‘Never mind now. Let’s get started. Even when we finish here and are on the way back to town we will still be only started.’
‘All right, boys,’ the sheriff said to the Negroes. ‘Jump to it. Let’s get out of here——’ and there was no sound, he heard nothing to warn him, he just looked up and around as his uncle and the sheriff did and saw, coming not down the road but around from behind the church as though from among the high windy pines themselves, a man in a wide pale hat and a clean faded blue shirt whose empty left sleeve was folded neatly back and pinned cuff to shoulder with a safetypin, on a small trim claybank mare showing too much eye-white and followed by two younger men riding double on a big saddleless black mule with a rope-burn on its neck and followed in their turn (and keeping carefully clear of the mule’s heels) by two gaunt Trigg foxhounds, coming at a rapid trot across the grove to the gate where the man stopped the mare and swung himself lightly and rapidly down with his one hand and dropped the reins across the mare’s neck and came with that light wiry almost springy rapidity through the gate and up to them—a short lean old man with eyes as pale as the sheriff’s and a red weathered face out of which jutted a nose like the hooked beak of an eagle, already speaking in a high thin strong uncracked voice:
‘What’s going on around here, Shurf?’
‘I’m going to open this grave, Mr Gowrie,’ the sheriff said.
‘No, Shurf,’ the other said, immediate, with no change whatever in the voice: not disputative, nothing: just a statement: ‘Not that grave.’
‘Yes, Mr Gowrie,’ the sheriff said. ‘I’m going to open it.’
Without haste or fumbling, almost deliberate in fact, the old man with his one hand unbuttoned two buttons on the front of his shirt and thrust the hand inside, hunching his hip slightly around to meet the hand and drew from inside the shirt a heavy nickel-plated pistol and still with no haste but no pause either thrust the pistol into his left armpit, clamping it butt-forward against his body by the stub of the arm while his one hand buttoned the shirt, then took the pistol once more into the single hand not pointing it at anything, just holding it.
But long before this he had seen the sheriff already moving, moving with really incredible speed not toward the old man but around the end of the grave, already in motion even before the two Negroes turned to run, so that when they whirled they seemed to run full tilt into the sheriff as into a cliff, even seeming to bounce back a little before the sheriff grasped them one in each hand as if they were children and then in the next instant seemed to be holding them both in one hand like two rag dolls, turning his body so that he was between them and the little wiry old man with the pistol, saying in that mild even lethargic voice:
‘Stop it. Dont you know the worst thing that could happen to a nigger would be dodging loose in a pair of convict pants around out here today?’
‘That’s right, boys,’ the old man said in his high inflectionless voice. ‘I aint going to hurt you. I’m talking to the Shurf here. Not my boy’s grave, Shurf.’
‘Send them back to the car,’ his uncle murmured rapidly. But the sheriff didn’t answer, still looking at the old man.
‘Your boy aint in that grave, Mr Gowrie,’ the sheriff said. And watching he thought of all the things the old man might have said—the surprise, the disbelief, the outrage perhaps, even the thinking aloud: How do you come to know my boy aint there?—the rationalising by reflective in which he might have paraphrased the sheriff speaking to his uncle six hours ago: You wouldn’t be telling me this if you didn’t know it was so; watching, even following the old man as he cut straight across all this and he thought suddenly with amazement: Why, he’s grieving: thinking how he had seen grief twice now in two years where he had not expected it or anyway anticipated it, where in a sense a heart capable of breaking had no business being: once in an old nigger who had just happened to outlive his old nigger wife and now in a violent foulmouthed godless old man who had happened to lose one of the six lazy idle violent more or less lawless a good deal more than just more or less worthless sons, only one of whom had ever benefitted his community and kind and that only by the last desperate resort of getting murdered out of it: hearing the high flat voice again immediate and strong and without interval, inflectionless, almost conversational:
‘Why, I just hope you dont tell me the name of the fellow that proved my boy aint there, Shurf. I just hope you wont mention that:’—little hard pale eyes staring at little hard pale eyes, the sheriff’s voice mild still, inscrutable now:
‘No, Mr Gowrie. It aint empty:’ and later, afterward, he realised that this was when he believed he knew not perhaps why Lucas had ever reached town alive because the reason for that was obvious: there happened to be no Gowrie present at the moment but the dead one: but at least how the old man and two of his sons happened to ride out of the woods behind the church almost as soon as he and the sheriff and his uncle reached the grave, and certainly why almost forty-eight hours afterward Lucas was still breathing. ‘It’s Jake Montgomery down there,’ the sheriff said.
The old man turned, immediate, not hurriedly and even quickly but just easily as if his spare small fleshless frame offered neither resistance to the air nor weight to the motive muscles, and shouted toward the fence where the two younger men still sat the mule identical as two clothing store dummies and as immobile, not even having begun yet to descend until the old man shouted: ‘Here, boys.’
‘Never mind,’ the sheriff said. ‘We’ll do it.’ He turned to the two Negroes. ‘All right. Get your shovels——’
‘I told you,’ his uncle murmured rapidly again. ‘Send them back to the car.’
‘That’s right, Lawyer—Lawyer Stevens, aint it?’ the old man said. ‘Get ’em away from here. This here’s our business. We’ll attend to it.’
‘It’s my business now, Mr Gowrie,’ the sheriff said.
The old man raised the pistol, steadily and without haste, bending his elbow until it came level, his thumb curling up and over the hammer cocking it so that it came already cocked level or not quite, not quite pointing at anything somewhere about the height of the empty belt-loops on the sheriff’s trousers. ‘Get them out of here, Shurf,’ the old man said.
‘All right,’ the sheriff said without moving. ‘You boys go back to the car.’
‘Further than that,’ the old man said. ‘Send ’em back to town.’
‘They’re prisoners, Mr Gowrie,’ the sheriff said. ‘I cant do that.’ He didn’t move. ‘Go back and get in the car,’ he told them. They moved then, walking not back toward the gate but directly away across the enclosure, walking quite fast, lifting their feet and knees in the filthy barred trousers quite high, walking quite fast by the time they reached the opposite fence and half stepping half hopping over it and only then changing direction back toward the two cars so that until they reached the sheriff’s car they would never be any nearer the two white men on the mule than when they had left the grave: and he looked at them now sitting the mule identical as two clothes pins on a line, the identical faces even weathered exactly alike, surly quick-tempered and calm, until the old man shouted again:
‘All right, boys:’ and they got down as one, at the same time even like a trained vaudeville team and again as one stepped with the same left leg over the fence, completely ignoring the gate: the Gowrie twins, identical even to the clothing and shoes except that one wore a khaki shirt and the other a sleeveless jersey; about thirty, a head taller than their father and with their father’s pale eyes and the nose too except that it was not the beak of an eagle but rather that of a hawk, coming up with no word, no glance
