Then Ratliff moved and took one of the chairs beyond the desk, the one against the wall, then half rose and placed the little parcel neatly on the filing case beside him and sat down, Stevens still writing steadily between pauses now and then to read from the open book beneath his left hand; until presently Ratliff reached and took the morning Memphis paper from the desk and opened it and rattled faintly the turn of the page and after a while rattled that one faintly, until Stevens said,
“Dammit, either get out of here or think about something else. You make me nervous.”
“I ain’t busy this mawnin,” Ratliff said. “If you got anything to tend to outside, I can set here and listen for the phone.”
“I have plenty I can do here if you’ll just stop filling the damned air with—” He flung, slammed the pencil down. “Obviously he hasn’t reached Memphis yet or anyway hasn’t tried to buy the gun, or we would have heard. Which is all we want: to get word there first. Do you think that any reputable pawnshop or sporting-goods store that cares a damn about its licence will sell him a gun now after the police—”
“If my name was Mink Snopes, I don’t believe I would go to no place that had a licence to lose for selling guns or pistols.”
“For instance?” Stevens said.
“Out at Frenchman’s Bend they said Mink was a considerable hell-raiser when he was young, within his means of course, which wasn’t much. But he made two or three of them country-boy Memphis trips with the young bloods of his time — Quicks and Tulls and Turpins and such: enough to probably know where to begin to look for the kind of places that don’t keep the kind of licences to have police worrying them ever time a gun or a pistol turns up in the wrong place or don’t turn up in the right one.”
“Don’t you think the Memphis police know as much about Memphis as any damned little murdering maniac, let alone one that’s been locked up in a penitentiary for forty years? The Memphis police, that have a damned better record than a dozen, hell, a hundred cities I could name—”
“All right, all right,” Ratliff said.
“By God, God Himself is not so busy that a homicidal maniac with only ten dollars in the world can hitchhike a hundred miles and buy a gun for ten dollars then hitchhike another hundred and shoot another man with it.”
“Don’t that maybe depend on who God wants shot this time?” Ratliff said. “Have you been by the sheriff’s this mawnin?”
“No,” Stevens said.
“I have. Flem ain’t been to him either yet. And he ain’t left town neither. I checked on that too. So maybe that’s the best sign we want: Flem ain’t worried. Do you reckon he told Linda?”
“No,” Stevens said.
“How do you know?”
“He told me.”
“Flem did? You mean he jest told you, or you asked him?”
“I asked him,” Stevens said. “I said, ‘Are you going to tell Linda?’ ”
“And what did he say?”
“He said, ‘Why?’ ” Stevens said.
“Oh,” Ratliff said.
Then it was noon. What Ratliff had in the neat parcel was a sandwich, as neatly made. “You go home and eat dinner,” he said. “I’ll set here and listen for it.”
“Didn’t you just say that if Flem himself don’t seem to worry, why the hell should we?”
“I won’t worry then,” Ratliff said. “I’ll jest set and listen.”
Though Stevens was back in the office when the call came in midafternoon. “Nothing,” the classmate’s voice said. “None of the pawnshops nor any other place a man might go to buy a gun or pistol of any sort, let alone a ten-dollar one. Maybe he hasn’t reached Memphis yet, though it’s more than twenty-four hours now.”
“That’s possible,” Stevens said.
“Maybe he never intended to reach Memphis.”
“All right, all right,” Stevens said. “Shall I write the commissioner myself a letter of thanks or—”
“Sure. But let him earn it first. He agreed that it not only won’t cost much more, it will even be a good idea to check his list every morning for the next two or three days, just in case. I thanked him for you. I even went further and said that if you ever found yourselves in the same voting district and he decided to run for an office instead of just sitting for it—” as Stevens put the telephone down and turned to Ratliff again without seeing him at all and said,
“Maybe he never will.”
“What?” Ratliff said. “What did he say?” Stevens told, repeated, the gist. “I reckon that’s all we can do,” Ratliff said.
“Yes,” Stevens said. He thought Tomorrow will prove it. But I’ll wait still another day. Maybe until Monday.
But he didn’t wait that long. On Saturday his office was always not busy with the county business he was paid a salary to handle, so much as constant with the social coming and going of the countrymen who had elected him to his office. Ratliff, who knew them all too, as well or even better, was unobtrusive in his chair against the wall where he could reach the telephone without even getting up; he even had another neat home-made sandwich, until at noon Stevens said,
“Go on home and eat a decent meal, or come home with me. It won’t ring today.”
“You must know why,” Ratliff said.
“Yes. I’ll tell you Monday. No: tomorrow. Sunday will be appropriate. I’ll tell you tomorrow.”
“So you know it’s all right now. All settled and finished now. Whether Flem knows it yet or not, he can sleep from now on.”
“Don’t ask me yet,” Stevens said. “It’s like a thread; it’s true only until I — something breaks it.”
“You was right all the time then. There wasn’t no need to tell her.”
“There never has been,” Stevens said. “There never will be.”
“That’s jest what I said,” Ratliff said. “There ain’t no need now.”
“And what I just said was there never was any need to tell her and there never would have been, no matter what happened.”
“Not even as a moral question?” Ratliff said.
“Moral hell and question hell,” Stevens said. “It ain’t any question at all: it’s a fact: the fact that not you nor anybody else that wears hair is going to tell her that her act of pity and compassion and simple generosity murdered the man who passes as her father whether he is or not or a son of a bitch or not.”
“All right, all right,” Ratliff said. “This here thread you jest mentioned. Maybe another good way to keep it from getting broke before time is to keep somebody handy to hear that telephone when it don’t ring at three o’clock this afternoon.”
So they were both in the office at three o’clock. Then it was four. “I reckon we can go now,” Ratliff said.
“Yes,” Stevens said.
“But you still won’t tell me now,” Ratliff said.
“Tomorrow,” Stevens said. “The call will have to come by then.”
“So this here thread has got a telephone wire inside of it after all.”
“So long,” Stevens said. “See you tomorrow.”
And Central would know where to find him at any time on Sunday too and in fact until almost half-past two that afternoon he still believed he was going to spend the whole day at Rose Hill. His life had known other similar periods of unrest and trouble and uncertainty even if he had spent most of it as a bachelor; he could recall one or two of them when the anguish and unrest were due to the fact that he was a bachelor, that is, circumstances, conditions insisted on his continuing celibacy despite his own efforts to give it up.
But back then he had had something to escape into: nepenthe, surcease: the project he had decreed for himself while at Harvard of translating the Old Testament back into the classic Greek of its first translating; after which he would teach himself Hebrew and really attain to purity; he had thought last night Why yes, I have that for tomorrow; I had forgotten about that. Then this morning he knew that that would not suffice any more, not ever again now.
He meant of course the effort: not just the capacity to concentrate but to believe in it; he was too old now and the real tragedy of age is that no anguish is any longer grievous enough to demand, justify, any sacrifice.
So it was not even two-thirty when with no surprise really he found himself getting into his car and still no surprise when, entering the empty Sunday afternoon Square, he saw Ratliff waiting at the foot of the office stairs, the two of them, in the office now, making no pretence as the clock crawled on to three. “What happened that we set exactly three o’clock as the magic deadline in this here business?” Ratliff said.
“Does it matter?” Stevens said.
“That’s right,” Ratliff said. “The main thing is not to jar or otherwise startle that-ere thread.” Then the courthouse clock struck its three heavy mellow blows into the Sabbath somnolence and for the first time Stevens realised how absolutely he had not just expected, but known, that his telephone would not ring before that hour. Then in that same second, instant, he knew why it had not rung; the fact that it had not rung was more proof of what it would have conveyed than the message itself would have been.
“All right,” he said. “Mink is dead.”
“What?” Ratliff said.
“I don’t know where, and it doesn’t matter. Because we should have known from the first that three hours of being free would
