“I give you your chance,” Lucas said. “Then you laid here asleep with your door unlocked and give me mine. Then I throwed the razor away and give it back. And then your throwed it back at me. That’s right, aint it?”
“Yes,” the white man said.
“Hah!” Lucas said. He flung the white man’s left hand and arm away, striking the other backward from the bed as his own right hand wrenched free; he had the pistol in the same motion, springing up and back as the white man rose too, the bed between them. He broke the pistol’s breech and glanced quickly at the cylinder and turned it until the empty chamber under the hammer was at the bottom, so that a live cartridge would come beneath the hammer regardless of which direction the cylinder rotated. “Because I’ll need two of them,” he said.
He snapped the breech shut and faced the white man. Again the white man saw his eyes rush until there was neither cornea nor iris. This is it, the white man thought, with that rapid and even unamazed clarity, gathering himself as much as he dared. Lucas didn’t seem to notice. He cant even see me right now, the white man thought. But that was too late too.
Lucas was looking at him now. “You thought I wouldn’t, didn’t you?” Lucas said. “You knowed I could beat you, so you thought to beat me with old Carothers, like Cass Edmonds done Isaac: used old Carothers to make Isaac give up the land that was his because Cass Edmonds was the woman-made McCaslin, the woman-branch, the sister, and old Carothers would have told Isaac to give in to the woman-kin that couldn’t fend for herself. And you thought I’d do that too, didn’t you?
You thought I’d do it quick, quicker than Isaac since it aint any land I would give up. I aint got any fine big McCaslin farm to give up. All I got to give up is McCaslin blood that rightfully aint even mine or at least aint worth much since old Carothers never seemed to miss much what he give to Tomey that night that made my father. And if this is what that McCaslin blood has brought me, I don’t want it neither. And if the running of it into my black blood never hurt him any more than the running of it out is going to hurt me, it wont even be old Carothers that had the most pleasure. — Or no,” he cried. He cant see me again, the white man thought.
Now. “No!” Lucas cried; “say I don’t even use this first bullet at all, say I just uses the last one and beat you and old Carothers both, leave you something to think about now and then when you aint too busy to try to think up what to tell old Carothers when you get where he’s done already gone, tomorrow and the one after that and the one after that as long as tomorrow—”
The white man sprang, hurling himself across the bed, grasping at the pistol and the hand which held it. Lucas sprang too; they met over the centre of the bed where Lucas clasped the other with his left arm almost like an embrace and jammed the pistol against the white man’s side and pulled the trigger and flung the white man from him all in one motion, hearing as he did so the light, dry; incredibly loud click of the miss-fire.
That had been a good year, though late in beginning after the rains and flood: the year of the long summer. He would make more this year than he had made in a long time, even though and in August some of his corn had not had its last ploughing.
He was doing that now, following the single mule between the rows of strong, waist-high stalks and the rich, dark, flashing blades, pausing at the end of each row to back the plough out and swing it and the yawing mule around into the next one, until at last the dinner smoke stood weightless in the bright air above his chimney and then at the old time she came along the fence with the covered pan and the pail. He did not look at her. He ploughed on until the plantation bell rang for noon.
He watered and fed the mule and himself ate — the milk, the still-warm biscuit — and rested in the shade until the bell rang again. Then, not rising yet, he took the cartridge from his pocket and looked at it again, musing — the live cartridge, not even stained, not corroded, the mark of the firing-pin dented sharp and deep into the unexploded cap — the dull little brass cylinder less long than a match, not much larger than a pencil, not much heavier, yet large enough to contain two lives.
Have contained, that is. Because I wouldn’t have used the second one, he thought. I would have paid. I would have waited for the rope, even the coal oil. I would have paid. So I reckon I aint got old Carothers’s blood for nothing, after all. Old Carothers, he thought. I needed him and he come and spoke for me. He ploughed again. Presently she came back along the fence and got the pan and pail herself instead of letting him bring them home when he came.
But she would be busy today; and it seemed to him still early in the afternoon when he saw the supper smoke — the supper which she would leave on the hearth for him when she went back to the big house with the children. When he reached home in the dusk, she was just departing. But she didn’t wear the white woman’s shoes now and her dress was the same shapeless faded calico she had worn in the morning. “Your supper’s ready,” she said. “I aint had time to milk yet. You’ll have to.”
“If I can wait on that milk, I reckon the cow can too,” he said. “Can you tote them both all right?”
“I reckon I can. I been taking care of both of them a good while now without no man-help.” She didn’t look back. “I’ll come back out when I gets them to sleep.”
“I reckon you better put your time on them,” he said gruffly. “Since that’s what you started out to do.” She went on, neither answering nor looking back, impervious, tranquil, somehow serene. Nor was he any longer watching her. He breathed slow and quiet. Women, he thought. Women. I wont never know. I dont want to.
I ruther never to know than to find out later I have been fooled. He turned toward the room where the fire was, where his supper waited. This time he spoke aloud: “How to God,” he said, “can a black man ask a white man to please not lay down with his black wife? And even if he could ask it, how to God can the white man promise he wont?”
III
“George Wilkins?” Edmonds said. He came to the edge of the gallery — a young man still, yet possessing already something of that almost choleric shortness of temper which Lucas remembered in old Cass Edmonds but which had skipped Zack.
In age he could have been Lucas’ son, but actually was the lesser man for more reason than that, since it was not Lucas who paid taxes insurance and interest or owned anything which had to be kept ditched drained fenced and fertilised or gambled anything save his sweat, and that only as he saw fit, against God for his yearly sustenance. “What in hell has George Wilkins — —”
Without changing the inflexion of his voice and apparently without effort or even design Lucas became not Negro but nigger, not secret so much as impenetrable, not servile and not effacing, but enveloping himself in an aura of timeless and stupid impassivity almost like a smell. “He’s running a kettle in that gully behind the Old West field. If you want the whisky too, look under his kitchen floor.”
“A still?” Edmonds said. “On my land?” He began to roar. “Haven’t I told and told every man woman and child on this place what I would do the first drop of white mule whisky I found on my land?”
“You didn’t need to tell me,” Lucas said. “I’ve lived on this place since I was born, since before your pa was. And you or him or old Cass either aint never heard of me having truck with any kind of whisky except that bottle of town whisky you and him give Molly Christmas.”
“I know it,” Edmonds said. “And I would have thought George Wilkins—” He ceased. He said, “Hah. Have I or haven’t I heard something about George wanting to marry that girl of yours?”
For just an instant Lucas didn’t answer. Then he said, “That’s right.”
“Hah,” Edmonds said again. “And so you thought that by telling me on George before he got caught himself, I would be satisfied to make him chop up his kettle and pour out his whisky and then forget about it.”
“I didn’t know,” Lucas said.
“Well, you know now,” Edmonds said. “And George will too when the sheriff—” he went back into the house. Lucas listened to the hard, rapid, angry clapping of his heels on the floor, then to the prolonged violent grinding of the telephone crank. Then he stopped listening, standing motionless in the half-darkness, blinking a little. He thought, All
