THE JAIL
501
day, carrying the alien shoes rolled neatly in the alien pants under
their arms, to stop at the bridge over Compson's creek long enough to
bathe their legs and feet before donning the pants and shoes, then
coming on to squat all day on the store gallery eating cheese and
crackers and peppermint candy (bought on credit too out of Comp–
son's and Ratcliffe's showcase) ,and now not only they but Haber–
sham and Holston and Grenier too were there on sufferance, ana–
chronistic and alien, not really an annoyance yet but simply a
dis–
comfort;
Then they were gone; the jail watched that: the halted ungreased
unpainted wagon, the span of underfed mules attached to it by
fragments of Eastern harness supplemented by raw deer-hide thongs,
the nine young men-the wild men, tameless and proud, who even
in their own generation's memory had been free and, in that of their
fathers, the heirs of kings-squatting about it, waiting, quiet and
composed, not even dressed in the ancient forest-softened deerskins
of their freedom but in the formal regalia of the white man's inex–
plicable ritualistic sabbaticals: broadcloth trousers and white shirts
with boiled-starch bosoms (because they were traveling now; they
would be visible to outworld, to strangers:-and carrying the New
England-made shoes under their arms too since the distance would
be long and walking was better barefoot), the shirts collarless and
cravatless true enough and with the tails worn outside, but still
board-rigid, gleaming, pristine, and in the rocking chair in the
wagon, beneath the slave-borne parasol, the fat shapeless old matri–
arch
in
the regal sweat-stained purple silk and the plumed hat, bare–
foot too of course but, being a queen, with another slave to carry her
slippers, putting her cross to the paper and then driving on, vanish–
ing slowly and terrifically to the slow and terrific creak and squeak
of the ungreased wagon-apparently and apparently only, since in
reality it was as though, instead of putting an inked cross at the
foot of a sheet of paper, she had lighted the train of a mine set be–
neath a dam, a dyke, a barrier already straining, bulging, bellying,
not only towering over the land but leaning, looming, imminent
with collapse, so that it only required the single light touch of the
pen in that brown illiterate hand, and the wagon did not vanish
slowly and terrifically from the scene to the terrific sounq of its un-
