In a way, it even simplified things. Even if there had been time (another hour and every field along the creek would have a negro and a mule in it), even if he could hope to obliterate all trace and sign of disturbed earth about the mound, it would do no good to move his still to another hiding-place.
Because when they came to the mound to dig they must not only find something, they must find it quick and at once and something the discovery and exhumation of which would cause them to desist and go away — say, only partly buried, and with just enough brush in front of it that they couldn’t help but find it even before they got the brush dragged off. Because it was a matter open to, admitting, no controversy, not even discussion. George Wilkins must go. He must be on his way before another night had passed.
II
He shoved his chair back from the supper table and stood up. He gave his daughter’s lowered, secret face a single look, not grim but cold. But he addressed neither her nor his wife directly. He might have been speaking to either of them or both or to neither: “Going down the road.”
“Where you going this time of night?” his wife said. “Messing around up yonder in the bottom all last night! Getting back home just in time to hitch up and get to the field a good hour after sunup! You needs to be in bed if you going to get that creek piece broke like Mister Roth — —”
Then he was out of the house and didn’t need to hear her any longer. It was night again. The dirt lane ran pale and dim beneath the moonless sky of corn-planting time. Presently it ran along beside the very field which he was getting ready to plant his cotton in when the whippoorwills began. If it had not been for George Wilkins, he would have had it all broken and bedded and ready now. But that was about over now.
Another ten minutes and it would be like dropping the nickel into the slot machine, not ringing down a golden shower about him, he didn’t ask that, need that; he would attend to the jackpot himself, but giving him peace and solitude in which to do so. That, the labour even at night and without help, even if he had to move half the mound, did not bother him. He was only sixty-seven, a better man still than some men half his age; ten years younger and he could still have done both, the night-work and the day. But now he wouldn’t try it.
In a way, he was a little sorry to give up farming. He had liked it; he approved of his fields and liked to work them, taking a solid pride in having good tools to use and using them well, scorning both inferior equipment and shoddy work just as he had bought the best kettle he could find when he set up his still — that copper-lined kettle the cost of which he liked less than ever to remember now that he was not only about to lose it but was himself deliberately giving it away.
He had even planned the very phrases, dialogue, in which, after the first matter was attended to, he would inform Edmonds that he had decided to quit farming, was old enough to retire, and for Edmonds to allot his land to someone else to finish the crop. “All right,” Edmonds would say.
“But you cant expect me to furnish a house and wood and water to a family that aint working any land.” And he would say, if it really came to that — and it probably would, since he, Lucas, would affirm to his death that Zack Edmonds had been as much better a man than his son as old Cass Edmonds had been than both of them together: “All right. I’ll rent the house from you. Name your price and I will pay you every Saturday night as long as I decide to stay here.”
But that would take care of itself. The other matter was first and prime. At first, on his return home this morning, his plan had been to notify the sheriff himself, so that there would be absolutely no slip-up, lest Edmonds should be content with merely destroying George’s still and cache and just running George off the place.
In that case, George would continue to hang around the place, merely keeping out of Edmonds’s sight; whereupon, without even any farm work, let alone the still, to keep him occupied, he would be idle all day and therefore up and out all night long and would constitute more of a menace than ever.
The report would have to come from Edmonds, the white man, because to the sheriff Lucas was just another nigger and both the sheriff and Lucas knew it, although only one of them knew that to Lucas the sheriff was a redneck without any reason for pride in his forbears nor hope for it in his descendants.
And if Edmonds should decide to handle the matter privately, without recourse to the law, there would be someone in Jefferson whom Lucas could inform that not only he and George Wilkins knew of a still on Carothers Edmonds’s place, but Carothers Edmonds knew it too.
He entered the wide carriage gate from which the drive curved mounting to the oak and cedar knoll where he could already see, brighter than any kerosene, the gleam of electricity in the house where the better men than this one had been content with lamps or even candles.
There was a tractor under the mule-shed which Zack Edmonds would not have allowed on the place too, and an automobile in a house built especially for it which old Cass would not even have put his foot in.
But they were the old days, the old time, and better men than these; Lucas himself made one, himself and old Cass coevals in more than spirit even, the analogy only the closer for its paradox: — old Cass a McCaslin only on his mother’s side and so bearing his father’s name though he possessed the land and its benefits and responsibilities; Lucas a McCaslin on his father’s side though bearing his mother’s name and possessing the use and benefit of the land with none of the responsibilities.
Better men: — old Cass, a McCaslin only by the distaff yet having enough of old Carothers McCaslin in his veins to take the land from the true heir simply because he wanted it and knew he could use it better and was strong enough, ruthless enough, old Carothers McCaslin enough; even Zack, who was not the man his father had been but whom Lucas, the man McCaslin, had accepted as his peer to the extent of intending to kill him, right up to the point when, his affairs all set in order like those of a man preparing for death, he stood over the sleeping white man that morning forty-three years ago with the naked razor in his hand.
He approached the house — the two log wings which Carothers McCaslin had built and which had sufficed old Buck and Buddy, connected by the open hallway which, as his pride’s monument and epitaph, old Cass Edmonds had enclosed and superposed with a second storey of white clapboards and faced with a portico. He didn’t go around to the back, the kitchen door.
He had done that only one time since the present Edmonds was born; he would never do it again as long as he lived. Neither did he mount the steps. Instead he stopped in the darkness beside the gallery and rapped with his knuckles on the edge of it until the white man came up the hall and peered out the front door. “Well?” Edmonds said. “What is it?”
“It’s me,” Lucas said.
“Well, come in,” the other said. “What are you standing out there for?”
“You come out here,” Lucas said. “For all you or me either know, George may be laying out yonder right now, listening.”
“George?” Edmonds said. “George Wilkins?” He came out on to the gallery — a young man still, a bachelor, forty-three years old last March. Lucas did not need to remember that. He would never forget it — that night of early spring following ten days of such rain that even the old people remembered nothing to compare it with, and the white man’s wife’s time upon her and the creek out of banks until the whole valley rose, bled a river choked with down timber and drowned livestock until not even a horse could have crossed it in the darkness to reach a telephone and fetch the doctor back.
And Molly, a young woman then and nursing their own first child, wakened at midnight by the white man himself and they followed then the white man through the streaming darkness to his house and Lucas waited in the kitchen, keeping the fire going in the stove, and Molly delivered the white child with none to help but Edmonds and then they knew that the doctor had to be fetched.
So even before daylight he was in the water and crossed it, how he never knew, and was back by dark with the doctor, emerging from that death (At one time he had believed himself gone, done for, both himself and the mule soon to be two more white-eyed and slack-jawed
