‘So they aint come for old Lucas yet,’ Aleck Sander said.
‘Is that what your people think about it too?’ he said.
‘And so would you,’ Aleck Sander said. ‘It’s the ones like Lucas makes trouble for everybody.’
‘Then maybe you better go to the office and sit with Uncle Gavin instead of coming with me.’
‘Going where with you?’ Aleck Sander said. And he told him, harsh and bald, in four words:
‘Dig up Vinson Gowrie.’ Aleck Sander didn’t move, still looking past and over his head toward the Square. ‘Lucas said it wasn’t his gun that killed him.’
Still not moving Aleck Sander began to laugh, not loud and with no mirth: just laughing; he said exactly what his uncle had said hardly a minute ago: ‘So would I,’ Aleck Sander said. He said: ‘Me? Go out there and dig that dead white man up? Is Mr Gavin already in the office or do I just sit there until he comes?’
‘Lucas is going to pay you,’ he said. ‘He told me that even before he told me what it was.’
Aleck Sander laughed, without mirth or scorn or anything else: with no more in the sound of it than there is anything in the sound of breathing but just breathing. ‘I aint rich,’ he said. ‘I dont need money.’
‘At least you’ll saddle Highboy while I hunt for a flashlight, wont you?’ he said. ‘You’re not too proud about Lucas to do that, are you?’
‘Certainly,’ Aleck Sander said, turning.
‘And get the pick and shovel. And the long tie-rope. I’ll need that too.’
‘Certainly,’ Aleck Sander said. He paused, half turned. ‘How you going to tote a pick and shovel both on Highboy when he dont even like to see a riding switch in your hand?’
‘I dont know,’ he said and Aleck Sander went on and he turned back toward the house and at first he thought it was his uncle coming rapidly around the house from the front, not because he believed that his uncle might have suspected and anticipated what he was about because he did not, his uncle had dismissed that too immediately and thoroughly not only from conception but from possibility too, but because he no longer remembered anyone else available for it to have been and even after he saw it was a woman he assumed it was his mother, even after he should have recognised the hat, right up to the instant when Miss Habersham called his name and his first impulse was to step quickly and quietly around the corner of the garage, from where he could reach the lot fence still unseen and climb it and go on to the stable and so go out the pasture gate without passing the house again at all, flashlight or not but it was already too late: calling his name: ‘Charles:’ in that tense urgent whisper then came rapidly up and stopped facing him, speaking in that tense rapid murmur:
‘What did he tell you?’ and now he knew what it was that had nudged at his attention back in his uncle’s office when he had recognised her and then in the next second flashed away: old Molly, Lucas’ wife, who had been the daughter of one of old Doctor Habersham’s, Miss Habersham’s grandfather’s, slaves, she and Miss Habersham the same age, born in the same week and both suckled at Molly’s mother’s breast and grown up together almost inextricably like sisters, like twins, sleeping in the same room, the white girl in the bed, the Negro girl on a cot at the foot of it almost until Molly and Lucas married, and Miss Habersham had stood up in the Negro church as godmother to Molly’s first child.
‘He said it wasn’t his pistol,’ he said.
‘So he didn’t do it,’ she said, rapid still and with something even more than urgency in her voice now.
‘I dont know,’ he said.
‘Nonsense,’ she said. ‘If it wasn’t his pistol——’
‘I dont know,’ he said.
‘You must know. You saw him—talked to him——’
‘I dont know,’ he said. He said it calmly, quietly, with a kind of incredulous astonishment as though he had only now realised what he had promised, intended: ‘I just dont know. I still dont know. I’m just going out there. . . . .’ He stopped, his voice died. There was an instant a second in which he even remembered he should have been wishing he could recall it, the last unfinished sentence. Though it was probably already too late and she had already done herself what little finishing the sentence needed and at any moment now she would cry, protest, ejaculate and bring the whole house down on him. Then in the same second he stopped remembering it. She said:
‘Of course:’ immediate murmurous and calm; he thought for another half of a second that she hadn’t understood at all and then in the other half forgot that too, the two of them facing each other indistinguishable in the darkness across the tense and rapid murmur: and then he heard his own voice speaking in the same tone and pitch, the two of them not conspiratorial exactly but rather like two people who have irrevocably accepted a gambit they are not at all certain they can cope with: only that they will resist it: ‘We dont even know it wasn’t his pistol. He just said it wasn’t.’
‘Yes.’
‘He didn’t say whose it was nor whether or not he fired it. He didn’t even tell you he didn’t fire it. He just said it wasn’t his pistol.’
‘Yes.’
‘And your uncle told you there in his study that that’s just exactly what he would say, all he could say.’ He didn’t answer that. It wasn’t a question. Nor did she give him time. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘Now what? To find out if it wasn’t his pistol—find out whatever it was he meant? Go out there and what?’
He told her, as badly as he had told Aleck Sander, explicit and succinct: ‘Look at him:’ not even pausing to think how here he should certainly have anticipated at least a gasp. ‘Go out there and dig him up and bring him to town where somebody that knows bullet holes can look at the bullet hole in him——’
‘Yes,’ Miss Habersham said. ‘Of course. Naturally he wouldn’t tell your uncle. He’s a Negro and your uncle’s a man:’ and now Miss Habersham in her turn repeating and paraphrasing and he thought how it was not really a paucity a meagreness of vocabulary, it was in the first place because the deliberate violent blotting out obliteration of a human life was itself so simple and so final that the verbiage which surrounded it enclosed it insulated it intact into the chronicle of man had of necessity to be simple and uncomplex too, repetitive, almost monotonous even; and in the second place, vaster than that, adumbrating that, because what Miss Habersham paraphrased was simple truth, not even fact and so there was not needed a great deal of diversification and originality to express it because truth was universal, it had to be universal to be truth and so there didn’t need to be a great deal of it just to keep running something no bigger than one earth and so anybody could know truth; all they had to do was just to pause, just to stop, just to wait: ‘Lucas knew it would take a child—or an old woman like me: someone not concerned with probability, with evidence. Men like your uncle and Mr Hampton have had to be men too long, busy too long.——Yes?’ she said. ‘Bring him in to town where someone who knows can look at the bullet hole. And suppose they look at it and find out it was Lucas’ pistol?’ And he didn’t answer that at all, nor had she waited again, saying, already turning: ‘We’ll need
