Dove had to wait a minute before the court grew relatively quiet again.
‘I just meant I weren’t guilty of nothin’ you read in them rules,’ he explained.
‘Guilty of nothin’ you say? Why then it naturally follow you’re mighty innocent of somethin’. Let’s see you deny that one.’
‘Of course I’m innocent of nothin’,’ Dove began to get angry as he grew confused.
‘Then you’re guilty of everythin’, naturally.’
‘Guilty of everythin’!’ the Dishrag bleated, the Timberwolf beetled, Sec Fiend giggled and Feathers crowed, ‘Guilty! Everyone guilty of everythin’!’
‘Looks like you walked smack-dab into it again,’ Murphy mourned for him. ‘If you’d just own up the court might go lighter. What we call mightigating circumstance.’
‘I stand mute,’ Dove resolved suddenly.
‘Too late,’ Murphy still sympathized, ‘you’ve already confessed.’
‘Confessed nothin’,’ Dove protested. ‘I didn’t confess nothin’!’
‘You said you were innocent of nothin’, and if that aint confessin’—’
‘Innocent of nothin’! Guilty of everythin’!’
‘You’ve heard the verdict,’ Murphy informed him. ‘What are you standing there for? The slop bucket’s in the corner.’
‘I don’t duck my head in no slop bucket,’ Dove took a firm stand.
Country Kline came to lean in the door. ‘I suggest you recommend mercy, gentlemen,’ he told no particular gentleman.
‘Six piggybacks! Call that mercy,’ Dishrag decided.
His Honor waited to see whether the prisoner would accept commutation. Dove looked at Country. Country nodded.
Dove stooped, hands on knees as though for leapfrog and His Honor clambered onto his back. Then it was up and down and around, Dove bowed nearly double with the lank youth’s weight, while the jury of his peers raced from cell to cell, keeping count at every turn.
When the punishment was done and Murphy had dismounted he told Dove lightly, ‘It wouldn’t do no great harm to spend a little tobacco on the boys to show you don’t bear them no ill will.’
Dove handed the court his Picayunes. His jealousy satisfied, Murphy lit one for Dove.
Peace reigned in Tank Ten once again.
And the bugs were back in their beds.
Early next morning the turnkey came up long before the meat tins were due.
‘Kline! Get dressed! Sheriff ’s waitin’ on you. That’s all I know.’
But the tank knew more than that: the feds had come for Country at last. Yet Country took his own good time in getting ready, as though still unsure about what that judge might throw at him.
‘I need time to think this over,’ he told the waiting turnkey as though he had a choice in the matter.
At last he shook hands all around, and last of all with Dove. ‘See you a hundred stretches hence,’ he promised and Dove was sorry to see him go.
To go in a driving rain, when the Mardi Gras was done, but night bulbs still burned on.
The night bulb that usually dimmed at six was allowed to burn that morning till the courthouse chimes rang at nine. A minute after the bulb began fading. Slowly, as though burning out. And the cells were left shadowed by the night that had passed.
A dark and lost hour, the first Dove had spent in a cell all alone. When a faraway train called like a train going farther and farther from home and he thought, ‘That engineer sounds terrible lonesome.’
Later, by standing at the run-around window, he saw they were at it again in the Animal Kingdom. But he had lost all desire to keep count. Someone was trying to get a spitting contest going for a sack of Bull Durham, but no one wanted to play. A green Lincoln wheeled around the yard, swaying a bit down the unpaved alley, its siren rising as it hit the open street with headlights fighting the fog.
‘There go the nabs!’ he announced to the tier, and everyone came crowding to see, but by then it was gone.
Still its siren rang on the iron faintly and he felt dead sick for home.
All that wintry afternoon the Southern rain never ceased. In the run-around the prisoners gathered together uneasily as dark came on, to read the rules of the Kangaroo Court like men reading Genesis on a raft at sea. Toward evening came a lull in the rain: in the lull they heard boots climbing stairs as though burdened.
It always took the sheriff longer to open the Tank Ten door than the outer doors because it was opened by the brake locked in a box on the outer wall and the key to the box, smaller than his other keys, always eluded him for a minute.
The men listened while he fumbled. ‘Somebody with him,’ everyone sensed.
The sheriff and a deputy with a badge on his cap, and between them Country Kline bent double, and all three soaking wet. He looked somehow smaller and his toes kept scraping the floor as they half-dragged and half-carried him.
Beneath the cocky red cap his face was so drained of blood it held no expression at all. Somebody bundled a blanket and stuffed it through the bars. Country sagged, mouth agape.
When he was stretched out he clutched his cap against his stomach and drank the rain running off his hair. The fingers began searching feebly for the wound.
‘I knew I had him when I seen him vomick,’ the deputy explained. Country’s face was more gray than Dove had ever seen a living face and his eyes kept dilating with shock.
‘Shouldn’t have turned rabbit on us, dad,’ the sheriff reproved him while the doc swabbed the belly with cotton batting.
‘He jumped out of the car,’ the deputy seemed to feel he owed the men peering through the bars an explanation, ‘I hollered, but he just bent over and started zig-zagging. Not sure as I blame him. Ninety-nine years is a mighty long time.’
Country’s throat was the same dead-gray as his fingers; the color of the concrete that had held him so long; the color of his only home; as well as the hue of that new and untried shore to which for so long he had half-wished to go.
‘We’ll have to op-rate, dad. Say “Okay,”’ the sheriff asked.
Caught between the double disappointments of dying too soon or staying alive to no purpose whatsoever, his eyes looked inward to make a choice; unaware that the choice had been taken from him. Behind his eyes Dove saw the man racing like a fox in an ever-diminishing circle. It was so hard to go, it was so hard to stay, it was all so hard all the way. The fingers, wet with rain or sweat, twisted weakly on the cap, trying to keep hold; the eyes kept trying to understand.
The sheriff put one ear to his lips to hear the whisper of legalized consent. If it had been himself with the gun he would have gotten the man at the knees, he felt.
The fingers abandoned the cap and wandered about the wound’s gray edge, tracing the torn tissue to make sure it was at last his own.
‘Tell us we can op-rate, dad,’ he asked. ‘I ought to sew you now.’
Outside the rain ceased a minute, as though it too listened for the whisper. The doctor looked up at the sheriff and the sheriff looked down at the doctor, his face a mask of impassivity. He’d been sued once; he wasn’t getting sued again. The odor of iodine began filling the tank.
‘Say yes,’ Dove urged him, ‘Say yes, Country.’
The turnkey came up, trying to hurry and walk softly both at once. ‘They got some broad downstairs claims she used to be his old lady. Got papers to prove it, I didn’t look too close. No, I didn’t search her, I was afraid of what I’d find. Maybe she’ll say yes for him.’
‘“Used-to-be” don’t git it,’ the sheriff shook his head like a weary mastiff, ‘as I understand it, as long as he’s conscious he’s suppose to say it hisself. If he aint, it takes a legal relation, else I’m liable. First aid is as far as law give me the right to go.’