Intruder in the Dust Read Online Free PDF Page B

morning) and the mercantile ones too so that the rest of the county except Beat Four would have somewhere to wait until word could come in from Fraser’s store that all was okeydoke again and they could unpark the trucks and cars and wagons and mules from the back streets and alleys and go home and go to bed: turning the corner this time and now the jail, looming, lightless except for the one crossbarred rectangle in the upper front wall where on ordinary nights the nigger crapshooters and whiskey-peddlers and razor-throwers would be yelling down to their girls and women on the street below and where Lucas would have been these three hours now (very likelybanging on the steel door for somebody to bring him his supper or perhaps having already had it and now merely to complain about its quality since without doubt he would consider that his right too along with the rest of his lodging and keep) except that people seemed to hold that the one sole end of the entire establishment of public office was to elect one man like Sheriff Hampton big enough or at least with sense and character enough to run the county and then fill the rest of the jobs with cousins and inlaws who had failed to make a living at everything else they ever tried. But then he was free and besides it was probably all over by now and even if it wasn’t he knew what he was going to do and there was plenty of time yet for that, tomorrow would be time enough for that; all he would need to do tonight was to give Highboy about two extra cups of oats against tomorrow and at first he believed he was or at least in a moment was going to be ravenously hungry himself, sitting down at the familiar table in the familiar room among the bright linen and silver and the water glasses and the bowl of narcissus and gladioli and a few roses in it too and his uncle said,
    ‘Your friend Beauchamp seems to have done it this time.’
    ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘They’re going to make a nigger out of him once in his life anyway.’
    ‘Charles!’ his mother said.—eating rapidly, eating quite a lot and talking rapidly and quite a lot too about the ballgame and waiting to get hungry any minute any second now until suddenly he knew that even the last bite had been too much, still chewing at it to get it down to where it would swallow, already getting up.
    ‘I’m going to the picture show,’ he said.
    ‘You haven’t finished,’ his mother said: then she said,‘The show doesn’t begin for almost an hour yet:’ and then not even just to his father and uncle but to all time all A.D. of Our Lord one thousand and nine hundred and thirty and forty and fifty: ‘I dont want him to go to town tonight. I dont want—’ and then at last one wail one cry to the supreme: his father himself: out of that nighttraddled dragonregion of fears and terrors in which women—mothers anyway—seemed from choice almost to dwell: ‘Charlie—’ until his uncle put his napkin down and rose too and said:
    ‘Then here’s your chance to wean him. I want him to do an errand for me anyway:’ and out: on the front gallery in the dark cool and after a while his uncle said: ‘Well? Go on.’
    ‘Aint you coming?’ he said. Then he said, ‘But why? Why?’
    ‘Does that matter?’ his uncle said, and then said what he had already heard when he passed the barbershop going on two hours ago now: ‘Not now. Not to Lucas nor anybody else of his color out there.’ But he had already thought of that himself not just before his uncle said it but even before whoever it had been in front of the barbershop two hours ago did, and for that matter the rest of it too: ‘In fact the true why is not what crisis he faced beyond which life would be no longer bearable until he shot a white man in the back but why of all white men he must pick a Gowrie to shoot and out of all possible places Beat Four to do it in.—Go on. But don’t be late. After all a man ought to be kind even to his parents now and then.’
    And