Teeftallow/Chapter 22

IN HIS hot little room on the west side of the Scovell House with the sun, a little past vertical, slating into his window, Abner Teeftallow had immured himself until the appointed hour of three in the afternoon.

The fact that he was under instructions to secrete himself, that he was hiding in his own room until the time came for him to hurry out and take part in a sharp and tragic and illegal spectacle—this filled Abner with his first sense of civic importance and, at the same time, kept him in nervous suspense like that of a new actor in the wings of the stage.

Time apparently had stopped in Irontown. The teamster glanced once more at the clock, a cheap tin affair which Tug Beavers had bought for their room. The hand seemed not a millimeter advanced since he had glanced at it before. In an hour and a half it would be time to start—an hour and a half. The timepiece ticked loudly in the hot little room; as Abner looked at it it broke into a startled double beat, ticketty-tick, ticketty-tick, as if it, too, somehow had become infected with the pervading nervousness.

At four- or five-minute intervals Abner would take his automatic from his pocket (he had bought one now) and reassure himself that its clip was full of cartridges. Then he would reinspect the bandanna handkerchief which he had cut into a mask, trying it on to see that the holes for the eyes and mouth fitted. He was apprehensive that in the moment of action the mask would not fit; that he would find himself working at it, adjusting it when all the other masks had marched out from behind the lumber pile to the lock-up, and he would be left. A vision of masked men hauling Peck Bradley out of his cell filled Abner's eyes. It reminded him ​of pictures he had seen in the dime novels. He wondered if Peck would fight. The alarm clock suddenly set up its double knock again, as if the scene somehow had got into its wheels and stirred it to violent action.

Abner paused with his mask to look at the clock. Its miniature violence was the only sound he could hear. Indeed, the silence, now that the teamster noticed it, was extraordinary. He sat listening with mouth open to catch the faintest noise, but could hear nothing at all. And yet there seemed something strained about the stillness, as if on the verge of an outbreak.

The teamster arose with a little shudder and walked to his window. He did not thrust out his head as ordinarily he would, but surveyed the street from the inside, moving about, well back of the window, to obtain the whole view. From one shabby end to the other, not a person was on it, not even a child at play. This very absence of life reinforced in the youth his sense of an impending cataclysm. The village in the still sunshine looked to Abner like some sort of gigantic trap, baited, set, ready to clash into swift and fatal action, but for the present, as silent and patient as the very sunshine itself.

At this normally busy time of day for the streets to be deserted advertised that every man, woman, and child in Irontown knew what was going to happen; that this solitude of street was the collective alibi of the village to prove before some future grand jury that Irontown knew nothing whatever about the tragedy it was about to perform. This was the acme of hill-country finesse and social solidarity.

Amid this crouching silence it became impossible for Abner to remain in his room. He glanced once more at the clock, felt the mask in his pocket, then arose and took a turn in the hall.

The hallway was faintly cooler than his own room and was a kind of clearing house for the odours of the whole establishment; smells from the dining room below, from the bedrooms, the penetrating odour of an insecticide which Miss Scovell ​had bought in consequence of Mrs. Roxie Biggers's defamation of her beds.

The thought flickered through Abner's mind that Mrs. Roxie had produced both these results: the smell inside, the suspended animation outside; odour and silence; maximal and minimal sequences of the visit of that dictatorial old woman to the Scovell House to see Tug Beavers

This momentary glimpse of life in the round so foreign to the hill type vanished swiftly from Abner's mind, leaving him occupied with that never-ending stream of petty defensive and offensive thoughts which form the intellectual staple of his class.

He wondered if some future grand jury would really indict the whole of Irontown. Would it put the whole village in jail? Where would the grand jury come from?

This brought him squarely against the question of mob violence and communal lawlessness, but Abner, like millions of others Americans, could make no further step in his thinking. His questions stood out like figures against a fog and produced only a sense of grotesqueness, mystery, and danger.

As for himself, he would march with the other and take his share like a man. He felt in his pockets to reassure himself that mask and pistol were there, walked past his room to glance in at the clock, and continued his noiseless marching up and down.

At the end of the hall opposite his own room a door stood open, and as he passed it he saw to his surprise Nessie Sutton kneeling beside her bed, apparently in prayer.

Abner stopped short, staring at the girl, wondering what she was doing in her room at that time of the day. A suspicion that she meant to join the lynching party shot through his head and was instantly rejected.

The girl must have heard Abner pause in his soft pacing, for she looked around. Her face was white and frightened. After a mute interrogation in her wide eyes she began in a low voice, "Are you—" then broke off and moved her ​head in a mysterious manner toward the silent village outside.

Abner knew that she was asking him if he would take part in the approaching murder. He hardly knew what to answer. He could not in loyalty to his gang admit anything in words. Neither could he possibly deny Nessie any question. So, staring at the girl, an idea for an explanatory evasion came to him. He drew the edge of his bandanna mask from his pocket, displayed it significantly, and thrust it back. As he did so he thought, "That's enough to show her I'm goin', but she couldn't swear before a grand jury what she saw. . . ." And Abner felt he had done exactly the right thing.

"How come you at home, Nessie?" he asked curiously.

"Mr. Baxter sent me. He said I better go home, there wouldn't be no trade." She paused, then added with a touch of horror: "All the stores are locked up!"

"Fuh God's sake!" echoed Abner in the same voice. He was shocked, thrown out of his bearings. The whole town was locked up! The affair had leaped beyond his reckoning. He had thought it merely a coup of the garage gang, but the business men of the village must be in it: Mr. Baxter, Mr. Bingham, Mr. Fuller. Abner never before had known these men to do anything beyond attending the meetings of their fraternal orders on lodge nights. He had looked upon them as human machines whom nothing stirred, nothing retarded; nothing broke their steady money-making gait. Other men might fight, gamble, mob, but these pillars of village society would do nothing unusual whatsoever. They were standardized automatons of small-town respectability, and now—these mechanical figures suddenly had come to life, had locked up their stores and gone out to kill a man!

A shiver went through the teamster. "Look here," he whispered, dry-mouthed, "I got to go—my Lord, I kain't stay here!" He was spurred by a feeling that it was unsafe to follow Tom Northcutt's instructions and await an appointed hour. Such an unprecedented occurrence might ​break loose any moment. He turned on his heel when the girl cried out, leaped up, and was on him before he knew it.

"Don't! Don't!" she cried. "Oh, Abner, don't go out there! It's murder, Abner! Dear Abner!"

She had her arms about his neck and suddenly began a vehement sobbing.

The teamster was shocked, amazed beyond all experience. The perfume of the girl, her soft slender body pressing passionately against him, so shocked and confused him that he could distinguish nothing clearly. She was a blur of bluish dress, of pale cornsilk hair, of perfume. As she sobbed he felt her bosom pressing in spasms against his own.

"Why, what's the matter, Nessie? Little girl! There! There! Don't cry, honey." As he lifted a hand to pat her cheek a tear splashed his fingers. This somehow renewed his sense of shock. "What is the matter, Nessie, honey?" he begged.

"You'll be a murderer, Abner!" she gasped. "It's awful! It's sinful, wicked! Don't you know it'll send your soul to—the bad place!"

The last phrase was a horrified aspirate. She was looking up at him with tears on her lashes, her pleading lips within three inches of his own. As the person of the girl gained upon Abner, the imminent drama at the lock-up receded from him. One urgency slowly faded from his mind and almost imperceptibly gave way to another.

She was so slight, a mere wisp in his arms, and unbelievably soft. Never before had his arms been about a woman, and now, under the spell of the girl, the topic they were debating so passionately wavered and grew uncertain in the growing wonder of her appeal. He collected his thoughts with an effort.

"But, Nessie," he objected, "it—it ain't murder if ever'-body does it; it's—it's—"

She broke into his definition passionately.

"But it is! You know it is, Abner! To kill a man! You—you wouldn't help kill a man!" She bent back her ​lithe torso to her arms' length, her waist still held in his arms, and looked at him with horror in her eyes.

Abner scrambled desperately after the topic, confused by a twitching in his breast. "But—but he shot Tug Beavers. . . ."

"What of that! You're not the executioner! You're not the law!"

"I—no, I'm not the law—I'm not—" he tried to recall the arguments Mrs. Roxie Biggers had used in favour of mob rule. They flickered out under a queer compressed feeling in his chest. His heart began a steadily accelerated pounding. Almost unaware of what he was doing he leaned down and pressed his lips to the girl's mouth.

There came a motionless silence. He felt a little quiver go through Nessie. She moved her head away and breathed in a faint voice, "Oh—don't do that. . . ."

His fingers shook so that he could hardly control them as he pressed her face back to his own.

She tried to pull away and mumbled, "Don't, Abner—please don't . . ."

His voice came out, shaken by his heartbeats. "You—you love me—don't you?"

She said nothing to this but pushed away from him in the circle of his arms, shaking as if with an ague. Abner swallowed drily. "You do—love me—I know you do." Her continued opposition somehow inflamed him. He kissed her again roughly. Her lips felt so soft and warm. She still tried to move her head, but at his growing violence relaxed weakly in his arms. With his lips still pressed to hers one of the teamster's trembling hands began exploring the rondures of her form. He pushed her door shut with his foot.

Once, later, she half gasped, half sobbed, "Oh—oh—Abner—please, p-l-e-a-s-e—"

The teamster was fetched back to the drama of village life by the softened report of a distant volley of shots. A kind of slow shock travelled through Abner and delivered ​him from the swoon of his bewildering experience. He got up and said in a whisper, mainly to himself, "My God, they've already gone!"

He started for the door. This time the girl neither moved nor spoke but remained just as she lay with closed eyes looking as if someone had felled her at a blow.

A backward glance at her aroused in Abner a kind of questioning remorse. He had a feeling of coming out of some sort of whirling force that had betrayed and wrecked Nessie, and now it had passed and left in the room a kind of draggled evil. He felt an impulse to get away from this evil thing. He opened the door as silently as he could and left Nessie in the room.

More distant shots took Abner’s mind from such dismal impressions and sent him tiptoeing down the hall, then down the stairs two at a time and so out in the street where he broke into a run for the lock-up.

The village street was still empty, and Abner’s flying feet aroused echoes as if some invisible runner raced the teamster just behind the string of houses. As he approached the alley which led from the business street to the lock-up, the youth craned forward, trying to peer down it long before he reached the vantage of its mouth. When he did dash into it all he saw was the lock-up door standing open and Constable Gifford walking away from it with one of his shirt sleeves torn.

The teamster rushed down on the officer.

"Where'd they go, Mr. Gifford? Which way?" He drew down to a panting walk.

"Yander way!" the constable flung an arm toward the west. "My Lord, they all jumped on me at wunst—what could a feller do! Look here, how they tore my shirt! They'd uh killed me if I hadn't of give 'em the key!" He held up his arm to display more prominently the torn sleeve.

Abner had no time to waste on the alibi the constable was preparing, but struck out again, westward, toward the old Squire Meredith place at a long trot.

​At every curve of the village street, and beyond town, at every curve of the country road, the running youth peered forward in hope of a glimpse of the violent melodrama. The road unfolded in yellow curves of summer dust.

Presently a fear began to mount in Abner's throat, which crystalized into an anguished certainty, that he had missed the lynchers altogether. He had missed their trail! They had turned off somewhere into the woods, for a stout tree, no doubt!

He now ran on miserably and hopelessly, but unable to stop running owing to the possibility that he might find them, that he might get to them. In his heart he damned his lingering with Nessie. The brief remorse he had suffered in her presence had vanished as completely as the reflection in a mirror when it is turned another way. He had missed the lynching! He could have wept!

As he mounted the long slope that led up to Squire Meredith's farm, running up grade became impossible. He slowed down to a heavy perspiring trot. He gasped for breath in the hot sunshine, but he could not walk. He could not endure the slow movement of a walk. Sweat stung his eyes. He thought expletives in mental sighs of frustration, "Oh damn—damn—damn that girl—" Then he was forced to give up even his poor trot. His legs were lead. The heat closed around him like a blanket.

He blinked up at the sun in despair when a swinging object on the right-hand side of the road transfixed his attention.

At the end of its rope the object turned slowly around until it faced the teamster standing frozen on the hot hillside. It turned on until it displayed three quarters of its back, then, gradually, it stopped, hung for a moment, and began slowly turning back again.

This slow passive exhibition of itself was the most gruesome thing Abner had ever imagined. It looked somehow as if it were dully summing up the whole matter—life had come to this. This was why he had been born, had laboured, ​stolen, and murdered—to this end. It was Peck Bradley, focussed to pure intellect at last.

The thing looked curiously shrunken and small. It seemed strange that the whole village should have made such a to-do over so trifling an object. It looked now as if one man—any man—might have done it. It was so small, shattered, and passive. The clothes were flecked with little round targets of dust where the bullets had struck. The thing never had got itself washed or combed after its three-days chase in the woods.

The head with its hog-bristle hair was bent at an awkward angle, and the face, rather badly shot, bore a certain messy grin as if there were a kind of jest in the fact that the very archtype of one stratum of hill-country illegal savoir faire should be seized upon by emulous fellow citizens and so sadly misprized. The body turned and returned to show the extent of its mishandling.

When Abner went closer he saw that one of its ears, two fingers, and a thumb had been cut cleanly off by souvenir hunters; men afraid, perhaps, they would forget this.

Abner stared and stared in a kind of mental syncope. It seemed to him as if he were peering through this body into another and a horrible world of which he had never even dreamed. The slowly revolving figure filled the earth with a terrible insecurity.

Then Abner observed that the mob had hanged Peck just above the place where he had lain in wait for Tug Beavers. With the melodramatic instinct of an uncultured folk, Irontown had brought Peck here. The implication was that this was not a dirty, hideous job, the sooner finished, the better; it was a processional, a rite, a holiday, a tidbit to be served with melodramatic sauce to the public palate. Abner himself, when he observed this, felt that it was a fine stroke.

A voice behind the youth shocked him profoundly.

"I'm glad to see you were not in this lynching party, Abner."

​Abner whirled as if stung and saw a familiar figure at whom he stared for several seconds before recognizing Mr. Ditmas; then he repeated, "Glad to see I ain't in it?"

"Yes, very glad."

Abner looked at Mr. Ditmas, rather relieved to take his eyes off the thing.

"How do you know I wasn't in it?" he asked with a certain penetration.

"If you had been in it you would have run off with the others."

"Yeh, that's so, I guess—but now a jury would say I he'ped do it if they found me stan'in' here."

Ditmas glanced at the youth more sharply, seeking to fathom this extraordinary thought.

"Possibly—a jury's notions are more or less mechanical, a certain notion for a certain situation—funny thing, a jury, take 'em one at a time, each man seems to have ordinary sense, put 'em together and you've got twelve dam fools—but how came you to think of that at all?"

"I—don't know."

The teamster looked so stupid and stodgy standing there by the figure, the engineer gave up his questioning and fell into another line of thought. He said, more to himself than to Abner, "I wonder what period of human development this throws back to? Almost every grade and condition of man has some sort of form they go through with before executing one of their members. The American Indians held elaborate pow wows; African tribes possessed genuine courts; in the Fijis executions were the subject of religious ceremonials and ended by making a feast off the corpse. . . ."

"The people here do this," said Abner, proffering the usual village explanation, "because the law won't do nothin' to nobody."

"Certainly, that's the queer part; the law seems to function in Africa, in the Fijis, in every other place on the globe at least enough for the people to have confidence in it and depend on it, but down here in the South there seems to be no ​confidence whatever in the law. That's the puzzle, why is that?"

Abner turned around and looked at the corpse, spurred to a certain dim intellectual effort by its concrete question.

"Why didn't the law work in the South?" He pondered it seriously and finally said, "It jest never did, Mr. Ditmas."

At that moment, at a considerable distance among the trees, Abner received an impression that something had moved. His woodman's sense had marked the stealthy gliding of a man. He broke off suddenly to ask, "Who was that?"

"Where?"

"Out yonder behind that log."

"I don't see anything behind that log."

"Course not now, after I pointed."

"Is there someone?"

"Shore, le's go see."

Ditmas was really incurious about another spectator of the gruesome scene, but he followed Abner, who moved slowly and noiselessly toward the log. Instinctively the engineer followed his example. The teamster dropped his hand to the automatic in his pocket—not that he meant to use it; he habitually placed himself in a defensive posture when he walked up on anything like this.

When they were within fifteen steps of the log both men were startled by a fear-struck voice,

"Oh—oh, Mastuh Abnah, fuh God's sake don' kill me, Mastuh. Ah ain't done nothin'!"

And around the end of the log peeked an eye and the quarter of the head of a Negro boy. A second later this turned out to be the black chore boy of the Scovell House.

The chore boy had the misplaced appearance of a tame house cat in the woods.

"John!" snapped Abner, irritated by the strain on his nerves. "What the hell are you doin' here!"

John was the colour of ashes. He could hardly control his thick lips to speak.

​"Ah—Ah jess come tuh—tuh see, Mas' Abnah! You won' kill me fuh—fuh dat, Mas' Abnah! Ah allus toted up yo' watah, Mas' Abnah. Ah—ah—"

"No!" cried Ditmas sharply, "of course we aren't going to do anything to you. You have a perfect right to come out and look—what are you afraid of?"

"Wuh—well, Mas' Ditmas, when de white fo'ks k-k-kill one pusson d-dey usually k-k-kill all de niggahs dey can fin' too."

John eased himself up beside the log and stood wetting his dark lips with his red tongue, watching the two white men narrowly and a little sidewise, evidently ready to make one last bid for life with his heels if Abner drew his automatic.

Mr. Ditmas touched Abner's arm. "Come on, let's go back to town—this is one hell of a country!"

"John—you can go," said Abner slowly and enigmatically, though exactly why he should have to give John permission to leave him in the woods was a mystery. The black boy began walking away, taking quick cautious strides and most of the time looking back to see exactly what Abner was doing.

As the youth and the man returned to the village, Mr. Ditmas mentioned once more Abner's interest in the old Coltrane lands and said he had found out there was some claim on a tract of timber land he was trying to buy from Railroad Jones.

Abner answered more or less absently. The conversation was the veriest stopgap after the curious excitement of meeting the chore boy in the woods.

When the two friends entered the village again, they observed that all the Negro shacks at the edge of the village were deserted. Hardly a black person remained in Irontown. Some had fled to the woods until this white storm blew over; some were in the coloured church praying to God to preserve them; others had taken what few possessions they could carry in their arms and had deserted Irontown permanently for some other village. The experience of their ​race told them to fly a spot touched by the epidemic of lynching. Three or four of the most able of the Negroes drove their wagons, loaded with household plunder, up the railroad to the next station, bought tickets and shipped North, and so expatriated themselves.