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needed to doze only now he couldn t; the desire to sleep was there but it was
awakefulness now he would have to combat and abate. It was after eight now;
one of the county schoolbusses passed as he prepared to drive Miss Habersham s
truck away from the curb and the street would be full of children too fresh
for Monday morning with books and paper bags of recess-time lunches and behind
the schoolbus was a string of cars and trucks stained with country mud and
dust so constant and unbroken that his uncle and his mother would already have
reached the jail before he ever managed to cut into it because Monday was
stock-auction day at the sales barns behind the Square and he could see them,
the empty cars and trucks rank on dense rank along the courthouse curb like
shoats at a feed-trough and the men with their stock-trader walking-sticks not
even stopping but gone straight across the Square and along the alley to the
sales barns to chew tobacco and unlighted cigars from pen to pen amid the
ammonia-reek of manure and liniment and the bawling of calves and the stamp
and sneeze of horses and mules and the secondhand wagons and plow gear and
guns and harness and watches and only the women (what few of them that is
since stock-sale day unlike Saturday was a man s time) remained about the
Square and the stores so that the Square itself would be empty except for the
parked cars and trucks until the men would come back for an hour at noon to
meet them at the cafes and restaurants.
Whereupon this time he jerked himself, no reflex now, not even out of sleep
but illusion, who had carried hypnosis right out of the house with him even
into the bright strong sun of day, even driving the pickup truck which before
last night he would not even have recognised yet which since last night had
become as inexpugnable a part of his memory and experience and breathing as
hiss of shoveled dirt or the scrape of a metal blade on a pine box would ever
be, through a mirage-vacuum in which not simply last night had not happened
but there had been no Saturday either, remembering now as if he had only this
moment seen it that there had been no children in the schoolbus but only grown
people and in the stream of cars and trucks following it and now following him
where he had finally cut in, a few of which even on stock-auction Monday (on
Saturday half of the flat open beds would have been jammed and packed with
them, men women and children in the cheap meagre finery in which they came to
town) should have carried Negroes, there had not been one dark face.
Nor one school-bound child on the street although he had heard without
listening enough of his uncle at the telephone to know that the superintendent
had called whether to have school today or not and his uncle had told him yes,
and in sight of the Square now he could see already three more of the yellow
busses supposed and intended to bring the county children in to school but
which their owner-contractor-operators translated on Saturdays and holidays
into pay-passenger transport and then the Square itself, the parked cars and
trucks as always as should be but the Square itself anything but empty: no
exodus of men toward the stock pens nor women into the stores so that as he
drove the pickup into the curb behind his uncle s car he could see already
where visible and sense where not a moil and mass of movement, one dense pulse
and hum filling the Square as when the crowd overflows the carnival midway or
the football field, flowing into the street and already massed along the side
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opposite to the jail until the head of it had already passed the blacksmith s
where he had stood yesterday trying to be invisible as if they were waiting
for a parade to pass (and almost in the middle of the street so that the still
unbroken stream of cars and trucks had to detour around them a clump of a
dozen or so more like the group in a reviewing stand in whose center in its
turn he recognized the badged official cap of the town marshal who at this
hour on this day would have been in front of the schoolhouse holding up
traffic for children to cross the street and he did not have to remember that
the marshal s name was Ingrum, a Beat Four Ingrum come to town as the apostate
sons of Beat Four occasionally did to marry a town girl and become barbers and
bailiffs and nightwatchmen as petty Ger-manic princelings would come down out
of their Brandenburg hills to marry the heiresses to European thrones) the men
and the women and not one child, the weathered country faces and sunburned
necks and backs of hands, the clean faded tieless earthcolored shirts and
pants and print cotton dresses thronging the Square and the street as though
the stores themselves were closed and locked, not even staring yet at the
blank front of the jail and the single barred window which had been empty and
silent too for going on forty-eight hours now but just gathering, condensing,
not expectant nor in anticipation nor even attentive yet but merely in that
pre-liminary settling down like the before-curtain in a theatre: and he
thought that was it: holiday: which meant a day for children yet here turned
upside down; and suddenly he real-ised that he had been completely wrong; it
was not Saturday which had never happened but only last night which to them
had not happened yet, that not only they didn t know about last night but
there was nobody, not even Hampton, who could have told them because they
would have refused to believe him; whereupon something like a skim or a veil
like that which crosses a chicken s eye and which he had not even known was
there went flick! from his own and he saw them for the first time the same
weathered still almost inattentive faces and the same faded clean cotton
shirts and pants and dresses but no crowd now waiting for the curtain to rise
on a stage s illusion but rather the one in the courtroom waiting for the
sheriff s officer to cry Oyez Oyez Oyez. This honor-able court; not even
impatient because the moment had not even come yet to sit in judgment not on
Lucas Beauchamp, they had already condemned him but on Beat Four, come not to
see what they called justice done nor even retribution ex-acted but to see
that Beat Four should not fail its white man s high estate.
So that he had stopped the truck was out and had already started to run when
he stopped himself: something of dignity something of pride remembering last
night when he had in-stigated and in a way led and anyway accompanied the
stroke which not one of the responsible elders but had failed even to
recognise its value, let alone its need, and something of caution too
remembering how his uncle had said almost noth-ing was enough to put a mob in
motion so perhaps even a child running toward the jail would have been enough: [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]