“Well, old man,” his uncle said. “You played hell at last.” Then Lucas moved. He sat up stiffly and swung his legs stiffly over the edge of the cot, picking one of them up by the knee between his hands and swinging it around as you open or close a sagging gate, groaning, grunting not just frankly and unabashed and aloud but comfortably, as the old grunt and groan with some long familiar minor stiffness so used and accustomed as to be no longer even an ache and which if they were ever actually cured of it, they would be bereft and lost; he listening and watching still in that rage and now amazement too at the murderer not merely in the shadow of the gallows but of a lynch-mob, not only taking time to groan over a stiffness in his back but doing it as if he had all the long rest of a natural life in which to be checked each time he moved by the old familiar catch.
“Looks like it,” Lucas said. “That’s why I sent for you. What you going to do with me?”
“Me?” his uncle said. “Nothing. My name aint Gowrie. It aint even Beat Four.”
Moving stiffly again Lucas bent and peered about his feet, then he reached under the cot and drew out the other shoe and sat up again and began to turn creakily and stiffly to look behind him when his uncle reached and took the first shoe from the cot and dropped it beside the other. But Lucas didn’t put them on. Instead he sat again, immobile, his hands on his knees, blinking. Then with one hand he made a gesture which completely dismissed Gowries, mob, vengeance, holocaust and all. “I’ll worry about that when they walks in here,” he said. “I mean the law. Aint you the county lawyer?”
“Oh,” his uncle said. “It’s the District Attorney that’ll hang you or send you to Parchman—not me.”
Lucas was still blinking, not rapidly: just steadily. He watched him. And suddenly he realised that Lucas was not looking at his uncle at all and apparently had not been for three or four seconds.
“I see,” Lucas said. “Then you can take my case.”
“Take your case? Defend you before the judge?”
“I’m gonter pay you,” Lucas said. “You dont need to worry.”
“I dont defend murderers who shoot people in the back,” his uncle said.
Again Lucas made the gesture with one of the dark gnarled hands. “Let’s forgit the trial. We aint come to it yet.” And now he saw that Lucas was watching his uncle, his head lowered so that he was watching his uncle upward from beneath through the grizzled tufts of his eyebrows—a look shrewd secret and intent. Then Lucas said: “I wants to hire somebody—” and stopped. And watching him, he thought remembered an old lady, dead now, a spinster, a neighbor who wore a dyed transformation and had always on a pantry shelf a big bowl of homemade teacakes for all the children on the street, who one summer (he couldn’t have been over seven or eight then) taught all of them to play Five Hundred: sitting at the card table on her screened side gallery on hot summer mornings and she would wet her fingers and take a card from her hand and lay it on the table, her hand not still poised over it of course but just lying nearby until the next player revealed exposed by some movement or gesture of triumph or exultation or maybe by just simple increased hard breathing his intention to trump or overplay it, whereupon she would say quickly: “Wait. I picked up the wrong one” and take up the card and put it back into her hand and play another one. That was exactly what Lucas had done. He had sat still before but now he was absolutely immobile. He didn’t even seem to be breathing.
“Hire somebody?” his uncle said. “You’ve got a lawyer. I had already taken your case before I came in here. I’m going to tell you what to do as soon as you have told me what happened.”
“No,” Lucas said. “I wants to hire somebody. It dont have to be a lawyer.”
Now it was his uncle who stared at Lucas. “To do what?”
He watched them. Now it was no childhood’s game of stakeless Five Hundred. It was more like the poker games he had overlooked. “Are you or aint you going to take the job?” Lucas said.
“So you aint going to tell me what you want me to do until after I have agreed to do it,” his uncle said. “All right,” his uncle said. “Now I’m going to tell you what to do. Just exactly what happened out there yesterday?”
“So you dont want the job,” Lucas said. “You aint said yes or no yet.”
“No!” his uncle said, harsh, too loud, catching himself but already speaking again before he had brought his voice back down to a sort of furious explicit calm: “Because you aint got any job to offer anybody. You’re in jail, depending on the grace of God to keep those damned Gowries from dragging you out of here and hanging you to the first lamp post they come to. Why they ever let you get to town in the first place I still dont understand—”
“Nemmine that now,” Lucas said. “What I needs is—”
“Nemmine that!” his uncle said. “Tell the Gowries to never mind it when they bust in here tonight. Tell Beat Four to just forget it—” He stopped; again with an effort you could almost see he brought his voice back to that furious patience. He drew a deep breath and expelled it. “Now. Tell me exactly what happened yesterday.”
For another moment Lucas didn’t answer, sitting on the bunk, his hands on his knees, intractable and composed, no longer looking at his uncle, working his mouth faintly as if he were tasting something. He said: “They was two folks, partners in a sawmill. Leastways they was buying the lumber as the sawmill cut it—”
“Who were they?” his uncle said.
“Vinson Gowrie was one of um.”
His uncle stared at Lucas for a long moment. But his voice was quite calm now. “Lucas,” he said, “has it ever occurred to you that if you just said mister to white people and said it like you meant it, you might not be sitting here now?”
“So I’m to commence now.” Lucas said. “I can start off by saying mister to the folks that drags me out of here and builds a fire under me.”
“Nothing’s going to happen to you—until you go before the judge,” his uncle said. “Dont you know that even Beat Four dont take liberties with Mr. Hampton—at least not here in town?”
“Shurf Hampton’s home in bed now.”
“But Mr. Will Legate’s sitting down stairs with a shotgun.”
“I aint ’quainted with no Will Legate.”
“The deer-hunter? The man that can hit a running rabbit with a thirty-thirty rifle?”
“Hah,” Lucas said. “Them Gowries aint deer. They might be cattymounts and panthers but they aint deer.”
“All right,” his uncle said. “Then I’ll stay here if you’ll feel better. Now. Go on. Vinson Gowrie and another man were buying lumber together. What other man?”
“Vinson Gowrie’s the only one that’s public yet.”
“And he got public by being shot in broad daylight in the back,” his uncle said. “Well, that’s one way to do it.—All right,” his uncle said. “Who was the other man?”
Lucas didn’t answer. He didn’t move; he might not even have heard, sitting peaceful and inattentive, not even really waiting: just sitting there while his uncle watched him. Then his uncle said:
“All right. What were they doing with it?”
“They was yarding it up as the mill cut it, gonter sell it all at once when the sawing was finished. Only the other man was hauling it away at night, coming in late after dark with a truck and picking up a load and hauling it over to Glasgow or Hollymount and selling it and putting the money in his pocket.”
“How do you know?”
“I seen um. Watched um.” Nor did he doubt this for a moment because he remembered Ephraim, Paralee’s father before he died, an old man, a widower who would pass most of the day dozing and waking in a rocking chair on Paralee’s gallery in summer and in front of the fire in winter and at night would walk the roads, not going anywhere, just moving, at times five and six miles from town before he would return at dawn to doze and wake all day in the chair again.