Snopes: The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion

“Thirty-eight years this coming summer,” he said.

“All right. Thirty-eight. How old are you?”

“I was born in eighty-three,” he said.

“So you’ve been here ever since you were twenty-five years old.” “I dont know. I never counted.”

“All right,” the Warden said. “Beat it. When you say the word I’ll write a letter to your sheriff.”

“I reckon I’ll stay,” he said. But he was wrong. Five months later the petition lay on the Warden’s desk.

“Who is Linda Snopes Kohl?” the Warden said.

He stood completely still for quite a long time. “Her paw’s a rich banker in Jefferson. His and my grandpaw had two sets of chillen.”

“She was the member of your family that signed the petition to the Governor to let you out.”

“You mean the sheriff sent for her to come and sign it?”

“How could he? You wouldn’t let me write the sheriff.”

“Yes,” he said. He looked down at the paper which he could not read. It was upside down to him, though that meant nothing either. “Show me where the ones signed to not let me out”

“What?” the Warden said.

“The ones that dont want me out.”

“Oh, you mean Houston’s family. No, the only other names on it are the District Attorney who sent you here and your Sheriff, Hubert Hampton, Junior, and V. K. Ratliff. Is he a Houston?”

“No,” he said. He drew the slow deep breath again. “So I’m free.”

“With one thing more,” the Warden said. “Your luck’s not even holding: it’s doubling.” But he handled that too the next morning after they gave him a pair of shoes, a shirt, overalls and jumper and a hat, all brand new, and a ten-dolar bill and the three dollars and eighty-five cents which were still left from the forty dollars Flem had sent him eighteen years ago, and the Warden said, “There’s a deputy here today with a prisoner from Greenville. He’s going back tonight. For a dollar he’ll drop you off right at the end of the bridge to Arkansas, if you want to go that way.”

“Much obliged,” he said. “I’m going by Memphis first. I got some business to tend to there.”

It would probably take all of the thirteen dollars and eighty-five cents to buy a pistol even in a Memphis pawn shop. He had planned to beat his way to Memphis on a freight train, riding the rods underneath a boxcar or between two of them, as he had once or twice as a boy and a youth. But as soon as he was outside the gate, he discovered that he was afraid to. He had been shut too long, he had forgotten how; his muscles might have lost the agility and coordination, the simple bold quick temerity for physical risk. Then he thought of watching his chance to scramble safely into an empty car and found that he didn’t dare that either, that in thirty-eight years he might even have forgotten the unspoken rules of the freemasonry of petty lawbreaking without knowing it until too late.

So he stood beside the paved highway which, when his foot touched it last thirty-eight years ago, had not even been gravel but instead was dirt marked only by the prints of mules and the iron tires of wagons; now it looked and felt as smooth and hard as a floor, what time you could see it or risk feeling it either for the cars and trucks rushing past on it. In the old days any passing wagon would have stopped to no more than his raised hand. But these were not wagons so he didn’t know what the new regulations for this might be either; in fact if he had known anything else to do but this he would already be doing it instead of standing, frail and harmless and not much larger than a child in the new overalls and jumper still showing their off-the-shelf creases and the new shoes and the hat, until the truck slowed in toward him and stopped and the driver said, “How far you going, dad?” “Memphis,” he said.

“I’m going to Clarksdale. You can hook another ride from there. As good as you can here, anyway.”

It was fall, almost October, and he discovered that here was something else he had forgotten about during the thirty-eight years: seasons. They came and went in the penitentiary too but for thirty-eight years the only right he had to them was the privilege of suffering because of them: from the heat and sun of summer whether he wanted to work in the heat of the day or not, and the rain and icelike mud of winter whether he wanted to be out in it or not. But now they belonged to him again: October next week, not much to see in this flat Delta country which he had misdoubted the first time he laid eyes on it from the train window that day thirty-eight years ago: just cotton stalks and cypress needles. But back home in the hills, all the land would be gold and crimson with hickory and gum and oak and maple, and the old fields warm with sage and splattered with scarlet sumac; in thirty-eight years he had forgotten that.