But here the next day he’s the first man back at work except the fireman, getting back to the mill before the fireman had his fire going, let alone steam up; five minutes earlier and he could even have helped the fireman wake Birdsong up so Birdsong could go home and go back to bed again, or he could even have cut Birdsong’s throat then and saved everybody trouble.
“So he comes to work, the first man on the job, when McAndrews and everybody else expected him to take the day off since even a nigger couldn’t want no better excuse for a holiday than he had just buried his wife, when a white man would have took the day off out of pure respect no matter how he felt about his wife, when even a little child would have had sense enough to take a day off when he would still get paid for it too. But not him.
The first man there, jumping from one log truck to another before the starting whistle quit blowing even, snatching up ten-foot cypress logs by himself and throwing them around like matches.
And then, when everybody had finally decided that that’s the way to take him, the way he wants to be took, he walks off the job in the middle of the afternoon without by-your-leave or much obliged or goodbye to McAndrews or nobody else, gets himself a whole gallon of bust-skull white-mule whisky, comes straight back to the mill and to the same crap game where Birdsong has been running crooked dice on them mill niggers for fifteen years, goes straight to the same game where he has been peacefully losing a probably steady average ninety-nine per cent. of his pay ever since he got big enough to read the spots on them miss-out dice, and cuts Birdsong’s throat clean to the neckbone five minutes later.” The wife passed him again and went to the dining-room.
Again he drew his feet back and raised his voice:
“So me and Maydew go out there. Not that we expected to do any good, as he had probably passed Jackson, Tennessee, about daylight; and besides, the simplest way to find him would be just to stay close behind them Birdsong boys.
Of course there wouldn’t be nothing hardly worth bringing back to town after they did find him, but it would close the case. So it’s just by the merest chance that we go by his house; I dont even remember why we went now, but we did; and there he is. Sitting behind the barred front door with a open razor on one knee and a loaded shotgun on the other? No. He was asleep.
A big pot of field peas et clean empty on the stove, and him laying in the back yard asleep in the broad sun with just his head under the edge of the porch in the shade and a dog that looked like a cross between a bear and a Polled Angus steer yelling fire and murder from the back door.
And we wake him and he sets up and says, ‘Awright, white folks. Ah done it. Jest dont lock me up,’ and Maydew says, ‘Mr. Birdsong’s kinfolks aint going to lock you up neither. You’ll have plenty of fresh air when they get hold of you,’ and he says, ‘Ah done it. Jest dont lock me up’ — advising, instructing the sheriff not to lock him up; he done it all right and it’s too bad but it aint convenient for him to be cut off from the fresh air at the moment.
So we loaded him into the car, when here come the old woman — his ma or aunt or something — panting up the road at a dog-trot, wanting to come with us too, and Maydew trying to explain to her what would maybe happen to her too if them Birdsong kin catches us before we can get him locked up, only she is coming anyway, and like Maydew says, her being in the car too might be a good thing if the Birdsongs did happen to run into us, because after all interference with the law cant be condoned even if the Birdsong connection did carry that beat for Maydew last summer.
“So we brought her along too and got him to town and into the jail all right and turned him over to Ketcham and Ketcham taken him on up stairs and the old woman coming too, right on up to the cell, telling Ketcham, ‘Ah tried to raise him right. He was a good boy. He aint never been in no trouble till now.
He will suffer for what he done. But dont let the white folks get him,’ until Ketcham says, ‘You and him ought to thought of that before he started barbering white men without using no lather first.’
So he locked them both up in the cell because he felt like Maydew did, that her being in there with him might be a good influence on the Birdsong boys if anything started if he should happen to be running for sheriff or something when Maydew’s term was up.
So Ketcham come on back down stairs and pretty soon the chain gang come in and went on up to the bull pen and he thought things had settled down for a while when all of a sudden he begun to hear the yelling, not howling: yelling, though there wasn’t no words in it, and he grabbed his pistol and run back up stairs to the bull pen where the chain gang was and Ketcham could see into the cell where the old woman was kind of squinched down in one corner and where that nigger had done tore that iron cot clean out of the floor it was bolted to and was standing in the middle of the cell, holding the cot over his head like it was a baby’s cradle, yelling, and says to the old woman, ‘Ah aint goan hurt you,’ and throws the cot against the wall and comes and grabs holt of that steel-barred door and rips it out of the wall, bricks hinges and all, and walks out of the cell toting the door over his head like it was a gauze window-screen, hollering, “It’s awright. It’s awright. Ah aint trying to git away.’
“Of course Ketcham could have shot him right there, but like he said, if it wasn’t going to be the law, then them Birdsong boys ought to have the first lick at him. So Ketcham dont shoot. Instead, he jumps in behind where them chain gang niggers was kind of backed off from that steel door, hollering, ‘Grab him!
Throw him down!’ except the niggers hung back at first too until Ketcham gets in where he can kick the ones he can reach, batting at the others with the flat of the pistol until they rush him. And Ketcham says that for a full minute that nigger would grab them as they come in and fling them clean across the room like they was rag dolls, saying, ‘Ah aint tryin to git out.
Ah aint tryin to git out,’ until at last they pulled him down — a big mass of nigger heads and arms and legs boiling around on the floor and even then Ketcham says every now and then a nigger would come flying out and go sailing through the air across the room, spraddled out like a flying squirrel and with his eyes sticking out like car headlights, until at last they had him down and Ketcham went in and begun peeling away niggers until he could see him laying there under the pile of them, laughing, with tears big as glass marbles running across his face and down past his ears and making a kind of popping sound on the floor like somebody dropping bird eggs, laughing and laughing and saying, ‘Hit look lack Ah just cant quit thinking.
Look lack Ah just cant quit.’ And what do you think of that?”
“I think if you eat any supper in this house you’ll do it in the next five minutes,” his wife said from the dining-room. “I’m going to clear this table then and I’m going to the picture show.”
THE OLD PEOPLE
I
AT FIRST THERE was nothing. There was the faint, cold, steady rain, the grey and constant light of the late November dawn, with the voices of the hounds converging somewhere in it and toward them. Then Sam Fathers, standing just behind the boy as he had been standing when the boy shot his first running rabbit with his first gun and almost with the first load it ever carried, touched his shoulder and he began to shake, not with any cold.
Then the buck was there. He did not come into sight; he was just there, looking not like a ghost but as if all of light were condensed in him and he were the source of it, not only moving in it but disseminating it, already running, seen first as you always see the deer, in
