Snopes: The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion

But that would be all right; there was that room she had fixed up for herself upstairs, while every word from home that trickled down to him in Parchman—you had to believe folks sometimes, you had to, you jest had to—told how his cousin spent all his time in the one downstairs cattycorner across that house that was bigger they said than even the jail. Then to look in the window and find her, not upstairs and across the house where she should have been, where in a way it had been promised to him she would be, but right there in the next room. In which case everything else he had believed in and depended on until now was probably trash and rubble too; there didn’t even need to be an open door between the two rooms so she could be sure to feel what the prison doctor had called the concussion because she wasn’t even deaf. Everything had lied to him; he thought quietly And I aint even got but one bullet left even if I would have time to use two before somebody come busting in from the street. I got to find a stick ofstovewood or a piece of ahm somewhere—that close, that near to ruination and destruction before he caught himself back right on the brink, murmuring, whispering, “Wait now, wait. Aint I told you and told you Old Moster dont play jokes; He jest punishes? Of course she’s deaf: aint all up and down Missippi been telling you that for ten years now? I dont mean that durn Parchman doctor nor all the rest of them durn jailbird son of a bitches that was all I had to try to find out what I had to know from, but that nigger jest yestiddy evening that got almost impident, durn nigh called a white man a liar to his face the least suh-jestion I made that maybe she was fooling folks. Niggers that dont only know all the undercover about white folks, let alone one that they already claim is a nigger lover and even one of them commonists to boot, until all the niggers in Yoknapatawpha County and likely Memphis and Chicago too know the truth about whether she is deaf or not or ever thing else about her or not. Of course she’s deaf, setting there with her back already to the door where you got to pass and they’s bound to be a back door too that all you got to do is jest find it and walk right on out,” and moved on, without haste: not furtive, just small and light-footed and invisible, on around the house and up the steps and on between the soaring columns of the portico like any other guest, visitor, caller, opening the screen door quietly into the hall and through it, passing the open door beyond which the woman sat, not even glancing toward it, and went on to the next one and drew the pistol from his overall bib; and, thinking hurriedly, a little chaotically, almost like tiny panting I aint got but one bullet so it will have to be in the face, the head; I cant reskjest the body with jest one bullet entered the room where his cousin sat and ran a few more steps toward him.

He didn’t need to say, “Look at me, Flem.” His cousin was already doing that, his head turned over his shoulder. Otherwise he hadn’t moved, only the jaws ceased chewing in midmotion. Then he moved, leaned slightly forward in the chair and he had just begun to lower his propped feet from the ledge, the chair beginning to swivel around, when Mink from about five feet away stopped and raised the toad-shaped iron-rust-colored weapon in both hands and cocked and steadied it, thinking Hit’s got to hit his face: not I’ve got to but It’s got to and pulled the trigger and rather felt than heard the dull foolish almost inattentive click. Now his cousin, his feet now flat on the floor and the chair almost swiveled to face him, appeared to sit immobile and even detached too, watching too Mink’s grimed shaking child-sized hands like the hands of a pet coon as one of them lifted the hammer enough for the other to roll the cylinder back one notch so that the shell would come again under the hammer; again that faint something out of the past nudged, prodded: not a warning nor even really a repetition: just faint and familiar and unimportant still since, whatever it had been, even before it had not been strong enough to alter anything nor even remarkable enough to be remembered; in the same second he had dismissed it. Hit’s all right he thought Hit’ll go this time: Old Moster dont play jokes and cocked and steadied the pistol again in both hands, his cousin not moving at all now though he was chewing faintly again, as though he too were watching the dull point of light on the cock of the hammer when it flicked away.