Knight's Gambit (6 page)

They gave him life. It was one of the shortest trials ever held in our county, because, as I said, nobody regretted the deceased and nobody except my Uncle Gavin seemed to be concerned about Monk. He had never been on a train before. He got on, handcuffed to the deputy, in a pair of new overalls which someone, perhaps the sovereign state whose peace and dignity he had outraged, had given him, and the still new, still pristine, gaudy-banded, imitation Panama hat (it was still only the first of June, and he had been in jail six weeks) which he had just bought during the week of the fatal Saturday night. He had the window side in the car and he sat there looking at us with his warped, pudgy, foolish face, waving the fingers of the hand, the free arm propped in the window until the train began to move, accelerating slowly, huge and dingy as the metal gangways clashed, drawing him from our sight hermetically sealed and leaving upon us a sense of finality more irrevocable than if we had watched the penitentiary gates themselves close behind him, never to open again in his life, the face looking back at us, craning to see us, wan and small behind the dingy glass, yet wearing that expression questioning yet unalarmed, eager, serene, and grave. Five years later one of the dead man’s two companions on that Saturday night, dying of pneumonia and whiskey, confessed that he had fired the shot and thrust the pistol into Monk’s hand, telling Monk to look at what he had done.

My Uncle Gavin got the pardon, wrote the petition, got the signatures, went to the capitol and got it signed and executed by the Governor, and took it himself to the penitentiary and told Monk that he was free. And Monk looked at him for a minute until he understood, and cried. He did not want to leave. He was a trusty now; he had transferred to the warden the same doglike devotion which he had given to old Fraser. He had learned to do nothing well, save manufacture and sell whiskey, though after he came to town he had learned to sweep out the filling station. So that’s what he did here; his life now must have been something like that time when he had gone to school. He swept and kept the warden’s house as a woman would have, and the warden’s wife had taught him to knit; crying, he showed my uncle the sweater which he was knitting for the warden’s birthday and which would not be finished for weeks yet.

So Uncle Gavin came home. He brought the pardon with him, though he did not destroy it, because he said it had been recorded and that the main thing now was to look up the law and see if a man could be expelled from the penitentiary as he could from a college. But I think he still hoped that maybe some day Monk would change his mind; I think that’s why he kept it. Then Monk did set himself free, without any help. It was not a week after Uncle Gavin had talked to him; I don’t think Uncle Gavin had even decided where to put the pardon for safekeeping, when the news came. It was a headline in the Memphis papers next day, but we got the news that night over the telephone: how Monk Oglethrop, apparently leading an abortive jailbreak, had killed the warden with the warden’s own pistol, in cold blood. There was no doubt this time; fifty men had seen him do it, and some of the other convicts overpowered him and took the pistol away from him. Yes. Monk, the man who a week ago cried when Uncle Gavin told him that he was free, leading a jailbreak and committing a murder (on the body of the man for whom he was knitting the sweater which he cried for permission to finish) so cold-blooded that his own confederates had turned upon him.

Uncle Gavin went to see him again. He was in solitary confinement now, in the death house. He was still knitting on the sweater. He knitted well, Uncle Gavin said, and the sweater was almost finished. ‘I ain’t got but three days more,’ Monk said. ‘So I ain’t got no time to waste.’

‘But why, Monk?’ Uncle Gavin said. ‘Why? Why did you do it?’ He said that the needles would not cease nor falter, even while Monk would look at him with that expression serene, sympathetic, and almost exalted. Because he had no conception of death. I don’t believe he had ever connected the carrion at his feet behind the filling station that night with the man who had just been walking and talking, or that on the ground in the compound with the man for whom he was knitting the sweater.

‘I knowed that making and selling that whiskey wasn’t right,’ he said. ‘I knowed that wasn’t it. Only I …’ He looked at Uncle Gavin. The serenity was still there, but for the moment something groped behind it: not bafflement nor indecision, just seeking, groping.

‘Only what?’ Uncle Gavin said. ‘The whiskey wasn’t it? Wasn’t what? It what?’

‘No. Not it.’ Monk looked at Uncle Gavin. ‘I mind that day on the train, and that fellow in the cap would put his head in the door and holler, and I would say “Is this it? Is this where we get off?” and the deppity would say No. Only if I had been there without that deppity to tell me, and that fellow had come in and hollered, I would have …’

‘Got off wrong? Is that it? And now you know what is right, where to get off right? Is that it?’

‘Yes,’ Monk said. ‘Yes. I know right, now.’

‘What? What is right? What do you know now that they never told you before?’

He told them. He walked up onto the scaffold three days later and stood where they told him to stand and held his head docilely (and without being asked) to one side so they could knot the rope comfortably, his face still serene, still exalted, and wearing that expression of someone waiting his chance to speak, until they stood back. He evidently took that to be his signal, because he said, ‘I have sinned against God and man and now I have done paid it out with my suffering. And now—’ they say he said this part loud, his voice clear and serene. The words must have sounded quite loud to him and irrefutable, and his heart uplifted, because he was talking inside the black cap now: ‘And now I am going out into the free world, and farm.’

You see? It just does not add up. Granted that he did not know that he was about to die, his words still do not make sense. He could have known but little more about farming than about Stonewall Jackson; certainly he had never done any of it. He had seen it, of course, the cotton and the corn in the fields, and men working it. But he could not have wanted to do it himself before, or he would have, since he could have found chances enough. Yet he turns and murders the man who had befriended him and, whether he realized it or not, saved him from comparative hell and upon whom he had transferred his capacity for doglike fidelity and devotion and on whose account a week ago he had refused a pardon: his reason being that he wanted to return into the world and farm land—this, the change, to occur in one week’s time and after he had been for five years more completely removed and insulated from the world than any nun. Yes, granted that this could be the logical sequence in that mind which he hardly possessed and granted that it could have been powerful enough to cause him to murder his one friend (Yes, it was the warden’s pistol; we heard about that: how the warden kept it in the house and one day it disappeared and to keep word of it getting out the warden had his Negro cook, another trusty and who would have been the logical one to have taken it, severely beaten to force the truth from him. Then Monk himself found the pistol, where the warden now recalled having hidden it himself, and returned it.)—granted all this, how in the world could the impulse have reached him, the desire to farm land have got into him where he now was? That’s what I told Uncle Gavin.

‘It adds up, all right,’ Uncle Gavin said. ‘We just haven’t got the right ciphers yet. Neither did they.’

‘They?’

‘Yes. They didn’t hang the man who murdered Gambrell. They just crucified the pistol.’

‘What do you mean?’ I said.

‘I don’t know. Maybe I never shall. Probably never shall. But it adds up, as you put it, somewhere, somehow. It has to. After all, that’s too much buffooning even for circumstances, let alone a mere flesh-and-blood imbecile. But probably the ultimate clowning of circumstances will be that we won’t know it.’

But we did know. Uncle Gavin discovered it by accident, and he never told anyone but me, and I will tell you why.

At that time we had for Governor a man without ancestry and with but little more divulged background than Monk had; a politician, a shrewd man who (some of us feared, Uncle Gavin and others about the state) would go far if he lived. About three years after Monk died he declared, without warning, a kind of jubilee. He set a date for the convening of the Pardon Board at the penitentiary, where he inferred that he would hand out pardons to various convicts in the same way that the English king gives out knighthoods and garters on his birthday. Of course, all the Opposition said that he was frankly auctioning off the pardons, but Uncle Gavin didn’t think so. He said that the Governor was shrewder than that, that next year was election year, and that the Governor was not only gaining votes from the kin of the men he would pardon but was laying a trap for the purists and moralists to try to impeach him for corruption and then fail for lack of evidence. But it was known that he had the Pardon Board completely under his thumb, so the only protest the Opposition could make was to form committees to be present at the time, which step the Governor—oh, he was shrewd—courteously applauded, even to the extent of furnishing transportation for them. Uncle Gavin was one of the delegates from our county.

He said that all these unofficial delegates were given copies of the list of those slated for pardon (the ones with enough voting kin to warrant it, I suppose)—the crime, the sentence, the time already served, prison record, etc. It was in the mess hall; he said he and the other delegates were seated on the hard, backless benches against one wall, while the Governor and his Board sat about the table on the raised platform where the guards would sit while the men ate, when the convicts were marched in and halted. Then the Governor called the first name on the list and told the man to come forward to the table. But nobody moved. They just huddled there in their striped overalls, murmuring to one another while the guards began to holler at the man to come out and the Governor looked up from the paper and looked at them with his eyebrows raised. Then somebody said from back in the crowd: ‘Let Terrel speak for us, Governor. We done ’lected him to do our talking.’

Uncle Gavin didn’t look up at once. He looked at his list until he found the name:
Terrel, Bill. Manslaughter. Twenty years. Served since May 9, 19—. Applied for pardon January, 19—. Vetoed by Warden C. L. Gambrell. Applied for pardon September, 19—. Vetoed by Warden C. L. Gambrell. Record, Troublemaker
. Then he looked up and watched Terrel walk out of the crowd and approach the table—a tall man, a huge man, with a dark aquiline face like an Indian’s, except for the pale yellow eyes and a shock of wild, black hair—who strode up to the table with a curious blend of arrogance and servility and stopped and, without waiting to be told to speak, said in a queer, high singsong filled with that same abject arrogance: ‘Your Honor, and honorable gentlemen, we have done sinned against God and man but now we have done paid it out with our suffering. And now we want to go out into the free world, and farm.’

Uncle Gavin was on the platform almost before Terrel quit speaking, leaning over the Governor’s chair, and the Governor turned with his little, shrewd, plump face and his inscrutable, speculative eyes toward Uncle Gavin’s urgency and excitement. ‘Send that man back for a minute,’ Uncle Gavin said. ‘I must speak to you in private.’ For a moment longer the Governor looked at Uncle Gavin, the puppet Board looking at him too, with nothing in their faces at all, Uncle Gavin said.

‘Why, certainly, Mr. Stevens,’ the Governor said. He rose and followed Uncle Gavin back to the wall, beneath the barred window, and the man Terrel still standing before the table with his head jerked suddenly up and utterly motionless and the light from the window in his yellow eyes like two match flames as he stared at Uncle Gavin.

‘Governor, that man’s a murderer,’ Uncle Gavin said. The Governor’s face did not change at all.

‘Manslaughter, Mr. Stevens,’ he said. ‘Manslaughter. As private and honorable citizens of the state, and as humble servants of it, surely you and I can accept the word of a Mississippi jury.’

‘I’m not talking about that,’ Uncle Gavin said. He said he said it like that, out of his haste, as if Terrel would vanish if he did not hurry; he said that he had a terrible feeling that in a second the little inscrutable, courteous man before him would magic Terrel out of reach of all retribution by means of his cold will and his ambition and his amoral ruthlessness. ‘I’m talking about Gambrell and that half-wit they hanged. That man there killed them both as surely as if he had fired the pistol and sprung that trap.’

Still the Governor’s face did not change at all. ‘That’s a curious charge, not to say serious,’ he said. ‘Of course you have proof of it.’

‘No. But I will get it. Let me have ten minutes with him, alone. I will get proof from him. I will make him give it to me.’

‘Ah,’ the Governor said. Now he did not look at Uncle Gavin for a whole minute. When he did look up again, his face still had not altered as to expression, yet he had wiped something from it as he might have done physically, with a handkerchief. (‘You see, he was paying me a compliment,’ Uncle Gavin told me. ‘A compliment to my intelligence. He was telling the absolute truth now. He was paying me the highest compliment in his power.’) ‘What good do you think that would do?’ he said.

‘You mean …’ Uncle Gavin said. They looked at one another. ‘So you would still turn him loose on the citizens of this state, this country, just for a few votes?’

‘Why not? If he murders again, there is always this place for him to come back to.’ Now it was Uncle Gavin who thought for a minute, though he did not look down.

‘Suppose I should repeat what you have just said. I have no proof of that, either, but I would be believed. And that would—’

‘Lose me votes? Yes. But you see, I have already lost those votes because I have never had them. You see? You force me to do what, for all you know, may be against my own principles too—or do you grant me principles?’ Now Uncle Gavin said the Governor looked at him with an expression almost warm, almost pitying—and quite curious. ‘Mr. Stevens, you are what my grandpap would have called a gentleman. He would have snarled it at you, hating you and your kind; he might very probably have shot your horse from under you someday from behind a fence—for a principle. And you are trying to bring the notions of 1860 into the politics of the nineteen hundreds. And politics in the twentieth century is a sorry thing. In fact, I sometimes think that the whole twentieth century is a sorry thing, smelling to high heaven in somebody’s nose. But, no matter.’ He turned now, back toward the table and the room full of faces watching them. ‘Take the advice of a well-wisher even if he cannot call you friend, and let this business alone. As I said before, if we let him out and he murders again, as he probably will, he can always come back here.’