“All right. What do you want me to do?”
“Go out there and look at him,” Lucas said.
“Go out where and look at who?” he said. But he understood all right. It seemed to him that he had known all the time what it would be; he thought with a kind of relief So that’s all it is even while his automatic voice was screeching with outraged disbelief: “Me? Me?” It was like something you have dreaded and feared and dodged for years until it seemed like all your life, then despite everything it happened to you and all it was was just pain, all it did was hurt and so it was all over, all finished, all right.
“I’ll pay you.” Lucas said.
So he wasn’t listening, not even to his own voice in amazed incredulous outrage: “Me go out there and dig up that grave?” He wasn’t even thinking anymore So this is what that plate of meat and greens is going to cost me. Because he had already passed that long ago when that something—whatever it was—had held him here five minutes ago looking back across the vast, the almost insuperable chasm between him and the old Negro murderer and saw, heard Lucas saying something to him not because he was himself, Charles Mallison junior, nor because he had eaten the plate of greens and warmed himself at the fire, but because he alone of all the white people Lucas would have a chance to speak to between now and the moment when he might be dragged out of the cell and down the steps at the end of a rope, would hear the mute unhoping urgency of the eyes. He said:
“Come here.” Lucas did so, approaching, taking hold of two of the bars as a child stands inside a fence. Nor did he remember doing so but looking down he saw his own hands holding to two of the bars, the two pairs of hands, the black ones and the white ones, grasping the bars while they faced one another above them. “All right,” he said. “Why?”
“Go and look at him,” Lucas said. “If it’s too late when you get back, I’ll sign you a paper now saying I owes you whatever you think it’s worth.”
But still he wasn’t listening; he knew it: only to himself: “I’m to go seventeen miles out there in the dark—”
“Nine,” Lucas said. “The Gowries buries at Caledonia Chapel. You takes the first right hand up into the hills just beyond the Nine-Mile branch bridge. You can be there in a half hour in your uncle’s automobile.”
“—I’m to risk having the Gowries catch me digging up that grave. I aim to know why. I dont even know what I’ll be looking for. Why?”
“My pistol is a fawty-one Colt,” Lucas said. Which it would be; the only thing he hadn’t actually known was the calibre—that weapon workable and efficient and well cared for yet as archaic peculiar and unique as the gold toothpick, which had probably (without doubt) been old Carothers McCaslin’s pride a half century ago.
“All right,” he said. “Then what?”
“He wasn’t shot with no fawty-one Colt.”
“What was he shot with?”
But Lucas didn’t answer that, standing there on his side of the steel door, his hands light-clasped and motionless around the two bars, immobile save for the faint movement of his breathing. Nor had he expected Lucas to and he knew that Lucas would never answer that, say any more, any further to any white man, and he knew why, as he knew why Lucas had waited to tell him, a child, about the pistol when he would have told neither his uncle nor the sheriff who would have been the one to open the grave and look at the body; he was surprised that Lucas had come as near as he had to telling his uncle about it and he realised, appreciated again that quality in his uncle which brought people to tell him things they would tell nobody else, even tempting Negroes to tell him what their nature forbade them telling white men: remembering old Ephraim and his mother’s ring that summer five years ago—a cheap thing with an imitation stone; two of them in fact, identical, which his mother and her room-mate at Sweetbriar Virginia had saved their allowances and bought and exchanged to wear until death as young girls will, and the room-mate grown and living in California with a daughter of her own at Sweetbriar now and she and his mother had not seen one another in years and possibly never would again yet his mother still kept the ring: then one day it disappeared; he remembered how he would wake late at night and see lights burning downstairs and he would know she was still searching for it: and all this time old Ephraim was sitting in his home-made rocking chair on Paralee’s front gallery until one day Ephraim told him that for half a dollar he would find the ring and he gave Ephraim the half dollar and that afternoon he left for a week at a Scout camp and returned and found his mother in the kitchen where she had spread newspapers on the table and emptied the stone crock she and Paralee kept the cornmeal in onto it and she and Paralee were combing through the meal with forks and for the first time in a week he remembered the ring and went back to Paralee’s house and there was Ephraim sitting in the chair on the gallery and Ephraim said, “Hit’s under the hawg-trough at your pa’s farm:” nor did Ephraim need to tell him how then because he had already remembered by then: Mrs. Downs: an old white woman who lived alone in a small filthy shoebox of a house that smelled like a foxden on the edge of town in a settlement of Negro houses, in and out of which Negroes came and went steadily all day long and without doubt most of the night: who (this not from Paralee who seemed always to not know or at least to have no time at the moment to talk about it, but from Aleck Sander) didn’t merely tell fortunes and cure hexes but found things: which was where the half dollar had gone and he believed at once and so implicitly that the ring was now found that he dismissed that phase at once and forever and it was only the things secondary and corollary which moved his interest, saying to Ephraim: “You’ve known all this week where it was and you didn’t even tell them?” and Ephraim looked at him a while rocking steadily and placidly and sucking at his cold ashfilled pipe with each rock like the sound of a small asthmatic cylinder: “I mought have told your maw. But she would need help. So I waited for you. Young folks and womens, they aint cluttered. They can listen. But a middle-year man like your paw and your uncle, they cant listen. They aint got time. They’re too busy with facks. In fact, you mought bear this in yo mind; someday you mought need it. If you ever needs to get anything done outside the common run, dont waste yo time on the menfolks; get the womens and children to working at it.” And he remembered his father’s not rage so much as outrage, his almost furious repudiation, his transference of the whole thing into a realm of assailed embattled moral principle, and even his uncle who until now had had no more trouble than he believing things that all other grown people doubted for the sole reason that they were unreasonable, while his mother went serenely and stubbornly about her preparations to go out to the farm which she hadn’t visited in over a year and even his father hadn’t seen it since months before the ring was missing and even his uncle refused to drive the car so his father hired a man from the garage and he and his mother went out to the farm and with the help of the overseer found under the trough where the hogs were fed, the ring. Only this was no obscure valueless little ring exchanged twenty years ago between two young girls but the death by shameful violence of a man who would die not because he was a murderer but because his skin was black. Yet this was all Lucas was going to tell him and he knew it was all; he thought in a kind of raging fury: Believe? Believe what? because Lucas was not even asking him to believe anything; he was not even asking a favor, making no last desperate plea to his humanity and pity but was even going to pay him provided the price was not too high, to go alone seventeen miles (no, nine: he remembered at least that he had heard that now) in the dark and risk being caught violating the grave of a member of a clan of men already at the pitch to commit the absolute of furious and bloody outrage without even telling him why. Yet he tried it again, as he knew Lucas not only knew he was going to but knew that he knew what answer he would get: