“No, suh, Mistah Nick! Doin’ something bad was jus’ what I didn’t! I try to do good, an’ then I get all mixed up, ol’ foolish me an’—an’—oh, Mistah Nick!” He covered his face with his hands. “D-Don’t be mad at me, suh. Uncle John, he don’t know nothin’ at all. He don’t h-hear nothin’ an’ he don’t see nothin’, an’— an’—please don’t kill me, Mistah Nick! Please don’t kill ol’ John.”

I patted him on the back, letting him cry for a minute. Then I said I knew he hadn’t done nothing wrong, so why would I want to do anything bad to him. But I’d sure be obliged if he told me just what had happened.

“Y-You—” He uncovered his face to look at me. “You really ain’t gonna kill me, Mistah Nick? Honest?”

“God-dang it, you callin’ me a liar?” I said. “Now, you just start talkin’, and don’t you tell me nothing but the truth.”

He told me what had happened, why he had brought Tom Hauck’s body back to his farm house.

It stacked up just about the way I thought it would.

He had come across the body early that evening while he was out hunting ‘possum, and he’d started to come into town to tell me about it. Then, with so many varmints around, he figured it might be best to bring the body in with him. So he’d loaded it on his old spring wagon, along with the shotgun, and headed for town again.

He was about halfway there when it struck him that it might be a pretty bad idea to show up in town with the remains; in fact, it was a god-danged bad idea to be caught even in the same neighborhood with them. Because a lot of people might figure he had a first-class motive for killing Tom. After all, Tom had given him a hard beating and intended to beat him again if he got within grabbing range. He just couldn’t lead a very happy life as long as Tom was around, so it wouldn’t be any surprise at all if he killed him. Anyways, Uncle John being a colored fella, he wouldn’t get the benefit of any doubts.

Tom Hauck was completely no good, and the community was well shet of him. But they’d still lynch Uncle John. It would sort of be their civic duty, the way they’d see it; part of the process of keeping the colored folks in hand.

Well, so poor old Uncle John had got himself in a pickle. He couldn’t take Tom’s body into town, or even be seen with it. And Tom being a white man, he couldn’t bring himself to just dump the body off in a ditch somewhere. There was only one thing he could do, as he saw it; only one thing that would be acceptable to Tom’s white ghost and the All-Knowing God that he had been taught to believe in. He’d just take the dead man back to his own home and leave him there.