Except maybe it’s like the fellow says, and there ain’t nowhere you can hide from either lightning or love. And I didn’t know why then. I hadn’t associated them names. I knowed that Thorpe was familiar to me, but that other business had been twenty years ago and I had forgotten it until I heard about that hung jury of yourn. Of course he wasn’t going to vote Bookwright free…. It’s dark. Let’s go to supper.’
But it was only twenty-two miles to town now, and we were on the highway now, the gravel; we would be home in an hour and a half, because sometimes we could make thirty and thirty-five miles an hour, and Uncle Gavin said that someday all the main roads in Mississippi would be paved like the streets in Memphis and every family in America would own a car. We were going fast now.
‘Of course he wasn’t,’ Uncle Gavin said. The lowly and invincible of the earth — to endure and endure and then endure, tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. Of course he wasn’t going to vote Bookwright free.’
‘I would have,’ I said. ‘I would have freed him. Because Buck Thorpe was bad. He—’
‘No, you wouldn’t,’ Uncle Gavin said. He gripped my knee with one hand even though we were going fast, the yellow light beam level on the yellow road, the bugs swirling down into the light beam and ballooning away. ‘It wasn’t Buck Thorpe, the adult, the man. He would have shot that man as quick as Bookwright did, if he had been in Bookwright’s place.
It was because somewhere in that debased and brutalized flesh which Bookwright slew there still remained, not the spirit maybe, but at least the memory, of that little boy, that Jackson and Longstreet Fentry, even though the man the boy had become didn’t know it, and only Fentry did. And you wouldn’t have freed him either. Don’t ever forget that. Never.’
The end
