Eupheus.”
“Come on.
Let’s get on back.
We might miss some of it.”
The first man looked at the house, at the closed door through which the two people had vanished.
“She knowed him too.”
“Knowed who?”
“That nigger.
Christmas.”
“Come on.” They returned to the car. “What do you think about that durn fellow, coming right into town here, within twenty miles of where he done it, walking up and down the main street until somebody recognised him.
I wish it had been me that recognised him.
I could have used that thousand dollars.
But I never do have any luck.”
The car moved on.
The first man was still looking back at the blank door through which the two people had disappeared.
In the hall of that little house dark and small and ranklyodored as a cave, the old couple stood.
The old man’s spent condition was still little better than coma, and when his wife led him to a chair and helped him into it, it seemed a matter of expediency and concern.
But there was no need to return and lock the front door, which she did.
She came and stood over him for a while.
At first it seemed as if she were just watching him, with concern and solicitude.
Then a third person would have seen that she was trembling violently and that she had lowered him into the chair either before she dropped him to the floor or in order to hold him prisoner until she could speak.
She leaned above him: dumpy, obese, gray in color, with a face like that of a drowned corpse.
When she spoke her voice shook and she strove with it, shaking, her hands clenched upon the arms of the chair in which he half lay, her voice shaking, restrained:
“Eupheus.
You listen to me.
You got to listen to me.
I ain’t worried you before.
In thirty years I ain’t worried you.
But now I am going to.
I am going to know and you got to tell me.
What did you do with Milly’s baby?”
Through the long afternoon they clotted about the square and before the jail—the clerks, the idle, the countrymen in overalls; the talk.
It went here and thereabout the town, dying and borning again like a wind or a fire until in the lengthening shadows the country people began to depart in wagons and dusty cars and the townspeople began to move supperward.
Then the talk flared again, momentarily revived, to wives and families about supper tables in electrically lighted rooms and in remote hill cabins with kerosene lamps.
And on the next day, the slow, pleasant country Sunday while they squatted in their clean shirts and decorated suspenders, with peaceful pipes about country churches or about the shady dooryards of houses where the visiting teams and cars were tethered and parked along the fence and the womenfolks were in the kitchen, getting dinner, they told it again:
“He don’t look any more like a nigger than I do.
But it must have been the nigger blood in him.
It looked like he had set out to get himself caught like a man might set out to get married.
He had got clean away for a whole week.
If he had not set fire to the house, they might not have found out about the murder for a month.
And they would not have suspected him then if it hadn’t been for a fellow named Brown, that the nigger used to sell whiskey while he was pretending to be a white man and tried to lay the whiskey and the killing both on Brown and Brown told the truth.
“Then yesterday morning he come into Mottstown in broad daylight, on a Saturday with the town full of folks.
He went into a white barbershop like a white man, and because he looked like a white man they never suspected him.
Even when the bootblack saw how he had on a pair of second hand brogans that were too big for him, they never suspected.
They shaved him and cut his hair and he payed them and walked out and went right into a store and bought a new shirt and a tie and a straw hat, with some of the very money he stole from the woman he murdered.
And then he walked the streets in broad daylight, like he owned the town, walking back and forth with people passing him a dozen times and not knowing it, until Halliday saw him and ran up and grabbed him and said,
‘Ain’t your name Christmas?’ and the nigger said that it was.
He never denied it.
He never did anything.
He never acted like either a nigger or a white man.