Edmonds looked up again at the impassive, the impenetrable face under the broad, old-fashioned hat. “Do you want her to go?” he said. “Is that it?”
“I’m going to be the man in this house,” Lucas said. It was not stubborn. It was quiet: final. His stare was as steady as Edmonds’s was, and immeasurably colder.
“Listen,” Edmonds said. “You’re getting along. You aint got a lot more time here. You said something about father a minute ago. All right. But when his time came and he laid down to die, he laid down in peace.” Because he never had anything — Jesus, he had almost said it aloud. Damn damn damn he thought — had anything about his wife in her old age to have to say God forgive me for doing that. Almost aloud; he just caught it. “And you time’s coming to want to lay down in peace, and you dont know when.”
“Nor does you.”
“That’s correct. But I’m forty-three. You are sixty-seven.” They stared at one another. Still the face beneath the hat was impassive, impenetrable. Then Lucas moved. He turned and spat neatly into the fire.
“All right,” he said quietly. “I want to lay down in peace too. I’ll get shut of the machine. I’ll give it to George Wilkins—” That was when the old woman moved. When Edmonds looked around she was trying to rise from the chair, trying to thrust herself up with one hand, the other arm outstretched, not to ward Lucas off but toward him, Edmonds.
“No!” she cried. “Mister Zack! Cant you see? Not that he would keep on using it just the same as if he had kept it, but he would fotch on to Nat, my last one and least one, the curse of God that’s gonter destroy him or her that touches what’s done been rendered back to Him? I wants him to keep it! That’s why I got to go, so he can keep it and not have to even think about giving it to George! Dont you see?”
Edmonds had risen too, his chair crashing over backward. He was trembling, glaring at Lucas. “So you’ll try your tricks on me too. On me,” he said in a shaking voice. “All right. You’re not going to get any divorce. And you’re going to get rid of that machine. You bring that thing up to my house the first thing in the morning. You hear me?”
He returned home, or to the stable. There was a moon now, blanched upon the open cotton almost ready for picking. The curse of God. He knew what she meant, what she had been fumbling toward.
Granted the almost unbelievable circumstance that there should be as much as a thousand dollars buried and forgotten somewhere within Lucas’s radius, and granted the even more impossible circumstance that Lucas should find it: what it might do to him, even to a man sixty-seven years old, who had, as Edmonds knew, three times that sum in a Jefferson bank; even a thousand dollars on which there was no sweat, at least none of his own.
And to George, the daughter’s husband, who had not a dollar anywhere, who was not yet twenty-five and with an eighteen-year-old wife expecting a child next spring.
There was no one to take the mare; he had told Dan not to wait. He unsaddled himself and rubbed her down and opened the gate to the pasture lane and slipped the bridle and slapped her moon-bright rump as she rushed suddenly away, cantering, curvetting, her three stockings and the blaze glinting moonward for an instant as she turned. “God damn it,” he said, “I wish to hell either me or Lucas Beauchamp was a horse. Or a mule.”
Lucas did not appear the next morning with the divining machine. When Edmonds himself departed at nine o’clock (it was Sunday) he still had not appeared. Edmonds was driving his car now; for a moment he thought of going to Lucas’s house, stopping there on his way.
But it was Sunday; it seemed to him that he had been worrying and stewing over Lucas’s affairs for six days a week since last May and very likely he would resume stewing and fretting over them at sunup tomorrow, and since Lucas himself had stated that beginning next week he would devote only Saturdays and Sundays to the machine, possibly until that time he would consider himself under his own dispensation to refrain from it on those two days.
So he went on. He was gone all that day — to church five miles away, then to Sunday dinner with some friends three miles further on, where he spent the afternoon looking at other men’s cotton and adding his voice to the curses at governmental interference with the raising and marketing of it.
So it was after dark when he reached his own gate again and remembered Lucas and Molly and the divining machine once more. Lucas would not have left it at the empty house in his absence, so he turned and drove on to Lucas’s cabin. It was dark; when he shouted there was no answer.
So he drove on the quarter-mile to George’s and Nat’s, but it was dark too, no answer there to his voice. Maybe it’s all right now, he thought. Maybe they’ve all gone to church. Anyway, it’ll be tomorrow in another twelve hours I’ll have to start in worrying about Lucas and something and so it might as well be this, something at least I am familiar with, accustomed to.
Then the next morning, Monday, he had been in the stable for almost an hour and neither Dan nor Oscar had appeared. He had opened the stalls himself and turned the mule drove into the lane to the pasture and was just coming out of the mare’s stall with the feed basket as Oscar came into the hallway, not running but trotting wearily and steadily.
Then Edmonds saw that he still wore his Sunday clothes — a bright shirt and a tie, serge trousers with a long tear in one leg and splashed to the knees with mud. “It’s Aunt Molly Beauchamp,” Oscar said. “She been missing since yestiddy sometime. We been hunting her all night.
We found where she went down to the creek and we been tracking her. Only she so little and light she dont hardly make a foot on the ground. Uncle Luke and George and Nat and Dan and some others are still hunting.”
“I’ll saddle the mare,” Edmonds said. “I’ve turned the mules out; you’ll have to go to the pasture and catch one. Hurry.”
The mules, free in the big pasture, were hard to catch; it was almost an hour before Oscar returned bareback on one of them. And it was two hours more before they overtook Lucas and George and Nat and Dan and another man where they followed and lost and hunted and found and followed again the faint, light prints of the old woman’s feet as they seemed to wander without purpose among the jungle of brier and rotted logs along the creek.
It was almost noon when they found her, lying on her face in the mud, the once immaculate apron and the clean faded skirts stained and torn, one hand still grasping the handle of the divining-machine as she had fallen with it. She was not dead.
When Oscar picked her up she opened her eyes, looking at no one, at nothing, and closed them again. “Run,” Edmonds told Dan. “Take the mare. Go back for the car and go get Doctor Rideout. Hurry. — Can you carry her?”
“I can tote her,” Oscar said. “She dont weigh hardly nothing. Not nigh as much as that finding-box.”
“I’ll tote her,” George said. “Bein as she’s Nat’s—” Edmonds turned on him, on Lucas too.
“You tote that box,” he said. “Both of you tote it. Hope it finds something between here and the house. Because if those needles ever move on my place afterward, neither of you all will be looking at them. — I’m going to see about that divorce,” he said to Lucas. “Before she kills herself.
Before you and that machine kill her between you. By God, I’m glad I aint walking in your shoes right now. I’m glad I aint going to lie in your bed tonight, thinking about what you’re going to think about.”
The day came. The cotton was all in and ginned and baled and frost had fallen, completing the firing of the corn which was being gathered and measured into the cribs. With Lucas and Molly in the back seat, he drove in to Jefferson and stopped before the county courthouse where the Chancellor was sitting. “You dont need to come in,” he told Lucas.
“They probably wouldn’t let you in. But you be around close. I’m not going to wait for you. And remember. Aunt Molly gets the house, and half your crop this year and half of it every year as long as you stay on my place.”
“You mean every year I keep on farming my land.”
“I mean every damned year you stay on my place. Just what I said.”
“Cass Edmonds give me that land to be mine long as I — —”
“You heard me,” Edmonds said. Lucas looked at him. He blinked.
“Do you want me to move off of it?” he said.
“Why?” Edmonds
