He couldn’t have said why he didn’t tell. “I never seen who had it,” he answered. “I reckon hit all happened too quick.”
“That’s what Stillwell seems to think,” the Warden said. He took from his desk a slitted envelope and a sheet of cheap ruled paper, folded once or twice. “This came this morning. But that’s right: you cant read writing, can you?”
“No,” he said. The Warden unfolded the sheet.
“It was mailed yesterday in Texarkana. It says, ‘He’s going to have to explain Jake Barron’ ” (he was the other convict, whom the guard had killed) “ ‘to somebody someday so take good care of him. Maybe you better take good care of him anyway since there are some of us still inside.’ ” The Warden folded the letter back into the envelope and put it back into the drawer and closed the drawer. “So there you are. I cant let you go around loose inside here, where any of them can get at you. You’ve only got five more years; even though you didn’t stop all of them, probably on a recommendation from me, the Governor would let you out tomorrow. But I cant do that because Stillwell will kill you.”
“If Cap’m Jabbo” (the guard who shot) “had jest killed Stillwell too, I could go home tomorrow?” he said. “Couldn’t you trace out where he’s at by the letter, and send Cap’m Jabbo wherever that is?”
“You want the same man to kill Stillwell that kept Stillwell from killing you two nights ago?”
“Send somebody else then. It don’t seem fair for him to get away when I got to stay here five more years.” Then he said, “But hit’s all right. Maybe we did have at le one champion here, after all.”
“Champion?” the Warden said. “One what here?” But he didn’t answer that. And now for the first time he began to count off the days and months. He had never done this before, not with that original twenty years they had given him at the start back there in Jefferson, nor even with the second twenty years they had added onto it after he let Montgomery Ward persuade him into that woman’s mother hubbard and sunbonnet. Because nobody was to blame for that but himself; when he thought of Flem in connection with it, it was with a grudging admiration, almost pride that they were of the same blood; he would think, say aloud, without envy even: “That Flem Snopes. You cant beat him. There aint a man in Missippi nor the U.S. and A. both put together that can beat Flem Snopes.”
But this was different. He had tried himself to escape and had failed and had accepted the added twenty years of penalty without protest; he had spent fifteen of them not only never trying to escape again himself, but he had risked his life to foil ten others who planned to: as his reward for which he would have been freed the next day, only a trained guard with a shotgun in his hands let one of the ten plotters get free. So these last five years did not belong to him at all. He had discharged his forty years in good faith; it was not his fault that they actually added up to only thirty-five, and these five extra ones had been compounded onto him by a vicious, even a horseplayish, gratuitor.
That Christmas his (now: for the first time) slowly diminishing sentence began to be marked off for him. It was a Christmas card, postmarked in Mexico, addressed to him in care of the Warden, who read it to him; they both knew who it was from: “Four years now. Not as far as you think.” On Valentine’s Day it was homemade: the coarse ruled paper bearing, drawn apparently with a carpenter’s or a lumberman’s red crayon, a crude heart into which a revolver was firing. “You see?” the Warden said. “Even if your five years were up …”
“It aint five now,” he said. “Hit’s four years and six months and nineteen days. You mean, even then you wont let me out?”
“And have you killed before you could even get home?”
“Send out and ketch him.”
“Send where?” the Warden said. “Suppose you were outside and didn’t want to come back and knew I wanted to get you back. Where would I send to catch you?”
“Yes,” he said. “So there jest aint nothing no human man can do.”
“Yes,” the Warden said. “Give him time and he will do something else the police somewhere will catch him for.”
“Time,” he said. “Suppose a man aint got time jest to depend on time.”
“At least you have got your four years and six months and nineteen days before you have to worry about it.”
“Yes,” he said. “He’ll have that much time to work in.” Then Christmas again, another card with the Mexican postmark: “Three years now. Not near as far as you think.” He stood there, fragile and small and durable in the barred overalls, his face lowered a little, peaceful. “Still Mexico, I notice,” he said. “Maybe He will kill him there.”
“What?” the Warden said. “What did you say?”
He didn’t answer. He just stood there, peaceful, musing, serene. Then he said: “Before I had thatere cow trouble with Jack Houston, when I was still a boy, I used to go to church ever Sunday and Wednesday prayer meeting too with the lady that raised me until I—”
“Who were they?” the Warden said. “You said your mother died.”
“He was a son of a bitch. She wasn’t no kin a-tall. She was jest his wife.—ever Sunday until I—”
“Was his name Snopes?” the Warden said.
“He was my paw.—until I got big enough to burn out on God like you do when you think you are already growed up and dont need nothing from nobody. Then when you told me how by keeping nine of them ten fellers from breaking out I didn’t jest add five more years to my time, I fixed it so you wasn’t going to let me out a-tall, I taken it back.”
“Took what back?” the Warden said. “Back from who?” “I taken it back from God.”
“You mean you’ve rejoined the church since that night two years ago? No you haven’t. You’ve never been inside the chapel since you came here back in 1908.” Which was true. Though the present Warden and his predecessor had not really been surprised at that. What they had expected him to gravitate to was one of the small violent irreconcilable nonconformist non-everything and -everybody else which existed along with the regular prison religious establishment in probably all Southern rural penitentiaries—small fierce cliques and groups (this one called themselves Jehovah’s Shareholders) headed by self-ordained leaders who had reached prison through a curiously consistent pattern: by the conviction of crimes peculiar to the middle class, to respectability, originating in
