“What?” Snopes said. The barber was looking at him.
“What was you trying to sell to that car when it run over you?” the barber said.
“Have a cigar,” Snopes said.
XXVII
The trial was set for the twentieth of June. A week after his Memphis visit, Horace telephoned Miss Reba. “Just to know if she’s still there,” he said. “So I can reach her if I need to.”
“She’s here,” Miss Reba said. “But this reaching. I dont like it. I dont want no cops around here unless they are on my business.”
“It’ll be only a bailiff,” Horace said. “Someone to hand a paper into her own hand.”
“Let the postman do it, then,” Miss Reba said. “He comes here anyway. In a uniform too. He dont look no worse in it than a full-blowed cop, neither. Let him do it.”
“I wont bother you,” Horace said. “I wont make you any trouble.”
“I know you aint,” Miss Reba said. Her voice was thin, harsh, over the wire. “I aint going to let you. Minnie’s done took a crying spell tonight, over that bastard that left her, and me and Miss Myrtle was sitting here, and we got started crying too. Me and Minnie and Miss Myrtle. We drunk up a whole new bottle of gin. I cant afford that. So dont you be sending no jay cops up here with no letters for nobody. You telephone me and I’ll turn them both out on the street and you can have them arrested there.”
On the night of the nineteenth he telephoned her again. He had some trouble in getting in touch with her.
“They’re gone,” she said. “Both of them. Dont you read no papers?”
“What papers?” Horace said. “Hello. Hello!”
“They aint here no more, I said,” Miss Reba said. “I dont know nuttin about them and I dont want to know nuttin except who’s going to pay me a week’s room rent on—”
“But cant you find where she went to? I may need her.”
“I dont know nuttin and I dont want to know nuttin,” Miss Reba said. He heard the receiver click. Yet the disconnection was not made at once. He heard the receiver thud onto the table where the telephone sat, and he could hear Miss Reba shouting for Minnie: “Minnie. Minnie!” Then some hand lifted the receiver and set it onto the hook; the wire clicked in his ear. After a while a detached Delsarte-ish voice said: “Pine Bluff dizzent . . . Enkyew!”
The trial opened the next day. On the table lay the sparse objects which the District Attorney was offering: the bullet from Tommy’s skull, a stoneware jug containing corn whiskey.
“I will call Mrs Goodwin to the stand,” Horace said. He did not look back. He could feel Goodwin’s eyes on his back as he helped the woman into the chair. She was sworn, the child lying on her lap. She repeated the story as she had told it to him on the day after the child was ill. Twice Goodwin tried to interrupt and was silenced by the Court. Horace would not look at him.
The woman finished her story. She sat erect in the chair, in her neat, worn gray dress and hat with the darned veil, the purple ornament on her shoulder. The child lay on her lap, its eyes closed in that drugged immobility. For a while her hand hovered about its face, performing those needless maternal actions as though unawares.
Horace went and sat down. Then only did he look at Goodwin. But the other sat quietly now, his arms folded and his head bent a little, but Horace could see that his nostrils were waxy white with rage against his dark face. He leaned toward him and whispered, but Goodwin did not move.
The District Attorney now faced the woman.
“Mrs Goodwin,” he said, “what was the date of your marriage to Mr Goodwin?”
“I object!” Horace said, on his feet.
“Can the prosecution show how this question is relevant?” the Court said.
“I waive, your Honor,” the District Attorney said, glancing at the jury.
When court adjourned for the day Goodwin said bitterly: “Well, you’ve said you would kill me someday, but I didn’t think you meant it. I didn’t think that you—”
“Dont be a fool,” Horace said. “Dont you see your case is won? That they are reduced to trying to impugn the character of your witness?” But when they left the jail he found the woman still watching him from some deep reserve of foreboding. “You mustn’t worry at all, I tell you. You may know more about making whiskey or love than I do, but I know more about criminal procedure than you, remember.”
“You dont think I made a mistake?”
“I know you didn’t. Dont you see how that explodes their case? The best they can hope for now is a hung jury. And the chances of that are not one in fifty. I tell you, he’ll walk out of that jail tomorrow a free man.”
“Then I guess it’s time to think about paying you.”
“Yes,” Horace said, “all right. I’ll come out tonight.”
“Tonight?”
“Yes. He may call you back to the stand tomorrow. We’d better prepare for it, anyway.”
At eight oclock he entered the mad woman’s yard. A single light burned in the crazy depths of the house, like a firefly caught in a brier patch, but the woman did not appear when he called. He went to the door and knocked. A shrill voice shouted something; he waited a moment. He was about to knock again when he heard the voice again, shrill and wild and faint, as though from a distance, like a reedy pipe buried by an avalanche.
He circled the house in the rank, waist-high weeds. The kitchen door was open. The lamp was there, dim in a smutty chimney, filling the room—a jumble of looming shapes rank with old foul female flesh—not with light but with shadow. White eyeballs rolled in a high, tight bullet head in brown gleams above a torn singlet strapped into overalls. Beyond the Negro the mad woman turned in an open cupboard, brushing her lank hair back with her forearm.
“Your bitch has gone to jail,” she said. “Go on with her.”
“Jail?” Horace said.
“That’s what I said. Where the good folks live. When you get a husband, keep him in jail where he cant bother you.” She turned to the negro, a small flask in her hand. “Come on, dearie. Give me a dollar for it. You got plenty money.”
Horace returned to town, to the jail. They admitted him. He mounted the stairs; the jailer locked a door behind him.
The woman admitted him to the cell. The child lay on the cot. Goodwin sat beside it, his arms crossed, his legs extended in the attitude of a man in the last stage of physical exhaustion.
“Why are you sitting there, in front of that slit?” Horace said. “Why not get into the corner, and we’ll put the mattress over you.”
“You come to see it done, did you?” Goodwin said. “Well, that’s no more than right. It’s your job. You promised I wouldn’t hang, didn’t you?”
“You’ve got an hour yet,” Horace said. “The Memphis train doesn’t get here until eight-thirty. He’s surely got better sense than to come here in that canary-colored car.” He turned to the woman. “But you. I thought better of you. I know that he and I are fools, but I expected better of you.”
“You’re doing her a favor,” Goodwin said. “She might have hung on with me until she was too old to hustle a good man. If you’ll just promise to get the kid a newspaper grift when he’s old enough to make change, I’ll be easy in my mind.”
The woman had returned to the cot. She lifted the child onto her lap. Horace went to her. He said: “You come on, now. Nothing’s going to happen. He’ll be all right here. He knows it. You’ve got to go home and get some sleep, because you’ll both be leaving here tomorrow. Come, now.”
“I reckon I better stay,” she said.
“Damn it, dont you know that putting yourself in the position for disaster is the surest way in the world to bring it about? Hasn’t your own experience shown you that? Lee knows it. Lee, make her stop this.”
“Go on, Ruby,” Goodwin said. “Go home and go to bed.”
“I reckon I better stay,” she said.
Horace stood over them. The woman mused above the child, her face bent and her whole body motionless. Goodwin leaned back against the wall, his brown wrists folded into the faded sleeves of his shirt. “You’re a man now,” Horace said. “Aren’t you? I wish that jury could see you now, locked up in a concrete cell, scaring women and children with fifth grade ghost stories. They’d know you never had the guts to kill anybody.”
“You better go on and go to bed yourself,” Goodwin said. “We could sleep here, if there wasn’t so much noise going on.”
“No; that’s too sensible for us to do,” Horace said. He left the cell. The jailer unlocked the door for him and he quitted the building. In ten minutes he returned, with a parcel. Goodwin had not moved. The woman watched him open the package. It contained a bottle of milk, a box of candy, a box of cigars. He gave Goodwin one of the cigars and took one himself. “You brought his bottle, didn’t you?”
The woman produced the bottle from a bundle beneath the cot. “It’s got some in it,” she said. She filled it from the bottle. Horace lit his and Goodwin’s cigars. When he looked again the bottle was
