A Gathering of Old Men by Ernest J. Gaines Page A

say.”
    “Yes, sir,” Johnny Paul said. He didn’t look at Mapes; he was still looking up the quarters. “Yes, sir, I figured that’s all you would see. But what do the rest don’t see? What y’all don’t see, Rufe?” he asked me. He didn’t look at me, still looking up the quarters. “What y’all don’t see, Clatoo? What y’all don’t see, Glo? What y’all don’t see, Corrine, Rooster, Beulah? What y’all don’t see, all the rest of y’all?”
    “I don’t have time for people telling me what they can’t or don’t see, Johnny Paul,” Mapes said. “I want—”
    Johnny Paul turned on him. He was tall as Mapes, but thin, thin. He was the color of Brown Mule chewing tobacco. His eyes gray, gray like Mapes’s eyes, but not hard like Mapes’s eyes. He looked dead at Mapes.
    “You ain’t got nothing but time, Sheriff.”
    “What?” Mapes said.
    “I did it,” Johnny Paul said.
    “I see,” Mapes said. “Either I stand here and let you talk about things you don’t see, and the things the others don’t see, or I take you in? I see.”
    “Yes, sir,” Johnny Paul said. “But you still don’t see. Yes, sir, what you see is the weeds, but you don’t see what we don’t see.”
    “Do you see it, Johnny Paul?” Mapes asked him.
    “No, I don’t see it,” Johnny Paul said. “That’s why I kilt him.”
    “I see,” Mapes said.
    “No, you don’t,” Johnny Paul said. “No, you don’t. You had to be here to don’t see it now. You just can’t come down here every now and then. You had to live here seventy-seven years to don’t see it now. No, Sheriff, you don’t see. You don’t even know what I don’t see.”
    “Do you know what you don’t see?” Mapes asked him.
    “Ask Mathu,” Johnny Paul said.
    “No, I’m asking you,” Mapes said. “I’ll get back to Mathu later.”
    “Ask Glo,” Johnny Paul said. “Ask Tucker. Gable. Clatoo. Ask Yank. Jameson there. Ask any of them, all of them what they don’t see no more.”
    “All right,” Mapes said. “Tell me. But make it quick. I can still get in some fishing.”
    “You still don’t see,” Johnny Paul said. “You still don’t see. I don’t have to make nothing quick. I can take all the time in the world I want, and it ain’t nothing you can do but take me to jail. You can’t slap me hard enough to hurt me no more, Sheriff.”
    “I see,” Mapes said.
    Johnny Paul kicked the ground. Thin as he was and kicking the ground like that coulda fractured his leg.
    “Do you?” he said. “Do you? Do you hear that church bell ringing?”
    “Are you all right?” Mapes asked him. “And maybe I shoulda asked you that before. Maybe I shoulda asked all y’all that before,” he said, looking at the rest of us. Then back to Johnny Paul. “Church bells, Johnny Paul?”
    “I hear him,” Beulah said from the steps. “He’s making sense.”
    “Then tell me in English what he’s saying in Gri-gri,” Mapes said.
    “Let him tell you,” Beulah said. “He talks good as I do.”
    “You want to go too, huh?” Mapes asked her.
    “That’s right,” Beulah said. “I don’t mind going. I been to the pen before. You was saying, Johnny Paul?”
    “Y’all remember how it used to be?” Johnny Paul said. He wasn’t answering Beulah, he wasn’t even speaking to her, or to Mapes now. He was just thinking out loud, the way a man talk to himself plowing the field by himself or hunting in the swamps with nothing but a gun, not even a dog. “Remember?” he said. “When they wasn’t no weeds—remember? Remember how they used to sit out there on the garry—Mama, Papa, Aunt Clara, Aunt Sarah, Unc Moon, Aunt Spoodle, Aunt Thread. Remember? Everybody had flowers in the yard. But nobody had four-o’clocks like Jack Toussaint. Every day at four o’clock, they opened up just as pretty. Remember?” He stopped, thinking back. The rest of us all thinking back. I had spent many, many days on the end of Jack’s garry, facing that bush.