The doctor arrived too late this time, also. Byron had to wait for him to dress. He was an oldish man now, and fussy, and somewhat disgruntled at having been wakened at this hour. Then he had to hunt for the switch key to his car, which he kept in a small metal strong box, the key to which in turn he could not find at once. Neither would he allow Byron to break the lock. So when they reached the cabin at last the east was primrosecolor and there was already a hint of the swift sun of summer. And again the two men, both older now, met at the door of a one-room cabin, the professional having lost again to the amateur, for as he entered the door, the doctor heard the infant cry. The doctor blinked at the minister, fretfully. "Well, doctor," he said, "I wish Byron had told me he had already called you in. I"d still be in bed." He thrust past the minister, entering. "You seem to have had better luck this time than you did the last time we consulted. Only you look about like you need a doctor yourself. Or maybe it"s a cup of coffee you need." Hightower said something, but the doctor had gone on, without stopping to listen. He entered the room, where a young woman whom he had never seen before lay wan and spent on a narrow army cot, and an old woman in a purple dress whom he had also never seen before, held the child upon her lap. There was an old man asleep on a second cot in the shadow. When the doctor noticed him, he said to himself that the man looked like he was dead, so profoundly and peacefully did he sleep. But the doctor did not notice the old man at once. He went to the old woman who held the child. "Well, well," he said. "Byron must have been excited. He never told me the whole family would be on hand, grandpa and grandma too." The woman looked up at him. He thought, "She looks about as much alive as he does, for all she is sitting up. Don"t look like she has got enough gumption to know she is even a parent, let alone a grandparent."
"Yes," the woman said. She looked up at him, crouching over the child. Then he saw that her face was not stupid, vacuous. He saw that at the same time it was both peaceful and terrible, as though the peace and the terror had both died long ago and come to live again at the same time. But he remarked mainly her att.i.tude at once like a rock and like a crouching beast. She jerked her head at the man; for the first time the doctor looked full at him where he lay sleeping upon the other cot. She said in a whisper at once cunning and tense with fading terror: "I fooled him. I told him you would come in the back way this time. I fooled him. But now you are here. You can see to Milly now. I"ll take care of Joey." Then this faded. While he watched, the life, the vividness, faded, fled suddenly from a face that looked too still, too dull to ever have harbored it; now the eyes questioned him with a gaze dumb, inarticulate, baffled as she crouched. over the child as if he had offered to drag it from her. Her movement roused it perhaps; it cried once. Then the bafflement too flowed away. It fled as smoothly as a shadow; she looked down at the child, musing, wooden faced, ludicrous. "It"s Joey," she said. "It"s my Milly"s little boy."
And Byron, outside the door where he had stopped as the doctor entered, heard that cry and something terrible happened to him. Mrs. Hines had called him from his tent. There was something in her voice so that he put on his trousers as he ran almost, and he pa.s.sed Mrs. Hines, who had not undressed at all, in the cabin door and ran into the room. Then he saw her and it stopped him dead as a wall. Mrs. Hines was at his elbow, talking to him; perhaps he answered; talked back. Anyway he had saddled the mule and was already galloping toward town while he still seemed to be looking at her, at her face as she lay raised on her propped arms on the cot, looking down at the shape of her body beneath the sheet with wailing and hopeless terror. He saw that all the time he was waking Hightower, all the time he was getting the doctor started, while somewhere in him the clawed thing lurked and waited and thought was going too fast to give him time to think. That was it. Thought too swift for thinking, until he and the doctor returned to the cabin. And then, just outside the cabin door where he had stopped, he heard the child cry once and something terrible happened to him.
He knew now what it was that seemed to lurk clawed and waiting while he crossed the empty square, seeking the doctor whom he had neglected to engage. He knew now why he neglected to engage a doctor beforehand. It is because he did not believe until Mrs. Hines called him from his tent that he (she) would need one, would have the need. It was like for a week now his eyes had accepted her belly without his mind believing. "Yet I did know, believe," he thought. "I must have knowed, to have done what I have done: the running and the lying and the worrying at folks." But he saw now that he did not believe until he pa.s.sed Mrs. Hines and looked into the cabin. When Mrs. Hines" voice first came into his sleeping, he knew what it was, what had happened; he rose and put on, like a pair of hurried overalls, the need for haste, knowing why, knowing that for five nights now he had been expecting it. Yet still he did not believe. He knew now that when he ran to the cabin and looked in, he expected to see her sitting up; perhaps to be met by her at the door, placid, unchanged, timeless. But even as he touched the door with his hand he heard something which he had never heard before. It was a moaning wail, loud, with a quality at once pa.s.sionate and abject, that seemed to be speaking clearly to something in a tongue which he knew was not his tongue nor that of any man. Then he pa.s.sed Mrs. Hines in the door and he saw her lying on the cot. He had never seen her in bed before and he believed that when or if he ever did, she would be tense, alert, maybe smiling a little, and completely aware of him. But when he entered she did not even look at him. She did not even seem to be aware that the door had opened, that there was anyone or anything in the room save herself and whatever it was that she had spoken to with that wailing cry in a tongue unknown to man. She was covered to the chin, yet her upper body was raised upon her arms and her head was bent. Her hair was loose and her eyes looked like two holes and her mouth was as bloodless now as the pillow behind her, and as she seemed in that att.i.tude of alarm and surprise to contemplate with a kind of outraged unbelief the shape of her body beneath the covers, she gave again that loud, abject, wailing cry. Mrs. Hines was now bending over her. She turned her head, that wooden face, across her purple shoulder. "Get," she said. "Get for the doctor. It"s come now."
He did not remember going to the stable at all. Yet there he was, catching his mule, dragging the saddle out and clapping it on. He was working fast, yet thinking went slow enough. He knew why now. He knew now that thinking went slow and smooth with calculation, as oil is spread slowly upon a surface above a brewing storm. "If I had known then," he thought. "If I had known then. If it had got through then." He thought this quietly, in aghast despair, regret. "Yes. I would have turned my back and rode the other way. Beyond the knowing and memory of man forever and ever I reckon I would have rode." But he did not. He pa.s.sed the cabin at a gallop, with thinking going smooth and steady, he not yet knowing why. "If I can just get past and out of hearing before she hollers again," he thought. "If I can just get past before I have to hear her again." That carried him for a while, into the road, the hardmuscled small beast going fast now, thinking, the oil, spreading steady and smooth: "I"ll go to Hightower first. I"ll leave the mule for him. I must remember to remind him about his doctor book. I mustn"t forget that," the oil said, getting him that far, to where he sprang from the still running mule and into Hightower"s house. Then he had something else. "Now that"s done," thinking Even if I can"t get a regular doctor That got him to the square and then betrayed him; he could feel it, clawed with lurking, thinking Even if I don"t get a regular doctor. Because I have never believed that I would need one. I didn"t believe It was in his mind, galloping in yoked and headlong paradox with the need for haste while he helped the old doctor hunt for the key to the strongbox in order to get the switch key for the car. They found it at last, and for a time the need for haste went hand in hand with movement, speed, along the empty road beneath the empty dawn that, or he had surrendered all reality, all dread and fear, to the doctor beside him, as people do. Anyway it got him back to the cabin, where the two of them left the car and approached the cabin door, beyond which the lamp still burned: for that interval he ran in the final hiatus of peace before the blow fell and the clawed thing overtook him from behind. Then he heard the child cry. Then he knew. Dawn was making fast. He stood quietly in the chill peace, the waking quiet-small, nondescript, whom no man or woman had ever turned to look at twice anywhere. He knew now that there had been something all the while which had protected him against believing, with the believing protected him. With stern and austere astonishment he thought It was like it was not until Mrs. Hines called me and I heard her and saw her face and knew that Byron Bunch was nothing in this world to her right then, that I found out that she is not a virgin And he thought that that was terrible, but that was not all. There was something else. His head was not bowed. He stood quite still in the augmenting dawn, while thinking went quietly And this too is reserved for me, as Reverend Hightower says. I"ll have to tell him now. I"ll have to tell Lucas Burch It was not unsurprise now. It was something like the terrible and irremediable despair of adolescence Why, I didn"t even believe until now that he was so. It was like me, and her, and all the other folks that I had to get mixed up in it, were just a lot of words that never even stood for anything, were not even us, while all the time what was us was going on and going on without even missing the lack of words. Yes. It ain"t until now that I ever believed that he is Lucas Burch. That there ever was a Lucas Burch.
"Luck," Hightower says; "luck. I don"t know whether I had it or not." But the doctor has gone on into the cabin. Looking back for another moment, Hightower watches the group about the cot, hearing still the doctor"s cheery voice. The old woman now sits quietly, yet looking back at her it seems but a moment ago that he was struggling with her for the child, lest she drop it in her dumb and furious terror. But no less furious for being dumb it was as, the child s.n.a.t.c.hed almost from the mother"s body, she held it high aloft, her heavy, bearlike body crouching as she glared at the old man asleep on the cot. He was sleeping so when Hightower arrived. He did not seem to breathe at all, and beside the cot the woman was crouching in a chair when he entered. She looked exactly like a rock poised to plunge over a precipice, and for an instant Hightower thought She has already killed him. She has taken her precautions well beforehand this time Then he was quite busy; the old woman was at his elbow without his being aware of it until she s.n.a.t.c.hed the still unbreathing child and held it aloft, glaring at the old sleeping man on the other cot with the face of a tiger. Then the child breathed and cried, and the woman seemed to answer it, also in no known tongue, savage and triumphant. Her face was almost maniacal as he struggled with her and took the child from her before she dropped it. "See," he said. "Look! He"s quiet. He"s not going to take it away this time." Still she glared at him, dumb, beastlike, as though she did not understand English. But the fury, the triumph, had gone from her face: she made a hoa.r.s.e, whimpering noise, trying to take the child from him. "Careful, now," he said "Will you be careful?" She nodded, whimpering, pawing lightly at the child. But her hands were steady, and he let her have it. And she now sits with it upon her lap while the doctor who had arrived too late stands beside the cot, talking in his cheerful, testy voice while his hands are busy. Hightower turns and. goes out, lowering himself carefully down the broken step, to the earth like an old man, as if there were something in his flabby paunch fatal and highly keyed, like dynamite. It is now more than dawn; it is morning: already the sun. He looks about, pausing; he calls: "Byron." There is no answer. Then he sees that the mule, which he had tethered to a fence post nearby, is also gone. He sighs. "Well," he thinks. "So I have reached the point where the crowning indignity which I am to suffer at Byron"s hands is a two-mile walk back home. That"s not worthy of Byron, of hatred. But so often our deeds are not. Nor we of our deeds.
He walks back to town slowly-a gaunt, paunched man in a soiled panama hat and the tail of a coa.r.s.e cotton nightshirt thrust into his black trousers. "Luckily I did take time to put on my shoes," he thinks. "I am tired," he thinks, fretfully. "I am tired, and I shall not be able to sleep." He is thinking it fretfully, wearily, keeping time to his feet when he turns into his gate. The sun is now high, the town has wakened; he smells the smoke here and there of cooking breakfasts. "The least thing he could have done," he thinks, "since he would not leave me the mule, would have been to ride ahead and start a fire in my stove for me. Since he thinks it better for my appet.i.te to take a two-mile stroll before eating."
He goes to the kitchen and builds a fire in the stove, slowly, clumsily; as clumsily after twenty-five years as on the first day he had ever attempted it, and puts coffee on. "Then I"ll go back to bed," he thinks. "But I know I shall not sleep. But he notices that his thinking sounds querulous, like the peaceful whining of a querulous woman who is not even listening to herself; then he finds that he is preparing his usual hearty breakfast, and he stops quite still, clicking his tongue as, though in displeasure. "I ought to feel worse than I do," he thinks. But he has to admit that he does not. And as he stands, tall, misshapen, lonely in his lonely and illkept kitchen, holding in his hand an iron skillet in which yesterday"s old grease is bleakly caked, there goes through him a glow, a wave, a surge of something almost hot, almost triumphant. "I showed them!" he thinks. "Life comes to the old man yet, while they get there too late. They get there for his leavings, as Byron would say." But this is vanity and empty pride. Yet the slow and fading glow disregards it, impervious to reprimand. He thinks, "What if I do? What if I do feel it? triumph and pride? What if I do?" But the warmth, the glow, evidently does not regard or need b.u.t.tressing either; neither is it quenched by the actuality of an orange and eggs and toast. And he looks down at the soiled and empty dishes on the table and he says, aloud now: "Bless my soul. I"m not even going to wash them now." Neither does he go to his bedroom to try sleep. He goes to the door and looks in, with that glow of purpose and pride, thinking, "If I were a woman, now. That"s what a woman would do: go back to bed to rest." He goes to the study. He moves like a man with a purpose now, who for twenty-five years has been doing nothing at all between the time to wake and the time to sleep again. Neither is the book which he now chooses the Tennyson: this time also he chooses food for a man. It is Henry IV and he goes out into the back yard and lies down in the sagging deck chair beneath the mulberry tree, plumping solidly and heavily into it. "But I shan"t be able to sleep," he thinks, "because Byron will be in soon to wake me. But to learn just what else he can think of to want me to do, will be almost worth the waking."
He goes to sleep soon, almost immediately, snoring. Anyone pausing to look down into the chair would have seen, beneath the twin glares of sky in the spectacles, a face innocent, peaceful, and a.s.sured. But no one comes, though when he wakes almost six hours later, he seems to believe that someone has called him. He sits up abruptly, the chair creaking beneath him. "Yes?" he says. "Yes? What is it?" But there is no one there, though for a moment longer he looks about, seeming to listen and to wait, with that air forceful and a.s.sured. And the glow is not gone either. "Though I had hoped to sleep it off," he thinks, thinking at once, "No. I don"t mean hoped. What is in my thought is feared. And so I have surrendered too," he thinks, quiet, still. He begins to rub his hands, gently at first, a little guiltily. "I have surrendered too. And I will permit myself. Yes. Perhaps this too is reserved for me. And so I shall permit myself." And then he says it, thinks it That child that I delivered. I have no namesake. But I have known them before this to be named by a grateful mother for the doctor who officiated. But then, there is Byron. Byron of course will take the pas of me. She will have to have others, more remembering the young strong body from out whose travail even there shone something tranquil and unafraid. More of them. Many more. That will be her life, her destiny. The good stock peopling in tranquil obedience to it the good earth; from these hearty loins without hurry or haste descending mother and daughter. But by Byron engendered next. Poor boy. Even though he did let me walk back home.
He enters the house. He shaves and removes the nightshirt and puts on the shirt which he had worn yesterday, and a collar and the lawn tie and the panama hat. The walk out to the cabin does not take him as long as the walk home did, even though he goes now through the woods where the walking is harder. "I must do this more often," he thinks, feeling the intermittent sun, the heat, smelling the savage and fecund odor of the earth, the woods, the loud silence. "I should never have lost this habit, too. But perhaps they both come back to me, if this itself be not the same prayer."
He emerges from the woods at the far side of the pasture "behind the cabin. Beyond the cabin he can see the clump of ees in which the house had stood and burned, though from here he cannot see the charred and mute embers of what were once planks and beams. "Poor woman," he thinks. "Poor, barren woman. To have not lived only a week longer, until luck returned to this place. Until luck and life returned to these barren and ruined acres." It seems to him that he can see, feel, about him the ghosts of rich fields, and of the rich fecund black life of the quarters, the mellow shouts, the presence of fecund women, the prolific naked children in the dust before the doors; and the big house again, noisy, loud with the treble shouts of the generations. He reaches the cabin. He does not knock; with his hand already opening the door he calls in a hearty voice that almost booms: "Can the doctor come in?"
The cabin is empty save for the mother and child. She is propped up on the cot, the child at breast. As Hightower enters, she is in the act of drawing the sheet up over her bared bosom, watching the door not with alarm at all, but with alertness, her face fixed in an expression serene and warm, as though she were about to smile. He sees this fade. I thought-" she says.
"Who did you think?" he says, booms. He comes to the cot and looks down at her, at the tiny, weazened, terracotta face of the child which seems to hang suspended without body and still asleep from the breast. Again she draws the sheet closer, modest and tranquil, while above her the gaunt, paunched, bald man stands with an expression on his face gentle, beaming, and triumphant. She is looking down at the child.
"It looks like he just can"t get caught up. I think he is asleep again and I lay him down and then he hollers and I have to put him back again."
"You ought not to be here alone," he says. He looks about the room. "Where-"
"She"s gone, too. To town. She didn"t say, but that"s where she has gone. He slipped out, and when she woke up she asked me where he was and I told her he went out, and she followed him."
"To town? Slipped out?" Then he says "Oh" quietly. His face is grave now.
"She watched him all day. And he was watching her. I could tell it. He was making out like he was asleep. She thought that he was asleep. And so after dinner she gave out. She hadn"t rested any last night, and after dinner she set in the chair and dozed. And he was watching her, and he got up from the other cot, careful, winking and squinching his face at me. He went to the door, still winking and squinting back at me over his shoulder, and tiptoed out. And I never tried to stop him nor wake her, neither." She looks at Hightower, her eyes grave, wide. "I was scared to. He talks funny. And the way he was looking at me. Like all the winking and squinching was not for me to not wake her up, but to tell me what would happen to me if I did. And I was scared to. And so I laid here with the baby and pretty soon she jerked awake. And then I knew she hadn"t aimed to go to sleep. It was like she come awake already running to the cot where he had been, touching it like she couldn"t believe he had done got away. Because she stood there at the cot, pawing at the blanket like maybe she thought he was mislaid inside the blanket somewhere. And then she looked at me, once. And she wasn"t winking and squinting, but I nigh wished she was. And she asked me and I told her and she put on her hat and went out." She looks at Hightower. "I"m glad she"s gone. I reckon I ought not to say it, after all she done for me. But ..."
Hightower stands over the cot. He does not seem to see her. His face is very grave; it is almost as though it had grown ten years older while he stood there. Or like his face looks now as it should look and that when he entered the room, it had been a stranger to itself. "To town," he says. Then his eyes wake, seeing again. "Well. It can"t be helped now," he says. "Besides, the men downtown, the sane ... there will be a few of them. ... Why are you glad they are gone?"
She looks down. Her hand moves about the baby"s head, not touching it: a gesture instinctive, unneeded, apparently unconscious of itself. "She has been kind. More than kind. Holding the baby so I could rest. She wants to hold him all the time, setting there in that chair You"ll have to excuse me. I ain"t once invited you to set" She watches him as he draws the chair up to the cot and sits down. "... Setting there where she could watch him on the cot, making out that he was asleep." She looks at Hightower; her eyes are questioning, intent. "She keeps on calling him Joey. When his name ain"t Joey. And she keeps on ..." She watches Hightower. Her eyes are puzzled now, questioning, doubtful. "She keeps on talking about She is mixed up someway. And sometimes I get mixed up too, listening, having to ..." Her eyes, her words, grope, fumble.
"Mixed up?"
"She keeps on talking about him like his pa was that ... the one in jail, that Mr. Christmas. She keeps on, and then I get mixed up and it"s like sometimes I can"t-like I am mixed up too and I think that his pa is that Mr.-Mr. Christmas too-" She watches him; it is as though she makes a tremendous effort of some kind. "But I know that ain"t so. I know that"s foolish. It"s because she keeps on saying it and saying it, and maybe I ain"t strong good yet, and I get mixed up too. But I am afraid. ..."
"Of what?"
"I don"t like to get mixed up. And I. am afraid she might get me mixed up, like they say how you might cross your eyes and then you can"t uncross ..." She stops looking at him. She does not move. She can feel him watching her.
"You say the baby"s name is not Joe. What is his name?"
For a moment longer she does not look at Hightower. Then she looks up. She says, too immediately, too easily: "I ain"t named him yet."
And he knows why. It is as though he sees her for the first time since he entered. He notices for the first time that her hair has been recently combed and that she has freshened her face too, and he sees, half hidden by the sheet, as if she had thrust them hurriedly there when he entered, a comb and a shard of broken mirror. "When I came in, you were expecting someone. And it was not me. Who were you expecting?"
She does not look away. Her face is neither innocent nor dissimulating. Neither is it placid and serene. "Expecting?"
"Was it Byron Bunch you expected?" Still she does not look away. Hightower"s face is sober, firm, gentle. Yet in it is that ruthlessness which she has seen in the faces of a few good people, men usually, whom she has known. He leans forward and lays his hand on hers where it supports the child"s body. "Byron is a good man," he says.
"I reckon I know that, well as anybody. Better than most."
"And you are a good woman. Will be. I don"t mean-" he says quickly. Then he ceases. "I didn"t mean-"
"I reckon I know," she says.
"No. Not this, This does not matter. This is not anything yet. It all depends on what you do with it, afterward. With yourself. With others." He looks at her; she does not look away. "Let him go. Send him away from you." They look at one another. "Send him away, daughter. You are probably not much more than half his age. But you have already outlived him twice over. He will never overtake you, catch up with you, because he has wasted too much time. And that too, his nothing, is as irremediable as your all. He can no more ever cast back and do, than you can cast back and undo. You have a manchild that is not his, by a man that is not him. You will be forcing into his life two men and only the third part of a woman, who deserves at the least that the nothing with which he has lived for thirty-five years be violated, if violated it must be, without two witnesses. Send him away."
"That ain"t for me to do. He is free. Ask him. I have not tried once to hold him."
"That"s it. You probably could not have held him, if you had tried to. That"s it. If you had known how to try. But then, if you had known that, you would not be here in this cot, with this child at your breast. And you won"t send him away? You won"t say the word?"
"I can say no more than I have said. And I said No to him five days ago."
"No?"
"He said for me to marry him. To not wait. And I said No."
"Would you say No now?"
She looks at him steadily. "Yes. I would say it now."
He sighs, huge, shapeless; his face is again slack, weary. "I believe you. You will continue to say it until after you have seen ..." He looks at her again; again his gaze is intent, hard. "Where is he? Byron?"
She looks at him. After a while she says quietly: "I don"t know." She looks at him; suddenly her face is quite empty, as though something which gave it actual solidity and firmness were beginning to drain out of it. Now there is nothing of dissimulation nor alertness nor caution in it. "This morning about ten o"clock he came back. He didn"t come in. He just came to the door and he stood there and he just looked at me. And I hadn"t seen him since last night and he hadn"t seen the baby and I said, "Come and see him," and he looked at me, standing there in the door, and he said, "I come to find out when you want to see him," and I said, "See who?" and he said, "They may have to send a deputy with him but I can persuade Kennedy to let him come," and I said, "Let who come?" and he said, "Lucas Bunch," and I said, "Yes," and he said, "This evening? Will that do?" and I said, "Yes," and he went away. He just stood there, and then he went away." While he watches her with that despair of all men in the presence of female tears, she begins to cry. She sits upright, the child at her breast, crying, not loud and not hard, but with a patient and hopeless abjectness, not hiding her face. "And you worry me about if I said No or not and I already said No and you worry me and worry me and now he is already gone. I will never see him again." And he sits there, and she bows her head at last, and he rises and stands over her with his hand on her bowed head, thinking Thank G.o.d, G.o.d help me. Thank G.o.d, G.o.d help me.
He found Christmas" old path through the woods to the mill. He did not know that it was there, but when he found in which direction it ran, it seemed like an omen to him in his exultation. He believes her, but he wants to corroborate the information for the sheer pleasure of hearing it again. It is just four o"clock when he reaches the mill. He inquires at the office.
"Bunch?" the bookkeeper, says. "You won"t find him here. He quit this morning."
"I know, I know," Hightower says.
"Been with the company for seven years, Sat.u.r.day evenings too. Then this morning he walked in and said he was quitting. No reason. But that"s the way these hillbillies do."
"Yes, yes," Hightower says. "They are fine people, though. Fine men and women." He leaves the office. The road to town pa.s.ses the planer shed, where Byron worked. He knows Mooney, the foreman. "I hear Byron Bunch is not with you anymore," he says, pausing.
"Yes," Mooney says. "He quit this morning." But Hightower is not listening; the overalled men watch the shabby, queershaped, not-quite-familiar figure looking with a kind of exultant interest at the walls, the planks, the cryptic machinery whose very being and purpose he could not have understood or even learned. "If you want to see him," Mooney says, "I reckon you"ll find him downtown at the courthouse."
"At the courthouse?"
"Yes, sir. Grand jury meets today. Special call. To indict that murderer."
"Yes, yes," Hightower says. "So he is gone. Yes. A fine young man. Goodday, goodday, gentlemen. Goodday to you." He goes on, while the men in overalls look after him for a time. His hands are clasped behind him. He paces on, thinking quietly, peacefully, sadly: "Poor man. Poor fellow. No man is, can be, justified in taking human life; least of all, a warranted officer, a sworn servant of his fellowman. When it is sanctioned publicly in the person of an elected officer who knows that he has not himself suffered at the hands of his victim, call that victim by what name you will, how can we expect an individual to refrain when he believes that he has suffered at the hands of his victim?" He walks on; he is now in his own street. Soon he can see his fence, the signboard; then the house beyond the rich foliage of August. "So he departed without coming to tell me goodbye. After all he has done for me. Fetched to me. Ay; given, restored, to me. It would seem that this too was reserved for me. And this must be all."
But it is not all. There is one thing more reserved for him.
Chapter 18.
When Byron reached town he found that he could not see the sheriff until noon, since the sheriff would be engaged all morning with the special Grand Jury. "You"ll have to wait," they told him.
"Yes," Byron said. "I know how."
"Know how what?" But he did not answer. He left the sheriff"s office and stood beneath the portico which faced the south side of the square. From the shallow, flagged terrace the stone columns rose, arching, weathered, stained with generations of casual tobacco. Beneath them, steady and constant and with a grave purposelessness (and with here and there, standing motionless or talking to one another from the sides of their mouths, some youngish men, townsmen, some of whom Byron knew as clerks and young lawyers and even merchants, who had a generally identical authoritative air, like policemen in disguise and not especially caring if the disguise hid the policeman or not) countrymen in overalls moved, with almost the air of monks in a cloister, speaking quietly among themselves of money and crops, looking quietly now and then upward at the ceiling beyond which the Grand Jury was preparing behind locked doors to take the life of a man whom few of them had ever seen to know, for having taken the life of a woman whom even fewer of them had known to see. The wagons and the dusty cars in which they had come to town were ranked about the square, and along the streets and in and out of the stores the wives and daughters who had come to town with them moved in clumps, slowly and also aimlessly as cattle or clouds. Byron stood there for quite a while, motionless, not leaning against anything-a small man who had lived in the town seven years yet whom even fewer of the country people than knew either the murderer or the murdered, knew by name or habit.
Byron was not conscious of this. He did not care now, though a week ago it would have been different. Then he would not have stood here, where any man could look at him and perhaps recognise him: Byron Bunch, that weeded another man"s laidby crop, without any halvers. The fellow that took care of another man"s wh.o.r.e while the other fellow was busy making a thousand dollars. And got nothing for it. Byron Bunch that protected her good name when the woman that owned the good name and the man she had given it to had both thrown it away, that got the other fellow"s b.a.s.t.a.r.d born in peace and quiet and at Byron Bunch"s expense, and heard a baby cry once for his pay. Got nothing for it except permission to fetch the other fellow back to her soon as he got done collecting the thousand dollars and Byron wasn"t needed anymore. Byron Bunch "And now I can go away," he thought. He began to breathe deep. He could feel himself breathing deep, as if each time his insides were afraid that next breath they would not be able to give far enough and that something terrible would happen, and that all the time he could look down at himself breathing, at his chest, and see no movement at all, like when dynamite first begins, gathers itself for the now Now NOW, the shape of the outside of the stick does not change; that the people who pa.s.sed and looked at him could see no change: a small man you would not look at twice, that you would never believe he had done what he had done and felt what he had felt, who had believed that out there at the mill on a Sat.u.r.day afternoon, alone, the chance to be hurt could not have found him.
He was walking among the people. "I got to go somewhere," he thought. He could walk in time to that: "I got to go somewhere." That would get him along. He was still saying it when he reached the boardinghouse. His room faced the street. Before he realised that he had begun to look toward it, he was looking away. "I might see somebody reading or smoking in the window," he thought. He entered the hall. After the bright morning, he could not see. at once. He could smell wet linoleum, soap. "It"s still Monday," he thought. "I had forgot that. Maybe it"s next Monday. That"s what it seems like it ought to be." He did not call. After a while he could see better. He could hear the mop in the back of the hall or maybe the kitchen. Then against the rectangle of light which was the rear door, also open, he saw Mrs. Beard"s head leaning out, then her body in full silhouette, advancing up the hall.
"Well," she said, "it"s Mister Byron Bunch. Mister Byron Bunch."
"Yessum," he said, thinking, "Only a fat lady that never had much more trouble than a mopping pail would hold ought not to try to be ..." Again he could not think of the word that Hightower would know, would use without having to think of it. "It"s like I not only can"t do anything without getting him mixed up in it, I can"t even think without him to help me out."-"Yessum," he said. And then he stood there, not even able to tell her that he had come to say goodbye. "Maybe I ain"t," he thought. "I reckon when a fellow has lived in one room for seven years, he ain"t going to get moved in one day. Only I reckon that ain"t going to interfere with her renting out his room."-"I reckon I owe you a little room rent," he said.
She looked at him: a hard, comfortable face, not unkind either. "Rent for what?" she said. "I thought you was settled. Decided to tent for the summer." She looked at him. Then she told him. She did it gently, delicately, considering. "I done already collected the rent for that room."
"Oh," he said. "Yes. I see. Yes." He looked quietly up the scoured, linoleumstripped stairway, scuffed bare by the aid of his own feet. When the new linoleum was put down three years ago, he had. been the first of the boarders to mount upon it. "Oh," he said. "Well, I reckon I better ..."
She answered that too, immediately, not unkind. "I tended to that. I put everything you left in your grip. It"s back in my room. If you want to go up and look for yourself, though?"
"No. I reckon you got every ... Well, I reckon I ..."
She was watching him. "You men," she said. "It ain"t a wonder womenfolks get impatient with you. You can"t even know your own limits for devilment. Which ain"t more than I can measure on a pin, at that. I reckon if it wasn"t for getting some woman mixed up in it to help you, you"d ever one of you be drug hollering into heaven before you was ten years old."
"I reckon you ain"t got any call to say anything against her," he said.
"No more I ain"t. I don"t need to. Don"t no other woman need to that is going to. I ain"t saying that it ain"t been women that has done most of the talking. But if you had more than mansense you would know that women don"t mean anything when they talk. It"s menfolks that take talking serious. It ain"t any woman that believes hard against you and her. Because it ain"t any woman but knows that she ain"t had any reason to have to be bad with you, even discounting that baby. Or any other man right now. She never had to. Ain"t you and that preacher and ever other man that knows about her already done everything for her that she could think to want? What does she need to be bad for? Tell me that."
"Yes," Byron says. He was not looking at her now. "I just come ..."
She answered that too, before it was spoken. "I reckon you"ll be leaving us soon." She was watching him. "What have they done this morning at the courthouse?"
"I don"t know. They ain"t finished yet."
"I bound that, too. They"ll take as much time and trouble and county money as they can cleaning up what us women could have cleaned up in ten minutes Sat.u.r.day night. For being such a fool. Not that Jefferson will miss him. Can"t get along without him. But being fool enough to believe that killing a woman will do a man anymore good than killing a man would a woman. ... I reckon they"ll let the other one go, now."
"Yessum. I reckon so."
"And they believed for a while that he helped do it. And so they will give him that thousand dollars to show it ain"t any hard feelings. And then they can get married. That"s about right, ain"t it?"
"Yessum." He, could feel her watching him, not unkindly.
"And so I reckon you"ll be leaving us. I reckon you kind of feel like you have wore out Jefferson, don"t you?"
"Something like that. I reckon I"ll move on."
"Well, Jefferson"s a good town. But it ain"t so good but what a footloose man like you can find in another one enough devilment and trouble to keep him occupied too. ... You can leave your grip here until you are ready for it, if you want."
He waited until noon and after. He waited until he believed that the sheriff had finished his dinner. Then he went to the sheriff"s home. He would not come in. He waited at the door until the sheriff came out-the fat man, with little wise eyes like bits of mica embedded in his fat, still face. They went aside, into the shade of a tree in the yard. There was no seat there; neither did they squat on their heels, as by ordinary (they were both countrybred) they would have done. The sheriff listened quietly to the man, the quiet little man who for seven years had been a minor mystery to the town and who had been for seven days wellnigh a public outrage and affront.
"I see," the sheriff said. "You think the time has come to get them married."
"I don"t know. That"s his business and hers. I reckon he better go out and see her, though. I reckon now is the time for that. You can send a deputy with him. I told her he would come out there this evening. What they do then is her business and hisn. It ain"t mine."
"Sho," the sheriff. said. "It ain"t yourn." He was looking at the other"s profile. "What do you aim to do now, Byron?"
"I don"t know." His foot moved slowly upon the earth; he was watching it. "I been thinking about going up to Memphis. Been thinking about it for a couple of years. I might do that. There ain"t nothing in these little towns."
"Sho. Memphis ain"t a bad town, for them that like city life. Of course, you ain"t got any family to have to drag around and hamper you. I reckon if I had been a single man ten years ago I"d have done that too. Been better off, maybe. You"re figuring on leaving right away, I reckon."
"Soon, I reckon." He looked up, then down again. He said: "I quit out at the mill this morning."
"Sho," the sheriff said. "I figured you hadn"t walked all the way in since twelve and aimed to get back out there by one o"clock. Well, it looks like-" He ceased. He knew that by night the Grand Jury would have indicted Christmas, and Brown-or Burch-would be a free agent save for his bond to appear as a witness at next month"s court. But even his presence would not be absolutely essential, since Christmas had made no denial and the sheriff believed that he would plead guilty in order to save his neck. "And it won"t do no harm, anyway, to throw the scare of G.o.d into that durn fellow, once in his life," he thought. He said: "I reckon that can be fixed. Of course, like you say, I will have to send a deputy with him. Even if he ain"t going to run so long as he has any hope of getting some of that reward money. And provided he don"t know what he is going to meet when he gets there. He don"t know that yet."
"No," Byron said. "He don"t know that. He don"t know that she is in Jefferson."
"So I reckon I"ll just send him out there with a deputy. Not tell him why: just send him out there. Unless you want to take him yourself."
"No," Byron said. "No. No." But he did not move.
"I"ll just do that. You"ll be gone by that time, I reckon. I"ll just send a deputy with him. Will four o"clock do?"
"It"ll be fine. It"ll be kind of you. It"ll be a kindness."
"Sho. Lots of folks beside me has been good to her since she come to Jefferson. Well, I ain"t going to say goodbye. I reckon Jefferson will see you again someday. Never knowed a man yet to live here a while and then leave it for good. Except maybe that fellow in the jail yonder. But he"ll plead guilty, I reckon. Save his neck. Take it out of Jefferson though, anyway. It"s right hard on that old lady that thinks she is his grandmother. The old man was downtown when I come home, hollering and ranting, calling folks cowards because they wouldn"t take him out of jail right then and there and lynch him." He began to chuckle, heavily. "He better be careful, or Percy Grimm"ll get him with that army of his." He sobered. "It"s right hard on her. On women." He looked at Byron"s profile. "It"s been right hard on a lot of us. Well, you come back some day soon. Maybe Jefferson will treat you better next time."
At four o"clock that afternoon, hidden, he sees the car come up and stop, and the deputy and the man whom he knew by the name of Brown get out and approach the cabin. Brown is not handcuffed now, and Byron watches them reach the cabin and sees the deputy push Brown forward and into the door. Then the door closes behind Brown, and the deputy sits on the step and takes a sack of tobacco from his pocket. Byron rises to his feet. "I can go now," he thinks. "Now I can go." His hiding place is a clump of shrubbery on the lawn where the house once stood. On the opposite side of the dump, hidden from the cabin and the road both, the mule is tethered. Lashed behind the worn saddle is a battered yellow suitcase which is not leather. He mounts the mule and turns it into the road. He does not look back.
The mild red road goes on beneath the slanting and peaceful afternoon, mounting a hill. "Well, I can bear a hill," he thinks. "I can bear a hill, a man can." It is peaceful and still, familiar with seven years. "It seems like a man can just about bear anything. He can even bear what he never done. He can even bear the thinking how some things is just more than he can bear. He can even bear it that if he could just give down and cry, he wouldn"t do it. He can even bear it to not look back, even when he knows that looking back or not looking back won"t do him any good."
The hill rises, cresting. He has never seen the sea, and so he thinks. "It is like the edge of nothing. Like once I pa.s.sed it I would just ride right off into nothing. Where trees would look like and be called by something else except trees, and men would look like and be called by something else except folks. And Byron Bunch he wouldn"t even have to be or not be Byron Bunch. Byron Bunch and his mule not anything with falling fast, until they would take fire like the Reverend Hightower says about them rocks running so fast in s.p.a.ce that they take fire and burn up and there ain"t even a cinder to have to hit the ground."
But then from beyond the hill crest there begins to rise that which he knows is there: the trees which are trees, the terrific and tedious distance which, being moved by blood, he must compa.s.s forever and ever between two inescapable horizons of the implacable earth. Steadily they rise, not portentous, not threatful. That"s it. They are oblivious of him. "Don"t know and don"t care," he thinks. "Like they were saying All right. You say you suffer. All right. But in the first place, all we got is your naked word for it. And in the second place, you just say that you are Byron Bunch. And in the third place, you are just the one that calls yourself Byron Bunch today, now, this minute. ... "Well," he thinks, "if that"s all it is, I reckon I might as well have the pleasure of not being able to bear looking back too." He halts the mule and turns in the saddle.
He did not realise that he has come so far and that the crest is so high. Like a shallow bowl the once broad domain of what was seventy years ago a plantation house lies beneath him, between him and the opposite ridge upon which is Jefferson. But the plantation is broken now by random negro cabins and garden patches and dead fields erosion gutted and choked with blackjack and sa.s.safras and persimmon and brier. But in the exact center the clump of oaks still stand as they stood when the house was built, though now there is no house among them. From here he cannot even see the scars of the fire; he could not even tell where. it used to stand if it were not for the oaks and the position of the ruined stable and the cabin beyond, the cabin toward which he is looking. It stands full and quiet in the afternoon sun, almost toylike; like a toy the deputy sits on the step. Then, as Byron watches, a man appears as though by magic at the rear of it, already running, in the act of running out from the rear of the cabin while the unsuspecting deputy sits quiet and motionless on the front step. For a while longer Byron too sits motionless, half turned in the saddle, and watches the tiny figure flee on across the barren slope behind the cabin, toward the woods.
Then a cold, hard wind seems to blow through him. It is at once violent and peaceful, blowing hard away like chaff or trash or dead leaves all the desire and the despair and the hopelessness and the tragic and vain imagining too. With the very blast of it he seems to feel himself rush back and empty again, without anything in him now which had not been there two weeks ago, before he ever saw her. The desire of this moment is more than desire: it is conviction quiet and a.s.sured; before he is aware that his brain has telegraphed his hand he has turned the mule from the road and is galloping along the ridge which parallels the running man"s course when he entered the woods. He has not even named the man"s name to himself. He does not speculate at all upon where the man is going, and why. It does not once enter his head that Brown is fleeing again, as he himself had predicted. If he thought about it at all, he probably believed that Brown was engaged, after his own peculiar fashion, in some thoroughly legitimate business having to do with his and Lena"s departure. But he was not thinking about that at all; he was not thinking about Lena at all; she was as completely out of his mind as if he had never seen her face nor heard her name. He is thinking: "I took care of his woman for him and I borned his child for him. And now there is one more thing I can do for him. I can"t marry them, because I ain"t a minister. And I may not can catch him, because he"s got a start on me. And I may not can whip him if I do, because he is bigger than me. But I can try it. I can try to do it."