She told them about the white man on the road about daylight and how he had swapped shoes with her, taking in exchange a pair of her husband’s brogans which she was wearing at the time.
The sheriff listened.
“That happened right by a cotton house, didn’t it?” he said.
She told him Yes.
He returned to his men, to the leashed and eager dogs.
He looked down at the dogs while the men asked questions and then ceased, watching him.
They watched him put the pistol back into his pocket and then turn and kick the dogs, once each, heavily. “Get them durn eggsuckers on back to town,” he said.
But the sheriff was a good officer.
He knew as well as his men that he would return to the cotton house, where he believed that Christmas had been hidden all the while, though. he knew now that Christmas would not be there when they returned.
They had some trouble getting the dogs away from the cabin, so that it was in the hot brilliance of ten o’clock that they surrounded the cotton house carefully and skillfully and quietly and surprised it with pistols, quite by the rules and without any particular hope; and found one astonished and terrified field rat.
Nevertheless the sheriff had the dogs—they had refused to approach the cotton house at all; they refused to leave the road, leaning and straining against the collars with simultaneous and reverted heads pointed back down the road toward the cabin from which they had been recently dragged away—brought up.
It took two men by main strength to fetch them up, where as soon as the leashes were slacked, they sprang as one and rushed around the cotton house and through the very marks which the fugitive’s legs had left in the tall and still dewed weeds in the house’s shadow, and rushed leaping and straining back toward the road, dragging the two men for fifty yards before they succeeded in passing the leashes about a sapling and snubbing the dogs up.
This time the sheriff did not even kick them.
At last the noise and the alarms, the sound and fury of the hunt, dies away, dies out of his hearing.
He was not in the cotton house when the man and the dogs passed, as the sheriff believed.
He paused there only long enough to lace up the brogans: the black shoes, the black shoes smelling of negro.
They looked like they had been chopped out of iron ore with a dull axe.
Looking down at the harsh, crude, clumsy shapelessness of them, he said “Hah” through his teeth.
It seemed to him that he could see himself being hunted by white men at last into the black abyss which had been waiting, trying, for thirty years to drown him and into which now and at last he had actually entered, bearing now upon his ankles the definite and ineradicable gauge of its upward moving.
It is just dawn, daylight: that gray and lonely suspension filled with the peaceful and tentative waking of birds.
The air, inbreathed, is like spring water.
He breathes deep and slow, feeling with each breath himself diffuse in the neutral grayness, becoming one with loneliness and quiet that has never known fury or despair.
‘That was all I wanted,’ he thinks in a quiet and slow amazement. ‘That was all, for thirty years.
That didn’t seem to be a whole lot to ask in thirty years.’
He has not slept very much since Wednesday, and now Wednesday has come and gone again, though he does not know it.
When he thinks about time, it seems to him now that for thirty years he has lived inside an orderly parade of named and numbered days like fence pickets, and that one night he went to sleep and when he waked up he was outside of them.
For a time after he fled on that Friday night he tried to keep up with the days, after the old habit.
Once, after lying all night in a haystack, he was awake in time to watch the farm house wake.
He saw before daylight a lamp come yellowly alive in the kitchen, and then in the gray yetdark he heard the slow, clapping sound of an axe, and movement, manmovement, among the waking cattle sounds in the nearby barn.
Then he could smell smoke, and food, the hot fierce food, and he began to say over and over to himself I have not eaten since I have not eaten since trying to remember how many days it had been since Friday in Jefferson, in the restaurant where he had eaten his supper, until after a while, in the lying still with waiting until the men should have eaten and gone to the field, the name of the day, of the week seemed more important than the food.
Because when the men were gone at last and he descended, emerged, into the level, jonquilcolored sun and went to the kitchen door, he didn’t ask for food at all.
He had intended to.
He could feel the harsh words marshaling in his mind, just behind his mouth.
And then the gaunt, leatherhard woman come to the door and looked at him and he could see shock and recognition and fear in her eyes and while he was thinking She knows me.
She has got the word too he heard his mouth saying quietly:
“Can you tell me what day this is?
I just want to know what day this is.”
“What day it is?”
Her face was gaunt as his, her body as gaunt and as tireless and as driven.
She said:
“You get away from here!
It’s Tuesday!
You get away from here!
I’ll call my man!”
He said, “Thank you,” quietly as the door banged.
Then he was running.
He did not remember starting to run.
He thought for a while that he ran because of and toward some destination that the running had suddenly remembered and hence his mind did not need to bother to remember why he was running, since the running was not difficult.
It was quite easy, in fact.
He felt quite light, weightless.