I would go up there now and then while the ground was still cold and see Jackson and his pa plowing and chopping brush, and that satchel hanging on a fence post and that boy asleep bolt upright in it like it was a feather bed.
He learned to walk that spring, and I would stand there at the fence and watch that dum little critter out there in the middle of the furrow, trying his best to keep up with Jackson, until Jackson would stop the plow at the turn row and go back and get him and set him straddle of his neck and take up the plow and go on.
In the late summer he could walk pretty good. Jackson made him a little hoe out of a stick and a scrap of shingle, and you could see Jackson chopping in the middle-thigh cotton, but you couldn’t see the boy at all; you could just see the cotton shaking where he was.’
‘Jackson made his clothes,’ Mrs. Pruitt said. ‘Stitched them himself, by hand. I made a few garments and took them up there. I never done it but once though. He took them and he thanked me. But you could see it. It was like he even begrudged the earth itself for what that child had to eat to keep alive. And I tried to persuade Jackson to take him to church, have him baptized. “He’s already named,” he said. “His name is Jackson and Longstreet Fentry. Pa fit under both of them.”’
‘He never went nowhere,’ Pruitt said. ‘Because where you saw Jackson, you saw that boy. If he had had to steal that boy down there at Frenchman’s Bend, he couldn’t ‘a’ hid no closer. It was even the old man that would ride over to Haven Hill store to buy their supplies, and the only time Jackson and that boy was separated as much as one full breath was once a year when Jackson would ride in to Jefferson to pay their taxes, and when I first seen the boy I thought of a setter puppy, until one day I knowed Jackson had gone to pay their taxes and I went up there and the boy was under the bed, not making any fuss, just backed up into the corner, looking out at me. He didn’t blink once.
He was exactly like a fox or a wolf cub somebody had caught just last night.’
We watched him take from his pocket a tin of snuff and tilt a measure of it into the lid and then into his lower lip, tapping the final grain from the lid with delicate deliberation. ‘All right,’ Uncle Gavin said. ‘Then what?’
‘That’s all,’ Pruitt said. ‘In the next summer him and the boy disappeared.’
‘Disappeared?’ Uncle Gavin said.
‘That’s right. They were just gone one morning. I didn’t know when. And one day I couldn’t stand it no longer, I went up there and the house was empty, and I went on to the field where the old man was plowing, and at first I thought the spreader between his plow handles had broke and he had tied a sapling across the handles, until he seen me and snatched the sapling off, and it was that shotgun, and I reckon what he said to me was about what he said to you this morning when you stopped there. Next year he had the nigger helping him again. Then, about five years later, Jackson come back. I don’t know when. He was just there one morning. And the nigger was gone again, and him and his pa worked the place like they use to.
And one day I couldn’t stand it no longer, I went up there and I stood at the fence where he was plowing, until after a while the land he was breaking brought him up to the fence, and still he hadn’t never looked at me; he plowed right by me, not ten feet away, still without looking at me, and he turned and come back, and I said, “Did he die, Jackson?” and then he looked at me. “The boy,” I said. And he said, “What boy?”’
They invited us to stay for dinner.
Uncle Gavin thanked them. We brought a snack with us,’ he said. ‘And it’s thirty miles to Varner’s store, and twenty-two from there to Jefferson. And our roads ain’t quite used to automobiles yet.’
So it was just sundown when we drove up to Varner’s store in Frenchman’s Bend Village; again a man rose from the deserted gallery and came down the steps to the car.
It was Isham Quick, the witness who had first reached Thorpe’s body — a tall, gangling man in the middle forties, with a dreamy kind of face and near-sighted eyes, until you saw there was something shrewd behind them, even a little quizzical.
‘I been waiting for you,’ he said. ‘Looks like you made a water haul.’ He blinked at Uncle Gavin. ‘That Fentry.’
‘Yes,’ Uncle Gavin said. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘I didn’t recognize it myself,’ Quick said. ‘It wasn’t until I heard your jury was hung, and by one man, that I associated them names.’
‘Names?’ Uncle Gavin said. What na — Never mind.
Just tell it.’
So we sat on the gallery of the locked and deserted store while the cicadas shrilled and rattled in the trees and the lightning bugs blinked and drifted above the dusty road, and Quick told it, sprawled on the bench beyond Uncle Gavin, loose-jointed, like he would come all to pieces the first time he moved, talking in a lazy sardonic voice, like he had all night to tell it in and it would take all night to tell it. But it wasn’t that long.
It wasn’t long enough for what was in it. But Uncle Gavin says it don’t take many words to tell the sum of any human experience; that somebody has already done it in eight: He was born, he suffered and he died.
‘It was pap that hired him. But when I found out where he had come from, I knowed he would work, because folks in that country hadn’t never had time to learn nothing but hard work. And I knowed he would be honest for the same reason: that there wasn’t nothing in his country a man could want bad enough to learn how to steal it. What I seem to have underestimated was his capacity for love.
I reckon I figured that, coming from where he come from, he never had none a-tall, and for that same previous reason — that even the comprehension of love had done been lost out of him back down the generations where the first one of them had had to take his final choice between the pursuit of love and the pursuit of keeping on breathing.
‘So he come to work, doing the same work and drawing the same pay as the niggers done. Until in the late fall, when the bottom got wet and we got ready to shut down for the winter, I found out he had made a trade with pap to stay on until spring as watchman and caretaker, with three days out to go home Christmas.
And he did, and the next year when we started up, he had done learned so much about it and he stuck to it so, that by the middle of summer he was running the whole mill hisself, and by the end of summer pap never went out there no more a-tall and I just went when I felt like it, maybe once a week or so; and by fall pap was even talking about building him a shack to live in in place of that shuck mattress and a old broke-down cookstove in the boiler shed.
And he stayed through that winter too. When he went home that Christmas we never even knowed it, when he went or when he come back, because even I hadn’t been out there since fall.
‘Then one afternoon in February — there had been a mild spell and I reckon I was restless — I rode out there. The first thing I seen was her, and it was the first time I had ever done that — a woman, young, and maybe when she was in her normal health she might have been pretty, too; I don’t know. Because she wasn’t just thin, she was gaunted. She was sick, more than just starved-looking, even if she was still on her feet, and it wasn’t just because she was going to have that baby in a considerable less than another month.
And I says, “Who is that?” and he looked at me and says, “That’s my wife,” and I says, “Since when? You never had no wife last fall. And that child ain’t a month off.” And he says, “Do you want us to leave?” and I says, “What do I want you to leave for?” I’m going to tell this from what I know now, what I found out after them two brothers showed up here three years later with their court paper, not from what he ever told me, because he never told nobody nothing.’
‘All right,’ Uncle Gavin said. ‘Tell.’
‘I don’t know where he found her. I don’t know if he found her somewhere, or if she just walked into the mill one day or one night and he looked up and seen her, and it was like the fellow says — nobody knows
