Light in August (39 page)

“Wasn’t nobody bothering him, even then,” the messenger said. “It was all happening so fast, and nobody knowed him, who he was or what he wanted or nothing. And the women hollering and screeching and him done retch into the pulpit and caught Brother Bedenberry by the throat, trying to snatch him outen the pulpit. We could see Brother Bedenberry talking to him, trying to pacify him quiet, and him jerking at Brother Bedenberry and slapping his face with his hand. And the womenfolks screeching and hollering so you couldn’t hear what Brother Bedenberry was saying, cep he never tried to hit back nor nothing, and then some of the old men, the deacons, went up to him and tried to talk to him and he let Brother Bedenberry go and he whirled and he knocked seventy year old Pappy Thompson clean down into the mourners’ pew and then he retch down and caught up a chair and whirled and made a pass at the others until they give back. And the folks still yelling and screeching and trying to get out. Then he turned and clumb into the pulpit, where Brother Bedenberry had done clumb out the other side, and he stood there—he was all muddy, his pants and his shirt, and his jaw black with whiskers—with his hands raised like a preacher. And he begun to curse, hollering it out, at the folks, and he cursed God louder than the women screeching, and some of the men trying to hold Roz Thompson, Pappy Thompson’s daughter’s boy, that was six foot tall and had a razor nekkid in his hand, hollering ‘I’ll kill him. Lemme go,
folks. He hit my grandpappy. I’ll kill him. Lemme go. Please lemme go’ and the folks trying to get out, rushing and trompling in the aisle and through the door, and him in the pulpit cursing God and the men dragging Roz Thompson out backwards and Roz still begging them to let him go. But they got Roz out and we went back into the bushes and him still hollering and cursing back there in the pulpit. Then he quit after a while and we seed him come to the door and stand there. And they had to hold Roz again. He must have heard the racket they made holding Roz, because he begun to laugh. He stood there in the door, with the light behind him, laughing loud, and then he begun to curse again and we could see him snatch up a bench leg and swing it back. And we heard the first lamp bust, and it got dim in the church, and then we heard the other lamp bust and then it was dark and we couldn’t see him no more. And where they was trying to hold Roz a terrible racket set up, with them hollerwhispering ‘Hold him! Hold him! Ketch him! Ketch him!’ Then somebody hollered ‘He’s done got loose’ and we could hear Roz running back toward the church and Deacon Vines says to me ‘Roz will kill him. Jump on a mule and ride for the sheriff. Tell him just what you seen.’ And wasn’t nobody bothering him, captain,” the negro said. “We never even knowed him to call his name. Never even seed him before. And we tried to hold Roz back. But Roz a big man, and him done knocked down Roz’ seventy year old grandpappy and Roz with that nekkid razor in his hand, not caring much who else he had to cut to carve his path back to the church where that white man was. But fore God we tried to hold Roz.”

That was what he told, because that was what he knew.
He had departed immediately: he did not know that at the time he was telling it, the negro Roz was lying unconscious in a neighboring cabin, with his skull fractured where Christmas, just inside the now dark door, had struck him with the bench leg when Roz plunged into the church. Christmas struck just once, hard, savagely, at the sound of running feet, the thick shape which rushed headlong through the doorway, and heard it without pause plunge on crashing among the overturned benches and become still. Also without pausing Christmas sprang out and to the earth, where he stood lightly, poised, still grasping the bench leg, cool, not even breathing hard. He was quite cool, no sweat; the darkness cool upon him. The churchyard was a pallid crescent of trampled and beaten earth, shaped and enclosed by undergrowth and trees. He knew that the undergrowth was full of negroes: he could feel the eyes. ‘Looking and looking,’ he thought. ‘Dont even know they cant see me.’ He breathed deeply; he found that he was hefting the bench leg, curiously, as though trying its balance, as if he had never touched it before. ‘I’ll cut a notch in it tomorrow,’ he thought. He leaned the leg carefully against the wall beside him and took from his shirt a cigarette and a match. As he struck the match he paused, and with the yellow flame spurting punily into life he stood, his head turned a little. It was hooves which he heard. He heard them come alive and grow swift, diminishing. “A mule,” he said aloud, not loud. “Bound for town with the good news.” He lit the cigarette and flipped the match away and he stood there, smoking, feeling the negro eyes upon the tiny living coal. Though he stood there until the cigarette was smoked down, he was quite alert. He had set his back against the wall
and he held the bench leg in his right hand again. He smoked the cigarette completely down, then he flipped it, twinkling, as far as he could toward the undergrowth where he could feel the negroes crouching. “Have a butt, boys,” he said, his voice sudden and loud in the silence. In the undergrowth where they crouched they watched the cigarette twinkle toward the earth and glow there for a time. But they could not see him when he departed, nor which way he went.

At eight oclock the next morning the sheriff arrived, with his posse and the bloodhounds. They made one capture immediately, though the dogs had nothing to do with it. The church was deserted; there was not a negro in sight. The posse entered the church and looked quietly about at the wreckage. Then they emerged. The dogs had struck something immediately, but before they set out a deputy found, wedged into a split plank on the side of the church, a scrap of paper. It had been obviously put there by the hand of man, and opened, it proved to be an empty cigarette container torn open and spread smooth, and on the white inner side was a pencilled message. It was raggedly written, as though by an unpractised hand or perhaps in the dark, and it was not long. It was addressed to the sheriff by name and it was unprintable—a single phrase—and it was unsigned. “Didn’t I tell you?” one of the party said. He was unshaven too and muddy, like the quarry which they had not yet even seen, and his face looked strained and a little mad, with frustration, outrage, and his voice was hoarse, as though he had been doing a good deal of unheeded shouting or talking recently. “I told you all the time! I told you!”

“Told me what?” the sheriff said, in a cold, level voice, bearing upon the other a gaze cold and level, the pencilled message in his hand. “What did you tell me when?” The other looked at the sheriff, outraged, desperate, frayed almost to endurance’s limit; looking at him, the deputy thought, ‘If he dont get that reward, he will just die.’ His mouth was open though voiceless as he glared at the sheriff with a kind of baffled and unbelieving amaze. “And I done told you, too,” the sheriff said, in his bleak, quiet voice. “If you dont like the way I am running this, you can wait back in town. There’s a good place there for you to wait in. Cool, where you wont stay so heated up like out here in the sun. Aint I told you, now? Talk up.”

The other closed his mouth. He looked away, as though with a tremendous effort; as though with a tremendous effort he said “Yes” in a dry, suffocated voice.

The sheriff turned heavily, crumpling the message. “You try to keep that from slipping your mind again, then,” he said. “If you got any mind to even slip on you.” They were ringed about with quiet, interested faces in the early sunlight. “About which I got the Lord’s own doubts, if you or anybody else wants to know.” Someone guffawed, once. “Shet up that noise,” the sheriff said. “Let’s get going. Get them dogs started, Bufe.”

The dogs were cast, still on leash. They struck immediately. The trail was good, easily followed because of the dew. The fugitive had apparently made no effort whatever to hide it. They could even see the prints of his knees and hands where he had knelt to drink from a spring. “I never yet knew
a murderer that had more sense than that about the folks that would chase him,” the deputy said. “But this durn fool dont even suspect that we might use dogs.”

“We been putting dogs on him once a day ever since Sunday,” the sheriff said. “And we aint caught him yet.”

“Them were cold trails. We aint had a good hot trail until today. But he’s made his mistake at last. We’ll get him today. Before noon, maybe.”

“I’ll wait and see, I reckon,” the sheriff said.

“You’ll see,” the deputy said. “This trail is running straight as a railroad. I could follow it, myself almost. Look here. You can even see his footprints. The durn fool aint even got enough sense to get into the road, in the dust, where other folks have walked and where the dogs cant scent him. Them dogs will find the end of them footprints before ten oclock.”

Which the dogs did. Presently the trail bent sharply at right angles. They followed it and came onto a road, which they followed behind the lowheaded and eager dogs who, after a short distance, swung to the roadside where a path came down from a cotton house in a nearby field. They began to bay, milling, tugging, their voices loud, mellow, ringing; whining and surging with excitement. “Why, the durn fool!” the deputy said. “He set down here and rested: here’s his footmarks: them same rubber heels. He aint a mile ahead right now! Come on, boys!” They went on, the leashes taut, the dogs baying, the men moving now at a trot. The sheriff turned to the unshaven man.

“Now’s your chance to run ahead and catch him and get that thousand dollars,” he said. “Why dont you do it?”

The man did not answer; none of them had much breath for talking, particularly when after about a mile the dogs, still straining and baying, turned from the road and followed a path which went quartering up a hill and into a corn field. Here they stopped baying, but if anything their eagerness seemed to increase; the men were running now. Beyond the headtall corn was a negro cabin. “He’s in there,” the sheriff said, drawing his pistol. “Watch yourselves now, boys. He’ll have a gun now.”

It was done with finesse and skill: the house surrounded by concealed men with drawn pistols, and the sheriff, followed by the deputy, getting himself for all his bulk swiftly and smartly flat against the cabin wall, out of range of any window. Still flat to the wall he ran around the corner and kicked open the door and sprang, pistol first, into the cabin. It contained a negro child. The child was stark naked and it sat in the cold ashes on the hearth, eating something. It was apparently alone, though an instant later a woman appeared in an inner door, her mouth open, in the act of dropping an iron skillet. She was wearing a pair of man’s shoes, which a member of the posse identified as having belonged to the fugitive. She told them about the white man on the road about daylight and how he had swapped shoes with her, taking in exchange a pair of her husband’s brogans which she was wearing at the time. The sheriff listened. “That happened right by a cotton house, didn’t it?” he said. She told him Yes. He returned to his men, to the leashed and eager dogs. He looked down at the dogs while the men asked questions and then ceased, watching him. They watched him put the pistol
back into his pocket and then turn and kick the dogs, once each, heavily. “Get them durn eggsuckers on back to town,” he said.

But the sheriff was a good officer. He knew as well as his men that he would return to the cottonhouse, where he believed that Christmas had been hidden all the while, though he knew now that Christmas would not be there when they returned. They had some trouble getting the dogs away from the cabin, so that it was in the hot brilliance of ten oclock that they surrounded the cotton house carefully and skilfully and quietly and surprised it with pistols, quite by the rules and without any particular hope; and found one astonished and terrified field rat. Nevertheless the sheriff had the dogs—they had refused to approach the cotton house at all; they refused to leave the road, leaning and straining against the collars with simultaneous and reverted heads pointed back down the road toward the cabin from which they had been recently dragged away—brought up. It took two men by main strength to fetch them up, where as soon as the leashes were slacked, they sprang as one and rushed around the cotton house and through the very marks which the fugitive’s legs had left in the tall and still dewed weeds in the house’s shadow, and rushed leaping and straining back toward the road, dragging the two men for fifty yards before they succeeded in passing the leashes about a sapling and snubbing the dogs up. This time the sheriff did not even kick them.

At last the noise and the alarms, the sound and fury of the hunt, dies away, dies out of his hearing. He was not in the cottonhouse when the man and the dogs passed, as the sheriff believed. He paused there only long enough to lace up the brogans: the black shoes, the black shoes smelling of negro. They looked like they had been chopped out of iron ore with a dull axe. Looking down at the harsh, crude, clumsy shapelessness of them, he said “Hah” through his teeth. It seemed to him that he could see himself being hunted by white men at last into the black abyss which had been waiting, trying, for thirty years to drown him and into which now and at last he had actually entered, bearing now upon his ankles the definite and ineradicable gauge of its upward moving.