It was of brick, square, proportioned, with four brick columns in shallow basrelief across the front and even a brick cornice under the eaves because it was old, built in a time when people took time to build even jails with grace and care and he remembered how his uncle had said once that not courthouses nor even churches but jails were the true record of a county’s, a community’s history, since not only the cryptic forgotten initials and words and even phrases cries of defiance and indictment scratched into the walls but the very bricks and stones themselves held, not in solution but in suspension, intact and biding and potent and indestructible, the agonies and shames and griefs with which hearts long since unmarked and unremembered dust had strained and perhaps burst. Which was certainly true of this one because it and one of the churches were the oldest buildings in the town, the courthouse and everything else on or in the Square having been burned to rubble by Federal occupation forces after a battle in 1864. Because scratched into one of the panes of the fanlight beside the door was a young girl’s single name, written by her own hand into the glass with a diamond in that same year and sometimes two or three times a year he would go up onto the gallery to look at it, it cryptic now in reverse, not for a sense of the past but to realise again the eternality, the deathlessness and changelessness of youth—the name of one of the daughters of the jailer of that time (and his uncle who had for everything an explanation not in facts but long since beyond dry statistics into something far more moving because it was truth: which moved the heart and had nothing whatever to do with what mere provable information said, had told him this too: how this part of Mississippi was new then, as a town a settlement a community less than fifty years old, and all the men who had come into it less long ago almost than even the oldest’s lifetime were working together to secure it, doing the base jobs along with the splendid ones not for pay or politics but to shape a land for their posterity, so that a man could be the jailer then or the innkeeper or farrier or vegetable peddler yet still be what the lawyer and planter and doctor and parson called a gentleman) who stood at that window that afternoon and watched the battered remnant of a Confederate brigade retreat through the town, meeting suddenly across that space the eyes of the ragged unshaven lieutenant who led one of the broken companies scratching into the glass not his name also, not only because a young girl of that time would never have done that but because she didn’t know his name then, let alone that six months later he would be her husband.
In fact it still looked like a residence with its balustraded wooden gallery stretching across the front of the lower floor. But above that the brick wall was windowless except for the single tall crossbarred rectangle and he thought again of the Sunday nights which seemed now to belong to a time as dead as Nineveh when from suppertime until the jailer turned the lights out and yelled up the stairs for them to shut up, the dark limber hands would lie in the grimed interstices while the mellow untroubled repentless voices would shout down to the women in the aprons of cooks or nurses and the girls in their flash cheap clothes from the mail order houses or the other young men who had not been caught yet or had been caught and freed yesterday, gathered along the street. But not tonight and even the room behind it was dark though it was not yet eight oclock and he could see, imagine them not huddled perhaps but certainly all together, within elbow’s touch whether they were actually touching or not and certainly quiet, not laughing tonight nor talking either, sitting in the dark and watching the top of the stairs because this would not be the first time when to mobs of white men not only all black cats were gray but they didn’t always bother to count them either.
And the front door was open, standing wide to the street which he had never seen before even in summer although the ground floor was the jailer’s living quarters, and tilted in a chair against the back wall so that he faced the door in full sight of the street, was a man who was not the jailer nor even one of the sheriffs deputies either. Because he had recognised him too: Will Legate, who lived on a small farm two miles from town and was one of the best woodsmen, the finest shot and the best deer-hunter in the county, sitting in the tilted chair holding the colored comic section of today’s Memphis paper, with leaning against the wall beside him not the hand-worn rifle with which he had killed more deer (and even running rabbits with it) than even he remembered but a double barrelled shotgun, who apparently without even lowering or moving the paper had already seen and recognised them even before they turned in at the gate and was now watching them steadily as they came up the walk and mounted the steps and crossed the gallery and entered: at which moment the jailer himself emerged from a door to the right—a snuffy untidy potbellied man with a harried concerned outraged face, wearing a heavy pistol bolstered onto a cartridge belt around his waist which looked as uncomfortable and out of place as a silk hat or a fifth-century iron slavecollar, who shut the door behind him, already crying at his uncle:
“He wont even shut and lock the front door! Just setting there with that durn funny paper waiting for anybody that wants to walk right in!”
“I’m doing what Mr. Hampton told me to,” Legate said in his pleasant equable voice.
“Does Hampton think that funny paper’s going to stop them folks from Beat Four?” the jailer cried.
“I dont think he’s worrying about Beat Four yet,” Legate said still pleasantly and equably. “This here’s just for local consumption now.”
His uncle glanced at Legate. “It seems to have worked. We saw the car—or one of them—make one trip around the Square as we came up. I suppose it’s been by here too.”
“Oh, once or twice,” Legate said. “Maybe three times. I really aint paid much mind.”
“And I hope to hell it keeps on working,” the jailer said. “Because you sure aint going to stop anybody with just that one britch-loader.”
“Sure,” Legate said. “I dont expect to stop them. If enough folks get their minds made up and keep them made up, aint anything likely to stop them from what they think they want to do. But then, I got you and that pistol to help me.”
“Me?” the jailer cried. “Me get in the way of them Gowries and Ingrums for seventy-five dollars a month? Just for one nigger? And if you aint a fool, you wont neither.”
“Oh I got to,” Legate said in his easy pleasant voice. “I got to resist. Mr. Hampton’s paying me five dollars for it.” Then to his uncle: “I reckon you want to see him.”
“Yes,” his uncle said. “If it’s all right with Mr. Tubbs.”
The jailer stared at his uncle, irate and harried. “So you got to get mixed up in it too. You can’t let well enough alone neither.” He turned abruptly. “Come on:” and led the way through the door beside which Legate’s chair was tilted, into the back hall where the stairway rose to the upper floor, snapping on the light switch at the foot of the stairs and began to mount them, his uncle then he following while he watched the hunch and sag of the holster at the jailer’s hip. Suddenly the jailer seemed about to stop; even his uncle thought so, stopping too but the jailer went on, speaking over his shoulder: “Dont mind me. I’m going to do the best I can; I taken an oath of office too.” His voice rose a little, still calm, just louder: “But dont think nobody’s going to make me admit I like it. I got a wife and two children; what good am I going to be to them if I get myself killed protecting a goddamn stinking nigger?” His voice rose again; it was not calm now: “And how am I going to live with myself if I let a passel of nogood sonabitches take a prisoner away from me?” Now he stopped and turned on the step above them, higher than both, his face once more harried and frantic, his voice frantic and outraged: “Better for everybody if them folks had took him as soon as they laid hands on him yesterday—”