The Grass Harp by Truman Capote Read Free Book Online Page B

there?”
    “Me, Riley Henderson.” It was indeed. He separated from the shadows, and his upraised, grinning face looked warped, wicked in the candlelight. “Just thought I’d see how you were getting on. Hope you’re not sore at me: I wouldn’t have told where you were, not if I’d known what it was all about.”
    “Nobody blames you, son,” said the Judge, and I remembered it was he who had championed Riley’s cause against his uncle Horace Holton: there was an understanding between them. “We’re enjoying a small taste of wine. I’m sure Miss Dolly would be pleased to have you join us.”
    Catherine complained there was no room; another ounce, and those old boards would give way. Still, we scrunched together to make a place for Riley, who had no sooner squeezed into it than Catherine grabbed a fistful of his hair. “That’s fortoday with you pointing your gun at us like I told you not to; and this,” she said, yanking again and speaking distinctively enough to be understood, “pays you back for setting the Sheriff on us.”
    It seemed to me that Catherine was impertinent, but Riley grunted good-naturedly, and said she might have better cause to be pulling somebody’s hair before the night was over. For there was, he told us, excited feelings in the town, crowds like Saturday night; the Reverend and Mrs. Buster especially were brewing trouble: Mrs. Buster was sitting on her front porch showing callers the bump on her head. Sheriff Candle, he said, had persuaded Verena to authorize a warrant for our arrest on the grounds that we had stolen property belonging to her.
    “And Judge,” said Riley, his manner grave, perplexed, “they’ve even got the idea they’re going to arrest you. Disturbing the peace and obstructing justice, that’s what I heard. Maybe I shouldn’t tell you this—but outside the bank I ran into one of your boys, Todd. I asked him what he was going to do about it, about them arresting you, I mean; and he said Nothing, said they’d been expecting something of the kind, that you’d brought it on yourself.”
    Leaning, the Judge snuffed out the candle; it was as though an expression was occurring in his face which he did not want us to see. In the dark one of us was crying, after a moment we knew that it was Dolly, and the sound of her tears set off silent explosions of love that, running the full circle round, bound us each to the other. Softly, the Judge said: “When they come we must be ready for them. Now, everybody listen to me.…”

III
    “ WE MUST KNOW OUR POSITION to defend it; that is a primary rule. Therefore: what has brought us together? Trouble. Miss Dolly and her friends, they are in trouble. You, Riley: we both are in trouble. We belong in this tree or we wouldn’t be here.” Dolly grew silent under the confident sound of the Judge’s voice; he said: “Today, when I started out with the Sheriff’s party, I was a man convinced that his life will have passed uncommunicated and without trace. I think now that I will not have been so unfortunate. Miss Dolly, how long? fifty, sixty years? it was that far ago that I remember you, a stiff and blushing child riding to town in your father’s wagon—never getting down from the wagon because you didn’t want us town-children to see you had no shoes.”
    “They had shoes, Dolly and That One,” Catherine muttered. “It was me that didn’t have no shoes.”
    “All the years that I’ve seen you, never known you, not ever recognized, as I did today, what you are: a spirit, a pagan …”
    “A pagan?” said Dolly, alarmed but interested.
    “At least, then, a spirit, someone not to be calculated by the eye alone. Spirits are accepters of life, they grant its differences—andconsequently are always in trouble. Myself, I should never have been a Judge; as such, I was too often on the wrong side: the law doesn’t admit differences. Do you remember old Carper, the fisherman who had a houseboat on the river? He was