‘Take it easy, Bill,’ the Captain remarked. ‘It’s just human nature some of ’em will try to crawl out and sell when they figure the time comes. We’ve got to expect that. It’s in the cards. It’s always in the cards, Bill. The Lord Jesus picked out what he figured was twelve good men, you know, and one of ’em sold him out.’

  ‘Just let ——’ Mr. Christian muttered.

  ‘Why, Bill, the Lord Jesus was a pretty good picker. He just got stung on one out of a round dozen. The only wonder is, somebody didn’t beat Judas to it and give a cut price.’

  Mr. Christian sat down at the table. His fingers, with their flat, thick nails, began to twist the edge of the black felt hat that lay on the table before him. He was silent and morose for the rest of the afternoon.

  At some time or other during the course of almost every meeting of the board, Mr. Munn himself would feel the general confidence and excitement taking hold of him. That feeling made everything seem so easy, every difficulty so superficial, the future so clear. It was like the sustaining and transforming warmth of liquor in a man’s stomach. Not even the example of Captain Todd, whom Mr. Munn admired, or his own habit of holding an idea suspended in his mind, turning it and considering it, could readily temper that feeling when it seized him. He would study Captain Todd’s face, motionless or smiling behind the clipped gray beard, and wonder about his calmness, what appeared to be his deep, inner certainty of self, his caution and detachment and tolerance in regard to the world outside himself. He was getting old, perhaps. He must be getting on to seventy. But his attitude seemed something different from the tiredness and skepticism of age. Perhaps you could only get to be like Captain Todd if you lived through some firm conviction, some enveloping confidence, some time in your life; that is, if you were stout enough to come out on the other side of it afterward and still be yourself. Mr. Munn remembered that somebody sometime had told him how Captain Todd once down in South Tennessee held a ford on a frozen creek all night and half a day with just forty or fifty men against a couple of companies of Yankee cavalry. That must have been in the last winter of the war when Hood was trying to get what was left of his army out of Tennessee. Anybody ought to have seen then that everything was folding up, going to pieces. But Captain Todd and his men had lain out there in the brush and rocks all night, waiting for the next rush at the ford; and all the next morning, too, when it got light enough to see how many there were on the other side and how many more were coming up. Once or twice Mr. Munn wondered about those other men with Captain Todd, those who weren’t killed at the ford or later, and who lived on — had they, when they got old, grown to be like Captain Todd, too? Or had they, that night at the ford, been sustained, not by a conviction and confidence truly their own, but merely by partaking for the time, communally, from the rich and fundamental store owned by somebody else? By Captain Todd?

  But now Captain Todd sat among the other men, aware, it seemed, of a ripe, secret security that he could count on, out of the swirl and reach of the general excitement, supported by a confidence different from the confidence in events and circumstances that would be subject to change and accident and the casual appetites and weaknesses of people. He was like a great gray boulder, still unsubmerged, in the course of some violent, flooded stream. You knew that when the flood season was past and the waters had lost their turbulence and had shrunk back into their normal and modest bed, the boulder would be there still, still itself and solid as ever. Captain Todd could be confident because he had no confidence in things and events; he knew things and events were blind. Blind as a bat.

  Mr. Munn felt that he knew that much about the old man, but knowing it did him no good. He would be caught up and drawn, in the very face of Captain Todd’s example, into the same current that gripped the other men about him. And at the same time he would know that, for himself at least, there was something unreal about those meetings in the long, dingy room above the bank, about the dry voice of Mr. Sills going on and on with his figures and reports, and about the exclamations and the vehement, booted tread of Mr. Christian. Mr. Sills found those figures real and final, and trusted them. Mr. Christian trusted that deep and prodigal surge of energy within himself. But the events that took place in that room did not afford Mr. Munn the true sense of reality. Rather, at moments he found it during those meetings in front of the country stores or in the spaces before the white, weatherboarded churches at the crossroads; or when some man, picking up the pen, said, ‘Well, I reckon I’ll do it’; or, even, that night when the rain beat on the roof of the schoolhouse at Rose Creek and he looked into the faces of the men, or when, afterwards, he rode alone through the darkness, within earshot of the sounding, swollen creek. Those times were more real to him, and even though they spoke to him in vague, untranslatable, and perhaps contradictory voices, he felt that sometime he might be able to define the truth that certainly they were proclaiming.

  And so, while the fall passed and winter came on, he lived, it sometimes seemed to him, as though poised on the brink of revelation. He did not know what was to happen, what the impending revelation might be that made him wake with that expectation. Sometimes, on waking, it sharpened his farmer’s sense of the weather, so that he would jump out of bed and, still in his nightshirt, hurry to the window to scan the sky. Then, when he had discovered what the sky promised, bad or good, he would feel a little puzzled, wondering why he had been so concerned; for the weather of that day, or of any day, had no bearing on the expectation that had prompted him to leap up.

  Though the expectation never came to focus now, as in the mornings of his childhood when he would remember, suddenly, that it was Saturday or Christmas, it filled him, even during the absorbing activities of the day, with an energy that drove him through the execution of his duties, as though every small obligation fulfilled would bring him that much nearer to the unnamed object of his excitement. And the energy seemed boundless. Even when, sitting with May at home at night, he would lean back in the chair and be silent, it was not because he was tired. He was never tired now. His nerves would be alive, and if he was silent, it was because his mind was, at those moments, like an eye unseeing but straining forward into the dark.

  ‘You look tired, Perse,’ his wife would say.

  ‘I’m not tired.’

  ‘Perse, I wish you wouldn’t work so hard,’ she would urge him. ‘You’re wearing yourself out.’

  ‘No,’ he would answer shortly, but in a tone more patient than irritated.

  ‘I wish you wouldn’t, Perse; you look tired.’

  ‘No, May.’

  ‘Other men don’t work that hard,’ she would insist.

  ‘It’ll be over soon.’

  She might come to sit in his lap then, and lean her head against his shoulder. He would put his arm around her waist and spread his fingers on her small, rounded hip, his thumb aware of the upper edge of her hip bone beneath the flesh, the bone in its fragility like a valuable bowl, or cup, wrapped to prevent damage.

  ‘Soon?’ she would ask.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I never see you much, any more,’ she would say. ‘You’re so busy, you’re away so much, Perse.’

  ‘I have to be away, honey,’ he would reply. Several times he tried to tell her precisely how he felt, carefully choosing some incident that had seemed to speak to him. ‘Up at the meeting at New Sharon Church,’ he would say, ‘there was an old man. I didn’t notice him much at first, because he sort of hung around the back of the crowd. It wasn’t a very big crowd, just about forty-five or fifty people, including the women there too. He didn’t look much different from other people, I reckon, but I got to noticing him ——’

  ‘Yes,’ she would put in, the question in her voice.

  ‘He was a sort of broken-down-looking old man, you might say. About sixty, maybe. I got to noticing him while the meeting went on. He had a wen — I reckon you would call it a wen — or something like that, on his left temple. About the size of a quarter, and purple-colored. He looked something like old Mr. Murdock — you know old Mr. Murdock, Bill Casady’s father-in-law? Used to crop over on the Tyler place.’

  ‘I don’t believe I remember him,’ and she would peer into the fire as though she were trying to stir her memory.

  ‘Well, anyway, that isn’t the point. He looked something like old Mr. Murdock, though, except for the wen. He had on overalls and an old black coat and a straw hat. I kept noticing him back in the crowd. After I got through talking, I called for people to sign up with the Association. Nobody came. Then I said I would like to answer any questions they had about how the Association worked, and then maybe they could see their way clear to signing up. Nobody said a word, and nobody budged. Then that old man started coming up toward the front.’ Then, telling that incident or another, he would be aware that the story was going to pieces in his hands. He had thought that, if he could tell her the story exactly as it happened, the meaning would become clear too, and the way he felt.

  He would finish somewhat lamely, apologetically: ‘Well, he signed up. After he signed up, three other men signed, too.’

  ‘That makes four who signed that time,’ then May had said ruminatively and politely.

  ‘Every little bit helps,’ he replied, suddenly irritated with his insufficiency. He did not even try to finish the story the way it had happened, although the scene was sharp in his mind. The old man had walked through the crowd, apparently oblivious of the other people. He might have been walking through an open field. He had said, ‘Boy, if you’ll please gimme that pen-staff, I’ll sign my name.’ But before he signed he looked up at Mr. Munn, and added: ‘I got me a little piece of ground, nigh onto thirty years back. All that time ain’t no man said me yea nor nay, nor go nor come. I’m gonna put my name down now, boy, and if you say yea, it’s yea, and nay, it’s nay. What little crop I got don’t amount to nothing. My crop ain’t a pea in the dish. But I aim to sign.’

  After signing, he had looked up, still holding the pen-staff. ‘Hit ain’t wrote very fair,’ he had said.

  At the moment of its occurrence that event, which now was nothing, which now stuck in his throat when he tried to put it into words, had possessed tremendous importance. It had seemed as if that moment was a point of vantage from which he could survey other moments in their true perspective and worth, moments of the past and, perhaps, moments of the future. Perhaps it still was, but, sitting before the fire with the slight and pleasant weight of May on his lap and his hand laid protectively upon her hip, he shook his head with a sudden motion of confusion.

  He had failed again in his attempt to explain himself to May, and to himself. The explanation, the thing that made him wake up suddenly in the morning as at the sound of a voice, the imminence of revelation — these things were real to him, certainly, but elusive. He was aware of them as of something seen out of the corner of the eye; when he turned his gaze directly, it was gone. But the expectation, even though it defied his definitions, colored everything, even his love for May. That love had been, for more than a year, a thing in itself, set off from other things by its fullness and completeness and poise. Now that could scarcely be said with truth any longer, for the love seemed now not an end and a reward, but a beginning and, however enchanting and happy, a task, not a whole but a part of a whole which he could not see, not a poise but a motion, blind though sweet, toward some unforetellable target. It was not the answer, as it had once seemed, but the question. Holding May on his lap, as when he told her the story of the old man, he would close his eyes and bend to kiss her neck, burying his face in the curve of flesh where the neck joined the shoulder. Or he would seize her in his arms and press her to him so tightly that he could feel the resilience of her ribs giving, as though by this small cruelty he might extort the satisfaction and the supreme assurance not to be had merely by love.

  ‘Don’t, Perse,’ she would then gasp out; ‘don’t, not that way!’

  He would not relieve the pressure in the slightest degree, a small germ of hardness sprouting in his mind, so that her words seemed addressed to someone else, not meant for him, impersonally overheard. Then, when she would again say, breathlessly, ‘Don’t, Perse,’ he would slacken his hold, feeling as he did so almost a hint of disappointment behind the fact of his pleasure in her. ‘I love you so much,’ he would say.

  ‘I love you, Perse,’ she would answer.

  Or standing with her before the fire at night, or in the yard under the unleafing trees on a Sunday afternoon, he might suddenly grasp her with her shoulders between his two hands and hold her out from him, staring into her eyes, and shake her a little, as one shakes a sullen child to make it speak and tell the truth. But there was nothing for her to tell. He did not even know what he wanted to hear her say. What she actually would say was, ‘I love you, Perse.’ That was enough, and not enough.

  But the same expectation of discovery and fulfillment that came on waking, or forced him to try to tell May some incident or to grasp her shoulders between his hands, made him sometimes stop for a split instant, unconscious of himself, and scrutinize the face of someone with whom he was talking. They said the same things now as they, or other people, had said before in this very same office. They were in trouble. They had quarreled with somebody else over money or land or cattle. They could no longer live with their wives or husbands. They expected death and wanted to make their wills. Listening all the while with professional care to their words, he watched their faces and was aware of something behind the words and faces, something that was unnamed for all their talk.

  When, back in the middle of the summer, he had seen Bunk Trevelyan’s wife for the first time, he had not noticed her at all as an individual and could not have said whether her face was sadder than another. Sitting in his office, her small, dry-clay-colored fingers clasped together with a painful stillness on the lap of her faded and sun-streaked blue crêpe-de-Chine dress, she had been like other women who had sat there, dressed in their good clothes for the occasion, and told him their troubles in just such a dead, monotonous, and impersonal voice. She had sat there with the look and the manner of all those other wives of croppers and poor farmers; having at that time no meaning except in so far as she had the meaning of those other women, no one of whom had meaning except that meaningless meaning of resemblance to all the others. She was, she had said in that flat, impersonal voice, the wife of Harris Trevelyan; maybe he knew Harris Trevelyan, he had a little place out the Murray Mill road.

  ‘I don’t believe I do,’ Mr. Munn had said.

  ‘He goes by the name of Bunk a right smart,’ she had continued. ‘But that ain’t his right and given name. Folks just call him that and there ain’t no sayen why. But I call him Harris. Which is his right name.’

  ‘I don’t reckon I know him by that name.’

  ‘He’s a right tall man, taller’n most,’ she had said with a flicker of pride in her voice. ‘He’s got red hair.’

  ‘I think I know him,’ Mr. Munn had said, and nodded as though on sudden recollection, not having ever laid eyes, as far as he knew, on the man who was named Harris or Bunk Trevelyan.

  ‘I reckoned you might know him,’ she had rejoined. Then, in that flat voice, almost with the tone of an afterthought, as though the real business of her call were already settled, she had remarked, ‘They got him in jail.’

  ‘In jail,’ Mr. Munn had repeated, not because of surprise but because of absent-mindedness, all the while wishing that the woman would leave so he could go out home and get out of the heat and sit on his porch with May.

  ‘They come and got him this morning.’

  ‘What did they arrest him for?’

  ‘He never done it,’ she had said.

  ‘Done what?’

  ‘Killed him.’ She must have seen the question in Mr. Munn’s eyes, for she had added, with the tone of apology and explanation: ‘Old Tad Duffy. They found him layen dead on the big road. He was a mean man, but Harris never killed him.’

  ‘I read about that part in the paper,’ Mr. Munn had said.

  ‘He never done it,’ the woman had insisted, her small, clay-colored fingers beginning to move aimlessly over the lap of the faded blue crêpe-de-Chine dress.

  ‘Tell me all about it,’ he had commanded her, ‘from the beginning.’

  That had been in early August. The office had been hot, and outside the sun had filled the street with a white incandescence. The heavy awning over the office window, with that glare beyond it, had seemed to be no more than dirty tissue paper. Mr. Munn had known that he would not get out soon to the coolness of his house. He would stay here listening to this woman, who sat very straight on the edge of her chair, a miserable straw hat with a ribbon on it stuck askew on her head, red dust streaking the hem of her blue dress, and who talked to him in that dry and distant voice.

  Bunk Trevelyan, his wife said, had quarreled with the man named Tad Duffy about a spring. Water was getting low in the well on the place Trevelyan had and they were using the spring to get drinking water from. The branch on the place was about dried up and they had to get water there at the spring, too, for the stock, because they couldn’t let the stock tramp in the spring if it was going to be fit for people to drink out of. Bunk Trevelyan found out Duffy was getting water from the spring, when the spring was on Trevelyan’s side. He told Duffy to stay away from the spring, but two days later he caught him there again putting water in a barrel set up in a wagon. The wagon was on Duffy’s side of the line, and Duffy had a negro boy helping him carry water to fill the barrel. When Trevelyan saw Duffy filling the barrel, he was so mad he didn’t say a word, he told his wife later, but ran to the house to get his rifle. When she saw him get the rifle and start running toward the spring, she followed him so as to stop him, she said, in case there was any trouble. By the time Trevelyan got to the spring, Duffy was in the wagon driving off. Trevelyan pointed his rifle all right — she said she couldn’t deny that — and the boy was telling the truth when he told the sheriff that, and she grabbed his arm and made him put the rifle down, but what he said was that he was going to fill that barrel so full of holes you could see daylight through it and that he was going to scare Duffy. He didn’t really shoot. And he never was going to shoot Duffy.