The Watchman (28 page)

Jasonl cried Mister Christmas Janders, throwing back his head in a soundless laugh. Oh, Lord, Sheriff, stop right there. My God, the incalculable, unforeseeable minds of men. A thousand years more at the bar and still I'd never fail to trip and stare aghast, confounded, eternally baffled and drunk with the wine of wonder at the things men think they see. Oh, Lord, Sheriff! Not another word along this train of thought. Another sentiment like that from you and I'll start doubting God myself. I'll quit the church and take up chess instead or maybe poker—at least some decent game where the bluffer with the sleeved and crooked aces isn't Him! Cat, did you hear? No. Thank God, no. Sheriff, don't you know at last tonight how infinitely blessed of Heaven are the lower beasts?

Luther stood up, still shaken from his outburst, and quaking even more within his wits at his conception of Jason's betrayal of Jill to the prosecutor. He seemed now clenched and struggling to keep all his mind from flying to bits like a thundering flywheel.

All right, Janders, he said. You've got your informer. You've got your creaky proofs. You've got your killer's instinct to bind them all together for that day lq the arena. And now, smart man, I'll give you what I came here to give you in the first place—the piece of paper that will knock your case to pieces.

It would take more than any piece of paper to do that, Sheriff Alt, said the prosecutor. A ream of paper couldn't shake it to pieces. Sheriff.

Luther closed his eyes, drew in his breath resolutely and then looked at Christmas Janders with perfect calm.

I mean a piece of paper, he said flatly. With my signed confession to the murder of the Blake boy.

Mister Janders smiled, looked down, and fondly stroked the cat.

Sheriff Alt, you are an extraordinary man, he said. I will never forget you.

Listen to me, said Luther. You'll be helpless in court to do anything but convict me with that confession. Will you look at me and hear what I'm telling you, Janders— I killed Cole Blake.

Sheriff Alt, said the prosecutor. If what you're saying now didn't move me so deeply I would take it as an insult.

I killed Cole Blake! said Luther Alt in a broken, croaking voice.

All my years of law, said Mister Christmas Janders. The thieves, wife beaters, burglars, bootleggers, whores—forgetting them. Think of the numberless murderers I've faced and studied—watching them scurry and race across this dirty floor of earth until Id pinned them like insects to the card. Thirty up yonder in the pen tonight. Sheriff. Do you think I don't know murder when I see it face to face? Do you think I could live with it so long and then be fooled? Do you imagine that even when I sent a man up that I knew was not exactly guilty that I ever fooled myself—no matter how much my duty and my hallowed responsibility made me fool the juries that he was? Thirty up yonder in their ceils tonight. Sheriff! And never one from Mound County that ever hanged, said Luther Alt. Never one that ever got the chair.

Which is no fault of mine, shrugged Christmas Janders. That's something deep in the curious mentality of Mound County—that they've never hanged one of their own, burned one of their own. That tradition, I think, is presently to end. That superstition began to die in Mound Countians the morning of Cole Blake's funeral. I sense these things, man. And I will wager you whatever stakes you name that within three months the first Mound Countian in history will go to his death in the penitentiary.

All right! cried Luther Alt. And that one will be me.

No, Sheriff Alt, said Christmas Janders, almost kindly. It will not be you.

God damn you, I confess! the Sheriff shouted. Fetch me paper and pen! You shall have it, sir. My confession in full. And you will see me die up there. Think of that, sir! Isn't it what you want? A death? Fetch me a paper and pen then! A death for you, sir!

Sheriff, forgive me but I need my pen just now, said Mister Christmas Janders, dropping the little cat and opening his desk drawer. I have a warrant to draw up.

Why do you doubt me? roared the Sheriff.

Because I know you're not a killer, Sheriff Alt, said Mister Christmas Janders, fitting his spectacles onto his nose and running through a stack of forms he had fetched out from the drawer.

You know nothing, you pimp of Death! How do you know what I am! cried Luther Alt.

With scarcely a motion wasted in his fumbling for the

warrant form among his papers Mister Christmas landers swept a large, gray-rubber eraser off his desk and sent it bouncing across the floor.

I know, he said. The same way the little cat yonder knows that's not a mouse.

Luther Alt turned his head, slowly straightened, moving now toward the prosecutor's desk, the immense and legended composure of his great face gone now to rack, the pistol in his hand the only steadied thing about him.

You think I couldn't kill, he whispered. That's why you won't believe me? You think that?

I do, said Mister Christmas landers, unflinching even as the first bullet from the booming, racketing muzzle cut into the oak-paneling three feet behind him. I know you couldn't kill, Sheriff Alt.

Luther squeezed the trigger again and the room chattered and rang with the explosion and the gargoyle-head of the chair-back just to the left of Christmas landers' shoulder disappeared and something clattered yards away amid the tiptoe paws of the stiff-tailed, bushy cat.

Do you believe it now, Mister Christmas landers? roared Luther Alt. Do you smell a killer yet? Does that long, wise counselor's nose of yours at last sniff murder in this room?

No, said the prosecutor quietly. It does not, sir.

Aren't you afraid to die. Mister Christmas landers? shouted the Sheriff, leaning over the desk a httle.

Yes, said the prosecutor gravely. We're all afraid to die. But I will tell you this, Sheriff—that in the matter of men and law I'd gamble my life on a guess. Because—

The third bullet did not seem to touch him and yet astonishingly the slight padding of his shoulder exploded and flowered out suddenly into a ridiculous flower of ragged gauze petals, like an ingeniously improvised paper carnation.

—because, the prosecutor continued, unflinching. In the first place my guess is never a guess. It is a knowing. And in the second place—

Even, it seemed, before the roar of the gun again, the spectacles lifted in a tiny snow of splinters and rose in an almost leisurely arc out of the fingers which had toyed with them on the blotter.

—in the second place, he said, even while the fifth bullet smashed the pen and ploughed into the oaken desk top at his elbow, splattering his shirt front with splashes of ink: the illusion of some lifeless, cold blood of azure fluid, welling

now from the judicial breast to stain the dustless, immaculate bosom of Mister Christmas landers.—I would not particularly wish to go on living after forty years of law-school j scrimping, humiliating apprenticeship, begging, fawning, bootlicking electioneering in the years of my tenure—thinking all that has been wasted and that I had come, at last, to know jl that I had learned nothing—that, in fact, I did not know that ' which it is life itself for me to know: the face and sense and recognition of those God-forsaken sons of Cain whom it is i my art to punish or destroy. Is that clear to you. Sheriff ' Alt? If I am not wrong—I believe the chamber of your police-special holds five cartridges. Now, do you wish to reload and continue your demonstration to me that you are a murderer by merely spoiling my clothes, riddling my office furniture and frightening a little cat?

He watched, wiping with his spotless white handkerchief at the splattered ink on his hands and wrists: Luther sitting again now, not slumped, but holding the empty revolver between his boots, not looking at Mister Christmas Janders but obliquely listening, vaguely absorbed rather in some vast and gathering tumult somewhere behind the rain and imagining, perhaps, that it was the wrath of somewhat tardy heaven, coming to put him to judgment; listening though, his head cocked a little, with all the old, sharp readiness of his sorrowful craft; hstening as, indeed now, Christmas Janders listened to the growing, grumbling murmur in the streets beyond the rain. Janders now at the window, bending to peer out through the pane and turning suddenly to Luther's squared and awakening shoulders in the chair.

The mob. By God, the mob, cried the prosecutor, following the Sheriff's racing figure down the black corridor of the courthouse. By God, we mustn't let it go this way. No, by God. Not after all the fine case I've built against her. By God, no—they can't—they mustn't. She's mine! It mustn't go this way. The mob mustn't get her before I do! They must not take the vengeance into their hands that rightfully belongs in minel

By now the rain had stopped. The wind had gone, though not as if it had fallen but rather had soared aloft to rarer altitudes and raced now beneath the washed, emerging galaxies: sweeping the vast skies clear of those last, small, glum and remnant clouds of the rains. The street bricks glistened. And now in the once more motionless and humid air of dripping aftermath the flooded gutters leaped with small,

flashing freshets and from the conduits beneath there came the muffled noise of huge throats drinking. And now again the fog came wisping up from the willows. Not all the close-packed shoulders of Adena's legion could keep it from Dede's yard—long after that now voiceless, shifting mob had gone, the fog would stay and steal up town and lay its siege upon Adena.

Dede Moonshine, awakened at last, stood in her pantry, thunderstruck and gawping out her window at the nightmare in her dooryard and the shuffling, silent horde which had come to her very step; women, children, men pressed and shoving from solid blocks around, down Water Street as far as the night revealed: a blinking, mismatched, sullen multitude, some half-dressed, some still in nightclothes with trousers and coats tugged hurriedly over: a noiseless and undulant mound of people and more still coming: men's shouts, women's cries, babble of car horns far in the straggling remoteness of their hindmost reaches from which this dinning racket rose, though at the front ranks, this brim of their overflowing vanguard silent at what it saw, at what it had come, indeed, to see as if in consunmiation of things dreamed.

It ringed and spread out, almost motionless now beyond Dede's window though, at the slightest movement in the man-mound's center, ripples would reach, at last, this foremost perimeter, and set them forward in a wave of staggering, unpurchased foothold, spilling them further a few feet, like lava, across the bricks and flower beds beneath Dede's rose of Sharon. Dede could not believe, nor could she doubt, and wanting no more of either horror she snatched the teeth from her mouth, turned away and went to fetch her mother's ragged Bible from the breadbox and sat in her rocker, suddenly, like a collapsed accordion, heaving chords of grieving, asthmatic dumbfound to the dark, rocking swiftly as if that motion might somehow exempt her from the millennium, hugging the book's limp, cold leather to her bony, muslined breast as if in tardy afterthought. Far off in the shot-riddled dark Jason raised his head from the rock among the pumpkin vines, and struggled to his feet. And like Dede, as he moved into the faint light of the dooryard, seeing the sea of them: the people oceaned out infinitely to the ends of Water Street and spilling back down through the shoreweeds, brush-filth, and willows across the bricks of the

old steamboat landing; Jason now, like Dede, believing, disbelieving; neither, both.

The once gardened and tended earth-shapes among the patterned bricks beneath the rose of Sharon were torn up and packed tight again as if beneath the hooves of driven cattle: Dede's nasturtiums, her lilies-of-the-valley impressed so flat into that stampeded and flattened soil as to appear painted upon a ceramic blackness: earth tamped and pressed by the aggregate tonnage of that militant, marching and now-retreated multitude. In the hollow of heel-flattened sour-grass and chick-weed beside Dede Moonshine's cistern lay what might have appeared at first to be a white, small heap of child's nightclothes: a little laundry thrown there and walked upon indifferently: though more to it, once stared at closely, than the spilled and hollow limpness of thrown-off nightdress: something shapeless, to be sure, though something broken, too, and since laundry does not break nor does it bleed, something dreadfully shapeful, after all, and something, as well, unreckonably pitiable, desolate and unspeakably familiar.

A few yards away, nearer the moon-flower vines which lay torn and strung out among their smashed and splintered arbors, some bricks of the paving by the door stoop lay strewn about, wrenched loose and uprooted as if by an implement of steel. While a foot closer to the brim of the crowd lay that implement: a revolver, its barrel twisted round like a baling hook and its muzzle tamped with the earth which this savage enterprise had jammed into it. High among measureless altitudes the wind sent scudding into the north the last of the night-rain's clouds and freed the moon so that, with soft suddenness, everything not shadowed by leaf or bough lay bright in that cold lambency: the trampled whiteness in the trench by the cistern now showing one tumbling lock of long, dark hair almost as if it had been carefuUy fixed so by the primping fingers of a girl; and from the rose of Sharon one stout, blossom-stripped, leaf-peeled branch bowed tautly earthward toward the bricks like a boy's fishing pole, while at its tip, at the noose-end of a double-yard's length of Dede's clothesline was hanged the motionless body of a small, white dog, its pink tongue showing among its little beard, its glassed toy eyes regarding sadly, it seemed, the moonlit, blameless faces of its executioners.

And so those among those fortunate few at the crowd's innermost circle were able to see everything. Everyone stared *at what nobody had done. Because after all, amid that moral algebra of man's quaint inmiunity through numbers, no one felt bad at what everyone did. And yet, perhaps, even in that hangdog moment, some among them felt a wince of jarred propriety when suddenly, far back in their ranks, with a voice hoarse from his panting struggle to shoulder through, the shout of Matthew Hood shattered the stillness of the first row's inner sanctum.

Let me through! Have they got her yet? Let me by here, madam! Have they caught her yet? cried the ragged, shrieking voice of the old hangman. Kill the little murdering bitch! Oh, kill her nowl For God's sake, people, don't stand by and let her go to trial. Kill her now, I beg you! Don't let that damned wop electrician up at the prison get her!

The faces bordering the spectacle seemed momentarily darkened. Though this was only because of one last errant cloud which, for an instant, masked the moon yet scurried now like a black sheep before the shepherd wind. Still Matthew Hood's zealous informality had somehow broken the sullen, tongue-tied mood of them all.

That's her yonder, ain't it? someone muttered.

Yonder by the cistern. Yes. That's her.

Who done it?

Don't ask me! 

Look like she's been fakly stomped into the earth.

Who'd you say done it?

It was an accident, said a man to the fore, his eyes heavily involved in certain details of his muddied shoe tops. Ever' one just come a-rushin' at her in droves and tumbling and pushing through the yard yonder. So that there wasn't no chance to seize her or nothing. Us that was in front might just as well tried stopping with a bulldozer at our backs— everyone just a-pushin' us on and right on top of her.

Was she out of bullets?

Dog if I know, said the man. Because we was all a-coming in so fast there was no chance to see her or know what we was doing.

By God, now, I seen her, cried another. I knowed God damned well what we was doing.

Well, observed the man. There's no one can lay it on to us that any one of us done it. One man's shoe is just like another's when there's folks in droves like that. Well, they can't send a town to prison, can they?

By God! screamed a woman, as if she were testifying in church. It's a justice all the same.

That's for God damned sure, choired a scattering of voices among the vast, massed mound.

ltd been us that done it if she'd have went to the chair, observed a man somewhere. As it was us that done it as we done it here. Til be blamed if I can perceive the difference.

Say now! cried a woman. You reckon he could have knowed it was her all along.

Who could have knowed? asked the man.

Why, the Sheriff, said the woman. He was her Pap, wasn't he? You reckon he could have been that close to her and not never saw'n it in her.

No-o-o, scoffed the man, watching interestedly as a faint gust of wind sent the little dog lightly twirling on the rope. He never knowed. He was a good Sheriff, Luther Alt. He'd not have stood by not doing nothing if he'd knowed. Looky there at that dog. Like one of them little dancing dogs in the circus.

Some laughed.

Who hanged the dog? cried a man.

Damn if 1 know, laughed the other, with a shifty, modest smile.

What'd they go and do that for?

Do what?

Hang the little dog, cried the voice. It never hurt no one.

I seen it up in Pruney Wrinkle's Hardware one morning last spring, laughed a lady. I seen it kill a fly.

Still, what'd they hang it for? cried the voice again. It never hurt no persons.

Don't matter, laughed the man. Time we got through stomping across this yard there wasn't no girl left to hang.

We had to hang something, said another.

Ain't that awful now, an older woman said, pushing her head through to survey the damage. Just look at poor Miss Dede's nice flowers—every last one of her geraniums stomped down flat.

Hell, she won't care, said the man. Winter's a-coming anyways. They'd all a-been dead 'fore long.

And in that closeness of them there they were of a single mind, a single sense and blood, so that something happening at the remotest edges of their kinning unanimity seemed almost instantly transmitted to the mind of them, as if by great, strange ganglia which webbed out through their one-

ness, and now something stirred, spreading them asunder at their midst: the deep alto subsidence of a siren and the bloodUke flickering cast of the Grimes Hght atop the Sheriff's station wagon. This was Tzchak. And in their wake came the Buick with Luther Alt and Mister Christmas landers.

Make way. One side now! Make way! Step aside, folksl cried the voice of the prosecutor. Make way. What's happened here?

And they fell aside and pressed each other back into a clear path before the eminence of law; opening like the sea before the Jews.

My God, what's this? cried Christmas landers.

Luther moved past him, past Tzchak, past the chief, oblivious of them all, moving into the little fan of light from poor Dede's praying pantry, standing for a moment looking at the little smiling dog which hung within the rose of Sharon's noose, then seeing, at last, the whiteness of the trampled nightdress by the cistern: its laced and spinsterish neatness spoiled now by earth and the rape of feet and the stains of grass and blood; its roundness vanished and the texture of it jutting here and there in fresh arrangements of skeletal brokenness.

Hey Luther, whispered Tzchak, peering round into his face. Why not leave me to manage all this?

I will manage all this, thank you, Mister Tzchak, he said, and went to the bench and caught up the old Indian blanket upon which Dede Moonshine sometimes sat to catch a little sun on summer noons, and fetching a clasp-knife from his jacket pocket cut the noose from the little dog's neck and, spreading the rug, laid it carefully there, and then went, steady and sure-footed, to the trampled cambric shapeless-ness close-huddled by the cistern; stooping a moment, lifted the lock of soft dark hair, held its weight for an instant in his jfingers and then carefully rearranged it as it was. Necks strained to watch him now: his back was to them. He could not, it seemed, have giieved; he would surely not be crying: not Luther Alt.

By God, a man whispered to his neighbors. He's iron, that man—he's iron. Tough as a chestnut rail!

The Sheriff seemed fixed there, squatting, regarding her without emotion, surely, for his shoulders were not shaking: he did not move for a time which, to them, seemed interminable and left them restless as showgoers at a dragging drama. But presently he stirred, as if rousing himself, bent

over her, plucking with his fingers, shifting, feeling, perhaps searching for some place to lift her, perhaps, it seemed to others who would remember it in years to come when they would tell it in their kitchens, trying to put that trodden wreckage back into the shape of something which, even for a foolish moment, might give him the counterfeit of the sleeping quick and not the undreaming dead. And when he raised her in his arms it was not difficult to conceal from them, beneath the flap of his jacket, the broken face upon her snapped and lolling neck, and doing that as if he would I spare them, as if he could not bear even for them to suffer what they now, in fact, expected and perhaps even wanted from him: some show of vengeance. For a moment he saw one face among those hundreds ranked around him and that face separate from the others; no part of them: a livid, stricken mask far back in the baroque tangle of Dede Moonshine's ruined yard: the face of the boy Jason, But then he moved on and laid her quickly in the blanket beside the white dog and folded them both with deft swiftness so that none of the crowd would even snatch that quick glimpse of her despoilment, tucking the fringed folds close and gently round those young dead as if for a warm sleep in a cold room in the bitter of a biting Texas winter's night, and lifting the bundle, gaudy with Navajo tints and shapes, movfi back toward the crowd.

Something I can do? said Tzchak, peering round at him.

Nothing, Mister Tzchak, said Luther Alt. It's all mine to do. You've been a good friend and I thank you.

The crowd opened before him now as if he held an out-thrust torch which could set their clothes ablaze. Tzchak stood beside Mister Christmas Janders watching as the crowd closed in behind the Sheriff and his shawled-up, ruined treasure.

By God, there's a man now. Mister Janders, sir, said Tzchak with a brisk, efficient squaring of his shoulders.

Yes, deputy, there's a man, said the prosecutor.

Mister Janders, murmured Tzchak, with a fawning air of aplomb, yet still with an air of manly self-assurance. This may be a poor occasion to bring the subject up but I've had something on my mind—I mean, since our little chat tonight in your office.

Yes, deputy, said Mister Christmas Janders.

Well, I know what Mound County thinks of Luther, he said, looking at the ink-stained shirt front in the prosecutor's

1 open coat. Even with all this—nothing's much changed about the way they look up to him. But still and all—well, you know the county court and all, Mister landers—

Yes, deputy. Sheriff Alt will surely be removed from office.

Well, Luther wouldn't even Hkely want to stay on as Sheriff here, said Tzchak. Lord, I know him. Even if they didn't fire him. Even if the County Court didn't decide to make a change he'd surely want to go.

Mister landers, I'll get right to the point. Within a week or so—when the Court comes to a vote—there may be an opening for a new Sheriff here. And so, I wondered—seeing as how you complimented me so highly tonight on my good police work—I was wondering if you could put in a word for me. Well, didn't I finilsh the case for you? Sure, I did. You as much as said so yourself tonight when you and me was alone up there in the courthouse and I told you it was her. And so. Mister landers—

Yes, deputy, said Mister Christmas landers. Get on with

it.

I was wondering if you could think of me as filling Luther

Alt's boots, Tzchak said.

Filling them? said the prosecutor. Deputy, don't you mean shining them?

On the stool at the end of the counter in the dining room of the Mound Hotel Cristi sat waiting for midnight. She clutched her good white gloves in one hand and the bus ticket in the other. Beside her high heels on the linoleum floor stood her suitcase. In the darkness behind her in the long empty room and to the fore the stuttering neon twilight in the big window fell across the deserted table with its two empty chairs. She had not presumed to sit in either. She listened absently to the rumbling voices of the three men beyond the doorway in the lighted lobby. And she heard, beyond those sounds, somewhere behind the farthest visible reaches of Lafayette Avenue along which street lamps now bloomed soft halos among the first gauzed bunting of the lifting mists, the attenuated rumor of some deep and gathering approach: the sound at first no more than the faintest susurration: a whisper so fine the wind might have made it. But there was no wind now. And the increase of it gathering now into audible definition: the sound as of some huge thing shuffling yonder with inexorable advance: the rumbling whisper of footfalls or, perhaps it might even be fancied, of one