Impervious to time too. Zachary Edmonds died, and in his turn he inherited the plantation the true heir to which, by male descent and certainly morally and, if the truth were known, probably legally too, was still alive, living on the doled pittance which his great-nephew now in his turn sent him each month. For twenty years now he had run it, tried to even with the changed times, as his father and grandfather and great-grandfather had done before him.
Yet when he looked back over those twenty years, they seemed to him one long and unbroken course of outrageous trouble and conflict, not with the land or weather (or even lately, with the federal government) but with the old negro who in his case did not even bother to remember not to call him mister, who called him Mr Edmonds and Mister Carothers or Carothers or Roth or son or spoke to him in a group of younger negroes, lumping them all together, as “you boys.”
There were the years during which Lucas had continued to farm his acreage in the same clumsy old fashion which Carothers McCaslin himself had probably followed, declining advice, refusing to use improved implements, refusing to let a tractor so much as cross the land which his McCaslin forebears had given him without recourse for life, refusing even to allow the pilot who dusted the rest of the cotton with weevil poison, even fly his laden aeroplane through the air above it, yet drawing supplies from the commissary as if he farmed, and at an outrageous and incredible profit, a thousand acres, having on the commissary books an account dating thirty years back which Edmonds knew he would never pay for the good and simple reason that Lucas would not only outlive the present Edmonds as he had outlived the two preceding him, but would probably outlast the very ledgers which held the account.
Then the still which Lucas had run almost in his, Edmonds’s, back yard for at least twenty years, according to his daughter, until his own avarice exposed him, and the three-hundred-dollar mule which he had stolen from not only his business partner and guarantor but actually from his own blood relation and swapped for a machine for divining the hiding-place of buried money; and now this: breaking up after forty-five years the home of the woman who had been the only mother he, Edmonds, ever knew, who had raised him, fed him from her own breast as she was actually doing her own child, who had surrounded him always with care for his physical body and for his spirit too, teaching him his manners, behaviour — to be gentle with his inferiors, honourable with his equals, generous to the weak and considerate of the aged, courteous, truthful and brave to all — who had given him, the motherless, without stint or expectation of reward that constant and abiding devotion and love which existed nowhere else in this world for him; — breaking up her home who had no other kin save an old brother in Jefferson whom she had not seen in ten years, and the eighteen-year-old married daughter with whom she would doubtless refuse to live since the daughter’s husband likewise had lain himself liable to the curse which she believed her own husband had incurred.
Impervious to time too. It seemed to Edmonds, sitting at his solitary supper which he couldn’t eat, that he could actually see Lucas standing there in the room before him — the face which at sixty-seven looked actually younger than his own at forty-three, showed less of the ravages of passions and thought and satieties and frustrations than his own — the face which was not at all a replica even in caricature of his grandfather McCaslin’s but which had heired and now reproduced with absolute and shocking fidelity the old ancestor’s entire generation and thought — the face which, as old Isaac McCaslin had seen it that morning forty-five years ago, was a composite of a whole generation of fierce and undefeated young Confederate soldiers, embalmed and slightly mummified — and he thought with amazement and something very like horror: He’s more like old Carothers than all the rest of us put together, including old Carothers. He is both heir and prototype simultaneously of all the geography and climate and biology which sired old Carothers and all the rest of us and our kind, myriad, countless, faceless, even nameless now except himself who fathered himself, intact and complete, contemptuous, as old Carothers must have been, of all blood black white yellow or red, including his own.
II
It was full dark when he tied the mare to Lucas’s fence and walked up the rock path neatly bordered with broken brick and upended bottles and such set into the earth, and mounted the steps and entered. Lucas was waiting, standing in the door with his hat on, in silhouette against the firelight on the hearth. The old woman did not rise.
She sat as in the commissary that afternoon, motionless, only bent a little forward, her tiny gnarled hands immobile again on the white apron, the shrunken and tragic mask touched here and there into highlight by the fire, and for the first time in his memory he was seeing her in or about the house without the clay pipe in her mouth. Lucas drew up a chair for him. But Lucas did not sit down.
He went and stood at the other side of the hearth, the firelight touching him too — the broad sweep of the hand-made beaver hat which Edmonds’s grandfather had given him fifty years ago, the faintly Syriac features, the heavy gold watch-chain looped across the unbuttoned vest. “Now what’s all this?” Edmonds said.
“She wants a voce,” Lucas said. “All right.”
“All right?” Edmonds said. “All right?”
“Yes. What’s it going to cost me?”
“I see,” Edmonds said. “If you got to pay out money for it, she cant have one. Well, this is one thing you aint going to swangdangle anybody out of. You aint buying or selling a gold-finding machine either now, old man. She dont want any mule.”
“She can have it,” Lucas said. “I just want to know how much it will cost me. Why cant you declare us voced like you done Oscar and that yellow slut he fotched out here from Memphis last summer? You not only declared them voced, you took her back to town yourself and bought her a railroad ticket back to Memphis.”
“Because they were not married very hard,” Edmonds said. “And sooner or later she was going to take a lick at him with that razor she carried. And if she had ever missed or fumbled, Oscar would have torn her head off.
He was just waiting for a chance to. That’s why I did it. But you aint Oscar. This is different. Listen to me, Lucas. You are an older man than me; I admit that. You may have more money than I’ve got, which I think you have, and you may have more sense than I’ve got, as you think you have. But you cant do this.”
“Dont tell me,” Lucas said. “Tell her. This aint my doing. I’m satisfied like this.”
“Yes. Sure. As long as you can do like you want to — spend all the time you aint sleeping and eating making George Wilkins walk up and down that creek bottom, toting that damn — that damn—” Then he stopped and started over, holding his voice not down only but back too, for a while yet at least: “I’ve told you and told you there aint any money buried around here. That you are just wasting your time. But that’s all right. You and George Wilkins both could walk around down there until you drop, for all of me. But Aunt Molly — —”
“I’m a man,” Lucas said. “I’m the man here. I’m the one to say in my house, like you and your paw and his paw were the ones to say in his. You aint got any complaints about the way I farm my land and make my crop, have you?”
“No complaints?” Edmonds said. “No complaints?” The other didn’t even pause.
“Long as I do that, I’m the one to say about my private business, and your father would be the first to tell you so if he was here. Besides, I will have to quit hunting every night soon now, to get my cotton picked. Then I’ll just hunt Saturday and Sunday night.” Up to now he had been speaking to the ceiling apparently. Now he looked at Edmonds. “But them two nights is mine. On them two nights I dont farm nobody’s land, I dont care who he is that claims to own it.”
“Well,” Edmonds said. “Two nights a week. You’ll have to start that next week, because some of your cotton is ready.” He turned to the old woman. “There, Aunt Molly,” he said. “Two nights a week, and he’s bound, even Lucas, to come to his senses soon — —”
“I dont axes him
