Snopes watched Turl. “Tom-Tom thinks you want to fire the day shift.”
Turl looked down. He looked briefly at Snopes’s face; at the still eyes, the slow unceasing jaw, and down again. “I can handle as much coal as Tom-Tom,” he said.
Snopes watched him: the smooth, brown, aside-looking face. “Tom-Tom knows that, too. He knows he’s getting old. But he knows there ain’t nobody else can crowd him but you.” Then, watching Turl’s face, Snopes told him how for two years Tom-Tom had been stealing brass from the plant, in order to lay it on Turl and get him fired; how only that day Tom-Tom had told him that Turl was the thief.
Turl looked up. “That’s a lie,” he said. “Can’t no nigger accuse me of stealing when I ain’t, I don’t care how big he is.”
“Sho’,” Snopes said. “So the thing to do is to get that brass back.”
“If Tom-Tom got it, I reckon Mr. Buck Conner the man to get it back,” Turl said. Buck Conner was the city marshal.
“Then you’ll go to jail, sure enough. Tom-Tom’ll say he didn’t know it was there. You’ll be the only one that knew it was there. So what you reckon Buck Conner’ll think? You’ll be the one that knew where it was hid at, and Buck Conner’ll know that even a fool has got more sense than to steal something and hide it in his corn-crib.
The only thing you can do is to get that brass back. Go out there in the daytime, while Tom-Tom is at work, and get it and bring it to me and I’ll put it away somewhere to use as evidence on Tom-Tom. Unless maybe you don’t want that day shift. Just say so, if you don’t. I reckon I can find somebody else that does.”
And Turl agreed to do that. He hadn’t fired any boilers for forty years. He hadn’t done anything at all for as long as forty years, since he was just past thirty. But even if he were a hundred, no man could ever accuse him of having done anything that would aggregate forty years net.
“Unless Turl’s night prowling might add up that much,” Harker said. “If Turl ever gets married, he wan’t need no front door a-tall; he wouldn’t know what it was for. If he couldn’t come tom-catting in through the back window, he wouldn’t know what he come after. Would you, Turl?”
So from here on it is simple enough, since a man’s mistakes, like his successes, usually are simple. Particularly the success. Perhaps that’s why it is so often missed: it was just over-looked.
“His mistake was in picking out Turl to pull his chestnuts,” Harker said. “But even Turl wasn’t as bad as the second mistake he made at the same time without knowing it. And that was, when he forgot about that high yellow wife of Tom-Tom’s.
When I found out how he had picked out Turl, out of all the niggers in Jefferson, that’s prowled at least once (or tried to) every gal within ten miles of town, to go out to Tom-Tom’s house knowing all the time how Tom-Tom would be down here wrastling coal until seven o’clock and then have two miles to walk home, and expect Turl to spend his time out there hunting for anything that ain’t hid in Tom-Tom’s bed, and when I would think about Tom-Tom down here, wrastling them boilers with this same amical cuckoldry like the fellow said about Mr. Snopes and Colonel Hoxey, stealing brass so he can keep Turl from getting his job away from him, and Turl out yonder tending to Tom-Tom’s home business at the same time, sometimes I think I will die.
“It was bound to not last. The question was, which would happen first: if Tom-Tom would catch Turl, or if Mr. Snopes would catch Turl, or if I would bust a blood vessel laughing some night. Well, it was Turl. He seemed to be having too much trouble locating that brass; he had been hunting it for three weeks already, coming in a little late almost every night now, with Tom-Tom having to wait until Turl come before he could start home.
Maybe that was it. Or maybe Mr. Snopes was out there himself one day, hid in the bushes too, waiting for it to get along toward dark (it was already April then); him on one side of Tom-Tom’s house and Turl creeping up through the corn patch on the other. Anyway, he come back down here one night and he was waiting when Turl come in about a half hour late, as usual, and Tom-Tom all ready to go home soon as Turl got here. Mr. Snopes sent for Turl and asked him if he had found it.
“‘Find it when?’ Turl says.
“‘While you was out there hunting for it about dusk tonight,’ Mr. Snopes says. And there’s Turl, wondering just how much Mr. Snopes knows, and if he can risk saying how he has been at home in bed since six-thirty this morning, or maybe up to Mottstown on business. ‘Maybe you are still looking for it in the wrong place,’ Mr. Snopes says, watching Turl, and Turl not looking at Mr. Snopes except maybe now and then. ‘If Tom-Tom had hid that iron in his bed, you ought to done found it three weeks ago,’ Mr. Snopes says. ‘So suppose you look in that corn-crib where I told you to look.’
“So Turl went out to look one more time. But he couldn’t seem to find it in the corn-crib neither. Leastways, that’s what he told Mr. Snopes when Mr. Snopes finally run him down back here about nine o’clock one night.
Turl was on a kind of a spot, you might say. He would have to wait until along toward dark to go up to the house, and already Tom-Tom had been grumbling some about how Turl was getting later and later about coming to work every night. And once he found that brass, he would have to begin getting back to the plant at seven o’clock, and the days getting longer all the time.
“So Turl goes back to give one more go-round for that brass evidence. But still he can’t find it. He must have looked under every shuck and thread in Tom-Tom’s bed tick, but without no more success than them two audits had. He just couldn’t seem to find that evidence nohow.
So then Mr. Snopes says he will give Turl one more chance, and if he don’t find that evidence this time, Mr. Snopes is going to tell Tom-Tom how there is a strange tom-cat on his back fence. And whenever a nigger husband in Jefferson hears that, he finds out where Turl is at before he even sharpens his razor: ain’t that so, Turl?
“So the next evening Turl goes out to look again. To do or die this time. He comes creeping up out of the woods about sundown, the best time of day for brass hunting, specially as there is a moon that night.
So here he comes, creeping up through the corn patch to the back porch, where the cot is, and pretty soon he can make out somebody in a white nightgown laying on the cot. But Turl don’t rise up and walk even then; that ain’t Turl’s way. Turl plays by the rules.
He creeps up — it’s dust-dark by then, and the moon beginning to shine a little — all careful and quiet, and tom-cats up on to the back porch and stoops over the cot and puts his hand on nekkid meat and says, ‘Honeybunch, papa’s done arrived.’”
IV
In the very quiet hearing of it I seemed to partake for the instant of Turl’s horrid surprise. Because it was Tom-Tom on the cot; Tom-Tom, whom Turl believed to be at the moment two miles away, waiting for Turl to come and take over from him at the power plant.
The night before, on his return home Tom-Tom had brought with him a last year’s watermelon which the local butcher had kept all Winter in cold storage and which he had given to Tom-Tom, being himself afraid to eat it, and a pint of whiskey. Tom-Tom and his wife consumed them and went to bed, where an hour later she waked Tom-Tom by her screaming. She was violently ill, and she was afraid that she was dying. She was too frightened to let Tom-Tom go for help, and while he dosed her as he could, she confessed to him about herself and Turl.
As soon as she told it she became easier and went off to sleep, either before she had time to realize the enormity of what she had done, or while she was still too occupied in being alive to care.
But Tom-Tom wasn’t. The next morning, after he convinced himself that she was all right, he reminded her of it. She wept some, and tried to retract; she ran the gamut of tears to anger, through denial and cajolery back to tears again. But she had Tom-Tom’s face to look at all the while, and so after a time she hushed and she just lay there, watching him as he went methodically about cooking breakfast, her own and his, saying no word, apparently oblivious of even her presence. Then he fed her, made her eat, with the same detachment, implacable and without heat.
She was waiting for him to leave for work; she was doubtless then and had been all the while inventing and discarding practical expedients; so busy that
