Intruder in the Dust (12 page)

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 realize 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.

‘Stay on,’ Miss Habersham said. ‘I’ve got the tools and the flashlight.’

‘It’s a half mile yet,’ he said. ‘Up hill. This aint a sidesaddle but maybe you could sit sideways. Where’s the truck?’ he said to Aleck Sander.

‘Behind them bushes,’ Aleck Sander said. ‘We aint holding a parade. Leastways I aint.’

‘No, no,’ Miss Habersham said. ‘I can walk.’

‘We’ll save time,’ he said. ‘It must be after ten now. He’s gentle. That was just when Aleck Sander threw the pick and shovel——’

‘Of course,’ Miss Habersham said. She handed the tools to Aleck Sander and approached the horse.

‘I’m sorry it aint——’ he said.

‘Pah,’ she said and took the reins from him and before he could even brace his hand for her foot she put it in the stirrup and went up as light and fast as either he or Aleck Sander could have done, onto the horse astride so that he had just time to avert his face, feeling her looking down in the darkness at his turned head. ‘Pah,’ she said again. ‘I’m seventy years old. Besides, we’ll worry about my skirt after we are done with this:’—moving Highboy herself before he had hardly time to take hold of the bit, back into the road when Aleck Sander said:

‘Hush,’ They stopped, immobile in the long constant invisible flow of pine. ‘Mule coming down the hill,’ Aleck Sander said.

He began to turn the horse at once. ‘I dont hear anything,’ Miss Habersham said. ‘Are you sure?’

‘Yessum,’ he said, turning Highboy back off the road: ‘Aleck Sander’s sure.’ And standing at Highboy’s head among the trees and undergrowth, his other hand lying
on the horse’s nostrils in case he decided to nicker at the other animal, he heard it too—the horse or mule coming steadily down the road from the crest. It was unshod probably; actually the only sound he really heard was the creak of leather and he wondered (without doubting for one second that he had) how Aleck Sander had heard it at all the two minutes and more it had taken the animal to reach them. Then he could see it or that is where it was passing them—a blob, a movement, a darker shadow than shadow against the pale dirt of the road, going on down the hill, the soft steady shuffle and screak of leather dying away, then gone. But they waited a moment more.

‘What was that he was toting on the saddle in front of him?’ Aleck Sander said.

‘I couldn’t even see whether it was a man on it or not,’ he said.

‘I couldn’t see anything,’ Miss Habersham said. He led the horse back into the road, ‘Suppose——’ she said.

‘Aleck Sander will hear it in time,’ he said. So once more Highboy surged strong and steady at the steepening pitch, he carrying the shovel and clutching the leather under Miss Habersham’s thin hard calf on one side and Aleck Sander with the pick on the other, mounting, really moving quite fast through the strong heady vivid living smell of the pines which did something to the lungs, the breathing as (he imagined: he had never tasted it. He could have—the sip from the communion cup didn’t count because it was not only a sip but sour consecrated and sharp: the deathless blood of our Lord not to be tasted, moving not downward toward the stomach but upward and outward into the Allknowledge between good and evil and the choice and the repudiation and the acceptance forever—at the table at Thanksgiving and Christmas but he had never wanted to.) wine did to the
stomach. They were quite high now, the ridged land opening and tumbling away invisible in the dark yet with the sense, the sensation of height and space; by day he could have seen them, ridge on pine-dense ridge rolling away to the east and the north in similitude of the actual mountains in Carolina and before that in Scotland where his ancestors had come from but he hadn’t seen yet, his breath coming a little short now and he could not only hear but feel too the hard short blasts from Highboy’s lungs as he was actually trying to run at this slope too even carrying a rider and dragging two, Miss Habersham steadying him, holding him down until they came out onto the true crest and Aleck Sander said once more ‘Here’ and Miss Habersham turned the horse out of the road because he could still see nothing until they were off the road and only then he distinguished the clearing not because it was a clearing but because in a thin distillation of starlight there stood, canted a little where the earth had sunk, the narrow slab of a marble headstone. And he could hardly see the church (weathered, unpainted, of wood and not much larger than a single room) at all even when he led Highboy around behind it and tied the reins to a sapling and unsnapped the tie-rope from the bit and went back to where Miss Habersham and Aleck Sander were waiting.

‘It’ll be the only fresh one,’ he said. ‘Lucas said there hasn’t been a burying here since last winter.’

‘Yes,’ Miss Habersham said. ‘The flowers too. Aleck Sander’s already found it.’ But to make sure (he thought quietly, he didn’t know to whom:
I’m going to make a heap more mistakes but dont let this be one of them.
) he hooded the flashlight in his wadded handkerchief so that one thin rapid pencil touched for a second the raw mound with its meagre scattering of wreaths and bouquets and even
single blooms and then for another second the headstone adjacent to it, long enough to read the engraved name:
Amanda Workitt wife of N. B. Forrest Gowrie 1878 1926
then snapped it off and again the darkness came in and the strong scent of the pines and they stood for a moment beside the raw mound, doing nothing at all. ‘I hate this,’ Miss Habersham said.

‘You aint the one,’ Aleck Sander said. ‘It’s just a half a mile back to the truck. Down hill too.’

She moved; she was first. ‘Move the flowers,’ she said. ‘Carefully. Can you see?’

‘Yessum,’ Aleck Sander said. ‘Aint many. Looks like they throwed them at it too.’

‘But we wont,’ Miss Habersham said. ‘Move them carefully.’ And it must be nearing eleven now; they would not possibly have time; Aleck Sander was right: the thing to do was to go back to the truck and drive away, back to town and through town and on, not to stop, not even to have time to think for having to keep on driving, steering, keeping the truck going in order to keep on moving, never to come back; but then they had never had time, they had known that before they ever left Jefferson and he thought for an instant how if Aleck Sander really had meant it when he said he would not come and if he would have come alone in that case and then (quickly) he wouldn’t think about that at all, Aleck Sander using the shovel for the first shift while he used the pick though the dirt was still so loose they didn’t really need the pick (and if it hadn’t been still loose they couldn’t have done it at all even by daylight); two shovels would have done and faster too but it was too late for that now until suddenly Aleck Sander handed him the shovel and climbed out of the hole and vanished and (not even using
the flashlight) with that same sense beyond sight and hearing both which had realised that what Highboy smelled at the branch was quicksand and which had discovered the horse or the mule coming down the hill a good minute before either he or Miss Habersham could begin to hear it, returned with a short light board so that both of them had shovels now and he could hear the
chuck!
and then the faint swish as Aleck Sander thrust the board into the dirt and then flung the load up and outward, expelling his breath, saying ‘Hah!’ each time— a sound furious raging and restrained, going faster and faster until the ejaculation was almost as rapid as the beat of someone running: ‘Hah! … Hah! … Hah!’ so that he said over his shoulder:

‘Take it easy. We’re doing all right:’ straightened his own back for a moment to mop his sweating face and seeing as always Miss Habersham in motionless silhouette on the sky above him in the straight cotton dress and the round hat on the exact top of her head such as few people had seen in fifty years and probably no one at any time looking up out of a halfway rifled grave: more than halfway because spading again he heard the sudden thud of wood on wood, then Aleck Sander said sharply:

‘Go on. Get out of here and gimme room:’ and flung the board up and out and took, jerked the shovel from his hands and he climbed out of the pit and even as he stooped groping Miss Habersham handed him the coiled tie-rope.

‘The flashlight too,’ he said and she handed him that and he stood too while the strong hard immobile flow of the pines bleached the sweat from his body until his wet shirt felt cold on his flesh and invisible below him in the pit the shovel rasped and scraped on wood, and
stooping and hooding the light again he flashed it downward upon the unpainted lid of the pine box and switched it off.

‘All right,’ he said. ‘That’s enough. Get out:’ and Aleck Sander with the last shovel of dirt released the shovel too, flinging the whole thing arcing out of the pit like a javelin and followed it in one motion, and carrying the rope and the light he dropped into the pit and only then remembered he would need a hammer, crowbar—something to open the lid with and the only thing of that nature would be what Miss Habersham might happen to have in the truck a half-mile away and the walk back uphill, stooping to feel, examine the catch or whatever it was to be forced when he discovered that the lid was not fastened at all: so that straddling it, balancing himself on one foot he managed to open the lid up and back and prop it with one elbow while he shook the rope out and found the end and snapped on the flashlight and pointed it down and then said, ‘Wait.’ He said, ‘Wait.’ He was still saying ‘Wait’ when he finally heard Miss Habersham speaking in a hissing whisper: