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By Root 17639 0

–or was twenty years ago before the concrete slab got laid down–the place where Time gets tangled in its own feet and lies down like an old hound and gives up the struggle. It is a place where you sit down and wait for night to come and arteriosclerosis. It is the place the local undertaker looks at with confidence and thinks he is not going to starve as long as that much work is cut out for him. But if you are sitting on the bench in the middle of the afternoon in late August with the old ones, it does not seem that anything will ever come, not even your funeral, and the sun beats down and the shadows don’t move across the bright dust, which, if you stare at it long enough, seems to be full of glittering speck like quartz. The old ones sit there with their liver-spotted hands crooked on the hickory sticks, and they emit a kind of metaphysical effluvium by virtue of which your categories are altered. Time and motion cease to be. It is like sniffing ether, and everything is sweet and sad and far away. You sit there among the elder gods, disturbed by no sound except the slight râle of the one who has asthma, and wait for them to lean from the Olympian and sunlight detachment and comment, with their unenvious and foreknowing irony, on the goings-on of the folks who are still snared in the toils of mortal compulsions. I seen Sim Saunders done built him a new barn. Then, Yeah, some folks thinks they is made of money. And, Yeah.

So I sat there and waited. And one of them said it, and another one leaned and shifted the quid and answered, and the last one said, “Yeah.” Then I waited again for a spell, for I knew my place in the picture, and then I said, “They tell me there’s gonna be a new schoolhouse.” Then I waited another spell while the words died away and it was as though I hadn’t said anything. Then one of them let the ambeer drop to the dry ground, and touched the spot with the end of the hickory stick, and said, “Yeah, and steam heat, hear tell.”

And Number Two: “Give them young ’uns pneumony, steam heat.”

And Number Three: “Yeah.”

And Number Four: “If’n they git hit built.”

I looked across the square at the painted clock face on the courthouse tower, which was the clock the old ones kept time by, and waited. Then I said, “What’s stopping ’em?”

And Number One: “Stark. Thet Stark.”

And Number Two: “Yeah, thet Willie Starl.”

And Number Three: “Too big fer his britches. Gits in the courthouse and gits his front feet in the through, and gits too big fer his britches.”

And Number Four: Yeah.”

I waited, then I said, “Wants ’em to take the low bid, they tell me.”

And Number One: “Yeah, wants ’em to take the low bid and git a passel of niggers in here.”

And Number Two: “To put white folks out of work. Builden hit.”

And Number Three: “You want to work longside a nigger? And specially him a strange nigger? Builden schoolhouse or backhouse, how so be hit?

And Number Four: “And white folk needen work.”

And Number One: “Yeah.”

Yeah, I said to myself, so that is the tale, for Mason County is red-neck country and they don’t like niggers, not strange niggers anyway, and they haven’t got many of their own. “How much could they save,” I asked, “taking the low bid?”

And Number One: Couldn’t save enuff to pay fer bringen no passel of niggers in here.”

“Putten white folks out of work,” Number Two said.

I waited till it was decent, then I got up and said, “Got to be moving. Good afternoon, gentlemen.”

One of the old ones looked up at me as though I had just come, and said, “What you work at, boy?”

“I don’t,” I said.

“Porely?” he asked.

“Not porely,” I said. “It is just I lack ambition.”

Which was God’s truth, I reckoned, as I walked on down the street.

I reckoned, too, that I had killed enough time and I might as well go to the courthouse and get my story in the way I was supposed to get it. All this sitting around in front of harness shops was not the way any newspaperman would go about getting his story. There isn’t ever anything you get that way which you can put into a newspaper. So I went on over to the courthouse.