![]() ![]() “Take your wagon and get out of this country before dark. I don’t figure to stay in a country among people who…” he said something unprintable and vile, addressed to no one. His father spoke for the first time, his voice cold and harsh, level, without emphasis: “I aim to. Leave this country and don’t come back to it.” I can’t find against you, Snopes, but I can give you advice. “Damnation! Send him out of here!” Now time, the fluid world, rushed beneath him again, the voices coming to him again through the smell of cheese and sealed meat, the fear and despair and the old grief of blood: “This case is closed. “No!” Harris said violently, explosively. Enemy! Enemy! he thought for a moment he could not even see, could not see that the Justice’s face was kindly nor discern that his voice was troubled when he spoke to the man named Harris: “Do you want me to question this boy?” But he could hear, and during those subsequent long seconds while there was absolutely no sound in the crowded little room save that of quiet and intent breathing it was as if he had swung outward at the end of a grape vine, over a ravine, and at the top of the swing had been caught in a prolonged instant of mesmerized gravity, weightless in time. Colonel Sartoris? I reckon anybody named for Colonel Sartoris in this country can’t help but tell the truth, can they?” The boy said nothing. “Colonel Sartoris Snopes,” the boy whispered. “What’s your name, boy?” the Justice said. He aims for me to lie, he thought, again with that frantic grief and despair. His father, stiff in his black Sunday coat donned not for the trial but for the moving, did not even look at him. He felt no floor under his bare feet he seemed to walk beneath the palpable weight of the grim turning faces. The boy,” and, crouching, small for his age, small and wiry like his father, in patched and faded jeans even too small for him, with straight, uncombed, brown hair and eyes gray and wild as storm scud, he saw the men between himself and the table part and become a lane of grim faces, at the end of which he saw the Justice, a shabby, collarless, graying man in spectacles, beckoning him. He knows.” For a moment the boy thought too that the man meant his older brother until Harris said, “Not him. I got the stock out but I lost the barn.” ![]() ‘Wood and hay kin burn.’ That night my barn burned. He said, ‘He say to tell you wood and hay kin burn.’ I said, ‘What?’ ‘That whut he say to tell you,’ the nigger said. ![]() That evening a nigger came with the dollar and got the hog. I told him he could have the hog when he paid me a dollar pound fee. I rode down to his house and saw the wire I gave him still rolled onto the spool in his yard. The next time I put the hog up and kept it. When he came to get it I gave him enough wire to patch up his pen. He could not see the table where the Justice sat and before which his father and his father’s enemy (our enemy he thought in that despair ourn! mine and hisn both! He’s my father!) stood, but he could hear them, the two of them that is, because his father had said no word yet: “But what proof have you, Mr. The boy, crouched on his nail keg at the back of the crowded room, knew he smelled cheese, and more: from where he sat he could see the ranked shelves close-packed with the solid, squat, dynamic shapes of tin cans whose labels his stomach read, not from the lettering which meant nothing to his mind but from the scarlet devils amid the silver curve of fish this, the cheese which he knew he smelled and the hermetic meat which his intestines believed he smelled coming in intermittent gusts momentary and brief between the other constant one, the smell and sense just a little of fear because mostly of despair and grief, the old fierce pull of blood. THE STORE in which the Justice of the Peace’s court was sitting smelled of cheese. ![]()
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