushed Jake’s skull with and put him into the coffin and filled the grave back up—and here it is again, the desperate the dreadful urgency, the loneliness the pariah-hood having not only the horror and repudiation of all man against him but having to struggle with the sheer inertia of earth and the terrible heedless rush of time but even beating all that coalition at last, the grave decent again even to the displaced flowers and the evidence of his original crime at last disposed and secure—” and it would have been again but this time his uncle didn’t pause “—then to straighten up at last and for the first time draw a full breath since the moment when Jake had approached him rubbing his thumb against the tips of the same fingers—and then to hear whatever it was that sent him plunging back up the hill then crawling creeping to lie once more panting but this tune not merely in rage and terror but in almost incredulous be­lief that one single man could be subject to this much bad luck, watching you three not only undo his work for the second time but double it now since you not only exposed Jake Montgomery but you refilled the grave and even put the flowers back: who couldn’t afford to let his brother Vinson be found in that grave but durst not let Jake Montgomery be found in it when (as he must have known) Hope Hampton got there tomorrow:” and stopped this time waiting for her to say it and she did:

  “He put his brother in quicksand.”

  “Ah,” his uncle said. “That moment may come to anyone when simply nothing remains to be done with your brother or husband or uncle or cousin or mother-in-law except de­stroy them. But you dont put them in quicksand. Is that it?”

  “He put him in quicksand,” she said with calm and im­placable finality, not moving nor stirring except her lips to speak until then she raised her hand and opened the watch pinned to her bosom and looked at it.

  “They haven’t reached Whiteleaf bottom yet,” his uncle said. “But dont worry, he’ll be there, my message might have reached him but no man in this county can possibly escape hearing anything ever told Willy Ingrum under the pledge of secrecy, because there’s nothing else he can do you see be­cause murderers are gamblers and like the amateur gambler the amateur murderer believes first not in his luck but in long shots, that the long shot will win simply because it’s a long shot but besides that, say he already knew he was lost and nothing Lucas could testify about Jake Montgomery or anyone else could harm him further and that his one last slim chance was to get out of the country, or say he knew even that was vain, knew for sure that he was running through the last few pence and pennies of what he could still call freedom, suppose he even knew for certain that tomor­row’s sun would not even rise for him,—what would you want to do first, one last act and statement of your deathless principles before you left your native land for good and maybe even the world for good if your name was Gowrie and your blood and thinking and acting had been Gowrie all your life and you knew or even only believed or even only hoped that at a certain moment in an automobile creeping in low gear through a lonely midnight creek bottom would be the cause and reason for all your agony and frustration and outrage and grief and shame and irreparable loss and that not even a white man but a nigger and you still had the pistol with at least one of the old original ten German bullets in it.—But dont worry,” he said quickly: “Dont worry about Mr. Hampton. He probably wont even draw his pistol, I aint certain in fact that he has one because he
has a way of carrying right along with him into all situations maybe not peace, maybe not abatement of the base emotions but at least a temporary stalemate of crude and violent behavior just by moving slow and breathing hard, this happened two or three terms ago back in the twenties, a Frenchman’s Bend lady naming no names at feud with another lady over some­thing which began (we understood) over the matter of a prize cake at a church supper bazaar, whose—the second lady’s—husband owned the still which had been supplying Frenchman’s Bend with whiskey for years bothering nobody until the first lady made official demand on Mr. Hampton to go out there and destroy the still and arrest the operator and then in about a week or ten days came in to town herself and told him that if he didn’t she was going to report him to the governor of the state and the president in Washington so Hope went that time, she had not only given him explicit di­rections but he said there was a path to it knee-deep in places where it had been trodden for years beneath the weight of stopperful gallon jugs so that you could have followed it even without the flashlight which he had and sure enough there was the still in as nice a location as you could want, cozy and sheltered yet accessible too with a fire burning under the kettle and a Negro tending it who of course didn’t know who owned it nor ran it nor anything about it even before he recognised Hampton’s size and finally even saw his badge: who Hope said offered him a drink first and then did fetch him a gourd of branch water and then made him comfortable sitting against a tree, even chunking up the fire to dry his wet feet while he waited for the owner to come back, quite comfortable Hope said, the two of them there by the fire in the darkness talking about one thing and another and the Negro asking him from time to time if he wouldn’t like an-other gourd of water until Hampton said the mockingbird was making so confounded much racket that finally he opened his eyes blinking for a while in the sunlight until he got them focused and there the mockingbird was on a limb not three feet above his head and before they loaded up the still to move it away somebody had gone to the nearest house and fetched back a quilt to spread over him and a pillow to put under his head and Hope said he noticed the pillow even had a fresh slip on it when he took it and the quilt to Varner’s store to be returned with thanks to whoever owned them and came on back to town. And another time—”

  “I’m not worrying,” Miss Habersham said.

  “Of course not,” his uncle said. “Because I know Hope Hampton—”

  “Yes,” Miss Habersham said. “I know Lucas Beauchamp.”

  “Oh,” his uncle said. Then he said, “Yes.” Then he said, “Of course.” Then he said, “Let’s ask Chick to plug in the kettle and we’ll have coffee while we wait, what do you think?”

  “That will be nice,” Miss Habersham said.

  Chapter Eleven

  FINALLY HE EVEN GOT up and went to one of the front win­dows looking down into the Square because if Monday was stock-auction and trade day then Saturday was certainly radio and automobile day; on Monday they were mostly men and they drove in and parked the cars and trucks around the Square and went straight to the sales barns and stayed there until time to come back to the Square and eat dinner and then went back to the sales barns and stayed there until time to come and get in the cars and trucks and drive home before full dark. But not Saturday; they were men and women and children too then and the old people and the babies and the young couples to buy the licenses for the weddings in the country churches tomorrow, come in to do a week’s shop­ping for staples and delicacies like bananas and twenty-five-cent sardines and machine-made cakes and pies and clothes and stockings and feed and fertilizer and plow-gear: which didn’t take long for any of them and no time at all for some of them so that some of the cars never really became per­manently stationary at all and within an hour or so many of the others had joined them moving steadily processional and quite often in second gear because of their own density round and round the Square then out to the end of the tree-dense residential streets to turn and come back and circle round and round the Square again as if they had come all the way in from the distant circumambient settlements and crossroads stores and isolate farms for that one purpose of enjoying the populous coming and going and motion and recognising one another and the zephyr-like smoothness of the paved streets and alleys themselves as well as looking at the neat new painted small houses among their minute neat yards and flowerbeds and garden ornaments which in the last few years had come to line them as dense as sardines or bananas; as a result of which the radios had to play louder than ever through their supercharged amplifiers to be heard above the mutter of exhausts and swish of tires and the grind of gears and the constant horns, so that long before you even reached the Square you not only couldn’t tell where one began and another left off but you didn’t even have to try to distinguish what any of them were playing or trying to sell you.

  But this one seemed to be even a Saturday among Satur­days so that presently his uncle had got up from behind the table and come to the other window too, which was why they happened to see Lucas before he reached the office though that was not yet; he was still standing (so he thought) alone at the window looking down into the Square thronged and jammed as he couldn’t remember it before—the bright sunny almost hot air heavy with the smell of blooming locust from the courthouse yard, the sidewalks dense and massed and slow with people black and white come in to town today as if by concert to collect at compound and so discharge not merely from balance but from remembering too that other Saturday only seven days ago of which they had been de­spoiled by an old Negro man who had got himself into the position where they had had to believe he had murdered a white man—that Saturday and Sunday and Monday only a week past yet which might never have been since nothing of them remained: Vinson and his brother Crawford (in his suicide’s grave and strangers would be asking for weeks yet what sort of jail and sheriff Yoknapatawpha County had where a man locked in it for murder could still get hold of a Luger pistol even if it didn’t have but one bullet in it and for that many weeks nobody in Yoknapatawpha County would still be able to tell him) side by side near their mother’s headstone in Caledonia churchyard and Jake Montgomery over in Crossman County where somebody probably claimed him too for the same reason somebody did Crawford and Miss Habersham sitting in her own hall now mending the stockings until time to feed the chickens and Aleck Sander down there on the Square in a flash Saturday shirt and a pair of zoot pants and a handful of peanuts or bananas too and he stand­ing at the window watching the dense unhurried unhurryable throng and the busy almost ubiquitous flash and gleam on Willy Ingrum’s cap-badge but mostly and above all the mo­tion and the noise, the radios and the automobiles—the juke­boxes in the drugstore and the poolball and the cafe and the bellowing amplifiers on the outside walls not only of the record-and-sheet music store but the army-and-navy supply store and both feed stores and (that they might falter) some­body standing on a bench in the courthouse yard making a speech in to another one with a muzzle like a siege gun bolted to the top of an automobile, not to mention the ones which would be running in the apartments and the homes where the housewives and the maids made up the beds and swept and prepared to cook dinner so that nowhere inside the town’s uttermost ultimate corporate rim should man woman or child citizen or guest or stranger be threatened with one second of silence; and the automobiles because explicitly speaking he couldn’t see the Square at all: only the dense impenetrable mass of tops and hoods moving in double line at a snail’s crawl around the Square in a sharp invisible aura of carbon monoxide and blatting horns and a light intermit­tent clashing of bumpers, creeping slowly one by one into the streets leading away from the Square while the other opposite line crept as slowly one by one into it; so dense and slow dowelled into one interlocked mosaic so infinitesimal of movement as to be scarcely worthy of the word that you could have crossed the Square walking on them—or even out to the edge of town for that matter or even on a horse for that matter. Highboy for instance to whom the five- or six-foot jump
from one top across the intervening hood to the next top would have been nothing or say the more or less motionless tops were laid with one smooth continuous surface of planks like a bridge and not Highboy but a gaited horse or a horse with one gait: a hard-driving rack seven feet in the air like a bird and travelling fast as a hawk or an eagle: with a feeling in the pit of his stomach as if a whole bottle of hot sodapop had exploded in it thinking of the gallant the splendid the really magnificent noise a horse would make racking in any direction on a loose plank bridge two miles long when suddenly his uncle at the other window said,

  “The American really loves nothing but his automobile: not his wife his child nor his country nor even his bank-account first (in fact he doesn’t really love that bank-account nearly as much as foreigners like to think because he will spend almost any or all of it for almost anything providing it is valueless enough) but his motorcar. Because the automo­bile has become our national sex symbol. We cannot really enjoy anything unless we can go up an alley for it. Yet our whole background and raising and training forbids the sub-rosa and surreptitious. So we have to divorce our wife today in order to remove from our mistress the odium of mistress in order to divorce our wife tomorrow in order to remove from our mistress and so on. As a result of which the Ameri­can woman has become cold and undersexed; she has pro­jected her libido onto the automobile not only because its glitter and gadgets and mobility pander to her vanity and incapacity (because of the dress decreed upon her by the national retailers association) to walk but because it will not maul her and tousle her, get her all sweaty and disarrranged. So in order to capture and master anything at all of her any­more the American man has got to make that car his own. Which is why let him live in a rented rathole though he must he will not only own one but renew it each year in pristine virginity, lending it to no one, letting no other hand ever know the last secret forever chaste forever wanton intimacy of its pedals and levers, having nowhere to go in it himself and even if he did he would not go where scratch or blemish might deface it, spending all Sunday morning washing and polishing and waxing it because in doing that he is caressing the body of the woman who has long since now denied him her bed.”