“Yes, ma’am,” said Mr. Lampley in his low, toneless voice, keeping his little blazing eyes fixed straight upon her.
“Why, yes,” Aunt Maw cried again, and this time with the vigorous accents of a mounting cheerful certitude, “they’ll teach that boy a trade and regular habits and the proper way to live, and you mark my words, everything’s goin’ to turn out good for him,” she said with heartening conviction. “He’ll forget all about this trouble. Why, yes!—the whole thing will blow right over, people will forget all about it. Why, say! everyone is liable to make a mistake sometime, aren’t they?” she said persuasively. “That happens to everyone—and I’ll bet you. I’ll bet you anything you like that when that boy comes back—”
“He ain’t comin’ back,” said Mr. Lampley.
“What say?” Aunt Maw cried in a sharp, startled tone.
“I said he ain’t comin’ back,” said Mr. Lampley.
“Why what’s the reason he’s not?” she said.
“Because if he does,” said Mr. Lampley, “I’ll kill him. And he knows it.”
She stood looking at him for a moment with a slight frown.
“Oh, Mr. Lampley,” she said quietly, shaking her head with a genial regret, “I’m sorry to hear you say that. I don’t like to hear you talk that way.”
He stared at her grimly for a moment with his furious, blazing eyes.
“Yes, ma’am,” he said, as if he had not heard her. “I’ll kill him. If he ever comes back here, I’ll kill him. I’ll beat him to death,” he said.
Aunt Maw looked at him, shaking her head a little, saying with a closed mouth: “Huh, huh, huh, huh.”
He was silent.
“I never could stand a thief,” he said at length. “If it’d been anything else, I could’ve forgotten it. But a thief!” for the first time his voice rose hoarsely on a surge of passion. “Ah-h-h!” he muttered, stroking his head, and now there was a queer note of trouble and bewilderment in his hard tone. “You don’t know! You don’t know,” he said, “the trouble I have had with that boy! His mother an’ me done all we could for him. We worked hard an’ we tried to raise him right—but we couldn’t do nothing with him,” he muttered. “He was a bad egg.” He looked at her quietly a moment with his little, blazing eyes. Then he said, slowly and deliberately, and with a note of strong rising virtue in his voice, “I beat him, I beat him till he couldn’t stand up—I beat him till the blood ran down his back—but it didn’t do no more good than if I was beatin’ at a post,” he said. “No, ma’am. I might as well have beaten at a post.”
And now his voice had a queer, hard note of grief, regret, and resignation in it, as if a man might say: “All that a father could do for a son I did for mine. But if a man shall beat his son until the blood runs down his back, and still that son learns neither grace nor penitence, what more can a father do?”
He paused a moment longer, with his eyes fixed hard upon her.
“No, ma’am,” he concluded, in his low, toneless voice, “I never expect to see his face again. He’ll never come back here. He knows I’ll kill him if he does.” Then he turned and walked off towards his ancient vehicle while Aunt Maw stood watching him with a troubled and regretful face.
AND HE HAD told the truth. Baxter never did come back. He was as lost to all of them as if he had been dead. They never saw him again.
But George, who heard all this, remembered Baxter suddenly. He remembered his part-brutal, part-corrupted face. He was a creature criminal from nature and entirely innocent. His laugh was throaty with a murky, hoarse, and hateful substance in it; there was something too glutinously liquid, rank, and coarse in his smile; and his eyes looked wet. He had too strange and sudden and too murderously obscure a rage for the clear, hard passions most boys knew. He had a knife with a long, curved blade, and when he saw negroes in the street he put his hand upon his knife. He made half-sobbings in his throat when his rage took hold of him. Yet he was large, quite handsome, well-proportioned. He was full of rough, sudden play, and was always challenging a boy to wrestle with him. He could wrestle strongly, rudely, laughing hoarsely if he flung somebody to the ground, enjoying a bruising struggle, and liking to pant and scuffle harshly with skinned knees upon the earth; and yet he would stop suddenly if he had made his effort but found his opponent stronger than he was, and succumb inertly, with a limp, sudden weakness, smiling, with no pride or hurt, as his opponent pinned him to the earth.