“All right,” he said. “You can go on home now. Go to bed. I know it wont do a damn bit of good to mention it, but I would like to see your south creek piece planted by tomorrow night. You doped around in it today like you hadn’t been to bed for a week. I dont know what you do at night, but you are too old to be tomcatting around the country whether you think so or not.”
He went back home. Now that it was all over, done, he realised how tired he actually was. It was as if the alternating waves of alarm and outrage and anger and fear of the past ten days, culminating in last night’s frantic activity and the past thirty-six hours during which he had not even taken off his clothes, had narcotised him, deadened the very weariness itself. But it was all right now.
If a little physical exhaustion, even another ten days or two weeks of it, was all required of him in return for that moment last night, he would not complain. Then he remembered that he had not told Edmonds of his decision to quit farming, for Edmonds to arrange to rent the land he had been working to someone else to finish his crop.
But perhaps that was just as well too; perhaps even a single night would suffice to find the rest of the money which a churn that size must have contained, and he would keep the land, the crop, from old habit, for something to occupy him. — Provided I dont need to keep it for a better reason still, he thought grimly.
Since I probably aint even made a scratch yet on the kind of luck that can wait unto I am sixty-seven years old, almost too old to even want it, to make me rich.
The house was dark except for a faint glow from the hearth in his and his wife’s room. The room across the hallway where his daughter slept was dark too. It would be empty too. He had expected that. I reckon George Wilkins is entitled to one more night of female company, he thought. From what I have heard, he wont find none of it where he’s going tomorrow.
When he got into bed his wife said without waking, “Whar you been? Walking the roads all last night. Walking the roads all tonight, with the ground crying to get planted. You just wait unto Mister Roth—” and then stopped talking without waking either. Sometime later, he waked. It was after midnight.
He lay beneath the quilt on the shuck mattress. It would be happening about now. He knew how they did it — the white sheriff and revenue officers and deputies creeping and crawling among the bushes with drawn pistols, surrounding the kettle, sniffing and whiffing like hunting dogs at every stump and disfiguration of earth until every jug and keg was found and carried back to where the car waited; maybe they would even take a sup or two to ward off the night’s chill before returning to the still to squat until George walked innocently in. He was neither triumphant nor vindictive. He even felt something personal toward George now.
He is young yet, he thought. They wont keep him down there for ever. In fact, as far as he, Lucas, was concerned, two weeks would be enough. He can afford to give a year or two at it. And maybe when they lets him out it will be a lesson to him about whose daughter to fool with next time.
Then his wife was leaning over the bed, shaking him and screaming. It was just after dawn. In his shirt and drawers he ran behind her, out on to the back gallery.
Sitting on the ground before it was George Wilkins’s patched and battered still; on the gallery itself was an assortment of fruit jars and stoneware jugs and a keg or so and one rusted five-gallon oilcan which, to Lucas’s horrified and sleep-dulled eyes, appeared capable of holding enough liquid to fill a ten-foot horse trough.
He could even see it in the glass jars — a pale, colourless fluid in which still floated the shreds of corn-husks which George’s tenth-hand still had not removed. “Whar was Nat last night?” he cried. He grasped his wife by the shoulder, shaking her. “Whar was Nat, old woman?”
“She left right behind you!” his wife cried. “She followed you again, like night before last! Didn’t you know it?”
“I knows it now,” Lucas said. “Get the axe!” he said. “Bust it! We ain’t got time to get it away.” But there was not time for that either. Neither of them had yet moved when the sheriff of the county, followed by a deputy, came around the corner of the house — a tremendous man, fat, who obviously had been up all night and obviously still did not like it.
“Damn it, Lucas,” he said. “I thought you had better sense than this.”
“This aint none of mine,” Lucas said. “You know it aint. Even if it was, would I have had it here? George Wilkins — —”
“Never you mind about George Wilkins,” the sheriff said. “I’ve got him too. He’s out there in the car, with that girl of yours. Go get your pants on. We’re going to town.”
Two hours later he was in the commissioner’s office in the federal courthouse in Jefferson. He was still inscrutable of face, blinking a little, listening to George Wilkins breathing hard beside him and to the voices of the white men.
“Confound it, Carothers,” the commissioner said, “what the hell kind of Senegambian Montague and Capulet is this anyhow?”
“Ask them!” Edmonds said violently. “Ask them! Wilkins and that girl of Lucas’s want to get married. Lucas wouldn’t hear of it for some reason — I just seem to be finding out now why. So last night Lucas came to my house and told me George was running a still on my land because—” without even a pause to draw a fresh breath Edmonds began to roar again “ — he knew damn well what I would do because I have been telling every nigger on my place for years just what I would do if I ever found one drop of that damn wildcat — —”
“Yes, yes,” the commissioner said; “all right, all right. So you telephoned the sheriff — —”
“And we got the message—” it was one of the deputies, a plump man though nowhere as big as the sheriff, voluble, muddy about the lower legs and a little strained and weary in the face too “ — and we went out there and Mr Roth told us where to look.
But there aint no kettle in the gully where he said, so we set down and thought about just where would we hide a still if we was one of Mr Roth’s niggers and we went and looked there and sho enough there it was, neat and careful as you please, all took to pieces and about half buried and covered with brush against a kind of mound in the creek bottom.
Only it was getting toward daybreak then, so we decided to come on back to George’s house and look under the kitchen floor like Mr Roth said, and then have a little talk with George. So we come on back to George’s house, only there aint any George or nobody else in it and nothing under the kitchen floor neither and so we are coming on back toward Mr Roth’s house to ask him if maybe he aint got the wrong house in mind maybe; it’s just about full daylight now and we are about a hundred yards from Lucas’s house when what do we see but George and the gal legging it up the hill toward Lucas’s cabin with a gallon jug in each hand, only George busted the jugs on a root before we could get to them.
And about that time Lucas’s wife starts to yelling in the house and we run around to the back and there is another still setting in Lucas’s back yard and about forty gallons of whisky setting on his back gallery like he was fixing to hold a auction sale and Lucas standing there in his drawers and shirt-tail, hollering, ‘Git the axe and bust it! Git the axe and bust it!’”
“Yes,” the commissioner said. “But who do you charge? You went out there to catch George, but all your evidence is against Lucas.”
“There was two stills,” the deputy said. “And George and that gal both swear Lucas has been making and selling whisky right there in Edmonds’s back yard for twenty years.” For an instant Lucas looked up and met Edmonds’s glare, not of reproach and no longer even of surprise, but of grim and furious outrage. Then he looked away, blinking, listening to George Wilkins breathing hard beside him like a man in the profoundest depths of sleep, and to the voices.
“But you cant make his own daughter testify against him,” the commissioner said.
“George can, though,” the deputy said. “George aint any kin to him. Not to mention being in a fix where George has got to think up something good to say and think of it quick.”
“Let the court settle all that, Tom,” the sheriff said. “I was up all last night and I haven’t even had my breakfast yet. I’ve brought you a prisoner and thirty or forty gallons of evidence and two witnesses. Let’s get done with this.”
“I think you’ve
