‘What did he tell you?’ and now he knew what it was that had nudged at his attention back in his uncle’s office when he had recognised her and then in the next second flashed away: old Molly, Lucas’ wife, who had been the daughter of one of old Doctor Habersham’s, Miss Habersham’s grandfather’s, slaves, she and Miss Habersham the same age, born in the same week and both suckled at Molly’s mother’s breast and grown up together almost inextricably like sisters, like twins, sleeping in the same room, the white girl in the bed, the Negro girl on a cot at the foot of it almost until Molly and Lucas married, and Miss Habersham had stood up in the Negro church as godmother to Molly’s first child.

  ‘He said it wasn’t his pistol,’ he said.

  ‘So he didn’t do it,’ she said, rapid still and with something even more than urgency in her voice now.

  ‘I dont know,’ he said.

  ‘Nonsense,’ she said. ‘If it wasn’t his pistol — —’

  ‘I dont know,’ he said.

  ‘You must know. You saw him — talked to him — —’

  ‘I dont know,’ he said. He said it calmly, quietly, with a kind of incredulous astonishment as though he had only now realised what he had promised, intended: ‘I just dont know. I still dont know. I’m just going out there. . . . .’ He stopped, his voice died. There was an instant a second in which he even remembered he should have been wishing he could recall it, the last unfinished sentence. Though it was probably already too late and she had already done herself what little finishing the sentence needed and at any moment now she would cry, protest, ejaculate and bring the whole house down on him. Then in the same second he stopped remembering it. She said:

  ‘Of course:’ immediate murmurous and calm; he thought for another half of a second that she hadn’t understood at all and then in the other half forgot that too, the two of them facing each other indistinguishable in the darkness across the tense and rapid murmur: and then he heard his own voice speaking in the same tone and pitch, the two of them not conspiratorial exactly but rather like two people who have irrevocably accepted a gambit they are not at all certain they can cope with: only that they will resist it: ‘We dont even know it wasn’t his pistol. He just said it wasn’t.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He didn’t say whose it was nor whether or not he fired it. He didn’t even tell you he didn’t fire it. He just said it wasn’t his pistol.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And your uncle told you there in his study that that’s just exactly what he would say, all he could say.’ He didn’t answer that. It wasn’t a question. Nor did she give him time. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘Now what? To find out if it wasn’t his pistol — find out whatever it was he meant? Go out there and what?’

  He told her, as badly as he had told Aleck Sander, explicit and succinct: ‘Look at him:’ not even pausing to think how here he should certainly have anticipated at least a gasp. ‘Go out there and dig him up and bring him to town where somebody that knows bullet holes can look at the bullet hole in him — —’

  ‘Yes,’ Miss Habersham said. ‘Of course. Naturally he wouldn’t tell your uncle. He’s a Negro and your uncle’s a man:’ and now Miss Habersham in her turn repeating and paraphrasing and he thought how it was not really a paucity a meagreness of vocabulary, it was in the first place because the deliberate violent blotting out obliteration of a human life was itself so simple and so final that the verbiage which surrounded it enclosed it insulated it intact into the chronicle of man had of necessity to be simple and uncomplex too, repetitive, almost monotonous even; and in the second place, vaster than that, adumbrating that, because what Miss Habersham paraphrased was simple truth, not even fact and so there was not needed a great deal of diversification and originality to express it because truth was universal, it had to be universal to be truth and so there didn’t need to be a great deal of it just to keep running something no bigger than one earth and so anybody could know truth; all they had to do was just to pause, just to stop, just to wait: ‘Lucas knew it would take a child — or an old woman like me: someone not concerned with probability, with evidence. Men like your uncle and Mr Hampton have had to be men too long, busy too long. —— Yes?’ she said. ‘Bring him in to town where someone who knows can look at the bullet hole. And suppose they look at it and find out it was Lucas’ pistol?’ And he didn’t answer that at all, nor had she waited again, saying, already turning: ‘We’ll need a pick and shovel. I’ve got a flashlight in the truck — —’

  ‘We?’ he said.

  She stopped; she said almost patiently: ‘It’s fifteen miles out there — —’

  ‘Ten,’ he said.

  ‘ —— a grave is six feet deep. It’s after eight now and you may have only until midnight to get back to town in time — —’ and something else but he didn’t even hear it. He wasn’t even listening. He had said this himself to Lucas only fifteen minutes ago but it was only now that he understood what he himself had said. It was only after hearing someone else say it that he comprehended not the enormity of his intention but the simple inert unwieldy impossible physical vastness of what he faced; he said quietly, with hopeless indomitable amazement:

  ‘We cant possibly do it.’

  ‘No,’ Miss Habersham said. ‘Well?’

  ‘Ma’am?’ he said. ‘What did you say?’

  ‘I said you haven’t even got a car.’

  ‘We were going on the horse.’

  Now she said, ‘We?’

  ‘Me and Aleck Sander.’

  ‘Then we’ll have three,’ she said. ‘Get your pick and shovel. They’ll begin to wonder in the house why they haven’t heard my truck start.’ She moved again.

  ‘Yessum,’ he said. ‘Drive on down the lane to the pasture gate. We’ll meet you there.’

  He didn’t wait either. He heard the truck start as he climbed the lot fence; presently he could see Highboy’s blaze in the black yawn of the stable hallway; Aleck Sander jerked the buckled girth-strap home through the keeper as he came up. He unsnapped the tie-rope from the bit-ring before he remembered and snapped it back and untied the other end from the wall-ring and looped it and the reins up over Highboy’s head and led him out of the hallway and got up.

  ‘Here,’ Aleck Sander said reaching up the pick and shovel but Highboy had already begun to dance even before he could have seen them as he always did even at a hedge switch and he set him back hard and steadied him as Aleck Sander said ‘Stand still!’ and gave Highboy a loud slap on the rump, passing up the pick and shovel and he steadied them across the saddle-bow and managed to hold Highboy back on his heels for another second, long enough to free his foot from the near stirrup for Aleck Sander to get his foot into it, Highboy moving then in a long almost buck-jump as Aleck Sander swung up behind and still trying to run until he steadied him again with one hand, the pick and shovel jouncing on the saddle, and turned him across the pasture toward the gate. ‘Hand me them damn shovels and picks,’ Aleck Sander said. ‘Did you get the flashlight?’

  ‘What do you care?’ he said. Aleck Sander reached his spare hand around him and took the pick and shovel; again for a second Highboy could actually see them but this time he had both hands free for the snaffle and the curb too. ‘You aint going anywhere to need a flashlight. You just said so.’

  They had almost reached the gate. He could see the dark blob of the halted truck against the pale road beyond it; that is, he could believe he saw it because he knew it was there. But Aleck Sander actually saw it: who seemed able to see in the dark almost like an animal. Carrying the pick and shovel, Aleck Sander had no free hand, nevertheless he had one with which he reached suddenly again and caught the reins outside his own hands and jerked Highboy almost back to a squat and said in a hissing whisper: ‘What’s that?’

  ‘It’s Miss Eunice Habersham’s truck,’ he said. ‘She’s going with us. Turn him loose, confound it!’ wrenching the reins from Aleck Sander, who released them quickly enough now, saying,

  ‘She’s gonter take the truck:’ and not even dropping the pick and shovel but flinging them clattering and clanging against the gate and slipping down himself and just in time because now Highboy stood erect on his hind feet until he struck him hard between the ears with the looped tie-rope.

  ‘Open the gate,’ he said.

  ‘We wont need the horse,’ Aleck Sander said. ‘Unsaddle and bridle him here. We’ll put um up when we get back.’

  Which was what Miss Habersham said; through the gate now and Highboy still sidling and beating his hooves while Aleck Sander put the pick and shovel into the back of the truck as though he expected Aleck Sander to throw them at him this time, and Miss Habersham’s voice from the dark cab of the truck:

  ‘He sounds like a good horse. Has he got a four-footed gait too?’

  ‘Yessum,’ he said. ‘Nome,’ he said. ‘I’ll take the horse too. The nearest house is a mile from the church but somebody might still hear a car. We’ll leave the truck at the bottom of the hill when we cross the branch.’ Then he answered that too before she had time to say it: ‘We’ll need the horse to bring him back down to the truck.’

  ‘Heh,’ Aleck Sander said. It wasn’t laughing. But then nobody thought it was. ‘How do you reckon that horse is going to tote what you dug up when he dont even want to tote what you going to do the digging with?’ But he had already thought of that too, remembering his grandfather telling of the old days when deer and bear and wild turkey could be hunted in Yoknapatawpha County within twelve miles of Jefferson, of the hunters: Major de Spain who had been his grandfather’s cousin and old General Compson and Uncle Ike McCaslin, Carothers Edmonds’ great-uncle, still alive at ninety, and Boon Hogganbeck whose mother’s mother had been a Chickasaw woman and the Negro Sam Fathers whose father had been a Chickasaw chief, and Major de Spain’s one-eyed hunting mule Alice who wasn’t afraid even of the smell of bear and he thought how if you really were the sum of your ancestry it was too bad the ancestors who had evoluted him into a secret resurrector of country graveyards hadn’t thought to equip him with a descendant of that unspookable one-eyed mule to transport his subjects on.

  ‘I dont know,’ he said.

  ‘Maybe he’ll learn by the time we get back to the truck,’ Miss Habersham said. ‘Can Aleck Sander drive?’

  ‘Yessum,’ Aleck Sander said.

  Highboy was still edgy; held down he would merely have lathered himself to no end so since it was cool tonight for the first mile he actually kept in sight of the truck’s tail-light. Then he slowed, the light fled diminishing on and vanished beyond a curve and he settled Highboy into the shambling halfrun halfwalk which no show judge would ever pass but which covered ground; nine miles of it to be covered and he thought with a kind of ghastly amusement that at last he would have time to think, thinking how it was too late to think now, not one of the three of them dared think now, if they had done but one thing tonight it was at least to put all thought ratiocination contemplation forever behind them; five miles from town and he would cross (probably Miss Habersham and Aleck Sander in the truck already had) the invisible surveyor’s line which was the boundary of Beat Four: the notorious, the fabulous almost and certainly least of all did any of them dare think now, thinking how it was never difficult for an outlander to do two things at once which Beat Four wouldn’t like since Beat Four already in advance didn’t like most of the things which people from town (and from most of the rest of the county too for that matter) did: but that it remained for them, a white youth of sixteen and a Negro one of the same and an old white spinster of seventy to elect and do at the same time the two things out of all man’s vast reservoir of invention and capability that Beat Four would repudiate and retaliate on most violently: to violate the grave of one of its progeny in order to save a nigger murderer from its vengeance.

  But at least they would have some warning (not speculating on who the warning could help since they who would be warned were already six and seven miles from the jail and still moving away from it as fast as he dared push the horse) because if Beat Four were coming in tonight he should begin to pass them soon (or they pass him) — the battered mud-stained cars, the empty trucks for hauling cattle and lumber, and the saddled horses and mules. Yet so far he had passed nothing whatever since he left town; the road lay pale and empty before and behind him too; the lightless houses and cabins squatted or loomed beside it, the dark land stretched away into the darkness strong with the smell of plowed earth and now and then the heavy scent of flowering orchards lying across the road for him to ride through like stagnant skeins of smoke so maybe they were making better time than even he had hoped and before he could stop it he had thought Maybe we can, maybe we will after all; — before he could leap and spring and smother and blot it from thinking not because he couldn’t really believe they possibly could and not because you dont dare think whole even to yourself the entirety of a dear hope or wish let alone a desperate one else you yourself have doomed it but because thinking it into words even only to himself was like the struck match which doesn’t dispel the dark but only exposes its terror — one weak flash and glare revealing for a second the empty road’s the dark and empty land’s irrevocable immitigable negation.

  Because — almost there now; Aleck Sander and Miss Habersham had already arrived probably a good thirty minutes ago and he took a second to hope Aleck Sander had had forethought enough to drive the truck off the road where anybody passing would not see it, then in the same second he knew that of course Aleck Sander had done that and it was not Aleck Sander he had ever doubted but himself for even for one second doubting Aleck Sander — he had not seen one Negro since leaving town, with whom at this hour on Sunday night in May the road should have been constant as beads almost — the men and young women and girls and even a few old men and women and even children before it got too late, but mostly the men the young bachelors who since last Monday at daylight had braced into the shearing earth the lurch and heave of plows behind straining and surging mules then at noon Saturday had washed and shaved and put on the clean Sunday shirts and pants and all Saturday night had walked the dusty roads and all day Sunday and all Sunday night would still walk them until barely time to reach home and change back into the overalls and the brogans and catch and gear up the mules and forty-eight hours even bedless save for the brief time there was a woman in it be back in the field again the plow’s point set into the new furrow when Monday’s sun rose: but not now, not tonight: where in town except for Paralee and Aleck Sander he had seen none either for twenty-four hours but he had expected that, they were acting exactly as Negroes and whites both would have expected Negroes to act at such a time; they were still there, they had not fled, you just didn’t see them — a sense a feeling of their constant presence and nearness: black men and women and children breathing and waiting inside their barred and shuttered houses, not crouching cringing shrinking, not in anger and not quite in fear: just waiting, biding since theirs was an armament which the white man could not match nor — if he but knew it — even cope with: patience; just keeping out of sight and out of the way, — but not here, no sense feeling here of a massed adjacence, a dark human presence biding and unseen; this land was a desert and a witness, this empty road its postulate (it would be some time yet before he would realise how far he had come: a provincial Mississippian, a child who when the sun set this same day had appeared to be — and even himself believed, provided he had thought about it at all — still a swaddled unwitting infant in the long tradition of his native land — or for that matter a witless foetus itself struggling — if he was aware that there had been any throes — blind and insentient and not even yet awaked in the simple painless convulsion of emergence) of the deliberate turning as with one back of the whole dark people on which the very economy of the land itself was founded, not in heat or anger nor even regret but in one irremediable invincible inflexible repudiation, upon not a racial outrage but a human shame.

  Now he was there; Highboy tightened and even began to drive a little, even after nine miles, smelling water and now he could see distinguish the bridge or at least the gap of lighter darkness where the road spanned the impenetrable blackness of the willows banding the branch and then Aleck Sander stood out from the bridge rail; Highboy snorted at him then he recognised him too, without surprise, not even remembering how he had wondered once if Aleck Sander would have forethought to hide the truck, not even remembering that he had expected no less, not stopping, checking Highboy back to a walk across the bridge then giving him his head to turn from the road beyond the bridge and drop in stiff fore-legged jolts down toward the water invisible for a moment longer then he too could see the reflected wimpling where it caught the sky: until Highboy stopped and snorted again then heaved suddenly up and back, almost unseating him.

  ‘He smell quicksand,’ Aleck Sander said. ‘Let him wait till he gets home, anyway. I’d rather be doing something else than what I am too.’

  But he took Highboy a little further down the bank where he might get down to the water but again he only feinted at it so he pulled away and back onto the road and freed the stirrup for Aleck Sander, Highboy again already in motion when Aleck Sander swung up. ‘Here,’ Aleck Sander said but he had already swung Highboy off the gravel and into the narrow dirt road turning sharp toward the black loom of the ridge and beginning almost at once its long slant up into the hills though even before it began to rise the strong constant smell of pines was coming down on them with no wind behind it yet firm and hard as a hand almost, palpable against the moving body as water would have been. The slant steepened under the horse and even carrying double he essayed to run at it as was his habit at any slope, gathering and surging out until he checked him sharply back and even then he had to hold him hard-wristed in a strong lurching uneven walk until the first level of the plateau flattened and even as Aleck Sander said ‘Here’ again Miss Habersham stood out of the obscurity at the roadside carrying the pick and shovel. Aleck Sander slid down as Highboy stopped. He followed.