He removed the overalls and dressed and left the house.
The street opened into a broader one.
To the left it went on to the square, the opening between two buildings black with a slow, continuous throng, like two streams of ants, above which the cupola of the courthouse rose from a clump of oaks and locusts covered with ragged snow.
He went on toward the square.
Empty wagons still passed him and he passed still more women on foot, black and white, unmistakable by the unease of their garments as well as by their method of walking, believing that town dwellers would take them for town dwellers too, not even fooling one another.
The adjacent alleys were choked with tethered wagons, the teams reversed and nuzzling gnawed corn-ears over the tail-boards.
The square was lined two-deep with ranked cars, while the owners of them and of the wagons thronged in slow overalls and khaki, in mail-order scarves and parasols, in and out of the stores, soiling the pavement with fruit- and peanut-hulls.
Slow as sheep they moved, tranquil, impassable, filling the passages, contemplating the fretful hurrying of those in urban shirts and collars with the large, mild inscrutability of cattle or of gods, functioning outside of time, having left time lying upon the slow and imponderable land green with corn and cotton in the yellow afternoon.
Horace moved among them, swept here and there by the deliberate current, without impatience.
Some of them he knew; most of the merchants and professional men remembered him as a boy, a youth, a brother lawyer—beyond a foamy screen of locust branches he could see the dingy second-story windows where he and his father had practised, the glass still innocent of water and soap as then—and he stopped now and then and talked with them in unhurried backwaters.
The sunny air was filled with competitive radios and phonographs in the doors of drug- and music-stores.
Before these doors a throng stood all day, listening.
The pieces which moved them were ballads simple in melody and theme, of bereavement and retribution and repentance metallically sung, blurred, emphasised by static or needle—disembodied voices blaring from imitation wood cabinets or pebble-grain horn-mouths above the rapt faces, the gnarled slow hands long shaped to the imperious earth, lugubrious, harsh, and sad.
That was Saturday, in May: no time to leave the land.
Yet on Monday they were back again, most of them, in clumps about the courthouse and the square, and trading a little in the stores since they were here, in their khaki and overalls and collarless shirts.
All day long a knot of them stood about the door to the undertaker’s parlor, and boys and youths with and without schoolbooks leaned with flattened noses against the glass, and the bolder ones and the younger men of the town entered in twos and threes to look at the man called Tommy.
He lay on a wooden table, barefoot, in overalls, the sun-bleached curls on the back of his head matted with dried blood and singed with powder, while the coroner sat over him, trying to ascertain his last name.
But none knew it, not even those who had known him for fifteen years about the countryside, nor the merchants who on infrequent Saturdays had seen him in town, barefoot, hatless, with his rapt, empty gaze and his cheek bulged innocently by a peppermint jawbreaker.
For all general knowledge, he had none.
16
On the day when the sheriff brought Goodwin to town, there was a negro murderer in the jail, who had killed his wife; slashed her throat with a razor so that, her whole head tossing further and further backward from the bloody regurgitation of her bubbling throat, she ran out the cabin door and for six or seven steps up the quiet moonlit lane.
He would lean in the window in the evening and sing.
After supper a few negroes gathered along the fence below—natty, shoddy suits and sweat-stained overalls shoulder to shoulder—and in chorus with the murderer, they sang spirituals while white people slowed and stopped in the leafed darkness that was almost summer, to listen to those who were sure to die and him who was already dead singing about heaven and being tired; or perhaps in the interval between songs a rich, sourceless voice coming out of the high darkness where the ragged shadow of the heaven-tree which snooded the street lamp at the corner fretted and mourned:
“Fo days mo!
Den dey ghy stroy de bes ba’ytone singer in nawth Mississippi!”
Sometimes during the day he would lean there, singing alone then, though after a while one or two ragamuffin boys or negroes with delivery baskets like as not, would halt at the fence, and the white men sitting in tilted chairs along the oil-foul wall of the garage across the street would listen above their steady jaws.
“One day mo!
Den Ise a gawn po sonnen bitch.
Say, Aint no place fer you in heavum!
Say, Aint no place fer you in hell!
Say, Aint no place fer you in jail!”
“Damn that fellow,” Goodwin said, jerking up his black head, his gaunt, brown, faintly harried face.
“I aint in any position to wish any man that sort of luck, but I’ll be damned.……” He wouldn’t talk.
“I didn’t do it.
You know that, yourself.
You know I wouldn’t have.
I aint going to say what I think.
I didn’t do it.
They’ve got to hang it on me first.
Let them do that.
I’m clear.
But if I talk, if I say what I think or believe, I wont be clear.”
He was sitting on the cot in his cell. He looked up at the windows: two orifices not much larger than sabre slashes.
“Is he that good a shot?” Benbow said.
“To hit a man through one of those windows?”
Goodwin looked at him.
“Who?”
“Popeye,” Benbow said.
“Did Popeye do it?” Goodwin said.
“Didn’t he?” Benbow said.