"Dirty habit," he said, in just a quiet conversational voice. "Got it young, though, and I reckon I'll keep it."
He spat out the window, wiped his chin with his hand, and wiped his hand on his pants. I found the makings I'd had at the asylum and started rolling a cigarette.
"About Joe Rothman," I said. "I didn't say anything about him, Mr. Walker."
"Why, I didn't think you had, Mr. Ford! It never occurred to me that you would," he said; and whether he meant it or not he sure sounded like it. "You know somethin', Mr. Ford? There wasn't a bit of sense in what I did back there."
"No," I said.
"No, sir, not a bit. I've been snorting and pawing up the earth around here for four days. Couldn't have fought harder getting Christ off the cross. And I reckon it was just habit like this chewing tobacco-I knew it but I kept right on chawing. I didn't get you free, Mr. Ford. I didn't have a thing to do with it. They let me have a writ. They let me know where you were. That's why you're here, Mr. Ford, instead of back there."
"I know," I said. "I figured it would be that way."
"You understand? They're not letting you go; they've gone too far to start backing water."
"I understand," I said.
"They've got something? Something you can't beat?"
"They've got it."
"Maybe you'd better tell me about it."
I hesitated, thinking, and finally I shook my head. "I don't think so, Mr. Walker. There's nothing you can do. Or I can do. You'd be wasting your time, and you might get Joe and yourself in a fix."
"Well, now, pshaw." He spat out the window again. "I reckon I might be a better judge of some things than you are, Mr. Ford. You-uh-aren't maybe a little distrustful, are you?"
"I think you know I'm not," I said. "I just don't want anyone else to get hurt."
"I see. Put it hypothetically, then. Just say that there are a certain set of circumstances which would have you licked-if they concerned you. Just make me up a situation that doesn't have anything to do with yours."
So I told him what they had and how they planned to use it, hypothetically. And I stumbled around a lot, because describing my situation, the evidence they had, in a hypothetical way was mighty hard to do. He got it, though, without me having to repeat a word.
"That's the whole thing?" he said. "They haven't got- they can't get, we'll say, anything in the way of actual testimony?"
"I'm pretty sure they can't," I said. "I may be wrong but I'm almost positive they couldn't get anything out of this-evidence."
"Well, then? As long as you're-"
"I know," I nodded. "They're not taking me by surprise, like they figured on. I–I mean this fellow I'm talking about-"
"Go right ahead, Mr. Ford. Just keep on using the first person. It's easier to talk that way."
"Well, I wouldn't cut loose in front of 'em. I don't think I would. But I'd do it sooner or later, with someone. It's best to have it happen now, and get it over with."
He turned his head a moment to glance at me, the big black hat flopping in the wind. "You said you didn't want anyone else to get hurt. You meant it?"
"I meant it. You can't hurt people that are already dead."
"Good enough," he said; and whether he knew what I really meant and was satisfied with it, I don't know. His ideas of right and wrong didn't jibe too close with the books.
"I sure hate to give up, though," he frowned. "Just never got in the habit of giving up, I reckon."
"You can't call it giving up," I said. "Do you see that car way back behind us? And the one up in front, the one that turned in ahead of us, a while back? Those are county cars, Mr. Walker. You're not giving up anything. It's been lost for a long time."
He glanced up into the rear-view mirror, then squinted ahead through the windshield. He spat and rubbed his hand against his pants, wiped it slowly against the soiled black cloth. "Still got quite a little ride ahead of us, Mr. Ford. About thirty miles isn't it?"
"About that. Maybe a little more."
"I wonder if you'd like to tell me about it. You don't need to, you understand, but it might be helpful. I might be able to help someone else."
"Do you think I could-that I'm able to tell you?"
"Why not?" he said. "I had a client years ago, Mr. Ford, a very able doctor. One of the most pleasant men you'd want to meet, and he had more money than he knew what to do with. But he'd performed about fifty abortions before they moved in on him, and so far as the authorities could find out every one of the abortion patients had died. He'd deliberately seen that they did die of peritonitis about a month after the operation. And he told me why-and he could've told anyone else why, when he finally faced up to the facts-he'd done it. He had a younger brother who was 'unfinished,' a prematurely born monstrosity, as the result of an attempted late-pregnancy abortion. He saw that terrible half-child die in agony for years. He never recovered from the experience-and neither did the women he aborted… Insane? Well, the only legal definition we have for insanity is the condition which necessitates the confinement of a person. So, since he hadn't been confined when he killed those women, I reckon he was sane. He made pretty good sense to me, anyhow."
He shifted the cud in his jaw, chewed a moment and went on. "I never had any legal schooling, Mr. Ford; picked up my law by reading in an attorney's office. All I ever had in the way of higher education was a couple years in agricultural college, and that was pretty much a plain waste of time. Crop rotation? Well, how're you going to do it when the banks only make crop loans on cotton? Soil conservation? How're you going to do terracing and draining and contour plowing when you're cropping on shares? Purebred stock? Sure. Maybe you can trade your razorbacks for Poland Chinas… I just learned two things there at that college, Mr. Ford, that was ever of any use to me. One was that I couldn't do any worse than the people that were in the saddle, so maybe I'd better try pulling 'em down and riding myself. The other was a definition I got out of the agronomy books, and I reckon it was even more important than the first. It did more to revise my thinking, if I'd really done any thinking up until that time. Before that I'd seen everything in black and white, good and bad. But after I was set straight I saw that the name you put to a thing depended on where you stood and where it stood. And… and here's the definition, right out of the agronomy books: 'A weed is a plant out of place.' Let me repeat that. 'A weed is a plant out of place.' I find a hollyhock in my cornfield, and it's a weed. I find it in my yard, and it's a flower.
"You're in my yard, Mr. Ford."
… So I told him how it had been while he nodded and spat and drove, a funny pot-bellied shrimp of a guy who really had just one thing, understanding, but so much of it that you never missed anything else. He understood me better'n I understood myself.
"Yes, yes," he'd say, "you had to like people. You had to keep telling yourself you liked them. You needed to offset the deep, subconscious feelings of guilt." Or, he'd say, he'd interrupt, "and, of course, you knew you'd never leave Central City. Overprotection had made you terrified of the outside world. More important, it was part of the burden you had to carry to stay here and suffer."
He sure understood.
I reckon Billy Boy Walker's been cussed more in high places than any man in the country. But I never met a man I liked more.
I guess the way you felt about him depended on where you stood.
He stopped the car in front of my house, and I'd told him all I had to tell. But he sat there for a few minutes, spitting and sort of studying.