“I’ve got him,” she said. She started to say something else, looking at him quietly for a moment, but she went on. He turned out the light and followed and locked the door. She was already in the car. He got in.
“Hotel, Isom,” he said. “I never did learn to drive one,” he said. “Sometimes, when I think of all the time I have spent not learning to do things.……”
The street was narrow, quiet. It was paved now, though he could remember when, after a rain, it had been a canal of blackish substance half earth, half water, with murmuring gutters in which he and Narcissa paddled and splashed with tucked-up garments and muddy bottoms, after the crudest of whittled boats, or made loblollies by treading and treading in one spot with the intense oblivion of alchemists. He could remember when, innocent of concrete, the street was bordered on either side by paths of red brick tediously and unevenly laid and worn in rich, random maroon mosaic into the black earth which the noon sun never reached; at that moment, pressed into the concrete near the entrance of the drive, were the prints of his and his sister’s naked feet in the artificial stone.
The infrequent lamps mounted to crescendo beneath the arcade of a fillingstation at the corner. The woman leaned suddenly forward. “Stop here, please, boy,” she said. Isom put on the brakes. “I’ll get out here and walk,” she said.
“You’ll do nothing of the kind,” Horace said. “Go on, Isom.”
“No; wait,” the woman said. “We’ll be passing people that know you. And then the square.”
“Nonsense,” Horace said. “Go on, Isom.”
“You get out and wait, then,” she said. “He can come straight back.”
“You’ll do no such thing,” Horace said. “By heaven, I—Drive on, Isom!”
“You’d better,” the woman said. She sat back in the seat. Then she leaned forward again. “Listen. You’ve been kind. You mean all right, but—”
“You dont think I am lawyer enough, you mean?”
“I guess I’ve got just what was coming to me. There’s no use fighting it.”
“Certainly not, if you feel that way about it. But you dont. Or you’d have told Isom to drive you to the railroad station. Wouldn’t you?” She was looking down at the child, fretting the blanket about its face. “You get a good night’s rest and I’ll be in early tomorrow.” They passed the jail—a square building slashed harshly by pale slits of light. Only the central window was wide enough to be called a window, criss-crossed by slender bars. In it the negro murderer leaned; below along the fence a row of heads hatted and bare above work-thickened shoulders, and the blended voices swelled rich and sad into the soft, depthless evening, singing of heaven and being tired. “Dont you worry at all, now. Everybody knows Lee didn’t do it.”
They drew up to the hotel, where the drummers sat in chairs along the curb, listening to the singing. “I must—” the woman said. Horace got down and held the door open. She didn’t move. “Listen. I’ve got to tell—”
“Yes,” Horace said, extending his hand. “I know. I’ll be in early tomorrow.” He helped her down. They entered the hotel, the drummers turning to watch her legs, and went to the desk. The singing followed them, dimmed by the walls, the lights.
The woman stood quietly nearby, holding the child, until Horace had done.
“Listen,” she said. The porter went on with the key, toward the stairs. Horace touched her arm, turning her that way. “I’ve got to tell you,” she said.
“In the morning,” he said. “I’ll be in early,” he said, guiding her toward the stairs. Still she hung back, looking at him; then she freed her arm by turning to face him.
“All right, then,” she said. She said, in a low, level tone, her face bent a little toward the child: “We haven’t got any money. I’ll tell you now. That last batch Popeye didn’t—”
“Yes, yes,” Horace said; “first thing in the morning. I’ll be in by the time you finish breakfast. Goodnight.” He returned to the car, into the sound of the singing. “Home, Isom,” he said. They turned and passed the jail again and the leaning shape beyond the bars and the heads along the fence. Upon the barred and slitted wall the splotched shadow of the heaven tree shuddered and pulsed monstrously in scarce any wind; rich and sad, the singing fell behind. The car went on, smooth and swift, passing the narrow street. “Here,” Horace said, “where are you—” Isom clapped on the brakes.
“Miss Narcissa say to bring you back out home,” he said.
“Oh, she did?” Horace said. “That was kind of her. You can tell her I changed her mind.”
Isom backed and turned into the narrow street and then into the cedar drive, the lights lifting and boring ahead into the unpruned tunnel as though into the most profound blackness of the sea, as though among straying rigid shapes to which not even light could give color. The car stopped at the door and Horace got out. “You might tell her it was not to her I ran,” he said. “Can you remember that?”
17
The last trumpet-shaped bloom had fallen from the heaven tree at the corner of the jail yard. They lay thick, viscid underfoot, sweet and oversweet in the nostrils with a sweetness surfeitive and moribund, and at night now the ragged shadow of full-fledged leaves pulsed upon the barred window in shabby rise and fall. The window was in the general room, the white-washed walls of which were stained with dirty hands, scribbled and scratched over with names and dates and blasphemous and obscene doggerel in pencil or nail or knifeblade. Nightly the negro murderer leaned there, his face checkered by the shadow of the grating in the restless interstices of leaves, singing in chorus with those along the fence below.
Sometimes during the day he sang also, alone then save for the slowing passerby and ragamuffin boys and the garage men across the way. “One day mo! Aint no place fer you in heavum! Aint no place fer you in hell! Aint no place fer you in whitefolks’ jail! Nigger, whar you gwine to? Whar you gwine to, nigger?”
Each morning Isom fetched in a bottle of milk, which Horace delivered to the woman at the hotel, for the child. On Sunday afternoon he went out to his sister’s. He left the woman sitting on the cot in Goodwin’s cell, the child on her lap. Heretofore it had lain in that drugged apathy, its eyelids closed to thin crescents, but today it moved now and then in frail, galvanic jerks, whimpering.
