nothing that morning. Because Mr. Snopes got there before six o’clock, before Turl had got away. He sent for Turl and asked him if he had found that brass and Turl told him no.
“‘Why didn’t you find it?’ Mr. Snopes said.
“Turl didn’t look away, this time. ‘Because it ain’t no brass there. That’s the main reason.’
“‘How do you know there ain’t?’ Mr. Snopes says.
“And Turl looked him straight in them eyes. ‘Because Tom-Tom say it ain’t,’ Turl says.
“Maybe he ought to knew then. But a man will go to any length to fool himself; he will tell himself stuff and believe it that he would be downright mad with a fellow he had done trimmed for believing it. So now he sends for Tom-Tom.
“‘I ain’t got no brass,’ Tom-Tom says.
“‘Where is it, then?’
“‘It’s where you said you wanted it.’
“‘Where I said I wanted it when?’
“‘When you took them whistle valves off the boilers,’ Tom-Tom says.
“That’s what whipped him. He didn’t dare to fire neither one of them, you see. And so he’d have to see one of them there all day long every day, and know that the other one was there all night long every night; he would have to know that during every twenty-four hours that passed, one or the other of them was there, getting paid paid, mind you, by the hour for living half their lives right there under that tank with them four loads of brass in it that now belonged to him by right of purchase and which he couldn’t claim now because now he had done waited too late.
“It sure was too late. But next New Year it got later. Come New Year’s and the town got audited again; again them two spectacled fellows come down here and checked the books and went away and come back with not only the city clerk, but with Buck Conner too, with a warrant for Turl and Tom-Tom. And there they were, hemming and hawing, being sorry again, pushing one another in front to talk. It seems how they had made a mistake two years ago, and instead of three-hundred-and-four-fifty-two of this here evaporating brass, there was five-hundred-and-twenty-five dollars worth, leaving a net of over two-hundred-and-twenty dollars. And there was Buck Conner with the warrant, all ready to arrest Turl and Tom-Tom when he give the word, and it so happening that Turl and Tom-Tom was both in the boiler-room at that moment, changing shifts.
“So Snopes paid them. Dug down and hauled out the money and paid them the two-hundred-and-twenty and got his receipt. And about two hours later I happened to pass through the office. At first I didn’t see nobody because the light was off. So I thought maybe the bulb was burned out, seeing as that light burned all the time. But it wasn’t burned out; it was just turned out. Only before I turned it on I saw him, setting there. So I didn’t turn the light on. I just went on out and left him setting there, setting right still.”
VI
IN THOSE DAYS Snopes lived in a new little bungalow on the edge of town, and, when shortly after that New Year he resigned from the power plant, as the weather warmed into Spring they would see him quite often in his tiny grassless and treeless side yard. It was a locality of such other hopeless little houses inhabited half by Negroes, and washed clay gullies and ditches filled with scrapped automobiles and tin cans, and the prospect was not pleasing. Yet he spent quite a lot of his time there, sitting on the steps, not doing anything.
And so they wondered what he could be looking at there, since there was nothing to see above the massed trees which shaded the town itself except the low smudge of the power plant, and the water tank. And it too was condemned now, for the water had suddenly gone bad two years ago and the town now had a new reservoir underground. But the tank was a stout one and the water was still good to wash the streets with, and so the town let it stand, refusing at one time a quite liberal though anonymous offer to purchase and remove it.
So they wondered what Snopes was looking at. They didn’t know that he was contemplating his monument: that shaft taller than anything in sight and filled with transient and symbolical liquid that was not even fit to drink, but which, for the very reason of its impermanence, was more enduring through its fluidity and blind renewal than the brass which poisoned it, than columns of basalt or of lead.
Dry September
I
THROUGH THE BLOODY September twilight, aftermath of sixty-two rainless days, it had gone like a fire in dry grass: the rumor, the story, whatever it was. Something about Miss Minnie Cooper and a Negro. Attacked, insulted, frightened: none of them, gathered in the barber shop on that Saturday evening where the ceiling fan stirred, without freshening it, the vitiated air, sending back upon them, in recurrent surges of stale pomade and lotion, their own stale breath and odors, knew exactly what had happened.
“Except it wasn’t Will Mayes,” a barber said. He was a man of middle age; a thin, sand-colored man with a mild face, who was shaving a client. “I know Will Mayes. He’s a good nigger. And I know Miss Minnie Cooper, too.”
“What do you know about her?” a second barber said.
“Who is she?” the client said. “A young girl?”
“No,” the barber said. “She’s about forty, I reckon. She ain’t married. That’s why I don’t believe…”
“Believe, hell!” a hulking youth in a sweat-stained silk shirt said. “Wont you take a white woman’s word before a nigger’s?”
“I don’t believe Will Mayes did it,” the barber said. “I know Will Mayes.”
“Maybe you know who did it, then. Maybe you already got him out of town, you damn nigger-lover.”
“I don’t believe anybody did anything. I don’t believe anything happened. I leave it to you fellows if them ladies that get old without getting married don’t have notions that a man can’t ”
“Then you are a hell of a white man,” the client said. He moved under the cloth. The youth had sprung to his feet.
“You don’t?” he said. “Do you accuse a white woman of lying?”
The barber held the razor poised above the half-risen client. He did not look around.
“It’s this durn weather,” another said. “It’s enough to make a man do anything. Even to her.”
Nobody laughed. The barber said in his mild, stubborn tone: “I ain’t accusing nobody of nothing. I just know and you fellows know how a woman that never…”
“You damn nigger-lover!” the youth said.
“Shut up, Butch,” another said. “We’ll get the facts in plenty of time to act.”
“Who is? Who’s getting them?” the youth said. “Facts, hell!”
“You’re a fine white man,” the client said. “Ain’t you?”
In his frothy beard he looked like a desert rat in the moving pictures. “You tell them, Jack,” he said to the youth. “If there ain’t any white men in this town, you can count on me, even if I ain’t only a drummer and a stranger.”
“That’s right, boys,” the barber said. “Find out the truth first. I know Will Mayes.”
“Well, by God!” the youth shouted. “To think that a white man in this town…”
“Shut up, Butch,” the second speaker said. “We got plenty of time.”
The client sat up. He looked at the speaker. “Do you claim that anything excuses a nigger attacking a white woman? Do you mean to tell me you are a white man and you’ll stand for it? You better go back North where you came from. The South don’t want your kind here.”
