Across the desk, seated again, Hightower watches him gravely. “What have you done, Byron?”
Byron speaks in that new voice: that voice brief, terse, each word definite of meaning, not fumbling. “I took her out there this evening. I had already fixed up the cabin, cleaned it good. She is settled now. She wanted it so. It was the nearest thing to a home he ever had and ever will have, so I reckon she is entitled to use it, especially as the owner ain’t using it now. Being detained elsewhere, you might say. I know you ain’t going to like it. You can name lots of reasons, good ones. You’ll say it ain’t his cabin to give to her. All right. Maybe it ain’t. But it ain’t any living man or woman in this country or state to say she can’t use it. You’ll say that in her shape she ought to have a woman with her. All right. There is a nigger woman, one old enough to be sensible, that don’t live over two hundred yards away. She can call to her without getting up from the chair or the bed. You’ll say, but that ain’t a white woman. And I’ll ask you what will she be getting from the white women in Jefferson about the time that baby is due, when here she ain’t been in Jefferson but a week and already she can’t talk to a woman ten minutes before that woman knows she ain’t married yet, and as long as that durn scoundrel stays above ground where she can hear of him now and then, she ain’t going to be married. How much help will she be getting from the white ladies about that time? They’ll see that she has a bed to lay on and walls to hide her from the street all right. I don’t mean that. And I reckon a man would be justified in saying she dont deserve no more than that, being as it wasn’t behind no walls that she got in the shape she is in. But that baby never done the choosing. And even if it had, I be durn if any poor little tyke, having to face what it will have to face in this world, deserves—deserves more than—better than—But I reckon you know what I mean. I reckon you can even say it.” Beyond the desk Hightower watches him while he talks in that level, restrained tone, not once at a loss for words until he came to something still too new and nebulous for him to more than feel. “And for the third reason. A white woman out there alone. You ain’t going to like that. You will like that least of all.”
“Ah, Byron, Byron.”
Byron’s voice is now dogged. Yet he holds his head up still. “I ain’t in the house with her. I got a tent. It ain’t close, neither. Just where I can hear her at need. And I fixed a bolt on the door. Any of them can come out, at any time, and see me in the tent.”
“Ah, Byron, Byron.”
“I know you ain’t thinking what most of them think. Are thinking. I know you would know better, even if she wasn’t—if it wasn’t for—I know you said that because of what you know that the others will think.”
Hightower sits again in the attitude of the eastern idol, between his parallel arms on the armrests of the chair. “Go away, Byron. Go away. Now. At once. Leave this place forever, this terrible place, this terrible, terrible place. I can read you. You will tell me that you have just learned love; I will tell you that you have just learned hope. That’s all; hope. The object does not matter, not to the hope, not even to you. There is but one end to this, to the road that you are taking: sin or marriage. And you would refuse the sin. That’s it, God forgive me. It will, must be, marriage or nothing with you. And you will insist that it be marriage. You will convince her; perhaps you already have, if she but knew it, would admit it: else, why is she content to stay here and yet make no effort to see the man whom she has come to find? I cannot say to you, Choose the sin, because you would not only hate me: you would carry that hatred straight to her. So I say, Go away. Now. At once. Turn your face now, and don’t look back. But not this, Byron.”
They look at one another. “I knew you would not like it,” Byron says. “I reckon I done right not to make myself a guest by sitting down. But I did not expect this. That you too would turn against a woman wronged and betrayed—”
“No woman who has a child is ever betrayed; the husband of a mother, whether he be the father or not, is already a cuckold. Give yourself at least the one chance in ten, Byron. If you must marry, there are single women, girls, virgins. It’s not fair that you should sacrifice yourself to a woman who has chosen once and now wishes to renege that choice. It’s not right. It’s not just. God didn’t intend it so when He made marriage. Made it? Women made marriage.”
“Sacrifice? Me the sacrifice? It seems to me the sacrifice—”
Not to her. For the Lena Groves there are always two men in the world and their number is legion: Lucas Burches and Byron Bunches. But no Lena, no woman, deserves more than one of them. No woman. There have been good women who were martyrs to brutes, in their cups and such. But what woman, good or bad, has ever suffered from any brute as men have suffered from good women? Tell me that, Byron.”
They speak quietly, without heat, giving pause to weigh one another’s words, as two men already impregnable, each in his own conviction will. “I reckon you are right,” Byron says. “Anyway, it ain’t for me to say that you are wrong. And I don’t reckon it’s for you to say that I am wrong, even if I am.”
“No,” Hightower says.
“Even if I am,” Byron says. “So I reckon I’ll say good night.” He says, quietly: “It’s a good long walk out there.”
“Yes,” Hightower says. “I used to walk it myself, now and then. It must be about three miles.”
“Two miles,” Byron says. “Well.” He turns. Hightower does not move. Byron shifts the parcels which he has not put down. “I’ll say good night,” he says, moving toward the door. “I reckon I’ll see you, sometime soon.”
“Yes,” Hightower says. “Is there anything I can do? Anything you need? bedclothes and such?”
“I’m obliged. I reckon she has a plenty. There was some already there. I’m obliged.”
“And you will let me know? If anything comes up. If the child— Have you arranged for a doctor?”
“I’ll get that attended to.”
“But have you seen one yet? Have you engaged one?”
“I aim to see to all that. And I’ll let you know.”
Then he is gone. From the window again Hightower watches him pass and go on up the street, toward the edge of town and his two mile walk, carrying his paperwrapped packages of food. He passed from sight walking erect and at a good gait; such a gait as an old man already gone to flesh and short wind, an old man who has already spent too much time sitting down, could not have kept up with. And Hightower leans there in the window, in the August heat, oblivious of the odor in which he lives—that smell of people who no longer live in life: that odor of overplump desiccation and stale linen as though a precursor of the tomb—listening to the feet which he seems to hear still long after he knows that he cannot, thinking, ‘God bless him, God help him’; thinking To be young. To be young. There is nothing else like it: there is nothing else in the world He is thinking quietly: ‘I should not have got out of the habit of prayer.’ Then he hears the feet no longer. He hears now only the myriad and interminable insects, leaning in the window, breathing the hot still rich maculate smell of the earth, thinking of how when he was young, a youth, he had loved darkness, of walking or sitting alone among trees at night. Then the ground, the bark of trees, became actual, savage, filled with, evocative of, strange and baleful half delights and half terrors. He was afraid of it. He feared; he loved in being afraid. Then one day while at the seminary he realised that he was no longer afraid. It was as though a door had shut somewhere. He was no longer afraid of darkness. He just hated it; he would flee from it, to walls, to artificial light. ‘Yes,’ he thinks. ‘I should never have let myself get out of the habit of prayer.’ He turns from the window. One wall of the study is lined with books. He pauses before them, seeking, until he finds the one which he wants. It is Tennyson. It is dogeared. He has had it ever since the seminary. He sits beneath the lamp and opens it. It does not take long. Soon the fine galloping language, the gutless swooning full of sapless trees and dehydrated lusts begins to swim smooth
and swift and peaceful. It is better than praying without having to bother to think aloud. It is like listening in a cathedral to a eunuch chanting in a language which he does not even need to not understand.
Chapter 14
“THERE’S somebody out there in that cabin,” the deputy told the sheriff. “Not hiding: living in it.”
“Go and see,” the sheriff said.
The deputy went and returned.
“It’s a woman. A young woman. And she’s all fixed up to live there a good spell, it looks like. And Byron Bunch is camped in a tent about as far from the cabin as from here to the post-office.”
“Byron Bunch?” the sheriff says. “Who is the woman?” “I don’t know. She is a stranger. A young woman. She told me all about it. She begun telling me almost before I got inside the cabin, like it was a speech. Like she had done got used to telling it, done got into the habit. And I reckon she has, coming here from over in Alabama somewhere, looking for her husband. He had done come on ahead of her to find work, it seems like, and after a while she started out after him and folks told her on the road that he was here. And about that time Byron come in and he said he could tell me about it. Said he aimed to tell you.”
“Byron Bunch,” the sheriff says.
“Yes,” the deputy says. He says: “She’s fixing to have a kid. It ain’t going to be long, neither.”
“A kid?” the sheriff says. He looks at the deputy. “And from Alabama. From anywhere. You can’t tell me that about Byron Bunch.”
“No more am I trying to,” the deputy says. “I ain’t saying it’s Byron’s. Leastways, Byron ain’t saying it’s his. I’m just telling you what he told me.”
“Oh,” the sheriff says. “I see. Why she is out there. So it’s one of them fellows. It’s Christmas, is it?”
“No. This is what Byron told me. He took me outside and told me, where she couldn’t hear. He said he aimed to come and tell you. It’s Brown’s. Only his name ain’t Brown. It’s Lucas Burch. Byron told me. About how Brown or Burch left her over in Alabama. Told her he was just coming to find work and fix up a home and then send for her. But her time come nigh and she hadn’t heard from him, where he was at or anything, so she just decided to not wait any longer. She started out afoot, asking along the road if anybody knowed a fellow named Lucas Burch, getting a ride here and there, asking everybody she met if they knew him. And so after a while somebody told her how there was a fellow named Burch or Bunch or something working at the planing mill in Jefferson, and she come on here. She got here Saturday, on a wagon, while we were all out at the murder, and she come out to the mill and found it was Bunch instead of Burch. And Byron said he told her that her husband was in Jefferson before he knew it. And then he said she had him pinned down and he had to tell her where Brown lived. But he ain’t told her that Brown or Burch is mixed up with Christmas in this killing. He just told her that Brown was away on business. And I reckon you can call it business. Work, anyway. I never saw a man want a thousand dollars badder and suffer more to get it, than him. And so she said that Brown’s house was bound to be the one that Lucas Burch had promised to get ready for her to live in, and so she moved out to wait until Brown come back from this here business he is away on. Byron said he couldn’t stop her because he didn’t want to tell her the truth about Brown after he had already lied to her in a way of speaking. He said he aimed to come and tell you about it before now, only you found it out too quick, before he had got her settled down good.”
“Lucas Burch?” the sheriff says.
“I was some surprised, myself,” the deputy says. “What do you aim to do about it?”’
“Nothing,” the sheriff says. “I reckon they won’t do no harm out there And it ain’t none of my house to tell her to get out of it. And like Byron told her, Burch or Brown or whatever his name is, is going to be right busy for a while longer yet.”
“Do you aim to tell Brown about her?”
“I reckon not,” the sheriff says. “It ain’t any of my business. I ain’t interested in the wives he left in Alabama, or anywhere else. What I am interested in is the husband he seems to have had since he come to Jefferson.”
The deputy guffaws. “I reckon that’s a fact,” he says. He sobers, muses. “If he don’t get that thousand dollars, I reckon he will just die.”
“I reckon he won’t,” the sheriff says.
At three o’clock Wednesday morning a negro rode into town on a saddleless mule. He went to the sheriff’s home and waked him. He had come direct from a negro church twenty miles away, where a revival meeting was in nightly progress. On the evening before, in the middle of a hymn, there had come a tremendous noise from the rear of the church, and turning the congregation saw a man standing in the door. The door had not been locked or even shut yet the man had apparently grasped it by the knob and hurled it back into the wall so that the sound crashed into the blended voices like a pistol shot. Then the man came swiftly up the aisle, where the singing had stopped short off, toward the pulpit where the preacher leaned, his hands still raised, his mouth still open. Then they saw that the man was white: In the thick, cavelike gloom which the two oil lamps but served to increase, they could not tell at once what he was until he was halfway up the aisle. Then they saw that his face was not black, and a woman began to shriek, and people in the rear sprang up and began to run toward the door; and another woman on the mourners’ bench, already in a semihysterical state, sprang up and whirled and glared at him for an instant with white rolling eyes and screamed, “It’s the devil! It’s Satan himself!” Then she ran, quite blind. She ran straight toward him and he knocked her down without stopping and stepped over her and went on, with the faces gaped for screaming falling away before him, straight to the pulpit and put his hand on the minister.
“Wasn’t nobody bothering him, even then,” the messenger said. “It was all happening so fast, and nobody knowed him, who he was or what he wanted or nothing. And the women hollering and screeching and him done retch into the pulpit and caught Brother Bedenberry by the throat, trying to snatch him outen the pulpit. We could see Brother Bedenberry talking to him, trying to pacify him quiet, and him jerking at Brother Bedenberry and slapping his face with his hand. And the womenfolks screeching and hollering so you couldn’t hear what Brother Bedenberry was saying, cep he never tried to hit back nor nothing, and then some of the old men, the deacons, went up to him and tried to talk to him and he let Brother Bedenberry go and he whirled and he knocked seventy year old Pappy Thompson clean down into the mourners’ pew and then he retch down and caught up a chair and whirled and made a pass at the others until they give back. And the folks still yelling and screeching and trying to get out. Then he turned and clumb into the pulpit, where Brother Bedenberry had done clumb out the other side, and he stood there—he was all muddy, his pants and his shirt, and his jaw black with whiskers—with his hands raised like a preacher. And he begun to curse, hollering it out, at the folks, and he cursed God louder than the women screeching, and some of the men trying to hold Roz Thompson, Pappy Thompson’s daughter’s boy, that was six foot tall and had a razor nekkid in his hand, hollering, ‘I’ll kill him. Lemme go, folks. He hit my grandpappy. I’ll kill him. Lemme go. Please lemme go,’ and the folks trying to get out, rushing and trompling in the aisle and through the door, and him in the pulpit cursing God and the men dragging Roz Thompson out backwards and Roz still begging them to let him go. But they got Roz out and we went back into the bushes and him still hollering and cursing back there in the pulpit. Then he quit after a while and we seed him come to the door and stand there. And they had to hold Roz again. He must have heard. the racket they made holding Roz, because he begun to laugh. He stood there in the door, with the light behind him, laughing loud, and then he begun to curse again and we could see him snatch up a bench leg and swing it back. And we heard the first lamp bust, and it got dim in the church, and then we heard the other lamp bust and then it was dark and we couldn’t see him no. more. And where
they was trying to hold Roz a terrible racket set up, with them hollerwhispering, ‘Hold him! Hold him! Ketch him! Ketch him!’ Then somebody hollered, ‘He’s done got loose,’ and we could hear Roz running back toward the church and Deacon Vines says to me, ‘Roz will kill him. Jump on a mule and ride for the sheriff. Tell him just what you seen.’ And wasn’t nobody bothering him, captain,” the negro said. “We never even knowed him to call his name. Never even seed him before. And we tried to hold Roz back. But Roz a big man, and him done knocked down Roz’ seventy year old grandpappy and Roz with that nekkid razor in his hand, not caring much who else he had to cut to carve his path back to the church where that white man was. But ‘fore God we tried to hold Roz.”
That was what he told, because that was what he knew. He had departed immediately: he did not know that at the time he was telling it, the negro Roz was lying unconscious in a neighboring cabin, with his skull fractured where Christmas, just inside the now dark door, had struck him with the bench leg when Roz plunged into the church. Christmas struck just once, hard, savagely, at the sound of running feet, the thick shape which rushed headlong through the doorway, and heard it without pause plunge on crashing among the overturned benches and become still. Also without pausing Christmas sprang out and to the earth, where he stood lightly poised, still grasping the bench leg, cool, not even breathing hard. He was quite cool, no sweat; the darkness cool upon him. The churchyard was a pallid crescent of trampled and beaten earth, shaped and enclosed by undergrowth and trees. He knew that the undergrowth was full of negroes: he could feel the eyes. ‘Looking and looking,’ he thought. ‘Don’t even know they can’t see me.’ He breathed deeply; he found that he was hefting the bench leg, curiously, as though trying its balance, as if he had never touched it before. ‘I’ll cut a notch in it tomorrow,’ he thought. He leaned the leg carefully against the wall beside him and took from his shirt a cigarette and a match. As he struck the match he paused, and with the yellow flame spurting punily into life he stood, his head turned a little. It was hooves which he heard. He heard them come alive and grow swift, diminishing. “A mule,” he said aloud, not loud. “Bound for town with the good news.” He lit the cigarette and flipped the match away and he stood there, smoking, feeling the negro eyes upon the tiny living coal. Though he stood there until the cigarette was smoked down, he was quite alert. He had set his back against the “wall and he held the bench leg in his right hand again. He smoked the cigarette completely down, then he flipped it, twinkling, as far as he could toward the undergrowth where he could feel the negroes crouching. “Have a butt, boys,” he said, his voice sudden and loud in the silence. In the undergrowth where they crouched they watched the cigarette twinkle toward the earth and glow there for a time. But they could not see him when he departed, nor which way he went.