“She can have all of it,” Lucas said. “I’ll raise it all right. And she can have all of it. I got them three thousand dollars old Carothers left me, right there in that bank yonder. They’ll last me out my time — unless you done decided to give half of them to somebody. And when me and George Wilkins find that money — —”
“Get out of the car,” Edmonds said. “Go on. Get out of it.”
The Chancellor was sitting in his office — a small detached building beside the courthouse proper. As they walked toward it Edmonds suddenly had to take the old woman’s arm, catching her just in time; feeling again the thin, almost fleshless arm beneath the layers of sleeve, dry and light and brittle and frail as a rotted stick. He stopped, holding her up. “Aunt Molly,” he said, “do you still want to do this? You dont have to. I’ll take that thing away from him. By God, I — —”
She tried to go on, tugging at his hand. “I got to,” she said. “He’ll get another one. Then he’ll give that one to George the first thing to keep you from taking it. And they’ll find it some day and maybe I’ll be gone then and cant help. And Nat was my least and my last one. I wont never see the others before I die.”
“Come on,” Edmonds said. “Come on then.”
There were a few people going in and out of the office; a few inside, not many. They waited quietly at the back of the room until their turn came. Then he found that he actually was holding her up. He led her forward, still supporting her, believing that if he released her for an instant even she would collapse into a bundle of dried and lifeless sticks, covered by the old, faded, perfectly clean garments, at his feet. “Ah, Mr Edmonds,” the Chancellor said. “This is the plaintiff?”
“Yes, sir,” Edmonds said. The Chancellor (he was quite old) slanted his head to look at Molly above his spectacles. Then he shifted them up his nose and looked at her through them. He made a clucking sound. “After forty-five years. You cant do anything about it?”
“No, sir,” Edmonds said. “I tried. I …” The Chancellor made the clucking sound again. He looked down at the bill which the clerk laid before him.
“She will be provided for, of course.”
“Yes, sir. I’ll see to that.”
The Chancellor mused upon the bill. “There’s no contest, I suppose.”
“No, sir,” Edmonds said. And then — and he did not even know Lucas had followed them until he saw the Chancellor slant his head again and look past them this time across the spectacles, and saw the clerk glance up and heard him say, “You, nigger! Take off your hat!” — then Lucas thrust Molly aside and came to the table, removing his hat as he did so.
“We aint gonter have no contest or no voce neither,” he said.
“You what?” the Chancellor said. “What’s this?” Lucas had not once looked at Edmonds. As far as Edmonds could tell, he was not looking at the Chancellor either. Edmonds thought idiotically how it must have been years since he had seen Lucas uncovered; in fact, he could not remember at all being aware previously that Lucas’s hair was grey.
“We dont want no voce,” Lucas said. “I done changed my mind.”
“Are you the husband?” the Chancellor said.
“That’s right,” Lucas said.
“Say sir to the court!” the clerk said. Lucas glanced at the clerk.
“What?” he said. “I dont want no court. I done changed my — —”
“Why, you uppity—” the clerk began.
“Wait,” the Chancellor said. He looked at Lucas. “You have waited too late. This bill has been presented in due form and order. I am about to pronounce on it.”
“Not now,” Lucas said. “We dont want no voce. Roth Edmonds knows what I mean.”
“What? Who does?”
“Why, the uppity—” the clerk said. “Your Honour—” Again the Chancellor raised his hand slightly toward the clerk. He still looked at Lucas.
“Mister Roth Edmonds,” Lucas said. Edmonds moved forward quickly, still holding the old woman’s arm. The Chancellor looked at him.
“Yes, Mr Edmonds?”
“Yes, sir,” Edmonds said. “That’s right. We dont want it now.”
“You wish to withdraw the bill?”
“Yes, sir. If you please, sir.”
“Ah,” the Chancellor said. He folded the bill and handed it to the clerk. “Strike this off the docket, Mr Hulett,” he said.
When they were out of the office, he was almost carrying her, though she was trying to walk. “Here,” he said, almost roughly, “it’s all right now. Didn’t you hear the judge? Didn’t you hear Lucas tell the judge that Roth Edmonds knows what he means?”
He lifted her into the car almost bodily, Lucas just behind them. But instead of getting in, Lucas said, “Wait a minute.”
“Wait a minute?” Edmonds said. “Hah!” he said. “You’ve bankrupted your waiting. You’ve already spent—” But Lucas had gone on. And Edmonds waited. He stood beside the car and watched Lucas cross the Square, towards the stores, erect beneath the old, fine, well-cared-for hat, walking with that unswerving and dignified deliberation which every now and then, and with something sharp at the heart, Edmonds recognised as having come from his own ancestry too as the hat had come.
He was not gone long. He returned, unhurried, and got into the car. He was carrying a small sack — obviously candy, a nickel’s worth. He put it into Molly’s hand.
“Here,” he said. “You aint got no teeth left but you can still gum it.”
III
It was cool that night. He had a little fire, and for supper the first ham from the smokehouse, and he was sitting at his solitary meal, eating with more appetite than it seemed to him he had had in months, when he heard the knocking from the front of the house — the rapping of knuckles on the edge of the veranda, not loud, not hurried, merely peremptory. He spoke to the cook through the kitchen door: “Tell him to come in here,” he said. He went on eating.
He was eating when Lucas entered and passed him and set the divining machine on the other end of the table. It was clean of mud now; it looked as though it had been polished, at once compact and complex and efficient-looking with its bright cryptic dials and gleaming knobs. Lucas stood looking down at it for a moment. Then he turned away. Until he left the room he did not once look toward it again. “There it is,” he said. “Get rid of it.”
“All right. I’ll put it away in the attic. Maybe by next spring Aunt Molly will forget about it and you can — —”
“No. Get rid of it.”
“For good?”
“Yes. Clean off this place, where I wont never see it again. Just dont tell me where. Sell it if you can and keep the money. But sell it a far piece away, where I wont never see it nor hear tell of it again.”
“Well,” Edmonds said. “Well.” He thrust his chair back from the table and sat looking up at the other, at the old man who had emerged out of the tragic complexity of his motherless childhood as the husband of the woman who had been the only mother he ever knew, who had never once said “sir” to his white skin and whom he knew even called him Roth behind his back, let alone to his face. “Look here,” he said. “You dont have to do that.
Aunt Molly’s old, and she’s got some curious notions. But what she dont know — Because you aint going to find any money, buried or not, around here or anywhere else. And if you want to take that damn thing out now and then, say once or twice a month, and spend the night walking up and down that damn creek — —”
“No,” Lucas said. “Get rid of it. I dont want to never see it again. Man has got three score and ten years on this earth, the Book says. He can want a heap in that time and a heap of what he can want is due to come to him, if he just starts in soon enough. I done waited too late to start. That money’s there.
Them two white men that slipped in here that night three years ago and dug up twenty-two thousand dollars and got clean away with it before anybody saw them. I know. I saw the hole where they filled it up again, and the churn it was buried in. But I am near to the end of my three score and ten, and I reckon to find that money aint for me.”
PANTALOON IN BLACK
I
HE STOOD IN the worn, faded clean overalls which Mannie herself had washed only a week ago, and heard the first clod strike the pine box. Soon he had one of the shovels himself, which in his hands (he was better than six feet and weighed better than two hundred pounds) resembled the toy shovel a child plays with at the shore, in half cubic foot of flung dirt no more than the light gout of sand the child’s shovel would have flung.
Another member of his sawmill gang touched his arm and said, “Lemme have
