“ ‘And that fire wasn’t reported until nigh eleven o’clock,’ the sheriff says. ‘And that house was still burning at three p.m. You mean to say a old wooden house, even a big one, would need seven hours to burn down in?’
“And Brown was setting there, looking this way and that, with them fellows watching him in a circle, hemming him in. ‘I’m just telling you the truth,’ Brown says. ‘That’s what you asked for.’ He was looking this way and that, jerking his head. Then he kind of hollered: ‘How do I know what time it was? Do you expect a man doing the work of a nigger slave at a sawmill to be rich enough to own a watch?’
“ ‘You aint worked at no sawmill nor at anything else in six weeks,’ the marshal says. ‘And a man that can afford to ride around all day long in a new car can afford to pass the courthouse often enough to see the clock and keep up with the time.’
“ ‘It wasn’t none of my car, I tell you!’ Brown says. ‘It was his. She bought it and give it to him; the woman he murdered give it to him.’
“ ‘That’s neither here nor there,’ the sheriff says. ‘Let him tell the rest of it.’
“And so Brown went on then, talking louder and louder and faster and faster, like he was trying to hide Joe Brown behind what he was telling on Christmas until Brown could get his chance to make a grab at that thousand dollars. It beats all how some folks think that making or getting money is a kind of game where there are not any rules at all. He told about how even when he saw the fire, he never dreamed that she would still be in the house, let alone dead. He said how he never even thought to look into the house at all; that he was just figuring on how to put out the fire.
“ ‘And that was round eight a.m.,’ the sheriff says. ‘Or so you claim. And Hamp Waller’s wife never reported that fire until nigh eleven. It took you a right smart while to find out you couldn’t put out that fire with your bare hands.’ And Brown sitting there in the middle of them (they had locked the door, but the windows was lined with folks’ faces against the glass) with his eyes going this way and that and his lip lifted away from his teeth. ‘Hamp says that after he broke in the door, there was already a man inside that house,’ the sheriff says. ‘And that that man tried to keep him from going up the stairs.’ And him setting there in the center of them, with his eyes going and going.
“I reckon he was desperate by then. I reckon he could not only see that thousand dollars getting further and further away from him, but that he could begin to see somebody else getting it. I reckon it was like he could see himself with that thousand dollars right in his hand for somebody else to have the spending of it.
Because they said it was like he had been saving what he told them next for just such a time as this. Like he had knowed that if it come to a pinch, this would save him, even if it was almost worse for a white man to admit what he would have to admit than to be accused of the murder itself. ‘That’s right,’ he says. ‘Go on. Accuse me. Accuse the white man that’s trying to help you with what he knows. Accuse the white man and let the nigger go free. Accuse the white and let the nigger run.’
“ ‘Nigger?’ the sheriff said. ‘Nigger?’
“It’s like he knew he had them then. Like nothing they could believe he had done would be as bad as what he could tell that somebody else had done. ‘You’re so smart,’ he says. ‘The folks in this town is so smart. Fooled for three years. Calling him a foreigner for three years, when soon as I watched him three days I knew he wasn’t no more a foreigner than I am. I knew before he even told me himself.’ And them watching him now, and looking now and then at one another.
“ ‘You better be careful what you are saying, if it is a white man you are talking about,’ the marshal says. ‘I dont care if he is a murderer or not.’
“ ‘I’m talking about Christmas,’ Brown says. ‘The man that killed that white woman after he had done lived with her in plain sight of this whole town, and you all letting him get further and further away while you are accusing the one fellow that can find him for you, that knows what he done. He’s got nigger blood in him. I knowed it when I first saw him. But you folks, you smart sheriffs and such. One time he even admitted it, told me he was part nigger. Maybe he was drunk when he done it: I dont know. Anyway, the next morning after he told me he come to me and he says (Brown was talking fast now, kind of glaring his eyes and his teeth both around at them, from one to another), he said to me, “I made a mistake last night.
Dont you make the same one.” And I said “How do you mean a mistake?” and he said, “You think a minute,” and I thought about something he done one night when me and him was in Memphis and I knowed my life wouldn’t be worth nothing if I ever crossed him and so I said, “I reckon I know what you mean. I aint going to meddle in what aint none of my business. I aint never done that yet, that I know of.” And you’d have said that, too,’ Brown says, ‘way out there, alone in that cabin with him and nobody to hear you if you was to holler. You’d have been scared too, until the folks you was trying to help turned in and accused you of the killing you never done.’ And there he sat, with his eyes going and going, and them in the room watching him and the faces pressed against the window from outside.
“ ‘A nigger,’ the marshal said. ‘I always thought there was something funny about that fellow.’
“Then the sheriff talked to Brown again. ‘And that’s why you didn’t tell what was going on out there until tonight?’
“And Brown setting there in the midst of them, with his lips snarled back and that little scar by his mouth white as a popcorn. ‘You just show me the man that would a done different,’ he says. ‘That’s all I ask. Just show me the man that would a lived with him enough to know him like I done, and done different.’
“ ‘Well,’ the sheriff says, ‘I believe you are telling the truth at last. You go on with Buck, now, and get a good sleep. I’ll attend to Christmas.’
“ ‘I reckon that means the jail,’ Brown says. ‘I reckon you’ll lock me up in jail while you get the reward.’
“ ‘You shut your mouth,’ the sheriff says, not mad. ‘If that reward is yours, I’ll see that you get it. Take him on, Buck.’
“The marshal come over and touched Brown’s shoulder and he got up. When they went out the door the ones that had been watching through the window crowded up: ‘Have you got him, Buck? Is he the one that done it?’
“ ‘No,’ Buck says. ‘You boys get on home. Get on to bed, now.’ ”
Byron’s voice ceases. Its flat, inflectionless, countrybred singsong dies into silence. He is now looking at Hightower with that look compassionate and troubled and still, watching across the desk the man who sits there with his eyes closed and the sweat running down his face like tears. Hightower speaks: “Is it certain, proved, that he has negro blood? Think, Byron; what it will mean when the people—if they catch . . . Poor man. Poor mankind.”
“That’s what Brown says,” Byron says, his tone quiet, stubborn, convinced. “And even a liar can be scared into telling the truth, same as a honest man can be tortured into telling a lie.”
“Yes,” Hightower says. He sits with his eyes closed, erect. “But they have not caught him yet. They have not caught him yet, Byron.”
Neither is Byron looking at the other. “Not yet. Not the last I heard. They took some bloodhounds out there today. But they hadn’t caught him when I heard last.”
“And Brown?”
“Brown,” Byron says. “Him. He went with them. He may have helped Christmas do it. But I dont reckon so. I reckon that setting fire to the house was about his limit. And why he done that, if he did, I reckon even he dont know. Unless maybe he thought that if the whole thing was just burned up, it would kind of not ever been at all, and then him and Christmas could go on riding around in that new car. I reckon he figured that what Christmas committed was not so much a sin as a mistake.”
His face is musing, downlooking; again it cracks faintly, with a kind of sardonic weariness. “I reckon he’s safe enough. I reckon she can find him now any time she wants, provided him and the sheriff aint out with the dogs. He aint trying to run—not with that thousand dollars hanging over his head, you might say. I reckon he wants to catch Christmas worse than
