Of course my being there alone except for her and Pap looked bad.
If it was a stall, dont common sense tell you I’d have invented a better one?”
“You’re not being tried by common sense,” Horace said.
“You’re being tried by a jury.”
“Then let them make the best of it.
That’s all they’ll get.
The dead man is in the barn, hadn’t been touched; me and my wife and child and Pap in the house; nothing in the house touched; me the one that sent for the sheriff.
No, no; I know I run a chance this way, but let me just open my head about that fellow, and there’s no chance to it.
I know what I’ll get.”
“But you heard the shot,” Horace said.
“You have already told that.”
“No,” he said,
“I didn’t.
I didn’t hear anything.
I dont know anything about it.……Do you mind waiting outside a minute while I talk to Ruby?”
It was five minutes before she joined him.
He said:
“There’s something about this that I dont know yet; that you and Lee haven’t told me.
Something he just warned you not to tell me.
Isn’t there?”
She walked beside him, carrying the child.
It was still whimpering now and then, tossing its thin body in sudden jerks.
She tried to soothe it, crooning to it, rocking it in her arms.
“Maybe you carry it too much,” Horace said; “maybe if you could leave it at the hotel.…”
“I guess Lee knows what to do,” she said.
“But the lawyer should know all the facts, everything.
He is the one to decide what to tell and what not to tell.
Else, why have one?
That’s like paying a dentist to fix your teeth and then refusing to let him look into your mouth, dont you see?
You wouldn’t treat a dentist or a doctor this way.”
She said nothing, her head bent over the child.
It wailed. “Hush,” she said, “hush, now.”
“And worse than that, there’s such a thing called obstructing justice.
Suppose he swears there was nobody else there, suppose he is about to be cleared—which is not likely—and somebody turns up who saw Popeye about the place, or saw his car leaving.
Then they’ll say, if Lee didn’t tell the truth about an unimportant thing, why should we believe him when his neck’s in danger?”
They reached the hotel.
He opened the door for her.
She did not look at him.
“I guess Lee knows best,” she said, going in.
The child wailed, a thin, whimpering, distressful cry.
“Hush,” she said.
“Shhhhhhhhhhhh.”
Isom had been to fetch Narcissa from a party; it was late when the car stopped at the corner and picked him up.
A few of the lights were beginning to come on, and men were already drifting back toward the square after supper, but it was still too early for the negro murderer to begin to sing.
“And he’d better sing fast, too,” Horace said.
“He’s only got two days more.”
But he was not there yet.
The jail faced west; a last faint copper-colored light lay upon the dingy grating and upon the small, pale blob of a hand, and in scarce any wind a blue wisp of tobacco floated out and dissolved raggedly away.
“If it wasn’t bad enough to have her husband there, without that poor brute counting his remaining breaths at the top of his voice.……”
“Maybe they’ll wait and hang them both together,” Narcissa said.