She looked at him: a hard, comfortable face, not unkind either. “Rent for what?” she said. “I thought you was settled. Decided to tent for the summer.” She looked at him. Then she told him. She did it gently, delicately, considering. “I done already collected the rent for that room.”
“Oh,” he said. “Yes. I see. Yes.” He looked quietly up the scoured, linoleumstripped stairway, scuffed bare by the aid of his own feet. When the new linoleum was put down three years ago, he had been the first of the boarders to mount upon it. “Oh,” he said. “Well, I reckon I better . . .”
She answered that too, immediately, not unkind. “I tended to that. I put everything you left in your grip. It’s back in my room. If you want to go up and look for yourself, though?”
“No. I reckon you got every . . . Well, I reckon I . . .”
She was watching him. “You men,” she said. “It aint a wonder womenfolks get impatient with you. You cant even know your own limits for devilment. Which aint more than I can measure on a pin, at that. I reckon if it wasn’t for getting some woman mixed up in it to help you, you’d ever one of you be drug hollering into heaven before you was ten years old.”
“I reckon you aint got any call to say anything against her,” he said.
“No more I aint. I dont need to. Dont no other woman need to that is going to. I aint saying that it aint been women that has done most of the talking. But if you had more than mansense you would know that women dont mean anything when they talk. It’s menfolks that take talking serious. It aint any woman that believes hard against you and her.
Because it aint any woman but knows that she aint had any reason to have to be bad with you, even discounting that baby. Or any other man right now. She never had to. Aint you and that preacher and ever other man that knows about her already done everything for her that she could think to want? What does she need to be bad for? Tell me that.”
“Yes,” Byron says. He was not looking at her now. “I just come . . .”
She answered that too, before it was spoken. “I reckon you’ll be leaving us soon.” She was watching him. “What have they done this morning at the courthouse?”
“I don’t know. They aint finished yet.”
“I bound that, too. They’ll take as much time and trouble and county money as they can cleaning up what us women could have cleaned up in ten minutes Saturday night. For being such a fool. Not that Jefferson will miss him. Cant get along without him. But being fool enough to believe that killing a woman will do a man anymore good than killing a man would a woman. . . . I reckon they’ll let the other one go, now.”
“Yessum. I reckon so.”
“And they believed for a while that he helped do it. And so they will give him that thousand dollars to show it aint any hard feelings. And then they can get married. That’s about right, aint it?”
“Yessum.” He could feel her watching him, not unkindly.
“And so I reckon you’ll be leaving us. I reckon you kind of feel like you have wore out Jefferson, dont you?”
“Something like that. I reckon I’ll move on.”
“Well, Jefferson’s a good town. But it aint so good but what a footloose man like you can find in another one enough devilment and trouble to keep him occupied too. . . . You can leave your grip here until you are ready for it, if you want.”
He waited until noon and after. He waited until he believed that the sheriff had finished his dinner. Then he went to the sheriff’s home. He would not come in. He waited at the door until the sheriff came out—the fat man, with little wise eyes like bits of mica embedded in his fat, still face.
They went aside, into the shade of a tree in the yard. There was no seat there; neither did they squat on their heels, as by ordinary (they were both countrybred) they would have done. The sheriff listened quietly to the man, the quiet little man who for seven years had been a minor mystery to the town and who had been for seven days wellnigh a public outrage and affront.
“I see,” the sheriff said. “You think the time has come to get them married.”
“I dont know. That’s his business and hers. I reckon he better go out and see her, though. I reckon now is the time for that. You can send a deputy with him. I told her he would come out there this evening. What they do then is her business and hisn. It aint mine.”
“Sho,” the sheriff said. “It aint yourn.” He was looking at the other’s profile. “What do you aim to do now, Byron?”
“I dont know.” His foot moved slowly upon the earth; he was watching it. “I been thinking about going up to Memphis. Been thinking about it for a couple of years. I might do that. There aint nothing in these little towns.”
“Sho. Memphis aint a bad town, for them that like city life. Of course, you aint got any family to have to drag around and hamper you. I reckon if I had been a single man ten years ago I’d have done that too. Been better off, maybe. You’re figuring on leaving right away, I reckon.”
“Soon, I reckon.” He looked up, then down again. He said: “I quit out at the mill this morning.”
“Sho,” the sheriff said. “I figured you hadn’t walked all the way in since twelve and aimed to get back out there by one o’clock. Well, it looks like—” He ceased. He knew that by night the Grand Jury would have indicted Christmas, and Brown—or Burch—would be a free agent save for his bond to appear as a witness at next month’s court. But even his presence would not be absolutely essential, since Christmas had made no denial and the sheriff believed that he would plead guilty in order to save his neck.
‘And it wont do no harm, anyway, to throw the scare of God into that durn fellow, once in his life,’ he thought. He said: “I reckon that can be fixed. Of course, like you say, I will have to send a deputy with him. Even if he aint going to run so long as he has any hope of getting some of that reward money. And provided he dont know what he is going to meet when he gets there. He dont know that yet.”
“No,” Byron said. “He dont know that. He dont know that she is in Jefferson.”
“So I reckon I’ll just send him out there with a deputy. Not tell him why: just send him out there. Unless you want to take him yourself.”
“No,” Byron said. “No. No.” But he did not move.
“I’ll just do that. You’ll be gone by that time, I reckon. I’ll just send a deputy with him. Will four o’clock do?”
“It’ll be fine. It’ll be kind of you. It’ll be a kindness.”
“Sho. Lots of folks beside me has been good to her since she come to Jefferson. Well, I aint going to say goodbye. I reckon Jefferson will see you again someday. Never knowed a man yet to live here a while and then leave it for good. Except maybe that fellow in the jail yonder. But he’ll plead guilty, I reckon. Save his neck. Take it out of Jefferson though, anyway. It’s right hard on that old lady that thinks she is his grandmother.
The old man was downtown when I come home, hollering and ranting, calling folks cowards because they wouldn’t take him out of jail right then and there and lynch him.” He began to chuckle, heavily. “He better be careful, or Percy Grimm’ll get him with that army of his.” He sobered. “It’s right hard on her. On women.” He looked at Byron’s profile. “It’s been right hard on a lot of us. Well, you come back some day soon. Maybe Jefferson will treat you better next time.”
At four o’clock that afternoon, hidden, he sees the car come up and stop, and the deputy and the man whom he knew by the name of Brown get out and approach the cabin. Brown is not handcuffed now, and Byron watches them reach the cabin and sees the deputy push Brown forward and into the door.
Then the door closes behind Brown, and the deputy sits on the step and takes a sack of tobacco from his pocket. Byron rises to his feet. ‘I can go now,’ he thinks. ‘Now I can go.’ His hiding place is a clump of shrubbery on the lawn where the house once stood. On the opposite side of the clump, hidden from the cabin and the road both, the mule is tethered. Lashed behind the worn saddle is a battered yellow suitcase which is not leather. He mounts the mule and turns it into the road. He does not look back.
The mild red road goes on beneath the slanting and peaceful afternoon, mounting a hill. ‘Well, I can bear a hill,’ he thinks. ‘I can bear a hill, a man can.’ It is peaceful and still, familiar
