‘Exactly what did he say when he had the rifle?’ Mr. Munn asked.

  ‘He said he was going to fill that barrel so full of holes you could see daylight through it and he was going to scare Duffy.’

  ‘Do you remember the exact words he used, exactly what he said about Duffy?’

  She looked at him expressionlessly, her tongue-tip coming out to wet her gray lips.

  ‘Don’t you remember?’ he demanded a little sharply.

  ‘He said,’ she began tonelessly, and wet her lips again, ‘he said he was going to scare that son-of-a-bitch so bad he ——’ Her voice trailed off.

  ‘Yes?’

  She stared at him pleadingly, the blood darkening the yellowish cast of her face. She shook her head. ‘I can’t say it,’ she said.

  ‘Is it because he used strong language?’ Mr. Munn asked.

  ‘It was right strong, you might say,’ she answered.

  ‘That’s the reason you don’t want to tell me,’ he demanded, ‘not because he said something you don’t want me to know, something incriminating?’

  ‘That’s the reason,’ she admitted, and wet her lips. ‘It was strong language. I can’t say it myself. Not in front of nobody.’

  ‘Well, tell me the rest,’ he ordered. At that moment he had begun to feel, for some reason, that Bunk Trevelyan was innocent.

  She told him how her husband went to town in his wagon the day Duffy was killed. When he got back from town she was out hilling up some hills for some late squash. When he got home he got his hoe and came on out to the field with her. The next day somebody told them old Tad Duffy was killed. He was stabbed and left by the road in some buckberry bushes. That was all they knew till the sheriff and two men came out and got Trevelyan out of the lot where he was milking and took him to jail.

  ‘I’m going down to the jail and talk to him,’ Mr. Munn said. ‘You better wait here till I get back. I won’t be gone very long.’ He went down the stairs, knowing that when he got back to his office Bunk Trevelyan’s wife would still be sitting, very erect, on the edge of her chair with her hands clasped in painful motionlessness on her lap. But at that time she had been in no true sense real to him. It was not until he saw her in her own house, the day when he went out there to ask her again about the quarrel before Tad Duffy was killed, that he understood her to be complete and individual, the center of a world as real and important as the world he knew concentric to himself. They stood in the two-room shack, the objects of her life around them — the split-bottom chairs, the pine table with the well-scrubbed top, the dresser with the cracked mirror, the stove, the wooden bed — and all those objects insinuated upon him, as with persistent whispers, the new knowledge about her. Because of the scrubbed pine top of the table, the small, dry, cracked hands themselves became in their motionlessness eloquent and, as it were, beckoned him on to a fuller penetration and knowledge. And the rickety bed, covered by the patchwork quilt with colors faded and washed dim, implied to him the secret integrity and purity of her passion — in any case, it must have been that way once, for instance, when Trevelyan brought her here for the first time. He recalled the inflection of pride with which, that day in his office, she had said her husband was taller than most. She set him off from other men. With irritation, the irritation of one who does not want to be disturbed, he suddenly knew how now at night, her skinny body wrapped in the flannel nightgown, she would stir in her dog-tired sleep and thrust out an arm emptily across the lumpy mattress to the place where Trevelyan wasn’t now.

  ‘Mrs. Trevelyan,’ he said, interrupting her as she told him how the new knife and the other things had been stolen from the kitchen that day after her husband got home and came out to the field, ‘Mrs. Trevelyan, do you have any children?’

  ‘No, sir,’ she answered, giving him a look of surprise, adjusting herself to the new question after what she had been saying. ‘No, sir, but I had two. They’re dead.’

  ‘When did they die?’

  ‘Last summer a year ago,’ she replied. ‘It was the bloody flux.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Mr. Munn said.

  Late that afternoon, when he was back out home taking a walk with May along the edge of a field where the tobacco had been cut, he thought of Bunk Trevelyan’s wife again. He wondered what that world she lived in was really like, what she herself was really like. But it was complete and individual and important, as much so as the one of his own or the world of May. He had an overpowering curiosity to know what it was like, to know what she was like. But how was it possible, he thought, when he could not even know about May, and could only guess? May was a small woman with a mass of blonde hair that seemed too heavy for her, as though she carried it courageously, with an effort. She had a gentle way of speaking, and when she was pleased her glance would brighten startlingly. In the spring she always seemed to be interested in gardening and would put seeds in the ground and would exclaim at the first tender shoots, but by the time the warm weather had settled in earnest, she forgot the garden, and the weeds might take it for all she noticed; in the fall she would stand for hours alone in the withered side garden, or walk about, wrapped in a sober, sweet meditation. She loved him, and at night she fell asleep with her head on his arm. And he loved her. Those things, and perhaps a thousand things like them, were what he knew about May. But they were not May. And if he could not penetrate to her world, and could only guess, what could he know about Bunk Trevelyan’s wife, whom he had seen only two or three times and whom he had never even touched with a finger?

  He reached to take May by the hand. She slipped her arm through the crook of his and walked close beside him.

  The tobacco had only recently been cut. The reddish field, marked accurately into the distance by the stobs of stalk where the plants had been, looked peculiarly bare, peculiarly at peace, under the rays of the last, long, level light. On the slight rise of ground at the far end of the field where the barn was, a wagon had been abandoned. It seemed to belong to the field, part of the impression of fulfillment and repose. ‘It’s a good crop,’ he said, as they walked up the lift of ground toward the barn.

  She did not answer, but pressed his arm in acknowledgment of the fact that he had spoken.

  ‘We might even get a decent price, too,’ he went on, ‘for a change. When I think that last year the best I got was four dollars and a half a hundred, and for prime leaf, I get so mad I wonder we stood it as long as we did. That damned buyer for the Alta Company, coming to my own barn door, this one right here in this field’ — and he pointed to the barn, where strands of blue smoke stood out from the eaves and thinned upward — ‘and saying to me, “Mr. Munn, we can give you four-seventy-five for your prime leaf and three for seconds,” and then telling me when I said no: “Mr. Munn, your place falls in my territory for buying and you won’t get an offer from anybody else; for your own convenience I’m telling you this so you can take my price and save yourself trouble, because when I come back again it’s likely the price won’t be so good, the price is falling so sharp the last few days.” I told him ——’

  May patted his arm and said: ‘I know, Perse. Don’t get wrought up about it, it was last year ——’

  He gently disengaged his arm from hers, and approached the door of the barn. ‘I just want to take a look,’ he said. ‘Do you want to?’

  ‘All right,’ she replied.

  Inside the barn it was almost dark except for the unwinking redness of the logs that smouldered on the dirt floor. He stared into the upper obscurity of the barn where the tobacco plants hung in solid tier on tier. Scarcely visible in the pall of smoke that sluggishly shifted in the upper reaches, the inverted plants looked like great bats sleeping in their clusters.

  ‘It’s not cured enough to be very risky yet,’ he said.

  He continued to stare upward at the suspended leaves. May came to stand beside him, putting her hand on his arm. ‘It’s not just getting more for your tobacco,’ he said, ‘even if we haven’t had an honest price in five years. It’s a little more than that’ — he hesitated a little — ‘at least, it might be.’

  A great flake of ash scaled off one of the logs, releasing a new puff of smoke and revealing, beneath, the steady brilliant redness of the heart of the burning wood.

  ‘It’s hot,’ May complained. ‘I feel a little faint.’

  ‘Let’s go,’ he said.

  Before he got to the house he remembered that he had told the Trevelyan woman he would send some negroes out to cut her patch of tobacco and get the firing started. It had been standing too long already.

  Chapter three

  IN THE end Mr. Munn was certain that Bunk Trevelyan was telling the truth. ‘Shore, I put a gun on him,’ Bunk Trevelyan said, sitting on the edge of his cot in the jail, humped forward with his great red hands hanging from off his knees. On his hands the coarse, red hairs looked pale against the redness of the skin. ‘But that don’t mean to say I stobbed the bastud. I never aimed to shoot him, even. I aimed to fill that-air barr’l so full of holes you could see daylight through hit. And I aimed to scare the bastud so he’d wet his pants leg. And I might a-done hit, too, if’n my wife didn’t grab holt of my arm that-a-way. Any man might a-done hit, finden the bastud down tote-en water off yore place and hit a drout and yore well nigh dry. When I seen him tote-en water outer my spring toward that-air barr’l, I didn’t say nuthen. I didn’t open my mouth. I just come to the house and grabbed my rifle and tore out down toward the spring. When I come to the turn in the path whar that big old sweet-gum is and seen him whippen up that old mule of his’n and my water a-sloshen outer his barr’l, I just up and put a bead on that-air barr’l. Any man might a-done sich. But I didn’t pull no trigger, even. My wife grabbed holt of my arm. What I done wasn’t no crime, and if’n that durn nigger boy didn’t go blabben off his durn mouth about what he seen to some other nigger and that nigger didn’t go blabben off his mouth to somebody else, I wouldn’t be here now. Let me git that nigger, I’ll frail him. But Duffy. Shore I put a gun on him, and shore I’m glad the bastud’s dead and don’t keer who knows hit, but that don’t go to say I kilt him. Now does hit?’

  ‘No,’ Mr. Munn admitted, ‘it doesn’t. Not before the law.’

  ‘Naw, hit don’t.’

  He was sure that Bunk Trevelyan was innocent. If he had intended to kill Tad Duffy he would have done it that day at the spring. If he had planned, later, to kill Duffy in cold blood, he would have planned it differently. Not on the road in the middle of the afternoon, with no cover. He would have found Duffy in the path through the woodlot some evening or down in the canebrake by the river. Mr. Munn looked at the big man lolling somnolently on the cot, and for the instant could almost see him leaning against a tree-trunk in the woods in the gathering dusk, with a knife appearing small and inconsequential in his great hand; or crouching in the cane by the path, and suddenly rising to seize the wrist of the passing man and swing him around while the knife fell and fell.

  He shook his head abruptly. No, that was not the way Bunk Trevelyan would do it. Not planned and calculated like that, but all at once in the blaze of fury, not in the woods or in the canebrake after waiting. He studied the man’s face, full-fleshed, but the flesh not concealing the long, heavy structure of the bone; and the blood seemed just below the surface of the sunburned, too-thin skin that was tight over the strong flesh. Against the redness of the flesh the red, unkempt, sun-streaked hair, like the hairs on his hands, looked pale. No, Bunk Trevelyan would do it all in a moment, with the sudden leap, or the rage-blind squeeze of the trigger. He would have done it, if at all, at the spring.

  This conviction was so firm in him that it was scarcely shaken even when, in the early afternoon of the second day of the trial, Mr. Little was called to the stand and testified about the knife. Mr. Little testified that in his hardware store, early in the afternoon of August second, 1904, he sold a butcher knife to the defendant. He recollected it just as it was without any question, he said, because the knife he sold to the defendant was the first knife in a new order that had just come in the day before. He knew that that was the exact day because he had the record in his store of the day the box came in, and he had checked up by the express company, too, before he ever opened his mouth to anybody about it, because, he said, he never was a man to open his mouth about something he couldn’t back up. It was a gross of knives, bought from the Dewey Jobbing Company in Nashville, and the stock number of the knives was M–120073. This was how he remembered it so good. The defendant had asked to look at some butcher knives, but he said he didn’t like any of the knives he saw and did Mr. Little have any other kind. The defendant said he didn’t want any of those tin knives, which, Mr. Little said, was just a way of talking because all the knives were good grade and most were A-number-1 grade steel. They were all good merchandise. What the defendant said he wanted was a good heavy knife without too long a blade nor too curved, something his wife could use round the kitchen and he could use when hog-killing time came in.

  When Mr. Little said ‘hog-killing time,’ somebody snickered in the courtroom and the judge rapped with his gavel. ‘When hog-killing time came in,’ Mr. Little repeated with an air of impersonal dignity, and proceeded. The new knives would be just what the defendant wanted, he had told the defendant. Then he went back and opened up the new box and got one out. It would do all right, the defendant said. He took it and paid for it and said, ‘Much obliged,’ and went on out.

  ‘Could you identify the type of knife which you sold to the defendant?’ the prosecuting attorney asked Mr. Little.

  Mr. Little said that he would be able to do so. The blade was shorter than ordinary, he said, and a little thicker on the blunt edge, and the brass brads in the handle weren’t round, they were square, and they weren’t set in a straight line. And the trade-mark was on the blade up near the handle. It read ‘Maiden Steel.’

  The prosecuting attorney unwrapped a newspaper-covered parcel and held up a knife. ‘Was it a knife like this?’ he demanded.

  Mr. Little examined the knife, and said that it was the same kind.

  All the while Mr. Little was giving his testimony, Mr. Munn was covertly watching Bunk Trevelyan. Trevelyan was leaning back in his chair, his size filling it. Part of the time he seemed to be giving attention to what the witness was saying, but only with a kind of strained and uninterested politeness; then his glance would stray to one of the high windows beyond which, against the chilly-looking, impersonal blueness of the sky, the tips of black boughs were visible, bare except for a few rags of leaves. He did not seem disturbed or surprised at the testimony about the knife; he did not even seem interested. Without looking at the jury Mr. Munn could feel the tension there. This was the moment that was bringing the trial to focus for them. There was almost always such a moment, when the men in the jury box would lean forward a little bit, and you just about knew whether you had won or lost.

  This was the time, he was almost sure, hopelessly; and was surer when, immediately after Mr. Little got down, the coroner, Doctor Abel, was put on the stand again and, holding the bright, clean knife in his hand and turning it slowly over and over, said that the four stab wounds in the back of the deceased could have been made by this kind of knife. They were wide enough and deep enough, he said, for the first wound entered the back just below the twelfth rib and penetrated the inner half of the right kidney of the deceased, opening the renal artery. ‘That’s the one,’ he said, assuming an air of authority, ‘that must have been made first.’ And he reached to his own back, clumsily, for he was a fat man, to indicate the point of entry. ‘Just like I said,’ he added; then continued, ‘and that second wound between the eleventh and twelfth ribs, that one was clean in to the liver and penetrated the portal vein, yes, sir. And the one up in the lung — the one that must have been made last, like I said, when the man was sinking down — up between the third and fourth ribs about the middle between the fourth dorsal vertebra and ——’ The voice went on and on, but Mr. Munn was not listening.

  The coroner was the last witness for the prosecution. While he spoke, Bunk Trevelyan was looking out the window, at the clear sky. When the judge granted Mr. Munn’s motion for a postponement until the next morning, Mr. Munn, without a word to his client, walked out of the courtroom, and down the stairs to the dingy main hall of the courthouse and out into the sunlight. He leaned against a tree on one side of the courthouse yard, lighting his pipe and staring down at the faded grass of the late season. The pleasure of the first flavor of the tobacco after the abstinence of the afternoon filled him, and then was forgotten. People who had been at the trial began to cross the yard in scattered groups.

  A man stopped in front of him and said, ‘Well, Perse, it looks kinda like they might get your boy this time.’

  Regarding the man, Mr. Munn puffed the smoke idly from his lips before he spoke. ‘Maybe not,’ he rejoined, and shook his head.

  ‘It looks like it.’

  ‘Maybe not,’ Mr. Munn repeated. ‘You can’t ever tell.’ Meanwhile he was watching the open yard behind the courthouse.

  ‘So long, Perse,’ the man said.

  ‘So long,’ Mr. Munn replied, and started toward the rear of the courthouse. He had seen Bunk Trevelyan being led across the yard, his red, uncovered, shaggy head well above the heads of the two deputies who escorted him. He followed at a little distance, making no effort to catch up. They were taking Trevelyan back to his cage until tomorrow.