But Miss Habersham was just stopped, nor even that for long: ‘It wasn’t for a man either last night.’
‘Wait, Hope,’ his uncle said. Then his uncle turned to Miss Habersham. ‘Your job’s in town here,’ he said. ‘Dont you know that?’ Now Miss Habersham watched his uncle. But she still hadn’t sat back in the seat, giving no ground to anyone yet; watching, it was as though she had not at all exchanged one opponent for another but without pause or falter had accepted them both, asking no quarter, crying no odds. ‘Will Legate’s a farmer,’ his uncle said. ‘Besides being up all night. He’s got to go home and see to his own business for a little while.’
‘Hasn’t Mr Hampton got other deputies?’ Miss Habersham said. ‘What are they for?’
‘They’re just men with guns,’ his uncle said. ‘Legate himself told Chick and me last night that if enough men made up their minds and kept them made up, they would pass him and Mr Tubbs both in time. But if a woman, a lady, a white lady . . . . .’ His uncle stopped, ceased; they stared at each other; watching them he thought again of his uncle and Lucas in the cell last night (it was last night, of course; it seemed like years now); again except for the fact that his uncle and Miss Habersham were actually looking into each other’s physical eyes instead of bending each upon the other that absolute concentration of all the senses in the sum of which mere clumsy fallible perception weighed little more than the ability to read Sanskrit would, he might have been watching the last two stayers in a poker-pot. ‘. . . . just to sit there, in sight, where the first one that passes can have the word spread long before Beat Four can even get the truck cranked up to start to town . . . . while we go out there and finish it for good, for ever——’
Miss Habersham leaned slowly back until her back came against the seat. She said: ‘So I’m to sit there on that staircase with my skirts spread or maybe better with my back against the balustrade and one foot propped against the wall of Mrs Tubbs’ kitchen while you men who never had time yesterday to ask that old nigger a few questions and so all he had last night was a boy, a child——’ His uncle said nothing. The sheriff leaned above the window breathing vast subterranean sighs, not breathing hard but just as a big man seems to have to breathe. Miss Habersham said: ‘Drive me home first. I’ve got some mending to do. I aint going to sit there all morning doing nothing so that Mrs Tubbs will think she has to talk to me. Drive me home first. I realised an hour ago what a rush and hurry you and Mr Hampton are in but you can spare the time for that. Aleck Sander can bring my truck to the jail on his way to school and leave it in front of the gate.’
‘Yessum,’ his uncle said.
Chapter Six
So they drove Miss Habersham home, out to the edge of town and through the shaggy untended cedar grove to the paintless columned portico where she got out and went into the house and apparently on through it without even stopping because at once they could hear her somewhere in the back yelling at someone—the old Negro man probably who was Molly’s brother and Lucas’ brother-in-law—in her strong voice strained and a little high from sleeplessness and fatigue, then she came out again carrying a big cardboard box full of what looked like unironed laundry and long limp webs and ropes of stockings and got back into the car and they drove back to the Square through the fresh quiet morning streets: the old big decaying wooden houses of Jefferson’s long-ago foundation set like Miss Habersham’s deep in shaggy untended lawns of old trees and rootbound scented and flowering shrubs whose very names most people under fifty no longer knew and which even when children lived in them seemed still to be spellbound by the shades of women, old women still spinsters and widows waiting even seventy-five years later for the slow telegraph to bring them news of Tennessee and Virginia and Pennsylvania battles, which no longer even faced the street but peered at it over the day-after-tomorrow shoulders of the neat small new one-story houses designed in Florida and California set with matching garages in their neat plots of clipped grass and tedious flowerbeds, three and four of them now, a subdivision now in what twenty-five years ago had been considered a little small for one decent front lawn, where the prosperous young married couples lived with two children each and (as soon as they could afford it) an automobile each and the memberships in the country club and the bridge clubs and the junior rotary and chamber of commerce and the patented electric gadgets for cooking and freezing and cleaning and the neat trim colored maids in frilled caps to run them and talk to one another over the telephone from house to house while the wives in sandals and pants and painted toenails puffed lipstick-stained cigarettes over shopping bags in the chain groceries and drugstores.
Or would have been and should have been; Sunday and they might have passed, accepted a day with no one to plug and unplug the humming sweepers and turn the buttons on the stoves as a day off a vacation or maybe an occasion like a baptising or a picnic or a big funeral but this was Monday, a new day and a new week, rest and the need to fill time and conquer boredom was over, children fresh for school and husband and father for store or office or to stand around the Western Union desk where the hourly cotton reports came in; breakfast must be forward and the pandemoniac bustle of exodus yet still no Negro had they seen—the young ones with straightened hair and makeup in the bright trig tomorrow’s clothes from the mailorder houses who would not even put on the Harper’s Bazaar caps and aprons until they were inside the white kitchens and the older ones in the ankle-length homemade calico and gingham who wore the long plain homemade aprons all the time so that they were no longer a symbol but a garment, not even the men who should have been mowing the lawns and clipping the hedges; not even (crossing the Square now) the street department crews who should have been flushing the pavement with hoses and sweeping up the discarded Sunday papers and empty cigarette packs; across the Square and on to the jail where his uncle got out too and went up the walk with Miss Habersham and up the steps and through the still-open door where he could still see Legate’s empty chair still propped against the wall and he heaved himself bodily again out of the long soft timeless rushing black of sleep to find as usual that no time had passed, his uncle still putting his hat back on and turning to come back down the walk to the car. Then they stopped at home, Aleck Sander already out of the car and gone around the side of the house and vanished and he said,
‘No.’
‘Yes,’ his uncle said. ‘You’ve got to go to school. Or better still, to bed and to sleep. —Yes,’ his uncle said suddenly: ‘and Aleck Sander too. He must stay at home today too. Because this mustn’t be talked about, not one word about it until we have finished it. You understand that.’
But he wasn’t listening, he and his uncle were not even talking about the same thing, not even when he said ‘No’ again and his uncle out of the car and already turning toward the house stopped and looked back at him and then stood looking at him for a good long moment and then said,
‘We are going at this a little hindpart-before, aint we? I’m the one who should be asking you if I can go.’ Because he was thinking about his mother, not just remembered about her because he had done that as soon as they crossed the Square five minutes ago and the simplest thing would have been to get out of his uncle’s car there and go and get in the sheriff’s car and simply stay in
