“No much obliged,” Mink said. “When does the next train pass?”
“Four twenty-two,” the operator said. “You waiting for it?”
“That’s right,” he said.
“That’s six hours off yet. You can go home and go to bed and then come back.”
“I live out at Frenchman’s Bend,” he said.
“Oh,” the operator said. Then the face was gone from the window and he sat again. It was quiet now and he even began to notice, hear the katydids in the dark trees beyond the tracks buzzing and chirring back and forth, interminable and peaceful, as if they might be the sound of the peaceful minutes and seconds themselves of the dark peaceful summer night clicking to one another. Then the whole room shook and trembled, filled with thunder; the freight train was already passing and even now he couldn’t seem to get himself awake enough to get outside in time. He was still sitting on the hard bench, cramped and cold while the ruby lights on the caboose flicked across the windows then across the open door, sucking the thunder behind them; the four crossing blasts came back and died away. This time the operator was in the room with him and the overhead bulb had been switched off. “You were asleep,” he said.
“That’s right,” Mink said. “I nigh missed that un.”
“Why don’t you lay down on the bench and be comfortable?”
“You aint got no rule against it?”
“No,” the operator said. “I’ll call you when they signal Number Eight.”
“Much obliged,” he said, and lay back. The operator went back into the room where the telegraph was already chattering again. Yes he thought peacefully if Flem had been here he could a stopped all this on that first day before it ever got started. Working for Varner like he done, being in with Houston and Quick and all the rest of them. He could do it now if I could jest a waited. Only it wasn’t me that couldn’t wait. It was Houston hisself that wouldn’t give me time. Then immediately he knew that that was wrong too, that no matter how long he had waited They Themselves would have prevented Flem from getting back in time. He must drain this cup too: must face, accept this last ultimate useless and reasonless risk and jeopardy too just to show how much he could stand before They would let his cousin come back where he could save him. This same cup also contained Houston’s life but he wasn’t thinking about Houston. In a way, he had quit thinking about Houston at the same moment when Varner told him he would have to pay the pound fee. “All right,” he said peacefully, aloud this time, “if that’s what They want, I reckon I can stand that too.”
At half-past seven he was standing in the small lot behind the post office where the R.F.D. carriers’ buckboards would stand until the carriers came out the back door with the bags of mail. He had already discerned the one for Frenchman’s Bend and he stood quietly, not too near: simply where the carrier could not help but see him, until the man who had knocked him down yesterday came out and saw, recognised, him, a quick glance, then came on and stowed the mail pouch into the buckboard, Mink not moving yet, just standing there, waiting, to be refused or not refused, until the carrier got in and released the wrapped lines from the whip stock and said, “All right. I reckon you got to get back to your crop. Come on,” and Mink approached and got in.
It was just past eleven when he got down at Varner’s store and said Much obliged and began the five-mile walk home. So he was home in time for dinner, eating steadily and quietly while his wife nagged and whined at him (evidently she hadn’t noticed the disturbed brick) about where he was last night and why, until he finished, drank the last of his coffee and rose from the table and with vicious and obscene cursing drove the three of them, his wife and the two girls, with the three hoes out to the patch to chop out his early cotton, while he lay on the floor in the cool draft of the dogtrot hall, sleeping away the afternoon.
Then it was tomorrow morning. He took from its corner behind the door the tremendous ten-gauge double-barrelled shotgun which had belonged to his grandfather, the twin hammers standing above the receiver almost as tall as the ears of a rabbit. “Now what?” his wife said, cried. “Where you fixing to go with that?”
“After a rabbit,” he said. “I’m burnt out on sowbelly,” and with two of the heaviest loads out of his meager stock of Number-Two and -Five and -Eight-shot shells, he went not even by back roads and lanes but by hedgerows and patches of woods and ditches and whatever else would keep him private and unseen, back to the ambush he had prepared two days ago while waiting for Varner to return, where the road from Houston’s to Varner’s store crossed the creek bridge—the thicket beside the road, with a log to sit on and the broken-off switches not yet healed over where he had opened a sort of port to point the gun through, with the wooden planks of the bridge fifty yards up the road to serve as an alert beneath the stallion’s hooves in case he dozed off.
Because sometimes a week would pass before Houston would ride in to the store. But sooner or later he would do so. And if all he, Mink, needed to beat Them with was just waiting, They could have given up three months ago and saved Themselves and everybody else trouble. So it was not the first day nor the second either that he would go home with no rabbit, to eat his supper in quiet and inflexible silence while his wife nagged and whined at him about why there was none, until he would push away his empty plate and in a cold level vicious monotone curse her silent.
And it might not have been the third day either. In fact, he couldn’t remember how many days it had been, when at last he heard the sudden thunder of the hooves on the bridge and then saw them: the stallion boring, frothing a little, wrenching its arrogant vicious head at the snaffle and curb both with which Houston rode it, the big lean hound bounding along beside it. He cocked the two hammers and pushed the gun through the porthole, and even as he laid the sight on Houston’s chest, leading him just a little, his finger already taking up the slack in the front trigger, he thought And even now. They still aint satisfied yet as the first shell clicked dully without exploding, his finger already moving back to the rear trigger, thinking And even yet as this one crashed and roared, thinking how if there had only been time, space, between the roar of the gun and the impact of the shot, for him to say to Houston and for Houston to have to hear it: “I aint shooting you because of them thirty-seven and a half four-bit days. That’s all right; I done long ago forgot and forgive that. Likely Will Varner couldn’t do nothing else, being a rich man too and all you rich folks has got to stick together or else maybe some day the ones that aint rich might take a notion to raise up and take hit away from you. That aint why I shot you. I killed you because of that-ere extry one-dollar pound fee.”
TWO
So the jury said “Guilty” and the Judge said “Life” but he wasn’t even listening. Because something had happened to him. Even while the sheriff was bringing him in to town that first day, even though he knew that his cousin was still in Texas, he believed that at every mile post Flem or a messenger from him would overtake them or step into the road and stop them, with the money or the word or whatever it would be that would make the whole thing dissolve, vanish like a dream.
And during all the long weeks while he waited in jail for his trial, he would stand at the little window of his cell, his grimed hands gripped among the bars and his face craned and pressed against them, to watch a slice of the street before the jail and the slice of the Square which his cousin would have to cross to come to the jail and abolish the dream, free him, get him out. “Which is all I want,” he would tell himself. “Jest to get out of here and go back home and farm. That dont seem like a heap to ask.”
And at night too still standing there, his face invisible but his wan hands looking almost white, almost clean in the grimed interstices against the cell’s darkness, watching the free people, men and women and young people who had nothing but peaceful errands or pleasures as they strolled in the evening cool toward the Square, to watch the picture show or eat ice cream in the drugstore or maybe just stroll peaceful and free because they we
re free, he beginning at last to call down to them, timidly at first, then louder and louder, more and more urgent as they would pause, almost as though startled, to look up at his window and then seem almost to hurry on, like they were trying to get beyond where he could see them; finally he began to offer, promise them money: “Hey! Mister! Missus! Somebody! Anybody that will send word out to Varner’s store to Flem Snopes! He will pay you! Ten dollars! Twenty dollars!”
And even when the day finally came and they brought him handcuffed into the room where he would face his jeopardy, he had not even looked once toward the Bench, the dais which could well be his Golgotha too, for looking, staring out over the pale identical anonymous faces of the crowd for that of his cousin or at least the messenger from him; right up to the moment when the Judge himself had to lean down from his high desk and say, “You, Snopes! Look at me. Did you or didn’t you kill Jack Houston?” and he answered:
“Dont bother me now. Cant you see I’m busy?”
And the next day too, while the lawyers shouted and wrangled and nagged, he hearing none of it even if he could have understood it, for watching the door at the rear where his cousin or the messenger would have to enter; and on the way back to the cell, still handcuffed, his unflagging glance which at first had been merely fretted and impatient but which now was beginning to be concerned, a little puzzled and quite sober, travelling rapid and quick and searching from face to face as he passed them or they passed him, to stand again at his cell window, his unwashed hands gripping the grimed bars and his face wrenched and pressed against them to see as much as possible of the street and the Square below where his kinsman or the messenger would have to pass.
So when on the third day, handcuffed again to the jailor, he realised that he had crossed the Square without once looking at one of the faces which gaped at him, and had entered the courtroom and taken his accustomed place in the dock still without once looking out over the massed faces toward that rear door, he still did not dare admit to himself that he knew why. He just sat there, looking as small and frail and harmless as a dirty child while the lawyers ranted and wrangled, until the end of the day when the jury said Guilty and the Judge said Life and he was returned, handcuffed, to his cell, and the door clanged to and he sitting now, quiet and still and composed on the mattress-less steel cot, this time only looking at the small barred window where for months now he had stood sixteen or eighteen hours a day in quenchless expectation and hope.
Only then did he say it, think it, let it take shape in his mind: He aint coming. Likely he’s been in Frenchman’s Bend all the time. Likely he heard about that cow clean out there in Texas and jest waited till the word come back they had me safe in jail, and then come back to make sho they would do ever thing to me they could now that they had me helpless. He might even been hid in the back of that room all the time, to make sho wouldn’t nothing slip up before he finally got rid of me for good and all.
So now he had peace. He had thought he had peace as soon as he realised what he would have to do about Houston, and that Houston himself wasn’t going to let him wait until Flem got back. But he had been wrong. That wasn’t peace then; it was too full of too many uncertainties: such as if anybody would send word to Flem about his trouble at all, let alone in time. Or even if the word was sent in time, would the message find Flem in time. And even if Flem got the message in time, there might be a flood or a wreck on the railroad so he couldn’t get back in time.
But all that was finished now. He didn’t have to bother and worry at all now since all he had to do was wait, and he had already proved to himself that he could do that. Just to wait: that’s all he needed; he didn’t even need to ask the jailor to send a message since the lawyer himself had said he would come back to see him after supper.
So he ate his supper when they brought it—the same sidemeat and molasses and undercooked biscuits he would have had at home; this in fact a little better since the meat had more lean in it than he could afford to eat. Except that his at home had been free, eaten in freedom. But then he could stand that too if that was all they demanded of him now. Then he heard the feet on the stairs, the door clashed, letting the lawyer in, and clashed again on both of them—the lawyer young and eager, just out of law school they told him, whom the Judge had appointed for him—commanded rather, since even he, Mink, busy as he was at the time, could tell that the man didn’t really want any part of him and his trouble—he never did know why then because then he still thought that all the Judge or anybody else needed to do to settle the whole business was just to send out to Frenchman’s Bend and get hold of his cousin.
Too young and eager in fact, which was why he—the lawyer—had made such a hash of the thing. But that didn’t matter now either; the thing now was to get on to what came next. So he didn’t waste any time. “All right,” he said. “How long will I have to stay there?”
“It’s Parchman—the penitentiary,” the lawyer said. “Cant you understand that?”
“All right,” he said again. “How long will I have to stay?”
“He gave you life,” the lawyer said. “Didn’t you even hear him? For the rest of your life. Until you die.”
“All right,” he said for the third time, with that peaceful, that almost compassionate patience: “How long will I have to stay?”
By that time even this lawyer understood. “Oh. That depends on you and your friends—if you have any. It may be all your life, like Judge Brummage said. But in twenty or twenty-five years you will be eligible under the Law to apply for pardon or parole—if you have responsible friends to support your petition, and your record down there at Parchman dont hold anything against you.”
“Suppose a man aint got friends,” he said.
“Folks that hide in bushes and shoot other folks off their horses without saying Look out first or even whistling, don’t have,” the lawyer said. “So you wont have anybody left except you to get you out.”
“All right,” he said, with that unshakable, that infinite patience, “that’s what I’m trying to get you to stop talking long enough to tell me. What do I have to do to get out in twenty or twenty-five years?”
“Not to try to escape yourself or engage in any plot to help anybody else escape. Not to get in a fight with another prisoner or a guard. To be on time for whatever they tell you to do, and do it without shirking or complaining or talking back, until they tell you to quit. In other words, to start right now doing all the things that, if you had just been doing them all the time since that day last fall when you decided to let Mr Houston winter your cow for nothing, you wouldn’t be sitting in this cell here trying to ask somebody how to get out of it. But mainly, dont try to escape.”
“Escape?” he said.
“Break out. Try to get away.”
“Try?” he said.
“Because you cant,” the lawyer said with a kind of seething yet patient rage. “Because you cant escape. You cant make it. You never can. You cant plan it without some of the others catching on to it and they always try to escape with you and so you all get caught. And even if they dont go with you, they tell the Warden on you and you are caught just the same. And even if you manage to keep everybody else from knowing about it and go alone, one of the guards shoots you before you can climb the fence. So even if you are not in the dead house or the hospital, you are back in the penitentiary with twenty-five more years added onto your sentence. Do you understand now?”
“That’s all I got to do to get out in twenty or twenty-five years. Not try to escape. Not get in no fights with nobody. Do whatever they tell me to do, as long as they say to do it. But mainly not try to escape. That’s all I got to do to get out in twenty or twenty-five years.”
“That’s right,” the lawyer said.
“All right,” he said. “Now go back and ask that judge if that’s right, and if he says it is, to send me a wrote-out paper saying so.”
“So you dont trust me,” the lawyer said.
“I dont trus
t nobody,” he said. “I aint got time to waste twenty or twenty-five years to find out whether you know what you’re talking about or not. I got something I got to attend to when I get back out. I want to know. I want a wrote-out paper from that judge.”
“Maybe you never did trust me then,” the lawyer said. “Maybe you think I made a complete bust of your whole case. Maybe you think that if it hadn’t been for me, you wouldn’t even be here now. Is that it?”
And he, Mink, still with that inflexible and patient calm: “You done the best you knowed. You jest wasn’t the man for the job. You’re young and eager, but that wasn’t what I needed. I needed a trader, a smart trader, that knowed how to swap. You wasn’t him. Now you go get that paper from that judge.”
Now he, the lawyer, even tried to laugh. “Not me,” he said. “The Court discharged me from this case right after he sentenced you this afternoon. I just stopped in to say good-bye and to see if there was anything else I could do for you. But evidently folks that dont have friends dont need well-wishers either.”
“But I aint discharged you yet,” Mink said, rising now, without haste, the lawyer already on his feet, springing, leaping back against the locked door, looking at the small figure moving toward him as slight and frail and harmless-looking as a child and as deadly as a small viper—a half-grown asp or cobra or krait. Then the lawyer was shouting, bellowing, even while the turnkey’s feet galloped on the stairs and the door clashed open and the turnkey stood in it with a drawn pistol.
“What is it?” the turnkey said. “What did he try to do?”
“Nothing,” the lawyer said. “It’s all right. I’m through here. Let me out.” Only he was not through; he only wished he were. He didn’t even wait until morning. Instead, not fifteen minutes later he was in the hotel room of the Circuit Judge who had presided on the case and pronounced the sentence, he, the lawyer, still breathing hard, still incredulous at his recent jeopardy and still amazed at his escape from it.
Snopes: The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion Page 82