“I’m interested in truth,” the sheriff said.
“So am I,” Uncle Gavin said. “It’s so rare. But I am more interested in justice and human beings.”
“Ain’t truth and justice the same thing?” the sheriff said.
“Since when?” Uncle Gavin said. “In my time I have seen truth that was anything under the sun but just, and I have seen justice using tools and instruments I wouldn’t want to touch with a ten-foot fence rail.”
The sheriff told us about the killing, standing, looming above the table-lamp — a big man with little hard eyes, talking down at Uncle Gavin’s wild shock of prematurely white hair and his quick thin face, while Uncle Gavin sat on the back of his neck practically, his legs crossed on the desk, chewing the bit of his corncob pipe and spinning and unspinning around his finger his watch chain weighted with the Phi Beta Kappa key he got at Harvard.
“Why?” Uncle Gavin said.
“I asked him that, myself,” the sheriff said. “He said, ‘Why do men ever kill their wives? Call it for the insurance.’ ”
“That’s wrong,” Uncle Gavin said. “It’s women who murder their spouses for immediate personal gain — insurance policies, or at what they believe is the instigation or promise of another man. Men murder their wives from hatred or rage or despair, or to keep them from talking since not even bribery not even simple absence can bridle a woman’s tongue.”
“Correct,” the sheriff said. He blinked his little eyes at Uncle Gavin. “It’s like he wanted to be locked up in jail. Not like he was submitting to arrest because he had killed his wife, but like he had killed her so that he would be locked up, arrested. Guarded.”
“Why?” Uncle Gavin said.
“Correct too,” the sheriff said. “When a man deliberately locks doors behind himself, it’s because he is afraid. And a man who would voluntarily have himself locked up on suspicion of murder...” He batted his hard little eyes at Uncle Gavin for a good ten seconds while Uncle Gavin looked just as hard back at him. “Because he wasn’t afraid. Not then nor at any time. Now and then you meet a man that aint ever been afraid, not even of himself. He’s one.”
“If that’s what he wanted you to do,” Uncle Gavin said, “why did you do it?”
“You think I should have waited a while?”
They looked at one another a while. Uncle Gavin wasn’t spinning the watch chain now. “All right,” he said. “Old Man Pritchel—”
“I was coming to that,” the sheriff said. “Nothing.”
“Nothing?” Uncle Gavin said. “You didn’t even see him?” And the sheriff told that too — how as he and the deputy and Flint stood on the gallery, they suddenly saw the old man looking out at them through a window — a face rigid, furious, glaring at them through the glass for a second and then withdrawn, vanished, leaving an impression of furious exultation and raging triumph, and something else...
“Fear?” the sheriff said. “No. I tell you, he wasn’t afraid— Oh,” he said. “You mean Pritchel.” This time he looked at Uncle Gavin so long that at last Uncle Gavin said,
“All right. Go on.” And the sheriff told that too: how they entered the house, the hall, and he stopped and knocked at the locked door of the room where they had seen the face and he even called old Pritchel’s name and still got no answer. And how they went on and found Mrs. Flint on a bed in the back room with the shotgun wound in her neck, and Flint’s battered truck drawn up beside the back steps as if they had just got out of it.
“There were three dead squirrels in the truck,” the sheriff said. “I’d say they had been shot since daylight” — and the blood on the steps, and on the ground between the steps and the truck, as if she had been shot from inside the truck, and the gun itself, still containing the spent shell, standing just inside the hall door as a man would put it down when he entered the house. And how the sheriff went back up the hall and knocked again at the locked door—
“Locked where?” Uncle Gavin said.
“On the inside,” the sheriff said — and shouted against the door’s blank surface that he would break the door in if Mr. Pritchel didn’t answer and open it, and how this time the harsh furious old voice answered, shouting:
“Get out of my house! Take that murderer and get out of my house.”
“You will have to make a statement,” the sheriff answered.
“I’ll make my statement when the time comes for it!” the old man shouted. “Get out of my house, all of you!” And how he (the sheriff) sent the deputy in the car to fetch the nearest neighbor, and he and Flint waited until the deputy came back with a man and his wife. Then they brought Flint on to town and locked him up and the sheriff telephoned back to old Pritchel’s house and the neighbor answered and told him how the old man was still locked in the room, refusing to come out or even to answer save to order them all (several other neighbors had arrived by now, word of the tragedy having spread) to leave. But some of them would stay in the house, no matter what the seemingly crazed old man said or did, and the funeral would be tomorrow.
“And that’s all?” Uncle Gavin said.
“That’s all,” the sheriff said. “Because it’s too late now.”
“For instance?” Uncle Gavin said.
“The wrong one is dead.”
“That happens,” Uncle Gavin said.
“For instance?”
“That clay-pit business.”
“What clay-pit business?” Because the whole county knew about old Pritchel’s clay-pit. It was a formation of malleable clay right in the middle of his farm, of which people in the adjacent countryside made quite serviceable though crude pottery — those times they could manage to dig that much of it up before Mr. Pritchel saw them and drove them off. For generations, Indian and even aboriginal relics — flint arrow-heads, axes and dishes and skulls and thigh-bones and pipes — had been excavated from it by random boys, and a few years ago a party of archaeologists from the State University had dug into it until Old Man Pritchel got there, this time with a shotgun. But everybody knew this; this was not what the sheriff was telling, and now Uncle Gavin was sitting erect in the chair and his feet were on the floor now.
“I hadn’t heard about this,” Uncle Gavin said.
“It’s common knowledge out there,” the sheriff said. “In fact, you might call it the local outdoor sport. It began about six weeks ago. They are three northern men. They’re trying to buy the whole farm from old Pritchel to get the pit and manufacture some kind of road material out of the clay, I understand. The folks out there are still watching them trying to buy it. Apparently the northerners are the only folks in the country that don’t know yet old Pritchel aint got any notion of selling even the clay to them, let alone the farm.”
“They’ve made him an offer, of course.”
“Probably a good one. It runs all the way from two hundred and fifty dollars to two hundred and fifty thousand, depending on who’s telling it. Them northerners just don’t know how to handle him. If they would just set in and convince him that everybody in the county is hoping he won’t sell it to them, they could probably buy it before supper tonight.” He stared at Uncle Gavin, batting his eyes again. “So the wrong one is dead, you see. If it was that clay-pit, he’s no nearer to it than he was yesterday. He’s worse off than he was yesterday. Then there wasn’t anything between him and his pa-in-law’s money but whatever private wishes and hopes and feelings that dim-witted girl might have had. Now there’s a penitentiary wall, and likely a rope. It don’t make sense. If he was afraid of a possible witness, he not only destroyed the witness before there was anything to be witnessed but also before there was any witness to be destroyed. He set up a signboard saying ‘Watch me and mark me,’ not just to this county and this state but to all folks everywhere who believe the Book where it says Thou Shalt Not Kill — and then went and got himself locked up in the very place created to punish him for this crime and restrain him from the next one. Something went wrong.”