'If they go out there after dark, they know damned well the chance they take.'
'Sheriff,' a merry deputy called, 'bet it's Jimmy and Glory and them all.' 'That Jimmy, never was no good,' said another. 'That one always be in trouble. Lord, he done got Glory and the chilluns drowned, too.'
'We'll ride over and check in the morning.'
'Sheriff,' Sam implored, 'am I to understand you'll do nothing?
Nothing at all. Possibly a child?'
'Ain't no children out there, sir. The children are all dead. These people flee their responsibilities and they make plumb fool decisions and take terrible chances, and they pay the price, most of them do.
Jimmy owed money, he should have stayed like a man and worked off his debt, ' of running off to welch on it.'
'Sir, I have to tell you: If I don't see evidence of public safety activity on your part, I will myself make a report to the governor of Mississippi and?'
'Haw!' laughed one of the deputies, 'ain't that a good one. He's gonna go to Jackson and tell old Bilbo ' a drownded nigger!'
The others hooted.
'Sir,' the sheriff said, 'tell who you wish whatever you want. In Jackson they consider that we do our job well down here. We handle the uppity niggers, or rather the prison does. We make the state run, and we do our part to keep order, and I'm a proud man because of it. Now I warned you to leave this town.'
'Mr. Leon,' Lazear suddenly proclaimed, 'don't make us leave now. I don't know de river in de dark; we end up dead as them nigs.'
About three different conversations seemed to explode simultaneously: the deputies continued to enjoy the humorous idea of Sam's audience at the state capital; Lazear enjoined the sheriff to let them stay the night so that he did not have to face the river in the dark; and Sam continued to demand action on the missing family.
The sheriff finally reached to his holster, pulled out a big revolver, and fired a single shot to quiet them all. Its boom clapped and whanged, rolled and reverberated. Total silence followed as all looked at the large man with the revolver in hand.
'Y'all, you git back on patrol,' he told his deputies. 'Old man, you stay here, moored to that dock. At first light, you be gone, or by God, I'll make you wish you had. And you, Mr. Lawyer, you git back on that boat, and don't you come off to step on the dirt of my county ever agin.
If you do, I will personally have a knot beaten into your head that will last forever, and you can tell all your fancy Arkansas people, I got this knot in Thebes, Mississip, on account of some drownded niggers. And I don't care to speak again on this subject, no more, never.'
'Sheriff, you are making a big mistake.'
'Jed, you stay down here, make sure these two don't roam. And make sure they put off with the light. They give you any trouble, you can whip up on them any old way you want. Now I'm going home to get my supper.'
Jed detached himself from his chums and swaggered down. He was a big op boy, with three guns, and cords and leathers and belts everywhere.
He looked just dumb enough to take all this seriously, and wouldn't be con vincible else wise He'd as soon hit you with the club he carried as listen.
He spat a wad into the water, where it popped wetly as it hit.
'Don't you worry, Sheriff,' he said. 'I'll take care of these boys, you can bet on it.' sam awakened in the dark.
He had reached his conclusion at last.
He'd been building toward it for a long piece, fighting its implications, aware that he was troubling with the very stuff of his life, his destiny, his fate.
But now he knew he could not spend his time in Blue Eye, Arkansas, pretending to represent law and order, while three hundred miles away this chancre perpetuated itself, unseen, unmolested, uncontested.
He knew: Thebes must fall.
Somehow, some way, it must fall. In his mind, he sketched out a plan. It was orderly and well founded, almost certain to succeed. He would have to form a committee of well regarded, unassailably moral Southern prosecutors?he knew many of them?and very carefully review and accumulate the evidence. An unassailable report had to be created.
Then, carefully, copies of this document must be given to selected press, which would reveal the findings on the day that his committee presented the report to the governor of the state of Mississippi, the speaker of the house in the Mississippi state assembly, Mississippi's two senators and five congressmen, hell, maybe even, for the publicity value alone, Harry S. Damn Truman himself, or, since all this was some years off, whomsoever big wigged war general was in the White House.
It had to be done square and legal, one step at a time, with an eye toward reality, so that the final product had a Tightness to it that transcended the seething angers of the South. He wanted the white Southern mill worker and small-patch farmer, the sharecropper, the feed-store clerks, the small-town politicos, the damn women (if they could control their goddamn crying!), the Mac Whatevers and the Joneses and the Whites and the O'Whomevers; a new Confederacy, if you would, of the same of' boys who marched up Peahawk Ridge or across the wide-open ground at Gettysburg behind the fool Pickett or thrashed and perished in the cornfields of bloody Antietam. They could do it, for they had it within them, if they were ably led; they and they alone could bring Thebes down and make the world a better place.
But he knew this too: he had to start with a document.
It was all so much palaver without a piece of evidence, a piece of paper, that made it clear as a bell's last dying ding dong this is evil.
This is wrong. This must be stopped.
He had to have something. He knew it, and that there was no way around it.
He thought: I have to get into that store.
And then he thought: that is insane. It is in a prison, it is carefully guarded, it will not give up its secrets easy, it is a mile away down a dark and windy forest road that I have never traveled and, top it all, I am no man for breaking and entering. I would get caught, and if caught I would be in deep trouble.
He thought again: I need someone to help me. I need someone to take the risk, to get me a document.
Then he remembered the old lady whose chicken coop he'd rented. She spoke a gibberish at first, but as he listened more carefully and got used to the rhythms and strangenesses in her words, he had begun to understand her. It was she who told him about the Store. She must understand the legal underpinnings of Thebes County, the original crime that indebted its citizens to work for little or nothing for the benefit of boss men who kept his expenses in that way to a minimum while raking off the top, whose iron system of rule by violence lined his own pockets.
She must have a piece of paper. He remembered now, the weathered old face, the fierce eyes, the watchfulness; why, that old mama was the only one in the town whose spirit remained secretly intact, and Sam knew this to be in accordance with Negro ways, where authority frequently devolved on the sagacity of an old woman, who was smart and just and well-tempered by experience.
Sam squinted in the dark, and saw that it was near 4:00 a.m. If he could get by that behemoth on the dock, he could get to her house by 4:30 and back again by 5:00, and then he'd have it, something upon which to build. It was how a lawyer worked: go for the paper. Get the paper. Get the evidence. If there was any evidence.
He rose from his length of blanket on the prow of the boat, and carefully put on his shoes. Though it was warmish, he took his coat, which had been his pillow, and threw it on, to blot out the whiteness of his shirt. Rising craftily, he crept down the length of the boat, and stopped for just a second to listen to the easy sawing of old Lazear's aged lungs as he snoozed away in the cockpit, in some impossible position that no civilized being could find rest in. But Lazear snored as if lung-shot and producing death rattles, each a mighty shudder through bubbles of phlegm, but otherwise unwakeable.
Sam made the climb to the dock and discovered that the guardian deputy, of course, had grown bored with the passing of the nighttime hours and had departed for whatever recreation he wanted, probably a willing colored gal in a crib somewhere, for all the deputies had the look of men who're whup-ass on colored in the daylight and cuddle with it in the night.
Sam climbed the slope from the riverside area to what amounted to the town's main drag, not really much of
