A Fable

‘—which makes it harder; you might leave your own kin-folks holding the sack, but these are the sheriff’s friends and you’ve got to sleep in the same bed with his niece every night.’ Which was wrong too, since three years and two months and thirteen nights ago now, but that didn’t matter either, the cigar smoking in the judge’s ashtray now, and the voice: ‘Come back here’: and he returned, drawing the Negro with him, until they stood facing the white vest with its loop of watch-chain like a section of gold plow-trace, and the voice: ‘You’ve got to get him into a jail somewhere where they can hold him long enough for you to put a charge on him that the law will accept. They can turn him loose the next day or the next minute if they want to; all you want is to have him on record as having been charged with a legal crime or misdemeanor by a legally qualified officer of a legally constituted court, then when his lawyers sue your bondsmen for false arrest, they can tell them to go chase themselves.’

‘What charge?’ the turnkey said.

‘What’s the next big jail from here? Not a county seat: a town with at least five thousand people in it?’ The turnkey told him. ‘All right. Take him there. Take my car; it’s in the hotel garage; I’ll telephone my driver from here. Only, you’ll——but surely I dont need to tell you how to spirit a prisoner out of the clutches of a mob.’ Which was true too, that was a part of the turnkey’s dream too; he had planned it all, run it through his mind, out to the last splendid and victorious gesture, time and again since that moment two years ago when he had laid his hand on the Book and sworn the oath, not that he really expected it to happen but to be prepared against that moment when he should be called upon to prove not merely his fitness for his office but his honor and courage as a man, by preserving and defending the integrity of his oath in the very face of them by whose sufferance he held his office.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Only——’

‘All right,’ the lawyer said. ‘Unlock that damn thing. Here, give me the key:’ and took it from his hand and unlocked the handcuffs and flung them onto the table, where they made again that faint musical note.

‘Only——’ the turnkey said again.

‘Now go around by the corridor and shut the big door to the courtroom and lock it on the outside.’

‘That wont stop them—hold them——’

‘Dont worry about them. I’ll attend to that. Go on.’

‘Yes,’ he said, and turned, then stopped again. ‘Wait. What about them fellows outside the door there?’ For perhaps two or three seconds the lawyer didn’t say anything at all, and when he did speak, it was as though there was nobody else in the room, or in fact as though he was not even speaking aloud:

‘Five men. And you a sworn officer of the law, armed. You might even draw your pistol. They’re not dangerous, if you’re careful.’

‘Yes,’ he said, and turned again and stopped again, not looking back: just stopping as he had turned. ‘That charge.’

‘Vagrancy,’ the lawyer said.

‘Vagrancy?’ he said. ‘A man owning half of forty-five thousand dollars?’

‘Pah,’ the lawyer said. ‘He doesn’t own half of anything, even one dollar. Go on.’ But now it was he who didn’t move; maybe he didn’t look back, but he didn’t move either, talking himself this time, and calm enough too:

‘Because this thing is all wrong. It’s backwards. The law spirits a nigger prisoner out of jail and out of town, to protect him from a mob that wants to take him out and burn him. All these folks want to do is to set this one free.’

‘Dont you think the law should cut both ways?’ the lawyer said. ‘Dont you think it should protect people who didn’t steal forty-five thousand dollars too?’

‘Yes,’ the turnkey said; and now he looked at the lawyer, his hand on the doorknob again but not turning it yet. ‘Only that aint the question I want to ask anyway. And I reckon you got an answer to this one too and I hope it’s a good one—’ speaking calm and slow and clear himself too: ‘This is all to it. I just take him to Blankton long enough to get a legal charge on the books. Then he can go.’

‘Look at his face,’ the lawyer said. ‘He hasn’t got any money. He doesn’t even know where any is. Neither of them do, because there never was any and what little there might have been, that cockney swipe threw away long ago on whores and whisky.’

‘You still aint answered,’ the turnkey said. ‘As soon as the charge is on the books, he can go.’