And I wonder if maybe he wouldn’t give Linda back her two hundred and fifty dollars without even charging her no interest on it, for them two years of pardon. And I wonder jest how much of the rest of the money in that vault he would pay to have another twenty years added on to them. Or maybe jest ten more. Or maybe jest one more.”
Ten days later Stevens was in the Warden’s office at the state penitentiary. He had the money with him — twenty-five ten-dollar notes, quite new. “You don’t want to see him yourself?” the Warden said.
“No,” Stevens said. “You can do it. Anybody can. Simply offer him his choice: take the pardon and the two hundred and fifty dollars and get out of Mississippi as fast as he can, plus another two hundred and fifty every three months for the rest of his life if he never crosses the state line again; or stay here in Parchman another two years and rot and be damned to him.”
“Well, that ought to do it,” the Warden said. “It certainly would with me. Why is it whoever owns the two hundred and fifty dollars don’t want him to come back home so bad?”
Stevens said rapidly, “Nothing to come back to. Family gone and scattered, wife died twenty-five or thirty years ago and nobody knows what became of his two daughters. Even the tenant house he lived in either collapsed of itself or maybe somebody found it and chopped it up and hauled it away for firewood.”
“That’s funny,” the Warden said. “Almost anybody in Mississippi has got at least one cousin. In fact, it’s hard not to have one.”
“Oh, distant relations,” Stevens said. “Yes, it seems to have been the usual big scattered country clan.”
“So one of these big scattered connections don’t want him back home enough to pay two hundred and fifty dollars for it.”
“He’s mad,” Stevens said. “Somebody here during the last thirty-eight years must have had that idea occur to them and suggested it to you even if you hadn’t noticed it yourself.”
“We’re all mad here,” the Warden said. “Even the prisoners too. Maybe it’s the climate. I wouldn’t worry, if I were you. They all make these threats at the time — big threats, against the judge or the prosecuting lawyer or a witness that stood right up in public and told something that any decent man would have kept to himself; big threats: I notice there’s no place on earth where a man can be as loud and dangerous as handcuffed to a policeman. But even one year is a long time sometimes. And he’s had thirty-eight of them. So he don’t get the pardon until he agrees to accept the money. Why do you know he won’t take the money and doublecross you?”
“I’ve noticed a few things about people too,” Stevens said. “One of them is, how a bad man will work ten times as hard and make ten times the sacrifice to be credited with at least one virtue no matter how Spartan, as the upright man will to avoid the most abject vice provided it’s fun.
He tried to kill his lawyer right there in the jail during the trial when the lawyer suggested pleading him crazy. He will know that the only sane thing to do is to accept the money and the pardon, since to refuse the pardon because of the money, in two more years he not only wouldn’t have the two thousand dollars, he might even be dead. Or, what would be infinitely worse, he would be alive and free at last and poor, and Fle—” and stopped himself.
“Yes?” the Warden said. “Who is Fleh, that might be dead himself in two years more and so out of reach for good? The one that owns the two hundred and fifty dollars? Never mind,” he said. “I’ll agree with you. Once he accepts the money, everything is jake, as they say. That’s what you want?”
“That’s right,” Stevens said. “If there should be any sort of hitch, you can call me at Jefferson collect.”
“I’ll call you anyway,” the Warden said. “You’re trying too hard not to sound serious.”
“No,” Stevens said. “Only if he refuses the money.”
“You mean the pardon, don’t you?”
“What’s the difference?” Stevens said.
So when about midafternoon on the twenty-sixth he answered his telephone and Central said, “Parchman, Mississippi, calling Mr Gavin Stevens. Go ahead, Parchman,” and the faint voice said, “Hello. Lawyer?” Stevens thought rapidly So I am a coward after all. When it happens two years from now, at least none of it will spatter on me. At least I can tell her now because this will prove it and said into the mouthpiece:
“So he refused to take the money.”
“Then you already know,” Ratliff’s voice said.
“. . . What?” Stevens said after less than a second actually. “Hello?”
“It’s me,” Ratliff said. “V.K. At Parchman. So they already telephoned you.”
“Telephoned me what?” Stevens said. “He’s still there? He refused to leave?”
“No, he’s gone. He left about eight this morning. A truck going north—”
“But you just said he didn’t take the money.”
“That’s what I’m trying to tell you. We finally located the money about fifteen minutes ago. It’s still here. He—”
“Hold it,” Stevens said. “You said eight this morning. Which direction?”
“A Negro seen him standing by the highway until he caught a ride on a cattle truck going north, toward Tutwiler. At Tutwiler he could have went to Clarksdale and then on to Memphis. Or he could have went from Tutwiler to Batesville and on to Memphis that-a-way. Except that anybody wanting to go from Parchman to Jefferson could go by Batesville too lessen he jest wanted to go by way of Chicago or New Orleans for the trip. Otherwise he could be in Jefferson pretty close to now. I’m leaving right now myself and maybe you better—”
“All right,” Stevens said.
“And maybe Flem too,” Ratliff said.
“Damn it, I said all right,” Stevens said.
“But not her yet,” Ratliff said. “Ain’t no need to tell her yet that likely she’s jest finished killing her maw’s husband—”
But he didn’t even hear that, the telephone was already down; he didn’t even have his hat when he reached the Square, the street below, the bank where Snopes would be in one direction, the courthouse where the Sheriff would be in the other: not that it really mattered which one he saw first, thinking So I really am a coward after all the talk about destiny and fate that didn’t even sell Ratliff.
“You mean,” the Sheriff said, “he had already spent thirty-eight years in Parchman, and the minute somebody gets him out he’s going to try to do something that will send him straight back even if it don’t hang him first this time? Don’t be foolish. Even a fellow like they say he was would learn that much sense in thirty-eight years.”
“Ha,” Stevens said without mirth. “You expressed it exactly that time. You were probably not even a shirt-tail boy back in 1908. You were not in that courtroom that day and saw his face and heard him. I was.”
“All right,” the Sheriff said. “What do you want me to do?”
“Arrest him. What do you call them? roadblocks? Don’t even let him get into Yoknapatawpha County.”
“On what grounds?”
“You just catch him, I’ll furnish you with grounds as fast as you need them. If necessary we will hold him for obtaining money under false pretences.”
“I thought he didn’t take the money.”
“I don’t know what happened yet about the money. But I’ll figure out some way to use it, at least long enough to hold him on for a while.”
“Yes,” the Sheriff said. “I reckon you would. Let’s step over to the bank and see Mr Snopes; maybe all three of us can figure out something. Or maybe Mrs Kohl. You’ll have to tell her too, I reckon.”
Whereupon Stevens repeated almost verbatim what Ratliff had said into the telephone after he had put it down: “Tell a woman that apparently she just finished murdering her father at eight o’clock this morning?”
“All right, all right,” the Sheriff said. “You want me to come to the bank with you?”
“No,” Stevens said. “Not yet anyway.”
“I still think you have found a booger where there wasn’t one,” the Sheriff said. “If he comes back here at all, it’ll just be out at Frenchman’s Bend. Then all we’ll have to do is pick him up the first time we notice him in town and have a talk with him.”
“Notice, hell,” Stevens said. “Ain’t that what I’m trying to tell you? that you don’t notice him. That was the mistake Jack Houston made thirty-eight years ago: he didn’t notice him either until he stepped out from behind that bush that morning with that shotgun — if he even stepped out of the bushes before he shot, which I doubt.”
He recrossed the Square rapidly, thinking Yes, I really am a coward, after all when that quantity, entity with which he had spent a great deal of his life talking or rather having to listen to (his skeleton perhaps, which would outlast the rest of him by a few months or years — and without doubt would spend that time moralising
