Knight's Gambit by William Faulkner

weeks yet.
    So Uncle Gavin came home. He brought the pardon with him, though he did not destroy it, because he said it had been recorded and that the main thing now was to look up the law and see if a man could be expelled from the penitentiary as he could from a college. But I think he still hoped that maybe some day Monk would change his mind; I think that’s why he kept it. Then Monk did set himself free, without any help. It was not a week after Uncle Gavin had talked to him; I don’t think Uncle Gavin had even decided where to put the pardon for safekeeping, when the news came. It was a headline in the Memphis papers next day, but we got the news that night over the telephone: how Monk Oglethrop, apparently leading an abortive jailbreak, had killed the warden with the warden’s own pistol, in cold blood. There was no doubt this time; fifty men had seen him do it, and some of the other convicts overpowered him and took the pistol away from him. Yes. Monk, the man who a week ago cried when Uncle Gavin told him that he was free, leading a jailbreak and committing a murder (on the body of the man for whom he was knitting the sweater which he cried for permission to finish) so cold-blooded that his own confederates had turned upon him.
    Uncle Gavin went to see him again. He was in solitary confinement now, in the death house. He was still knitting on the sweater. He knitted well, Uncle Gavin said, and the sweater was almost finished. ‘I ain’t got but three days more,’ Monk said. ‘So I ain’t got no time to waste.’
    ‘But why, Monk?’ Uncle Gavin said. ‘Why? Why did you do it?’ He said that the needles would not cease nor falter, even while Monk would look at him with that expression serene, sympathetic, and almost exalted. Because he had no conception of death. I don’t believe he had ever connected the carrion at his feet behind the filling station that night with the man who had just been walking and talking, or that on the ground in the compound with the man for whom he was knitting the sweater.
    ‘I knowed that making and selling that whiskey wasn’t right,’ he said. ‘I knowed that wasn’t it. Only I …’ He looked at Uncle Gavin. The serenity was still there, but for the moment something groped behind it: not bafflement nor indecision, just seeking, groping.
    ‘Only what?’ Uncle Gavin said. ‘The whiskey wasn’t it? Wasn’t what? It what?’
    ‘No. Not it.’ Monk looked at Uncle Gavin. ‘I mind that day on the train, and that fellow in the cap would put his head in the door and holler, and I would say “Is this it? Is this where we get off?” and the deppity would say No. Only if I had been there without that deppity to tell me, and that fellow had come in and hollered, I would have …’
    ‘Got off wrong? Is that it? And now you know what is right, where to get off right? Is that it?’
    ‘Yes,’ Monk said. ‘Yes. I know right, now.’
    ‘What? What is right? What do you know now that they never told you before?’
    He told them. He walked up onto the scaffold three days later and stood where they told him to stand and held his head docilely (and without being asked) to one side so they could knot the rope comfortably, his face still serene, still exalted, and wearing that expression of someone waiting his chance to speak, until they stood back. He evidently took that to be his signal, because he said, ‘I have sinned against God and man and now I have done paid it out with my suffering. And now—’ they say he said this part loud, his voice clear and serene. The words must have sounded quite loud to him and irrefutable, and his heart uplifted, because he was talking inside the black cap now: ‘And now I am going out into the free world, and farm.’
    You see? It just does not add up. Granted that he did not know that he was about to die, his words still do not make sense. He could have known but little more about farming than about Stonewall Jackson; certainly he had