Light in August - William Faulkner [105]
“I reckon you ain’t tried hard enough to remember,” the sheriff said.
“I can’t remember because I can’t know,” the negro said. “I don’t even live nowhere near here. You ought to know where I stay at, white folks.”
“Mr. Buford says you live right down the road yonder,” the sheriff said.
“Lots of folks live down that road. Mr. Buford ought to know where I stay at.”
“He’s lying,” the deputy said. His name was Buford. He was the one who wielded the strap, buckle end outward. He held it poised. He was watching the sheriff’s face. He looked like a spaniel waiting to be told to spring into the water.
“Maybe so; maybe not,” the sheriff said. He mused upon the negro. He was still, huge, inert, sagging the cot springs. “I think he just don’t realise yet that I ain’t playing. Let alone them folks out there that ain’t got no jail to put him into if anything he wouldn’t like should come up. That wouldn’t bother to put him into a jail if they had one.” Perhaps there was a sign, a signal, in his eyes again; perhaps not. Perhaps the negro saw it; perhaps not. The strap fell again, the buckle raking across the negro’s back. “You remember yet?” the sheriff said.
“It’s two white men,” the negro said. His voice was cold, not sullen, not anything. “I don’t know who they is nor what they does. It ain’t none of my business. I ain’t never seed them. I just heard talk about how two white men lived here. I didn’t care who they was. And that’s all I know. You can whup the blood outen me. But that’s all I know.”
Again the sheriff sighed. “That’ll do. I reckon that’s right.”
“It’s that fellow Christmas, that used to work at the mill, and another fellow named Brown,” the third man said. “You could have picked out any man in Jefferson that his breath smelled right and he could have told you that much.”
“I reckon that’s right, too,” the sheriff said.
He returned to town. When the crowd realised that the sheriff was departing, a general exodus began. It was as if there were nothing left to look at now. The body had gone, and now the sheriff was going. It was as though he carried within him, somewhere within that inert and sighing mass of flesh, the secret itself: that which moved and evoked them as with a promise of something beyond the sluttishness of stuffed entrails and monotonous days. So there was nothing left to look at now but the fire; they had now been watching it for three hours. They were now used to it, accustomed to it; now it had become a permanent part of their lives as well as of their experiences, standing beneath its windless column of smoke taller than and impregnable as a monument which could be returned to at any time. So when the caravan reached town it had something of that arrogant decorum of a procession behind a catafalque, the sheriffs car in the lead, the other cars honking and blatting behind in the sheriff’s and their own compounded dust. It was held up momentarily at a street intersection near the square by a country wagon which’ had stopped to let a passenger descend. Looking out, the sheriff saw a young woman climbing slowly and carefully down from the wagon, with that careful awkwardness of advanced pregnancy. Then the wagon pulled aside; the caravan went on, crossing the square, where already the cashier of the bank had taken from the vault the envelope which the dead woman had deposited with him and which bore the inscription To be opened at my death. Joanna Burden The cashier was waiting at the sheriffs office when the sheriff came in, with the envelope and its contents. This was a single sheet of paper on which was written, by the same hand which inscribed the envelope Notify E. E. Peebles, Attorney,—Beale St., Memphis, Tenn., and Nathaniel Burrington,—St. Exeter, N. H. That was all.
“This Peebles is a nigger lawyer,” the cashier said.
“Is that so?” the sheriff said.
“Yes. What do you want me to do?”
“I reckon you better do what the paper says,” the sheriff said. “I reckon maybe I better do it myself.” He sent two wires. He received the Memphis reply in thirty minutes. The other came two hours later; within ten minutes afterward the word had gone through the town that Miss Burden