A Gathering of Old Men by Ernest J. Gaines

After Miss Merle left with her two baskets, Lou went out in the road where Mapes was. They leaned back against Mapes’s car looking at us in the yard. Me, I was leaning back against the end of the garry where you went around the house to the toilet. Chimley had just come from the toilet, and before he got back to the front I seen him bending over and getting a shell out of the shoe box under the house. He got two. He put one in the gun, the other one in his pocket. You see, that’s what we had been doing all the time. Sure, we was going back to the toilet, but we was doing more than just going to the toilet. Clatoo had already told us where he had put that box of shells, and every time one of us went to the toilet, and didn’t catch the white folks watching us, we ducked down by the side of the house and got a couple shells out of that box. And nobody knowed the difference. Not my wife, Beulah, not none of the other women, and surely not that crazy Jameson. We was more scared of him talking than we was anybody else.

Not long after Chimley had come back to the front, we heard the noise on the car radio. Mapes opened the door and started talking on the speaker. We could hear the static, then the other voice; the static, then Mapes. It went on like that couple minutes—static, other voice; static, then Mapes. Then he hung up the speaker, and him and Lou came back in the yard. Mapes was grinning. Oh, how he was grinning. Not grinning out, grinning in. You could tell he was grinning in, even if his mouth wasn’t moving.