And They Say It Is a Capital Offence

Bob Faulkner

There was a time before time when the sun still peeled the skin from the earth like sorrow from the bone, and the dogs howled not for hunger but for the things we buried in silence, and that was where it began, though I reckon it ended long before the first seed cracked in the soil behind Mama’s house, that little patch of red clay earth where the herb grew wild and free and illegal and green as the envy in the sheriff’s eyes.

I reckon it was morning, though the sun hung crooked behind the tangled boughs like a guilt-ridden noose in the courthouse square, the kind Mama said they used for justice once but now just rotted, neglected, like the truth they say lies at the bottom of every empty bottle and grave. And I remember — I do, I must — because the sound of the shot came before the knowing, and the knowing came before the sin, and the sin has stayed with me longer than any woman ever did.

They say I shot him. They say I did it in the street, in the clear light of Jah’s own morning, when the crows weren’t yet bold enough to perch on the gallows, when the town still had the decency to whisper. But they don’t know the story like I do, not the way it lived inside me like a sickness born of heat and old prayers and too many nights staring up at the cracked ceiling with a pistol resting on my stomach and the smell of burned leaves clinging to the curtain lace like a ghost that never washed away.

Sheriff John Brown.

His name came before him, a name you could feel under your feet before he entered a room. A name like iron, like punishment, like the law written in bootsteps across your porch at dawn. And he came for me, not once but always, in that way righteous men come for sinners they invented. Said the herb was sin. Said the garden was rebellion. Said I was filth and godless and brown like the dirt he’d rather pave over than let grow.

But I told them. Told them straight: I did not shoot the deputy.

You hear me? I didn’t shoot him. Never even raised the gun toward his soft white face or the sweat that glistened there like it came from fear and not from the judgment of the mighty Lord. He watched. He always watched. Eyes like the moon, seeing but powerless, rising and falling on the tide of someone else’s authority. If you want to talk of guilt, talk of him — who stood and watched and let it all happen, and who lives still, they say, up on the hill past the burnt pecan grove, quiet as rust.

But the sheriff? Brown? I shot him. Clear through the head like in a Cormac McCarthy story. I shot him and I watched him fall in Sutpen’s Hundred, and he fell like the old church bell fell when the lightning came — sudden and holy and wrong. But I swear it was in self-defence.

“Look here,” he said. “What are you up to?”

“Nothing. I’m all right. You and Spoade go on back. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Do you know where the station is?” Shreve said.

“II’ll find it. I’ll see you all tomorrow. Tell Mrs. Bland I’m sorry I spoiled her party.”

While he lay dying, I went across the yard, toward the road.

They came for me after that, of course. The law. The order. The men with rope and rage who wear righteousness like a uniform. Aiming to shoot I down.

And I ran — not because I was guilty, but because the law does not ask questions of the dead, and I was already halfway there. Freedom came my way one day and I started out of town, yeah. I ran past the memory of Mama, past the dying crops and the house with its windows all boarded up like eyes that refused to see. I ran into the hush. And can you imagine the curtains leaning in on the twilight upon the odour of the apple tree his head against the twilight his arms behind his head kimono-winged the voice that breathed o’er eden clothes upon the bed by the nose seen above the apple what he said?

The light in mother’s windows the light still on in Benjy’s room and I stooped through the fence and went across the pasture running I ran in the grey grass among the crickets the honeysuckle getting stronger and stronger and the smell of water then I could see the water the colour of grey honeysuckle I lay down on the bank with my face close to the ground so I couldn’t smell the honeysuckle I couldn’t smell it then and I lay there feeling the earth going through my clothes listening to the water and after a while I wasn’t breathing so hard and I lay there thinking if I didn’t move my face I wouldn’t have to breathe hard and smell it and then I wasn’t thinking about anything at all the dogs came along the bank and stopped I didn’t move.

And now I speak only in memory, for memory is the last thing they can’t outlaw, not yet. I speak from the place beneath the earth where the roots still remember my name, where the herb grows quiet and unashamed. I speak because even now, some nights, the wind carries the sound of a gunshot, and folks say it’s just an echo. But I know better. Reflexes had got the better of me and what is to be must be.

The clock does not matter. The bees move from the thyme to the lavender in that slow, holy way they have, and beyond the low wall of the garden, the world continues its steady march of ignorance and machinery. In the end, there is no justice, only memory. And memory, like the land, lies. If I am guilty, I will pay.

I, I, I.