“Lee,” she said.
She was stroking her hand slowly on his head, back and forth.
She began to smooth his hair into a part, patting his collarless shirt smooth.
Horace watched them.
“Would you like to stay here today?” he said quietly.
“I can fix it.”
“No,” Goodwin said.
“I’m sick of it.
I’m going to get it over with.
Just tell that goddamned deputy not to walk too close to me.
You and her better go and eat breakfast.”
“I’m not hungry,” the woman said.
“You go on like I told you,” Goodwin said.
“Lee.”
“Come,” Horace said.
“You can come back afterward.”
Outside, in the fresh morning, he began to breathe deeply.
“Fill your lungs,” he said.
“A night in that place would give anyone the jim-jams.
The idea of three grown people.… My Lord, sometimes I believe that we are all children, except children themselves.
But today will be the last.
By noon he’ll walk out of there a free man: do you realise that?”
They walked on in the fresh sunlight, beneath the high, soft sky.
High against the blue fat little clouds blew up from the south-west, and the cool steady breeze shivered and twinkled in the locusts where the blooms had long since fallen.
“I dont know how you’ll get paid,” she said.
“Forget it.
I’ve been paid.
You wont understand it, but my soul has served an apprenticeship that has lasted for forty-three years.
Forty-three years.
Half again as long as you have lived.
So you see that folly, as well as poverty, cares for its own.”
“And you know that he—that—”
“Stop it, now.
We dreamed that away, too.
God is foolish at times, but at least He’s a gentleman.
Dont you know that?”
“I always thought of Him as a man,” the woman said.
The bell was already ringing when Horace crossed the square toward the courthouse.
Already the square was filled with wagons and cars, and the overalls and khaki thronged slowly beneath the gothic entrance of the building.
Overhead the clock was striking nine as he mounted the stairs.
The broad double doors at the head of the cramped stair were open.
From beyond them came a steady preliminary stir of people settling themselves.
Above the seat-backs Horace could see their heads—bald heads, gray heads, shaggy heads and heads trimmed to recent feather-edge above sunbaked necks, oiled heads above urban collars and here and there a sunbonnet or a flowered hat.
The hum of their voices and movements came back upon the steady draft which blew through the door.
The air entered the open windows and blew over the heads and back to Horace in the door, laden with smells of tobacco and stale sweat and the earth and with that unmistakable odor of courtrooms; that musty odor of spent lusts and greeds and bickerings and bitterness, and withal a certain clumsy stability in lieu of anything better.
The windows gave upon balconies close under the arched porticoes.
The breeze drew through them, bearing the chirp and coo of sparrows and pigeons that nested in the eaves, and now and then the sound of a motor horn from the square below, rising out of and sinking back into a hollow rumble of feet in the corridor below and on the stairs.
The Bench was empty.
At one side, at the long table, he could see Goodwin’s black head and gaunt brown face, and the woman’s gray hat.
At the other end of the table sat a man picking his teeth. His skull was capped closely by tightly-curled black hair thinning upon a bald spot. He had a long, pale nose.