Had I a Hundred Mouths by William Goyen Page A

where Kansas Tate had lived, asking for her in Niggertown. He was told that she was dead and that he could find out more from the man, the uncle, who still lived on the place where Kansas Tate had worked for so many years.
    At the place Ormsby found the uncle, who took right to him, and the uncle told the long story to Ormsby and how Kansas Tate was dead from shock and grief. Ormsby wept and seemed gentle and saintly, yet he was the cause of all the woe and doom that had fallen upon the place. The uncle then told Ormsby his own story of his love for Louetta, of his fathering and nursing and healing Leander, child of rape, when he was dying in a cave from the violence of the KKK, of Leander’s lust for Louetta and of Louetta’s terrible suicide in the well. Ormsby then told of his long suffering and hiding and how he had been urged back to ask forgiveness. He told the uncle of his terrible deed and begged on his knees for mercy and forgiveness. His pink head shook with the sobs that poured silver tears down his black glistening face and the white signs of the claws of the alligators shone on his black body. The uncle might have straightaway killed Ormsby there in the house. But an extraordinary thing occurred. I forgive you, said the uncle. Who can cast the first stone? They had loved the same woman, and the white man had brought up the black man’s son and loved him like his own. The uncle told all this to Ormsby, the pink-headed nigger. Let’s try to live together in this place, the uncle said, or the Klu Klux Klan will kill you if they catch you, and me, too. You can live in this house with me. And together, the uncle said, being the only ones left of the whole story, we can wait for the possible return of our son Leander. The town rumbled at a white man and a black man living in the same house, for of course they found out about them. But who among them knew all that had happened? Yet they judged and denounced the two men as derelicts and the KKK rode for many nights around and around the house with burning torches until the dust from their horses’ hooves set a cloud over the old family house. But the two men laid low inside. Sometimes they saw the glow of fire at their windows and they looked out to see burning crosses staked in the road and in the fields. It is a miracle that the KKK arm of justice and morality did not set the house on fire, and their threats of this and of tar-and-feathering the two men as a means of punishment and of setting things aright came often in shouts and chants, but the old house stood untouched and the men inside unharmed. This is because, it is said, that some said they saw in a white glowing above the roof of the house the bright figure of a winged man flashing a sword and calling with a powerful voice, “This house is blest by forgiveness. Go away.” And all the fires of the burning crossed died out. This is what they say, this is what some saw.
    Leander never returned. Some dark nights and on some dark stormy days, one or other of the two men was sure that he saw a figure of Leander, the lost son, coming across the pasture, rising and falling in the high grass; or leaping and darting toward the house like a jackrabbit, at dusk in the twilight; or sometimes on the road in the summer heat, a glowing veil-like shape seemed to be arriving. But Leander never arrived.
    Finally Ormsby was found dead in his bed by the uncle one sleety morning in November. The uncle buried him in a grave on the place and put at its head a slab of wood with the words on it, “Leander’s father forgiven.”
    From then on, alone in the house of sorrow and forgiveness, the uncle drank, full of his silent story—except what he would tell of it to me when he would let me through the horseman-cursed door—graced, too by the horseman and the horse—until he closed that door to the old house and walked out on the highway to wait for somebody to pick him up that was going