But this was different. He had tried himself to escape and had failed and had accepted the added twenty years of penalty without protest; he had spent fifteen of them not only never trying to escape again himself, but he had risked his life to foil ten others who planned to: as his reward for which he would have been freed the next day, only a trained guard with a shotgun in his hands let one of the ten plotters get free. So these last five years did not belong to him at all. He had discharged his forty years in good faith; it was not his fault that they actually added up to only thirty-five, and these five extra ones had been compounded on to him by a vicious, even a horseplayish, gratuitor.

  That Christmas his (now: for the first time) slowly diminishing sentence began to be marked off for him. It was a Christmas card, postmarked in Mexico, addressed to him in care of the Warden, who read it to him; they both knew who it was from: “Four years now. Not as far as you think.” On Valentine’s Day it was home-made: the coarse ruled paper bearing, drawn apparently with a carpenter’s or a lumberman’s red crayon, a crude heart into which a revolver was firing. “You see?” the Warden said. “Even if your five years were up . . .”

  “It ain’t five now,” he said. “Hit’s four years and six months and nineteen days. You mean, even then you won’t let me out?”

  “And have you killed before you could even get home?”

  “Send out and ketch him.”

  “Send where?” the Warden said. “Suppose you were outside and didn’t want to come back and knew I wanted to get you back. Where would I send to catch you?”

  “Yes,” he said. “So there jest ain’t nothing no human man can do.”

  “Yes,” the Warden said. “Give him time and he will do something else the police somewhere will catch him for.”

  “Time,” he said. “Suppose a man ain’t got time jest to depend on time.”

  “At least you have got your four years and six months and nineteen days before you have to worry about it.”

  “Yes,” he said. “He’ll have that much time to work in.”

  Then Christmas again, another card with the Mexican postmark: “Three years now. Not near as far as you think.” He stood there, fragile and small and durable in the barred overalls, his face lowered a little, peaceful. “Still Mexico, I notice,” he said. “Maybe He will kill him there.”

  “What?” the Warden said. “What did you say?”

  He didn’t answer. He just stood there, peaceful, musing, serene. Then he said: “Before I had that-ere cow trouble with Jack Houston, when I was still a boy, I used to go to church ever Sunday and Wednesday prayer meeting too with the lady that raised me until I—”

  “Who were they?” the Warden said. “You said your mother died.”

  “He was a son of a bitch. She wasn’t no kin a-tall. She was jest his wife — ever Sunday until I—”

  “Was his name Snopes?” the Warden said.

  “He was my paw — until I got big enough to burn out on God like you do when you think you are already growed up and don’t need nothing from nobody. Then when you told me how by keeping nine of them ten fellers from breaking out I didn’t jest add five more years to my time, I fixed it so you wasn’t going to let me out a-tall, I taken it back.”

  “Took what back?” the Warden said. “Back from who?”

  “I taken it back from God.”

  “You mean you’ve rejoined the church since that night two years ago? No you haven’t. You’ve never been inside the chapel since you came here back in 1908.” Which was true. Though the present Warden and his predecessor had not really been surprised at that. What they had expected him to gravitate to was one of the small violent irreconcilable nonconformist non-everything and -everybody else which existed along with the regular prison religious establishment in probably all Southern rural penitentiaries — small fierce cliques and groups (this one called themselves Jehovah’s Shareholders) headed by self-ordained leaders who had reached prison through a curiously consistent pattern: by the conviction of crimes peculiar to the middle class, to respectability, originating in domesticity or anyway uxoriousness: bigamy, rifling the sect’s funds for a woman: his wife or someone else’s or, in an occasional desperate case, a professional prostitute.

  “I didn’t need no church,” he said. “I done it in confidence.”

  “In confidence?” the Warden said.

  “Yes,” he said, almost impatiently. “You don’t need to write God a letter. He has done already seen inside you long before He would even need to bother to read it. Because a man will learn a little sense in time even outside. But he learns it quick in here. That when a Judgment powerful enough to help you, will help you if you got to do is jest take back and accept it, you are a fool not to.”

  “So He will take care of Stillwell for you,” the Warden said.

  “Why not? What’s He got against me?”

  “Thou shalt not kill,” the Warden said.

  “Why didn’t He tell Houston that? I never went all the way in to Jefferson to have to sleep on a bench in the depot jest to try to buy them shells, until Houston made me.”

  “Well I’ll be damned,” the Warden said. “I will be eternally damned. You’ll be out of here in three more years anyway, but if I had my way you’d be out of here now, today, before whatever the hell it is that makes you tick starts looking cross-eyed at me. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life even thinking somebody is thinking the kind of hopes about me you wish about folks that get in your way. Go on now. Get back to work.”

  So when it was only October, no holiday valentine or Christmas card month that he knew of, when the Warden sent for him, he was not even surprised. The Warden sat looking at him for maybe half a minute, with something not just aghast but almost respectful in the look, then said: “I will be damned.” It was a telegram this time. “It’s from the Chief of Police in San Diego, California. There was a church in the Mexican quarter. They had stopped using it as a church, had a new one or something. Anyway it had been deconsecrated, so what went on inside it since, even the police haven’t quite caught up with yet. Last week it fell down. They don’t know why: it just fell down all of a sudden. They found a man in it — what was left of him. This is what the telegram says: ‘Fingerprints F.B.I, identification your man number 08213 Shuford H. Stillwell.’ ” The Warden folded the telegram back into the envelope and put it back into the drawer. “Tell me again about that church you said you used to go to before Houston made you kill him.”

  He didn’t answer that at all. He just drew a long breath and exhaled it. “I can go now,” he said. “I can be free.”

  “Not right this minute,” the Warden said. “It will take a month or two. The petition will have to be got up and sent to the Governor. Then he will ask for my recommendation. Then he will sign the pardon.”

  “The petition?” he said.

  “You got in here by law,” the Warden said. “You’ll have to get out by law.”

  “A petition,” he said.

  “That your family will have a lawyer draw up, asking the Governor to issue a pardon. Your wife — but that’s right, she’s dead. One of your daughters then.”

  “Likely they done married away too by now.”

  “All right,” the Warden said. Then he said, “Hell, man, you’re already good as out. Your cousin, whatever he is, right there in Jackson now in the legislature — Egglestone Snopes, that got beat for Congress two years ago?”

  He didn’t move, his head bent a little; he said, “Then I reckon I’ll stay here after all.” Because how could he tell a stranger: Clarence, my own oldest brother’s grandson, is in politics that depends on votes. When I leave here I won’t have no vote. What will I have to buy Clarence Snopes’s name on my paper? Which just left Eck’s boy, Wallstreet, whom nobody yet had ever told what to do. “I reckon I’ll be with you them other three years too,” he said.

  “Write your sheriff yourself,” the Warden said. “I’ll write the letter for you.”

  “Hub Hampton that sent me here is dead.”

  “You’ve still got a sheriff, haven’t you? What’s the matter with you? Have forty years in here scared you for good of fresh air and sunshine?”

  “Thirty-eight years this coming summer,” he said.

  “All right. Thirty-eight. How old are you?”

  “I was born in eighty-three,” he said.

  “So you’ve been here ever since you were twenty-five years old.”

  “I don’t know. I never counted.”

  “All right,” the Warden said. “Beat it. When you say the word I’ll write a letter to your sheriff.”

  “I reckon I’ll stay,” he said. But he was wrong. Five months later the petition lay on the Warden’s desk.

  “Who is Linda Snopes Kohl?” the Warden said.

  He stood completely still for quite a long time. “Her paw’s a rich banker in Jefferson. His and my grandpaw had two sets of chillen.”

  “She was the member of your family that signed the petition to the Governor to let you out.”

  “You mean the sheriff sent for her to come and sign it?”

  “How could he? You wouldn’t let me write the sheriff.”

  “Yes,” he said. He looked down at the paper which he could not read. It was upside down to him, though that meant nothing either. “Show me where the ones signed to not let me out.”

  “What?” the Warden said.

  “The ones that don’t want me out.”

  “Oh, you mean Houston’s family. No, the only other names on it are the District Attorney who sent you here and your Sheriff, Hubert Hampton, Junior, and V. K. Ratliff. Is he a Houston?”

  “No,” he said. He drew the slow deep breath again. “So I’m free.”

  “With one thing more,” the Warden said. “Your luck’s not even holding: it’s doubling.” But he handled that too the next morning after they gave him a pair of shoes, a shirt, overalls and jumper and a hat, all brand new, and a ten-dollar bill and the three dollars and eighty-five cents which were still left from the forty dollars Flem had sent him eighteen years ago, and the Warden said, “There’s a deputy here today with a prisoner from Greenville. He’s going back tonight. For a dollar he’ll drop you off right at the end of the bridge to Arkansas, if you want to go that way.”

  “Much obliged,” he said. “I’m going by Memphis first. I got some business to tend to there.”

  It would probably take all of the thirteen dollars and eighty-five cents to buy a pistol even in a Memphis pawn shop. He had planned to beat his way to Memphis on a freight train, riding the rods underneath a boxcar or between two of them, as he had once or twice as a boy and a youth. But as soon as he was outside the gate, he discovered that he was afraid to. He had been shut too long, he had forgotten how; his muscles might have lost the agility and co-ordination, the simple bold quick temerity for physical risk. Then he thought of watching his chance to scramble safely into an empty car and found that he didn’t dare that either, that in thirty-eight years he might even have forgotten the unspoken rules of the freemasonry of petty lawbreaking without knowing it until too late.

  So he stood beside the paved highway which, when his foot touched it last thirty-eight years ago, had not even been gravel but instead was dirt marked only by the prints of mules and the iron tyres of wagons; now it looked and felt as smooth and hard as a floor, what time you could see it or risk feeling it either for the cars and trucks rushing past on it. In the old days any passing wagon would have stopped to no more than his raised hand. But these were not wagons so he didn’t know what the new regulations for this might be either; in fact if he had known anything else to do but this he would already be doing it instead of standing, frail and harmless and not much larger than a child in the new overalls and jumper still showing their off-the-shelf creases and the new shoes and the hat, until the truck slowed in toward him and stopped and the driver said, “How far you going, dad?”

  “Memphis,” he said.

  “I’m going to Clarksdale. You can hook another ride from there. As good as you can here, anyway.”

  It was fall, almost October, and he discovered that here was something else he had forgotten about during the thirty-eight years: seasons. They came and went in the penitentiary too, but for thirty-eight years the only right he had to them was the privilege of suffering because of them: from the heat and sun of summer whether he wanted to work in the heat of the day or not, and the rain and icelike mud of winter whether he wanted to be in it or not. But now they belonged to him again: October next week, not much to see in this flat Delta country which he had misdoubted the first time he laid eyes on it from the train window that day thirty-eight years ago; just cotton stalks and cypress needles. But back home in the hills, all the land would be gold and crimson with hickory and gum and oak and maple, and the old fields warm with sage and splattered with scarlet sumac; in thirty-eight years he had forgotten that.

  When suddenly, somewhere deep in memory, there was a tree, a single tree. His mother was dead; he couldn’t remember her nor even how old he was when his father married again. So the woman wasn’t even kin to him and she never let him forget it: that she was raising him not from any tie or claim and not because he was weak and helpless and a human being, but because she was a Christian. Yet there was more than that behind it. He knew that at once — a gaunt harried slattern of a woman whom he remembered always either with a black eye or holding a dirty rag to her bleeding where her husband had struck her. Because he could always depend on her, not to do anything for him because she always failed there, but for constancy, to be always there and always aware of him, surrounding him always with that shield which actually protected, defended him from nothing but on the contrary seemed actually to invite more pain and grief. But simply to be there, lachrymose, harassed, yet constant.

  She was still in bed, it was midmorning; she should have been hours since immolated into the ceaseless drudgery which composed her days. She was never ill, so it must have been the man had beat her this time even harder than he knew, lying there in bed talking about food — the fatback, the coarse meal, the molasses which as far as he knew was the only food all people ate except when they could catch or kill something else; evidently this new blow had been somewhere about her stomach. “I can’t eat hit,” she whimpered. “I need to relish something else. Maybe a squirrel.” He knew now; that was the tree. He had to steal the shotgun: his father would have beat him within an inch of his life — to lug the clumsy weapon even taller than he was, into the woods, to the tree, the hickory, to ambush himself beneath it and crouch, waiting, in the drowsy splendour of the October afternoon, until the little creature appeared. Whereupon he began to tremble (he had but the one shell) and he remembered that too: the tremendous effort to raise the heavy gun long enough, panting against the stock, “Please God please God,” into the shock of the recoil and the reek of the black powder until he could drop the gun and run and pick up the still warm small furred body with hands that trembled and shook until he could barely hold it. And her hands trembling too as she fondled the carcass. “We’ll dress hit and cook hit now,” she said. “We’ll relish hit together right now.” The hickory itself was of course gone now, chopped into firewood or wagon spokes or single trees years ago; perhaps the very place where it had stood was eradicated now into ploughed land — or so they thought who had felled and destroyed it probably. But he knew better: unaxed in memory and unaxeable, inviolable and immune, golden and splendid with October. Why yes he thought it ain’t a place a man wants to go back to; the place don’t even need to be there no more. What aches a man to go back to is what he remembers.

  Suddenly he craned his neck to see out the window. “Hit looks like—” and stopped. But he was free; let all the earth know where he had been for thirty-eight years. “ — Parchman,” he said.

  “Yep,” the driver said. “P.O.W. camp.”

  “What?” he said.

  “Prisoners from the war.”

  “From the war?”

  “Where you been the last five years, dad?” the driver said. “Asleep?”

  “I been away,” he said. “I mind one war they fit with the Spaniards when I was a boy, and there was another with the Germans after that one. Who did they fight this time?”

  “Everybody.” The driver cursed. “Germans, Japanese, Congress too. Then they quit. If they had let us lick the Russians too, we might a been all right. But they just licked the Krauts and Japs and then decided to choke everybody else to death with money.”

  He thought Money. He said: “If you had twenty-five dollars and found thirty-eight more, how much would you have?”

  “What?” the driver said. “I wouldn’t even stop to pick up just thirty-eight dollars. What the hell you asking me? You mean you got sixty-three dollars and can’t find nothing to do with it?”

  Sixty-three he thought. So that’s how old I am. He thought quietly. Not justice; I never asked that; jest fairness, that’s all. That was all; not to have anything for him: just not to have anything against him. That was all he wanted, and sure enough, here it was.

  LINDA

  SIX

  V. K. Ratliff

  “YOU AIN’T EVEN going to meet the train?” Chick says. Lawyer never even looked up, setting there at the desk with his attention (his nose anyway) buried in the papers in front of him like there wasn’t nobody else in the room. “Not just a new girl coming to town,” Chick says, “but a wounded female war veteran. Well, maybe not a new girl,” he says. “Maybe that’s the wrong word. In fact maybe ‘new’ is the wrong word all the way round. Not a new girl in Jefferson, because she was born and raised here. And even if she was a new girl in Jefferson or new anywhere else once, that would be just once because no matter how new you might have been anywhere once, you wouldn’t be very new anywhere any more after you went to Spain with a Greenwich Village poet to fight Hitler. That is, not after the kind of Greenwich Village poet that would get you both blown up by a shell anyhow. That is, provided you were a girl. So just say, not only an old girl that used to be new, coming back to Jefferson, but the first girl old or new either that Jefferson ever had to come home wounded from a war. Men soldiers yes, of course yes. But this is the first female girl soldier we ever had, not to mention one actually wounded by the enemy. Naturally we don’t include rape for the main reason that we ain’t talking about rape.” Still his uncle didn’t move. “I’d think you’d have the whole town down there at the depot to meet her. Out of simple sympathetic interest, not to mention pity: a girl that went all the way to Spain to a war and the best she got out of it was to lose her husband and have both eardrums busted by a shell. Mrs Cole,” he says.