“Hit done awready hope me. Ah’m awright now.”
“Don’t lie to me,” she said. “You aint never lied to me. Dont lie to me now.”
Then he said it. It was his own voice, without either grief or amazement, speaking quietly out of the tremendous panting of his chest which in a moment now would begin to strain at the walls of this room too. But he would be gone in a moment.
“Nome,” he said, “Hit aint done me no good.”
“And hit cant! Cant nothing help you but Him! Ax Him! Tole Him about hit! He wants to hyar you and help you!”
“Efn He God, Ah dont needs to tole Him. Efn He God, He awready know hit. Awright. Hyar Ah is. Leff Him come down hyar and do me some good.”
“On yo knees!” she cried. “On yo knees and ax Him!” But it was not his knees on the floor, it was his feet. And for a space he could hear her feet too on the planks of the hall behind him and her voice crying after him from the door: “Spoot! Spoot!” — crying after him across the moon-dappled yard the name he had gone by in his childhood and adolescence, before the men he worked with and the bright dark nameless women he had taken in course and forgotten until he saw Mannie that day and said, “Ah’m thu wid all dat,” began to call him Rider.
It was just after midnight when he reached the mill. The dog was gone now. This time he could not remember when nor where. At first he seemed to remember hurling the empty jug at it. But later the jug was still in his hand and it was not empty, although each time he drank now the two icy runnels streamed from his mouth-corners, sopping his shirt and overalls until he walked constantly in the fierce chill of the liquid tamed now of flavour and heat and odour too even when the swallowing ceased. “Sides that,” he said, “Ah wouldn’t thow nothin at him. Ah mout kick him efn he needed hit and was close enough. But Ah wouldn’t ruint no dog chunkin hit.”
The jug was still in his hand when he entered the clearing and paused among the mute soaring of the moon-blond lumber-stacks. He stood in the middle now of the unimpeded shadow which he was treading again as he had trod it last night, swaying a little, blinking about at the stacked lumber, the skidway, the piled logs waiting for tomorrow, the boiler-shed all quiet and blanched in the moon. And then it was all right. He was moving again. But he was not moving, he was drinking, the liquid cold and swift and tasteless and requiring no swallowing, so that he could not tell if it were going down inside or outside.
But it was all right. And now he was moving, the jug gone now and he didn’t know the when or where of that either. He crossed the clearing and entered the boiler shed and went on through it, crossing the junctureless backloop of time’s trepan, to the door of the tool-room, the faint glow of the lantern beyond the plank-joints, the surge and fall of living shadow, the mutter of voices, the mute click and scutter of the dice, his hand loud on the barred door, his voice loud too: “Open hit. Hit’s me. Ah’m snakebit and bound to die.”
Then he was through the door and inside the tool-room. They were the same faces — three members of his timber gang, three or four others of the mill crew, the white night-watchman with the heavy pistol in his hip pocket and the small heap of coins and worn bills on the floor before him, one who was called Rider and was Rider standing above the squatting circle, swaying a little, blinking, the dead muscles of his face shaped into smiling while the white man stared up at him. “Make room, gamblers,” he said. “Make room. Ah’m snakebit and de pizen cant hawm me.”
“You’re drunk,” the white man said. “Get out of here. One of you niggers open the door and get him out of here.”
“Dass awright, boss-man,” he said, his voice equable, his face still fixed in the faint rigid smiling beneath the blinking of the red eyes; “Ah aint drunk. Ah just cant wawk straight fer dis yar money weighin me down.”
Now he was kneeling too, the other six dollars of his last week’s pay on the floor before him, blinking, still smiling at the face of the white man opposite, then, still smiling, he watched the dice pass from hand to hand around the circle as the white man covered the bets, watching the soiled and palm-worn money in front of the white man gradually and steadily increase, watching the white man cast and win two doubled bets in succession then lose on for twenty-five cents, the dice coming to him at last, the cupped snug clicking of them in his fist. He spun a coin into the centre.
“Shoots a dollar,” he said, and cast, and watched the white man pick up the dice and flip them back to him. “Ah lets hit lay,” he said. “Ah’m snakebit. Ah kin pass wid anything,” and cast, and this time one of the negroes flipped the dice back. “Ah lets hit lay,” he said, and cast, and moved as the white man moved, catching the white man’s wrist before his hand reached the dice, the two of them squatting, facing each other above the dice and the money, his left hand grasping the white man’s wrist, his face still fixed in the rigid and deadened smiling, his voice equable, almost deferential: “Ah kin pass even wid missouts.
But dese hyar yuther boys—” until the white man’s hand sprang open and the second pair of dice clattered on to the floor beside the first two and the white man wrenched free and sprang up and back and reached the hand backward toward the pocket where the pistol was.
The razor hung between his shoulder-blades from a loop of cotton string round his neck inside his shirt. The same motion of the hand which brought the razor forward over his shoulder flipped the blade open and freed it from the cord, the blade opening on until the back edge of it lay across the knuckles of his fist, his thumb pressing the handle into his closing fingers, so that in the second before the half-drawn pistol exploded he actually struck at the white man’s throat not with the blade but with a sweeping blow of his fist, following through in the same motion so that not even the first jet of blood touched his hand or arm.
II
After it was over — it didn’t take long; they found the prisoner on the following day, hanging from the bell-rope in a negro schoolhouse about two miles from the sawmill, and the coroner had pronounced his verdict of death at the hands of a person or persons unknown and surrendered the body to its next of kin all within five minutes — the sheriff’s deputy who had been officially in charge of the business was telling his wife about it.
They were in the kitchen. His wife was cooking supper. The deputy had been out of bed and in motion ever since the jail delivery shortly before midnight of yesterday and had covered considerable ground since, and he was spent now from lack of sleep and hurried food at hurried and curious hours and, sitting in a chair beside the stove, a little hysterical too.
“Them damn niggers,” he said. “I swear to godfrey, it’s a wonder we have as little trouble with them as we do. Because why? Because they aint human. They look like a man and they walk on their hind legs like a man, and they can talk and you can understand them and you think they are understanding you, at least now and then. But when it comes to the normal human feelings and sentiments of human beings, they might just as well be a damn herd of wild buffaloes. Now you take this one today — —”
“I wish you would,” his wife said harshly. She was a stout woman, handsome once, greying now and with a neck definitely too short, who looked not harried at all but composed in fact, only choleric.
Also, she had attended a club rook-party that afternoon and had won the first, the fifty-cent, prize until another member had insisted on a recount of the scores and the ultimate throwing out of one entire game. “Take him out of my kitchen, anyway. You sheriffs! Sitting around that courthouse all day long, talking. It’s no wonder two or three men can walk in and take prisoners out from under your very noses. They would take your chairs and desks and window sills too if you ever got your feet and backsides off of them that long.”
“It’s more of them Birdsongs than just two or three,” the deputy said. “There’s forty-two active votes in that connection. Me and Maydew taken the poll-list and counted them one day. But listen—” The wife turned from the stove, carrying a dish. The deputy snatched his feet rapidly out of the way as she passed him, passed almost over him, and went into the dining-room. The deputy raised his voice a little to carry the increased distance: “His wife dies on him. All right. But does he grieve?
He’s the biggest and busiest man at the funeral. Grabs a shovel
