“That’s what he doing now,” Aleck Sander said. “Telephoning.”
“Maybe you’d better go to the hall where you can overhear good what he’s saying,” his uncle told Aleck Sander. Then his uncle looked at Miss Habersham again; he too watched her slicing rapid slice after slice of the bacon as fast and even almost as a machine could have done it. “Mr. Hampton says we wont need any papers. We can attend to it ourselves without bothering Judge Maycox—”
Miss Habersham released the knife. She didn’t lay it down, she just opened her hand and in the same motion picked up the cuptowel and was wiping her hands as she turned from the table, crossing the kitchen toward them faster, a good deal faster than even the sheriff had moved. “Then what are we wasting time here for?” she said. “For him to put on his necktie and coat?”
His uncle stepped quickly in front of her. “We cant do anything in the dark,” he said. “We must wait for daylight.”
“We didn’t,” Miss Habersham said. Then she stopped; it was either that or walk over his uncle though his uncle didn’t touch her, just standing between her and the door until she had to stop at least for the second for his uncle to get out of the way: and he looked at her too, straight, thin, almost shapeless in the straight cotton dress beneath the round exactitude of the hat and he thought She’s too old for this and then corrected it: No a woman a lady shouldn’t have to do this and then remembered last night when he had left the office and walked across the back yard and whistled for Aleck Sander and he knew he had believed—and he still believed it—that he would have gone alone even if Aleck Sander had stuck to his refusal but it was only after Miss Habersham came around the house and spoke to him that he knew he was going to go through with it and he remembered again what old Ephraim had told him after they found the ring under the hog trough: If you got something outside the common run that’s got to be done and cant wait, dont waste your time on the menfolks; they works on what your uncle calls the rules and the cases. Get the womens and the children at it; they works on the circumstances. Then the hall door opened. He heard the sheriff cross the diningroom to the kitchen door. But the sheriff didn’t enter the kitchen, stopping in the door, standing in it even after Miss Habersham said in a harsh, almost savage voice:
“Well?” and he hadn’t put on his shoes nor even picked up the dangling galluses and he didn’t seem to have heard Miss Habersham at alclass="underline" just standing looming bulging in the door looking at Miss Habersham—not at the hat, not at the eyes nor even her face: just at her—as you might look at a string of letters in Russian or Chinese which someone you believed had just told you spelled your name, saying at last in a musing baffled voice:
“No:” then turning his head to look at him and saying, “It aint you neither:” then turning his head further until he was looking at Aleck Sander while Aleck Sander slid his eyes up at the sheriff then slid them away again then slid them up again. “You,” the sheriff said. “You’re the one. You went out there in the dark and helped dig up a dead man. Not only that, a dead white man that the rest of the white folks claimed another nigger had murdered. Why? Was it because Miss Habersham made you?”
“Never nobody made me,” Aleck Sander said. “I didn’t even know I was going. I had done already told Chick I didn’t aim to. Only when we got to the truck everybody seemed to just take it for granted I wasn’t going to do nothing else but go and before I knowed it I wasn’t.”
“Mr. Hampton,” Miss Habersham said. Now the sheriff looked at her. He even heard her now.
“Haven’t you finished slicing that meat yet?” he said. “Give me the knife then.” He took her by the arm, turning her back to the table. “Aint you done enough rushing and stewing around tonight to last you a while? It’ll be daylight in fifteen minutes and folks dont start lynchings in daylight. They might finish one by daylight if they had a little trouble or bad luck and got behind with it. But they dont start them by daylight because then they would have to see one another’s faces. How many can eat more than two eggs?”
They left Aleck Sander with his breakfast at the kitchen table and carried theirs into the diningroom, he and his uncle and Miss Habersham carrying the platter of fried eggs and meat and the pan of biscuits baked last night and warmed again in the oven until they were almost like toast and the coffeepot in which the unstrained grounds and the water had been boiling together until the sheriff had thought to remove the pot from the hot part of the stove; four of them although the sheriff had set five places and they had barely sat down when the sheriff raised his head listening though he himself heard nothing, then rose and went into the dark hall and toward the rear of the house and then he heard the sound of the back door and presently the sheriff came back with Will Legate though minus the shotgun, and he turned his head enough to look out the window behind him and sure enough it was daylight.
The sheriff served the plates while his uncle and Legate passed theirs and the sheriff’s cup to Miss Habersham at the coffeepot. Then at once he seemed to have been hearing for a long time the sheriff from a great distance saying “... boy ... boy ...” then “Wake him up, Gavin. Let him eat his breakfast before he goes to sleep:” and he jerked, it was still only daylight, Miss Habersham was still pouring coffee into the same cup and he began to eat, chewing and even swallowing, rising and falling as though to the motion of the chewing along the deep soft bottomless mire of sleep, into then out of the voices buzzing of old finished things no longer concern of his: the sheriff’s:
“Do you know Jake Montgomery, from over in Crossman County? Been in and out of town here for the last six months or so?” then Legate’s:
“Sure. A kind of jackleg timber buyer now. Used to run a place he called a restaurant just across the Tennessee line out of Memphis, though I never heard of nobody trying to buy nothing that had to be chewed in it, until a man went and got killed in it one night two-three years ago. They never did know just how much Jake did or didn’t have to do with it but the Tennessee police run him back across the Mississippi line just on principle. Since then I reckon he’s been laying around his pa’s farm over beyond Glasgow. Maybe he’s waiting until he figgers folks have forgot about that other business and he can set up again in another place on a highway with a hole under the floor big enough to hide a case of whiskey in.”
“What was he doing around here?” the sheriff said: then Legate:
“Buying timber, aint he? Aint him and Vinson Gowrie ...” Then Legate said with the barest inflection, “Was?” and then with no inflection at alclass="underline" “What is he doing?” and he this time, his own voice indifferent along the soft deep edge of sleep, too indifferent to bother if it were aloud or not:
“He aint doing anything now.”
But it was better afterward, out of the stale warm house again into the air, the morning, the sun in one soft high level golden wash in the highest tips of the trees, gilding the motionless obese uprush of the town water tank in spiderlegged elongate against the blue, the four of them in his uncle’s car once more while the sheriff stood leaned above the driver’s window, dressed now even to a bright orange-and-yellow necktie, saying to his uncle:
“You run Miss Eunice home so she can get some sleep. I’ll pick you up at your house in say an hour—”