“You a officer?” he said.
“You damn right I am,” the deputy said. “Just let me get this damn gun—”
“All right,” the other said. “Yonder’s your boat, and here’s the woman. But I never did find that bastard on the cottonhouse.”
ONE OF THE GOVERNOR’S YOUNG MEN ARRIVED AT THE PENITENTIARY the next morning. That is, he was fairly young (he would not see thirty again though without doubt he did not want to, there being that about him which indicated a character which never had and never would want anything it did not, or was not about to, possess), a Phi Beta Kappa out of an Eastern university, a colonel on the Governor’s staff who did not buy it with a campaign contribution, who had stood in his negligent Eastern-cut clothes and his arched nose and lazy contemptuous eyes on the galleries of any number of little lost backwoods stores and told his stories and received the guffaws of his overalled and spitting hearers and with the same look in his eyes fondled infants named in memory of the last administration and in honor (or hope) of the next, and (it was said of him and doubtless not true) by lazy accident the behinds ot some who were not infants any longer though still not old enough to vote. He was in the Warden’s office with a briefcase, and presently the deputy wrarden of the levee was there too. He would have been sent for presently though not yet, but he came anyhow, without knocking, with his hat on, calling the Governor’s young man loudly by a nickname and striking him with a flat hand on the back and lifted one thigh to the Warden’s desk, almost between the Warden and the caller, the emissary. Or the vizier with the command, the knotted cord, as began to appear immediately.
“Well,” the Governor’s young man said, “you’ve played the devil, haven’t you?” The Warden had a cigar. He had offered the caller one. It had been refused, though presently, while the Warden looked at the back of his neck with hard immobility even a little grim, the deputy leaned and reached back and opened the desk drawer and took one.
“Seems straight enough to me,” the Warden said. “He got swept away against his will. He came back as soon as he could and surrendered.”
“He even brought that damn boat back,” the deputy said. “If he’d a throwed the boat away he could a walked back in three days. But no sir. He’s got to bring the boat back. ‘Here’s your boat and here’s the woman but I never found no bastard on no cotton-house.’ ” He slapped his knee, guffawing. “Them convicts. A mule’s got twice as much sense.”
“A mule’s got twice as much sense as anything except a rat,” the emissary said in his pleasant voice. “But that’s not the trouble.”
“What is the trouble?” the Warden said.
“This man is dead.”
“Hell fire, he aint dead,” the deputy said. “He’s up yonder in that bunkhouse right now, lying his head off probly. I’ll take you up there and you can see him.” The Warden was looking at the deputy.
“Look,” he said. “Bledsoe was trying to tell me something about that Kate mule’s leg. You better go up to the stable and—”
“I done tended to it,” the deputy said. He didn’t even look at the Warden. He was watching, talking to, the emissary. “No sir. He aint—”
“But he has received an official discharge as being dead. Not a pardon nor a parole either: a discharge. He’s either dead, or free. In either case he doesn’t belong here.” Now both the Warden and the deputy looked at the emissary, the deputy’s mouth open a little, the cigar poised in his hand to have its tip bitten off. The emissary spoke pleasantly, extremely distinctly: “On a report of death forwarded to the Governor by the Warden of the Penitentiary.” The deputy closed his mouth, though otherwise he didn’t move. “On the official evidence of the officer delegated at the time to the charge and returning of the body of the prisoner to the Penitentiary.” Now the deputy put the cigar into his mouth and got slowly off the desk, the cigar rolling across his lip as he spoke:
“So that’s it. I’m to be it, am I?” He laughed shortly, a stage laugh, two notes. “When I done been right three times running through three separate administrations? That’s on a book somewhere too. Somebody in Jackson can find that too. And if they cant, I can show—”
“Three administrations?” the emissary said. “Well, well. That’s pretty good.”
“You damn right it’s good,” the deputy said. “The woods are full of folks that didn’t.” The Warden was again watching the back of the deputy’s neck.
“Look,” he said. “Why dont you step up to my house and get that bottle of whiskey out of the sideboard and bring it down here?”
“All right,” the deputy said. “But I think we better settle this first. I’ll tell you what we’ll do—”
“We can settle it quicker with a drink or two,” the Warden said. “You better step on up to your place and get a coat so the bottle—”
“That’ll take too long,” the deputy said. “I wont need no coat.” He moved to the door, where he stopped and turned. “I’ll tell you what to do. Just call twelve men in here and tell him it’s a jury—he never seen but one before and he wont know no better—and try him over for robbing that train. Hamp can be the judge.”
“You cant try a man twice for the same crime,” the emissary said. “He might know that even if he doesn’t know a jury when he sees one.”
“Look,” the Warden said.
“All right. Just call it a new train robbery. Tell him it happened yesterday, tell him he robbed another train while he was gone and just forgot it. He couldn’t help himself. Besides, he wont care. He’d just as lief be here as out. He wouldn’t have nowhere to go if he was out. None of them do. Turn one loose and be damned if he aint right back here by Christmas like it was a reunion or something, for doing the very same thing they caught him at before.” He guffawed again. “Them convicts.”
“Look,” the Warden said. “While you’re there, why dont you open the bottle and see if the liquor’s any good. Take a drink or two. Give yourself time to feel it. If it’s not good, no use in bringing it.”
“O. K.,” the deputy said. He went out this time.
“Couldn’t you lock the door?” the emissary said. The Warden squirmed faintly. That is, he shifted his position in his chair.
“After all, he’s right,” he said. “He’s guessed right three times now. And he’s kin to all the folks in Pittman County except the niggers.”
“Maybe we can work fast then.” The emissary opened the briefcase and took out a sheaf of papers. “So there you are,” he said.
“There what are?”
“He escaped.”
“But he came back voluntarily and surrendered.”
“But he escaped.”
“All right,” the Warden said. “He escaped. Then what?” Now the emissary said look. That is, he said,
“Listen. I’m on per diem. That’s tax-payers, votes. And if there’s any possible chance for it to occur to anyone to hold an investigation about this, there’ll be ten senators and twenty-five representatives here on a special train maybe. On per diem. And it will be mighty hard to keep some of them from going back to Jackson by way of Memphis or New Orleans—on per diem.”
“All right,” the Warden said. “What does he say to do?”
“This. The man left here in charge of one specific officer. But he was delivered back here by a different one.”
“But he surren—” This time the Warden stopped of his own accord. He looked, stared almost, at the emissary. “All right. Go on.”
“In specific charge of an appointed and delegated officer, who returned here and reported that the body of the prisoner was no longer in his possession; that, in fact, he did not know where the prisoner was. That’s correct, isn’t it?” The Warden said nothing. “Isn’t that correct?” the emissary said, pleasantly, insistently.
“But you cant do that to him. I tell you he’s kin to half the—”
“That’s taken care of. The Chief has made a place for him on the highway patrol.”
“Hell,”
the Warden said. “He cant ride a motorcycle. I dont even let him try to drive a truck.”
“He wont have to. Surely an amazed and grateful State can supply the man who guessed right three times in succession in Mississippi general elections with a car to ride in and somebody to run it if necessary. He wont even have to stay in it all the time. Just so he’s near enough so when an inspector sees the car and stops and blows the horn of it he can hear it and come out.”
“I still dont like it,” the Warden said.
“Neither do I. Your man could have saved all of this if he had just gone on and drowned himself, as he seems to have led everybody to believe he had. But he didn’t. And the Chief says do. Can you think of anything better?” The Warden sighed.
“No,” he said.
“All right.” The emissary opened the papers and uncapped a pen and began to write. “Attempted escape from the Penitentiary, ten years’ additional sentence,” he said. “Deputy Warden Buckworth transferred to Highway Patrol. Call it for meritorious service even if you want to. It wont matter now. Done?”
“Done,” the Warden said.
“Then suppose you send for him. Get it over with.” So the Warden sent for the tall convict and he arrived presently, saturnine and grave, in his new bed-ticking, his jowls blue and close under the sunburn, his hair recently cut and neatly parted and smelling faintly of the prison barber’s (the barber was in for life, for murdering his wife, still a barber) pomade. The Warden called him by name.
“You had bad luck, didn’t you?” The convict said nothing, “They are going to have to add ten years to your time.”
“All right,” the convict said.
“It’s hard luck. I’m sorry.”
“All right,” the convict said. “If that’s the rule.” So they gave him the ten years more and the Warden gave him the cigar and now he sat, jackknifed backward into the space between the upper and lower bunks, the unlighted cigar in his hand while the plump convict and four others listened to him. Or questioned him, that is, since it was all done, finished, now and he was safe again, so maybe it wasn’t even worth talking about any more.
“All right,” the plump one said. “So you come back into the River. Then what?”
“Nothing. I rowed.”
“Wasn’t it pretty hard rowing coming back?”
“The water was still high. It was running pretty hard still. I never made much speed for the first week or two. After that it got better.” Then, suddenly and quietly, something—the inarticulateness, the innate and inherited reluctance for speech, dissolved and he found himself, listened to himself, telling it quietly, the words coming not fast but easily to the tongue as he required them: How he paddled on (he found out by trying it that he could make better speed, if you could call it speed, next the bank—this after he had been carried suddenly and violently out to midstream before he could prevent it and found himself, the skiff, travelling back toward the region from which he had just escaped and he spent the better part of the morning getting back inshore and up to the canal again from which he had emerged at dawn) until night came and they tied up to the bank and ate some of the food he had secreted in his jumper before leaving the armory in New Orleans and the woman and the infant slept in the boat as usual and when daylight came they went on and tied up again that night too and the next day the food gave out and he came to a landing, a town, he didn’t notice the name of it, and he got a job. It was a cane farm—
“Cane?” one of the other convicts said. “What does anybody want to raise cane for? You cut cane. You have to fight it where I come from. You burn it just to get shut of it.”
“It was sorghum,” the tall convict said.
“Sorghum?” another said. “A whole farm just raising sorghum? Sorghum? What did they do with it?” The tall one didn’t know. He didn’t ask, he just came up the levee and there was a truck waiting full of niggers and a white man said, “You there. Can you run a shovel plow?” and the convict said, “Yes,” and the man said, “Jump in then,” and the convict said, “Only I’ve got a—”
“Yes,” the plump one said. “That’s what I been aiming to ask. What did—” The tall convict’s face was grave, his voice was calm, just a little short:
“They had tents for the folks to live in. They were behind.” The plump one blinked at him.
“Did they think she was your wife?”
“I dont know. I reckon so.” The plump one blinked at him.
“Wasn’t she your wife? Just from time to time kind of, you might say?” The tall one didn’t answer this at all. After a moment he raised the cigar and appeared to examine a loosening of the wrapper because after another moment he licked the cigar carefully near the end. “All right,” the plump one said. “Then what?” So he worked there four days. He didn’t like it. Maybe that was why: that he too could not quite put credence in that much of what he believed to be sorghum. So when they told him it was Saturday and paid him and the white man told him about somebody who was going to Baton Rouge the next day in a motor boat, he went to see the man and took the six dollars he had earned and bought food with it and tied the skiff behind the motor boat and went to Baton Rouge. It didn’t take long and even after they left the motor boat at Baton Rouge and he was paddling again it seemed to the convict that the River was lower and the current not so fast, so hard, so they made fair speed, tying up to the bank at night among the willows, the woman and baby sleeping in the skiff as of old. Then the food gave out again. This time it was a wood landing, the wood stacked and waiting, a wagon and team being unladen of another load. The men with the wagon told him about the sawmill and helped him drag the skiff up the levee; they wanted to leave it there but he would not so they loaded it onto the wagon too and he and the woman got on the wagon too and they went to the sawmill. They gave them one room in a house to live in here. They paid two dollars a day and furnish. The work was hard. He liked it. He stayed there eight days.
“If you liked it so well, why did you quit?” the plump one said. The tall convict examined the cigar again, holding it up where the light fell upon the rich chocolate-colored flank.
“I got in trouble,” he said.
“What trouble?”
“Woman. It was a fellow’s wife.”
“You mean you had been toting one piece up and down the country day and night for over a month, and now the first time you have a chance to stop and catch your breath almost you got to get in trouble over another one?” The tall convict had thought of that. He remembered it: how there were times, seconds, at first when if it had not been for the baby he might have, might have tried. But they were just seconds because in the next instant his whole being would seem to flee the very idea in a kind of savage and horrified revulsion; he would find himself looking from a distance at this millstone which the force and power of blind and risible Motion had fastened upon him, thinking, saying aloud actually, with harsh and savage outrage even though it had been two years since he had had a woman and that a nameless and not young negress, a casual, a straggler whom he had caught more or less by chance on one of the fifth-Sunday visiting days, the man—husband or sweetheart—whom she had come to see having been shot by a trusty a week or so previous and she had not heard about it: “She aint even no good to me for that.”
“But you got this one, didn’t you?” the plump convict said.
“Yah, the tall one said. The plump one blinked at him.
“Was it good?”
“It’s all good,” one of the others said. “Well? Go on. How many more did you have on the way back? Sometimes when a fellow starts getting it it looks like he just cant miss even if—” That was all, the convict told them. They left the sawmill fast, he had no time to buy food until they reached the next landing. There he spent the whole sixteen dollars he had earned and they went on. The River was lower now, there was no doubt of it, and sixteen dollars’ worth looked like a lot of food and he thought maybe it would do, would be enough. But maybe there was more current
in the River still than it looked like. But this time it was Mississippi, it was cotton; the plow handles felt right to his palms again, the strain and squat of the slick buttocks against the middle buster’s blade was what he knew, even though they paid but a dollar a day here. But that did it. He told it: they told him it was Saturday again and paid him and he told about it—night, a smoked lantern in a disc of worn and barren earth as smooth as silver, a circle of crouching figures, the importunate murmurs and ejaculations, the meagre piles of worn bills beneath the crouching knees, the dotted cubes clicking and scuttering in the dust; that did it. “How much did you win?” the second convict said.
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