“Going down to Jackson for a couple of days on a little business,” he said. “Too bad I missed you last night. I come on back in a car. I reckon you was settled for the night, maybe?” He looked down at Horace, vast, pasty, his intention unmistakable. “I could have took you to a place most folks dont know about. Where a man can do just whatever he is big enough to do. But there’ll be another time, since I done got to know you better.” He lowered his voice a little, moving a little aside. “Dont you be uneasy. I aint a talker. When I’m here, in Jefferson, I’m one fellow; what I am up town with a bunch of good sports aint nobody’s business but mine and theirn. Aint that right?”
Later in the morning, from a distance he saw his sister on the street ahead of him turn and disappear into a door. He tried to find her by looking into all the stores within the radius of where she must have turned, and asking the clerks. She was in none of them. The only place he did not investigate was a stairway that mounted between two stores, to a corridor of offices on the first floor, one of which was that of the District Attorney, Eustace Graham.
Graham had a club foot, which had elected him to the office he now held. He worked his way into and through the State University; as a youth the town remembered him as driving wagons and trucks for grocery stores. During his first year at the University he made a name for himself by his industry. He waited on table in the commons and he had the government contract for carrying the mail to and from the local postoffice at the arrival of each train, hobbling along with the sack over his shoulder: a pleasant, open-faced young man with a word for everyone and a certain alert rapacity about the eyes.
During his second year he let his mail contract lapse and he resigned from his job in the commons; he also had a new suit. People were glad that he had saved through his industry to where he could give all his time to his studies. He was in the law school then, and the law professors groomed him like a race-horse. He graduated well, though without distinction. “Because he was handicapped at the start,” the professors said. “If he had had the same start that the others had . . . He will go far,” they said.
It was not until he had left school that they learned that he had been playing poker for three years in the office of a livery stable, behind drawn shades. When, two years out of school, he got elected to the State legislature, they began to tell an anecdote of his school days.
It was in the poker game in the livery stable office. The bet came to Graham. He looked across the table at the owner of the stable, who was his only remaining opponent.
“How much have you got there, Mr Harris?” he said.
“Forty-two dollars, Eustace,” the proprietor said. Eustace shoved some chips into the pot. “How much is that?” the proprietor said.
“Forty-two dollars, Mr Harris.”
“Hmmm,” the proprietor said. He examined his hand. “How many cards did you draw, Eustace?”
“Three, Mr Harris.”
“Hmmm. Who dealt the cards, Eustace?”
“I did, Mr Harris.”
“I pass, Eustace.”
He had been District Attorney but a short time, yet already he had let it be known that he would announce for Congress on his record of convictions, so when he found himself facing Narcissa across the desk in his dingy office, his expression was like that when he had put the forty-two dollars into the pot.
“I only wish it weren’t your brother,” he said. “I hate to see a brother-in-arms, you might say, with a bad case.” She was watching him with a blank, enveloping look. “After all, we’ve got to protect society, even when it does seem that society does not need protection.”
“Are you sure he cant win?” she said.
“Well, the first principle of law is, God alone knows what the jury will do. Of course, you cant expect—”
“But you dont think he will.”
“Naturally, I—”
“You have good reason to think he cant. I suppose you know things about it that he doesn’t.”
He looked at her briefly. Then he picked up a pen from his desk and began to scrape at the point with a paper cutter. “This is purely confidential. I am violating my oath of office. I wont have to tell you that. But it may save you worry to know that he hasn’t a chance in the world. I know what the disappointment will be to him, but that cant be helped. We happen to know that the man is guilty. So if there’s any way you know of to get your brother out of the case, I’d advise you to do it. A losing lawyer is like a losing anything else, ballplayer or merchant or doctor: his business is to—”
“So the quicker he loses, the better it would be, wouldn’t it?” she said. “If they hung the man and got it over with.” His hands became perfectly still. He did not look up. She said, her tone cold and level: “I have reasons for wanting Horace out of this case. The sooner the better. Three nights ago that Snopes, the one in the legislature, telephoned out home, trying to find him. The next day he went to Memphis. I dont know what for. You’ll have to find that out yourself. I just want Horace out of this business as soon as possible.”
She rose and moved toward the door. He hobbled over to open it; again she put that cold, still, unfathomable gaze upon him as though he were a dog or a cow and she waited for it to get out of her path. Then she was gone. He closed the door and struck a clumsy clog-step, snapping his fingers just as the door opened again; he snapped his hands toward his tie and looked at her in the door, holding it open.
“What day do you think it will be over with?” she said.
“Why, I cuh— Court opens the twentieth,” he said. “It will be the first case. Say . . . Two days. Or three at the most, with your kind assistance. And I need not assure you that this will be held in strictest confidence between us. . . .” He moved toward her, but her blank calculating gaze was like a wall, surrounding him.
“That will be the twenty-fourth.” Then she was looking at him again. “Thank you,” she said, and closed the door.
That night she wrote Belle that Horace would be home on the twenty-fourth. She telephoned Horace and asked for Belle’s address.
“Why?” Horace said.
“I’m going to write her a letter,” she said, her voice tranquil, without threat. Dammit, Horace thought, holding the dead wire in his hand, How can I be expected to combat people who will not even employ subterfuge. But soon he forgot it, forgot that she had called. He did not see her again before the trial opened.
Two days before it opened Snopes emerged from a dentist’s office and stood at the curb, spitting. He took a gold-wrapped cigar from his pocket and removed the foil and put the cigar gingerly between his teeth. He had a black eye, and the bridge of his nose was bound in soiled adhesive tape. “Got hit by a car in Jackson,” he told them in the barber-shop. “But dont think I never made the bastard pay,” he said, showing a sheaf of yellow bills. He put them into a notecase and stowed it away. “I am an American,” he said. “I dont brag about it, because I was born one. And I been a decent Baptist all my life, too.
Oh, I aint no preacher and I aint no old maid; I been around with the boys now and then, but I reckon I aint no worse than lots of folks that pretends to sing loud in church. But the lowest, cheapest thing on this earth aint a nigger: it’s a jew. We need laws against them. Drastic laws. When a durn lowlife jew can come to a free country like this and just because he’s got a law degree, it’s time to put a stop to things.
A jew is the lowest thing on this creation. And the lowest kind of jew is a jew lawyer. And the lowest kind of jew lawyer is a Memphis jew lawyer. When a jew lawyer can hold up an American, a white man, and not give him but ten dollars for something that two Americans, Americans, southron gentlemen; a judge living in the capital of the State of Mississippi and a lawyer that’s going to be as big a man as his pa some day, and a judge too; when they give him ten times as much for the same thing than the lowlife jew, we need a law. I been a liberal spender all my life; whatever I had has always been my friends’ too. But when a durn, stinking, lowlife jew will refuse to pay an American one tenth of what another American, and a judge at that—”
“Why did you sell it to him, then?” the
