‘No,’ Stevens said. Tell about how the smoke was there behind that table that afternoon when you came to wake him to go home, when there hadn’t anybody passed you all that day except Mr. Virge Holland yonder. And Mr. Virge don’t smoke, and the Judge didn’t smoke. But that smoke was there. Tell what you told me.’
‘It was there. And I thought that he was asleep like always, and I went to wake him up—’
‘And this little box was sitting on the edge of the table where he had been handling it while he talked to Mr. Virge, and when you reached your hand to wake him—’
‘Yes, sir. It jumped off the table and I thought he was asleep—’
The box jumped off the table. And it made a noise and you wondered why that didn’t wake the Judge, and you looked down at where the box was lying on the floor in the smoke, with the lid open, and you thought that it was broken. And so you reached your hand down to see, because the Judge liked it because Miss Emma had brought it back to him from across the water, even if he didn’t need it for a paper weight in his office. So you closed the lid and set it on the table again. And then you found that the Judge was more than asleep.’
He ceased. We breathed quietly, hearing ourselves breathe. Stevens seemed to watch his hand as it turned the box slowly this way and that. He had turned a little from the table in talking with the old negro, so that now he faced the bench rather than the jury, the table. ‘Uncle Job calls this a gold: box. Which is as good a name as any. Better than most. Because all metal is about the same; it just happens that some I folks want one kind more than another. But it all has certain general attributes, likenesses.
One of them is, that whatever is shut up in a metal box will stay in it unchanged for a longer time than in a wooden or paper box. You can shut up smoke, for instance, in a metal box with a tight lid like this one, and even a week later it will still be there. And not only that, a chemist or a smoker or tobacco seller like Doctor West can tell what made the smoke, what kind of tobacco, particularly if it happens to be a strange brand, a kind not sold in Jefferson, and of which he just happened to have two packs and remembered who he sold one of them to.’
We did not move. We just sat there and heard the man’s urgent stumbling feet on the floor, then we saw him strike the box from Stevens’ hand. But we were not particularly watching him, even then. Like him, we watched the box bounce into two pieces as the lid snapped off, and emit a fading vapor which dissolved sluggishly away. As one we leaned across the table and looked down upon the sandy and hopeless mediocrity of Granby Dodge’s head as he knelt on the floor and flapped at the fading smoke with his hands.
‘But I still don’t..’ Virginius said. We were outside now, in the courthouse yard, the five of us, blinking a little at one another as though we had just come out of a cave.
You’ve got a will, haven’t you?’ Stevens said. Then Virginius stopped perfectly still, looking at Stevens.
Oh,’ he said at last.
‘One of those natural mutual deed-of-trust wills that any two business partners might execute,’ Stevens said. You and Granby each the other’s beneficiary and executor, for mutual protection of mutual holdings. That’s natural. Likely Granby was the one who suggested it first, by telling you how he had made you his heir. So you’d better tear it up, yours, your copy. Make Anse your heir, if you have to have a will.’
‘He won’t need to wait for that,’ Virginius said. ‘Half of that land is his.’
‘You just treat it right, as he knows you will,’ Stevens said. ‘Anse don’t need any land.’
‘Yes,’ Virginius said. He looked away. ‘But I wish…’
‘You just treat it right. He knows you’ll do that.’
‘Yes,’ Virginius said. He looked at Stevens again. ‘Well, I reckon I… we both owe you….’
‘More than you think,’ Stevens said. He spoke quite soberly. ‘Or to that horse. A week after your father died, Granby bought enough rat poison to kill three elephants, West told me. But after he remembered what he had forgotten about that horse, he was afraid to kill his rats before that will was settled. Because he is a man both shrewd and ignorant at the same time: a dangerous combination.
Ignorant enough to believe that the law is something like dynamite: the slave of whoever puts his hand to it first, and even then a dangerous slave; and just shrewd enough to believe that people avail themselves of it, resort to it, only for personal ends. I found that out when he sent a negro to see me one day last summer, to find out if the way in which a man died could affect the probation of his will. And I knew who had sent the negro to me, and I knew that whatever information the negro took back to the man who sent him, that man had already made up his mind to disbelieve it, since I was a servant of the slave, the dynamite. So if that had been a normal horse, or Granby had remembered in time, you would be underground now.
Granby might not he any better off than he is, but you would be dead.’
Oh,’ Virginius said, quietly, soberly. ‘I reckon I’m obliged.’
‘Yes,’ Stevens said. ‘You’ve incurred a right smart of obligation. You owe Granby something.’ Virginius looked at him. ‘You owe him for those taxes he has been paying every year now for fifteen years.’
‘Oh,’ Virginius said. ‘Yes. I thought that father…. Every November, about, Granby would borrow money from me, not much, and not ever the same amount. To buy stock with, he said. He paid some of it back. But he still owes me… no. I owe him now.’ He was quite grave, quite sober. When a man starts doing wrong, it’s not what he does; it’s what he leaves.’
‘But it’s what he does that people will have to hurt him for, the outsiders. Because the folks that’ll be hurt by what he leaves won’t hurt him. So it’s a good thing for the rest of us that what he does takes him out of their hands. I have taken him out of your hands now, Virge, blood or no blood. Do you understand?’
‘I understand,’ Virginius said. ‘I wouldn’t anyway…’ Then suddenly he looked at Stevens. ‘Gavin,’ he said.
What?’ Stevens said.
Virginius watched him. ‘You talked a right smart in yonder about chemistry and such, about that smoke. I reckon I believed some of it and I reckon I didn’t believe some of it. And I reckon if I told you which I believed and didn’t believe, you’d laugh at me.’ His face was quite sober. Stevens’ face was quite grave too. Yet there was something in Stevens’ eyes, glance; something quick and eager; not ridiculing, either.
‘That was a week ago. If you had opened that box to see if that smoke was still in there, it would have got out. And if there hadn’t been any smoke in that box, Granby wouldn’t have given himself away. And that was a week ago. How did you know there was going to be any smoke in that box?’
‘I didn’t,’ Stevens said. He said it quickly, brightly, cheerfully, almost happily, almost beaming. ‘I didn’t. I waited as long as I could before I put the smoke in there. Just before you all came into the room, I filled that box full of pipe smoke and shut it up. But I didn’t know. I was a lot scareder than Granby Dodge. But it was all right. That smoke stayed in that box almost an hour.’
The End
