A Fable

‘Five minutes, gentlemen,’ the lawyer said. ‘Then we will resume in the courtroom,’ and closed the door and came back to where the turnkey and the Negro stood. But he didn’t even look at the Negro; and the turnkey, spent, exhausted, almost comatose from courage and excitement, discovered, realised with a kind of outraged unbelief that the lawyer, who had voluntarily given himself only ten minutes to do whatever he intended to do, was apparently going to use up some of them smoking, watching the lawyer produce the cigar from an upper pocket of the white vest which looked as if it had come right out from under the washerwoman’s smoothing-iron five minutes ago—a pocket which contained three more just like it. Then the turnkey recognised its brand and therefore its cost—one dollar—because he had owned one once (and on the following Sunday morning smoked it) through the mistake of a stranger under the impression that it was the sheriff who had married his, the turnkey’s, sister instead of he who had married the sheriff’s brother’s wife’s niece, recognised it with grief and outrage too, the same thing happening again but this time a thousand times worse: the man who gave him the other cigar had asked nothing of him, whereas he knew now and at last what the lawyer wanted, was after, had been after all the while, setting the price of his, the turnkey’s, corruption at that of one one-dollar cigar: this was the forty thousand dollars which the nigger had escaped with and hidden so good that even the Federal Government couldn’t find it. Then the grief and outrage was not even outrage, let alone grief; it was triumph and pride and even joy too, since not only had the lawyer already lost even before he laid eyes on the nigger, he (the lawyer) wasn’t even going to find it out until he (the turnkey) got good and ready to tell him, waiting for the lawyer to speak first, with no organ in the voice either now, which instead was as hard and calm and cold and vacant of trash as that of his wife’s uncle-by-marriage:

‘You’ve got to get him out of town. It’s your only chance.’ And maybe his (the turnkey’s) voice wasn’t too calm and maybe to a big city lawyer it didn’t sound too hard either. But even one as big as this one could have heard the finality in it and, if he listened, the scorn and the contempt and the pleasure too:

‘I can think of another. In fact, I’m fixing right now to take it.’ Then to the nigger: ‘Come on:’ already moving toward the corridor door, drawing the nigger after him, and already reaching from the snap on his belt the ring containing the handcuff key. ‘You’re thinking of that money. I aint. Because it aint mine to think about. It’s his, half of it is that is; whether or not a nigger aint got any business with half of forty thousand dollars aint none of my business nor yours neither. And soon as I unlock these handcuffs, he can go and get it,’ and turned the knob and had opened the door when the voice stopped him—the hard calm not even loud voice behind him sounding like somebody dropping pebbles into a churn:

‘Neither am I. Because there’s not any money. I’m not even thinking about you. I’m thinking about your bondsmen:’ and (the turnkey) heard the match and turned in time to watch the flame’s hunchy squat at the drawing cigar’s tip and the first pale gout of smoke hiding for an instant the lawyer’s face.

‘That’s all right too,’ the turnkey said. ‘I been living in the jail two years already. So I wont even have to move. I expect I can even stand chain-gang work too.’

‘Pah,’ the lawyer said, not through smoke but in smoke, by means of smoke, the puff, the gout, the pale rich costly balloon bursting, vanishing, leaving the hard calm not loud word as durable and single as a piece of gravel or a buckshot: ‘When you arrested this man the second time, you broke the law. As soon as you turn him loose, he wont have to hunt for a lawyer because there are probably a dozen of them from Memphis and Saint Louis and Little Rock waiting down there in the yard now, just hoping you will have no more sense than to turn him loose. They’re not going to put you in jail. They’re not even going to sue you. Because you haven’t got any money or know where any is, anymore than this nigger does. They’re going to sue your bondsmen—whoever they were and whatever it was they thought you could do for them—and your—what is it? brother-in-law?—the sheriff.’

‘They were my——’ he started to say kinsmen, but they were not, they were his wife’s kinsmen; he had plenty of his own, but none of them—or all of them together, for that matter—had enough money in a bank anywhere to guarantee a bond. Then he started to say friends, but they were his wife’s family’s friends too. But then it didn’t matter what he said, because the voice had already read his mind: