Light in August Chapter 17 by William Faulkner Lyrics
That was Sunday night. Lena’s child was born the next morning. It was just dawn when Byron stopped his galloping mule before the house which he had quitted not six hours ago. He sprang to the ground already running, and ran up the narrow walk toward the dark porch. He seemed to stand aloof and watch himself, for all his haste, thinking with a kind of grim unsurprise: ‘Byron Bunch borning a baby. If I could have seen myself now two weeks ago, I would not have believed my own eyes. I would have told them that they lied.’
The window was dark now beyond which six hours ago he had left the minister. Running, he thought of the bald hеad, the clenched hands, thе prone flabby body sprawled across the desk. ‘But I reckon he has not slept much,’ he thought. ‘Even if he aint playing—playing—’ He could not think of the word midwife, which he knew that Hightower would use. ‘I reckon I dont have to think of it,’ he thought. ‘Like a fellow running from or toward a gun aint got time to worry whether the word for what he is doing is courage or cowardice.’
The door was not locked. Apparently he knew that it would not be. He felt his way into the hall, not quiet, not attempting to be. He had never been deeper into the house than the room where he had last seen the owner of it sprawled across the desk in the full downglare of the lamp. Yet he went almost as straight to the right door as if he knew, or could see, or were being led. ‘That’s what he’d call it,’ he thought, in the fumbling and hurried dark. ‘And she would too.’ He meant Lena, lying yonder in the cabin, already beginning to labor. ‘Only they would both have a different name for whoever did the leading.’ He could hear Hightower snoring now, before he entered the room. ‘Like he aint so much upset, after all,’ he thought. Then he thought immediately: ‘No. That aint right. That aint just. Because I dont believe that. I know that the reason he is asleep and I aint asleep is that he is an old man and he cant stand as much as I can stand.’
He approached the bed. The still invisible occupant snored profoundly. There was a quality of profound and complete surrender in it. Not of exhaustion, but surrender, as though he had given over and relinquished completely that grip upon that blending of pride and hope and vanity and fear, that strength to cling to either defeat or victory, which is the I-Am, and the relinquishment of which is usually death. Standing beside the bed Byron thought again A poor thing. A poor thing It seemed to him now that to wake the man from that sleep would be the sorest injury which he had ever done him. ‘But it aint me that’s waiting,’ he thought. ‘God knows that. Because I reckon He has been watching me too lately, like the rest of them, to see what I will do next.’
He touched the sleeper, not roughly, but firmly. Hightower ceased in midsnore; beneath Byron’s hand he surged hugely and suddenly up. “Yes?” he said. “What? Who is it? Who is there?”
“It’s me,” Byron said. “It’s Byron again. Are you awake now?”
“Yes. What—”
“Yes,” Byron said. “She says it’s about due now. That the time has come.”
“She?”
“Tell me where the light . . . Mrs Hines. She is out there. I am going on for the doctor. But it may take some time. So you can take my mule. I reckon you can ride that far. Have you still got your book?”
The bed creaked as Hightower moved. “Book? My book?”
“The book you used when that nigger baby came. I just wanted to remind you in case you would need to take it with you. In case I dont get back with the doctor in time. The mule is out at the gate. He knows the way. I will walk on to town and get the doctor. I’ll get back out there as soon as I can.” He turned and recrossed the room. He could hear, feel, the other sitting up in the bed. He paused in the middle of the floor long enough to find the suspended light and turn it on. When it came on he was already moving on toward the door. He did not look back. Behind him he heard Hightower’s voice:
“Byron! Byron!” He didn’t pause, didn’t answer.
Dawn was increasing. He walked rapidly along the empty street, beneath the spaced and failing street lamps about which bugs still whirled and blundered. But day was growing; when he reached the square the façade of its eastern side was in sharp relief against the sky. He was thinking rapidly. He had made no arrangement with a doctor. Now as he walked he was cursing himself in all the mixed terror and rage of any actual young father for what he now believed to have been crass and criminal negligence. Yet it was not exactly the solicitude of an incipient father. There was something else behind it, which he was not to recognise until later. It was as though there lurked in his mind, still obscured by the need for haste, something which was about to spring full clawed upon him. But what he was thinking was, ‘I got to decide quick. He delivered that nigger baby all right, they said. But this is different. I ought to done it last week, seen ahead about a doctor instead of waiting, having to explain now, at the last minute, hunt from house to house until I find one that will come, that will believe the lies that I will have to tell. I be dog if it dont look like a man that has done as much lying lately as I have could tell a lie now that anybody would believe, man or woman. But it dont look like I can. I reckon it just aint in me to tell a good lie and do it well.’ He walked rapidly, his footsteps hollow and lonely in the empty street; already his decision was made, without his even being aware of it. To him there was nothing either of paradox or of comedy about it. It had entered his mind too quickly and was too firmly established there when he became aware of it; his feet were already obeying it. They were taking him to the home of the same doctor who had arrived too late at the delivery of the negro child at which Hightower had officiated with his razor and his book.
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 strongbox, 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. Dont 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 attitude 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 passed 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 passed 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 passionate 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 passed 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 attitude 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 passed 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 cant 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 dont 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 aint until now that I ever believed that he is Lucas Burch. That there ever was a Lucas Burch
‘Luck,’ Hightower says; ‘luck. I dont 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 snatched 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 snatched 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 hoarse, 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 coarse 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 appetite 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 twentyfive 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 buttressing 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 to 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 twentyfive 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 shant 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 assured. 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 assured. And the glow is not gone either. ‘Though I had hoped to sleep it off,’ he thinks, thinking at once, ‘No. I dont 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 will both come back to me, if this itself be not the same as 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 trees 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 cant 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 cant 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 aint 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 aint 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 cant—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 aint so. I know that’s foolish. It’s because she keeps on saying it and saying it, and maybe I aint strong good yet, and I get mixed up too. But I am afraid. . . .”
“Of what?”
“I dont 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 cant 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 aint 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 dont 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 thirtyfive years be violated, if violated it must be, without two witnesses. Send him away.”
“That aint 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 wont send him away? You wont 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 dont 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 Burch,’ 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 God, God help me. Thank God, God 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 wont find him here. He quit this morning.”
“I know, I know,” Hightower says.
“Been with the company for seven years, Saturday 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 passes 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.
The window was dark now beyond which six hours ago he had left the minister. Running, he thought of the bald hеad, the clenched hands, thе prone flabby body sprawled across the desk. ‘But I reckon he has not slept much,’ he thought. ‘Even if he aint playing—playing—’ He could not think of the word midwife, which he knew that Hightower would use. ‘I reckon I dont have to think of it,’ he thought. ‘Like a fellow running from or toward a gun aint got time to worry whether the word for what he is doing is courage or cowardice.’
The door was not locked. Apparently he knew that it would not be. He felt his way into the hall, not quiet, not attempting to be. He had never been deeper into the house than the room where he had last seen the owner of it sprawled across the desk in the full downglare of the lamp. Yet he went almost as straight to the right door as if he knew, or could see, or were being led. ‘That’s what he’d call it,’ he thought, in the fumbling and hurried dark. ‘And she would too.’ He meant Lena, lying yonder in the cabin, already beginning to labor. ‘Only they would both have a different name for whoever did the leading.’ He could hear Hightower snoring now, before he entered the room. ‘Like he aint so much upset, after all,’ he thought. Then he thought immediately: ‘No. That aint right. That aint just. Because I dont believe that. I know that the reason he is asleep and I aint asleep is that he is an old man and he cant stand as much as I can stand.’
He approached the bed. The still invisible occupant snored profoundly. There was a quality of profound and complete surrender in it. Not of exhaustion, but surrender, as though he had given over and relinquished completely that grip upon that blending of pride and hope and vanity and fear, that strength to cling to either defeat or victory, which is the I-Am, and the relinquishment of which is usually death. Standing beside the bed Byron thought again A poor thing. A poor thing It seemed to him now that to wake the man from that sleep would be the sorest injury which he had ever done him. ‘But it aint me that’s waiting,’ he thought. ‘God knows that. Because I reckon He has been watching me too lately, like the rest of them, to see what I will do next.’
He touched the sleeper, not roughly, but firmly. Hightower ceased in midsnore; beneath Byron’s hand he surged hugely and suddenly up. “Yes?” he said. “What? Who is it? Who is there?”
“It’s me,” Byron said. “It’s Byron again. Are you awake now?”
“Yes. What—”
“Yes,” Byron said. “She says it’s about due now. That the time has come.”
“She?”
“Tell me where the light . . . Mrs Hines. She is out there. I am going on for the doctor. But it may take some time. So you can take my mule. I reckon you can ride that far. Have you still got your book?”
The bed creaked as Hightower moved. “Book? My book?”
“The book you used when that nigger baby came. I just wanted to remind you in case you would need to take it with you. In case I dont get back with the doctor in time. The mule is out at the gate. He knows the way. I will walk on to town and get the doctor. I’ll get back out there as soon as I can.” He turned and recrossed the room. He could hear, feel, the other sitting up in the bed. He paused in the middle of the floor long enough to find the suspended light and turn it on. When it came on he was already moving on toward the door. He did not look back. Behind him he heard Hightower’s voice:
“Byron! Byron!” He didn’t pause, didn’t answer.
Dawn was increasing. He walked rapidly along the empty street, beneath the spaced and failing street lamps about which bugs still whirled and blundered. But day was growing; when he reached the square the façade of its eastern side was in sharp relief against the sky. He was thinking rapidly. He had made no arrangement with a doctor. Now as he walked he was cursing himself in all the mixed terror and rage of any actual young father for what he now believed to have been crass and criminal negligence. Yet it was not exactly the solicitude of an incipient father. There was something else behind it, which he was not to recognise until later. It was as though there lurked in his mind, still obscured by the need for haste, something which was about to spring full clawed upon him. But what he was thinking was, ‘I got to decide quick. He delivered that nigger baby all right, they said. But this is different. I ought to done it last week, seen ahead about a doctor instead of waiting, having to explain now, at the last minute, hunt from house to house until I find one that will come, that will believe the lies that I will have to tell. I be dog if it dont look like a man that has done as much lying lately as I have could tell a lie now that anybody would believe, man or woman. But it dont look like I can. I reckon it just aint in me to tell a good lie and do it well.’ He walked rapidly, his footsteps hollow and lonely in the empty street; already his decision was made, without his even being aware of it. To him there was nothing either of paradox or of comedy about it. It had entered his mind too quickly and was too firmly established there when he became aware of it; his feet were already obeying it. They were taking him to the home of the same doctor who had arrived too late at the delivery of the negro child at which Hightower had officiated with his razor and his book.
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 strongbox, 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. Dont 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 attitude 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 passed 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 passed 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 passionate 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 passed 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 attitude 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 passed 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 cant 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 dont 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 aint until now that I ever believed that he is Lucas Burch. That there ever was a Lucas Burch
‘Luck,’ Hightower says; ‘luck. I dont 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 snatched 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 snatched 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 hoarse, 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 coarse 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 appetite 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 twentyfive 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 buttressing 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 to 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 twentyfive 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 shant 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 assured. 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 assured. And the glow is not gone either. ‘Though I had hoped to sleep it off,’ he thinks, thinking at once, ‘No. I dont 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 will both come back to me, if this itself be not the same as 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 trees 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 cant 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 cant 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 aint 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 aint 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 cant—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 aint so. I know that’s foolish. It’s because she keeps on saying it and saying it, and maybe I aint strong good yet, and I get mixed up too. But I am afraid. . . .”
“Of what?”
“I dont 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 cant 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 aint 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 dont 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 thirtyfive years be violated, if violated it must be, without two witnesses. Send him away.”
“That aint 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 wont send him away? You wont 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 dont 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 Burch,’ 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 God, God help me. Thank God, God 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 wont find him here. He quit this morning.”
“I know, I know,” Hightower says.
“Been with the company for seven years, Saturday 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 passes 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.