The Watchman (31 page)

I'll report this to the warden, said the minister bitterly.

Which warden, Preacher? said the guard. The one that runs my prison or the one that runs yours?

Behind the closed door Luther heard none of this, and likely would not have heard it had the door been open, for in the intervals when he was not whispering to the broken bundle in his arms he seemed listening, head tilted a little, to the murmur of lost voices beyond the walls, listening and then resuming his own soft reassurances, rocking a httle to and fro, pressing the bundle close against him in cradling arms, sobbing a breath or two, then leaning his head forward to whisper again.

I wanted them to think it was me, he explained gently. Lord, I'd not have minded come here to sit and burn for you, my Jill. But it all come about too fast. And all I tried to do for you I did too late. Hasn't it always been that way with me now, Jill? Didn't I always come fumbling around trying to do things when it was too late? Yes, Lord, too late. But I'm here now. You know I'm here now, don't you? Does it help it any? No. Too late, too late. Look yonder, my two little ladies—look there on the benches. See yonder? They've all come watch us. The noble, the respectable, the genteel folk of Mound County. Well, we must not find ourselves unable to forgive them that.

He raised his eyes from the bundle and cast a long, slow glance of sweeping, smiling inventory across the shadowed tiers of benches gleaming faintly in the obscure light from the two red bulbs above the shut, green door. It would have

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The Watchman 211

seemed ungenerous, unforgiving, he felt, if he did not smile at them: those faces that seemed watching there.

Then suddenly he seemed to gather himself up in a powerful spasm of outrage and snapped his eyes open, glaring into the gallery, searching the paUid phantoms of the faces there, squaring his shoulders for some final gesture of his dwindled officialdom.

Mister Christmas landers, take the prisoner and draw up the indictment, sir! he roared, his voice echoing in ricocheting chatter among the close, green walls. Mister Prosecutor Christmas landers, I arrest the earth I Oh, it's a clear case, sir, and you should be pleased at the evidence, for you shall certainly have an easy day of it in courtl The death sentence? Oh, most certainly, Mister Janders, and what an execution night! Gallows and witnessing chairs sprung up like mushrooms round the earth! Oh, what a gala gallows nightl Take the prisoner, sir. I deliver him into your custody, Mr. Christmas Janders, and may His soul have mercy on God. What's that? The prisoner's name, sir? The prisoner's name is We. Any ahases, sir?—is that what you asked? Oh, yes, indeed, Mister Janders. The prisoner We has committed the majority of his crimes under the alias Them. That's always a matter of where he happens to be standing at the time, sir. His crime? Yes, now, the crime. Mmmm, let me think a spell. Lord, I knew it only a moment ago. The crime. Yes, now it comes back. The prisoner's crime, Mister Janders, is the crime of being a prisoner. Are you getting all this down? Good. Then let me go on. The prisoner's crime is the crime of being a prisoner in a room without light—without lampshine to see, to understand. The lamps, sir? Why were they out? Mister Janders, why are lamps ever snuffed suddenly out? You know that as weU as I, sir. The wind. The wind. The blowing curtains and the wind of night. A sighing suddenly—a flame gone guttering—and then the dark come clanging down like the iron door of evening when dusk has done.

He moaned and closed his eyes, thrusting his big head back against the shadowed metal clasps above the ghastly chair, moving his legs from side to side against the heavy dangling straps, the cathodes at the scuffed calf of his dark boots, rocking his lost children in his arms as if he would soothe them again to sleep from their waking to his surly outburst.

Hush, he whispered. Hush, my little broken ladies. Hush. I'll shout no more. There now—hush. Sleep again.

And so he stayed in that rocking, anguished posture, his' knees pulled up, holding his bundle clenched close against him, patting it with clumsy, pacifying fingers, and then stopped moving, poised, his head quite still and once again a-tilt, as if listening to certain murmurous, enormous colloquies beyond the thick walls.

Mercy? Reprieve? Forgiveness? he whispered. Too late, too late. All time's run out. The Governor's gone a-fishing in his boat and struggles now with nets among the wind and spindrift seas. The Governor's gone fishing for lost souls in the roaring oceans of the dark I Too late, too late! No mercies —no reprieves. The wind's too loud—he'll never hear our shouts from shore. No pardons now. No. And it is dark. Jill, is there light down there inside your folded, shawled-up warmth? Yes, light for JiU—it's there—I glimpsed a flicker of its gleam. Light from the little dog's love, I would reckon. Or maybe that queer, pale light of dreams. Now, by God, it's light we need in here!

He moved his head wearily downward with something of faint surprise across his eyes and slowly reaching his hand between his body and the close-cradled bundle, felt a moment, then raised his hand to a space close inches from his squinting, fading eyes, staring at the glistening scarlet of his dappled fingers.

It's seeping through my shirt, he commented quietly. The warm, the wetness of it. Yes. No wonder my head bows and my eyehds won't stay up. Yes. I didn't know.

He stared sorrowfully an instant more at the crimson, jellying liquid on his outstretched fingers, before his hand fell to the rug again, struggling to lift it closer, tighter against his breast.

That's almost a miracle, he smiled. I never felt the wound at all. Yet here's the proof: my blood. My blood. I only thank the kindly Christ of mercy that it isn't yours, my broken dears. Good night.

And forever slumped his cheek down close against their tucked-in, silent shapes.

Now in the strange, still halfway hours from midnight till dayrise the pavements of the mist-bound street before the window of the Mound Hotel still stured and thronged with restless, sleepless people. Among their feverish, gossiping faces of holiday time excitement the pale face of Jason moved shouldering and nudging among them, his eyes raised and

searching through them for the briUiant blond curls, the pale and dark-eyed face of a girl whose small, moist footprints upon the leafy bricks by the bus stop had already vanished beneath the thousand erasing shoesoles which had aimlessly shambled across them in the hours since she had gone. The light in her room still shone in the mists above the faintly gUstening drugstore bottles filled with nameless, dark and ominously tinted liquids. But she was not here: Jason had been there. Restive and glittery with brass the instruments of the Trumpet Home Tabernacle Band flashed among the fabric of mist-dampened arms and shoulders. The players blew into the mouthpieces of their horns, shook them out, oiled their valves; a tall and gangling girl with net-bound, mouse-colored hair and a long, longing face of buckwheat-batter complexion, struck the hide of her bass-drum now and then and tested her cymbal. The little band had assembled the moment the news spread that Luther Alt had disappeared into the prison gates. They seemed waiting, almost listening, for some swishing whisper of an invisible baton fall among the mists to strike up a hymn. Hood the old hangman smiled at everyone for no imaginable reason to those who did not know him: he had dropped his battered cornet several times on the bricks among the feet that shuffled round and about him and each time he had stooped, unsteadily, to feel for it among their shoes, his loose, shabby overcoat gave out a music of its own: the tinkling chink of all his half-swilled tiny liquor bottles. Young boys and girls in open zipper-jackets with the house paint stenciled letters of the Cole Blake Rebels spelled out across black, wet leather backs moved laughing through the crowd.

Voices hushed and harsh in the hotel lobby raced crisply back and forth above the rumble of the restless, errant crowd, the tuning-up of instruments among the zealous little evangelic band in the mists beneath the stteet lamp's indifferent and undistinguishing haze of woolly luminescence. Fresh rumor had come and ran whispering but, unconfirmed, it was not yet fresh news and so could not run shouting.

In the dining room Jason got up and walked slowly to the table by the window. His hand stole out, hesitated, then rested on the chrome-barred back of the chair. After a long while he eased the chair legs back from the table, looked at it a moment more with an appraising, soft frown creasing his brow, his eyes seemingly confused by the enigma of this simple, utilitarian object in contrast to the aching stir of iinre-

lated reminiscences among his thoughts; as if this simple lunchroom furniture bewildered him momentarily in his, search of it for lost, arcane, intrinsic meanings which it could not possibly now, in fact, any longer imply.

He sat down slowly, like a man with sore, stiff joints, lowering himself cautiously into a seat of suspect and untested soundness. His eyes wandered to the sill of the longl window, not seeing the crowd beyond, not hearing the rising aspiration of their grumbling gossip. His gaze rested on 1 something, noted it absently in its obscured and shadowy corner, perhaps something deep in the stunned jumble of his thoughts thinking: Strange. This lunchroom always so j neat. The clean farm waitresses in their bright, starched aprons constantly fussing, readying the tables, polishing formica tops, filling sugar bowls, dusting, mopping and re-mopping in the ruddy midnight shadows after closing time. Strange. A dusty dixie cup. He leaned over a little to see inside it. It had been there for ages, surely: in the bottom of it was the crust of some dark and unimaginable liquid, long dried out to this brittle residue among which the burnished j relics of dead flies glistened in the neon burn, like the ' minuscule bodies of fossils immured in coal for many and immeasurable millenniums.

Jason sighed with weariness and looked away, reminded of nothing but the carelessness of kitchen help. Then suddenly, a moment later, there came to his nostrils most unmistakably the faint, frail scent of a rose. He got up suddenly, placed the chair carefully back where it had been, and crept back uneasily to his dark stool at the counter.

m get a little sleep, at least, he thought. I'll take off my jacket, roll it into a cushion and lay my head on it there, on the counter. No one will find me. Dayrise will wake me. I'll hear the bus. A few hours sleep, at least.

He breathed in and out heavily once or twice and finally blew his nose into his handkerchief, replaced it in his pocket, then sneezed. The scent of rose persisted. He lifted his eyes to the window, to the crowd, searching angrily for some sight of the flat, spotless beige of the round, uptilted top of his father's officer's cap. No sign of that. A man moved among the close throngs, smiling with chilly benevolence, his mouth moving with animation, his fingers passing out little white cards like a stage magician; now nodding his thanks, now shaking his head with self-effacing modesty, he moved swiftly, sidling sUckly through the weaving shoulders, smil-

ing again, nodding with that jerky, supplicating arrogance, pressing the little cards into outstretched hands with thankful piety: a man announcing a candidacy. Women clasped his fingers, squeezed them gratefully. Men slapped him on the shoulder, threw back their heads in nodding laughs of admiration and assenting pledge.

Deputy Tzchak with the indefatigable concurrence of his native enterprise and the hasty labors of a Lafayette Avenue job-printer had the cards of his campaign for office set up in type no more than five minutes after word came of the child-murderess's death.

Jason, ill at ease, turned on his stool and searched among the stretching black of the dining room for some pale evidence of roses. But now suddenly the voice of Jibbons the horse trader rose in a bawling, ragged shout from the lobby.

By God, he died!

What say? Shrilled a woman's voice from the street through the half-open door. Who's that died? What say, Mister?

The Sheriff died! roared Jibbons, his voice quavery with thrill, like a newsboy announcing apocalypse. Jake McCartle just phoned me from the prison. Did you all hear that? Luther Alt just died!

The dinning murmur of them hushed now, all feet paused, breaths just drawn in were held, breaths just exhaled hovered in the mists.

How? shouted a man's voice from somewhere among the frozen, poised torrent of hats and bright-shawled heads.

Did he kill hisself? shrilled a small child's voice. Did he taken his pistol and kill hisself!

Doc Snedeker's been working over him for fifteen minutes! cried the horse trader. And he don't know how! He died in the chair!

Like a single breath, like a great, communal gasp the murmur of their wonder drowned him out.

Wait now! bawled the horse trader. He never killed hisself. And no one so much as laid a finger on him! But he's dead just the same. When Snedeker and McCartle and the other guards and the warden come in the room they found him sitting there with the girl bundled tight in his arms—in the electric chair.

Who th'owed the switch on him? shouted the hat again.

No one, I tell you! shouted Jibbons, gold teeth ghttering

in his open mouth like ranked bullets in a gun belt. He jus died, that's all.

Well, what's he die from? cried the woman.

Snedeker's still working on him, I tell you! cried Jibbons flushing angrily like a courthouse raconteur whose point has' been spoiled by the question of a small, unwelcome boy. Snedeker don't know a bit more about what he died from than McCartle nor the Warden nor ary other of them up there. He just died, that's all. McCartle said it took three men to pull his arms unwound from round the girl. They was all clenched about her bundled body like a fist. McCartle had to break his right arm to get her loose.

It was God Almighty struck him dead! cried the ex-hangman, snatching the cornet mouthpiece from his puckered, ready lips.

Maybe, said another quietly somewhere in the mists. And then again maybe he just wore out.

Maybe he bumped against some sort of a live wire there in the chair 1