V
She missed Mrs. Worthington. She saw the old woman drive smoothly away from Price’s in her car, alone in the back seat. The negro driver’s head was round as a cannonball and Mrs. Burney watched it draw away, smelling gasoline. The shadow of the courthouse was like thinned tobacco smoke filling one side of the square, and standing in the door of a store she saw an acquaintance, a friend of her son’s. He had been in Dewey’s company, an officer or something, but he hadn’t got killed, not him! Trust them generals and things.
(No, no! I won’t feel like this! He done the best he could. It ain’t his fault if he wasn’t brave enough to get killed, like Dewey was. They are all jealous of Dewey anyway: won’t talk about him except that he done what was right. Done what was right! Didn’t I know he would? Dewey, Dewey. So young he was, so big and brave. Until that Green man took him off and got him killed.)
She felt sorry for the man, felt kindly toward him, pitying him. She stopped beside him. Yes, ma’am, he was all right. Yes, the other boys were all right.
“But then you wasn’t killed,” she explained. “All soldiers wasn’t like Dewey: so brave—foolhardy, almost. … I always told him not to let that Green get him—get him—”
“Yes, yes,” he agreed, looking at her meticulous, bent neatness.
“He was all right? He didn’t want for nothing?”
“No, no, he was all right,” he assured her. Sunset was almost come. Sparrows in a final delirium in the dusty elms, the last wagons going slowly countryward.
“Men don’t know,” she said bitterly. “You probably never done for him what you could. That Mr. Green. … I always misdoubted him.”
“He is dead, too, you know,” he reminded her.
(I won’t be unjust to him!) “You was a officer or something: seems like you’d have took better care of a boy you knowed.”
“We did all we could for him,” he told her patiently. The square, empty of wagons, was quiet. Women went slowly in the last of the sun, meeting husbands, going home to supper. She felt her rheumatism more, now that the air was getting cooler, and she became restive in her fretful black.
“Well. You seen his grave, you say. … You are sure he was all right?” So big and strong he was, so good to her.
“Yes, yes. He was all right.”
Madden watched her bent, neat rotundity going down the street among shadows, beneath metallic awnings. The shadow of the courthouse had taken half the town like a silent victorious army, not firing a shot. The sparrows completed a final dusty delirium and went away, went away across evening into morning, retracing months: a year.
Someone on a fire-step had shouted Gas and the officer leaped among them striking, imploring. Then he saw the officer’s face in red and bitter relief as the man on the fire-step, sharp against the sorrowful dawn, turned screaming, You have got us killed, and shot him in the face at point-blank range.