And still a good while until daylight when his uncle stopped the car at the sheriff’s gate and led the way up the short walk and onto the rented gallery. (Since he couldn’t succeed himself, although now in his third term the elapsed time covering Sheriff Hampton’s tenure was actually almost twice as long as the twelve years of his service. He was a countryman, a farmer and son of farmers when he was first elected and now owned himself the farm and house where he had been born, living in the rented one in town during his term of office then returning to the farm which was his actual home at each expiration, to live there until he could run for—and be elected—sheriff again.)
“I hope he’s not a heavy sleeper,” Miss Habersham said.
“He aint asleep,” his uncle said. “He’s cooking breakfast.”
“Cooking breakfast?” Miss Habersham said: and then he knew that, for all her flat back and the hat which had never shifted from the exact top of her head as though she kept it balanced there not by any pins but simply by the rigid unflagging poise of her neck as Negro women carry a whole family wash, she was about worn out with strain and lack of sleep too.
“He’s a country man,” his uncle said. “Any food he eats after daylight in the morning is dinner. Mrs. Hampton’s in Memphis with their daughter waiting for the baby and the only woman who’ll cook a man’s breakfast at half-past three a.m. is his wife. No hired town cook’s going to do it. She comes at a decent hour about eight oclock and washes the dishes.” His uncle didn’t knock. He started to open the door then stopped and looked back past both of them to where Aleck Sander stood at the bottom of the front steps. “And dont you think you’re going to get out of it just because your mama dont vote,” he told Aleck Sander. “You come on too.”
Then his uncle opened the door and at once they smelled the coffee and the frying hogmeat, walking on linoleum toward a faint light at the rear of the hall then across a linoleum-floored diningroom in rented Grand Rapids mission into the kitchen, into the hard cheerful blast of a woodstove where the sheriff stood over a sputtering skillet in his undershirt and pants and socks, his braces dangling and his hair mussed and tousled with sleep like that of a ten-year-old boy, a battercake turner in one hand and a cuptowel in the other. The sheriff had already turned his vast face toward the door before they entered it and he watched the little hard pale eyes flick from his uncle to Miss Habersham to himself and then to Aleck Sander and even then it was not the eyes which widened so much for that second but rather the little hard black pupils which had tightened in that one flick to pinpoints. But the sheriff said nothing yet, just looking at his uncle now and now even the little hard pupils seemed to expand again as when an expulsion of breath untightens the chest and while the three of them stood quietly and steadily watching the sheriff his uncle told it, rapid and condensed and succinct, from the moment in the jail last night when his uncle had realised that Lucas had started to tell—or rather ask—him something, to the one when he had entered his uncle’s room ten minutes ago and waked him up, and stopped and again they watched the little hard eyes go flick, flick, slick, across their three faces then back to his uncle again, staring at his uncle for almost a quarter of a minute without even blinking. Then the sheriff said:
“You wouldn’t come here at four oclock in the morning with a tale like that if it wasn’t so.”
“You aint listening just to two sixteen-year-old children,” his uncle said. “I remind you that Miss Habersham was there.”
“You dont have to,” the sheriff said. “I haven’t forgot it. I dont think I ever will.” Then the sheriff turned. A gigantic man and in the fifties too, you wouldn’t think he could move fast and he didn’t really seem to yet he had taken another skillet from a nail in the wall behind the stove and was already turning toward the table (where for the first time he noticed, saw the side of smoked meat) before he seemed to have moved at all, picking up a butcher knife from beside the meat before his uncle could even begin to speak:
“Have we got time for that? You’ve got to drive sixty miles to Harrisburg to the District Attorney; you’ll have to take Miss Habersham and these boys with you for witnesses to try and persuade him to originate a petition for the exhumation of Vinson Gowrie’s body—”
The sheriff wiped the handle of the knife rapidly with the cuptowel. “I thought you told me Vinson Gowrie aint in that grave.”
“Officially he is,” his uncle said. “By the county records he is. And if you, living right here and knowing Miss Habersham and me all your political life, had to ask me twice, what do you think Jim Halladay is going to do?—Then you’ve got to drive sixty miles back here with your witnesses and the petition and get Judge Maycox to issue an order—”
The sheriff dropped the cuptowel onto the table. “Have I?” he said mildly, almost inattentively: so that his uncle stopped perfectly still watching him as the sheriff turned from the table, the knife in his hand.
“Oh,” his uncle said.
“I’ve thought of something else too,” the sheriff said. “I’m surprised you aint. Or maybe you have.”
His uncle stared at the sheriff. Then Aleck Sander—he was behind them all, not yet quite through the diningroom door into the kitchen—said in a voice as mild and impersonal as though he were reading off a slogan catch-phrase advertising some object he didn’t own and never expected to want:
“It mought not a been a mule. It mought have been a horse.”
“Maybe you’ve thought of it now,” the sheriff said.
“Oh,” his uncle said. He said: “Yes.” But Miss Habersham was already talking. She had given Aleck Sander one quick hard look but now she was looking at the sheriff again as quick and as hard.
“So do I,” she said. “And I think we deserve better than secrecy.”
“I do too, Miss Eunice,” the sheriff said. “Except that the one that needs considering right now aint in this room.”
“Oh,” Miss Habersham said. She said “Yes” too. She said, “Of course:” already moving, meeting the sheriff halfway between the table and the door and taking the knife from him and going on to the table when he passed her and came on toward the door, his uncle then he then Aleck Sander moving out of the way as the sheriff went on into the diningroom and across it into the dark hall, shutting the door behind him: and then he was wondering why the sheriff hadn’t finished dressing when he got up; a man who didn’t mind or had to or anyway did get up at half-past three in the morning to cook himself some breakfast would hardly mind getting up five minutes earlier and have time to put his shirt and shoes on too then Miss Habersham spoke and he remembered her; a lady’s presence of course was why he had gone to put on the shirt and shoes without even waiting to eat the breakfast and Miss Habersham spoke and he jerked, without moving heaved up out of sleep, having been asleep for seconds maybe even minutes on his feet as a horse sleeps but Miss Habersham was still only turning the side of meat onto its edge to cut the first slice. She said: “Cant he telephone to Harrisburg and have the District Attorney telephone back to Judge Maycox?”