She said, “Did you find him?”
“We found him,” Boze said. He took out his badge and showed it to her. “We’re county sheriff’s deputies, Mrs. Parsons. You’d best tell us what happened in there.”
“I shot him,” she said. Matter-of-fact, like she was telling you the time of day. “This morning, just after breakfast. Ever since I’ve wanted to hitch up the buggy and drive in and tell about it, but I couldn’t seem to find the courage. It took all the courage I had to fire the rifle.”
“But why’d you do a thing like that?”
“Because of what he did in Tule River last night.”
“You mean the hanging man?”
“Yes. Jubal killed him.”
“Did he tell you that?”
“Yes. Not long before I shot him.”
“Why did he do it — hang that fellow?”
“He was crazy jealous, that’s why.”
I asked her, “Who was the dead man?”
“I don’t know.”
“You mean to say he was a stranger?”
“Yes,” she said. “I only saw him once. Yesterday afternoon. He rode in looking for work. I told him we didn’t have any, that we were tenant farmers, but he wouldn’t leave. He kept following me around, saying things. He thought I was alone here — a woman alone.”
“Did he — make trouble for you?”
“Just with words. He kept saying things, ugly things. Men like that — I don’t know why, but they think I’m a woman of easy virtue. It has always been that way, no matter where we’ve lived.”
“What did you do?” Boze asked.
“Ignored him at first. Then I begged him to go away. I told him my husband was wild jealous, but he didn’t believe me. I thought I was alone too, you see; I thought Jubal had gone off to work in the fields.”
“But he hadn’t?”
“Oh, he had. But he came back while the drifter was here and he overheard part of what was said.”
“Did he show himself to the man?”
“No. He would have if matters had gone beyond words, but that didn’t happen. After a while he got tired of tormenting me and went away. The drifter, I mean.”
“Then what happened?”
“Jubal saddled his horse and followed him. He followed that man into Tule River and when he caught up with him he knocked him on the head and he hung him.”
Boze and I traded another look. I said what both of us were thinking: “Just for deviling you? He hung a man for that?”
“I told you, Jubal was crazy jealous. You didn’t know him. You just — you don’t know how he was. He said that if a man thought evil, and spoke evil, it was the same as doing evil. He said if a man was wicked, he deserved to be hung for his wickedness and the world would be a better place for his leaving it.”
She paused, and then made a gesture with one hand at her bosom. It was a meaningless kind of gesture, but you could see where a man might take it the wrong way. Might take her the wrong way, just like she’d said. And not just a man, either; women, too. Everybody that didn’t keep their minds open and went rooting around after sin in other folks.
“Besides,” she went on, “he worshipped the ground I stand on. He truly did, you know. He couldn’t bear the thought of anyone sullying me.”
I cleared my throat. The sweat on me had dried and I felt cold now. “Did you hate him, Mrs. Parsons?”
“Yes, I hated him. Oh, yes. I feared him, too — for a long time I feared him more than anything else. He was so big. And so strong-willed. I used to tremble sometimes, just to look at him.”
“Was he cruel to you?” Boze asked. “Did he hurt you?”
“He was and he did. But not the way you mean; he didn’t beat me, or once lay a hand to me the whole nine years we were married. It was his vengeance that hurt me. I couldn’t stand it, I couldn’t take any more of it.”
She looked away from us again, out over the alfalfa fields — and a long ways beyond them, at something only she could see. “No roots,” she said, “that was part of it, too. No roots. Moving here, moving there, always moving — three states and five homesteads in less than ten years. And the fear. And the waiting. This was the last time, I couldn’t take it ever again. Not one more minute of his jealousy, his cruelty... his wickedness.”
“Ma’am, you’re not making sense—”
“But I am,” she said. “Don’t you see? He was Jubal Parsons, the Hanging Man.”
I started to say something, but she shifted position on the steps just then — and when she did that her face came out of shadow and into the sunlight, and I saw in her eyes a kind of terrible knowledge. It put a chill on my neck like the night wind does when it blows across a graveyard.
“That drifter in Tule River wasn’t the first man Jubal hung on account of me,” she said. “Not even the first in California. That drifter was the Hanging Man’s eighth.”
Changes
The big flat-faced stranger came into the Elite Barber Shop just before closing that Wednesday afternoon.
Asa was stropping his old Spartacus straight razor, humming to himself and thinking how good a cold lemonade was going to taste. Over at the shoeshine stand Leroy Heavens sat on a three-legged stool, working on his own pair of brogans with a stained cloth; sweat lacquered his face and made it glisten like black onyx. The mercury in the courthouse thermometer had been up to 97 at high noon and Asa judged it wasn’t much cooler than that right now: the summer flies were still heat-drugged, floating in circles on such breeze as the ceiling fan stirred up.
In the long mirror across the rear wall Asa watched the stranger shut the door and stand looking around. Leroy and the shoeshine stand got a passing glance; so did the three 1920s Otis barber chairs, the waiting-area furniture, the open door to Asa’s living quarters in back, the counter full of clippers and combs and other tonsorial tools, and the display shelves of both modern and old-fashioned grooming supplies.
When the eyes flicked over him Asa said, “Sure is a hot one,” by way of greeting. “That sun’ll raise blisters, a person stands under it too long.”
The big man didn’t say anything. Just headed across to where Asa was standing behind the number one chair. He wore a loose-fitting summer shirt and a pair of spiffy cream-colored slacks; dark green-tinted sunglasses hid his eyes. Asa took him to be somewhere in his middle fifties, reckoning from the lines in his face. Some face it was, too: looked as though somebody had beat on it with a mallet to flatten it that way, to get the nose and lips all spread out and shapeless.
The display shelves were to the left of the number one chair; the stranger stopped there and peered down at the old-fashioned supplies. He picked up and inspected a silvertip-badger shaving brush, an ironstone mug, a block of crystal alum, a bottle of imported English lavender water. The left corner of his mouth bent upward in a sort of smile.
“Nice stuff you got here,” he said, and Asa knew right off that he was from up North. New York, maybe; he had that kind of damn-Yankee accent you kept hearing on the TV. “Not too many places stock it nowadays.”
“That’s a fact,” Asa agreed. “I’m just about the only barber in Hallam County that does.”
“Sell much of it?”
“Nope, not much. Had that silvertip brush two years now; got a genuine tortoiseshell handle, too. Kind of a shame nobody wants it.”
The stranger made a noise through his flattened nose. “Doesn’t surprise me. All anybody wants these days is modern junk, modern ideas. People’d be a lot better off if they stuck to the old ways.”
“Well,” Asa said philosophically, “things change.”