“I know,” she said. Then he realised that she was not looking at him, not seeing him at least. “It’s terrible.”
“So is murder terrible,” Stevens said. “It’s better this way.” Then she was looking at him again.
“I wasn’t thinking of him. I was thinking of Mollie. She mustn’t know.”
“Yes,” Stevens said. “I have already talked with Mr Wilmoth at the paper. He has agreed not to print anything. I will telephone the Memphis paper, but it’s probably too late for that. … If we could just persuade her to go on back home this afternoon, before the Memphis paper … Out there, where the only white person she ever sees is Mr Edmonds, and I will telephone him; and even if the other darkies should hear about it, I’m sure they wouldn’t.
And then maybe in about two or three months I could go out there and tell her he is dead and buried somewhere in the North.…” This time she was watching him with such an expression that he ceased talking; she sat there, erect on the hard chair, watching him until he had ceased.
“She will want to take him back home with her,” she said.
“Him?” Stevens said. “The body?” She watched him. The expression was neither shocked nor disapproving. It merely embodied some old, timeless, female affinity for blood and grief. Stevens thought: She has walked to town in this heat. Unless Hamp brought her in the buggy he peddles eggs and vegetables from.
“He is the only child of her oldest daughter, her own dead first child. He must come home.”
“He must come home,” Stevens said as quietly. “I’ll attend to it at once. I’ll telephone at once.”
“You are kind.” For the first time she stirred, moved. He watched her hands draw the reticule toward her, clasping it. “I will defray the expenses. Can you give me some idea —— ?”
He looked her straight in the face. He told the lie without batting an eye, quickly and easily. “Ten or twelve dollars will cover it. They will furnish a box and there will be only the transportation.”
“A box?” Again she was looking at him with that expression curious and detached, as though he were a child. “He is her grandson, Mr Stevens. When she took him to raise, she gave him my father’s name — Samuel Worsham. Not just a box, Mr Stevens. I understand that can be done by paying so much a month.”
“Not just a box,” Stevens said. He said it in exactly the same tone in which he had said He must come home. “Mr Edmonds will want to help, I know. And I understand that old Luke Beauchamp has some money in the bank. And if you will permit me — —”
“That will not be necessary,” she said. He watched her open the reticule; he watched her count on to the desk twenty-five dollars in frayed bills and coins ranging down to nickels and dimes and pennies. “That will take care of the immediate expense. I will tell her — You are sure there is no hope?”
“I am sure. He will die tonight.”
“I will tell her this afternoon that he is dead then.”
“Would you like for me to tell her?”
“I will tell her,” she said.
“Would you like for me to come out and see her, then, talk to her?”
“It would be kind of you.” Then she was gone, erect, her feet crisp and light, almost brisk, on the stairs, ceasing. He telephoned again, to the Illinois warden, then to an undertaker in Joliet. Then once more he crossed the hot, empty square. He had only to wait a short while for the editor to return from dinner.
“We’re bringing him home,” he said. “Miss Worsham and you and me and some others. It will cost — —”
“Wait,” the editor said. “What others?”
“I dont know yet. It will cost about two hundred. I’m not counting the telephones; I’ll take care of them myself. I’ll get something out of Carothers Edmonds the first time I catch him; I dont know how much, but something. And maybe fifty around the square. But the rest of it is you and me, because she insisted on leaving twenty-five with me, which is just twice what I tried to persuade her it would cost and just exactly four times what she can afford to pay — —”
“Wait,” the editor said. “Wait.”
“And he will come in on Number Four the day after tomorrow and we will meet it, Miss Worsham and his grandmother, the old nigger, in my car and you and me in yours. Miss Worsham and the old woman will take him back home, back where he was born. Or where the old woman raised him. Or where she tried to. And the hearse out there will be fifteen more, not counting the flowers — —”
“Flowers?” the editor cried.
“Flowers,” Stevens said. “Call the whole thing two hundred and twenty-five. And it will probably be mostly you and me. All right?”
“No it aint all right,” the editor said. “But it dont look like I can help myself. By Jupiter,” he said, “even if I could help myself, the novelty will be almost worth it. It will be the first time in my life I ever paid money for copy I had already promised beforehand I wont print.”
“Have already promised beforehand you will not print,” Stevens said. And during the remainder of that hot and now windless afternoon, while officials from the city hall, and justices of the peace and bailiffs come fifteen and twenty miles from the ends of the county, mounted the stairs to the empty office and called his name and cooled their heels a while and then went away and returned and sat again, fuming, Stevens passed from store to store and office to office about the square — merchant and clerk, proprietor and employee, doctor dentist lawyer and barber — with his set and rapid speech: “It’s to bring a dead nigger home. It’s for Miss Worsham. Never mind about a paper to sign: just give me a dollar. Or a half a dollar then. Or a quarter then.”
And that night after supper he walked through the breathless and star-filled darkness to Miss Worsham’s house on the edge of town and knocked on the paintless front door. Hamp Worsham admitted him — an old man, belly-bloated from the vegetables on which he and his wife and Miss Worsham all three mostly lived, with blurred old eyes and a fringe of white hair about the head and face of a Roman general.
“She expecting you,” he said. “She say to kindly step up to the chamber.”
“Is that where Aunt Mollie is?” Stevens said.
“We all dar,” Worsham said.
So Stevens crossed the lamplit hall (he knew that the entire house was still lighted with oil lamps and there was no running water in it) and preceded the Negro up the clean, paintless stairs beside the faded wallpaper, and followed the old Negro along the hall and into the clean, spare bedroom with its unmistakable faint odour of old maidens.
They were all there, as Worsham had said — his wife, a tremendous light-coloured woman in a bright turban leaning in the door, Miss Worsham erect again on a hard straight chair, the old Negress sitting in the only rocking-chair beside the hearth on which even tonight a few ashes smouldered faintly.
She held a reed-stemmed clay pipe but she was not smoking it, the ash dead and white in the stained bowl; and actually looking at her for the first time, Stevens thought: Good Lord, she’s not as big as a ten-year-old child. Then he sat too, so that the four of them — himself, Miss Worsham, the old Negress and her brother — made a circle about the brick hearth on which the ancient symbol of human coherence and solidarity smouldered.
“He’ll be home the day after tomorrow, Aunt Mollie,” he said. The old Negress didn’t even look at him; she never had looked at him.
“He dead,” she said. “Pharaoh got him.”
“Oh yes, Lord,” Worsham said. “Pharaoh got him.”
“Done sold my Benjamin,” the old Negress said. “Sold him in Egypt.” She began to sway faintly back and forth in the chair.
“Oh yes, Lord,” Worsham said.
“Hush,” Miss Worsham said. “Hush, Hamp.”
“I telephoned Mr Edmonds,” Stevens said. “He will have everything ready when you get there.”
“Roth Edmonds sold him,” the old Negress said. She swayed back and forth in the chair. “Sold my Benjamin.”
“Hush,” Miss Worsham said. “Hush, Mollie. Hush now.”
“No,” Stevens said. “No he didn’t, Aunt Mollie. It wasn’t Mr Edmonds. Mr Edmonds didn’t—” But she cant hear me, he thought. She was not even looking at him. She never had looked at him.
“Sold my Benjamin,” she said. “Sold him in Egypt.”
“Sold him in Egypt,” Worsham said.
“Roth Edmonds sold my Benjamin.”
“Sold him to Pharaoh.”
“Sold him to Pharaoh and now he dead.”
“I’d better go,” Stevens said. He rose quickly. Miss Worsham rose too, but he did not wait for her to precede him. He went down the hall fast, almost running; he did not even know whether she was following him or not. Soon I will be outside, he thought. Then there will be air, space, breath. Then he could hear her behind him — the crisp,
