You can tell her I changed her mind.”
Isom backed and turned into the narrow street and then into the cedar drive, the lights lifting and boring ahead into the unpruned tunnel as though into the most profound blackness of the sea, as though among straying rigid shapes to which not even light could give color.
The car stopped at the door and Horace got out.
“You might tell her it was not to her I ran,” he said.
“Can you remember that?”
17
The last trumpet-shaped bloom had fallen from the heaven tree at the corner of the jail yard.
They lay thick, viscid underfoot, sweet and oversweet in the nostrils with a sweetness surfeitive and moribund, and at night now the ragged shadow of full-fledged leaves pulsed upon the barred window in shabby rise and fall.
The window was in the general room, the white-washed walls of which were stained with dirty hands, scribbled and scratched over with names and dates and blasphemous and obscene doggerel in pencil or nail or knifeblade.
Nightly the negro murderer leaned there, his face checkered by the shadow of the grating in the restless interstices of leaves, singing in chorus with those along the fence below.
Sometimes during the day he sang also, alone then save for the slowing passerby and ragamuffin boys and the garage men across the way.
“One day mo!
Aint no place fer you in heavum!
Aint no place fer you in hell!
Aint no place fer you in whitefolks’ jail!
Nigger, whar you gwine to?
Whar you gwine to, nigger?”
Each morning Isom fetched in a bottle of milk, which Horace delivered to the woman at the hotel, for the child.
On Sunday afternoon he went out to his sister’s.
He left the woman sitting on the cot in Goodwin’s cell, the child on her lap.
Heretofore it had lain in that drugged apathy, its eyelids closed to thin crescents, but today it moved now and then in frail, galvanic jerks, whimpering.
Horace went up to Miss Jenny’s room.
His sister had not appeared.
“He wont talk,” Horace said.
“He just says they will have to prove he did it.
He said they had nothing on him, no more than on the child.
He wouldn’t even consider bond, if he could have got it.
He says he is better off in the jail.
And I suppose he is.
His business out there is finished now, even if the sheriff hadn’t found his kettles and destroyed—”
“Kettles?”
“His still.
After he surrendered, they hunted around until they found the still.
They knew what he was doing, but they waited until he was down.
Then they all jumped on him.
The good customers, that had been buying whiskey from him and drinking all that he would give them free and maybe trying to make love to his wife behind his back.
You should hear them down town.
This morning the Baptist minister took him for a text.
Not only as a murderer, but as an adulterer; a polluter of the free Democratico-Protestant atmosphere of Yoknapatawpha county.
I gathered that his idea was that Goodwin and the woman should both be burned as a sole example to that child; the child to be reared and taught the English language for the sole end of being taught that it was begot in sin by two people who suffered by fire for having begot it.
Good God, can a man, a civilized man, seriously.……”
“They’re just Baptists,” Miss Jenny said.
“What about the money?”
“He had a little, almost a hundred and sixty dollars.
It was buried in a can in the barn.
They let him dig that up.
‘That’ll keep her’ he says ‘until it’s over.
Then we’ll clear out.
We’ve been intending to for a good while.
If I’d listened to her, we’d have been gone already.