Knight's Gambit by William Faulkner Page A

never done any of it. He had seen it, of course, the cotton and the corn in the fields, and men working it. But he could not have wanted to do it himself before, or he would have, since he could have found chances enough. Yet he turns and murders the man who had befriended him and, whether he realized it or not, saved him from comparative hell and upon whom he had transferred his capacity for doglike fidelity and devotion and on whose account a week ago he had refused a pardon: his reason being that he wanted to return into the world and farm land—this, the change, to occur in one week’s time and after he had been for five years more completely removed and insulated from the world than any nun. Yes, granted that this could be the logical sequence in that mind which he hardly possessed and granted that it could have been powerful enough to cause him to murder his one friend (Yes, it was the warden’s pistol; we heard about that: how the warden kept it in the house and one day it disappeared and to keep word of it getting out the warden had his Negro cook, another trusty and who would have been the logical one to have taken it, severely beaten to force the truth from him. Then Monk himself found the pistol, where the warden now recalled having hidden it himself, and returned it.)—granted all this, how in the world could the impulse have reached him, the desire to farm land have got into him where he now was? That’s what I told Uncle Gavin.
    ‘It adds up, all right,’ Uncle Gavin said. ‘We just haven’t got the right ciphers yet. Neither did they.’
    ‘They?’
    ‘Yes. They didn’t hang the man who murdered Gambrell. They just crucified the pistol.’
    ‘What do you mean?’ I said.
    ‘I don’t know. Maybe I never shall. Probably never shall. But it adds up, as you put it, somewhere, somehow. It has to. After all, that’s too much buffooning even for circumstances, let alone a mere flesh-and-blood imbecile. But probably the ultimate clowning of circumstances will be that we won’t know it.’
    But we did know. Uncle Gavin discovered it by accident, and he never told anyone but me, and I will tell you why.
    At that time we had for Governor a man without ancestry and with but little more divulged background than Monk had; a politician, a shrewd man who (some of us feared, Uncle Gavin and others about the state) would go far if he lived. About three years after Monk died he declared, without warning, a kind of jubilee. He set a date for the convening of the Pardon Board at the penitentiary, where he inferred that he would hand out pardons to various convicts in the same way that the English king gives out knighthoods and garters on his birthday. Of course, all the Opposition said that he was frankly auctioning off the pardons, but Uncle Gavin didn’t think so. He said that the Governor was shrewder than that, that next year was election year, and that the Governor was not only gaining votes from the kin of the men he would pardon but was laying a trap for the purists and moralists to try to impeach him for corruption and then fail for lack of evidence. But it was known that he had the Pardon Board completely under his thumb, so the only protest the Opposition could make was to form committees to be present at the time, which step the Governor—oh, he was shrewd—courteously applauded, even to the extent of furnishing transportation for them. Uncle Gavin was one of the delegates from our county.
    He said that all these unofficial delegates were given copies of the list of those slated for pardon (the ones with enough voting kin to warrant it, I suppose)—the crime, the sentence, the time already served, prison record, etc. It was in the mess hall; he said he and the other delegates were seated on the hard, backless benches against one wall, while the Governor and his Board sat about the table on the raised platform where the guards would sit while the men ate, when the convicts were marched in and halted.