“The light hurts them,” she said. He helped her up and turned the chair until its back was towards the window. This time she found it herself and sat down. Edmonds returned to the swivel chair.
“All right,” he said. “What is it?”
“I want to leave Lucas,” she said. “I want one of them … one of them …” Edwards sat perfectly motionless, staring at the face which now he could not distinctly see.
“You what?” he said. “A divorce? After forty-five years, at your age? What will you do? How will you get along without somebody — —”
“I can work. I will — —”
“Damn that,” Edmonds said. “You know I didn’t mean that. Even if father hadn’t fixed it in his will to take care of you for the rest of your life. I mean what will you do? Leave the house that belongs to you and Lucas and go live with Nat and George?”
“That will be just as bad,” she said. “I got to go clean away. Because he’s crazy. Ever since he got that machine, he’s done went crazy. Him and — and …” Even though he had just spoken it, he realised that she couldn’t even think of George’s name.
She spoke again, immobile, looking at nothing as far as he could tell, her hands like two cramped ink-splashes on the lap of the immaculate apron: “ — stays out all night long every night with it, hunting that buried money. He done even take care of his own stock right no more.
I feeds the mare and the hogs and milks, tries to. But that’s all right. I can do that. I’m glad to do that when he is sick in the body. But he’s sick in the mind now. Bad sick. He dont even get up to go to church on Sunday no more. He’s bad sick, marster. He’s doing a thing the Lord aint meant for folks to do. And I’m afraid.”
“Afraid of what?” Edmonds said. “Lucas is strong as a horse. He’s a better man than I am, right now. He’s all laid by now, with nothing to do until his crop makes. It wont hurt him to stay up all night walking up and down that creek with George for a while. He’ll have to quit next month to pick his cotton.”
“It aint that I’m afraid of.”
“Then what?” he said. “What is it?”
“I’m afraid he’s going to find it.”
Again Edmonds sat in his chair, looking at her. “Afraid he’s going to find it?” Still she looked at nothing that he could see, motionless, tiny, like a doll, an ornament.
“Because God say, ‘What’s rendered to My earth, it belong to Me unto I resurrect it. And let him or her touch it, and beware.’ And I’m afraid. I got to go. I got to be free of him.”
“There aint any buried money in this country,” Edmonds said. “Hasn’t he been poking around in the bottom ever since last spring, hunting for it?
And that machine aint going to find it either. I tried my best to keep him from buying it. I did everything I knew except have that damn agent arrested for trespass. I wish now I had done that. If I had just foreseen —— But that wouldn’t have done any good. Lucas would just have met him down the road somewhere and bought it. But he aint going to find any more buried money with it than he found walking up and down the creek, making George Wilkins dig where he thought it ought to be. Even he’ll believe that soon. He’ll quit. Then he’ll be all right.”
“No,” she said. “Lucas is an old man. He dont look it, but he’s sixty-seven years old. And when a man that old takes up money-hunting, it’s like when he takes up gambling or whisky or women. He aint going to have time to quit. And then he’s gonter be lost, lost.…” She ceased. She did not move on the hard chair, not even the depthless splotches of her knotted hands against the apron’s blanched spread. Damn, damn, damn, Edmonds thought.
“I could tell you how to cure him in two days,” he said. “If you were twenty years younger. But you couldn’t do it now.”
“Tell me. I can do it.”
“No,” he said. “You are too old now.”
“Tell me. I can do it.”
“Wait till he comes in with that thing to-morrow morning, then take it yourself and go down to the creek and hunt buried money. Do it the next morning, and the one after that. Let him find out that’s what you are doing — using his machine while he is asleep, all the time he is asleep and cant watch it, cant hunt himself. Let him come in and find there’s no breakfast ready for him, wake up and find there’s no supper ready because you’re still down in the creek bottom, hunting buried money with his machine. That’ll cure him. But you’re too old. You couldn’t stand it. You go back home and when Lucas wakes up, you and he — No, that’s too far for you to walk twice in one day. Tell him I said to wait there for me. I’ll come after supper and talk to him.”
“Talking wont change him. I couldn’t. And you cant. All I can do is to go clean away from him.”
“Maybe it cant,” Edmonds said. “But I can damn sure try it. And he will damn sure listen. I’ll be there after supper. You tell him to wait.”
She rose then. He watched her toil back down the road toward home, tiny, almost like a doll. It was not just concern, and, if he had told himself the truth, not concern for her at all. He was raging — an abrupt boiling-over of an accumulation of floutings and outrages covering not only his span but his father’s lifetime too, back into the time of his grandfather McCaslin Edmonds.
Lucas was not only the oldest person living on the place, older even than Edmonds’s father would have been, there was that quarter strain not only of white blood and not even Edmonds blood, but of old Carothers McCaslin himself, from whom Lucas was descended not only by a male line but in only two generations, while Edmonds was descended by a female line and five generations back; even as a child the boy remarked how Lucas always referred to his father as Mr Edmonds, never as Mister Zack, as the other negroes did, and how with a cold and deliberate calculation he evaded having to address the white man by any name whatever when speaking to him.
Yet it was not that Lucas made capital of his white or even his McCaslin blood, but the contrary. It was as if he were not only impervious to that blood, he was indifferent to it. He didn’t even need to strive with it. He didn’t even have to bother to defy it.
He resisted it simply by being the composite of the two races which made him, simply by possessing it. Instead of being at once the battle-ground and victim of the two strains, he was a vessel, durable, ancestryless, non-conductive, in which the toxin and its anti stalemated one another, seetheless, unrumoured in the outside air.
There had been three of them once: James, then a sister named Fonsiba, then Lucas, children of Aunt Tomey’s Turl, old Carothers McCaslin’s son, and Tennie Beauchamp, whom Edmonds’s great-uncle Amodeus McCaslin won from a neighbour in a poker game in 1859. Fonsiba married and went to Arkansas to live and never returned, though Lucas continued to hear from her until her death.
But James, the eldest, ran away before he became of age and didn’t stop until he had crossed the Ohio River and they never heard from or of him again at all — that is, that his white kindred ever knew.
It was as though he had not only (as his sister was later to do) put running water between himself and the land of his grandmother’s betrayal and his father’s nameless birth, but he had interposed latitude and geography too, shaking from his feet for ever the very dust of the land where his white ancestor could acknowledge or repudiate him from one day to another, according to his whim, but where he dared not even repudiate the white ancestor save when it met the white man’s humour of the moment.
But Lucas remained. He didn’t have to stay. Of the three children, he not only had no material shackles (nor, as Carothers Edmonds began to comprehend later, moral ones either) holding him to the place, he alone was equipped beforehand with financial independence to have departed for ever at any time after his twenty-first birthday.
It was known father to son to son among the Edmonds until it came to Carothers in his
