A Fable

‘Yes,’ the lawyer said. ‘Lock the courtroom doors first. Then come back for the nigger.’ Then the turnkey opened the door; the five men stood there but he didn’t even falter: on through and past them; then suddenly, instead of following the corridor to the courtroom’s rear door as the lawyer had ordered him, he turned toward the stairs, moving fast now, not running: just moving fast, down the stairs and along the hall to the office of his wife’s uncle-in-law, deserted now, and into the office, around the partition and straight to the drawer and opened it and without even faltering, took from beneath the mass of old discharged warrants and incomplete subpoenas and paper clips and rubber stamps and corroded pen points, the spare office pistol and slipped it into the empty holster and returned to the hall and mounted the opposite stairway which brought him to the main courtroom doors and drew them quietly to even as a face, then three, then a dozen, turned to look at him, and turned the key in the lock and withdrew it and put it into his pocket, already hurrying again, even running now, back to the judge’s chambers where the lawyer had put the receiver back on its hook and pushed the telephone away and reached for the cigar in the ashtray and actually looked for the first time at the Negro, drawing the cigar to life in one slow inhale-exhale and through the smoke for the first time examined the calm no-aged Roman senator’s face framed in a narrow unclosed circlet of grizzled hair clasping the skull like a caesar’s laurels above the aged worn carefully brushed carefully mended frock coat, and then spoke, the two of them in succinct flat poste-riposte that was almost monotone:

‘You haven’t got any money, have you?’

‘No.’

‘You dont even know where any is, do you?’

‘No.’

‘Because there’s not any. There never was. And even that little, your white bully boy threw away before you even saw it——’

‘You’re wrong. And you believe you’re wrong too. Because I know——’

‘All right. Maybe it was even a whole hundred dollars.’

‘More than that.’

‘More than thirty thousand dollars?’ and only the faintest hesitation here; no faulting: only an interval: the voice still strong, still invincibly unshaken and unshakable:

‘Yes.’

‘How much more than thirty thousand dollars?.… All right. How much more than a hundred dollars? … Did you ever have a hundred dollars? Ever see a hundred dollars? … All right. You know it’s more than a hundred dollars, but you dont know how much more. Is that it?’

‘Yes. But you dont need to worry——’

‘And you came back to get your half of the hundred dollars anyway.’

‘I came back to tell him goodbye before he goes back home.’

‘Back home?’ the lawyer said quickly. ‘You mean, England? Did he tell you that?’ and the other, insuperably calm, insuperably intractable:

‘How could he told me? Because he wouldn’t need to. When a man comes to the place where he aint got anything left worth spending or losing, he always goes back home. But you dont need to worry, because I know what you’re fixing to do: lock me up in the jail until he hears about it in the newspapers and comes back. And you’re right, because that’s what he’ll do, because he needs me too. And you dont need to worry about how much money it is; it’ll be enough for all the lawyers too.’

‘Like the loaves and the fishes?’ the lawyer said. But this time it was not an interval; there was no answer at all, serenely nothing, and the interval was the lawyer’s to put an end to: ‘So he’s the one who needs you. Yet he’s the one who has the forty thousand dollars. How can anyone with forty thousand dollars need you?’ and again the interval, intractable and serene, again the lawyer’s to break: ‘Are you an ordained minister?’

‘I dont know. I bears witness.’

‘To what? God?’

‘To man. God dont need me. I bears witness to Him of course, but my main witness is to man.’

‘The most damning thing man could suffer would be a valid witness before God.’