I’ll come out tonight.”
“Tonight?”
“Yes.
He may call you back to the stand tomorrow.
We’d better prepare for it, anyway.”
At eight oclock he entered the mad woman’s yard.
A single light burned in the crazy depths of the house, like a firefly caught in a brier patch, but the woman did not appear when he called.
He went to the door and knocked.
A shrill voice shouted something; he waited a moment.
He was about to knock again when he heard the voice again, shrill and wild and faint, as though from a distance, like a reedy pipe buried by an avalanche.
He circled the house in the rank, waist-high weeds.
The kitchen door was open.
The lamp was there, dim in a smutty chimney, filling the room—a jumble of looming shapes rank with old foul female flesh—not with light but with shadow.
White eyeballs rolled in a high, tight bullet head in brown gleams above a torn singlet strapped into overalls.
Beyond the negro the mad woman turned in an open cupboard, brushing her lank hair back with her forearm.
“Your bitch has gone to jail,” she said.
“Go on with her.”
“Jail?” Horace said.
“That’s what I said.
Where the good folks live.
When you get a husband, keep him in jail where he cant bother you.”
She turned to the negro, a small flask in her hand.
“Come on, dearie.
Give me a dollar for it.
You got plenty money.”
Horace returned to town, to the jail.
They admitted him.
He mounted the stairs; the jailer locked a door behind him.
The woman admitted him to the cell.
The child lay on the cot.
Goodwin sat beside it, his arms crossed, his legs extended in the attitude of a man in the last stage of physical exhaustion.
“Why are you sitting there, in front of that slit?” Horace said.
“Why not get into the corner, and we’ll put the mattress over you.”
“You come to see it done, did you?” Goodwin said.
“Well, that’s no more than right.
It’s your job.
You promised I wouldn’t hang, didn’t you?”
“You’ve got an hour yet,” Horace said.
“The Memphis train doesn’t get here until eight-thirty.
He’s surely got better sense than to come here in that canary-colored car.”
He turned to the woman.
“But you.
I thought better of you.
I know that he and I are fools, but I expected better of you.”
“You’re doing her a favor,” Goodwin said.
“She might have hung on with me until she was too old to hustle a good man.
If you’ll just promise to get the kid a newspaper grift when he’s old enough to make change, I’ll be easy in my mind.”
The woman had returned to the cot. She lifted the child onto her lap.
Horace went to her.
He said: “You come on, now.