“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 it was mid-morning before she realized that he had no intention of going to town, though she did not know that he had arranged to get word to the plant by seven that morning that he would take the day off.
So she lay there in the bed, quite quiet, her eyes a little wide, still as an animal, while he cooked their dinner and fed her again with that clumsy and implacable care. And just before sundown he locked her in the bedroom, she still saying no word, not asking him what he was about, just watching with her quiet, still eyes the door until it closed and the key clicked.
Then Tom-Tom put on one of her nightgowns and with a naked butcher knife beside him, he lay down on the cot on the back porch. And there he was, without having moved for almost an hour, when Turl crept on to the porch and touched him.
In the purely reflex action of Turl’s turning to flee, Tom-Tom rose, clutching the knife, and sprang at Turl. He leaped astride of Turl’s neck and shoulders; his weight was the impetus which sent Turl off the porch, already running when his feet touched earth, carrying with him on the retina of his fear a single dreadful glint of moonlight on the blade of the lifted knife, as he crossed the back lot and, with Tom-Tom on his back, entered the trees — the two of them a strange and furious beast with two heads and a single pair of legs like an inverted centaur speeding phantomlike just ahead of the boardlike streaming of Tom-Tom’s shirt-tail and just beneath the silver glint of the lifted knife, through the moony April woods.
“Tom-Tom big buck man,” Turl said. “Make three of me. But I sho’ toted him. And whenever I would see the moon glint that butcher knife, I could a picked up two more like him without even stopping.” He said that at first he just ran; it was only when he found himself among the trees that it occurred to him that his only hope was to rake Tom-Tom off against a tree trunk. “But he helt on so tight with that one arm that whenever I busted him into a tree, I had to bust into the tree too. And then we’d bounce off and I’d catch that moonglint in that nekkid knife, and I could a picked up two more Tom-Toms.
“‘Bout that time was when Tom-Tom started squalling. He was holding on with both hands then, so I knowed that I had done outrun that butcher knife anyhow. But I was good started then; my feets never paid Tom-Tom no more mind when he started squalling to stop and let him off than they did me.
Then Tom-Tom grabbed my head with both hands and begun to haul it around like I was a runaway bareback mule, and then I seed the ditch. It was about forty foot deep and it looked a solid mile across, but it was too late then. My feets never even slowed up. They run far as from here to that door yonder out into nekkid air before us even begun to fall. And they was still clawing that moonlight when me and Tom-Tom hit the bottom.”
The first thing I wanted to know was, what Tom-Tom used in lieu of the butcher knife which he had dropped. He didn’t use anything. He and Turl just sat there in the ditch and talked. Because there is a sanctuary beyond despair for any beast which has dared all, which even its mortal enemy respects. Or maybe it was just nigger nature.
Anyway, it was perfectly plain to both of them as they sat there, perhaps panting a little while they talked, that Tom-Tom’s home had been outraged, not by Turl, but by Flem Snopes; that Turl’s life and limbs had been endangered, not by Tom-Tom, but by Flem Snopes.
That was so plain to them that they sat there quietly in the ditch, getting their wind back, talking a little without heat like two acquaintances meeting in the street; so plain that they made their concerted plan without recourse to definite words on the subject. They merely compared notes; perhaps they laughed a little at themselves.
Then they climbed out of the ditch and returned to Tom-Tom’s cabin, where Tom-Tom unlocked his wife, and he and Turl sat before the hearth while the woman prepared a meal for them, which they ate as quietly but without loss of time: the two grave, scratched faces leaned to the same lamp, above the same dishes, while in the background the woman watched them, shadowy and covert and unspeaking.
Tom-Tom took her to the barn with them to help load the brass into the wagon, where Turl spoke for the first time since they climbed together out of the ditch in Harker’s “amical” cuckoldry: “Great God, man, how long did it take you to tote all this stuff out here?”
“Not long,” Tom-Tom said. “Been working at it ‘bout two years.”
It required four trips in the wagon; it was daybreak when the last load was disposed of, and the sun was rising when Turl entered the power plant, eleven hours late.
“Where in hell you been?” Harker said.
Turl glanced up at the three gauges, his scratched face wearing an expression of monkeylike gravity. “Been helping a friend of mine.”
“Helping what friend of yours?”
“Boy named Turl,” Turl said, squinting at the gauges.
V
“And that was all he said,” Harker said. “And me looking at that scratched face of hisn, and at the mate of it that Tom-Tom brought in at six o’clock. But Turl didn’t tell me then. And I ain’t the only one he never told nothing that morning. Because Mr. Snopes got there before six o’clock, before Turl had got away. He sent for Turl and asked him if he had found that brass and Turl told him no.
“‘Why didn’t you find it?’ Mr. Snopes said.
“Turl didn’t look away, this time. ‘Because it ain’t no brass there. That’s the main reason.’
“‘How do you know there ain’t?’ Mr. Snopes says.
“And Turl looked him straight in them eyes. ‘Because Tom-Tom say it ain’t,’ Turl says.
“Maybe he ought to knew then. But a man will go to any length to fool himself; he will tell himself stuff and believe it that he would be downright mad with a fellow he had done trimmed for believing it. So now he sends for Tom-Tom.
“‘I
