“What gun was he shot with, Lucas?” and got exactly what even Lucas knew he had expected:
“I’m gonter pay you,” Lucas said. “Name yo price at anything in reason and I will pay it.”
He drew a long breath and expelled it while they faced each other through the bars, the bleared old man’s eyes watching him, inscrutable and secret. They were not even urgent now and he thought peacefully He’s not only beat me, he never for one second had any doubt of it. He said: “All right. Just for me to look at him wouldn’t do any good, even if I could tell about the bullet. So you see what that means. I’ve got to dig him up, get him out of that hole before the Gowries catch me, and in to town where Mr. Hampton can send to Memphis for an expert that can tell about bullets.” He looked at Lucas, at the old man holding gently to the bars inside the cell and not even looking at him anymore. He drew a long breath again. “But the main thing is to get him up out of the ground where somebody can look at him before the ...” He looked at Lucas. “I’ll have to get out there and dig him up and get back to town before midnight or one oclock and maybe even midnight will be too late. I dont see how I can do it. I cant do it.”
“I’ll try to wait,” Lucas said.
Chapter Four
THERE WAS A WEATHERED battered second-hand-looking pickup truck parked at the curb in front of the house when he reached home. It was now well past eight oclock; it was a good deal more than a possibility that there remained less than four hours for his uncle to go to the sheriff’s house and convince him and then find a J.P. or whoever they would have to find and wake and then convince too to open the grave (in lieu of permission from the Gowries, which for any reason whatever, worst of all to save a nigger from being burned over a bonfire, the President of the United States himself let alone a country sheriff would never get) and then go out to Caledonia church and dig up the body and get back to town with it in time. Yet this of all nights would be one when a farmer whose stray cow or mule or hog had been impounded by a neighbor who insisted on collecting a dollar pound fee before he would release it, must come in to see his uncle, to sit for an hour in his uncle’s study saying yes or no or I reckon not while his uncle talked about crops or politics, one of which his uncle knew nothing about and the other the farmer didn’t, until the man would get around to telling what he came for.
But he couldn’t stand on ceremony now. He had been walking pretty fast since he left the jail but he was trotting now, catacorner across the lawn, onto the gallery and across it into the hall past the library where his father would still be sitting under one reading lamp with the Memphis paper’s Sunday crossword puzzle page and his mother under the other one with the new Book-of-the-Month book, and on back to what his mother used to try to call Gavin’s study but which Paralee and Aleck Sander had long since renamed the office so that everyone now called it that. The door was closed; he could hear the murmur of the man’s voice beyond it during the second in which without even stopping he rapped twice and at the same time opened the door and entered already saying:
“Good evening, sir. Excuse me. Uncle Gavin—”
Because the voice was his uncle’s; seated opposite his uncle beyond the desk, instead of a man with a shaved sunburned neck in neat tieless Sunday shirt and pants, was a woman in a plain cotton print dress and one of the round faintly dusty-looking black hats squarely on the top of her head such as his grandmother had used to wear and then he recognised her even before he saw the watch—small gold in a hunting case suspended by a gold brooch on her flat bosom almost like and in almost exactly the same position as the heart sewn on the breast of the canvas fencing vest—because since his grandmother’s death no other woman in his acquaintance wore or even owned one and in fact he should have recognised the pickup truck: Miss Habersham, whose name was now the oldest which remained in the county. There had been three once: Doctor Habersham and a tavern keeper named Holston and a Huguenot younger son named Grenier who had ridden horseback into the county before its boundaries had ever been surveyed and located and named, when Jefferson was a Chickasaw trading post with a Chickasaw word to designate it out of the trackless wilderness of cane-brake and forest of that time but all gone now, vanished except the one even from the county’s spoken recollection: Holston merely the name of the hotel on the Square and few in the county to know or care where the word came from, and the last of the blood of Louis Grenier the elegante, the dilettante, the Paris-educated architect who had practised a little of law but had spent most of his time as a planter and painter (and more amateur as a raiser of food and cotton than with canvas and brush) now warmed the bones of an equable cheerful middleaged man with the mind and face of a child who lived in a half-shed half-den he built himself of discarded boards and pieces of flattened stove-pipe and tin cans on the bank of the river twenty miles away, who didn’t know his age and couldn’t write even the Lonnie Grinnup which he now called himself and didn’t even know that the land he squatted on was the last lost scrap of the thousands of acres which his ancestor had been master of and only Miss Habersham remained: a kinless spinster of seventy living in the columned colonial house on the edge of town which had not been painted since her father died and had neither water nor electricity in it, with two Negro servants (and here again something nagged for an instant at his mind his attention but already in the same second gone, not even dismissed: just gone) in a cabin in the back yard, who (the wife) did the cooking while Miss Habersham and the man raised chickens and vegetables and peddled them about town from the pickup truck. Until two years ago they had used a plump aged white horse (it was said to be twenty years old when he first remembered it, with a skin beneath the burnished white hairs as clean and pink as a baby’s) and a buggy. Then they had a good season or something and Miss Habersham bought the pickup truck second hand and every morning winter and summer they would be seen about the streets from house to house, Miss Habersham at the wheel in cotton stockings and the round black hat which she had been wearing for at least forty years and the clean print dresses which you could see in the Sears Roebuck catalogues for two dollars and ninety-eight cents with the neat small gold watch pinned to the flat unmammary front and the shoes and the gloves which his mother said were made to her measure in a New York shop and cost thirty and forty dollars a pair for the one and fifteen and twenty for the other, while the Negro man trotted his vast belly in and out of the houses with a basket of bright greens or eggs in one hand and the plucked naked carcass of a chicken in the other;—recognised, remembered, even (his attention) nagged at and already dismissed because there wasn’t time, saying rapidly:
“Good evening, Miss Habersham. Excuse me. I’ve got to speak to Uncle Gavin:” then again to his uncle, “Uncle Gavin—”