A Fable

was nobody else in the room, or in fact as though he was not even speaking aloud:

‘Five men. And you a sworn officer of the law, armed. You might even draw your pistol. They’re not dangerous, if you’re careful.’

‘Yes,’ he said, and turned again and stopped again, not looking back: just stopping as he had turned. ‘That charge.’

‘Vagrancy,’ the lawyer said.

‘Vagrancy?’ he said. ‘A man owning half of forty-five thousand dollars?’

‘Pah,’ the lawyer said. ‘He doesn’t own half of anything, even one dollar. Go on.’ But now it was he who didn’t move; maybe he didn’t look back, but he didn’t move either, talking himself this time, and calm enough too:

‘Because this thing is all wrong. It’s backwards. The law spirits a nigger prisoner out of jail and out of town, to protect him from a mob that wants to take him out and burn him. All these folks want to do is to set this one free.’

‘Dont you think the law should cut both ways?’ the lawyer said. ‘Dont you think it should protect people who didn’t steal forty-five thousand dollars too?’

‘Yes,’ the turnkey said; and now he looked at the lawyer, his hand on the doorknob again but not turning it yet. ‘Only that aint the question I want to ask anyway. And I reckon you got an answer to this one too and I hope it’s a good one—’ speaking calm and slow and clear himself too: ‘This is all to it. I just take him to Blankton long enough to get a legal charge on the books. Then he can go.’

‘Look at his face,’ the lawyer said. ‘He hasn’t got any money. He doesn’t even know where any is. Neither of them do, because there never was any and what little there might have been, that cockney swipe threw away long ago on whores and whisky.’

‘You still aint answered,’ the turnkey said. ‘As soon as the charge is on the books, he can go.’

‘Yes,’ the lawyer said. ‘Lock the courtroom doors first. Then come back for the nigger.’ Then the turnkey opened the door; the five men stood there but he didn’t even falter: on through and past them; then suddenly, instead of following the corridor to the courtroom’s rear door as the lawyer had ordered him, he turned toward the stairs, moving fast now, not running: just moving fast, down the stairs and along the hall to the office of his wife’s uncle-in-law, deserted now, and into the office, around the partition and straight to the drawer and opened it and without even faltering, took from beneath the mass of old discharged warrants and incomplete subpoenas and paper clips and rubber stamps and corroded pen points, the spare office pistol and slipped it into the empty holster and returned to the hall and mounted the opposite stairway which brought him to the main courtroom doors and drew them quietly to even as a face, then three, then a dozen, turned to look at him, and turned the key in the lock and withdrew it and put it into his pocket, already hurrying again, even running now, back to the judge’s chambers where the lawyer had put the receiver back on its hook and pushed the telephone away and reached for the cigar in the ashtray and actually looked for the first time at the Negro, drawing the cigar to life in one slow inhale-exhale and through the smoke for the first time examined the calm no-aged Roman senator’s face framed in a narrow unclosed circlet of grizzled hair clasping the skull like a caesar’s laurels above the aged worn carefully brushed carefully mended frock coat, and then spoke, the two of them in succinct flat poste- riposte that was almost monotone:

‘You haven’t got any money, have you?’

‘No.’

‘You dont even know where any is, do you?’

‘No.’

‘Because there’s not any. There never was. And even that little, your white bully boy threw away before you even saw it——’

‘You’re wrong. And you believe you’re wrong too. Because I know——’

‘All right. Maybe it was even a whole hundred dollars.’

‘More than that.’

‘More than thirty thousand dollars?’ and only the faintest hesitation here; no faulting: only an interval: the voice still strong, still invincibly unshaken and unshakable:

‘Yes.’

‘How much more than thirty thousand dollars?.… All right. How much more than a hundred dollars? … Did you ever have a hundred dollars? Ever see a hundred dollars? … All right. You know it’s more than a hundred dollars, but you dont know how much more. Is that it?’

‘Yes. But you dont need to worry——’

‘And you came back to get your half of the hundred dollars anyway.’

‘I came back to tell him goodbye before he goes back home.’

‘Back home?’ the lawyer said quickly. ‘You mean, England? Did he tell you that?’ and the other, insuperably calm, insuperably intractable:

‘How could he told me? Because he wouldn’t need to. When a man comes to the place where he aint got anything left worth spending or losing, he always goes back home. But you dont need to worry, because I know what you’re fixing to do: lock me up in the jail until he hears about it in the newspapers and comes back. And you’re right, because that’s what he’ll do, because he needs me too. And you dont need to worry about how much money it is; it’ll be enough for all the lawyers too.’

‘Like the loaves and the fishes?’ the lawyer said. But this time it was not an interval; there was no answer at all, serenely nothing, and the interval was the lawyer’s to put an end to: ‘So he’s the one who needs you. Yet he’s the one who has the forty thousand dollars. How can anyone with forty thousand dollars need you?’ and again the interval, intractable and serene, again the lawyer’s to break: ‘Are you an ordained minister?’

‘I dont know. I bears witness.’

‘To what? God?’