Virginius went, then. He didn’t hurry, didn’t run. He packed up his belongings (he would have more than Anse; quite a few little things) and went four or five miles to live with a cousin, the son of a remote kinsman of his mother. The cousin lived alone, on a good farm too, though now eaten up with mortgages, since the cousin was no farmer either, being half a stock-trader and half a lay preacher — a small, sandy, nondescript man whom you would not remember a minute after you looked at his face and then away — and probably no better at either of these than at fanning.
Without haste Virginius left, with none of his brother’s foolish and violent finality; for which, strange to say, we thought none the less of Young Anse for showing, possessing. In fact, we always looked at Virginius a little askance too; he was a little too much master of himself. For it is human nature to trust quickest those who cannot depend on themselves.
We called Virginius a deep one; we were not surprised when we learned how he had used his savings to disencumber the cousin’s farm. And neither were we surprised when a year later we learned how Old Anse had refused to pay the taxes on his land and how, two days before the place would have gone delinquent, the sheriff received anonymously in the mail cash to the exact penny of the Holland assessment. ‘Trust Virginius,’ we said, since we believed we knew that the money needed no name to it. The sheriff had notified Old Anse.
‘Put it up for sale and be damned,’ Old Anse said. ‘If they think that all they have to do is set there waiting, the whole brood and biling of them…’
The sheriff sent Young Anse word. ‘It’s not my land,’ Young Anse sent back.
The sheriff notified Virginius. Virginius came to town and looked at the tax books himself. ‘I got all I can carry myself, now,’ he said. ‘Of course, if he lets it go, I hope I can get it. But I don’t know. A good farm like that won’t last long or go cheap.’ And that was all. No anger, no astonishment, no regret. But he was a deep one; we were not surprised when we learned how the sheriff had received that package of money, with the unsigned note: Tax money for Anselm Holland farm. Send receipt to Anselm Holland, Senior.
‘Trust Virginius,’ we said. We thought about Virginius quite a lot during the next year, out there in a strange house, farming strange land, watching the farm and the house where he was born and that was rightfully his going to ruin. For the old man was letting it go completely now: year by year the good broad fields were going back to jungle and gully, though still each January the sheriff received that anonymous money in the mail and sent the receipt to Old Anse, because the old man had stopped coming to town altogether now, and the very house was falling down about his head, and nobody save Virginius ever stopped there.
Five or six times a year he would ride up to the front porch, and the old man would come out and bellow at him in savage and violent vituperation, Virginius taking it quietly, talking to the few remaining negroes once he had seen with his own eyes that his father was all right, then riding away again. But nobody else ever stopped there, though now and then from a distance someone would see the old man going about the mournful and shaggy fields on the old white horse which was to kill him.
Then last summer we learned that he was digging up the graves in the cedar grove where five generations of his wife’s people rested. A negro reported it, and the county health officer went out there and found the white horse tied in the grove, and the old man himself came out of the grove with a shotgun. The health officer returned, and two days later a deputy went out there and found the old man lying beside the horse, his foot fast in the stirrup, and on the horse’s rump the savage marks of the stick — not a switch: a stick — where it had been struck again and again and again.
So they buried him, among the graves which he had violated. Virginius and the cousin came to the funeral. They were the funeral, in fact. For Anse, Junior, didn’t come. Nor did he come near the place later, though Virginius stayed long enough to lock the house and pay the negroes off. But he too went back to the cousin’s, and in due time Old Anse’s will was offered for probate to Judge Dukinfield. The substance of the will was no secret; we all learned of it.
Regular it was, and we were surprised neither at its regularity nor at its substance nor it wording:… with the exception of these two bequests, I give and bequeath… my property to my elder son Virginius, provided it be proved to the satisfaction of the… Chancellor that it was the said Virginius who has been paying the taxes on my land, the… Chancellor to be the sole and unchallenged judge of the proof.
The other two bequests were:
To my younger son Anselm, I give… two full sets of mule harness, with the condition that this… harness be used by… Anselm to make one visit to my grave. Otherwise this… harness to become and remain part… of my property as described above.
To my cousin-in-law Granby Dodge I give… one dollar in cash, to be used by him for the purchase of a hymn book or hymn books, as a token of my gratitude for his having fed and lodged my son Virginius since… Virginius quitted my roof.
That was the will. And we watched and listened to hear or see what Young Anse would say or do. And we heard and saw nothing. And we watched to see what Virginius would do. And he did nothing. Or we didn’t know what he was doing, what he was thinking. But that was Virginius. Because it was all finished then, anyway. All he had to do was to wait until Judge Dukinfield validated the will, then Virginius could give Anse his half — if he intended to do this. We were divided there. ‘He and Anse never had any trouble,’ some said. ‘Virginius never had any trouble with anybody,’ others said. ‘If you go by that token, he will have to divide that farm with the whole county.’
‘But it was Virginius that tried to pay Anse’s fine that,’ the first ones said. ‘And it was Virginius that sided with his father when Young Anse wanted to divide the land, too,’ the second ones said.
So we waited and we watched. We were watching Judge Dukinfield now; it was suddenly as if the whole thing had sifted into his hands; as though he sat godlike above the vindictive and jeering laughter of that old man who even underground would not die, and above these two irreconcilable brothers who for fifteen years had been the same as dead to each other.
But we thought that in his last coup, Old Anse had overreached himself; that in choosing Judge Dukinfield the old man’s own fury had checkmated him; because in Judge Dukinfield we believed that Old Anse had chosen the one man among us with sufficient probity and honor and good sense — that sort of probity and honor which has never had time to become confused and self-doubting with too much learning in the law.
The very fact that the validating of what was a simple enough document appeared to be taking him an overlong time, was to us hut fresh proof that Judge Dukinfield was the one man among us who believed that justice is fifty per cent legal knowledge and fifty per cent unhaste and confidence in himself and in God.
So as the expiration of the legal period drew near, we watched Judge Dukinfield as he went daily between his home and his office in the courthouse yard. Deliberate and unhurried he moved — a widower of sixty and more, portly, white-headed, with an erect and dignified carriage which the Negroes called ‘rear-backted.’ He had been appointed Chancellor seventeen years ago; he possessed little knowledge of the law and a great deal of hard common SENSE; AND FOR thirteen years now no man had opposed him for reelection and even those who would be most enraged by his air of bland and affable condescension voted for him on occasion with a kind of childlike confidence and trust.
So we watched him without impatience, knowing that what he finally did would be right, not because he did it, but because he would not permit himself or anyone else to do anything until it was right. So each morning we would see him cross the square at exactly ten minutes past eight o’clock and go on to the courthouse, where the negro janitor had preceded him by exactly ten minutes, with the clocklike precision with which the block signal presages the arrival of the train, to open the office for the day. The Judge would enter the office, and the Negro would take his position in a wire-mended splint chair in the flagged passage which separated the office from the courthouse proper where he would sit all day
