Intruder in the Dust by William Faulkner

the other one,’ he said. ‘I can attend to it through the bars:’ and didn’t wait, the door closed behind him, he heard the bar slide back into the slot but still all he had to do was just to rap on it, hearing the jailer’s feet going away back down the stairs but even then all he had to do was just to yell loud and bang on the floor and Legate anyway would hear him, thinking
Maybe he will remind me of that goddamn plate of collards and sidemeat or maybe he’ll even tell me I’m all he’s got, all that’s left and that will be enough
——walking fast, then the steel door and Lucas had not moved, still standing in the middle of the cell beneath the light, watching the door when he came up to it and stopped and said in a voice as harsh as his uncle’s had ever been:
    ‘All right. What do you want me to do?’
    ‘Go out there and look at him,’ Lucas said.
    ‘Go out where and look at who?’ he said. But he understood all right. It seemed to him that he had known all the time what it would be; he thought with a kind of relief
So that’s all it is
even while his automatic voice was screeching with outraged disbelief: ‘Me?
Me?’
It was like something you have dreaded and feared and dodged for years until it seemed like all your life, then despite everythingit happened to you and all it was was just pain, all it did was hurt and so it was all over, all finished, all right.
    ‘I’ll pay you,’ Lucas said.
    So he wasn’t listening, not even to his own voice in amazed incredulous outrage: ‘Me go out there and dig up that grave?’ He wasn’t even thinking anymore
So this is what that plate of meat and greens is going to cost me
. Because he had already passed that long ago when that something—whatever it was—had held him here five minutes ago looking back across the vast, the almost insuperable chasm between him and the old Negro murderer and saw, heard Lucas saying something to him not because he was himself, Charles Mallison junior, nor because he had eaten the plate of greens and warmed himself at the fire, but because he alone of all the white people Lucas would have a chance to speak to between now and the moment when he might be dragged out of the cell and down the steps at the end of a rope, would hear the mute unhoping urgency of the eyes. He said:
    ‘Come here.’ Lucas did so, approaching, taking hold of two of the bars as a child stands inside a fence. Nor did he remember doing so but looking down he saw his own hands holding to two of the bars, the two pairs of hands, the black ones and the white ones, grasping the bars while they faced one another above them. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Why?’
    ‘Go and look at him,’ Lucas said. ‘If it’s too late when you get back, I’ll sign you a paper now saying I owes you whatever you think it’s worth.’
    But still he wasn’t listening; he knew it: only to himself: ‘I’m to go seventeen miles out there in the dark——’
    ‘Nine,’ Lucas said. ‘The Gowries buries at Caledonia Chapel. You takes the first right hand up into the hillsjust beyond the Nine-Mile branch bridge. You can be there in a half hour in your uncle’s automobile.’
    ‘——I’m to risk having the Gowries catch me digging up that grave. I aim to know why. I dont even know what I’ll be looking for. Why?’
    ‘My pistol is a fawty-one Colt,’ Lucas said. Which it would be; the only thing he hadn’t actually known was the calibre—that weapon workable and efficient and well cared for yet as archaic peculiar and unique as the gold toothpick, which had probably (without doubt) been old Carothers McCaslin’s pride a half century ago.
    ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Then what?’
    ‘He wasn’t shot with no fawty-one Colt.’
    ‘What was he shot with?’
    But Lucas didn’t answer that, standing there on his side of the steel door, his hands light-clasped and motionless around the two bars, immobile save for the faint movement of his breathing. Nor had he