He made the payment each year, coming back and cleaning up the place. They said he would clean up that house inside like a woman, washing and scrubbing it. It would take him two weeks each April. Then he would go away again, nobody knew where, returning each April to make the payment at the bank and clean up that empty house that never belonged to him.
He had been doing that for about five years when I saw him in Maxey’s shop in Jefferson, the year after I saw him in a shop in Porterfield, in that serge suit and that black bow tie. Maxey said he had them on when he got off the south-bound train that day in Jefferson, carrying that paper suitcase.
Maxey said they watched him for two days about the square, him not seeming to know anybody or to have any business or to be in any hurry; just walking about the square like he was just looking around.
It was the young fellows, the loafers that pitch dollars all day long in the clubhouse yard, waiting for the young girls to come giggling down to the post office and the soda fountain in the late afternoon, working their hips under their dresses, leaving the smell of perfume when they pass, that gave him his name.
They said he was a detective, maybe because that was the last thing in the world anybody would suspect him to be. So they named him Hawkshaw, and Hawkshaw he remained for the twelve years he stayed in Jefferson, behind that chair in Maxey’s shop. He told Maxey he was from Alabama.
“What part?” Maxey said. “Alabama’s a big place. Birmingham?” Maxey said, because Hawkshaw looked like he might have come from almost anywhere in Alabama except Birmingham.
“Yes,” Hawkshaw said. “Birmingham.”
And that was all they ever got out of him until I happened to notice him behind the chair and to remember him back in Porterfield.
“Porterfield?” Maxey said. “My brother-in-law owns that shop. You mean you worked in Porterfield last year?”
“Yes,” Hawkshaw said. “I was there.”
Maxey told me about the vacation business. How Hawkshaw wouldn’t take his summer vacation; said he wanted two weeks in April instead. He wouldn’t tell why. Maxey said April was too busy for vacations, and Hawkshaw offered to work until then, and quit. “Do you want to quit then?” Maxey said that was in the summer, after Mrs Burchett had brought Susan Reed to the shop for the first time.
“No,” Hawkshaw said. “I like it here. I just want two weeks off in April.”
“On business?” Maxey said.
“On business,” Hawkshaw said.
When Maxey took his vacation, he went to Porterfield to visit his brother-in-law; maybe shaving his brother-in-law’s customers, like a sailor will spend his vacation in a rowboat on an artificial lake. The brother-in-law told him Hawkshaw had worked in his shop, would not take a vacation until April, went off and never came back. “He’ll quit you the same way,” the brother-in-law said. “He worked in a shop in Bolivar, Tennessee, and in one in Florence, Alabama, for a year and quit the same way. He wont come back. You watch and see.”
Maxey said he came back home and he finally got it out of Hawkshaw how he had worked for a year each in six or eight different towns in Alabama and Tennessee and Mississippi. “Why did you quit them?” Maxey said. “You are a good barber; one of the best children’s barbers. I ever saw. Why did you quit?”
“I was just looking around,” Hawkshaw said.
Then April came, and he took his two weeks. He shaved himself and packed up that paper suitcase and took the north-bound train.
“Going on a visit, I reckon,” Maxey said.
“Up the road a piece,” Hawkshaw said.
So he went away, in that serge suit and black bow tie. Maxey told me how, two days later, it got out how Hawkshaw had drawn from the bank his year’s savings. He boarded at Mrs Cowan’s and he had joined the church and he spent no money at all. He didn’t even smoke. So Maxey and Matt and I reckon everybody else in Jefferson thought that he had saved up steam for a year and was now bound on one of these private sabbaticals among the fleshpots of Memphis.
Mitch Ewing, the depot freight agent, lived at Mrs Cowan’s too. He told how Hawkshaw had bought his ticket only to the junction-point. “From there he can go to either Memphis or Birmingham or New Orleans,” Mitch said.
“Well, he’s gone, anyway,” Maxey said. “And mark my words, that’s the last you’ll see of that fellow in this town.”
And that’s what everybody thought until two weeks later. On the fifteenth day Hawkshaw came walking into the shop at his regular time, like he hadn’t even been out of town, and took off his coat and begun to hone his razors. He never told anybody where he had been. Just up the road a piece.
Sometimes I thought I would tell them. I would make Jefferson and find him there behind that chair. He didn’t change, grow any older in the face, any more than that Reed girl’s hair changed, for all the gum and dye she put on it.
But there he would be, back from his vacation “up the road a piece,” saving his money for another year, going to church on Sunday, keeping that sack of peppermints for the children that came to him to be barbered, until it was time to take that paper suitcase and his year’s savings and go back to Division to pay on the mortgage and clean up the house.
Sometimes he would be gone when I got to Jefferson, and Maxey would tell me about him cutting that Reed girl’s hair, snipping and snipping it and holding the mirror up for her to see like she was an actress. “He dont charge her,” Matt Fox said. “He pays the quarter into the register out of his own pocket.”
“Well, that’s his business,” Maxey said. “All I want is the quarter. I dont care where it comes from.”
Five years later maybe I would have said, “Maybe that’s her price.” Because she got in trouble at last. Or so they said. I dont know, except that most of the talk about girls, women, is envy or retaliation by the ones that dont dare to and the ones that failed to. But while he was gone one April they were whispering how she had got in trouble at last and had tried to doctor herself with turpentine and was bad sick.
Anyhow, she was off the streets for about three months; some said in a hospital in Memphis, and when she came into the shop again she took Matt’s chair, though Hawkshaw’s was empty at the time, like she had already done before to devil him, maybe. Maxey said she looked like a painted ghost, gaunt and hard, for all her bright dress and such, sitting there in Matt’s chair, filling the whole shop with her talking and her laughing and her perfume and her long, naked-looking legs, and Hawkshaw making out he was busy at his empty chair.
Sometimes I thought I would tell them. But I never told anybody except Gavin Stevens. He is the district attorney, a smart man: not like the usual pedagogue lawyer and office holder. He went to Harvard, and when my health broke down (I used to be a bookkeeper in a Gordonville bank and my health broke down and I met Stevens on a Memphis train when I was coming home from the hospital) it was him that suggested I try the road and got me my position with this company.
I told him about it two years ago. “And now the girl has gone bad on him, and he’s too old to hunt up another one and raise her,” I said. “And some day he’ll have the place paid out and those Alabama Starnes can come and take it, and he’ll be through. Then what do you think he will do?”
“I dont know,” Stevens said.
“Maybe he’ll just go off and die,” I said.
“Maybe he will,” Stevens said.
“Well,” I said, “he wont be the first man to tilt at windmills.”
“He wont be the first man to die, either,” Stevens said.
III
So last week I went on to Division. I got there on a Wednesday. When I saw the house, it had just been painted. The storekeeper told me that the payment Hawkshaw had made was the last one; that Starnes’ mortgage was clear. “Them Alabama Starnes can come and take it now,” he said.
“Anyway, Hawkshaw did what he promised her, promised Mrs Starnes,” I said.
“Hawkshaw?” he said. “Is that what they call him? Well, I’ll be durned. Hawkshaw. Well, I’ll be durned.”
It was three months before I made Jefferson again. When I passed the barber shop I looked in without stopping. And there was another fellow behind Hawkshaw’s chair, a young fellow. “I wonder if Hawk left his sack of peppermints,” I said to myself. But I didn’t stop. I just thought, ‘Well, he’s gone at last,’ wondering just where he would be when old age got him and he couldn’t move again; if he would probably die behind a chair somewhere in a little three-chair country shop, in his shirt sleeves and that black tie and those
