Intruder in the Dust by William Faulkner Page B

man up? Is Mr Gavin already in the office or do I just sit there until he comes?’
    ‘Lucas is going to pay you,’ he said. ‘He told me that even before he told me what it was.’
    Aleck Sander laughed, without mirth or scorn or anything else: with no more in the sound of it than there is anything in the sound of breathing but just breathing. ‘I aint rich,’ he said. ‘I dont need money.’
    ‘At least you’ll saddle Highboy while I hunt for a flashlight, wont you?’ he said. ‘You’re not too proud about Lucas to do that, are you?’
    ‘Certainly,’ Aleck Sander said, turning.
    ‘And get the pick and shovel. And the long tie-rope. I’ll need that too.’
    ‘Certainly,’ Aleck Sander said. He paused, half turned. ‘How you going to tote a pick and shovel both on Highboy when he dont even like to see a riding switch in your hand?’
    ‘I dont know,’ he said and Aleck Sander went on and he turned back toward the house and at first he thought it was his uncle coming rapidly around the house from the front, not because he believed that his uncle might have suspected and anticipated what he was about because he did not, his uncle had dismissed that too immediately and thoroughly not only from conception but from possibility too, but because he no longer remembered anyone else available for it to have been and even after he saw it was a woman he assumed it was his mother, even afterhe should have recognised the hat, right up to the instant when Miss Habersham called his name and his first impulse was to step quickly and quietly around the corner of the garage, from where he could reach the lot fence still unseen and climb it and go on to the stable and so go out the pasture gate without passing the house again at all, flashlight or not but it was already too late: calling his name: ‘Charles:’ in that tense urgent whisper then came rapidly up and stopped facing him, speaking in that tense rapid murmur:
    ‘What did he tell you?’ and now he knew what it was that had nudged at his attention back in his uncle’s office when he had recognised her and then in the next second flashed away: old Molly, Lucas’ wife, who had been the daughter of one of old Doctor Habersham’s, Miss Habersham’s grandfather’s, slaves, she and Miss Habersham the same age, born in the same week and both suckled at Molly’s mother’s breast and grown up together almost inextricably like sisters, like twins, sleeping in the same room, the white girl in the bed, the Negro girl on a cot at the foot of it almost until Molly and Lucas married, and Miss Habersham had stood up in the Negro church as godmother to Molly’s first child.
    ‘He said it wasn’t his pistol,’ he said.
    ‘So he didn’t do it,’ she said, rapid still and with something even more than urgency in her voice now.
    ‘I dont know,’ he said.
    ‘Nonsense,’ she said. ‘If it wasn’t his pistol——’
    ‘I dont know,’ he said.
    ‘You must know. You saw him—talked to him——’
    ‘I dont know,’ he said. He said it calmly, quietly, with a kind of incredulous astonishment as though he had only now realised what he had promised, intended: ‘Ijust dont know. I still dont know. I’m just going out there……’ He stopped, his voice died. There was an instant a second in which he even remembered he should have been wishing he could recall it, the last unfinished sentence. Though it was probably already too late and she had already done herself what little finishing the sentence needed and at any moment now she would cry, protest, ejaculate and bring the whole house down on him. Then in the same second he stopped remembering it. She said:
    ‘Of course:’ immediate murmurous and calm; he thought for another half of a second that she hadn’t understood at all and then in the other half forgot that too, the two of them facing each other indistinguishable in the darkness across the tense and rapid murmur: and then he heard his own voice speaking