“It ain’t five now,” he said. “Hit’s four years and six months and nineteen days. You mean, even then you won’t let me out?”
“And have you killed before you could even get home?”
“Send out and ketch him.”
“Send where?” the Warden said. “Suppose you were outside and didn’t want to come back and knew I wanted to get you back. Where would I send to catch you?”
“Yes,” he said. “So there jest ain’t nothing no human man can do.”
“Yes,” the Warden said. “Give him time and he will do something else the police somewhere will catch him for.”
“Time,” he said. “Suppose a man ain’t got time jest to depend on time.”
“At least you have got your four years and six months and nineteen days before you have to worry about it.”
“Yes,” he said. “He’ll have that much time to work in.”
Then Christmas again, another card with the Mexican postmark: “Three years now. Not near as far as you think.” He stood there, fragile and small and durable in the barred overalls, his face lowered a little, peaceful. “Still Mexico, I notice,” he said. “Maybe He will kill him there.”
“What?” the Warden said. “What did you say?”
He didn’t answer. He just stood there, peaceful, musing, serene. Then he said: “Before I had that-ere cow trouble with Jack Houston, when I was still a boy, I used to go to church ever Sunday and Wednesday prayer meeting too with the lady that raised me until I—”
“Who were they?” the Warden said. “You said your mother died.”
“He was a son of a bitch. She wasn’t no kin a-tall. She was jest his wife — ever Sunday until I—”
“Was his name Snopes?” the Warden said.
“He was my paw — until I got big enough to burn out on God like you do when you think you are already growed up and don’t need nothing from nobody. Then when you told me how by keeping nine of them ten fellers from breaking out I didn’t jest add five more years to my time, I fixed it so you wasn’t going to let me out a-tall, I taken it back.”
“Took what back?” the Warden said. “Back from who?”
“I taken it back from God.”
“You mean you’ve rejoined the church since that night two years ago? No you haven’t. You’ve never been inside the chapel since you came here back in 1908.” Which was true. Though the present Warden and his predecessor had not really been surprised at that. What they had expected him to gravitate to was one of the small violent irreconcilable nonconformist non-everything and -everybody else which existed along with the regular prison religious establishment in probably all Southern rural penitentiaries — small fierce cliques and groups (this one called themselves Jehovah’s Shareholders) headed by self-ordained leaders who had reached prison through a curiously consistent pattern: by the conviction of crimes peculiar to the middle class, to respectability, originating in domesticity or anyway uxoriousness: bigamy, rifling the sect’s funds for a woman: his wife or someone else’s or, in an occasional desperate case, a professional prostitute.
“I didn’t need no church,” he said. “I done it in confidence.”
“In confidence?” the Warden said.
“Yes,” he said, almost impatiently. “You don’t need to write God a letter. He has done already seen inside you long before He would even need to bother to read it. Because a man will learn a little sense in time even outside. But he learns it quick in here. That when a Judgment powerful enough to help you, will help you if you got to do is jest take back and accept it, you are a fool not to.”
“So He will take care of Stillwell for you,” the Warden said.
“Why not? What’s He got against me?”
“Thou shalt not kill,” the Warden said.
“Why didn’t He tell Houston that? I never went all the way in to Jefferson to have to sleep on a bench in the depot jest to try to buy them shells, until Houston made me.”
“Well I’ll be damned,” the Warden said. “I will be eternally damned. You’ll be out of here in three more years anyway, but if I had my way you’d be out of here now, today, before whatever the hell it is that makes you tick starts looking cross-eyed at me. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life even thinking somebody is thinking the kind of hopes about me you wish about folks that get in your way. Go on now. Get back to work.”
So when it was only October, no holiday valentine or Christmas card month that he knew of, when the Warden sent for him, he was not even surprised. The Warden sat looking at him for maybe half a minute, with something not just aghast but almost respectful in the look, then said: “I will be damned.” It was a telegram this time. “It’s from the Chief of Police in San Diego, California.
There was a church in the Mexican quarter. They had stopped using it as a church, had a new one or something. Anyway it had been deconsecrated, so what went on inside it since, even the police haven’t quite caught up with yet. Last week it fell down. They don’t know why: it just fell down all of a sudden. They found a man in it — what was left of him. This is what the telegram says: ‘Fingerprints F.B.I, identification your man number 08213 Shuford H. Stillwell.’ ” The Warden folded the telegram back into the envelope and put it back into the drawer. “Tell me again about that church you said you used to go to before Houston made you kill him.”
He didn’t answer that at all. He just drew a long breath and exhaled it. “I can go now,” he said. “I can be free.”
“Not right this minute,” the Warden said. “It will take a month or two. The petition will have to be got up and sent to the Governor. Then he will ask for my recommendation. Then he will sign the pardon.”
“The petition?” he said.
“You got in here by law,” the Warden said. “You’ll have to get out by law.”
“A petition,” he said.
“That your family will have a lawyer draw up, asking the Governor to issue a pardon. Your wife — but that’s right, she’s dead. One of your daughters then.”
“Likely they done married away too by now.”
“All right,” the Warden said. Then he said, “Hell, man, you’re already good as out. Your cousin, whatever he is, right there in Jackson now in the legislature — Egglestone Snopes, that got beat for Congress two years ago?”
He didn’t move, his head bent a little; he said, “Then I reckon I’ll stay here after all.” Because how could he tell a stranger: Clarence, my own oldest brother’s grandson, is in politics that depends on votes. When I leave here I won’t have no vote. What will I have to buy Clarence Snopes’s name on my paper? Which just left Eck’s boy, Wallstreet, whom nobody yet had ever told what to do. “I reckon I’ll be with you them other three years too,” he said.
“Write your sheriff yourself,” the Warden said. “I’ll write the letter for you.”
“Hub Hampton that sent me here is dead.”
“You’ve still got a sheriff, haven’t you? What’s the matter with you? Have forty years in here scared you for good of fresh air and sunshine?”
“Thirty-eight years this coming summer,” he said.
“All right. Thirty-eight. How old are you?”
“I was born in eighty-three,” he said.
“So you’ve been here ever since you were twenty-five years old.”
“I don’t know. I never counted.”
“All right,” the Warden said. “Beat it. When you say the word I’ll write a letter to your sheriff.”
“I reckon I’ll stay,” he said. But he was wrong. Five months later the petition lay on the Warden’s desk.
“Who is Linda Snopes Kohl?” the Warden said.
He stood completely still for quite a long time. “Her paw’s a rich banker in Jefferson. His and my grandpaw had two sets of chillen.”
“She was the member of your family that signed the petition to the Governor to let you out.”
“You mean the sheriff sent for her to come and sign it?”
“How could he? You wouldn’t let me write the sheriff.”
“Yes,” he said. He looked down at the paper which he could not read. It was upside down to him, though that meant nothing either. “Show me where the ones signed to not let me out.”
“What?” the Warden said.
“The ones that don’t want me out.”
“Oh, you mean Houston’s family. No, the only other names on it are the District Attorney who sent you here and your Sheriff, Hubert Hampton, Junior, and V. K. Ratliff. Is he a Houston?”
“No,” he said. He drew the slow deep breath again. “So I’m free.”
“With one thing more,” the Warden said. “Your luck’s not even holding: it’s doubling.” But he handled that too the next morning after they gave him a pair of shoes, a shirt, overalls and jumper and a hat, all brand new, and a ten-dollar bill and the three dollars and eighty-five cents which were still left from the forty dollars Flem had sent him eighteen years ago, and the Warden said, “There’s a deputy here today with a prisoner
