Intruder in the Dust (15 page)

‘No.’

‘Yes,’ his uncle said. ‘You’ve got to go to school. Or better still, to bed and to sleep. ——Yes,’ his uncle said suddenly: ‘and Aleck Sander too. He must stay at home today too. Because this mustn’t be talked about, not one
word about it until we have finished it. You understand that.’

But he wasn’t listening, he and his uncle were not even talking about the same thing, not even when he said ‘No’ again and his uncle out of the car and already turning toward the house stopped and looked back at him and then stood looking at him for a good long moment and then said,

‘We are going at this a little hindpart-before, aint we? I’m the one who should be asking you if I can go.’ Because he was thinking about his mother, not just remembered about her because he had done that as soon as they crossed the Square five minutes ago and the simplest thing would have been to get out of his uncle’s car there and go and get in the sheriff’s car and simply stay in it until they were ready to go back out to the church and he had probably thought about it at the time and would even have done it probably if he hadn’t been so worn out and anticlimaxed and dull for sleep and he knew he couldn’t cope with her this time even if he had been completely fresh; the very fact that he had already done it twice in eleven hours, once by secrecy and once by sheer surprise and rapidity of movement and of mass, but doomed him completer now to defeat and rout: musing on his uncle’s naïve and childlike rationalising about school and bed when faced with that fluid and implacable attack, when once more his uncle read his mind, standing beside the car and looking down at him for another moment with compassion and no hope even though he was a bachelor of fifty thirty-five years free of woman’s dominion, his uncle too knowing remembering how she would use the excuses of his education and his physical exhaustion only less quicker than she would have discarded them; who would listen no more to rational reasons for his staying
at home than for—civic duty or simple justice or humanity or to save a life or even the peace of his own immortal soul—his going. His uncle said:

‘All right. Come on. I’ll talk to her.’

He moved, getting out; he said suddenly and quietly, in amazement not at despair of hope but at how much hopelessness you could really stand: ‘You’re just my uncle.’

‘I’m worse than that,’ his uncle said. ‘I’m just a man.’ Then his uncle read his mind again: ‘All right. I’ll try to talk to Paralee too. The same condition obtains there; motherhood doesn’t seem to have any pigment in its skin.’

And his uncle too was probably thinking how you not only couldn’t beat them, you couldn’t even find the battlefield in time to admit defeat before they had moved it again; he remembered, it was two years ago now, he had finally made the high school football team or that is he had won or been chosen for one of the positions to make an out-of-town trip because the regular player had been injured in practice or fallen behind in his grades or maybe his mother either wouldn’t let him go, something, he had forgotten exactly what because he had been too busy all that Thursday and Friday racking his brains in vain to think how to tell his mother he was going to Mottstown to play on the regular team, right up to the last minute when he had to tell her something and so did: badly: and weathered it since his father happened to be present (though he really hadn’t calculated it that way—not that he wouldn’t have if he hadn’t been too worried and perplexed with a blending of anger and shame and shame at being angry and ashamed ((crying at her at one point: ‘Is it the team’s fault that I’m the only child you’ve got?’)) to think of it) and left that Friday afternoon with the team feeling as he imagined a soldier might feel wrenching out
of his mother’s restraining arms to go fight a battle for some shameful cause; she would grieve for him of course if he fell and she would even look on his face again if he didn’t but there would be always ineradicable between them the ancient green and perennial adumbration: so that all that Friday night trying to go to sleep in a strange bed and all the next forenoon too waiting for the game to start he thought better for the team if he had not come since he probably had too much on his mind to be worth anything to it: until the first whistle blew and on and afterward until bottom-most beneath the piled mass of both teams, the ball clutched to his chest and his mouth and nostrils both full of the splashed dried whitewash marking the goal line he heard and recognised above all the others that one voice shrill triumphant and bloodthirsty and picked up at last and the wind thumped back into him he saw her foremost in the crowd not sitting in the grandstand but among the ones trotting and even running up and down the sideline following each play, then in the car that evening on the way back to Jefferson, himself in the front seat beside the hired driver and his mother and three of the other players in the back and her voice as proud and serene and pitiless as his own could have been: ‘Does your arm still hurt?’—entering the hall and only then discovering that he had expected to find her still just inside the front door still in the loose hair and the nightdress and himself walking back even after three hours into the unbroken uninterrupted wail. But instead it was his father already roaring who came out of the diningroom and still at it even with his uncle yelling back almost into his face:

‘Charley. Charley. Dammit, will you wait?’ and only then his mother fully dressed, brisk busy and composed,
coming up the hall from the back, the kitchen, saying to his father without even raising her voice:

‘Charley. Go back and finish your breakfast. Paralee isn’t feeling well this morning and she doesn’t want to be all day getting dinner ready:’ then to him—the fond constant familiar face which he had known all his life and therefore could neither have described it so that a stranger could recognise it nor recognise it himself from anyone’s description but only brisk calm and even a little inattentive now, the wail a wail only because of the ancient used habit of its verbiage: ‘You haven’t washed your face:’ nor even pausing to see if he followed, on up the stairs and into the bathroom, even turning on the tap and putting the soap into his hands and standing with the towel open and waiting, the familiar face wearing the familiar expression of amazement and protest and anxiety and invincible repudiation which it had worn all his life each time he had done anything removing him one more step from infancy, from childhood: when his uncle had given him the Shetland pony someone had taught to take eighteen- and twenty-four-inch jumps and when his father had given him the first actual powder-shooting gun and the afternoon when the groom delivered Highboy in the truck and he got up for the first time and Highboy stood on his hind legs and her scream and the groom’s calm voice saying, ‘Hit him hard over the head when he does that. You dont want him falling over backward on you’ but the muscles merely falling into the old expression through inattention and long usage as her voice had merely chosen by inattention and usage the long-worn verbiage of wailing because there was something else in it now—the same thing which had been there in the car that afternoon when she said, ‘Your arm doesn’t hurt at
all now does it?’ and on the other afternoon when his father came home and found him jumping Highboy over the concrete watertrough in the lot, his mother leaning on the fence watching and his father’s fury of relief and anger and his mother’s calm voice this time: ‘Why not? The trough isn’t near as tall as that flimsy fence-thing you bought him that isn’t even nailed together:’ so that even dull for sleep he recognised it and turned his face and hands dripping and cried at her in amazed and incredulous outrage: ‘You aint going too! You cant go!’ then even dull for sleep realising the fatuous naïveté of anyone using cant to her on any subject and so playing his last desperate card: ‘If you go, then I wont! You hear me? I wont go!’

‘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 jail:’ 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.’