“Do you want me to answer that?” Lucas said.
“No!” Edmonds said violently. “Get in the car!”
When they reached town, the streets leading into it and the Square itself were crowded with cars and wagons; the flag rippled and flew in the bright May weather above the federal courthouse. Following Edmonds, he and Nat and George crossed the thronged pavement, walking in a narrow lane of faces they knew — other people from their place, people from other places along the creek and in the neighbourhood, come the seventeen miles also with no hope of getting into the courtroom itself but just to wait on the street and see them pass — and faces they only knew by hearsay: the rich white lawyers and judges and marshals talking to one another around their proud cigars, the haughty and powerful of the earth.
They entered the marble foyer, crowded too and sonorous with voices, where George began to walk gingerly on the hard heels of his Sunday shoes. Then Lucas took from his coat the thick, soiled, folded document which had laid hidden under the loose brick in his fireplace for three weeks now and touched Edmonds’s arm with it — the paper thick enough and soiled enough yet which of its own accord apparently fell open at a touch, stiffly but easily too along the old hand-smudged folds, exposing, presenting among the meaningless and unread lettering between salutation and seal the three phrases in the cramped script of whatever nameless clerk which alone of the whole mass of it Lucas at least had bothered to read: George Wilkins and Nathalie Beauchamp and a date in October of last year.
“Do you mean,” Edmonds said, “that you have had this all the time? All these three weeks?” But still the face he glared at was impenetrable, almost sleepy-looking.
“You hand it to Judge Gowan,” Lucas said.
He and Nat and George sat quietly on a hard wooden bench in a small office, where an oldish white man — Lucas knew him though not particularly that he was a deputy marshal — chewed a toothpick and read a Memphis newspaper.
Then a young, brisk, slightly harried white man in glasses opened the door and glinted his glasses an instant and vanished; then, following the old white man they crossed the foyer again, the marble cavern murmurously resonant with the constant slow feet and the voices, the faces watching them again as they mounted the stairs. They crossed the empty courtroom without pausing and entered another office but larger, finer, quieter.
There was an angry-looking man whom Lucas did not know — the United States Attorney, who had moved to Jefferson only after the administration changed eight years ago, after Lucas had stopped coming to town very often anymore.
But Edmonds was there, and behind the table sat a man whom Lucas did know, who had used to come out in old Cass’s time forty and fifty years ago and stay for weeks during the quail season, shooting with Zack, with Lucas to hold the horses while they got down to shoot when the dogs pointed. It took hardly any time at all.
“Lucas Beauchamp?” the judge said. “With thirty gallons of whisky and a still sitting on his back porch in broad daylight? Nonsense.”
“Then there you are,” the angry man said, flinging out his hands. “I didn’t know anything about this either until Edmonds—” But the judge was not even listening to him. He was looking at Nat.
“Come here, girl,” he said. Nat moved forward and stopped. Lucas could see her trembling. She looked small, thin as a lath, young; she was their youngest and last — seventeen, born into his wife’s old age and, it sometimes seemed to him, into his too. She was too young to be married and face all the troubles which married people had to get through in order to become old and find out for themselves the taste and savour of peace. Just a stove and a new back porch and a well were not enough. “You’re Lucas’s girl?” the judge said.
“Yassuh,” Nat said in her high, sweet, chanting soprano. “I’m name Nat. Nat Wilkins, Gawge Wilkins’s wife. There the paper fer hit in yo hand.”
“I see it is,” the judge said. “It’s dated last October.”
“Yes sir, Judge,” George said. “We been had it since I sold my cotton last fall. We uz married then, only she wont come to live in my house unto Mister Lu — I mean I gots a stove and the porch fixed and a well dug.”
“Have you got that now?”
“Yes sir, Judge,” George said. “I got the money for hit now and I’m just fo gittin the rest of it, soon as I gits around to the hammerin and the diggin.”
“I see,” the judge said. “Henry,” he said to the other old man, the one with the toothpick, “have you got that whisky where you can pour it out?”
“Yes, Judge,” the other said.
“And both those stills where you can chop them to pieces, destroy them good?”
“Yes, Judge.”
“Then clear my office. Get them out of here. Get that jimber-jawed clown out of here at least.”
“He’s talking about you, George Wilkins,” Lucas murmured.
“Yes sir,” George said. “Sound like he is.”
IV
At first he thought that two or three days at the outside would suffice — or nights, that is, since George would have to be in his crop during the day, let alone getting himself and Nat settled for marriage in their house.
But a week passed, and though Nat would come back home at least once during the day, usually to borrow something, he had not seen George at all.
He comprehended the root of his impatience — the mound and its secret which someone, anyone else, might stumble upon by chance as he had, the rapid and daily shortening of the allotted span in which he had not only to find the treasure but to get any benefit and pleasure from it, all in abeyance until he could complete the petty business which had intervened, and nothing with which to pass the period of waiting — the good year, the good early season, and cotton and corn springing up almost in the planter’s wheel-print, so that there was now nothing to do but lean on the fence and watch it grow; — on the one hand, that which he wanted to do and could not; on the other, that which he could have done and no need for.
But at last, in the second week, when he knew that in one more day his patience would be completely gone, he stood just inside his kitchen door and watched George enter and cross the lot in the dusk and enter the stable and emerge with his mare and put her to the wagon and drive away. So the next morning he went no further than his first patch and leaned on the fence in the bright dew looking at his cotton until his wife began to shout at him from the house.
When he entered, Nat was sitting in his chair beside the hearth, bent forward, her long narrow hands dangling limp between her knees, her face swollen and puffed again with crying. “Yawl and your George Wilkins!” Molly said. “Go on and tell him.”
“He aint started on the well or nothing,” Nat said. “He aint even propped up the back porch. With all that money you give him, he aint even started. And I axed him and he just say he aint got around to it yet, and I waited and I axed him again and he still just say he aint got around to it yet.
Unto I told him at last that ifn he didn’t get started like he promised, my mind gonter change about whatall I seed that night them shurfs come out here and so last night he say he gwine up the road a piece and do I wants to come back home and stay because he mought not get back unto late and I say I can bar the door because I thought he was going to fix to start on the well.
And when I seed him catch up pappy’s mare and wagon, I knowed that was it. And it aint unto almost daylight when he got back, and he aint got nothing. Not nothing to dig with and no boards to fix the porch, and he had done spent the money pappy give him.
And I told him what I was gonter do and I was waiting at the house soon as Mister Roth got up and I told Mister Roth my mind done changed about what I seed that night and Mister Roth started in to cussing and say I done waited too late because I’m Gawge’s wife now and the Law wont listen to me and for me to come and tell you and Gawge both to be offen his place by sundown.”
“There now!” Molly cried. “There’s your George Wilkins!” Lucas was already moving toward the door. “Whar you gwine?” she said. “Whar we gonter move to?”
“You wait to start worrying about where we will move to when Roth Edmonds starts to worrying about why we aint gone,” Lucas said.
The sun was well up now. It was going to be hot today; it was going to make cotton
