“If my name was Mink Snopes, I don’t believe I would go to no place that had a licence to lose for selling guns or pistols.”

  “For instance?” Stevens said.

  “Out at Frenchman’s Bend they said Mink was a considerable hell-raiser when he was young, within his means of course, which wasn’t much. But he made two or three of them country-boy Memphis trips with the young bloods of his time — Quicks and Tulls and Turpins and such: enough to probably know where to begin to look for the kind of places that don’t keep the kind of licences to have police worrying them ever time a gun or a pistol turns up in the wrong place or don’t turn up in the right one.”

  “Don’t you think the Memphis police know as much about Memphis as any damned little murdering maniac, let alone one that’s been locked up in a penitentiary for forty years? The Memphis police, that have a damned better record than a dozen, hell, a hundred cities I could name—”

  “All right, all right,” Ratliff said.

  “By God, God Himself is not so busy that a homicidal maniac with only ten dollars in the world can hitchhike a hundred miles and buy a gun for ten dollars then hitchhike another hundred and shoot another man with it.”

  “Don’t that maybe depend on who God wants shot this time?” Ratliff said. “Have you been by the sheriff’s this mawnin?”

  “No,” Stevens said.

  “I have. Flem ain’t been to him either yet. And he ain’t left town neither. I checked on that too. So maybe that’s the best sign we want: Flem ain’t worried. Do you reckon he told Linda?”

  “No,” Stevens said.

  “How do you know?”

  “He told me.”

  “Flem did? You mean he jest told you, or you asked him?”

  “I asked him,” Stevens said. “I said, ‘Are you going to tell Linda?’ ”

  “And what did he say?”

  “He said, ‘Why?’ ” Stevens said.

  “Oh,” Ratliff said.

  Then it was noon. What Ratliff had in the neat parcel was a sandwich, as neatly made. “You go home and eat dinner,” he said. “I’ll set here and listen for it.”

  “Didn’t you just say that if Flem himself don’t seem to worry, why the hell should we?”

  “I won’t worry then,” Ratliff said. “I’ll jest set and listen.”

  Though Stevens was back in the office when the call came in midafternoon. “Nothing,” the classmate’s voice said. “None of the pawnshops nor any other place a man might go to buy a gun or pistol of any sort, let alone a ten-dollar one. Maybe he hasn’t reached Memphis yet, though it’s more than twenty-four hours now.”

  “That’s possible,” Stevens said.

  “Maybe he never intended to reach Memphis.”

  “All right, all right,” Stevens said. “Shall I write the commissioner myself a letter of thanks or—”

  “Sure. But let him earn it first. He agreed that it not only won’t cost much more, it will even be a good idea to check his list every morning for the next two or three days, just in case. I thanked him for you. I even went further and said that if you ever found yourselves in the same voting district and he decided to run for an office instead of just sitting for it—” as Stevens put the telephone down and turned to Ratliff again without seeing him at all and said,

  “Maybe he never will.”

  “What?” Ratliff said. “What did he say?” Stevens told, repeated, the gist. “I reckon that’s all we can do,” Ratliff said.

  “Yes,” Stevens said. He thought Tomorrow will prove it. But I’ll wait still another day. Maybe until Monday.

  But he didn’t wait that long. On Saturday his office was always not busy with the county business he was paid a salary to handle, so much as constant with the social coming and going of the countrymen who had elected him to his office. Ratliff, who knew them all too, as well or even better, was unobtrusive in his chair against the wall where he could reach the telephone without even getting up; he even had another neat home-made sandwich, until at noon Stevens said,

  “Go on home and eat a decent meal, or come home with me. It won’t ring today.”

  “You must know why,” Ratliff said.

  “Yes. I’ll tell you Monday. No: tomorrow. Sunday will be appropriate. I’ll tell you tomorrow.”

  “So you know it’s all right now. All settled and finished now. Whether Flem knows it yet or not, he can sleep from now on.”

  “Don’t ask me yet,” Stevens said. “It’s like a thread; it’s true only until I — something breaks it.”

  “You was right all the time then. There wasn’t no need to tell her.”

  “There never has been,” Stevens said. “There never will be.”

  “That’s jest what I said,” Ratliff said. “There ain’t no need now.”

  “And what I just said was there never was any need to tell her and there never would have been, no matter what happened.”

  “Not even as a moral question?” Ratliff said.

  “Moral hell and question hell,” Stevens said. “It ain’t any question at all: it’s a fact: the fact that not you nor anybody else that wears hair is going to tell her that her act of pity and compassion and simple generosity murdered the man who passes as her father whether he is or not or a son of a bitch or not.”

  “All right, all right,” Ratliff said. “This here thread you jest mentioned. Maybe another good way to keep it from getting broke before time is to keep somebody handy to hear that telephone when it don’t ring at three o’clock this afternoon.”

  So they were both in the office at three o’clock. Then it was four. “I reckon we can go now,” Ratliff said.

  “Yes,” Stevens said.

  “But you still won’t tell me now,” Ratliff said.

  “Tomorrow,” Stevens said. “The call will have to come by then.”

  “So this here thread has got a telephone wire inside of it after all.”

  “So long,” Stevens said. “See you tomorrow.”

  And Central would know where to find him at any time on Sunday too and in fact until almost half-past two that afternoon he still believed he was going to spend the whole day at Rose Hill. His life had known other similar periods of unrest and trouble and uncertainty even if he had spent most of it as a bachelor; he could recall one or two of them when the anguish and unrest were due to the fact that he was a bachelor, that is, circumstances, conditions insisted on his continuing celibacy despite his own efforts to give it up. But back then he had had something to escape into: nepenthe, surcease: the project he had decreed for himself while at Harvard of translating the Old Testament back into the classic Greek of its first translating; after which he would teach himself Hebrew and really attain to purity; he had thought last night Why yes, I have that for tomorrow; I had forgotten about that. Then this morning he knew that that would not suffice any more, not ever again now. He meant of course the effort: not just the capacity to concentrate but to believe in it; he was too old now and the real tragedy of age is that no anguish is any longer grievous enough to demand, justify, any sacrifice.

  So it was not even two-thirty when with no surprise really he found himself getting into his car and still no surprise when, entering the empty Sunday afternoon Square, he saw Ratliff waiting at the foot of the office stairs, the two of them, in the office now, making no pretence as the clock crawled on to three. “What happened that we set exactly three o’clock as the magic deadline in this here business?” Ratliff said.

  “Does it matter?” Stevens said.

  “That’s right,” Ratliff said. “The main thing is not to jar or otherwise startle that-ere thread.” Then the courthouse clock struck its three heavy mellow blows into the Sabbath somnolence and for the first time Stevens realised how absolutely he had not just expected, but known, that his telephone would not ring before that hour. Then in that same second, instant, he knew why it had not rung; the fact that it had not rung was more proof of what it would have conveyed than the message itself would have been.

  “All right,” he said. “Mink is dead.”

  “What?” Ratliff said.

  “I don’t know where, and it doesn’t matter. Because we should have known from the first that three hours of being free would kill him, let alone three days of it.” He was talking rapidly, not babbling: “Don’t you see? a little kinless tieless frail alien animal that never really belonged to the human race to start with, let alone belonged in it, then locked up in a cage for thirty-eight years and now at sixty-three years old suddenly set free, shoved, flung out of safety and security into freedom like a krait or a fer-de-lance that is quick and deadly dangerous as long as it can stay inside the man-made man-tended tropic immunity of its glass box, but wouldn’t live even through the first hour set free, flung, hoicked on a pitchfork or a pair of long-handled tongs into a city street?”

  “Wait,” Ratliff said, “wait.”

  But Stevens didn’t even pause. “Of course we haven’t heard yet where he was found or how or by whom identified because nobody cares; maybe nobody has even noticed him yet. Because he’s free. He can even die wherever he wants to now. For thirty-eight years until last Thursday morning he couldn’t have had a pimple or a hangnail without it being in a record five minutes later. But he’s free now. Nobody cares when or where or how he dies provided his carrion doesn’t get under somebody’s feet. So we can go home now, until somebody does telephone and you and Flem can go and identify him.”

  “Yes,” Ratliff said. “Well—”

  “Give it up,” Stevens said. “Come on out home with me and have a drink.”

  “We could go by first and kind of bring Flem up to date,” Ratliff said. “Maybe even he might take a dram then.”

  “I’m not really an evil man,” Stevens said. “I wouldn’t have loaned Mink a gun to shoot Flem with; I might not even have just turned my head while Mink used his own. But neither am I going to lift my hand to interfere with Flem spending another day or two expecting any moment that Mink will.”

  He didn’t even tell the Sheriff his conviction that Mink was dead. The fact was, the Sheriff told him; he found the Sheriff in his courthouse office and told him his and Ratliff’s theory of Mink’s first objective and the reason for it and that the Memphis police would still check daily the places where Mink might try to buy a weapon.

  “So evidently he’s not in Memphis,” the Sheriff said. “That’s how many days now?”

  “Since Thursday.”

  “And he’s not in Frenchman’s Bend.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I drove out yesterday and looked around a little.”

  “So you did believe me, after all,” Stevens said.

  “I get per diem on my car,” the Sheriff said. “Yesterday was a nice day for a country drive. So he’s had four days now, to come a hundred miles. And he don’t seem to be in Memphis. And I know he ain’t in Frenchman’s Bend. And according to you, Mr Snopes knows he ain’t in Jefferson here. Maybe he’s dead.” Whereupon, now that another had stated it, spoke it aloud, Stevens knew that he himself had never believed it, hearing without listening while the Sheriff went on: “A damned little rattlesnake that they say never had any friends to begin with and nobody out at the Bend knows what became of his wife and his two girls or even when they disappeared. To be locked up for thirty-eight years and then suddenly turned out like you do a cat at night, with nowhere to go and nobody really wanting him out. Maybe he couldn’t stand being free. Maybe just freedom killed him. I’ve known it to happen.”

  “Yes,” Stevens said, “you’re probably right,” thinking quietly We won’t stop him. We can’t stop him — not all of us together, Memphis police and all. Maybe even a rattlesnake with destiny on his side don’t even need luck, let alone friends. He said: “Only we don’t know yet. We can’t count on that.”

  “I know,” the Sheriff said. “I deputised two men at Varner’s store yesterday that claim they remember him, would know him again. And I can have Mr Snopes followed, watched back and forth to the bank. But dammit, watch for who, what, when, where? I can’t put a man inside his house until he asks for it, can I? His daughter. Mrs Kohl. Maybe she could do something. You still don’t want her to know?”

  “You must give me your word,” Stevens said.

  “All right,” the Sheriff said. “I suppose your Jackson buddy will let you know the minute the Memphis police get any sort of a line, won’t he?”

  “Yes,” Stevens said. Though the call didn’t come until Wednesday. Ratliff had rung him up a little after ten Tuesday night and told him the news, and on his way to the office this morning he passed the bank whose drawn shades would not be raised today, and as he stood at his desk with the telephone in his hand he could see through his front window the sombre black-and-white-and-violet convolutions of tulle and ribbon and waxen asphodels fastened to the locked front door.

  “He found a ten-dollar pistol,” the classmate’s voice said. “Early Monday morning. It wasn’t really a properly licensed pawnshop, so they almost missed it. But under a little . . . persuasion the proprietor recalled the sale. But he said not to worry, the pistol was only technically still a pistol and it would require a good deal more nourishment than the three rounds of ammunition they threw in with it to make it function.”

  “Ha,” Stevens said without mirth. “Tell the proprietor from me he doesn’t know his own strength. The pistol was here last night. It functioned.”

  SEVENTEEN

  WHEN HE REACHED the Junction a little before eleven o’clock Monday morning, he was in the cab of another cattle truck.

  The truck was going on east into Alabama, but even if it had turned south here actually to pass through Jefferson, he would have left it at this point. If it had been a Yoknapatawpha County truck or driven by someone from the county or Jefferson, he would not have been in it at all.

  Until he stepped out of the store this morning with the pistol actually in his pocket, it had all seemed simple; he had only one problem: to get the weapon; after that, only geography stood between him and the moment when he would walk up to the man who had seen him sent to the penitentiary without raising a finger, who had not even had the decency and courage to say No to his bloodcry for help from kin to kin, and say, “Look at me, Flem,” and kill him.

  But now he was going to have to do what he called “figger” a little. It seemed to him that he was confronted by an almost insurmountable diffusion of obstacles. He was in thirty miles of Jefferson now, home, one same mutual north Mississippi hill-country people even if there was still a trivial county line to cross; it seemed to him that from now on anyone, everyone he met or who saw him, without even needing to recognise or remember his specific face and name, would know at once who he was and where he was going and what he intended to do. On second thought — an immediate, flashing, almost simultaneous second thought — he knew this to be a physical impossibility, yet he dared not risk it; that the thirty-eight years of being locked up in Parchman had atrophied, destroyed some quality in him which in people who has not been locked up had very likely got even sharper, and they would recognise, know, divine who he was without his even knowing it had happened. It’s because I done had to been away so long he thought. Like now I’m fixing to have to learn to talk all over again.

  He meant not talk, but think. As he walked along the highway (blacktop now, following a graded survey line, on which automobiles sped, which he remembered as winding dirt along which slow mules and wagons, or at best a saddle horse, followed the arbitrary and random ridges) it would be impossible to disguise his appearance — change his face, his expression, alter his familiar regional clothes or the way he walked; he entertained for a desperate and bizarre moment then dismissed it the idea of perhaps walking backward, at least whenever he heard a car or truck approaching, to give the impression that he was going the other way. So he would have to change his thinking, as you change the colour of the bulb inside the lantern even though you can’t change the lantern itself; as he walked he would have to hold himself unflagging and undeviating to thinking like he was someone who had never heard the name Snopes and the town Jefferson in his life, wasn’t even aware that if he kept on this road he would have to pass through it; to think instead like someone whose destination and goal was a hundred and more miles away and who in spirit was already there and only his carcass, his progressing legs, walked this particular stretch of road.

  Also, he was going to have to find somebody he could talk with without rousing suspicion, not to get information so much as to validate it. Until he left Parchman, was free at last, the goal for which he had bided patiently for thirty-eight years now practically in his hand, he believed he had got all the knowledge he would need from the, not day-to-day of course and not always year-to-year, but at least decade-to-decade trickling which had penetrated even into Parchman — how and where his cousin lived, how he spent his days, his habits, what time he came and went and where to and from; even who lived in or about his house with him. But now that the moment was almost here, that might not be enough. It might even be completely false, wrong, he thought again It’s having to been away so long like I had to been; having to been in the place I had to been as though he had spent those thirty-eight years not merely out of the world but out of life, so that even facts when they finally reached him had already ceased to be truth in order to have penetrated there; and, being inside Parchman walls, were per se inimical and betraying and fatal to him if he attempted to use them, depend on them, trust them.

  Third, there was the pistol. The road was empty now, running between walls of woods, no sound of traffic and no house or human in sight and he took the pistol out and looked at it again with something like despair. It had not looked very much like a pistol in the store this morning; here, in the afternoon’s sunny rural solitude and silence, it looked like nothing recognisable at all; looking, if anything, more than ever like the fossilised terrapin of his first impression. Yet he would have to test it, spend one of his three cartridges simply to find out if it really would shoot and for a moment, a second something nudged at his memory. It’s got to shoot he thought. It’s jest got to. There ain’t nothing else for hit to do. Old Moster jest punishes; He don’t play jokes.