But Reba was a lady. She just held her hand out until he quit fumbling at his fly and took the folded money order out of whatever pocket it was in and handed it to her. A lady. She never raised her hand at him. She never even cursed him. She just went to the front door and took hold of the knob and turned and said, “Button yourself up. Ain’t no man going to walk out of my house at just eleven o’clock at night with his pants still hanging open.” Then she closed the door after him and locked it. Then she unfolded the money order. Minnie was right. It was for two dollars, issued at Lonoke, Arkansas. The sender’s name was spelled Q’Milla Strutterbuck. “His sister or his daughter?” Reba said. “What’s your guess?”
Minnie was looking too. “It’s his wife,” she said. “His sister or mama or grandma would sent five. His woman would sent fifty — if she had it and felt like sending it. His daughter would sent fifty cents. Wouldn’t nobody but his wife sent two dollars.”
She brought two more bottles of beer to the dining-room table. “All right,” Reba said. “You want a favour. What favour?”
I took out the money again and shoved the ten across to her again, still holding the other forty. “This is for you and Minnie, to remember me until I come back in two years. I want you to send the other to my great-uncle in the Mississippi penitentiary at Parchman.”
“Will you come back in two years?”
“Yes,” I said. “You can look for me. Two years. The man I’m going to be working for says I’ll be back in one, but I don’t believe him.”
“All right. Now what do I do with the forty?”
“Send it to my great-uncle Mink Snopes in Parchman.”
“What’s he in for?”
“He killed a man named Jack Houston back in 1908.”
“Did Houston deserve killing?”
“I don’t know. But from what I hear, he sure worked to earn it.”
“The poor son of a bitch. How long is your uncle in for?”
“Life,” I said.
“All right,” she said. “I know about that too. When will he get out?”
“About 1948 if he lives and nothing else happens to him.”
“All right. How do I do it?” I told her, the address and all.
“You could send it From another prisoner.”
“I doubt it,” she said. “I ain’t never been in jail. I don’t aim to be.”
“Send it From a friend then.”
“All right,” she said. She took the money and folded it. “The poor son of a bitch,” she said.
“Which one are you talking about now?”
“Both of them,” she said. “All of us. Every one of us. The poor son of a bitches.”
I hadn’t expected to see Clarence at all until tomorrow morning. But there he was, a handful of crumpled bills scattered on the top of the dresser like the edge of a crap game and Clarence undressed down to his trousers standing looking at them and yawning and rooting in the pelt on his chest. This time they — Clarence — had found a big operator, a hot sport who, Virgil having taken on the customary two successfully, bet them he couldn’t handle a third one without stopping, offering them the odds this time, which Clarence covered with Flem’s other fifty since this really would be a risk; he said how he even gave Virgil a chance to quit and not hold it against him: “ ’We’re ahead now, you know; you done already proved yourself.’
And do you know, the little sod never even turned a hair. ‘Sure,’ he says, ‘Send her in.’ And now my conscience hurts me,” he said, yawning again. “It was Flem’s money. My conscience says don’t tell him a durn thing about it: the money just got spent like he thinks it was. But shucks, a man don’t want to be a hog.”
So we went back home. “Why do you want to go back to the jail?” Flem said. “It’ll be three weeks yet.”
“Call it for practice,” I said. “Call it a dry run against my conscience.” So now I had a set of steel bars between; now I was safe from the free world, safe and secure for a little while from the free Snopes world where Flem was parlaying his wife into the presidency of a bank and Clarence even drawing per diem as a state senator between Jackson and Gayoso Street to take the wraps off Virgil whenever he could find another Arkansas sport who refused to believe what he was looking at, and Byron in Mexico or wherever he was with whatever was still left of the bank’s money, and mine and Clarence’s father I.O. and all of our Uncle Wesley leading a hymn with one hand and fumbling the skirt of an eleven-year-old infant with the other; I don’t count Wallstreet and Admiral Dewey and their father Eck, because they don’t belong to us: they are only our shame.
Not to mention Uncle Murdering Mink six or seven weeks later (I had to wait a little while you see not to spook him too quick). “Flem?” he said. “I wouldn’t a thought Flem wanted me out. I’d a thought he’d been the one wanted to keep me here longest.”
“He must have changed,” I said. He stood there in his barred overalls, blinking a little — a damn little worn-out dried-up shrimp of a man not as big as a fourteen-year-old boy. Until you wondered how in hell anything as small and frail could have held enough mad, let alone steadied and aimed a ten-gauge shotgun, to kill anybody.
“I’m obliged to him,” he said. “Only, if I got out tomorrow, maybe I won’t done changed. I been here a long time now. I ain’t had much to do for a right smart while now but jest work in the field and think. I wonder if he knows to risk that? A man wants to be fair, you know.”
“He knows that,” I said. “He don’t expect you to change inside here because he knows you can’t. He expects you to change when you get out. Because he knows that as soon as the free air and sun shine on you again, you can’t help but be a changed man even if you don’t want to.”
“But jest suppose I don’t—” He didn’t add change in time because he stopped himself.
“He’s going to take that risk,” I said. “He’s got to. I mean, he’s got to now. He couldn’t have stopped them from sending you here. But he knows you think he didn’t try. He’s got to help you get out not only to prove to you he never put you here but so he can quit thinking and remembering that you believe he did. You see?”
He was completely still, just blinking a little, his hands hanging empty but even now shaped inside the palms like the handles of a plow and even his neck braced a little as though still braced against the loop of the ploughlines. “I just got five more years, then I’ll get out by myself. Then won’t nobody have no right to hold expectations against me. I won’t owe nobody no help then.”
“That’s right,” I said. “Just five more years. That’s practically nothing to a man that has already put in fifteen years with a man with a shotgun watching him plow cotton that ain’t his whether he feels like plowing that day or not, and another man with a shotgun standing over him while he eats grub that he either ate it or not whether he felt like eating or not, and another man with a shotgun to lock him up at night so he could either go to sleep or stay awake whether he felt like doing it or not. Just five years more, then you’ll be out where the free sun and air can shine on you without any man with a shotgun’s shadow to cut it off. Because you’ll be free.”
“Free,” he said, not loud: just like that: “Free.” That was all. It was that easy. Of course the guard I welshed to cursed me; I had expected that: it was a free country; every convict had a right to try to escape just as every guard and trusty had the right to shoot him in the back the first time he didn’t halt. But no unprintable stool pigeon had the right to warn the guard in advance.
I had to watch it too. That was on the bill too: the promissory note of breathing in a world that had Snopeses in it. I wanted to turn my head or anyway shut my eyes. But refusing to not look was all I had left now: the last sorry lousy almost worthless penny — the damn little thing looking like a little girl playing mama in the calico dress and sunbonnet that he believed was Flem’s idea (that had been difficult; he still wanted to believe
