Thirty minutes later two men brought him home in a car. One of them drove while the other held Hines up in the back seat. His face was pale now beneath the stubble and the dirt, and his eyes were closed. They lifted him bodily from the car and carried him through the gate and up the walk of rotting bricks and shards of concrete, to the steps. His eyes were open now, but they were quite empty, rolled back into his skull until the dirty, bluish whites alone showed.
But he was still quite limp and helpless. Just before they reached the porch the front door opened and his wife came out and closed the door behind her and stood there, watching them. They knew that it was his wife because she came out of the house where he was known to live. One of the men, though a resident of the town, had never seen her before. “What is it?” she said.
“He’s all right,” the first man said. “We just been having a right smart of excitement downtown a while ago, and with this hot weather and all, it was a little too much for him.” She stood before the door as if she were barring them from the house—a dumpy, fat little woman with a round face like dirty and unovened dough, and a tight screw of scant hair. “They just caught that nigger Christmas that killed that lady up at Jefferson last week,” the man said. “Uncle Doc just got a little upset over it.”
Mrs Hines was already turning back, as though to open the door. As the first man said later to his companion, she halted in the act of turning, as if someone had hit her lightly with a thrown pebble. “Caught who?” she said.
“Christmas,” the man said. “That nigger murderer. Christmas.”
She stood at the edge of the porch, looking down at them with her gray, still face. “As if she already knew what I would tell her,” the man said to his companion as they returned to the car. “Like she wanted all at the same time for me to tell her it was him and it wasn’t him.”
“What does he look like?” she said.
“I never noticed much,” the man said. “They had to bloody him up some, catching him. Young fellow. He dont look no more like a nigger than I do, either.” The woman looked at them, down at them. Between the two men Hines stood on his own legs now, muttering a little now as if he were waking from sleep. “What do you want us to do with Uncle Doc?” the man said.
She did not answer that at all. It was as though she had not even recognised her husband, the man told his companion later. “What are they going to do with him?” she said.
“Him?” the man said. “Oh. The nigger. That’s for Jefferson to say. He belongs to them up there.”
She looked down at them, gray, still, remote. “Are they going to wait on Jefferson?”
“They?” the man said. “Oh,” he said. “Well, if Jefferson aint too long about it.” He shifted his grip on the old man’s arm. “Where do you want us to put him?” The woman moved then. She descended the steps and approached. “We’ll tote him into the house for you,” the man said.
“I can tote him,” she said. She and Hines were about the same height, though she was the heavier. She grasped him beneath the arms. “Eupheus,” she said, not loud; “Eupheus.” She said to the two men, quietly: “Let go. I got him.” They released him. He walked a little now. They watched her help him up the steps and into the door. She did not look back.
“She never even thanked us,” the second man said. “Maybe we ought to take him back and put him in jail with the nigger, since he seemed to know him so well.”
“Eupheus,” the first man said. “Eupheus. I been wondering for fifteen years what his name might be. Eupheus.”
“Come on. Let’s get on back. We might miss some of it.”
The first man looked at the house, at the closed door through which the two people had vanished. “She knowed him too.”
“Knowed who?”
“That nigger. Christmas.”
“Come on.” They returned to the car. “What do you think about that durn fellow, coming right into town here, within twently miles of where he done it, walking up and down the main street until somebody recognised him. I wish it had been me that recognised him. I could have used that thousand dollars. But I never do have any luck.” The car moved on. The first man was still looking back at the blank door through which the two people had disappeared.
In the hall of that little house dark and small and rankly-odored as a cave, the old couple stood. The old man’s spent condition was still little better than coma, and when his wife led him to a chair and helped him into it, it seemed a matter of expediency and concern. But there was no need to return and lock the front door, which she did. She came and stood over him for a while. At first it seemed as if she were just watching him, with concern and solicitude.
Then a third person would have seen that she was trembling violently and that she had lowered him into the chair either before she dropped him to the floor or in order to hold him prisoner until she could speak. She leaned above him: dumpy, obese, gray in color, with a face like that of a drowned corpse. When she spoke her voice shook and she strove with it, shaking, her hands clenched upon the arms of the chair in which he half lay, her voice shaking, restrained: “Eupheus. You listen to me. You got to listen to me. I aint worried you before. In thirty years I aint worried you. But now I am going to. I am going to know and you got to tell me. What did you do with Milly’s baby?”
Through the long afternoon they clotted about the square and before the jail—the clerks, the idle, the countrymen in overalls; the talk. It went here and there about the town, dying and homing again like a wind or a fire until in the lengthening shadows the country people began to depart in wagons and dusty cars and the townspeople began to move supperward.
Then the talk flared again, momentarily revived, to wives and families about suppertables in electrically lighted rooms and in remote hill cabins with kerosene lamps. And on the next day, the slow, pleasant country Sunday while they squatted in their clean shirts and decorated suspenders, with peaceful pipes about country churches or about the shady dooryards of houses where the visiting teams and cars were tethered and parked along the fence and the womenfolks were in the kitchen, getting dinner, they told it again: “He dont look any more like a nigger than I do. But it must have been the nigger blood in him.
It looked like he had set out to get himself caught like a man might set out to get married. He had got clean away for a whole week. If he had not set fire to the house, they might not have found out about the murder for a month. And they would not have suspected him then if it hadn’t been for a fellow named Brown, that the nigger used to sell whiskey while he was pretending to be a white man and tried to lay the whiskey and the killing both on Brown and Brown told the truth.
“Then yesterday morning he come into Mottstown in broad daylight, on a Saturday with the town full of folks. He went into a white barbershop like a white man, and because he looked like a white man they never suspected him. Even when the bootblack saw how he had on a pair of second hand brogans that were too big for him, they never suspected. They shaved him and cut his hair and he payed them and walked out and went right into a store and bought a new shirt and a tie and a straw hat, with some of the very money he stole from the woman he murdered.
And then he walked the streets in broad daylight, like he owned the town, walking back and forth with people passing him a dozen times and not knowing it, until Halliday saw him and ran up and grabbed him and said, ‘Aint your name Christmas?’ and the nigger said that it was. He never denied it. He never did anything. He never acted like either a nigger or a white man. That was it. That was what made the folks so mad. For him to be a murderer and all dressed up and walking the town like he dared them to touch him, when he ought to have been skulking and hiding in the woods, muddy and dirty and running. It was like he never even knew he was a murderer, let alone a nigger too.
“And so Halliday (he was excited, thinking about that thousand dollars, and he had already hit the nigger a couple of times in the face, and the nigger acting like a nigger for the first time and
