The sound of music from the distant church has long since ceased. Through the open window there comes now only the peaceful and myriad sounds of the summer night. Beyond the desk Hightower sits, looking more than ever like an awkward beast tricked and befooled of the need for flight, brought now to bay by those who tricked and fooled it. The other three sit facing him; almost like a jury. Two of them are also motionless, the woman with that stonevisaged patience of a waiting rock, the old man with a spent quality like a charred wick of a candle from which the flame has been violently blown away. Byron alone seems to possess life. His face is lowered. He seems to muse upon one hand which lies upon his lap, the thumb and forefinger of which rub slowly together with a kneading motion while he appears to watch with musing absorption. When Hightower speaks, Byron knows that he is not addressing him, not addressing anyone in the room at all. “What do they want me to do?” he says. “What do they think, hope, believe, that I can do?”
Then there is no sound; neither the man nor the woman have heard, apparently. Byron does not expect the man to hear. ‘He don’t need any help,’ he thinks. ‘Not him. It’s hindrance he needs’; thinking remembering the comastate of dreamy yet maniacal suspension in which the old man had moved from place to place a little behind the woman since he had met them twelve hours ago. ‘It’s hindrance he needs. I reckon it’s a good thing for more folks than her that he is wellnigh helpless.’ He is watching the woman. He says quietly, almost gently: “Go on. Tell him what you want. He wants to know what you want him to do. Tell him.”
“I thought maybe—” she says. She speaks without stirring. Her voice is not tentative so much as rusty, as if it were being forced to try to say something outside the province of being said aloud, of being anything save felt, known. “Mr. Bunch said that maybe—”
“What?” Hightower says. He speaks sharply, impatiently, his voice a little high; he too has not moved, sitting back in the chair, his hands upon the armrests. “What? That what?”
“I thought ...” The voice dies again. Beyond the window the steady insects whirr. Then the voice goes on, flat, toneless, she sitting also with her head bent a little, as if she too listened to the voice with the same quiet intentness: “He is my grandson, my girl’s little boy. I just thought that if I ... if he ...” Byron listens quietly, thinking It’s right funny. You’d think they had done got swapped somewhere. Like it was him ‘that had a nigger grandson waiting to be hung The voice goes on. “I know it ain’t right to bother a stranger. But you are lucky. A bachelor, a single man that could grow old without the despair of love. But I reckon you couldn’t never see it even if I could tell it right. I just thought that maybe if it could be for one day like it hadn’t happened. Like folks never knew him as a man that had killed ...” The voice ceases again. She has not stirred. It is as though she listened to it cease as she listened to it begin, with the same interest, the same quiet unastonishment.
“Go on,” Hightower says, in that high impatient voice; “go on.”
“I never saw him when he could walk and talk. Not for thirty years I never saw him. I am not saying he never did what they say he did. Ought not to suffer for it like he made them that loved and lost suffer. But if folks could maybe just let him for one day. Like it hadn’t happened yet. Like the world never had anything against him yet. Then it could be like he had just went on a trip and grew man grown and come back. If it could be like that for just one day. After that I would not interfere. If he done it, I would not be the one to come between him and what he must suffer. Just for one day, you see. Like he had been on a trip and come back, telling me about the trip, without any living earth against him yet.”
“Oh,” Hightower says, in his shrill, high voice. Though he has not moved, though the knuckles of the hands which grip the chairarms are taut and white, there begins to emerge from beneath his clothing a slow and repressed quivering. “Ah, yes,” he says. “That’s all. That’s simple. Simple. Simple.” Apparently he cannot stop saying it. “Simple. Simple.” He has been speaking in a low tone; now his voice rises. “What is it they want me to do? What must I do now? Byron! Byron? What is it? What are they asking of me now?” Byron has risen. He now stands beside the desk, his hands on the desk, facing Hightower. Still Hightower does not move save for that steadily increasing quivering of his flabby body. “Ah, yes. I should have known. It will be Byron who will ask it. I should have known. That will be reserved for Byron and for me. Come, come. Out with it. Why do you hesitate now?”
Byron looks down at the desk, at his hands upon the desk. “It’s a poor thing. A poor thing.”
“Ah. Commiseration? After this long time? Commiseration for me, or for Byron? Come; out with it. What do you want me to do? For it is you: I know that. I have known that all along. Ah, Byron, Byron. What a dramatist you would have made.”
“Or maybe you mean a drummer, a agent, a salesman,” Byron says. “It’s a poor thing. I know that. You don’t need to tell me.”
“But I am not clairvoyant, like you. You seem to know already what I could tell you, yet you will not tell me what you intend for me to know. What is it you want me to do? Shall I go plead guilty to the murder? Is that it?”
Byron’s face cracks with that grimace faint, fleeting, sardonic, weary, without mirth. “It’s next to that, I reckon.” Then his face sobers; it is quite grave. “It’s a poor thing to ask. God knows I know that.” He watches his slow hand where it moves, preoccupied and trivial, upon the desk top. “I mind how I said to you once that there is a price for being good the same as for being bad; a cost to pay. And it’s the good men that can’t deny the bill when it comes around. They can’t deny it for the reason that there ain’t anyway to make them pay it, like a honest man that gambles. The bad men can deny it; that’s why don’t anybody expect them to pay on sight or any other time. But the good can’t. Maybe it takes longer to pay for being good than for being bad. And it won’t be like you haven’t done it before, haven’t already paid a bill like it once before. It oughtn’t to be so bad now as it was then.”
“Go on. Go on. What is it I am to do?”
Byron watches his slow and ceaseless hand, musing. “He ain’t never admitted that he killed her. And all the evidence they got against him is Brown’s word, which is next to none. You could say he was here with you that night. Every night when Brown said he watched him go up to the big house and go in it. Folks would believe you. They would believe that, anyway. They would rather believe that about you than to believe that he lived with her like a husband and then killed her. And you are old now. They wouldn’t do anything to you about it that would hurt you now. And I reckon you are used to everything else they can do.”
“Oh,” Hightower says. “Ah. Yes. Yes. They would believe it. That would be very simple, very good. Good for all. Then he will be restored to them who have suffered because of him, and Brown without the reward could be scared into making her child legitimate and then into fleeing again and forever this time. And then it would be just her and Byron. Since I am just an old man who has been fortunate enough to grow old without having to learn the despair of love.” He is shaking, steadily; he looks up now. In the lamplight his face looks slick, as if it had been oiled. Wrung and twisted, it gleams in the lamplight; the yellowed, oftwashed shirt which was fresh this morning is damp with sweat. “It’s not because I can’t, don’t dare to,” he says; “it’s because I won’t! I won’t! do you hear?” He raises his hands from the chairarms. “It’s because I won’t do it!” Byron does not move. His hand on the desk top has ceased; he watches the other, thinking It ain’t me he is shouting at. It’s like he knows there is something nearer him than me to convince of that Because now Hightower is shouting, “I won’t do it! I won’t!” with his hands raised and clenched, his face sweating, his lip lifted upon his clenched and rotting teeth from about which the long sagging of flabby and puttycolored flesh falls away. Suddenly his voice rises higher yet. “Get out!” he screams. “Get out of my house! Get out o
f my house!” Then he falls forward, onto the desk, his face between his extended arms and his clenched fists. As, the two old people moving ahead of him, Byron looks back from the door, he sees that Hightower has not moved, his bald head and his extended and clenchfisted arms lying full in the pool of light from the shaded lamp. Beyond the open window the sound of insects has not ceased, not faltered.
Chapter 17
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 head, the clenched hands, the prone flabby body sprawled across the desk. ‘But I reckon he has not slept much,’ he thought. ‘Even if he ain’t playing—playing—’ He could not think of the word midwife, which he knew that Hightower would use. ‘I reckon I don’t have to think of it,’ he thought. ‘Like a fellow running from or toward a gun ain’t 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 ain’t so much upset, after all,’ he thought. Then he thought immediately: ‘No. That ain’t right. That ain’t just. Because I don’t believe that. I know that the reason he is asleep and I ain’t asleep is that he is an old man and he can’t 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 ain’t 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 don’t 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 don’t 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 don’t look like I can. I reckon it just ain’t 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 strong box, the key to which in turn he could not find at once. Neither would he allow Byron to break the lock. So when they reached the cabin at last the east was primrosecolor and there was already a hint of the swift sun of summer. And again the two men, both older now, met at the door of a one-room cabin, the professional having lost again to the amateur, for as he entered the door, the doctor heard the infant cry. The doctor blinked at the minister, fretfully. “Well, doctor,” he said, “I wish Byron had told me he had already called you in. I’d still be in bed.” He thrust past the minister, entering. “You seem to have had better luck this time than you did the last time we consulted. Only you look about like you need a doctor yourself. Or maybe it’s a cup of coffee you need.” Hightower said something, but the doctor had gone on, without stopping to listen. He entered the room, where a young woman whom he had never seen before lay wan and spent on a narrow army cot, and an old woman in a purple dress whom he had also never seen before, held the child upon her lap. There was an old man asleep on a second cot in the shadow. When the doctor noticed him, he said to himself that the man looked like he was dead, so profoundly and peacefully did he sleep. But the doctor did not notice the old man at once. He went to the old woman who held the child. “Well, well,” he said. “Byron must have been excited. He never told me the whole family would be on hand, grandpa and grandma too.” The woman looked up at him. He thought, ‘She looks about as much alive as he does, for all she is sitting up. Don’t look like she has got enough gumption to know she is even a parent, let alone a grandparent.’