Then it stopped, its fore feet bunched and planted, its body bunching against them, until Mr. McCallum, again with that unbelievable quickness, walked to it and swung the cudgel with all his strength across its face, and it screamed again and whirled, spun, already galloping, and Mr. McCallum turned and walked toward the fence. He didn’t run: he walked, and although the horse galloped two complete circles around him before he reached the fence and climbed it, it never quite threatened him again.
And during another time Captain Gualdres didn’t move, metal-hard, inviolable, not even pale. Then Captain Gualdres turned to his uncle; it was in Spanish still, but now he could follow it.
‘I have lost,’ Captain Gualdres said.
‘Not lost,’ his uncle said.
‘Truth,’ Captain Gualdres said. ‘Not lost.’ Then Captain Gualdres said, ‘Thanks.’
IV.
Then Saturday, no school: the whole unchallengeable day in which to have sat around the office and attended the little rest of it, the cleaning up; the what little rest of it remained, or so he thought, who even at that late hour of December afternoon had not yet known his own capacity to be astonished and amazed.
He hadn’t even really believed that Max Harriss would come back from Memphis. Mr. Markey, in Memphis, hadn’t believed it either apparently.
‘Memphis city police cant transport a prisoner back to Mississippi,’ Mr. Markey said. ‘You know that. Your sheriff will have to send someone—’
‘He’s not a prisoner,’ his uncle said. ‘Tell him that. Tell him I just want him to come back here and talk to me.’
Then for almost half a minute there was nothing on the telephone at all except the faint hum of the distant power which kept the line alive, which was costing somebody money whether voices went over it or not. Then Mr. Markey said:
‘If I gave him that message and told him he could go, would you really expect to see him again?’
‘Give him the message,’ his uncle said. ‘Tell him I want him to come back here and talk to me.’
And Max Harriss came back. He arrived just ahead of the others, just far enough ahead of them to have got through the anteroom and into the office while the other two were still mounting the stairs; and he, Charles, shut the anteroom door and Max stood in front of it, watching his uncle, delicate and young and expensive-looking still and a little tired and strained-looking too as if he hadn’t slept much last night, except for his eyes.
They didn’t look young or tired either, watching his uncle exactly as they had looked at him night before last; looking anything but all right by a good long shot. But at least there wasn’t anything cringing in them, whatever else there might he.
‘Sit down,’ his uncle said.
‘Thanks,’ Max said, immediate and harsh, not contemptuous: just final, immediate, negative. But he moved in the next second. He approached the desk and began to peer this way and that about the office in burlesque exaggeration. ‘I’m looking for Hamp Killegrew,’ he said. ‘Or maybe it’s even the sheriff himself. Where’ve you got him hidden? in the water-cooler? If that’s where you put either one of them, they are dead of shock by now.’
But still his uncle didn’t answer, until he, Charles, looked at his uncle too. His uncle wasn’t even looking at Max. He had even turned the swivel chair sideways and was looking out the window, motionless except for the almost infinitesimal stroking of the thumb of the hand which held it, on the bowl of the cold cob pipe.
Then Max stopped that too and stood looking down at his uncle’s profile with the hard flat eyes in which there was little of youth or peace or anything else that should have been in them.
‘All right,’ Max said. ‘You couldn’t prove an intention, design. All that you can prove, you wont even have to.
I already admit it. I affirm it. I bought a horse and turned it into a private stable on my mother’s property. I know a little law too, you see. I probably know just exactly the minor and incorrect amount of it to make a first-class small-town Mississippi lawyer. Maybe even a state legislator, though probably a little too much ever to be elected governor.’
Still his uncle didn’t move, except for the thumb. ‘I’d sit down, if I were you,’ he said.
‘You’d do more than that right now if you were me,’ Max said. ‘Well?’
Now his uncle moved. He swung the chair around with the pressure of his knee against the desk, until he faced Max.
‘I don’t need to prove it,’ his uncle said. ‘Because you are not going to deny it.’
‘No,’ Max said. He said it immediately, contemptuously. It wasn’t even violent. ‘I don’t deny it. So what? Where’s your sheriff?’
His uncle watched Max. Then he put the stem of the cold pipe into his mouth and drew at it as if it had fire and tobacco in it; he spoke in a voice mild and even almost inconsequential:
‘I suppose that when Mr. McCallum brought the horse out and you had him put it into Captain Gualdres’ private stable, you told the grooms and the other Negroes that Captain Gualdres had bought it himself and wanted it let alone. Which wasn’t hard for them to believe, since Captain Gualdres had already bought one horse which he wouldn’t let anyone else touch.’
But Max no more answered that than he had answered the other night when his uncle asked him about not being registered for draft. There was not even contempt in his face while he waited for his uncle to go on.
‘All right,’ his uncle said. When are Captain Gualdres and your sister to be married?’
And that was when he, Charles, found out what else it was in the flat hard eyes. It was despair and grief. Because he watched the rage blaze up and burn, scour, sear them out until there was nothing left in them but the rage and the hatred, and he thought how maybe his uncle was right and there are more ignoble things than hatred and how if you do hate anyone, it must surely be the man you have failed to kill even if he doesn’t know it.
‘I’ve been doing some trading lately,’ his uncle said. ‘I’ll know soon whether I did so bad at it or not. I’m going to make another trade with you. You are not nineteen years old, you are twenty-one, but you haven’t even registered yet. Enlist.’
‘Enlist?’ Harriss said.
‘Enlist,’ his uncle said.
‘I see,’ Harriss said. ‘Enlist, or else.’
Then Harriss began to laugh. He stood there in front of the desk, looking down at his uncle and laughing. But it never had touched his eyes in the first place, so it didn’t need to leave them: it was just his face which the laughter left, laughing itself gradually away from his eyes even if it hadn’t ever been there, until at last they looked like his sister’s had two nights ago: the grief and the despair, but without the tenor and fear, while his uncle’s cheeks went through the motion of drawing at the cold pipe as though there were smoke in it.
‘No,’ his uncle said. ‘No “else.” Just enlist. Look.
You are playing poker (l assume you know poker, or at least — like a lot of people — anyway play it). You draw cards. When you do that, you affirm two things: either that you have something to draw to, or you are willing to support to your last cent the fact that you have not.
You don’t draw and then throw the cards in because they are not what you wanted, expected, hoped for; not just for the sake of your own soul and pocket-book, but for the sake of the others in the game, who have likewise assumed that unspoken obligation.’
Then they were both motionless, even the void similitude of his uncle’s smoking. Then Harriss drew a long breath. You could hear it: the inhale and the suspiration.
‘Now?’ he said.
‘Yes,’ his uncle said. ‘Now. Go back to Memphis now and enlist.’
‘I…’ Harriss said. There are things—’
‘I know,’ his uncle said. ‘But I wouldn’t go out there now. They will allow you a few days after you are enlisted to come back home and say — put your affairs in order. Go back now. Your car is downstairs, isn’t it? Go back to Memphis now and enlist.’
‘Yes,’ Harriss said. He drew another of the long breaths and let it go. ‘Go down those steps and get in the car by myself, and leave. What makes you think you or the army or anybody else will ever catch me again?’
‘I hadn’t thought about it at all,’ his uncle said. ‘Would it make you feel better to give me your word?’
And that was all. Harriss stood there for another moment by the desk, then he went back to the door and stood there, his head bent a little. Then he raised his head and he, Charles, thought that he would have done that too: gone back through the anteroom where the others were. But his uncle spoke in time.
‘The window,’ his uncle said, and got up himself from the swivel chair and went and opened it, onto the outside gallery from which the stairs descended to the street, and Max stepped through it and his uncle closed the window
