It would be even quieter inland, it would become only a bright silver summer murmur among the heavy decorous trees, upon the clipped sward; it would be clipped; he could imagine it, it would be a good deal like the park where he had waited, maybe even with children and nurses at times, the best, the very best; there would even be a headstone soon, at just exactly the right time, when restored earth and decorum stipulated, telling nothing; it would be clipped and green and quiet, the body, the shape of it under the drawn sheet, flat and small and moving in the hands of two men as if without weight though it did, nevertheless bearing and quiet beneath the iron weight of earth.
Only that cant be all of it, he thought. It cant be. The waste. Not of meat, there is always plenty of meat. They found that out twenty years ago preserving nations and justifying mottoes—granted the nations the meat preserved are worth the preserving with the meat it took gone. But memory. Surely memory exists independent of the flesh. But this was wrong too. Because it wouldn’t know it was memory, he thought. It wouldn’t know what it was it remembered. So there’s got to be the old meat, the old frail eradicable meat for memory to titillate.
That was the second time he almost got it. But it escaped him again. But he was not trying yet; it was still all right, he was not worried; it would return when the time was ready and even stand still to his hand.
Then one night he was allowed a bath, and a barber (they had taken his razor blades away from him) came early the next morning and shaved him, and in a new shirt and manacled to an officer on one side and his court-designated lawyer on the other he walked through the still early sun, up the street where people—malaria-ridden men from the sawmill swamps and the wind- and sun-bitten professional shrimpers—turned to look after him, toward the courthouse from the balcony of which a bailiff was already crying.
It was like the jail in its turn, of two storeys, of the same stucco, the same smell of creosote and tobacco spittle but not the vomit, set in a grassless plot with a half dozen palms and oleanders again too, blooming pink and white above a low thick mass of lantana. Then an entry filled yet, for a while yet, with shadow and a cellar-like coolness, the tobacco stronger, the air filled with a steady human sound, not exactly speech but that droning murmur which might have been the very authentic constant unsleeping murmur of functioning pores.
They mounted stairs, a door; he walked up an aisle between filled benches while heads turned and the bailiff’s voice still chanted from the balcony, and sat at a table between his lawyer and the officer then a moment later rose and stood again while the gownless judge in a linen suit and the high black shoes of an old man came with a short quick purposeful stride and took the Bench.
It did not take long, it was businesslike, brief, twenty-two minutes to get a jury, his appointed lawyer (a young man with a round moon face and myopic eyes behind glasses, in a crumpled linen suit) challenging monotonously but it just took twenty-two minutes, the judge sitting high behind a pine counter grained and stained to resemble mahogany with his face which was not a lawyer’s face at all but that of a Methodist Sunday School superintendent who on week days was a banker and probably a good banker, a shrewd banker, thin, with neat hair and a neat moustache and old-fashioned gold-rimmed spectacles. “How does the indictment read?” he said. The clerk read it, his voice droning, almost drowsy among the redundant verbiage:
“. . . against the peace and dignity of the State of Mississippi . . . manslaughter . . .” A man rose at the far end of the table. He wore a suit of crumpled, almost disreputable, seersucker. He was quite fat and his was the lawyer’s face, a handsome face, almost noble, cast for footlights, forensic shrewd and agile: the District Attorney.
“We believe we can prove murder, Your Honor.”
“This man is not indicted for murder, Mr. Gower. You should know that. Arraign the accused.” Now the plump young lawyer rose. He had neither the older one’s stomach nor the lawyer’s face, not yet anyway.
“Guilty, Your Honor,” he said. And now Wilbourne heard it from behind him—the long expulsion, the sigh.
“Is the accused trying to throw himself upon the mercy of this Court?” the judge said.
“I just plead guilty, Your Honor,” Wilbourne said. He heard it again behind him, louder, but already the judge was hammering sharply with his child’s croquet mallet.
“Dont speak from there!” he said. “Does the accused wish to throw himself on the mercy of the Court?”
“Yes, Your Honor,” the young lawyer said.
“Then you dont need to make a case, Mr. Gower. I will instruct the jury—” This time it was no sigh. Wilbourne heard the caught breath, then it was almost a roar, not that loud of course, not yet, the little hard wooden mallet furious against the wood and the bailiff shouting something too, and there was movement, a surging sound of feet in it too; a voice cried, “That’s it! Go ahead! Kill him!” and Wilbourne saw it—the gray buttoned coat (the same one) moving steadily toward the Bench, the face, the outrageous face: the man who without any warning had had to stand the wrong sort of suffering, the one suffering for which he was not fitted, who even now must be saying to himself, But why me? Why? What have I done? What in the world can I have done in my life? coming steadily on then stopping and beginning to speak, the roar cutting short off as he opened his mouth:
“Your Honor—If the Court please—”
“Who is this?” the judge said.
“I am Francis Rittenmeyer,” Rittenmeyer said. Now it was a roar again, the gavel going again, the judge himself shouting now, shouting the roar into silence:
“Order! Order! One more outbreak like this and I will clear the room! Disarm that man!”
“I’m not armed,” Rittenmeyer said. “I just want—” But already the bailiff and two other men were upon him, the smooth gray sleeves pinioned while they slapped at his pockets and sides.
“He’s not armed, Your Honor,” the bailiff said. The judge turned upon the District Attorney, trembling too, a neat orderly man too old for this too.
“What is the meaning of this clowning, Mr. Gower?”
“I dont know, Your Honor. I didn’t—”
“You didn’t summons him?”
“I didn’t consider it necessary. Out of consideration for his—”
“If the Court please,” Rittenmeyer said. “I just want to make a—” The judge lifted his hand; Rittenmeyer ceased. He stood motionless, his face calm as a carving, with something about it of the carved faces on Gothic cathedrals, the pale eyes possessing something of the same unpupilled marble blankness. The judge stared at the District Attorney. It (the District Attorney’s) was the lawyer’s face now, completely, completely watchful, completely alert, the thinking going fast and secret behind it. The judge looked at the young lawyer, the plump one, hard.
Then he looked at Rittenmeyer. “This case is closed,” he said. “But if you still wish to make a statement, you may do so.” Now there was no sound at all, not even that of breathing that Wilbourne could hear save his own and that of the young lawyer beside him, as Rittenmeyer moved toward the witness box. “This case is closed,” the judge said. “The accused is waiting sentence. Make your statement from there.” Rittenmeyer stopped. He was not looking at the judge, he was not looking at anything, his face calm, impeccable, outrageous.
“I wish to make a plea,” he said. For a moment the judge did not move, staring at Rittenmeyer, the gavel still clutched in his fist like a sabre, then he leaned slowly forward, staring at Rittenmeyer: and Wilbourne heard it begin, the long in-sucking, the gathering of amazement and incredulity.
“You what?” the judge said. “A what? A plea? For this man? This man who wilfully and deliberately performed an operation on your wife which he knew might cause her death and which did?” And now it did roar, in waves, renewed; he could hear the feet in it and the separate screaming voices, the officers of the Court charging into the wave like a football team: a vortex of fury and turmoil about the calm immobile outrageous face above the smooth beautifully cut coat: “Hang them! Hang them both!” “Lock them up together! Let the son of a bitch work on him this time with the knife!” roaring on above the trampling and screaming, dying away at last but still not ceasing, just muffled beyond the closed doors for a time, then rising again from outside the building, the judge standing now, his arms propped on the bench, still clutching the gavel, his head jerking and trembling, the head of an old man indeed now.
Then he sank slowly back, his head jerking as the heads of old men do. But his voice was quite calm, cold: “Give
