Because (quitting abandoning emerging from scattering with one sweep that confetti-swirl of raging facetiae) he realised that he had never doubted getting out there and even getting the body up. He could see himself reaching the church, the graveyard without effort nor even any great elapse of time; he could see himself singlehanded even having the body up and out still with no effort, no pant and strain of muscles and lungs nor laceration of the shrinking sensibilities. It was only then that the whole wrecked and tumbling midnight which peer and pant though he would he couldn’t see past and beyond, would come crashing down on him. So (moving: he had not stopped since the first second’s fraction while he closed the office door) he flung himself bodily with one heave into a kind of deadly reasonableness of enraged calculation, a calm sagacious and desperate rationability not of pros and cons because there were no pros: the reason he was going out there was that somebody had to and nobody else would and the reason somebody had to was that not even Sheriff Hampton (vide Will Legate and the shotgun stationed in the lower hall of the jail like on a lighted stage where anybody approaching would have to see him or them before they even reached the gate) were completely convinced that the Gowries and their kin and friends would not try to take Lucas out of the jail tonight and so if they were all in town tonight trying to lynch Lucas there wouldn’t be anybody hanging around out there to catch him digging up the grave and if that was a concrete fact then its obverse would be concrete too: if they were not in town after Lucas tonight then any one of the fifty or a hundred men and boys in the immediate connection by blood or just foxhunting and whiskeymaking and pine lumbertrading might stumble on him and Aleck Sander: and that too, that again: he must go on a horse for the same reason: that nobody else would except a sixteen-year-old boy who owned nothing to go on but a horse and he must even choose here: either to go alone on the horse in half the time and spend three times the time getting the body up alone because alone he would not only have to do all the digging but the watching and listening too, or take Aleck Sander with him (he and Aleck Sander had travelled that way before on Highboy for even more than ten miles—a big rawboned gelding who had taken five bars even under a hundred and seventy-five pounds and a good slow canter even with two up and a long jolting driving trot as fast as the canter except that not even Aleck Sander could stand it very long behind the saddle and then a shuffling nameless halfrun halfwalk which he could hold for miles under both of them, Aleck Sander behind him for the first time at the canter then trotting beside the horse holding to the off stirrup for the next one) and so get the body up in a third of the time at the risk of having Aleck Sander keeping Lucas company when the Gowries came with the gasoline: and suddenly he found himself escaped back into the confetti exactly as you put off having to step finally into the cold water, thinking seeing hearing himself trying to explain that to Lucas too:
We have to use the horse. We cant help it: and Lucas:
You could have axed him for the car: and he:
He would have refused. Dont you understand? He wouldn’t only have refused, he would have locked me up where I couldn’t even have walked out there, let alone had a horse: and Lucas:
All right, all right. I aint criticising you. After all, it aint you them Gowries is fixing to set afire:—moving down the hall to the back door: and he was wrong; not when he had said All right to Lucas through the steel bars nor when he had stepped back into the hall and closed the office door behind him, but here was the irrevocable moment after which there would be no return; he could stop here and never pass it, let the wreckage of midnight crash harmless and impotent against these walls because they were strong, they would endure; they were home, taller than wreckage, stronger than fear;—not even stopping, not even curious to ask himself if perhaps he dared not stop, letting the screen door quietly to behind him and down the steps into the vast furious vortex of the soft May night and walking fast now across the yard toward the dark cabin where Paralee and Aleck Sander were no more asleep than all the other Negroes within a mile of town would sleep tonight, not even in bed but sitting quietly in the dark behind the closed doors and shuttered windows waiting for what sound what murmur of fury and death to breathe the spring dark: and stopped and whistled the signal he and Aleck Sander had been using to one another ever since they learned to whistle, counting off the seconds until the moment should come to repeat it, thinking how if he were Aleck Sander he wouldn’t come out of the house to anybody’s whistle tonight either when suddenly with no sound and certainly no light behind to reveal him by Aleck Sander stood out from the shadows, walking, already quite near in the moonless dark, a little taller than he though there was only a few months’ difference between them: and came up, not even looking at him but past, over his head, toward the Square as if looking could make a lofting trajectory like a baseball, over the trees and the streets and the houses, to drop seeing into the Square—not the homes in the shady yards and the peaceful meals and the resting and the sleep which were the end and the reward, but the Square: the edifices created and ordained for trade and government and judgment and incarceration where strove and battled the passions of men for which the rest and the little death of sleep were the end and the escape and the reward.
“So they aint come for old Lucas yet,” Aleck Sander said.
“Is that what your people think about it too?” he said.
“And so would you,” Aleck Sander said. “It’s the ones like Lucas makes trouble for everybody.”
“Then maybe you better go to the office and sit with Uncle Gavin instead of coming with me.”
“Going where with you?” Aleck Sander said. And he told him, harsh and bald, in four words:
“Dig up Vinson Gowrie.” Aleck Sander didn’t move, still looking past and over his head toward the Square. “Lucas said it wasn’t his gun that killed him.”
Still not moving Aleck Sander began to laugh, not loud and with no mirth: just laughing; he said exactly what his uncle had said hardly a minute ago: “So would I,” Aleck Sander said. He said: “Me? Go out there and dig that dead white man up? Is Mr. Gavin already in the office or do I just sit there until he comes?”
“Lucas is going to pay you,” he said. “He told me that even before he told me what it was.”
Aleck Sander laughed, without mirth or scorn or anything else: with no more in the sound of it than there is anything in the sound of breathing but just breathing. “I aint rich,” he said. “I dont need money.”
“At least you’ll saddle Highboy while I hunt for a flashlight, wont you?” he said. “You’re not too proud about Lucas to do that, are you?”
“Certainly.” Aleck Sander said, turning.
“And get the pick and shovel. And the long tie-rope. I’ll need that too.”
“Certainly,” Aleck Sander said. He paused, half turned. “How you going to tote a pick and shovel both on Highboy when he dont even like to see a riding switch in your hand?”
“I dont know,” he said and Aleck Sander went on and he turned back toward the house and at first he thought it was his uncle coming rapidly around the house from the front, not because he believed that his uncle might have suspected and anticipated what he was about because he did not, his uncle had dismissed that too immediately and thoroughly not only from conception but from possibility too, but because he no longer remembered anyone else available for it to have been and even after he saw it was a woman he assumed it was his mother, even after he should have recognised the hat, right up to the instant when Miss Habersham called his name and his first impulse was to step quickly and quietly around the corner of the garage, from where he could reach the lot fence still unseen and climb it and go on to the stable and so go out the pasture gate without passing the house again at all, flashlight or not but it was already too late: calling his name: “Charles:” in that tense urgent whisper then came rapidly up and stopped facing him, speaking in that tense rapid murmur: