domesticity or anyway uxoriousness: bigamy, rifling the sect’s funds for a woman: his wife or someone else’s or, in an occasional desperate case, a professional prostitute.
“I didn’t need no church,” he said. “I done it in confidence.”
“In confidence?” the Warden said.
“Yes,” he said, almost impatiently. “You dont need to write God a letter. He has done already seen inside you long before He would even need to bother to read it. Because a man will learn a little sense in time even outside. But he learns it quick in here. That when a Judgment powerful enough to help you, will help you if all you got to do is jest take back and accept it, you are a fool not to.”
“So He will take care of Stillwell for you,” the Warden said.
“Why not? What’s He got against me?”
“Thou shalt not kill,” the Warden said.
“Why didn’t He tell Houston that? I never went all the way in to Jefferson to have to sleep on a bench in the depot jest to try to buy them shells, until Houston made me.”
“Well I’ll be damned,” the Warden said. “I will be eternally damned. You’ll be out of here in three more years anyway but if I had my way you’d be out of here now, today, before whatever the hell it is that makes you tick starts looking cross-eyed at me. I dont want to spend the rest of my life even thinking somebody is thinking the kind of hopes about me you wish about folks that get in your way. Go on now. Get back to work.”
So when it was only October, no holiday valentine or Christmas card month that he knew of, when the Warden sent for him, he was not even surprised. The Warden sat looking at him for maybe half a minute, with something not just aghast but almost respectful in the look, then said: “I will be damned.” It was a telegram this time. “It’s from the Chief of Police in San Diego, California. There was a church in the Mexican quarter. They had stopped using it as a church, had a new one or something. Anyway it had been deconsecrated, so what went on inside it since, even the police haven’t quite caught up with yet. Last week it fell down. They dont know why: it just fell down all of a sudden. They found a man in it—what was left of him. This is what the telegram says: ‘Fingerprints F.B.I. identification your man Number 08213 Shuford H. Stillwell.’ ” The Warden folded the telegram back into the envelope and put it back into the drawer. “Tell me again about that church you said you used to go to before Houston made you kill him.”
He didn’t answer that at all. He just drew a long breath and exhaled it. “I can go now,” he said. “I can be free.”
“Not right this minute,” the Warden said. “It will take a month or two. The petition will have to be got up and sent to the Governor. Then he will ask for my recommendation. Then he will sign the pardon.”
“The petition?” he said.
“You got in here by law,” the Warden said. “You’ll have to get out by law.”
“A petition,” he said.
“That your family will have a lawyer draw up, asking the Governor to issue a pardon. Your wife—but that’s right, she’s dead. One of your daughters then.”
“Likely they done married away too by now.”
“All right,” the Warden said. Then he said, “Hell, man, you’re already good as out. Your cousin, whatever he is, right there in Jackson now in the legislature—Egglestone Snopes, that got beat for Congress two years ago?”
He didn’t move, his head bent a little; he said, “Then I reckon I’ll stay here after all.” Because how could he tell ay here aftanger:
“Write your sheriff yourself,” the Warden said. “I’ll write the letter for you.”
“Hub Hampton that sent me here is dead.”
“You’ve still got a sheriff, haven’t you? What’s the matter with you? Have forty years in here scared you for good of fresh air and sunshine?”
“Thirty-eight years this coming summer,” he said.
“All right. Thirty-eight. How old are you?”
“I was born in eighty-three,” he said.
“So you’ve been here ever since you were twenty-five years old.” “I dont know. I never counted.”
“All right,” the Warden said. “Beat it. When you say the word I’ll write a letter to your sheriff.”
“I reckon I’ll stay,” he said. But he was wrong. Five months later the petition lay on the Warden’s desk.
“Who is Linda Snopes Kohl?” the Warden said.
He stood completely still for quite a long time. “Her paw’s a rich banker in Jefferson. His and my grandpaw had two sets of chillen.”
“She was the member of your family that signed the petition to the Governor to let you out.”
“You mean the sheriff sent for her to come and sign it?”
“How could he? You wouldn’t let me write the sheriff.”
“Yes,” he said. He looked down at the paper which he could not read. It was upside down to him, though that meant nothing either. “Show me where the ones signed to not let me out”
“What?” the Warden said.
“The ones that dont want me out.”
