He continued to say it long after he knew the other had had time to walk back and forth between the two houses ten times over. It seemed to him then that he had known all the time the other was not coming, as if he were in the house where the white man waited, watching his, Lucas’s, house in his turn. Then he knew that the other was not even waiting, and it was as if he stood already in the bedroom itself, above the slow respirations of sleep, the undefended and oblivious throat, the naked razor already in his hand.
He re-entered the house, the room where his wife and the two children were asleep on the bed. The supper which had been cooking on the hearth when he entered at dusk had not even been taken up, what was left of it long since charred and simmered away and probably almost cool now among the fading embers. He set the skillet and coffee pot aside and with a stick of wood he raked the ashes from one corner of the fireplace, exposing the bricks, and touched one of them with his wet finger.
It was hot, not scorching, searing, but possessing a slow, deep solidity of heat, a condensation of the two years during which the fire had burned constantly above it, a condensation not of fire but of time, as though not the fire’s dying and not even water would cool it but only time would.
He prised the brick up with his knife blade and scraped away the warm dirt under it and lifted out a small metal dispatch box which his white grandfather, Carothers McCaslin himself, had owned almost a hundred years ago, and took from it the knotted rag tight and solid with the coins, some of which dated back almost to Carothers McCaslin’s time, which he had begun to save before he was ten years old. His wife had removed only her shoes (He recognised them too.
They had belonged to the white woman who had not died, who had not even ever existed.) before lying down. He put the knotted rag into one of them and went to the walnut bureau which Isaac McCaslin had given him for a wedding present and took his razor from the drawer.
He was waiting for daylight. He could not have said why. He squatted against a tree halfway between the carriage gate and the white man’s house, motionless as the windless obscurity itself while the constellations wheeled and the whippoorwills choired faster and faster and ceased and the first cocks crowed and the false dawn came and faded and the birds began and the night was over.
In the first of light he mounted the white man’s front steps and entered the unlocked front door and traversed the silent hall and entered the bedroom which it seemed to him he had already entered and that only an instant before, standing with the open razor above the breathing, the undefended and defenceless throat, facing again the act which it seemed to him he had already performed. Then he found the eyes of the face on the pillow looking quietly up at him and he knew then why he had had to wait until daylight.
“Because you are a McCaslin too,” he said. “Even if you was woman-made to it. Maybe that’s the reason. Maybe that’s why you done it: because what you and your pa got from old Carothers had to come to you through a woman — a critter not responsible like men are responsible, not to be held like men are held. So maybe I have even already forgive you, except I cant forgive you because you can forgive only them that injure you; even the Book itself dont ask a man to forgive them he is fixing to harm because even Jesus found out at last that was too much to ask a man.”
“Put the razor down and I will talk to you,” Edmonds said.
“You knowed I wasn’t afraid, because you knowed I was a McCaslin too and a man-made one. And you never thought that, because I am a McCaslin too, I wouldn’t. You never even thought that, because I am a nigger too, I wouldn’t dare. No. You thought that because I am a nigger I wouldn’t even mind. I never figured on the razor neither.
But I gave you your chance. Maybe I didn’t know what I might have done when you walked in my door, but I knowed what I wanted to do, what I believed I was going to do, what Carothers McCaslin would have wanted me to do. But you didn’t come. You never even gave me the chance to do what old Carothers would have told me to do.
You tried to beat me. And you wont never, not even when I am hanging dead from the limb this time tomorrow with the coal oil still burning, you wont never.”
“Put down the razor, Lucas,” Edmonds said.
“What razor?” Lucas said. He raised his hand and looked at the razor as if he did not know he had it, had never seen it before, and in the same motion flung it toward the open window, the naked blade whirling almost blood-coloured into the first copper ray of the sun before it vanished.
“I dont need no razor. My nekkid hands will do. Now get the pistol under your pillow.”
Still the other didn’t move, not even to draw his hands from under the sheet. “It’s not under the pillow. It’s in that drawer yonder where it always is and you know it. Go and look. I’m not going to run. I couldn’t.”
“I know you aint,” Lucas said. “And you know you aint. Because you know that’s all I needs, all I wants, is for you to try to run, to turn your back on me and run. I know you aint going to. Because all you got to beat is me. I got to beat old Carothers. Get your pistol.”
“No,” the other said. “Go home. Get out of here. Tonight I will come to your house — —”
“After this?” Lucas said. “Me and you, in the same country, breathing the same air even? No matter what you could say, what you could even prove so I would have to believe it, after this? Get the pistol.”
The other drew his hands out from under the sheet and placed them on top of it. “All right,” he said. “Stand over there against the wall until I get it.”
“Hah,” Lucas said. “Hah.”
The other put his hands back under the sheet. “Then go and get your razor,” he said.
Lucas began to pant, to indraw short breaths without expiration between. The white man could see his foreshortened chest, the worn faded shirt straining across it. “When you just watched me throw it away?” Lucas said. “When you know that if I left this room now, I wouldn’t come back?”
He went to the wall and stood with his back against it, still facing the bed. “Because I done already beat you,” he said. “It’s old Carothers. Get your pistol, white man.” He stood panting in the rapid inhalations until it seemed that his lungs could not possibly hold more of it.
He watched the other rise from the bed and grasp the foot of it and swing it out from the wall until it could be approached from either side; he watched the white man cross to the bureau and take the pistol from the drawer. Still Lucas didn’t move.
He stood pressed against the wall and watched the white man cross to the door and close it and turn the key and return to the bed and toss the pistol on to it and only then look toward him. Lucas began to tremble. “No,” he said.
“You on one side, me on the other,” the white man said. “We’ll kneel down and grip hands. We wont need to count.”
“No!” Lucas said in a strangling voice. “For the last time. Take your pistol. I’m coming.”
“Come on then. Do you think I’m any less a McCaslin just because I was what you call woman-made to it? Or maybe you aint even a woman-made McCaslin but just a nigger that’s got out of hand?”
Then Lucas was beside the bed. He didn’t remember moving at all. He was kneeling, their hands gripped, facing across the bed and the pistol the man whom he had known from infancy, with whom he had lived until they were both grown almost as brothers lived. They had fished and hunted together, they had learned to swim in the same water, they had eaten at the same table in the white boy’s kitchen and in the cabin of the negro’s mother; they had slept under the same blanket before a fire in the woods.
“For the last time,” Lucas said. “I tell you — —” Then he cried, and not to the white man and the white man knew it; he saw the whites of the negro’s eyes rush suddenly with red like the eyes of a bayed animal — a bear, a fox: “I tell you! Dont ask too much of me!” I was wrong, the white man thought. I have gone too far.
But it was too late. Even as he tried to snatch his hand free Lucas’s hand closed on it. He darted his left hand toward the pistol but Lucas caught that wrist too. Then they did not move save their forearms, their gripped hands turning gradually until the white man’s hand was pressed back-downward on the pistol. Motionless, locked,
