“Dry your face and comb your hair,” she said. “Then come on down and drink your coffee.”
That too. Paralee was all right too apparently because his uncle was at the telephone in the hall when he entered the diningroom, his father already roaring again before he had even sat down:
“Dammit, why didn’t you tell me last night? Dont you ever again—”
“Because you wouldn’t have believed him either,” his uncle said coming in from the hall. “You wouldn’t have listened either. It took an old woman and two children for that, to believe truth for no other reason than that it was truth, told by an old man in a fix deserving pity and belief, to someone capable of the pity even when none of them really believed him. Which you didn’t at first,” his uncle said to him. “When did you really begin to believe him? When you opened the coffin, wasn’t it? I want to know, you see. Maybe I’m not too old to learn either. When was it?”
“I dont know,” he said. Because he didn’t know. It seemed to him that he had known all the time. Then it seemed to him that he had never really believed Lucas. Then it seemed to him that it had never happened at all, heaving himself once more with no movement up out of the long deep slough of sleep but at least to some elapse of time now, he had gained that much anyway, maybe enough to be safe on for a while like the tablets night truck drivers took not as big hardly as a shirt button yet in which were concentrated enough wakefulness to reach the next town because his mother was in the room now brisk and calm, setting the cup of coffee down in front of him in a way that if Paralee had done it she would have said that Paralee had slopped it at him: which, the coffee, was why neither his father nor his uncle had even looked at her, his father on the contrary exclaiming,
“Coffee? What the devil is this? I thought the agreement was when you finally consented for Gavin to buy that horse that he would neither ask for nor even accept a spoonful of coffee until he was eighteen years old:” and his mother not even listening, with the same hand and in the same manner half shoving and half popping the cream pitcher then the sugar bowl into his reach and already turning back toward the kitchen, her voice not really hurried and impatient: just brisk:
“Drink it now. We’re already late:” and now they looked at her for the first time: dressed, even to her hat, with in the crook of her other arm the straw basket out of which she had darned his and his father’s and his uncle’s socks and stockings ever since he could remember, though his uncle at first saw only the hat and for a moment seemed to join him in the same horrified surprise he had felt in the bathroom.
“Maggie!” his uncle said. “You cant! Charley—”
“I dont intend to,” his mother said, not even stopping. “This time you men will have to do the digging. I’m going to the jaiclass="underline" ” already in the kitchen now and only her voice coming back: “I’m not going to let Miss Habersham sit there by herself with the whole county gawking at her. As soon as I help Paralee plan dinner we’ll—” but not dying fading: ceasing, quitting: since she had dismissed them though his father still tried once more:
“He’s got to go to school.”
But even his uncle didn’t listen. “You can drive Miss Eunice’s truck, cant you?” his uncle said. “There wont be a Negro school today for Aleck Sander to be going to so he can leave it at the jail. And even if there was I doubt if Paralee’s going to let him cross the front yard inside the next week.” Then his uncle seemed even to have heard his father or at least decided to answer him: “Nor any white school either for that matter if this boy hadn’t listened to Lucas, which I wouldn’t, and to Miss Habersham, which I didn’t. Well?” his uncle said. “Can you stay awake that long? You can get a nap once we are on the road.”
“Yes sir,” he said. So he drank the coffee which the soap and water and hard toweling had unfogged him enough to know he didn’t like and didn’t want but not enough for him to choose what simple thing to do about it: that is not drink it: tasting sipping then adding more sugar to it until each— coffee and sugar—ceased to be either and became a sickish quinine sweet amalgam of the worst of both until his uncle said,
“Dammit, stop that,” and got up and went to the kitchen and returned with a saucepan of heated milk and a soup bowl and dumped the coffee into the bowl and poured the hot milk into it and said. “Go on. Forget about it. Just drink it.” So he did, from the bowl in both hands like water from a gourd, hardly tasting it and still his father flung a little back in his chair looking at him and talking, asking him just how scared Aleck Sander was and if he wasn’t even scareder than Aleck Sander only his vanity wouldn’t allow him to show it before a darky and to tell the truth now, neither of them would have touched the grave in the dark even enough to lift the flowers off of it if Miss Habersham hadn’t driven them at it: his uncle interrupting:
“Aleck Sander even told you then that the grave had already been disturbed by someone in a hurry, didn’t he?”
“Yes sir,” he said and his uncle said:
“Do you know what I’m thinking now?”
“No sir,” he said.
“I’m being glad Aleck Sander couldn’t completely penetrate darkness and call out the name of the man who came down the hill carrying something in front of him on the mule.” And he remembered that: the three of them all thinking it but not one of them saying it: just standing invisible to one another above the pit’s invisible inky yawn.
“Fill it up,” Miss Habersham said. They did, the (five times now) loosened dirt going down much faster than it came up though it seemed forever in the thin starlight filled with the constant sound of the windless pines like one vast abateless hum not of amazement but of attention, watching, curiosity; amoral, detached, not involved and missing nothing. “Put the flowers back,” Miss Habersham said.
“It’ll take time,” he said.
“Put them back,” Miss Habersham said, So they did.
“I’ll get the horse,” he said. “You and Aleck Sander—”
“We’ll all go,” Miss Habersham said. So they gathered up the tools and the rope (nor did they use the flashlight again) and Aleck Sander said “Wait” and found by touch the board he had used for a shovel and carried that until he could push it back under the church and he untied Highboy and held the stirrup but Miss Habersham said, “No. We’ll lead him. Aleck Sander can walk exactly behind me and you walk exactly behind Aleck Sander and lead the horse.”
“We could go faster—” he said again and they couldn’t see her face: only the thin straight shape, the shadow, the hat which on anyone else wouldn’t even have looked like a hat but on her as on his grandmother looked exactly right, like exactly nothing else, her voice not loud, not much louder than breathing, as if she were not even moving her lips, not to anyone, just murmuring: