“I’m not hungry,” the woman said.
“You go on like I told you,” Goodwin said.
“Lee.”
“Come,” Horace said. “You can come back afterward.”
Outside, in the fresh morning, he began to breathe deeply. “Fill your lungs,” he said. “A night in that place would give anyone the jim-jams. The idea of three grown people.… My Lord, sometimes I believe that we are all children, except children themselves. But today will be the last. By noon he’ll walk out of there a free man: do you realise that?”
They walked on in the fresh sunlight, beneath the high, soft sky. High against the blue fat little clouds blew up from the south-west, and the cool steady breeze shivered and twinkled in the locusts where the blooms had long since fallen.
“I dont know how you’ll get paid,” she said.
“Forget it. I’ve been paid. You wont understand it, but my soul has served an apprenticeship that has lasted for forty-three years. Forty-three years. Half again as long as you have lived. So you see that folly, as well as poverty, cares for its own.”
“And you know that he—that—”
“Stop it, now. We dreamed that away, too. God is foolish at times, but at least He’s a gentleman. Dont you know that?”
“I always thought of Him as a man,” the woman said.
The bell was already ringing when Horace crossed the square toward the courthouse. Already the square was filled with wagons and cars, and the overalls and khaki thronged slowly beneath the gothic entrance of the building. Overhead the clock was striking nine as he mounted the stairs.
The broad double doors at the head of the cramped stair were open. From beyond them came a steady preliminary stir of people settling themselves. Above the seat-backs Horace could see their heads—bald heads, gray heads, shaggy heads and heads trimmed to recent feather-edge above sunbaked necks, oiled heads above urban collars and here and there a sunbonnet or a flowered hat.
The hum of their voices and movements came back upon the steady draft which blew through the door. The air entered the open windows and blew over the heads and back to Horace in the door, laden with smells of tobacco and stale sweat and the earth and with that unmistakable odor of courtrooms; that musty odor of spent lusts and greeds and bickerings and bitterness, and withal a certain clumsy stability in lieu of anything better. The windows gave upon balconies close under the arched porticoes. The breeze drew through them, bearing the chirp and coo of sparrows and pigeons that nested in the eaves, and now and then the sound of a motor horn from the square below, rising out of and sinking back into a hollow rumble of feet in the corridor below and on the stairs.
The Bench was empty. At one side, at the long table, he could see Goodwin’s black head and gaunt brown face, and the woman’s gray hat. At the other end of the table sat a man picking his teeth. His skull was capped closely by tightly-curled black hair thinning upon a bald spot. He had a long, pale nose. He wore a tan palm beach suit; upon the table near him lay a smart leather brief-case and a straw hat with a red-and-tan band, and he gazed lazily out a window above the ranked heads, picking his teeth. Horace stopped just within the door. “It’s a lawyer,” he said. “A Jew lawyer from Memphis.” Then he was looking at the backs of the heads about the table, where the witnesses and such would be. “I know what I’ll find before I find it,” he said. “She will have on a black hat.”
He walked up the aisle. From beyond the balcony window where the sound of the bell seemed to be and where beneath the eaves the guttural pigeons crooned, the voice of the bailiff came:
“The honorable Circuit Court of Yoknapatawpha county is now open according to law.……”
Temple had on a black hat. The clerk called her name twice before she moved and took the stand. After a while Horace realised that he was being spoken to, a little testily, by the Court.
“Is this your witness, Mr Benbow?”
“It is, your Honor.”
“You wish her sworn and recorded?”
“I do, your Honor.”
Beyond the window, beneath the unhurried pigeons, the bailiff’s voice still droned, reiterant, importunate, and detached, though the sound of the bell had ceased.
28
The district attorney faced the jury. “I offer as evidence this object which was found at the scene of the crime.” He held in his hand a corn-cob. It appeared to have been dipped in dark brownish paint. “The reason this was not offered sooner is that its bearing on the case was not made clear until the testimony of the defendant’s wife which I have just caused to be read aloud to you gentlemen from the record.
“You have just heard the testimony of the chemist and the gynecologist—who is, as you gentlemen know, an authority on the most sacred affairs of that most sacred thing in life: womanhood—who says that this is no longer a matter for the hangman, but for a bonfire of gasoline—”
“I object!” Horace said: “The prosecution is attempting to sway—”
“Sustained,” the Court said. “Strike out the phrase beginning ‘who says that’, mister clerk. You may instruct the jury to disregard it, Mr Benbow. Keep to the matter in hand, Mr District Attorney.”
The District Attorney bowed. He turned to the witness stand, where Temple sat. From beneath her black hat her hair escaped in tight red curls like clots of resin. The hat bore a rhinestone ornament. Upon her black satin lap lay a platinum bag. Her pale tan coat was open upon a shoulder knot of purple. Her hands lay motionless, palm-up
