“It looks like he just can’t get caught up. I think he is asleep again and I lay him down and then he hollers and I have to put him back again.”
“You ought not to be here alone,” he says. He looks about the room. “Where—”
“She’s gone, too. To town. She didn’t say, but that’s where she has gone. He slipped out, and when she woke up she asked me where he was and I told her he went out, and she followed him.”
“To town? Slipped out?” Then he says “Oh” quietly. His face is grave now.
“She watched him all day. And he was watching her. I could tell it. He was making out like he was asleep. She thought that he was asleep. And so after dinner she gave out. She hadn’t rested any last night, and after dinner she set in the chair and dozed. And he was watching her, and he got up from the other cot, careful, winking and squinching his face at me. He went to the door, still winking and squinting back at me over his shoulder, and tiptoed out. And I never tried to stop him nor wake her, neither.” She looks at Hightower, her eyes grave, wide. “I was scared to. He talks funny. And the way he was looking at me. Like all the winking and squinching was not for me to not wake her up, but to tell me what would happen to me if I did. And I was scared to. And so I laid here with the baby and pretty soon she jerked awake. And then I knew she hadn’t aimed to go to sleep. It was like she come awake already running to the cot where he had been, touching it like she couldn’t believe he had done got away. Because she stood there at the cot, pawing at the blanket like maybe she thought he was mislaid inside the blanket somewhere. And then she looked at me, once. And she wasn’t winking and squinting, but I nigh wished she was. And she asked me and I told her and she put on her hat and went out.” She looks at Hightower. “I’m glad she’s gone. I reckon I ought not to say it, after all she done for me. But …”
Hightower stands over the cot. He does not seem to see her. His face is very grave; it is almost as though it had grown ten years older while he stood there. Or like his face looks now as it should look and that when he entered the room, it had been a stranger to itself. “To town,” he says. Then his eyes wake, seeing again. “Well. It can’t be helped now,” he says. “Besides, the men downtown, the sane ... there will be a few of them. ... Why are you glad they are gone?”
She looks down. Her hand moves about the baby’s head, not touching it: a gesture instinctive, unneeded, apparently unconscious of itself. “She has been kind. More than kind. Holding the baby so I could rest. She wants to hold him all the time, setting there in that chair— You’ll have to excuse me. I ain’t once invited you to set” She watches him as he draws the chair up to the cot and sits down. “... Setting there where she could watch him on the cot, making out that he was asleep.” She looks at Hightower; her eyes are questioning, intent. “She keeps on calling him Joey. When his name ain’t Joey. And she keeps on ...” She watches Hightower. Her eyes are puzzled now, questioning, doubtful. “She keeps on talking about— She is mixed up someway. And sometimes I get mixed up too, listening, having to …” Her eyes, her words, grope, fumble.
“Mixed up?”
“She keeps on talking about him like his pa was that … the one in jail, that Mr. Christmas. She keeps on, and then I get mixed up and it’s like sometimes I can’t—like I am mixed up too and I think that his pa is that Mr.—Mr. Christmas too—” She watches him; it is as though she makes a tremendous effort of some kind. “But I know that ain’t so. I know that’s foolish. It’s because she keeps on saying it and saying it, and maybe I ain’t strong good yet, and I get mixed up too. But I am afraid. …”
“Of what?”
“I don’t like to get mixed up. And I. am afraid she might get me mixed up, like they say how you might cross your eyes and then you can’t uncross …” She stops looking at him. She does not move. She can feel him watching her.
“You say the baby’s name is not Joe. What is his name?”
For a moment longer she does not look at Hightower. Then she looks up. She says, too immediately, too easily: “I ain’t named him yet.”
And he knows why. It is as though he sees her for the first time since he entered. He notices for the first time that her hair has been recently combed and that she has freshened her face too, and he sees, half hidden by the sheet, as if she had thrust them hurriedly there when he entered, a comb and a shard of broken mirror. “When I came in, you were expecting someone. And it was not me. Who were you expecting?”
She does not look away. Her face is neither innocent nor dissimulating. Neither is it placid and serene. “Expecting?”
“Was it Byron Bunch you expected?” Still she does not look away. Hightower’s face is sober, firm, gentle. Yet in it is that ruthlessness which she has seen in the faces of a few good people, men usually, whom she has known. He leans forward and lays his hand on hers where it supports the child’s body. “Byron is a good man,” he says.
“I reckon I know that, well as anybody. Better than most.”
“And you are a good woman. Will be. I don’t mean—” he says quickly. Then he ceases. “I didn’t mean—”
“I reckon I know,” she says.
“No. Not this, This does not matter. This is not anything yet. It all depends on what you do with it, afterward. With yourself. With others.” He looks at her; she does not look away. “Let him go. Send him away from you.” They look at one another. “Send him away, daughter. You are probably not much more than half his age. But you have already outlived him twice over. He will never overtake you, catch up with you, because he has wasted too much time. And that too, his nothing, is as irremediable as your all. He can no more ever cast back and do, than you can cast back and undo. You have a manchild that is not his, by a man that is not him. You will be forcing into his life two men and only the third part of a woman, who deserves at the least that the nothing with which he has lived for thirty-five years be violated, if violated it must be, without two witnesses. Send him away.”
“That ain’t for me to do. He is free. Ask him. I have not tried once to hold him.”
“That’s it. You probably could not have held him, if you had tried to. That’s it. If you had known how to try. But then, if you had known that, you would not be here in this cot, with this child at your breast. And you won’t send him away? You won’t say the word?”
“I can say no more than I have said. And I said No to him five days ago.”
“No?”
“He said for me to marry him. To not wait. And I said No.”
“Would you say No now?”
She looks at him steadily. “Yes. I would say it now.”
He sighs, huge, shapeless; his face is again slack, weary. “I believe you. You will continue to say it until after you have seen ...” He looks at her again; again his gaze is intent, hard. “Where is he? Byron?”
She looks at him. After a while she says quietly: “I don’t know.” She looks at him; suddenly her face is quite empty, as though something which gave it actual solidity and firmness were beginning to drain out of it. Now there is nothing of dissimulation nor alertness nor caution in it. “This morning about ten o’clock he came back. He didn’t come in. He just came to the door and he stood there and he just looked at me. And I hadn’t seen him since last night and he hadn’t seen the baby and I said, ‘Come and see him,’ and he looked at me, standing there in the door, and he said, ‘I come to find out when you want to see him,’ and I said, ‘See who?’ and he said, ‘They may have to send a deputy with him but I can persuade Kennedy to let him come,’ and I said, ‘Let who come?’ and he said, ‘Lucas Bunch,’ and I said, ‘Yes,’ and he said, ‘This evening? Will that do?’ and I said, ‘Yes,’ and he went away. He just stood there, and then he went away.” While he watches her with that despair of all men in the presence of female tears, she begins to cry. She sits upright, the child at her breast, crying, not loud and not hard, but with a patient and hopeless abjectness, not hiding her face. “And you worry me about if I said No or not an
d 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 won’t 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.
Chapter 18
WHEN Byron reached town he found that he could not see the sheriff until noon, since the sheriff would be engaged all morning with the special Grand Jury. “You’ll have to wait,” they told him.
“Yes,” Byron said. “I know how.”
“Know how what?” But he did not answer. He left the sheriff’s office and stood beneath the portico which faced the south side of the square. From the shallow, flagged terrace the stone columns rose, arching, weathered, stained with generations of casual tobacco. Beneath them, steady and constant and with a grave purposelessness (and with here and there, standing motionless or talking to one another from the sides of their mouths, some youngish men, townsmen, some of whom Byron knew as clerks and young lawyers and even merchants, who had a generally identical authoritative air, like policemen in disguise and not especially caring if the disguise hid the policeman or not) countrymen in overalls moved, with almost the air of monks in a cloister, speaking quietly among themselves of money and crops, looking quietly now and then upward at the ceiling beyond which the Grand Jury was preparing behind locked doors to take the life of a man whom few of them had ever seen to know, for having taken the life of a woman whom even fewer of them had known to see. The wagons and the dusty cars in which they had come to town were ranked about the square, and along the streets and in and out of the stores the wives and daughters who had come to town with them moved in clumps, slowly and also aimlessly as cattle or clouds. Byron stood there for quite a while, motionless, not leaning against anything—a small man who had lived in the town seven years yet whom even fewer of the country people than knew either the murderer or the murdered, knew by name or habit.
Byron was not conscious of this. He did not care now, though a week ago it would have been different. Then he would not have stood here, where any man could look at him and perhaps recognise him: Byron Bunch, that weeded another man’s laidby crop, without any halvers. The fellow that took care of another man’s whore while the other fellow was busy making a thousand dollars. And got nothing for it. Byron Bunch that protected her good name when the woman that owned the good name and the man she had given it to had both thrown it away, that got the other fellow’s bastard born in peace and quiet and at Byron Bunch’s expense, and heard a baby cry once for his pay. Got nothing for it except permission to fetch the other fellow back to her soon as he got done collecting the thousand dollars and Byron wasn’t needed anymore. Byron Bunch ‘And now I can go away,’ he thought. He began to breathe deep. He could feel himself breathing deep, as if each time his insides were afraid that next breath they would not be able to give far enough and that something terrible would happen, and that all the time he could look down at himself breathing, at his chest, and see no movement at all, like when dynamite first begins, gathers itself for the now Now NOW, the shape of the outside of the stick does not change; that the people who passed and looked at him could see no change: a small man you would not look at twice, that you would never believe he had done what he had done and felt what he had felt, who had believed that out there at the mill on a Saturday afternoon, alone, the chance to be hurt could not have found him.
He was walking among the people. ‘I got to go somewhere,’ he thought. He could walk in time to that: ‘I got to go somewhere.’ That would get him along. He was still saying it when he reached the boardinghouse. His room faced the street. Before he realised that he had begun to look toward it, he was looking away. ‘I might see somebody reading or smoking in the window,’ he thought. He entered the hall. After the bright morning, he could not see. at once. He could smell wet linoleum, soap. ‘It’s still Monday,’ he thought. ‘I had forgot that. Maybe it’s next Monday. That’s what it seems like it ought to be.’ He did not call. After a while he could see better. He could hear the mop in the back of the hall or maybe the kitchen. Then against the rectangle of light which was the rear door, also open, he saw Mrs. Beard’s head leaning out, then her body in full silhouette, advancing up the hall.
“Well,” she said, “it’s Mister Byron Bunch. Mister Byron Bunch.”
“Yessum,” he said, thinking, ‘Only a fat lady that never had much more trouble than a mopping pail would hold ought not to try to be ...’ Again he could not think of the word that Hightower would know, would use without having to think of it. ‘It’s like I not only can’t do anything without getting him mixed up in it, I can’t even think without him to help me out.’—“Yessum,” he said. And then he stood there, not even able to tell her that he had come to say goodbye. ‘Maybe I ain’t,’ he thought. ‘I reckon when a fellow has lived in one room for seven years, he ain’t going to get moved in one day. Only I reckon that ain’t going to interfere with her renting out his room.’—“I reckon I owe you a little room rent,” he said.
She looked at him: a hard, comfortable face, not unkind either. “Rent for what?” she said. “I thought you was settled. Decided to tent for the summer.” She looked at him. Then she told him. She did it gently, delicately, considering. “I done already collected the rent for that room.”
“Oh,” he said. “Yes. I see. Yes.” He looked quietly up the scoured, linoleumstripped stairway, scuffed bare by the aid of his own feet. When the new linoleum was put down three years ago, he had. been the first
of the boarders to mount upon it. “Oh,” he said. “Well, I reckon I better ...”
She answered that too, immediately, not unkind. “I tended to that. I put everything you left in your grip. It’s back in my room. If you want to go up and look for yourself, though?”
“No. I reckon you got every ... Well, I reckon I …”
She was watching him. “You men,” she said. “It ain’t a wonder womenfolks get impatient with you. You can’t even know your own limits for devilment. Which ain’t more than I can measure on a pin, at that. I reckon if it wasn’t for getting some woman mixed up in it to help you, you’d ever one of you be drug hollering into heaven before you was ten years old.”
“I reckon you ain’t got any call to say anything against her,” he said.
“No more I ain’t. I don’t need to. Don’t no other woman need to that is going to. I ain’t saying that it ain’t been women that has done most of the talking. But if you had more than mansense you would know that women don’t mean anything when they talk. It’s menfolks that take talking serious. It ain’t any woman that believes hard against you and her. Because it ain’t any woman but knows that she ain’t had any reason to have to be bad with you, even discounting that baby. Or any other man right now. She never had to. Ain’t you and that preacher and ever other man that knows about her already done everything for her that she could think to want? What does she need to be bad for? Tell me that.”
“Yes,” Byron says. He was not looking at her now. “I just come …”
She answered that too, before it was spoken. “I reckon you’ll be leaving us soon.” She was watching him. “What have they done this morning at the courthouse?”
“I don’t know. They ain’t finished yet.”
“I bound that, too. They’ll take as much time and trouble and county money as they can cleaning up what us women could have cleaned up in ten minutes Saturday night. For being such a fool. Not that Jefferson will miss him. Can’t get along without him. But being fool enough to believe that killing a woman will do a man anymore good than killing a man would a woman. ... I reckon they’ll let the other one go, now.”