“Looks like it,” Ratliff would say. “Mawnin, Linda.”
“Howdy, V.K.,” she would answer in her deaf voice but almost exactly with Stevens’s inflection: who could not have heard him greet Ratliff since, and even he could not remember when she could have heard him before. Then Stevens would produce the gold lighter monogrammed G L S though L was not his initial, and light her cigarette, then at the cabinet above the wash basin he and Ratliff would assemble the three thick tumblers and the sugar basin and the single spoon and a sliced lemon and Ratliff would produce from his clothing somewhere the flask of corn whiskey a little of which old Mr Calvin Bookwright still made and aged each year and shared now and then with the few people tactful enough to retain his precarious irascible friendship. Then, Linda with her cigarette and Stevens with his cob pipe, the three of them would sit and sip the toddies, Stevens still talking and scribbling now and then on the pad for her to answer, until she would set down her empty glass and rise and say good-bye and leave them. Then Ratliff said:
“So you aint told Flem yet.” Stevens smoked. “But then of course you dont need to, being as it’s pretty well over the county now that Mink Snopes’s cousin Linda or niece Linda or whichever it is, is getting him out.” Stevens smoked. Ratliff picked up one of the toddy glasses. “You want another one?”
“No much obliged,” Stevens said.
“So you aint lost your voice,” Ratliff said. “Except, maybe back there in that vault in the bank where he would have to be counting his money, he cant hear what’s going on. Except maybe that one trip he would have to make outside.” Stevens smoked. “To go across to the sheriff’s office.” Stevens smoked. “You right sho you dont want another toddy?”
“All right,” Stevens said. “Why?”
“That’s what I’m asking you. You’d a thought the first thing Flem would a done would been to go to the sheriff and remind him of them final words of Mink’s before Judge Long invited him to Parchman. Only he aint done that. Maybe because at least Linda told him about them two hundred and fifty dollars and even Flem Snopes can grab a straw when there aint nothing else in sight? Because naturally Flem cant walk right up to her and write on that tablet, The minute you let that durn little water moccasin out he’s going to come straight back here and pay you up to date for your maw’s grave and all the rest of it that these Jefferson meddlers have probably already persuaded you I was to blame for; naturally he dont dare risk putting no such idea as that in her head and have her grab a-holt of you and go to Parchman and take him out tonight and have him back in Jefferson by breakfast tomorrow, when as it is he’s still got three more weeks, during which anything might happen: Linda or Mink or the Governor or the pardon board might die or Parchman itself might blow up. When did you say it would be?”
“When what will be?” Stevens said.
“The day they will let him out.”
“Oh. Some time after the twentieth. Probably the twenty-sixth.”
“The twenty-sixth,” Ratliff said. “And you’re going down there before?”
“Next week,” Stevens said. “To leave the money and talk with the Warden myself. That he is not to touch the money until he promises to leave Mississippi before sundown and never come back.”
“In that case,” Ratliff said, “everything’s all right. Especially if I—” He stopped.
“If you what?” Stevens said.
“Nothing,” Ratliff said. “Fate, and destiny, and luck, and hope, and all of us mixed up in it—us and Linda and Flem and that durn little half-starved wildcat down there in Parchman, all mixed up in the same luck and destiny and fate and hope until cant none of us tell where it stops and we begin. Especially the hope. I mind I used to think that hope was about all folks had, only now I’m beginning to believe that that’s about all anybody needs—jest hope. The pore son of a bitch over yonder in that bank vault counting his money because that’s the one place on earth Mink Snopes cant reach him in, and long as he’s got to stay in it he might as well count money to be doing something, have something to do. And I wonder if maybe he wouldn’t give Linda back her two hundred and fifty dollars without even charging her no interest on it, for them two years of pardon. And I wonder jest how much of the rest of the money in that vault he would pay to have another twenty years added onto them. Or maybe jest ten more. Or maybe jest one more.”
Ten days later Stevens was in the Warden’s office at the state penitentiary. He had the money with him— twenty-five ten-dollar notes, quite new. “You dont want to see him yourself?” the Warden said.
“No,” Stevens said. “You can do it. Anybody can. Simply offer him his choice: take the pardon and the two hundred and fifty dollars and get out of Mississippi as fast as he can, plus another two hundred and fifty every three months for the rest of his life if he never crosses the state line again; or stay here in Parchman another two years and rot and be damned to him.”
“Well, that ought to do it,” the Warden said. “It certainly would with me. Why is it whoever owns the two hundred and fifty dollars dont want him to come back home so bad?”
Stevens said rapidly, “Nothing to come back to. Family gone and scattered, wife died twenty-five or thirty years ago and nobody knows what became of his two daughters. Even the tenant house he lived in either collapsed of itself or maybe somebody found it and chopped it up and hauled it away for firewood.”
“That’s funny,” the Warden said. “Almost anybody in Mississippi has got at least one cousin. In fact, it’s hard not to have one.”
“Oh, distant connections, relations,” Stevens said. “Yes, it seems to have been the usual bignd scatterttered country clan.”
“So one of these big scattered connections dont want him back home enough to pay two hundred and fifty dollars for it.”
“He’s mad,” Stevens said. “Somebody here during the last thirty-eight years must have had that idea occur to them and suggested it to you even if you hadn’t noticed it yourself.”
“We’re all mad here,” the Warden said. “Even the prisoners too. Maybe it’s the climate. I wouldn’t worry, if I were you. They all make these threats at the time—big threats, against the judge or the prosecuting lawyer or a witness that stood right up in public and told something that any decent man would have kept to himself; big threats: I notice there’s no place on earth where a man can be as loud and dangerous as handcuffed to a policeman. But even one year is a long time sometimes. And he’s had thirty-eight of them. So he dont get the pardon until he agrees to accept the money. Why do you know he wont take the money and double-cross you?”
