“What did he tell you?” and now he knew what it was that had nudged at his attention back in his uncle’s office when he had recognised her and then in the next second flashed away: old Molly, Lucas’ wife, who had been the daughter of one of old Doctor Habersham’s, Miss Habersham’s grandfather’s, slaves, she and Miss Habersham the same age, born in the same week and both suckled at Molly’s mother’s breast and grown up together almost inextricably like sisters, like twins, sleeping in the same room, the white girl in the bed, the Negro girl on a cot at the foot of it almost until Molly and Lucas married, and Miss Habersham had stood up the Negro church as godmother to Molly’s first child.
“He said it wasn’t his pistol,” he said.
“So he didn’t do it,” she said, rapid still and with something even more than urgency in her voice now.
“I dont know,” he said.
“Nonsense,” she said. “If it wasn’t his pistol—”
“I dont know,” he said.
“You must know. You saw him—talked to him—”
“I dont know,” he said. He said it calmly, quietly, with a kind of incredulous astonishment as though he had only now realised what he had promised, intended: “I just dont know. I still dont know. I’m just going out there ...” He stopped, his voice died. There was an instant a second in which he even remembered he should have been wishing he could recall it, the last unfinished sentence. Though it was probably already too late and she had already done herself what little finishing the sentence needed and at any moment now she would cry, protest, ejaculate and bring the whole house down on him. Then in the same second he stopped remembering it. She said:
“Of course:” immediate murmurous and calm; he thought for another half of a second that she hadn’t understood at all and then in the other half forgot that too, the two of them facing each other indistinguishable in the darkness across the tense and rapid murmur: and then he heard his own voice speaking in the same tone and pitch, the two of them not conspiratorial exactly but rather like two people who have irrevocably accepted a gambit they are not at all certain they can cope with: only that they will resist it: “We dont even know it wasn’t his pistol. He just said it wasn’t.”
“Yes.”
“He didn’t say whose it was nor whether or not he fired it. He didn’t even tell you he didn’t fire it. He just said it wasn’t his pistol.”
“Yes.”
“And your uncle told you there in his study that that’s just exactly what he would say, all he could say.” He didn’t answer that. It wasn’t a question. Nor did she give him time. “All right,” she said. “Now what? To find out if it wasn’t his pistol—find out whatever it was he meant? Go out there and what?”
He told her. as badly as he had told Aleck Sander, explicit and succinct: “Look at him:” not even pausing to think how here he should certainly have anticipated at least a gasp. “Go out there and dig him up and bring him to town where somebody that knows bullet holes can look at the bullet hole in him—”
“Yes,” Miss Habersham said. “Of course. Naturally he wouldn’t tell your uncle. He’s a Negro and your uncle’s a man:” and now Miss Habersham in her turn repeating and paraphrasing and he thought how it was not really a paucity a meagreness of vocabulary, it was in the first place because the deliberate violent blotting out obliteration of a human life was itself so simple and so final that the verbiage which surrounded it enclosed it insulated it intact into the chronicle of man had of necessity to be simple and uncomplex too, repetitive, almost monotonous even; and in the second place, vaster than that, adumbrating that, because what Miss Habersham paraphrased was simple truth, not even fact and so there was not needed a great deal of diversification and originality to express it because truth was universal, it had to be universal to be truth and so there didn’t need to be a great deal of it just to keep running something no bigger than one earth and so anybody could know truth; all they had to do was just to pause, just to stop, just to wait: “Lucas knew it would take a child—or an old woman like me: someone not concerned with probability, with evidence. Men like your uncle and Mr. Hampton have had to be men too long, busy too long.—Yes?” she said. “Bring him in to town where someone who knows can look at the bullet hole. And suppose they look at it and find out it was Lucas’ pistol?” And he didn’t answer that at all, nor had she waited again, saying, already turning: “We’ll need a pick and shovel. I’ve got a flashlight in the truck—”
“We?” he said.
She stopped; she said almost patiently: “It’s fifteen miles out there—”
“Ten,” he said.
“—a grave is six feet deep. It’s after eight now and you may have only until midnight to get back to town in time—” and something else but he didn’t even hear it. He wasn’t even listening. He had said this himself to Lucas only fifteen minutes ago but it was only now that he understood what he himself had said. It was only after hearing someone else say it that he comprehended not the enormity of his intention but the simple inert unwieldy impossible physical vastness of what he faced; he said quietly, with hopeless indomitable amazement:
“We cant possibly do it.”
“No,” Miss Habersham said. “Well?”
“Ma’am?” he said. “What did you say?”
“I said you haven’t even got a car.”
“We were going on the horse.”
Now she said, “We?”
“Me and Aleck Sander.”
“Then we’ll have three,” she said. “Get your pick and shovel. They’ll begin to wonder in the house why they haven’t heard my truck start.” She moved again.
“Yessum,” he said. “Drive on down the lane to the pasture gate. We’ll meet you there.”
He didn’t wait either. He heard the truck start as he climbed the lot fence; presently he could see Highboy’s blaze in the black yawn of the stable hallway; Aleck Sander jerked the buckled girth-strap home through the keeper as he came up. He unsnapped the tie-rope from the bit-ring before he remembered and snapped it back and untied the other end from the wall-ring and looped it and the reins up over Highboy’s head and led him out of the hallway and got up.
“Here,” Aleck Sander said reaching up the pick and shovel but Highboy had already begun to dance even before he could have seen them as he always did even at a hedge switch and he set him back hard and steadied him as Aleck Sander said “Stand still!” and gave Highboy a loud slap on the rump, passing up the pick and shovel and he steadied them across the saddle-bow and managed to hold Highboy back on his heels for another second, long enough to free his foot from the near stirrup for Aleck Sander to get his foot into it, Highboy moving then in a long almost buck-jump as Aleck Sander swung up behind and still trying to run until he steadied him again with one hand, the pick and shovel jouncing on the saddle, and turned him across the pasture toward the gate. “Hand me them damn shovels and picks,” Aleck Sander said. “Did you get the flashlight?”