Sanctuary (29 page)

It was not until he had left school that they learned that he had been playing poker for three years in the office of a livery stable, behind drawn shades. When, two years out of school, he got elected to the State legislature, they began to tell an anecdote of his school days.

It was in the poker game in the livery stable office. The bet came to Graham. He looked across the table at the owner of the stable, who was his only remaining opponent.

“How much have you got there, Mr Harris?” he said.

“Forty-two dollars, Eustace,” the proprietor said. Eustace shoved some chips into the pot. “How much is that?” the proprietor said.

“Forty-two dollars, Mr Harris.”

“Hmmm,” the proprietor said. He examined his hand. “How many cards did you draw, Eustace?”

“Three, Mr Harris.”

“Hmmm. Who dealt the cards, Eustace?”

“I did, Mr Harris.”

“I pass, Eustace.”

He had been District Attorney but a short time, yet already he had let it be known that he would announce for Congress on his record of convictions, so when he found himself facing Narcissa across the desk in his dingy office, his expression was like that when he had put the forty-two dollars into the pot.

“I only wish it weren’t your brother,” he said. “I hate to see a brother-in-arms, you might say, with a bad case.” She was watching him with a blank, enveloping look. “After all, we’ve got to protect society, even when it does seem.……”

“Are you sure he cant win?” she said.

“Well, the first principle of law is, God alone knows what the jury will do. Of course, you cant expect—”

“But you dont think he will.”

“Naturally, I—”

“You have good reason to think he cant. I suppose you know things about it that he doesn’t.”

He looked at her briefly. Then he picked up a pen from his desk and began to scrape at the point with a paper cutter. “This is purely confidential. I am violating my oath of office; I wont have to tell you that. But it may save you worry to know that he hasn’t a chance in the world. I know what the
disappointment will be to him, but that cant be helped. We happen to know that the man is guilty. So if there’s any way you know of to get your brother out of the case, I’d advise you to do it. A losing lawyer is like a losing anything else, ballplayer or merchant or doctor: his business is to—”

“So the quicker he loses, the better it would be, wouldn’t it?” she said. “If they hung the man and got it over with.” His hands became perfectly still. He did not look up. She said, her tone cold and level: “I have reasons for wanting Horace out of this case. The sooner the better. Three nights ago that Snopes, the one in the legislature, telephoned out home, trying to find him. The next day he went to Memphis. I dont know what for. You’ll have to find that out yourself. I just want Horace out of this business as soon as possible.”

She rose and moved toward the door. He hobbled over to open it; again she put that cold, still, unfathomable gaze upon him as though he were a dog or a cow and she waited for it to get out of her path. Then she was gone. He closed the door and struck a clumsy clog-step, snapping his fingers just as the door opened again; he snapped his hands toward his tie and looked at her in the door, holding it open.

“What day do you think it will be over with?” she said.

“Why, I cuh—Court opens the twentieth,” he said. “It will be the first case. Say.…Two days. Or three at the most, with your kind assistance. And I need not assure you that this will be held in strictest confidence between us.……” He moved toward her, but her blank calculating gaze was like a wall, surrounding him.

“That will be the twenty-fourth.” Then she was looking
at him again. “Thank you,” she said, and closed the door.

That night she wrote Belle that Horace would be home on the twenty-fourth. She telephoned Horace and asked for Belle’s address.

“Why?” Horace said.

“I’m going to write her a letter,” she said, her voice tranquil, without threat. Dammit, Horace thought, holding the dead wire in his hand, How can I be expected to combat people who will not even employ subterfuge. But soon he forgot it, forgot that she had called. He did not see her again before the trial opened.

Two days before it opened Snopes emerged from a dentist’s office and stood at the curb, spitting. He took a gold-wrapped cigar from his pocket and removed the foil and put the cigar gingerly between his teeth. He had a black eye, and the bridge of his nose was bound in soiled adhesive tape. “Got hit by a car in Jackson,” he told them in the barbershop. “But dont think I never made the bastard pay,” he said, showing a sheaf of yellow bills. He put them into a notecase and stowed it away. “I’m an American,” he said. “I dont brag about it, because I was born one. And I been a decent Baptist all my life, too. Oh, I aint no preacher and I aint no old maid; I been around with the boys now and then, but I reckon I aint no worse than lots of folks that pretends to sing loud in church. But the lowest, cheapest thing on this earth aint a nigger: it’s a jew. We need laws
against them. Drastic laws. When a durn lowlife jew can come to a free country like this and just because he’s got a law degree, it’s time to put a stop to things. A jew is the lowest thing on this creation. And the lowest kind of jew is a jew lawyer. And the lowest kind of jew lawyer is a Memphis jew lawyer. When a jew lawyer can hold up an American, a white man, and not give him but ten dollars for something that two Americans, Americans, southron gentlemen; a judge living in the capital of the State of Mississippi and a lawyer that’s going to be as big a man as his pa some day, and a judge too; when they give him ten times as much for the same thing than the lowlife jew, we need a law. I been a liberal spender all my life; whatever I had has always been my friends’ too. But when a durn, stinking, lowlife jew will refuse to pay an American one tenth of what another American, and a judge at that—”

“Why did you sell it to him, then?” the barber said.

“What?” Snopes said. The barber was looking at him.

“What was you trying to sell to that car when it run over you?” the barber said.

“Have a cigar,” Snopes said.

T
he trial was set for the twentieth of June. A week after his Memphis visit, Horace telephoned Miss Reba. “Just to know if she’s still there,” he said. “So I can reach her if I need to.”

“She’s here,” Miss Reba said. “But this reaching. I dont like it. I dont want no cops around here unless they are on my business.”

“It’ll be only a bailiff,” Horace said. “Someone to hand a paper into her own hand.”

“Let the postman do it, then,” Miss Reba said. “He
comes here anyway. In a uniform too. He dont look no worse in it than a full-blowed cop, neither. Let him do it.”

“I wont bother you,” Horace said. “I wont make you any trouble.”

“I know you aint,” Miss Reba said. Her voice was thin, harsh, over the wire. “I aint going to let you. Minnie’s done took a crying spell tonight, over that bastard that left her, and me and Miss Myrtle was sitting here, and we got started crying too. Me and Minnie and Miss Myrtle. We drunk up a whole new bottle of gin. I cant afford that. So dont you be sending no jay cops up here with no letters for nobody. You telephone me and I’ll turn them both out on the street and you can have them arrested there.”

On the night of the nineteenth he telephoned her again. He had some trouble in getting in touch with her.

“They’re gone,” she said. “Both of them. Dont you read no papers?”

“What papers?” Horace said. “Hello. Hello!”

“They aint here no more, I said,” Miss Reba said. “I dont know nuttin about them and I dont want to know nuttin except who’s going to pay me a week’s room rent on—”

“But cant you find where she went to? I may need her.”

“I dont know nuttin and I dont want to know nuttin,” Miss Reba said. He heard the receiver click. Yet the disconnection was not made at once. He heard the receiver thud onto the table where the telephone sat, and he could hear Miss Reba shouting for Minnie: “Minnie. Minnie!” Then some hand lifted the receiver and set it onto the hook; the
wire clicked in his ear. After a while a detached Delsarte-ish voice said: “Pine Bluff dizzent.…Enkyew!”

The trial opened the next day. On the table lay the sparse objects which the District Attorney was offering: the bullet from Tommy’s skull, a stoneware jug containing corn whiskey. “I will call Mrs Goodwin to the stand,” Horace said. He did not look back. He could feel Goodwin’s eyes on his back as he helped the woman into the chair. She was sworn, the child lying on her lap. She repeated the story as she had told it to him on the day after the child was ill. Twice Goodwin tried to interrupt and was silenced by the Court. Horace would not look at him.

The woman finished her story. She sat erect in the chair, in her neat, worn gray dress and hat with the darned veil, the purple ornament on her shoulder. The child lay on her lap, its eyes closed in that drugged immobility. For a while her hand hovered about its face, performing those needless maternal actions as though unawares.

Horace went and sat down. Then only did he look at Goodwin. But the other sat quietly now, his arms folded and his head bent a little, but Horace could see that his nostrils were waxy white with rage against his dark face. He leaned toward him and whispered, but Goodwin did not move.

The District Attorney now faced the woman.

“Mrs Goodwin,” he said, “what was the date of your marriage to Mr Goodwin?”

“I object!” Horace said, on his feet.

“Can the prosecution show how this question is relevant?” the Court said.

“I waive, your Honor,” the District Attorney said, glancing at the jury.

When court adjourned for the day Goodwin said bitterly: “Well, you’ve said you would kill me someday, but I didn’t think you meant it. I didn’t think that you—”

“Dont be a fool,” Horace said. “Dont you see your case is won? That they are reduced to trying to impugn the character of your witness?” But when they left the jail he found the woman still watching him from some deep reserve of foreboding. “You mustn’t worry at all, I tell you. You may know more about making whiskey or love than I do, but I know more about criminal procedure than you, remember.”

“You dont think I made a mistake?”

“I know you didn’t. Dont you see how that explodes their case? The best they can hope for now is a hung jury. And the chances of that are not one in fifty. I tell you, he’ll walk out of that jail tomorrow a free man.”

“Then I guess it’s time to think about paying you.”

“Yes,” Horace said, “all right. 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.