“Not if. When.”
“All right,” Mitch said. He always had to be tougher than anybody else, he thought. I guess being tough was the only religion he ever had. And I reckon it’s as good as any, if it lasts. Got help you, though, if it ever quits on you. “All right, then. When.”
Sewell looked at him. “You still got a shovel on this shirt-tail farm? Or has he sold that too?”
Twenty-one
Mitch nodded his head, and the thing was done.
There had always been a deep and unspoken understanding between them. So unlike in many ways, the one corrupt, professionally violent, and criminal, and the other with his bitter honesty and a sort of harsh and thorn- protected, inarticulate capacity for love, they had always been able to meet on this common ground of a hard and unflinching realism. Courage was a quality each recognized and respected in the other; perhaps it had been passed on to them by their mother as valor is said to be in the breeding of fighting bulls, or perhaps it had been forced upon them by long association with the pitiful contrast of their father’s weakness. At any rate, they understood each other now, and nodded, glad there had to be no further talk.
For Sewell there was in it the final guarantee that he would never be taken alive to go to the electric chair, and the grisly humor of one last supreme victory over the forces of the law he hated. The five-hundred-dollar reward forever unclaimed by any money-hungry deputy and the forever unsolved mystery of his disappearance would constitute the farewell expression of contempt he would leave them. Mitch had enough insight into the working of his brother’s mind to be aware of this, but for him the reasons were different, although they came to the same conclusion.
There was a proud, unbending strain of clannishness in him, clannishness in the true sense of love and loyalty to family, which excluded the law, or at least came first, before the law. If Sewell owed a debt to law and to society for his misdeeds—and Mitch was too honest to deny this—Sewell would have paid it when he died, as surely as if he had paid it on the gallows or in the electric chair, and with the payment of this debt what was left of Sewell or the memory of Sewell was no longer society’s concern. It was strictly a matter for his family. And since, besides himself, the family consisted of a half-demented old man who lived in a dream and a girl too young to understand and too vulnerable to grief, he would accept the full responsibility. Damn the law now that the debt was being paid; it no longer had any concern in the matter. Damn the radio and newspapers, the publicity, the tumult, and the money-hungry scramble for reward. There had been enough of Roman carnival. It could end here in a hidden grave on this remaining and pitiful remnant of the land the Neelys still possessed.
He crouched now, wooden-faced, quiet, unwinking, below the edge of the sheltering raincoat and looked at Sewell, half ashamed of the weakness of his outburst a few minutes ago. There for a moment it had been hard to take, almost too hard, but now it was over and the grief was contained where it should be, below the surface and out of sight.
“How do you feel now?” he asked.
“O.K.,” Sewell replied. They were both aware of the lie.
“Can I get you anything?”
“No. I wish I had a cigarette, but I reckon yours are ruined too.”
“The tobacco’s still dry. It’s in a can. But the papers are wet.”
“It don’t matter.”
“I’ll run up to the house and get some more papers.”
“Never mind,” Sewell said.
“It won’t take a minute.”
He slid backward out of the dead tree and stood up in the rain. For a moment his gaze swung outward over the water backed up below him. What was it doing? Was it still rising, or had it reached the crest and begun to fall? Then he turned away; there was no time for it now. Just for an instant a great bitterness welled up in him. It seemed somehow that for a period of time that went back farther than he could remember—and was actually just since daybreak this morning—he had been caught up in one desperate and inconclusive struggle after another. First there had been the argument with Jessie, which he had had to abandon in a hopeless mess when he ran to fight the rising water trying to engulf the crop, and now in turn that was swallowed up in the larger disaster of Sewell. Maybe the old man’s right, he thought. The thing to do is to find a world of your own. Then he shook it off and started up the hill toward the house.
* * *
The cars had been arriving and departing since mid-morning. Three of them had come and gone by now, and there was one still parked in the front yard while its two occupants searched the river bottom. As each arrived and began to disgorge its slickered, white-hatted men with rifles, Cass would leap up from beside the radio and run out into the rain in an antic frenzy of lamentation with the burlesque and monstrous hat athwart his head.
“He’s drowned,” he would wail. “It said on the radio He didn’t come up no more. I’m his daddy and I tried to raise him up a Christian, but he’s drowned in the river.”
“We don’t know,” the men would say. “And we don’t believe anything until we see it.”
“But it said so on the radio,” he would cry out, trotting after them as far as the barn and unable to grasp the fact that these men in the field were the ones who fed the information in the first place into radio’s all devouring gut and were uninterested in its digestive rumblings.
And then, as they left him, he would stand for a moment lost and uncertain in the rain and call out after them the repeated theme and password of his incipient madness: “I’m his daddy. He was my boy.” Whether this was a misguided bid for fame or the tortured admission of a sense of guilt they had no way of knowing—if they cared.
Joy sulked in her room and looked with contempt upon all this frenetic exhibitionism. I’m only his wife, she thought. Nobody cares enough to ask me how I feel. The silly old idiot, making a fool of himself like that. I think he’s going nuts. But you’d think somebody might have heard that he had a wife.
The last car, which had a press sticker on the windshield, rolled into the yard in midafternoon carrying two men, neither of whom had raincoats. They got out and ran up on the porch, one of them carrying a bulky camera case. The reporter was a lean-faced young man with closely cropped dark hair and alert gray eyes, and an air of eager impatience about him like a hunting dog on a frosty morning. The photographer was older, around forty, sloppily dressed in an old gray suit with food stains on the vest. The vest itself was closed with only one of its buttons, which was in the wrong buttonhole, causing it to extend down some two inches lower on one side than on the other. He was dark-haired too, but the hair was long, with a few strands of gray, and would never stay combed, springing up wildly on both sides of the part and giving him a perpetual air of having just got out of bed. The face was gaunt, long-jawed, with cavernous eye sockets, and the eyes themselves were gray, with an expression of detached and somewhat cynical boredom. His name was Lambeth, and he was half drunk.
Cass was sitting on the bed in the front room listening to the radio when they arrived. Springing up, he ran into the hall and onto the front porch just as they leaped upon it from out of the rain.
“There’s news coming in.” he said excitedly, pausing only for an instant in his headlong orbit. “Got to listen to the news. I’ll talk to you in a minute.” Then he whirled and was gone, disappearing through the open window back into his room again.
They started, and looked at each other. They could hear the radio’s voice inside the room.
“Looks like one of the listening audience,” Lambeth said, unslinging the camera case and leaning boredly against the wall.
The reporter walked to the window and looked in. Cass was seated on the edge of the bed with his face pushed up in front of the radio, rapt, intent, unmoving, while the comic and improbable hat dripped water onto the floor.
“Are you Mr. Neely?” he asked.
“Can’t talk to you now,” Cass said, frowning.
